The Dirty Truth About “Bounce-Back Entrepreneurs”
Issue #2041
- WEALTHY: When you need an investment expert the most (Andrew Gordon)
- HEALTHY: An update on the HRT controversy (Jon Herring)
- WISE: Roy Ash’s definition of "entrepreneur"
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Rehab for serial entrepreneurs (Michael Masterson)
- "All work and no play" is worse than you thought (Suzanne Richardson)
- It’s Good to Know… about a plan to take away Hitler’s citizenship
- Add "leitmotif" to your vocabulary
It’s Time for You to Achieve Total Success in Your Business and Personal Life
In just a moment, you’ll have the chance to achieve the success you’ve always dreamed of.
Whatever success means to you, whether it’s:
- More time to spend with your spouse and kids…
- A brand new Mercedes parked in your garage…
- Your own business…
- A vacation home in the French Riviera…
- A steady stream of cash flowing into your bank account each month…
- The respect and admiration of your colleagues…
… You CAN have it.
By mastering a few key principles, you’ll find yourself easily overcoming obstacles… motivating others… boosting your income… and drawing attention from people in high places.
Learn how to achieve what most people never dare to accomplish with our special program, The Ultimate Power Pack. But I urge you to order immediately, because this offer ends at 5:00 p.m. today.
Don’t miss out on your opportunity to become more powerful, wealthier, and more successful than you ever thought possible.
- Patrick Coffey
Internet Marketing Director
ETR Insider Report: When the Market Turns South, We Can Help
By Andrew M. Gordon
When the market is moving up, it floats all kinds of investments and makes everybody happy. Subscriptions to investment and trading services also go up. But as sure as day follows night, when the market goes down or sideways, subscriptions begin to trail off.
I wish it were the other way around - with subscriptions going up during the lousy times and going down during the good times. That’s because I can do the most good for my own subscribers during those periods when the market slows or drops.
As index returns drop and the performance of mutual funds gets spotty, that’s when you really need help from an authority with an outstanding record of selecting stocks. And that’s why, as soon as I saw the Dow reach record highs on consecutive days recently, I began bracing for another "mini-correction."
It hasn’t hit yet, but I believe it will… and soon. So I asked ETR’s marketing guru, Jedd Canty, to get the word out. Because when stock prices can be this volatile, THAT IS THE BEST TIME to get the services of a reliable stock picker.
Will Jedd’s efforts to get the word out make a difference? I don’t know. I can only hope people realize that when the market goes south, they can still make outstanding profits… with a little help.
[Ed. Note: Despite its volatility, the market has been generally good over the past 12 months. Even so, the gains made by both the Dow and the S&P 500 don’t come close to matching the overall gains made by Andrew’s Wealth Advantage portfolio. Check it out.]
"An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it."
Roy Ash
The Dirty Truth About "Bounce-Back Entrepreneurs" - and How to Move Beyond It
By Michael Masterson
Colin Morris, like so many entrepreneurs I have met, is in the middle of a whirlwind of his own creation. He has plenty of ideas about how to get himself out of his current troubles and on to a new, better path. But I wonder if he will.
His natural talents (ambition, imagination, passion) are all working at full speed, but not all in the same direction. As a result, his career has seen a big rise and fall and, if I’m right about him, it will continue to be characterized by exhilarating ups and downs for the rest of his life … unless he makes a change now.
Colin may be a type of entrepreneur that I’ve been thinking about lately - the type of person who is always recovering from some financial wreckage and busily and hopefully moving on to his next fortune. You know that his natural talents may well get him to the top again, but you are equally sure he won’t stay there long - that some time after he reaches the crest, some "unforeseen" problem will surprise him and send him crashing back down again.
For the moment, let’s call these folks "serial entrepreneurs," because that is what they call themselves. Serial entrepreneurs - they will tell you - go from one business success to another. Listen to them at a business seminar and you will hear engaging stories of brilliant business triumphs. What they don’t tell you - but what you need to know - is that in between all those great successes there are even bigger failures. And those failures usually take away everything that was gained by the prior successes and leave them financially and spiritually broken.
But just for a while. These entrepreneurs somehow gather their mental and emotional resources and bounce back to take on yet another business challenge. So instead of serial entrepreneurs, let us call them Bounce-Back Entrepreneurs (BBEs).
