Have you absorbed the ‘Winning Headlines’ section yet? How did you get on writing one hundred headlines? My hunch is that you found it challenging.

Well, realise, if it was instantly easy, everybody would do it.

The fact is, headline writing is a skill you become more masterful at the more you write. My advice is to write as many headlines as you can. Keep a notebook purely for writing down headline ideas. Headline writing, to me, is like printing money. The more you can portray the most appealing and persuasive benefits and advantages of what you sell, the more you do sell.

The reason I’m placing this much emphasis on headlines is because I want you to become a master headline writer. It’s your passport to riches. Cosmopolitan magazine pays its top writers six-figure salaries to create compelling headlines for each issue.

Why? Because when a magazine sits on newsagent racks, alongside hundreds of competing titles, its success or failure almost all rests on the ability of the front cover headlines to catch the interest of browsers, and drive them to the tills. If the front cover headlines are weak, sales dramatically drop, and the magazine can bomb that month. The society and fashion magazine industry is brutal. Each publication has to employ skilled headline writers to win the game. It’s a great industry to watch, and learn from.

At the time of writing this, BRAD lists 102 national newspapers, 2,686 regional newspapers, 3,293 consumer magazines, and 5,581 business titles. That’s 11,662 publications, a large percentage of which rely on news rack sales. You’ve got to have compelling, intriguing, fascinating article headlines on front covers to win sales amongst this volume of competition.

But only a handful of businesses – including most publishers – understand the significance of headlines. They fail to grasp the reason their product or service or publication limps along – again, as long as it extends a good value in some tangible way – is 80 to 90 percent directly proportional to the strength of the appeal made in their headlines.

How do you become a master headline writer for whatever you sell? Here are five tips:

Tip One, imagine you are a £100,000-a-year headline writer for the major publication in your industry or profession, or your choice of national newspaper. Your assignment: write a powerful headline for your product or service, for an ad to be published on the front page of the next issue. Write twenty alternative headlines, then choose those you think are the most compelling four. By the way, you’ll discover in a later session, how to identify which headlines, of all the ones you’ve written, will produce the greatest volume of sales.

Tip Two, take one of the eight headline categories I gave you yesterday, and write twelve to fourteen headlines within that category. Write 12 – 14 headlines under the benefit or advantage category today.

Tomorrow, take the next category – curiosity – and write 12 or 14 curiosity-evoking headlines. Continue doing that for 8 days. You’ll end up with over 100 headlines. And because you broke them down into easy, manageable bits, it’s a less daunting and easier process. You’ll be surprised how much you can achieve when you take one step at a time.

Tip Three, go for a walk, or a run – ideally somewhere quiet – and take a notepad with you. When you disengage your logical mind – which is in overdrive when you’re working – by getting out of your office, or workshop, or factory – wherever you work – your subconscious or creative mind is able to kick-in.

I get my best ideas when I’m walking in the country, or shopping, or playing with my children, or jogging, or on holiday… these are the times I have my most innovative ideas, the best new marketing approaches, or twists.

It’s often annoying to people I’m with, because I’ll stop in the middle of a shopping centre, or stop in the middle of a walk, to capture my ideas on paper. I’ll often write pages of ideas and details that stream out of me when I’m not trying.

You’ll find the same happen to you. Ideas will come to you when you’re off the job. Make sure you always keep one of those dictation machines or a notepad with you wherever you go. If you don’t capture your ideas immediately, you’ll lose many of them, or they’ll come to you too quickly and you’ll forget the details.

Then, it’s important to act on these ideas immediately. You’ll find they are some of your most powerful and effective concepts.

Tip Four, keep a notebook by the side of your bed. Often, ideas flow from your creative mind as you wake up, before your logical mind takes over, or even in the middle of the night. Again, immediately jot down or record the ideas you have. They’ll often be your best.

Tip Five, subscribe to the following four publications and learn from some of the great headline writers of today. Emulate the style, approach and appeal of the headlines you see on the front page and throughout these titles. And don’t be prejudiced… whether you personally like or dislike these publications, you can’t deny the fact they’re successful. Each of these are leaders in their category, often selling more than double the number of issues their competitor ever manage.

