By Verne Harnish

“…keeping you great”

HEADLINES:

On-Demand Online Seminars Expiring — the last day to purchase/view David Allen’s (Getting Things Done) online seminar is this Friday, January 22; the last day for Dr. Robert Cialdini (Influence) is February 17.

Double Sales — My Hope For All Companies the Next Three Years — I shot this 60 second video for Mike Maddock’s Maddock Douglas website (he’s using education-based content to drive marketing) outlining the two key focuses for the next three years — Going Global; Getting Lean. Take a minute to watch, then take the challenge. The video link is in the right hand column of Maddock’s website (www.maddockdouglas.com)

Improving Sales Productivity 10-Fold — speaking of Lean, “imagine what would happen if you melded the precision and predictability of process engineering to the big black box we call sales?” exclaims Guy Parsons, Lean guru. That’s exactly what Australian, Justin Roff-Marsh, a leader in applying Process Engineering to Sales has accomplished. Hosted by Gazelles Lean, Parsons is moderating a complimentary 30 minute conference call with Roff-Marsh on February 4th, 2pm ET, as he discusses some of his breakthrough successes. There will be a 15 minute Q&A that follows. Roff-March has also written a couple white papers you can download and he’ll provide a one-page “action” sheet for those that participate. Register to receive the phone number and pass code (http://www.gazelles.com/justin_guy_concall_4feb10.html).

Radical Stuff in Sales — Roff-Marsh suggests salespeople earn salaries and give up control of their calendars. In return, they get executive assistants and they get relieved of the responsibility for all activities other than face-to-face, business-development meetings. Their clients typically have very small bus-dev teams (why it interested me) but those salespeople perform 20 true sales meetings a week — 10x the standard. “We typically work in engineer-to-order environments — technical sales, in other words,” explains Roff-Marsh with Ballistix (www.ballistix.com). Here’s a link to his Blog: (www.salesprocessengineering.net)

VC Chuckles — and this note from Ed Sullivan, CEO of Aria Systems (www.ariasystems.com), “My new VC, VenRock (Rockefeller founded) chuckled when I explained to them the Rockefeller habits (we’re implementing)! The habits certainly contributed to our success and helped us expand into CA and make managing a geographically diverse company easier.” Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), a key indicator of the health of a SaaS vendor, grew more than 300% in 2009. Here’s a link to more information (http://bit.ly/900DVs)

Australia National Growth Summit — Feb 17-18 in Sydney, the theme is “Going Global, Getting Lean.” Joining me on the stage is the famous German researcher Hermann Simon, author of my favorite business book of all time Hidden Champions; Guy Parsons, Lean guru that is showing mid-market firms how to double productivity, even on the service side of the business (including sales); and David Meerman Scott, the thought leader on Web2.0 implementation for business and author of World Wide Rave, will also beam in for the event. Hope to see all our Australian and New Zealand friends in Sydney for a fantastic two days (http://www.growthsummit.com.au/).

Topgrading Your Daugther — and this note from Bob Hubbard, Hubbard Family Swim School (www.hubbardswim.com). “After I attended a Topgrading event in Denver a few years ago, I actually came home and Topgraded my existing management team, including my daughter. It is one of the best management things I ever did. I learned a lot about our people. Yes, even about my daughter, who had a four year career as a college soccer coach in between working with us. I found out about talents that a number of our staff had that I would never have suspected. It has enabled us to bring people into new roles and responsibilities that matched some of their hidden talents and avocations. It also helped explain why some of them struggled in areas in which we thought they would have excelled. It was a little weird talking with people who had worked for us for five or six years about their first job, etc. Once we got into a rhythm it was great.”

Geoff Smart’s Topgrading Online Seminar — this Thursday, January 21, 2010, noon — 1:30pm ET (http://www.gazelles.com/ggs_geoff.html)

EDUCATION:

Growth Summit

National Growth Summit ’10
17 & 18 February 2010, Sydney
Fortune Sales and Marketing Summit
April 20 – 22, 2010, Las Vegas, NV
The Making of Asian Giants
April 27 – 29, 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Fortune Growth Summit
Oct 19 – 21, 2010, Orlando, FL

Growth Series Webcasts

PEOPLE — Geoff Smart – 21 Jan ’10
STRATEGY — Jeff Jarvis – 18 Feb ’10
EXECUTION — Chip Heath – 25 Mar ’10

