#1 priority with your website
You need to read this classic book.
I’m currently re-reading, “Ready, Fire, Aim” (RFA), by Mark Ford, ETR’s co-founder (he wrote it under the pen name of Michael Masterson). Mark’s essays are the best in the industry when it comes to showing you how to build wealth.
In fact, Mark wrote over 2,000 essays for ETR up until 2011. But according to Mark, ETR came about by accident in 2000 when he first wrote a memo to a colleague about the importance of getting to work before your employees.
That memo spawned over 2000 thousand essays, several books, and countless success stories, including Matt Smith and myself. But of everything Mark has written, RFA is the most valuable.
Ready, Fire, Aim outlines the most valuable lessons and skills required at the four stages of business. Most important to FIM readers is his advice about growing a business to $1 million in sales.
Selling is the first stage of entrepreneurship, and the focus of a Stage 1 business is to make sales. It’s not about getting a nice office, or even creating the perfect product. It’s all about selling.
“When you are starting a new business, selling must be your #1 job. Learning to sell is an obligation, not a choice. You don’t need to know how to create products or motivate people or manage anything to successfully start a business,” Mark says.
“What you need are two fundamental skills: 1) You have to know how to make a sale. 2) You have to be able to put that sales process into action. Once your business is making sales and you have achieved a minimum critical mass of customers, your problems, challenges, and opportunities change.”
As Mark continues, “During the start-up stage of your business is to simply learn how to sell one particular product to one particular market. You just need to do one thing well: Sell the hell out of your one product. You will get to $1 million quickly, and perhaps even to $10 million, simply by repeating this one trick over and over again. As long as it keeps working, keep doing it.”
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I know of only six people that put any effort into this at all (if you did, please send me your results). I want to congratulate Virtual Mastermind member Shane Fielder for following my advice and putting together this sales success story.
See the September Internet Independence bonus report. Read it. Study it. Apply Shane’s lessons to your business. It works, and you will be rewarded for it.
And for those of you that have already identified the best way to sell and past $1 million in sales, Mark has this advice, “The easiest way to create profits in your business is to sell your best customers a higher-level version of something they have already bought.”
So keep selling,
Craig Ballantyne
“Every time a business changes, so must its leader – you.” – Mark Ford