Consider why that is.

The four publications are: Cosmopolitan, The Sun newspaper, The Sunday Times newspaper, and the National Enquirer, which now has a UK edition.

Love them or hate them, each of these will provide you with an incalculably valuable lesson in how to structure headlines that capture the interest of hundreds of thousands of people in each category. Plus you’ll see teasers, strap lines, sub-headlines and bullet points – techniques to capture readership and increase the desire to buy. For less than £3 each issue, it’s the best headline-writing education you can buy.

Before I share this, remember the most important success principle I’ve given you: One of the greatest methods of generating wealth in business is to not focus on or even desire wealth.

The secret of success and wealth is to focus primarily on the highest result you are able to provide for your customers or clients. Don’t think about the money, it flows easily and naturally when you provide an astonishing result that customers want more and more of from you - and as they tell friends, family, and colleagues which they’ll do automatically and enthusiastically.

Now, as you hear about the two restaurants you’ll see this principle demonstrated. Realise how in giving the greater result one restaurant piles up the big money, while the other – in being money conscious - receives the small change business.

Here’s the story:

We were told by the owner of the café in the centre of the little town of Vicopisano (where we were staying) that there were two restaurants: one lower priced, one higher priced. We enjoy a good restaurant so we headed for the ‘better’ one first.

Restaurant One

As we approached restaurant one, we were immediately impressed. It was a beautiful old building set in the side of the olive grove hills, with a charming old stairway cut into the hill down to the restaurant from the car park.

As you reach the last step and turn into the restaurant, there is a wonderful outside seating area, overlooking the groves and the ancient little town at the bottom of the valley, where you can eat when the weather is warm enough. That evening was already beautifully mild but no one was sitting outside. I thought that was strange.

But then, inside, there was also not a customer in sight. But, if you’ve been to Italy, you know that restaurants generally do not open until 8pm; this was about 8:15pm so we thought it was probably just too early to be busy.

We were greeted by the owner and invited to sit wherever we wished, and were given menus. The first thing he said to us was, “You can’t have pizzas here.” Interesting! Do English people only eat pizza? I don’t think so! Maybe it was just a language thing; maybe he meant to say, “Welcome, we do everything Italian except pizzas, I hope you don’t mind.”

As we were looking at the menus I said to Joanie, “This place doesn’t look a hundred percent clean. And there’s no sparkle, no soul to it.” It was weird, kind of ‘dead.’ Anyway, we chose from the menu and eventually received our meals – portions of the food were very good, some average, some poor. And the wine was awful! We weren’t given a choice – house wine or nothing – and it was bad.

The meal came to about 95 euros. We tipped another 20 euros – they could do with it, there still was not another soul in the restaurant.

We left knowing we’d never go back. Even the children felt it. It was a pity; the owner was trying hard to be friendly and to provide a good service but you could feel he was struggling. He was the kind of person you think is putting on a friendly effort at your table but is probably saying things about you in the privacy of the kitchen. Uncomfortable.

Restaurant Two

A couple of days later we drove to the second restaurant. From the outside it didn’t appear to be more than a cheap café – a few basic white wooden tables and chairs outside under a canopy, and a handful of plants dotted around.

But as soon as you get inside the scene changes! This place is the most charming, welcoming, warm, Italian family-type restaurant – just what we wanted! We were greeted by the staff with big, genuine smiles, and immediate good service.

But get this: as we were looking at the menus, out of the blue we were presented with a starter course we didn’t order! It was their welcome gift to us, and it was delicious. Five minutes later another gift course arrived! We hadn’t even indicated what we would order, but they were simply showering us with the pride of the kitchen as if we were the most important customers they’d received in ten years. Of course, they did the same for every table. Beautiful. And very smart. And no big, dramatic fanfare; just a beautifully understated genuineness that we fell in love with.

Their food, presentation and service was the best casual restaurant experience you can get. Just wonderful… every sentence, every move, every little touch. They are a great family restaurant, enjoying every minute of serving and delighting their customers with delicious traditional Italian food, and practicing the greatest secret of success in any business: give, give, give in every way you can.