Growth Workshops – Four Decisions: SuperGreen Execution

Spring 2010

Jan 21 – Richmond
Jan 26 – Ft. Lauderdale
Mar 2 – Atlanta
May 25 – Houston
Sep 23 – New York City
Oct 7 – Portland

Summits & Conferences

Great Game of Business with Jack Stack

Gazelles DVD/Online Learning Products — Gazelles.tv

PEOPLE
Whats the Secret to Providing World Class Customer Experience
Topgrading

STRATEGY
High Stakes Negotiations
The Art of Advantage

EXECUTION
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits
Execute Without Drama

Did you miss previous insights? – read here (http://verneharnish.typepad.com/growthguy/archives.html)

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Dub Publishing president started with a specialty automobile magazine and turned it into a $34-million business.

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles

6:58 PM PST, December 11, 2009

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

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please see the attach video ( 1 min) of the unemployment in the US…. and the government is saying we are already getting out of recesion.

http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

I believe there will be a new downturn and low around summer 2011.

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Commentary by Jeff Cornwall

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009905110317

There appears to be an increase in the number of entrepreneurs selling their businesses over the past few months. Financially strong companies and cash-rich investors looking for good acquisitions are starting to move into the market.

Just having assets such as buildings, land, equipment and even inventory is not what creates value. Those assets must have the ability to continue to earn profits for a new owner. It is the prospect of those future profits that gives a business its real value.

The simplest way to think about business value is this: People are buying your business’s ability to generate future profits. Typically, the value is based on a multiple of profits. Historically, valuations have been about three to eight times annual operating cash profits (ignoring things like depreciation, corporate taxes and interest expenses) with the most typical multiplier being about four.

If a buyer offers a multiple of profits of four, and your business has operating cash profits of $100,000, you can expect a valuation of about $400,000.

Since it is a buyer’s market right now, you need to set realistic expectations going into any discussions about a sale of your business. I am hearing that there has been about a one-point drop to a multiple of three times profits.

What does that mean? Just like home values, your business’s value has dropped by about 25 percent, all things being equal.

But remember: The other part of the valuation equation is the profitability of the business.

How to prepare

Most entrepreneurs have reported a significant drop in their profit margins over the past year. So, that means that the drop in values could become much greater than 20 percent or 25 percent if profits are also down. My advice is as follows:

Understand what drives the value of a business. What multiple you are likely to get is based on your projected growth, the health of your industry, the strength of your customer base projected into the future, and specific strategic advantages that you may be able to offer the buyer.

Know your number. If you need a certain amount of money from your business to retire, have that number in mind going in. If the market is not supporting that value right now, you might want to wait until a later time. Use that time to improve your profitability so that when the economy picks up your operation will have an even greater value.

Seek expert advice. Work with your certified public accountant and an attorney who specializes in mergers and acquisitions to understand the process and to help set realistic expectations. This will be money well spent.

Realize that deals change. Once the buyer gets into due diligence, the price may drop. Once they learn more about the business, they may lower their projections for what they believe your business can earn for them in the future.

Be prepared for this, and know how much you are willing to go down ahead of time. Be ready to walk away if the price they are willing to pay drops too much.

Don’t let your emotions lead you to take an overly discounted price — buyers can smell desperation and will use that to their advantage by trying to drive down the price during due diligence.

The odds are that about one out of 50 inquiries about buying a business will lead to an actual sale. Keep a level head and don’t even dream about how you’ll spend all of that money until you get it in the bank.

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by Gary Van Linde

Basic Concepts

1)    The essence of the “Infinite Banking Concept” is to recover the interest that one normally pays to a banking institution through the use of dividend paying life insurance and then lending those funds to others so that the policy owner makes what a banking institution does.  Funds may be lent to any party including your-self and earnings grow within the policy tax deferred.  Thus you are both reducing your tax burden and capturing monies for yourself that a banking institution normally would receive.
2)    A foundational principle of the concept is that anytime you can cut the payment of interest to others and direct that same market rate of interest to an entity you own and control, which are subject to minimal taxation then you will have improved your wealth generating potential significantly. (Insurance companies do pay taxes – it is just that dividends in an insurance policy are not taxed – we will talk about this later.)
3)    A concept or principle that must be understood before we began is that we are not talking about investing here rather we are talking about financing.  Financing is a process not a product.  Financing involves both the creation of and maintenance of a pool of money and its use.  However we will see that when a financing system is combined with an investment system the combination of the two will always out perform an investment system.  When the system combines reduced tax liability with a financing engine and allows complete control over your investments there appears to be no system capable of generating wealth with as much consistency or speed.
4)    A second concept or principle we must all agree on is that you finance everything.   You either finance by:
a.    Paying interest to someone else – a bank, lender, etc.
b.    Or giving up interest you could have earned otherwise.