I have known many BBEs who are famous business-opportunity gurus. They make a lot of money - usually by telling other entrepreneurs how they got rich the first time. But the dirty truth is that they have never been able to acquire any substantial wealth for themselves, because their businesses keep rising and falling and their savings get eaten up by the cost of the crashes.
In building wealth, it’s not so much how much money you make when you make the money, but how little you lose when you lose it.
I can conjure up at least a half-dozen BBEs who fit nicely into this category. They have great talents and charisma, but when it comes to the nitty-gritty, they end up making poor choices and their businesses can’t sustain themselves. I remember saying to one of the people I am thinking about - one of the best-known business gurus in the world, in fact - "You will always be able to make a high income, but you will never grow rich unless you change your habits."
"Twenty years from now," I told him, "you will have to work just as hard to make the million or two million you spend every year, because you won’t have accumulated 20 or 30 million dollars in savings."
I said that to him about 20 years ago. He is, as I predicted, still working his butt off to pay for his lifestyle.
Is Colin on his way to becoming a BBE? I hope not. But you be the judge. Here is what he wrote to me in a recent letter:
"I have been a self-made, self-employed business owner for about 15 years now. I am now involved in a legal battle involving one of my companies, and it is sucking all of my savings and nearly most of my life-blood. We are talking about millions at stake here (my ex sold the business fraudulently to a public company behind my back after I moved to NYC) and, well, at the ripe old age of 38 I am finding myself having to start over from scratch to make ends meet until this case resolves.
"One of my numerous ‘jobs’ as president and CEO was to write the marketing copy. It is something I enjoy and have a real passion for. Branding, designing ads, writing ad copy, etc. After reading your latest issue of ETR, something just whispered to me to shoot you an e-mail to ask if you know of the fastest route to secure a position in that field. Is there a database for companies searching for copywriters? Or a headhunter that you know of?
"I always wrote copy for my various companies, but never thought of doing it for another company. What a marvelous idea! Any advice would be appreciated!"
My reaction his letter is: Whoa! Slow down there, Colin! You are in the middle of paying lawyers gobs of money to settle what sounds like a marriage-inspired business-destruction lawsuit. You are also in the middle of developing your next business. In starting that business, you are doing everything yourself. And despite this, or perhaps because of it, you’ve begun to think about hiring yourself out to be a freelance copywriter.
Let’s start with the basics.
First of all, freelance copywriting isn’t a business. It’s a self-employment opportunity. It is like being a doctor or a lawyer. You can make a high income doing it, but the job itself doesn’t create any equity. To create equity, you need to build a good business that doesn’t need you to run it. Self-employment companies, which include most freelance professions, just won’t do that for you.
Equity is how you cash out in the end - how you get the big bucks. A high income is good, but the trouble with a high income is that an expensive lifestyle usually goes with it. (I’ve explained most of this stuff in Automatic Wealth and Automatic Wealth for Grads.)
To get a business past the threshold where you are doing everything yourself, as Colin is doing right now, you have to pay attention to three fundamental elements:
- Marketing and sales
- Product development
- Operations
Most BBEs are good at marketing and sales. Some are good at product development too, though for most of them product development means getting lots of half-assed products sold, not creating a line - or several lines - of quality, integrated products that exceed customers’ expectations. Most BBEs are also bad at operations, probably because operations are on the expense side of the ledger… and because they are just plain boring.
If any of this sounds familiar to Colin - or to you, if you’re in a similar situation - here are my recommendations:
- Recognize that you can’t do everything yourself, that you need people who are better than you at certain things to help you run your business.
- Step back and examine your personal strengths and weaknesses, and match those with the three fundamental elements of every business: marketing/sales, product development, and operations.
- In each of these areas, you need to have a genuine superstar at the helm. You can be the superstar in one, probably marketing/sales, but get someone else - a true superstar-in-training - to head up product development and operations.
- Give those people the authority to do their jobs the right way. Don’t insist - directly or indirectly - that they always subsume their objectives to your marketing plans.
Sales and marketing are always the number one priority of a business builder. They should consume 80 percent of your intellectual resources. But your product-development superstar must spend 80 percent of his time trying to figure out what new product will capture the imagination of your marketplace. And your operations superstar must spend 80 percent of his time making sure that everything runs smoothly.
Hire the best people you can find. Make sure they are better at what they do than you are. And give them the respect they need to build your business.
And finally - and this is probably the most important point - understand that building a truly valuable business will take you at least five to seven years. Make a mental commitment now to be fully engaged for that length of time. Any impulse you have to do something else along the way must be rejected.
