50 Shades of Jay # 34 – Blog-athon — “When the Mood Strikes”

This 34th shade is a fun one. I just finished tying up arrangements with a rarefied collection of mammoth and complex thinkers to each do collaborative blogs with me, for me, or for my perspective. I’m calling the umbrella MEGA blog “When The Mood Strikes” because there will be different types of posts, different versions from different perspectives, that won’t be published at pre-set intervals.

One version is going to be a fast-paced review of all the fun and diverse activities going on in my life at different intervals, always with big ideas, insights, and lessons that emanated from each of my zany and outrageous business adventures. Another is a separate collaboration I’m doing with one of direct marketing’s richest, masterful, and most articulate perspectives on the intersection of the offline/online world and what nobody still gets that needs to be understood and acted on. I hope you thoroughly enjoy this one!

What Every Young Entrepreneur Ought To Know About Starting A Business

By Jay Abraham

The world is filled with delusions, misinformation, confusions and hallucinations about what it takes to start a business and be an entrepreneur.

You think you have to go into terrible debt? Not so.
You think you have to work mercilessly hard? It’s not true.
You think you have to be miserable and beleaguered until you finally make it? Wrong again. Yes, you could opt to be this person and you’ve very welcomed to follow that path…but I wouldn’t.
The truth that every young entrepreneur ought to realize about starting a business is this…
You can have the fastest, safest, easiest, most result certain first endeavor.

You can start a business that has the highest probability of making money so you have predictable cash flow that can be used to subsidize your current income; and/or finance products or services or equipment you might need; and validate to you that you have the capability of making and creating commerce and making new profits and revenue happen.

You don’t have to put your life in jeopardy financially. I know a lot of people who put everything on the line – and they won. However, I know a lot of people who put everything on the line – and they lost everything. There are many more of these stories than the former. When they lost everything, the worst thing they lost was their entrepreneurial spirit. They lost the willingness to try again. They lost the capacity to see themselves as someone who was destined to succeed. They lost the ability to have passion for creating a business, enterprise or vehicle that they owned, could grow, and utilize to create many other vehicles. They lost all of that passion, possibility and purpose forever…

I don’t want to see that happen to any young entrepreneur … I don’t want to see that happen to you.

I want to help take you through a methodical way of thinking, and then through a series of safe, proven, high success probability actions where the only way you will get stressed, depressed, and fail is if you don’t act. The truth is you have virtually unlimited directions, options, possibilities and choices available to you to start your business.

A Brand New Porsche Every Year For The Rest Of Your Life: The Power of Creative Thinking

by Jay Abraham

There was a young man who wanted to drive Porsche automobiles all his life…but he couldn’t afford one.

He then found out a Porsche dealership was for sale in his city…but he couldn’t afford the $1,000,000 down payment.

Instead of seeing these things as problems – he saw an opportunity.

Car dealers can allow people to drive “demonstrators”, which means you can take a brand new car and for 3 months maximum you can drive it and it’s still considered a new car. It uses special plates and it’s not registered as sold, and then it goes back to the dealership.

Now, he didn’t have the $1,000,000 down payment for the Porsche dealership, but he knew there must be a lot of Porsche car enthusiasts who really wanted to drive Porsches and didn’t have the money to keep buying new ones.

So he ran an ad in the newspaper:

“I can give you a brand new Porsche to drive every year for the rest of your life. Instead of spending $100,000 every year for a new one, pay $75,000 one time and you will never pay another penny again.”

200 people responded. He said to these people that if they gave him the $75,000, he would use the money together to buy a Porsche dealership and as a Porsche dealer he would allow them to drive a demonstrator for 3 months every year for free. He would simply take it back and give them a new one, and they would keep doing that.

He never had to pay a penny in interest to the banks because it wasn’t a loan.

He never had to pay a penny to any partners because it wasn’t a partnership.

He used this simple philosophy and raised $3,000,000, bought the dealership and got $1,500,000 extra as a bonus.

That’s the power of creative thinking.

Why People Stop Buying From You (And What You Can Do About It)

By Jay Abraham

When people stop buying from you, it’s for three different reasons:

Reason #1: They have an interruption in their life that has nothing to do with your product or service. Maybe they were on vacation; maybe they had to work on a project; maybe they got sick; and so on. They stopped doing business with you for no reason that was negative about your company.

Reason #2: They had a negative experience with your company. Maybe the delivery caused them dissatisfaction; maybe a promise wasn’t kept or an expectation wasn’t met; maybe the assembly went wrong; and so on. This accounts for the majority of reasons people stop buying.

Reason #3: They no longer benefit from your product or service because their situation has changed.

What can you do about this? Try implementing one of these solutions depending on the reason they stopped buying:

Response to Reason #1: Contact them and express how they haven’t bought from your company in a while and sincerely ask them if anything is wrong and ask if you’ve done anything wrong – then, express how if you did something wrong, it wasn’t intentional. The important point here is to do whatever it takes to make them happy, be aware of their well-being, and satisfy them.

