An old friend of mine contacted me out of the blue one day and we chatted about what we’ve both been up to. It was a great conversation and a memorable chat. Afterward he sent me an email and said he wanted to send me a business book that was very valuable to him. He said, “it’s like having a $300/hr consultant sitting by your side.” So, being the avid reader that I am, of course I said, “sure, send it my way!”

Reading it is like opening your eyes to a new way of looking at old things. It challenges some preconceived notions, which is certainly a good thing. Here’s some notable quotes from the book that I’ve read thus far. I’m on page 133 of 360. Will post a follow up with the next installment:

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
by Jay Abraham

• Instead of giving the salespeople 10% of the profit on a sale to a new first time client, give them 100% of the profit on the first sale.
• Clothing stores, auction houses, jewelry stores, and others hold private “by invitation only” sales events for preferred clients
• If in your field these people are referred to as customers, that’s fine. But whatever you call them, always think of them as a client.
• Determine who in your marketing area is already selling to the clients you want to be reaching, and who has their trust, respect, and goodwill.
• If you sell software for a company, you could contact a salesperson who works for a corporation that sells the computer hardware to the same client base and develop a mutually beneficial relationship.
• Tell your clients that you enjoy doing business with them and that they probably associate with other people like themselves who mirror their values and quality. If you acknowledge your client’s value and importance to you, they’ll be eager to reciprocate.
• Willingly offer to advise, talk to, or meet with anyone important to that client. In other words, offer to consult their referral without expectations of purchase, so your clients see you as a valuable expert who they can put their friends in touch.
• Why do clients stop buying from you?
  • Reason one: They stop buying temporarily and just never get around to dealing with you again. Out of sight, out of mind.
  • Reason two: They become dissatisfied. The important thing to realize, though, is that rarely did you intentionally offend or dissatisfy that client
• When you recognize that over 80% of all lost clients didn’t leave for irreparable reasons, you can instantly take action and get many–even most—of those clients back.
• I want you to stop accepting your present-day business circumstances as the way it has to be. You’re going for major breakthroughs.
• The Strategy of Preeminence is quite simply the ability to put your clients’ needs always ahead of your own. When you master that your success will naturally follow.
• The Strategy of Preeminence is a powerful yet simple strategy that almost single-handedly can transform your business or career.
• If you use the word customers, that’s fine. But always think of them as clients. And when you start to serve clients rather than sell clients, the limits on your business success will disappear.
• One of the biggest mistakes, probably the biggest mistake, people make in any business is that they fall in love with the wrong thing. They fall in love with their product, service, or company. You should believe passionately in your product, service, or company. but you should fall in love with your clients.
• Falling in love with your clients means taking responsibility for their well-being. Putting their best interests ahead of your own.
• It means following up after the sales–not just to patronize but to contribute, acknowledge, and assure that client that you care about them.
• I guarantee that when you practice the Strategy of Preeminence the rewards you will accumulate with astonish you. And I don’t mean just financial rewards. There is no question that you will generate more money than you ever imagined when you start putting your client’s needs first. But it won’t stop there.
• Acquiring clients at a breakeven or a slight loss and making substantial profits on back-end repurchasing is one of the most overlooked and underutilized methods of client growth and generation available to you.