We paid, thanked them with enthusiasm, and said to each other we’ll go back in a flash if ever we visit Vicopisano again.

And you know what? The bill came to 95 euros – the same as the first restaurant – and we added a nice tip. But here’s the interesting thing: I wonder why the café owner said the first was more expensive? Maybe, just maybe, the perceived lack of soul, sparkle, quality and service makes it seem more expensive. Or maybe she was subtlety trying to put us off going to the ‘more expensive’ restaurant.

Wait…

Before clicking off this advisory in search of ‘other business-building methods’ on LTITD, make an immediate list of ways in which you can give more to your customers. Can you gift product? Can you gift service? Can you gift treatment, consultation, advisory? How can you improve the warmth, interest and friendliness of your staff toward every customer. How can you gift the ‘pride of the kitchen’ and delight every customer who is lucky enough to visit your business or practice.

Think and act on these things now before you do anything else, or before you foolishly click away from the greatest success secret ever invented - giving - in search of ‘more powerful’ or ‘more ingenious’ methods of business growth.

There aren’t any.

By STEVEN BREWER

97% of all motivational failure will fall into 7 key categories. If you can identify and master these pitfalls, you are well on the way to a new lifestyle. New successes and new found riches.

Motivation Destroyer 1: Belief

You are who you think you are and if you do not believe you are capable of achieving what you are setting out to do then, there is an enormous chance you will prove yourself right. On your journey to success there will be moments of self doubt, that’s natural, but recognise that they are only moments and quickly get yourself back on track. Also look out for the “do-gooders” who also will try to sow an element of doubt in your mind that you perhaps have “unrealistic expectations”, are acting “way above your station” and perhaps they kindly suggest that it’s time for you to “get real”. Their opinions and limiting beliefs are based on their own experiences and beliefs. Remember, if we all stuck to what we know and nobody took risks we would still be riding round on Penny Farthings.

Motivation Destroyer 2: Focus

When you embark on your new journey that requires you to make some changes your motivation to make the changes is at its peak. There will be reasons you decide to make the changes and these reasons are your focus. Most of us make the mistake of making a note of the actual changes we are going to make and not the reasons behind those changes. It is vital that you write down you reasons why in order to refer back to them when your focus changes.

Imagine you are a smoker and you really want to give up. Your focus on the day you stop smoking is achieve a personal ambition. Three weeks in and you are out socialising, your focus may switch to enjoying yourself and your resolve may be weak. You refer to your original reasons why you made the change. Which of these two comments would have a greater effect?

• Stop Smoking
• Prolong and preserve my life because I will not get another one.

I am sure you get the point.

Motivation Destroyer 3: Habits.

Habit is the dark horse that shows up too often, and it’s the sneakiest Motivation Destroyer. We don’t even see it coming. We think things are natural. We think they’re just happening by default, when actually they are habits. We don’t realise

that we’ve made choices unless we pay attention to, identify, and work to change our negative habits.

We have great intentions set in our minds that something’s going to happen. We may join a weight-loss support group or a fitness club. Many of us attend success seminars. We set our goals, we make our plans and we leave fired up and completely convinced that, without a shadow of any doubt, this time we’re going to achieve the goal, this time we’re going to plug in this great stuff we just learned.

A few days pass, three, seven, ten, whatever the case might be, and all of a sudden something happens and we go, “Wait a minute, I’m not doing what I said I was going to do.” That’s where the Motivation Destroyer has jumped on me, and I didn’t even see it coming.

Two of the Motivation Destroyers that directly relate to habits are focus and belief.

Motivation Destroyer 4: Emotional Responses

Throughout our life we unconsciously train our mind to react to certain situations in certain ways. When we encounter sadness we cry, when we encounter rudeness we get angry, when we are alone we get bored. These situations are personal to us and are based on our experiences in life to date.

These emotional responses are closely linked to our habits and sometimes we need to re-train ourselves and recondition our emotional responses. An example of this maybe termed as stepping outside of your comfort zone in order to make changes. If you are aiming for weight loss you may have to change your eating habits. This may lead to bouts of hunger. You may associate hunger with frustration and anxiety and this make you irritable and short tempered which is potentially the route to failure.