5)    For these reasons when we are discussing investment alternatives we must not only weigh the return we will receive but we must also evaluate what we are forfeiting or giving up.  This mind set will become more important as we evaluate the “Infinite Banking Concept”.
6)    For all of the reasons mentioned above every person should be fully engaged in two businesses.
a.    Your  occupation
b.    Banking
7)    Of the two businesses mentioned above, banking appears to be the one that has the greatest potential for helping a person generate long term wealth.
8)    If we look at the average American we will find that most Americans spend about $ 0.24 – $.34 of every dollar on interest expense.  (Home, Car, Boat, Credit Card, etc.) For example if you look at the purchase of a home, approximately 85 % of the monies paid during the first five years of your mortgage are interest payments.
9)    Also looking at the average American we find that about $ 0.30 of every dollar is paid in taxes.
10)    Summing these quantities we see that the Average American is paying from         $ 0.54 to $ 0.64 of every dollar they earn on interest expense and taxes.  If a legal, legitimate method could be developed to simply capture half of this loss the wealth creating ability of the average man would be significantly improved.
11)    In short, if these two sources of revenue could be captured then you would be further along in generating wealth for yourself than if you made good investments in the market that were achieving high rates of return.
12)    As a note, the methods we are about to discuss are used by Wachovia Bank.  To capitalize their banking system, Wachovia has over thirteen billion dollars in cash values of dividend paying life insurance on their top executives.  This pool of capital is one of the primary sources of working capital the bank draws on to fuel their banking system.

How Insurance Works
1)    In developing an insurance policy several steps must take place.  These are as follows:
a.    Actuaries develop a statistical model based on the lives of ten million selected people.  The model predicts the number of people that will die each year within the selected population.  The model covers people from the age of birth until one hundred years of age.
b.    After the actuaries have developed the population model, rate makers will take this information and determine what the company will have to charge in order to pay the death claim promised and make the whole system work.
c.    Lawyers make legal and binding contracts that are offered to the public through a sales force.
d.    An administrative organization made up of executives, clerks, etc. oversees and administers the whole system.
2)    So far so good.  The contract you sign is unilateral.  The insurance company promises to do certain things if you meet the standards of acceptability and make your premium payments.
3)    If you will look at your contract closely you will see that you are the owner of the contract not the insurance company.  The owner is the most important person in the play that is unfolding.
4)    To make the insurance plan work the owner (you) must make payments into the company (insurance company) and the insurance company must put this money to work in order to produce the benefits promised.  This is usually done in conservative financial instruments such as bonds, mortgages, etc.  Sometimes an insurance company will invest in speculative investments such as real estate or joint ventures but this is usually a small part of the investment portfolio.
5)    Now since you are the owner of the policy and not the insurance company you outrank every potential borrower who wishes to use the money in your policy that is available to be lent.
6)    Since you are the owner of the policy and you out rank every other borrower you have absolute control over the equity (cash value) that has accrued in your account.
7)    In essence the insurance company can only lend the equity (cash value) in your policy to other places if the policy owner (you) does not exercise his option to use the money at the interest rate agreed.
8)    By investing the premiums paid the insurance company creates an ever increasing pool of money to service the policy.
9)    Now at the end of the year the directors call in the accounts and ask “How did we do on John Doe’s policy in comparison with the assumptions made by the actuaries and the rate makers?”
10)    Based upon this comparison a dividend may be declared.

Why is a dividend not taxable?
1)    Let’s look at an example.
2)    The rate makers determine that John Doe’s policy will cost him $ 1.00 / year for the insurance he wants.
3)    Now the insurance company recognizes that several factors may cause the $ 1.00 / Year estimate to be wrong such as high administrative cost, larger than expected death claims, or lower than expected earnings.
4)    As a result they apply a fudge factor and bump the rate to $ 1.10 / year.  This extra $ 0.10 is the capital that makes the system viable
5)    After a few years the directors call the accounts in and ask “How did we do on John Doe’s policy in comparison with the assumptions made by the actuaries and the rate makers?”
6)    The accounts report we have collected $ 1.10 in premium on John Doe’s policy and it has only cost us $ 0.80 to deliver the promised death benefit.
7)    As a result the directors now have $ 0.30 to make a decision with.
8)    Since the directors are smart people they decide to place $ 025 into a contingency fund and return the remaining $ .275 as a dividend.
9)    Since the dividend is not an actual “gain” but is rather a “return of premium” the dividend is not considered a taxable event.
10)    Unlike a dividend declared in a security which may lose its value as the stock rises or falls a dividend declared in an insurance policy can never lose any of its value.  Once a dividend is declared it is guaranteed – it can never loose its value.
11)    If the owner will use the “dividend” to purchase additional Paid Up Insurance       (No cost for acquisition or sales commission) the result is an ever increasing, tax differed accumulation of cash values that support an ever increasing death benefit.  This pool of money has no real governmental strings attached as to how, when or why it may be used and can be passed on to the next generation with limited or no estate taxes.