• It’s important to get clients into the buying stream as quickly and easily as possible.
• Most businesses and people make it far too hard for clients and employers to start a relationship with them. They make it too difficult to get prospects to start using their products or services to the maximum advantage. If you lower or totally eliminate the hurdle in starting a relationship, far more people will begin one with you.
• They want to do everything possible to make it easy and attractive to get you started buying and using their service in the first place.
• Make a list of every product or service you or your company sells. Then figure out how you can lower the resistance barrier to a prospective client, employer, or prospect by lowering the entrance fee you ask.
• Picking a USP: speedy service, a longer and more comprehensive warranty or guarantee than the norm.
• The bottom line is this: Develop a USP and extol it in everything you do. It can put you head and shoulders above your competition forever.
• One of the biggest “competitive-edge” advantages you’ll ever gain is to always make it easier for the client to say yes than it is for them to say no. You do it by taking away the financial, psychological, or emotional risk factors that are always attached (stated or unstated) to virtually any decision-making proposition you ever ask a client to make.
• Assume the risk in every transaction you have with your clients. Let them know that, if they are ever dissatisfied, you will give them their money back, redo the job at no charge, or whatever else it takes to demonstrate your total, passionate commitment to their satisfaction.
• You must totally and completely guarantee the purchase for your client.
• Offer them an exceptional money-back guarantee, but allow the client to keep the bonus if he or she asks for a refund.
• Their biggest discovery is that the primary reason people don’t buy is that they don’t want to look bad in the eyes of their peers, and they don’t want to make a mistake.
• If there’s no risk in doing something, a lot more people tend to give it a try. Once they try it out, if your product or service performs as you say, most people will continue buying again and again.
• Usually a sixty-day guarantee will outproduce a thirty-day guarantee by 20-100%.
• Sample guarantee: “No Questions asked, 100 percent money back guarantee anytime within sixty days if my product fails to perform exactly as promised.”
• a tv set distributor offers to back any sets not sold by his retailers in the first 180 days
• I’ve seen strong risk reversal double and triple sales while only adding .5 to 3 percent in additional refunds to a company’s numbers.
• Look at your business, products, services, or employment skills and talents. Make a complete list of every obstacle to your clients or employers that might prevent them from purchasing, dealing with, or choosing you over your competition. Mitigate them or even better—Eliminate them!
• Instead of simply selling cars, most dealers offer their clients the opportunity to add on a stereo system, convenient financing, security devices, a sunroof, car phones, an extended warranty, and all kinds of other options to the basic purchase.
• Watch what people themselves do with your service or product after they buy it, and offer to do it for them for a fee.
• Can you offer a client a larger unit of purchase–perhaps a family size month’s supply, or  a three month, six month, or a year’s supply?
• Put in add-ons when they go up to the next step – ex: receive an extra business building report
• By merely offering people three different choices, 2/3 of the buyers bought a higher unit of sales.
• “Since we don’t know exactly what you have on the shelf now, we’ll send over one hundred books on consignment. Just send back those you don’t want”
• The important point here is to always focus on the increased profit–not lost profit—that an add-on transaction brings you.
• Consider offering three times the average volume being purchased now for two and half times the price. Offer three month, three year, etc.
• Bundle your products together to achieve the end result. Clients will thank you for it and you’ll profit tremendously by doing it.