Response to Reason #2: Contact them and humble yourself by making right whatever went wrong. Do whatever is necessary including giving them something free or giving them their money back. If they are so upset they won’t deal with you, tell them you understand but that you don’t want their last interaction with your company to be a negative one – and then do something that will leave them with a good memory of doing business with you. Do whatever it takes to make it right.

Response to Reason #3: Contact them and express genuine concern for and interest in their current situation. Ask them if everything is going alright with their new situation and look for ways to offer them complimentary products or services that could add to or enhance their new situation – even if that means referring them to competitors. When you look out for their best interest, it will stand out in their minds, and many times these people who no longer benefit from your product or service will refer you to other people who would benefit.

Statistically, if you respond in the aforementioned ways via calls, letters, in-person meetings, and so on, it will renew business activity from all three situations where people stop buying.

The Myth of Risky Business: A Safer Way To Success

By Jay Abraham

What do you want to do?

“I want to run a company that has 1,000 employees and generates $50 million.”
“I want to build a chain of 500 retail stores.”
“I want to make $1,000,000 in a year.”

What is it for YOU?

Now, once you know what you want, let me ask you a question: If there’s an easier, safer, less demanding, less expensive, less stressful way to get to your end result – wouldn’t you want to know what it is?

Here’s a reality most people miss: There could be ten easier, faster, safer ways to do what you want with a lot less management, less fixed commitments, and so on – but you have to be informed.

For example, maybe you want to make passive income. You can make passive income from OTHER PEOPLE’S assets, relationships, media or distribution, where you work very hard for a short period and then you get recurring income over and over again. That recurring income can be used to finance and stabilize your transition to the next level when you figure out what your next level is; that income can be used to finance at a bank; that income can be used to supplement your lifestyle and relieve you of stress…

No matter where you are right now, the differential between where you are and where you want to be – the delta – is your current gap. Most people try and get from where they are to where they want to be very quickly, very dangerously and very poorly because they don’t know a lot about it. I recommend you slowly stair-step methodically a little higher and make sure that you have stable, predictable, solid revenue behind you all the time that will always be there to support and finance whatever new things you want to do is.

This is a way of thinking; a mental mindset. It’s important that you create business vehicles that work harder for you than you work for them – AND – the best way to do it is safely, without needless risk, utilizing high probability success methods.

Increase Your Sales 20% to 5000%: A Different Way To Look At Selling

By Jay Abraham

There are a lot of people who erroneously believe selling is manipulative. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let me give you a preeminent paradigm and perspective from which to look at selling:

Selling is nothing more than the passionate ability to advocate, champion, and represent a concept, solution to a problem, way of achieving an opportunity or desired outcome with such compelling certainty and trustworthiness that the prospective market you are selling to totally and absolutely embraces and accepts what you are saying – and they trust you enough to take action.

You want to be seen as the most trusted advisor to your market. An advisor counsels people in what will give them the best outcome. If you advise your market on what is in their best interest, more often than not you will make bigger and larger quantity sales. The reward to you for doing what will make your client get a better outcome is you will get a larger sales and increased profits.

When you and your organization become consultative and advisory oriented in your sales approach, this approach can increase your organizations sales from 20% to 5000%. In fact, get everybody in your organization who interfaces with the public – not just the sales people – trained in consultative advisory selling. It will transform your results, it will transform your culture, and it will connect you to your clients in a way you can’t fathom.

Marketers, Direct Marketers, Artists! The 10 Inviolable Rules Of Design and Typography

By Denny Hatch

1. “Lookers are shoppers while readers are buyers. If you can engage your prospect through reading, you’re on your way to a sale.”

2. “Currently 45 million Americans are functionally illiterate and cannot read above a fifth grade level.” http://literacyprojectfoundation.org

3. “50% of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level.” —http://literacyprojectfoundation.org

4. “The addictive nature of Web browsing can leave you with an attention span of 9 seconds—the same as a goldfish.” —Dr. Ted Selker, MIT Media Lab

5. Communications coins of the realm today are:
– The 160-character text used by 271 million mobile phone subscribers.
– The 140 character tweet, employed by 284 million active Twitter users who send 500 million tweets a day.
– If you want people to read your long copy, it must be broken up into bite-sized paragraphs.

6. “Avoid gray walls of type.” —David Ogilvy, Advertising legend

7. “Neatness rejects involvement.” —Lew Smith, Agency EVP

8. It is imperative to keep the reader’s eye moving.

9. After two or three inches of copy, insert your first boldface crosshead—or mini-headline—and thereafter pepper mini- headlines throughout. These mini-headlines should be the same size and font as text, but centered—either underlined or in boldface. An ingenious sequence of boldly displayed crossheads or mini-headlines can deliver the substance of your entire pitch to glancers who are too lazy to wade through the text. —David Ogilvy

10. “Ugly works!” —Bob Hacker, Founder, The Hacker Group