But it seems risky
1)    A point to consider about an insurance policy is that they are designed to become more efficient over time no matter what happens.  How can this be?
2)    Insurance policies become more efficient over time because over the life of the policy the cash value is guaranteed to reach the face amount of the policy.  As a result the insurance company faces an ever decreasing “net amount of risk”.

Possible Uses of the Infinite Banking System
1)    Medical Insurance – This system works well for people who are “un-insurable”.
2)    Car Insurance
3)    Life Insurance
4)    Buy Sell Agreements
5)    Home Mortgages
6)    Car, Boat financing
7)    Equipment financing
8)    Estate planning & Wealth X-fers
9)    Charitable trust and giving
10)    College savings plan
11)    Leasing business
12)    Retirement planning
13)    Eliminates need for Social Security
14)    Can cover multiple generations – good method of teaching and transferring wealth to successive generations.
15)    Business financing
16)    Others – ?

JEANETTE’S BANKING SYSTEM

My oldest grand-daughter, Jeanette, finished Nursing School in May of 2003.  She got a job right away.  She bought her first car, a Toyota Celica, for $21,500 and paid cash for it with a policy loan on a policy her parents bought on her when she was 2 years old.  (I bought one on her at the same time that is three times greater premium).

Jeanette set up an amortization table to repay the loan over five years at 10% interest.  In making the “car payments” she is even accelerating her own high interest schedule.  This means she is going to repay the loan “before she runs out of the amortization schedule.”

If she doesn’t finish the schedule  –  then she is “stealing from her banking system.”  This means  –  sometime in the next five years  — she needs to see a life insurance agent and buy another policy to accommodate that extra money she is paying on her car.  The earlier she makes that move, the better, because the earlier you start a policy, and the longer it stays in force, the more efficient it gets.

When she completes the schedule, she will have proved to me that she fully understands the essentials of “being your own banker.”   She will have “graduated from the Nash School of Finance”  Summa Cum Laude!   At that point I will give to her the policy that I bought on her when she was age 2.  My wife will have to join me in the gift and we will have to spread it over more than two years because of the IRS gifting limitations.
(Note:  at this point she will have at least three policies.)
When she buys the next car, she simply repeats the process.

When she is 40 years old, we can assume that buying a house is a high priority in her financial life.  All she has to do to pay cash for it is call her life agent and say, “Get me a policy loan of $350,000 on my policies.”   The agent needs to deliver the checks  –  along with an amortization table for 30 years at 10% interest.  (The more interest she pays her banking system, the better, because she will get back all her cost basis at retirement time, tax-free!).

The agent also needs to tell her, “Jeanette, your next door neighbor bought his house last month  –  and he had to pay $12,000 in closing costs.  You didn’t have to do that!  To play ‘honest banker’ with yourself, you need to pay $12,000 back to your policies now to emulate what everyone else has to do in such transactions.”

This all means that she is going to pay off that “house loan” before she finishes the 30 year schedule.  And this means she must buy another policy to accommodate that extra cash flow.  And, remember, the earlier she does it, the better the whole system performs.

NOW  –  when she gets to be 70 years old, she can stop all premium payments and begin to withdraw dividend income in the neighborhood of $150,000 for the rest of her life.  This won’t diminish the death benefit of about $3,000,000 regardless of how much longer she lives.

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By Seth Godin

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By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 10, 2009
Bangalore, India

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

While his tongue was slightly in cheek, Gupta and many other Indian business people I spoke to this week were trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants on temporary work permits known as H-1B visas.

Bad signal. In an age when attracting the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world is the most important competitive advantage a knowledge economy can have, why would we add barriers against such brainpower — anywhere? That’s called “Old Europe.” That’s spelled: S-T-U-P-I-D.