How Come That Idiot’s Rich and I’m Not?

by Robert Shemin (Author)

About a month ago I read this book pretty much cover to cover sitting in Borders Bookstore. Here are the key takeaways I took from it and have tried to implement in my own life. My responses to these points in are italics:

• have one goal only

  To build recurring revenue to sustain myself during a 2month travel to Australia and SE Asia. My plane leaves in mid-December, 2008.

• have a charm to remind of goal

  When my sister was in Vietnam, she sent me this amazing handmade dragon lantern. During the shipment a number of the dragons broke off. Today, I took one of those broken dragons (about the size of a quarter) and tied it to a hemp string and have hung it around my neck as my ‘charm’. Perfect, especially since the Asian dragon is symbolic of power!

• find some heroes to emulate and copy what they do daily

  The way Tim Ferriss lives his life is an inspiration to me. He’s totally changed the way I think about the intersection between business life and personal life. I’ve been reading his blog a lot lately and staying up to date on his tweets via twitter.  I’m still trying to find more ‘heroes’ so-to-speak. I have been a longtime fan of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which is pretty much led by Ty Pennington. I look up to his zest for life and his urge to help people. So, perhaps I will add him to my list.

• start tracking daily money in and out down to the penny

  hmmm…I don’t know about this one. But i have definitely started to be more aware. I’ve cut the spending on credit cards down to nil, so I’m just using my debit card for everything now. I’ve made an effort to move my auto billing for things like cell phone, internet, and auto insurance to my debit card, because I realize I had just forgot about all those auto bills, and my debt was racking up. This way I can see it all the time.

• a vision without a map is worthless

  I have created an action item list for the 4 endeavors that are in front of me at the moment. I was sure to give myself deadlines for each item, and was especially sure to only put items on the list that help me reach my ONE goal.

• start a plan by first looking at the end goal

  I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to get through a list of tasks when I keep reminding myself WHY I’m doing it. Forgetting the end goal in my experience is the worst mistake I can make. If I do, I lose a LOT of motivation. Otherwise, the tasks seem to fly through and it keeps my excitement level high.

So, I’ve been realized that other than holding on to some shares of Microsoft since my 16th birthday, I really know very little about the stock market—and picking winners.  I figured I’d lessen the gap of knowledge a bit by picking up a couple books on investing in the stock market.  Here’s what I learned from the first one:

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius Even if You’re Not Too Smart: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits
by Joel Greenblatt

1. increase # of stocks to decrease risk. (seems obvious, i know…but there was this cool set of statistics mentioned the book that shows the risk going down 75% when you have 4 stocks and all the way up to something around 80 stocks.  never seen it written out in statistics like that, rather than simply saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”)
   
2. Buy spin-off companies.  (This is was the biggest point of the authors.  Says this is where the guaranteed cash is. There’s proven statistics on it)
3. invest in companies that might be acquired soon
4. invest in good companies that are coming out of bankruptcy.
5. invest right after corporate restructuring has been announced
6. look for cool concept stores and invest in their public parent company (if there is one)
7. the Wall Street Journal is the best source for investment news.  (I guess this makes sense given that the WSJ Online is one of the few successful subscriber based periodicals online. Now that you know what tips off a good investment you can make sense of the news.)
8. Look into investment newsletters (but it costs some cash to subscribe)
1. Outstanding Investor Digest – the best
2. The Turnaround Letter

So I’m going to start reading the financial news more, watch the announcements, etc.  Mainly looking for company spin-offs as the authors seemed so confident as money makers.  Was searching for a website or blog that specialized in making announcements like this, but have yet to find one.  My first investment may not be for a little while, but I’ve got my ETrade and Zecco accounts all ready to go.

Trump: How to Get Rich by Donald Trump

I just read this book in one sitting. It was a casual, fast read. I didn’t have super high expectations as the reviewers on Amazon only rated it 3/5 stars. There were a few good nuggets of wisdom, though, just as I had hoped. Here are my favorites:

Manage people tip

• “People have different ways of achieving results. I enjoy figuring out how each of my key employees excels. If people are your resource, you’d better try to learn something useful about them. Being able to do so is what makes a good manager a great one.”

Be an informed world citizen

• “Perhaps one of the reason I’ve been able to sell and rent apartments to people of so many foreign nationalities is that I’ve made an effort to understand where they’re coming from.”

Be detail oriented (I still need to work more on this one)

• “If you don’t know every aspect of what you’re doing, down to the paper clips, you’re setting yourself up for some unwelcome surprises.”

Public speaking (tailoring your speech to your audience)

• On winging a speech 5 minutes before showtime: “all in all, it was a valuable lesson in public speaking. Think about your audience first. The rest will fall into place.”
• Never read off your note cards. You can have the best written speech, but the audience will feel it’s contrived.

Comparing yourself to others’ achievements. Don’t do it.

• “Comparing ourselves to others is a waste of time. I’ve heard people say, “well, Mr. Lucky had a million dollars before he was thirty and I’ve worked just as hard as he has.” Well, Mr. Lucky has nothing to do with you, your possibilities, your success, or your failure. Don’t let anyone else be your yardstick. That’s taking power away from yourself in a big way.”