You need to retrain yourself that hunger pangs in the first instance are inevitable and this is a positive sign that your body and mind are making changes. Fill that time with something worthwhile such as exercise or a phone call to a friend, this will help to recondition your emotional response.

Motivation Destroyer 5: Energy

Energy or lack of energy is a huge component of staying motivated. When we lack the energy to perform the tasks of every day life, we often find additional challenges overwhelming.

Energy, according to Webster, is “vitality and expression”. Another definition for energy is “the capacity for action or accomplishment”. That’s the one I gravitate towards. How well do we think or feel we can do? What do we have the energy to do?

What are we physically capable of doing or mentally capable of doing? If our energy is drained – no matter how exciting the goal is – it’s next to impossible to get moving toward that goal.

As I was discussing this with several people and doing research, one of the things reported to me most often was this: when your energy levels are deplted, it’s as if you’ve lost your spirit, and you have no zest. The symptoms of energy depletion are similar to those of depression. You want to sit, you want to sleep, you certainly don’t want to exercise, and you don’t want to follow any type of a goal plan. You just don’t have it in you. Your mind isn’t working right. You’re physically not feeling good.

Motivation Destroyer 6: Surroundings

Not only is important to think like the person you want to change into but it is also important to act like the person you want to become.

Let me clarify that by saying when you are changing into a different person I do not mean you are changing into Superwoman or Spiderman. What I mean you will still be you, you will just have a developed a different persona.

Surround yourself, as far as possible with people who already think like this new person that you are evolving into. If you want to be fit and healthy, surround yourself with people who are already there. If you want to be successful in business, again surround yourself with people who are already there.

Also change your surroundings, if you are striving for business success, invest a little money into improving your working environment; a new and bigger chair, a new desk, a new suit anything to help break the mould of the old working environment.

Motivation Destroyer 7: Time Management

Time Management is the biggest culprit in the 21^st century, and it simply means being too busy.

When you’re talking about the myth of time management, you’re really saying that the job is self-management, and the way we manage ourselves is by building our character, letting our character grow, being purposeful about it and mastering skills that allow us to be successful in whatever our personal endeavours are. It comes down to hard work and discipline to manage ourselves, as time passes by.

Time is a resource just like money is a resource. Most of the people at one point or another have done some sort of financial analysis of their income.

One of the first things that a financial planner will have you do is sit down and find out where all your money goes. In today’s world, people will find out, “Oh! I’m spending £2 a day on Starbuck’s lattes. If I do that five days a week, that’s £10, then you multiply that by 50 weeks. Then the realisation comes that you are spending £500 a year on coffee!”

The same thing should be done with our time because it’s also a resource. Where is our time going? A long time ago somebody encouraged me to do a time inventory and to track where I spent my time over the course of a week. I wrote down everything I did. If I spent 10 minutes on a phone call, I wrote it down. If I went to lunch for 30 minutes, I wrote it down. I wrote down whatever I did for one week, and I realised that I worked 111 hours in a week. A number of different things were interesting to me.

Number one, it made me realise that I worked way too much. Number two, it made me realize where all of my time went. I added it all up, X amount of time on the phone, X amount of time in commute, X amount of time in lunch, X amount of time in meetings, etc. The last thing it did was give me permission to re-adjust my time schedule, because I had a firm grasp on where my time was being spent.

When we take a time inventory, it’s really just sitting down, going, “Where am I spending my time?” I would encourage people to do it for at least a week, and if they can do it for two weeks, that would be great. Write down everything you do, and then at the end of the week or the end of two weeks, go back and add it up. You’re going to be amazed at what you find.

You’re going to find a lot of time on the telephone, a lot of time answering emails, a lot of time in meetings. You’ll probably be amazed at how much time you’re spending in the car.

Once you get all that, you’re going to be able to do a couple of things. You’re going to be able to shrink some of those times, find yourself some extra time. But then you’re also going to be able to re-utilise some of that time. For example, driving around. You might think, “I spend eight hours a week in the car,” and then you think, “Maybe I should start doing what Zig Ziglar says, and that is go to Automobile University, so I can spend four hours a week listening to some audio programs and improving my life.”