“If you do this, it will be one of the best things for India and one of the worst for Americans, [because] Indians will be forced to innovate at home,” said Subhash B. Dhar, a member of the executive council that runs Infosys, the well-known Indian technology company that sends Indian workers to the U.S. to support a wide range of firms. “We protected our jobs for many years and look where it got us. Do you know that for an Indian company, it is still easier to do business with a company in the U.S. than it is to do business today with another Indian state?”

Each Indian state tries to protect its little economy with its own rules. America should not be trying to copy that. “Your attitude,” said Dhar, should be “ ‘whoever can make us competitive and dominant, let’s bring them in.’ ”

If there is one thing we know for absolute certain, it’s this: Protectionism did not cause the Great Depression, but it sure helped to make it “Great.” From 1929 to 1934, world trade plunged by more than 60 percent — and we were all worse off.

We live in a technological age where every study shows that the more knowledge you have as a worker and the more knowledge workers you have as an economy, the faster your incomes will rise. Therefore, the centerpiece of our stimulus, the core driving principle, should be to stimulate everything that makes us smarter and attracts more smart people to our shores. That is the best way to create good jobs.

According to research by Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, more than half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants over the last decade. These immigrant-founded tech companies employed 450,000 workers and had sales of $52 billion in 2005, said Wadhwa in an essay published this week on BusinessWeek.com.

He also cited a recent study by William R. Kerr of Harvard Business School and William F. Lincoln of the University of Michigan that “found that in periods when H-1B visa numbers went down, so did patent applications filed by immigrants [in the U.S.]. And when H-1B visa numbers went up, patent applications followed suit.”

We don’t want to come out of this crisis with just inflation, a mountain of debt and more shovel-ready jobs. We want to — we have to — come out of it with a new Intel, Google, Microsoft and Apple. I would have loved to have seen the stimulus package include a government-funded venture capital bank to help finance all the start-ups that are clearly not starting up today — in the clean-energy space they’re dying like flies — because of a lack of liquidity from traditional lending sources.

Newsweek had an essay this week that began: “Could Silicon Valley become another Detroit?” Well, yes, it could. When the best brains in the world are on sale, you don’t shut them out. You open your doors wider. We need to attack this financial crisis with green cards not just greenbacks, and with start-ups not just bailouts. One Detroit is enough.

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By Steve Strauss for USA TODAY
Q: Help! I own a small consultancy business. A new client e-mailed me a few days ago but the message ended up in my spam folder, as did her follow-up. Now she won’t return my calls. How can I get her back? — Aaron

A: You probably can’t.

The new client concluded, fairly or unfairly (but fairly, I think) that if things are going wrong already, at the start of your working relationship, it does not bode well for work down the road.

But I suggest that a bigger issue is at play, namely, the value and power of first impressions. And especially in this economy, first impressions are more important than ever.

Back in my UCLA days, I once got a job as at a new pizza joint. My roommate at the time gave me some advice that has served me well ever since. “When you get a new job,” he told me, “work extra hard the first month. Do extra without being asked. Say yes to everything. They will see what a good, hard worker you are, and forever more will look at you through that lens.” I must say that I have since found this to be quite accurate.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Aaron | Steve Strauss | Small Business Bible | Blink

The old saying is true: You don’t get a second chance to make a great first impression.

Think about the e-mail fiasco above. Do you think that the client would have walked away if this had happened a few months into the relationship, after she had seen how valuable Aaron’s work was? Of course not; she might have been annoyed a bit, but she probably would not have cut him off.

And today, in this battered economy, my sense is that potential customers seem to be even more fickle, instinctively knowing that it’s a buyer’s market out there. “I can always take my business elsewhere, and probably find what you are selling cheaper anyway,” they seem to be thinking.

So you gotta make a superb first impression.

But in this e-world, don’t think that first impressions simply come from face-to-face meetings. Far from it. Your great first impression has to take into account all of the following:

Website: Make no mistake, these days, people judge you as much by your website as anything else. If you don’t have one, or have one that looks like your teenage daughter created it, or it has say a ‘© 2003′ at the bottom, or is otherwise dated and/or unprofessional, you are losing potential clients, no doubt about it.

E-mail: Do you respond to emails in a timely manner? What about the form of your emails? If you use lower case letters (as far too many business people do), or you don’t use proper grammar, spacing, or punctuation (again, far too common), or if you fail to appreciate that email is hardly different than a business letter, then again, you are making a bad first impression.