Winning Retail by Willard Ander & Neil Stern

1. Display your lamps like Pottery Barn. Show your lamp in a mock up of a living room. “Here’s how to make your living room beautiful.” This allows Pottery Barn to sell the complete solution rather than just a product. Selling the benefit rather than just the commodity.

2. If you’re truly going to have a customer-comes-first approach to retailing, then you have be ready to hire a team that’s knowledgeable and highly motivated to provide solutions and help make shopping easy and enjoyable for customers.

3. Do little things that show the customer that you truly understand them and that you’re putting them first.

4. To win over the long-term stores must be best at something—not just good at everything. They have to meet the min standards in ALL areas, excel in SOME areas, and be best in ONE area.

5. Beware that customer perceptions may be totally different that management’s perceptions. Ask your customers to be sure.

6. Customers are very focused when they shop—they typically do not care about most of the messages we are bombarding them with.

7. Management needs to realize that in order to sell more products, the company has to become more relevant in customers’ lives. This means selling more products to existing customers and reaching new customers as well. Introduce new product designs, new colors, and experiment with new materials. This will help you move from being a seller of products to being a lifestyle brand.

8. Live a customer-centric business lifestyle. Customers are becoming less patient. They don’t want to wait for floundering stores to improve. It’s more important than ever for stores to be constantly adapting and testing new prototypes.

9. Hot Topic’s splashy merchandise grabs lots of headlines, but what really makes the company revolutionary is its speed-to-market capabilities. They don’t’ operate a massive central warehouse. They don’t bother with things like vendor rebates or ad planning so there’s no need to order merchandise far in advance. Within days or just a couple of weeks of seeing certain trendsetters wearing something, Hot Topic can have a version of that style on its sales floors.

10. Put your customers in control. Empower them. Trust their intellect. Make your store easier to shop by providing key information. Giving them power makes them come to see a retailer as an advocate rather than an adversary. Let the customers help themselves. Provide them with the tools to answer their questions.

11. Try to avoid talking too much about creating a wonderful “customer experience.” Some customers feel that an experience is “what you get when you don’t get what you expect.”

12. Be sure to help the customer figure out what to buy.

13. The winning retailers in the future will be master of technology, able to effectively use these tools to streamline costs and better server customers. Retailing is still a combination of art and science though. Developing balance between merchants’ instincts and the vast array of technological advances will further separate winners and losers in the future.

The Power of Six Sigma by Chowdhury

1. The goal is not simply to improve quality for the sake improving quality, but to make customers happier and add money to the bottom line.
2. Most companies think improving quality costs money, so it’s a trade-off, a tug-ofwar between your customers and your accounts. They ask themselves, How much quality can we afford to give the customers and still make a profit? But Six Sigma companies flip that.
3. Focus more on people that are already IN your store, or are current customers. Don’t just spend lots of money getting people in there. Make sure it’s worth their time. Spend money on that. If you keep THAT guy and get his friends you don’t need to advertise nearly as much.
4. Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what you want done and they’ll surprise you with their ingenuity in getting there.
5. Pick the problem that’s giving the most trouble, the one that’s costing the company the most, the one that’s making customers unhappy—the one that will reward you the most if you can fix it.
6. Be sure to assign very specific jobs to the people on your team. This eliminates confusion and lack of direction. Guarantees that the job gets done. Even the Red Cross advises rescuers on the scene to point to a specific member in the crowed to get a blanket, to another call 911, and so on. Otherwise, everyone just stands there. Finally, put it all in writing and pass it around. If everyone can see who’s doing what and when, that breeds accountability.
7. The main thrust of Six Sigma is to reduce errors and waste in every kind of business endeavor to please customers and fatten the bottom line. You do that not simply by cranking up quality control, but by taking a step back, defined where the underlying problems—within the business process, or operation—and eliminating them. The key do doing all that, is measuring where you are and where you want to go, analyzing the data, improving trhe situation, and controlling the activity after you fix it to make sure you don’t slip. And you do that by giving everyone on board very specific jobs and rewards—recognition, promotion, bonuses—for doing them well. The Black Belt, especially, needs to be given all the resources necessary to focus solely on making the Six Sigma projects a success. The power of Six Sigma is that everyone throughout the corporation is speaking the same language.
8. Six sigma is the answer to the old phrase, “we just need to do things better.” Six Sigma is about doing better, but with an actual measureable process.
9. The DMAIC methodology breaks down as follows:

a. Define the project goals and customer (internal and external) requirements.

b. Measure the process to determine current performance.

c. Analyze and determine the root cause(s) of the defects.

d. Improve the process by eliminating defect root causes.

e. Control future process performance.