A time inventory is the very first thing we need to do. It gives us a 30,000-foot-view of where we’re at currently. The only way to start going in a different direction is to know exactly where you are headed now.

“Wisdoms From A Master Salesman” – Get Steven Brewer’s free Sales Wisdom Weekly ezine here: www.stevebrewer.co.uk

By Max Eames

“I need you to help me.  I need a MAN.”  Intrigued by this, I asked my friend Jennifer what she had in mind.  Mouse in the kitchen?  Honking-great spider in the basement?

Jennifer wanted to buy a 4×4 because of the nature of her work, and she wanted me to go with her to car dealers as a ‘human shield’:  “I don’t want them to patronise me or make jokes about whether I can handle a 4×4,” she explained.   So off we went.

And don’t these car salesmen have their patter down to a fine art?  I’m a coach and have studied NLP; they were using every trick in the book.  I found myself resorting to advanced ‘Jedi mind techniques’, poised and ready for appropriate counter-attacks at every turn.

Right on cue in the paint-by-numbers spiel, a deal was struck, but Jennifer laid out a set of upgrades she wished to see:  metallic blue paint, cruise control, rear parking sensors… and the list went on.

She gave our honorary NLP Master Practitioner a hint of why she chose this machine over the many others:  no clemency for the air-conditioned glove-box and the tinted rear windows; by now she’d become insistent on automatic transmission, the fact that the rear tailgate HAD to open sideways, and the need for the spare wheel to have a PROPER tyre in a hard case, mounted to the tailgate – because the soft cases get vandalised in Central London.

Jennifer conceded defeat on the fact that the car would not have an alarm and that it might be taxed to within an inch of its life by the Mayor of London.  She accepted the argument that diesel isn’t as cheap as it used to be, and resigned herself to the petrol engine.  With the sweetener of ‘interest-free credit’, I beheld the biro in her hand, sealing her fate in triplicate.

Some weeks later, the showmanship of it all was impressive.  When we arrived to collect the vehicle, they’d parked it front and centre, with the grille facing outward.  It was love at first site.  But as we were fussing around collecting this and that, she kept whispering to me, “What’s wrong with it?”  And I have to admit I was wondering the same thing.

It didn’t take long for the penny to drop:  “Excuse me; there’s a mistake.  I wanted the model with the spare wheel mounted on the tailgate, like the one I drove in the test-drive.  You’ll have to mount it afterward because I did go on about it being the whole point of driving a 4×4; remember?”

For once the salesman lost his aplomb.  “Erm…. You see, the model you test drove was a few months old.  We no longer do them with the tyre on the back.  You see, since the tailgate opens sideways, people found that it was just too cumbersome.  In the last couple of months, we’ve gone for a spacesaver tyre in the boot.  Statistically, hardly anybody gets a flat nowadays. “   If she had been told beforehand, no doubt, she’d have resigned herself to it, just like the rear-tinted windows.

“But I like the look of it and this isn’t about practicality.  I JUST like the look of it.  The whole back of the car looks as if it’s missing something.  I’m seeing this car all over London, and the whole thing that makes it look like a 4×4 is that it has the tyre on the back!  Plus, I HATE spacesaver tyres.  The RAC won’t touch them if you do have a flat.”  But she’d signed on the line… in triplicate.

Literally, the next day she rang me, livid:   Guess what?  My car has a flat.  And the bloody RAC won’t touch it.  I have to try to drive it to a garage whilst there’s still some air in it. “

I went with her; after all, it was a spot of unbelievable bad luck.  I didn’t score any points when I opened the glove box and put in my can of drink:  “At least the glove box is air conditioned.  My car has that too.  I’ve never understood the point of it until today.”

The quality of YOUR communication will affect your business success – especially in tough times.  Jennifer would have excitedly told a handful of friends about her purchase – but now she will tell dozens of friends how misled, cheated, and disappointed she felt.  And she will relive the moment every time she opens the tailgate on a supermarket shop.    Be sure to heighten YOUR communication at every opportunity, with every sector of your business.