Stick to your knitting. Surround yourself with superstars. Good luck!
[Ed. Note: Michael’s "Automatic Wealth" system can help you retire early and enjoy the freedom of financial independence. Learn how to do it with his best-selling book Automatic Wealth: The Six Steps to Financial Independence.]
Alternative Energy Stocks Hitting All-Time Highs in 2007
What happens when an industry doubles its revenues in only four years?
You guessed it: investors get rich.
Alternative energy stocks have turned into a red-hot profit opportunity for early investors. That’s why visionaries like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson and Ted Turner are heavily invested. Over $2 billion in venture capital poured into the sector in 2006 alone.
If you’re not invested now, you’ll regret it later. Get the name of the #1 company that could become the Google of the solar energy sector and much more in my timely new report right here.
More Evidence Against Pharmaceutical Hormone Replacement
By Jon Herring
In ETR #1657 I told you about the efforts of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to restrict your access to safe, natural hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The drug giant was petitioning the FDA to prohibit bio-identical hormones. As you might expect, the stated reason was that these products "endanger human health."
Wyeth has never proven that statement - but it is quite clear that these increasingly popular products endanger the company’s multi-billion-dollar revenues in the HRT sector. And, not surprisingly, it is Wyeth’s products that appear to "endanger human health."
I’ve told you before about studies showing that taking synthetic hormones can raise a woman’s risk of heart attack, stroke, and breast cancer. Now you can add ovarian cancer to the list. Results from the UK-sponsored Million Women Study, published in The Lancet, suggest that synthetic HRT has resulted in approximately 70 deaths per year due to ovarian cancer.
To be fair, there are some who question the results of this study, and certainly much is still to be verified. But it does seem to confirm what has already been shown: that synthetic HRT drugs come with significant potential risks. So why take the risk when a safer, natural alternative is available?
If you are considering HRT to combat symptoms of menopause, do it with bio-identical hormones. Here is what Dr. Sears recommends:
"You should get your total estrogens, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA-S tested before considering any hormone therapy. So ask your doctor for a blood test to look at your ‘hormone panel.’ Once you begin real bio-identical hormone therapy, you should get a hormone panel every three months until your levels are in balance."
A Surprising Link Between Lifestyle and Work Ethics
By Suzanne Richardson
"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Or so the saying goes. But too much work can do more than make you feel a little boring. It can make you tired, stressed, neglectful of your health and family, and… unethical?
In a Deloitte survey of employed adults - conducted by Harris Interactive - a whopping 91 percent agreed that having a good work-life balance makes people more likely to behave ethically on the job.
What’s behind this curious connection?
Deloitte board chairwoman Sharon L. Allen suggests that someone whose time and energy is too invested in work may actually become dependent on that job. Not only is the job responsible for a regular paycheck, it becomes a source of the person’s personal worth. "This makes it even harder to make a good choice when faced with an ethical dilemma if they believe it will impact their professional success," says Allen.
It’s Good to Know: A Plan to Take Away Hitler’s German Citizenship
Members of a regional branch of one of Germany’s main political parties, the Social Democrats, are seeking to strip Adolf Hitler of his German citizenship. Hitler, born in Austria, gave up his nationality in 1925 and became a German citizen in 1932 with the help of Nazi officials in the state of Braunschweig. Modern day Braunschweig Social Democrats, whose party was outlawed under Hitler, are hoping not only to erase the stigma of its role in the dictator’s rise to power, but also to inform people about this little known detail of history.
(Source: Reuters)
Learn how to "Hotwire” the Internet for fast and furious profits…
These days, it seems like everyone’s getting bogged down with all the technical jargon and being intimidated by the internet… and rightly so, because doing things the way all the ‘experts’ say is a real headache!
This system assumes you have absolutely no previous knowledge about making money from the internet nor any previous knowledge about computers.
Discover that much needed extra bit of breathing space and peace of mind an extra grand or two here and there can give you today. Read about it here…
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Leitmotif
"Leitmotif" (LITE-moh-teef) - from the German "leiten" ("to lead") - is a dominant and recurring theme. In music, it is especially associated with the operas of Richard Wagner.
Example (as used by Frederick Busch in The New York Times): "As is so often the case in a crazy household… guilt becomes a leitmotif."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker … build your self-confidence and intellect … increase your attractiveness to others … just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR’s new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007