11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding by Laura Ries

1. Brands are cold, silent, lifeless. Be the Donald Trump. Be the Steve Jobs. As the CEO you can make your brand famous if you become famous.
2. When building an Internet brand, you have to think category first and brand second. Customers are not primarily interested in companies, in brands, or even in websites. They are primarily interested in categories.
3. If you want to be the leader in a category, you first have to tell the prospect what the category is.
4. Be a global brand. Amazon means books in all countries. Books.com means books in only English speaking countries. But it is still important to have a national identity as well. Ex. Rolex is a global brand with a Swiss identity. Volvo global brand with Swedish identity. Maybe be the global brand with the Austin, TX identity.
5. Divergence is consistent with nature—nature tends towards chaos. All-in-one (convergent) type products/brands will always be there, but it makes more sense to go with nature. Convergent solutions drive like a boat and floats like a car.

22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Laura Ries

1. Good things happen when you contract rather than expand your business. Become a category killer, here are the steps:
1. a. Narrow the focus.
1. b. Stock in depth. A typical Toys R Us carries 10,000 toys versus 3,000 toys for even a large department store
1. c. Buy cheap. Toys R Us makes its money buying toys, not selling toys.
1. d. Sell cheap. When you can buy cheap, you can sell cheap and still maintain good margins.
1. e. Dominate the category.
2. Good things happen when you narrow the focus. Dominoes started out selling pizza and sub sandwiches. Little Caesars sold pizza, friend shrimp, fish and chips, and roasted chicken. Papa Johns sold pizza, cheese steaks, sub sandwiches, friend mushrooms, fried zucchini, salads, and onion rings. Then they contracted the menus and became category killers.
3. The best way to create news is to announce a new category, not a new product. Examples:
1. a. Rollerblade -first inline skate
1. b. Samuel Adams- first microbrewed beer
1. c. Saran Wrap – first plastic food wrap
1. d. Tide – first detergent
1. e. Time – first weekly news magazine
4. Quality, or rather the perception of quality resides in the mind of the buyer. If you want to build a powerful brand, you have to build a powerful perception of quality in the mind. Contracting your brand will allow you to do this—conveys you as a specialist.
5. If you’re in a category with a lot of competitors deliberately start with a higher price. Then ask yourself, what can we put into our brand to justify the higher price?
6. Run up a red flag whenever you hear the words, “why should we limit ourselves?” You should limit your brand. That’s the essence of branding. Your brand has to stand for something both simple and narrow in the mind.

101 Home Office Success Secrets by Lisa Kanarek

• Have a one page fact sheet available. When a reporter calls Alan Caruba, public relations counselor, editorial consultant and lecturer, he has a one page, up to date and accurate fact sheet ready to fax. He uses the sheet as a pre-interview piece, to give the reporter a feel for his background and expertise, or as a post-interview piece to provide the repeater with additional information. Caruba always offers to send the sheet, even if the reporter hasn’t requested it. Make sure it faxes well! Recommend to include information ranging from your company’s history, to what you are selling or doing. Also include your credentials.
• Follow the 13-13-12-12 Cold Call Plan.With the odds in his favor, Joe Charbonneau, president of Presentations Inc., and a master speaker, plays a numbers game to increase his sales. He knows that although he would like to, he and his staff will not close every sales call they make. To increase his company’s closure rate, he devised a comprehensive sales method that he calls the “13-13-12-12 Plan.”