In the end, talk is cheap; silence can be very expensive.

TALK-IS-CHEAP TIP NUMBER 1:  Let people know what’s going on.  That goes for your team members who are your agents, and your customers who are potentially your most ardent sales force.

TALK-IS-CHEAP TIP NUMBER 2:  Tell your suppliers if there are going to be delays, and tell them why.  You inspire trust and fellowship when “we’re all in it together.”

TALK-IS-CHEAP TIP NUMBER 3:  Keep your bank manager informed if you are heading to the upper limits of your business overdraft.  Don’t let there be an inference drawn from unusual activity.  Come clean.  You will be respected for it.

TALK-IS-CHEAP TIP NUMBER 4:  When you get wind of a rumour at the water cooler, hold a meeting and quash it.  Don’t have your sales force polishing up their CVs during lunch hour.

It’s amazing how resilient we all are when we are kept in the loop.  Good communication heightens your chance of staying in relationship with others, and it is the best way to build rapport in increasingly uncertain times.

Max Eames works with entrepreneurs who are committed to ‘firing on all cylinders’ through strengthening company performance as well as increasing cashflow.   A psychotherapist and coach, he is author and creator of the breakthrough WEALTH MECHANICprogramme.

You can get a copy of Max’s book Wealth Mechanic plus valuable free bonuses here!

By Max Eames 

Until a number of months ago, I’ve been going to the same high-street dry cleaners for some twenty years. Decades before local estate agents got clever and started referring to my neighbourhood as ‘bohemian’, this family-owned business had the foresight to purchase the freehold.  It had all the makings of a good little business; so much so that it was eventually handed down to the next generation.

In fact, for some years now the founder would simply wave from the back of the shop and leave his son to it. But just around Christmas, Faisal, the son and man-in-charge, surprised me with, “Max, we can do this for you, but you’ll have to pick it up by Saturday. And I mean you HAVE to.”

I figured the family was going back to India for a long holiday, so I said, “Lucky you; this is the time of year when I’d kill to go back to California for a few weeks. I could do with a bit of sun myself.

But the family weren’t off for a sunny holiday:  “No, we’re shutting shop – you see… there’s a recession coming this year. And it’s not going to be fun. But my father says all the signs are there, and it’s time to call it a day.”

Faisal’s dad walked with great effort toward the counter to soften the blow. “It’s like this… The customers who get their business suits dry-cleaned twice a week are letting it slide a bit.  And instead of seeing the same faces week on week, it might be once a fortnight – or worse.”

Faisal lowered his voice to elaborate:  “By then, let me tell you, some of what these guys bring in is RIPE; it stinks. It’s the classic ‘nobody-will-notice-if-I-wear-it-again-if-it’s-navy’ business suit the City types think they can get away with… and that’s why we KNOW rough times are heading our way.”

Well, nearly six months down the line, it turns out this family’s rather unscientific methods might be as good a barometer as any.  One of my most reliable barometers is this:  “When America sneezes, Britain catches a cold.”

So what does a recession look like to the ordinary businessman?  Well, the last time I saw it get REALLY ugly was in the late 80’s.  And it went something like this:

The housing market stopped delivering the previously spectacular returns on investment… Seeing this happen, many people lost their nerve in terms of carrying massive overdrafts, loans and credit card balances… Anybody who wanted to sell their house saw the price of their asset fall, and so a lot of people decided to stay put…

Everybody started to batten down the hatches and put off big-ticket purchases of all descriptions… Retailers began to feel the pinch, and then their suppliers felt the pinch on the back of everybody’s retrenchment…

Businesses that might have been full of beans a few months before started to shelve plans, freeze jobs, and even say goodbye to staff because there wasn’t as much to do in the office… Banks lost confidence and became rather choosy about the money they lent – to families, other banks, and businesspeople… And then the circle closed, with further stalls in the housing market for some years.

If, like me, you’re middle-aged or thereabouts, there’s more than a faint whiff of déjà vu in the air, isn’t there?