Storefront/ Office: You might be able to get away with having a disheveled office or store if you are some sort of artist, but even then, I doubt it. People will judge the quality and professionalism of your business by its physical appearance, like it or not.

Phone: Often, the first impression that people will have of your business is how they are treated on the phone. Do they get a real person or endless voicemail? Is the real person they speak with friendly or cold and aloof? And if you think this is not really that much of a concern, think about the last time you ended up in voicemail heck and how you felt about that business.

Signage: The very first thing anybody may notice about your business is it sign or signs. What does it say about your business if yours are old, dilapidated, out of date, or are hard to read?

Advertising: Maybe even before your signs, people may first make an impression about your business from your ads. Therefore, yours better reinforce your desired brand or people will get the wrong impression, and that’s exactly what we are trying to avoid.

As Malcolm Gladwell says about his book Blink, “When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, Blink is a book about those two seconds.”

What will people conclude about your business in those two seconds?

Today’s tip: If you are considering buying a franchise, then you need to check out the brand new AllBusiness.com AllStar Franchises List, which ranks the top 300 franchises for 2009. The list is the Web’s first interactive franchise ranking; you can analyze various factors that matter most to you (growth rank, longevity, etc.) and thereby create your own personal ranking. You can find it here.

Ask an Expert appears Mondays. You can e-mail Steve Strauss at: sstrauss@mrallbiz.com.And you can click here to see previous columns. Steven D. Strauss is a lawyer, author and speaker who specializes in small business and entrepreneurship. His latest book is The Small Business Bible. You can sign up for his free newsletter, “Small Business Success Secrets!” at his website —www.mrallbiz.com.

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By Dan Sullivan from www.strategiccoach.com

Lately, many people have been asking me what advice I have for entrepreneurs in today’s turbulent environment. It’s my belief that the “interesting” times we find ourselves in are not an anomaly, but rather a part of a natural evolution. The framework of “creative destruction,” which Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter identified as the natural evolutionary dynamic of capitalism in which old forms are destroyed to make way for the new, offers a broader perspective. We’re in an era where capitalism is no longer limited by national borders. The ordinary Creative Destruction® that used to happen within countries is now happening on a global scale. The media is focusing on the destruction because it’s good for ratings and readership, and because many media people, being bureaucratic employees, don’t understand capitalism. What they’re not reporting is that millions of entrepreneurs are creating new tools, systems, and concepts in response to the opportunities that are being created in this shift.

I want to encourage you to not be taken in by all the attention being given to the destructive part of this transformation and instead to focus on the creative. Great new things are happening that will emerge as we get past most of the destruction. Because of who you are and the relationships you’ve cultivated, you have big opportunities to create value for your clients and customers during times when they’re feeling especially powerless, isolated, and confused. You might not be able to sell the same thing you sold six months ago, but you can be useful in entirely new ways.

The D.O.S. Conversation®, which we teach in the Strategic Coach® Program, is the perfect tool to use to open doors to new opportunities. Its greatest strength is that it puts you in touch with your clients. This is a great opportunity for you now because the D.O.S.® issues of your clientele will have changed in significant ways recently. By having these conversations in the coming months, you can position yourself in a uniquely positive way with your key clients and customers who are feeling confused and shaky because of an uncertain economy.

For those of you not familiar with the conversation, it’s entirely made up of questions. The first question you ask allows the person to identify what needs to happen over the next three years in order for them to be happy with their progress. This is followed by three more questions that flesh out the dangers they would like to eliminate, the opportunities they’d like to capture, and the strengths they have that can be leveraged.

By having this kind of conversation, which is entirely focused on them, you can help your clients or prospects get clear about how their lives have changed, and also about important things that have stayed the same. You can help them to find opportunities they haven’t seen and also see where you might be able to offer them creative solutions. This is a time when people are much more likely to be open to someone with a positive creative approach than to just another person selling a thing. Even the new sense of perspective you leave them with will be incredibly valuable and will differentiate you from all the other people who are focused on pushing products. I keep reminding all Strategic Coach® entrepreneurs that even though you may not be able to sell something right now, it doesn’t mean you can’t be useful. And as soon as you are seen as extraordinarily useful—through The D.O.S. Conversation—the sales will start flowing again.

Stay creative, keep listening to your clients, and seek out new ways to be useful, and you’ll be in good shape to make the most of this uncertainty and create new forms of value that will propel your business forward. And always remember, the market rewards creators.

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