But what exactly IS a recession?  Is there actually much to be afraid of?  The canny entrepreneur would consider it to be the backdrop to an amazing set of opportunities, and you should too. It’s a chance to roll up the shirtsleeves and really go to work. After all, what business would not benefit from efforts to manage costs, get a handle on wastage, and review internal practices?  In the good times, most of us just trundle along.  Now there’s a valid reason to take action.

You don’t need a recession-ometer to start taking action.  In these times, the canny entrepreneur pulls over, has a look under the hood, fiddles with the machinery, and adjusts a few things before hitting the road again. Recession or not, there’s no time like the present.

—

Max Eames works with entrepreneurs who are committed to ‘firing on all cylinders’ through strengthening company performance as well as increasing cash flow.  A psychotherapist and coach, he is author and creator of the WEALTH MECHANIC programme.

Click here: http://www.wealthmechanic.com/ to get a copy of Max’s breakthrough new book Wealth Mechanic on 107 days risk-free trial!

This is one of the most important sessions, if not the most important I’ll teach you.

There are six reasons what I’ll show you here is critical:

One, you will never again have to pull your hair out thinking, “Which one of these headline statements, or which sales appeal, or which call to action, or which field or tele-sales approach, or which web page will pull the highest response?” This ingenious yet ever so simple strategy will provide you with the answer.

Two, you will never be left wondering if a new product or service you are contemplating adding to your range, or manufacturing, or a report or book you are writing, will sell well, or bomb. This simple strategy will provide you with the answer before you commit.

Three, you will never deprive yourself by accepting less profits than your business or professional practice is capable of generating each week and month. And let me add, in my experience, your enterprise is almost certainly capable of generating more – dramatically more – from what you’re already doing, probably than you’re allowing or enabling it to. This strategy will reveal how to ethically and rapidly optimise the numbers of buyers you attract, and maximise your revenues and profits.

Four, you will never put your enterprise, or yourself, at financial risk by exhausting your cash resources on marketing activities or expansion programmes that fail to consistently produce worthwhile cash returns and profit growth. This strategy will reveal what you need to know to make every penny invested in marketing, on staff, on premises, on equipment, on manufacturing produce a worthwhile return. It’s like having a business genie at your side.

Five, you will discover how to accelerate your growth by up to two, or five or ten times, or more, from self-accumulated cash resources. This strategy will reveal how you achieve this for your particular and individual enterprise.

Six, you will never fail at any business endeavour you undertake, nor any business activity you perform. This strategy is the one guiding principle you can absolutely trust to provide the correct answers and solutions you want in any business situation.

What is it? It’s the very simple yet effectual technique of TESTING.

I put it to you that you, or I, or Richard Branson, or Michael Bloomberg, or Rupert Murdoch, or any business owner or marketing mind can never judge, with certainty, whether a particular headline, or sales appeal, or guarantee, or design, or product, or service, or merchandising or display method, or advert, or letter, or brochure, or web page, or staff member – or whatever new activity, or approach, or expansion is being considered – will work in our favour, will be a profitable direction to take, or will flop.

Unless we are able to predict the future with accuracy, it is impossible, ever, to be sure. Therefore, it represents a risk to us, either great or small.

I have never believed risk is a necessary part of doing business.  I believe in hedging my bet, cutting my risk down to the bare minimum wherever possible. No business needs to take more than miniscule risk if they understand how to greatly minimise or eliminate entirely the possibility of a marketing investment, activity, or new approach underperforming or failing to perform.

The only group of people who have the right and the ability to judge whether your market will respond or reject what you offer it, is the market itself - your customers or clients themselves.

Very often, what you or I think is a compelling headline approach, or an appealing sales story, or a persuasive guarantee, or a worthwhile expansion, or a valuable new product or service turns out not to be. The market fails to respond, or is lethargic.

A simple test process of asking your market what it thinks of your approach, will provide the certain answer, by the high or lack of, volume of response you receive.

If you ask your market in the right way – that’s critical – and you receive an enthusiastic response, there’s your answer. You have a winning appeal, or product, or service. If you ask, and receive a lethargic or uninspired response, again, you have your answer.

I’ll give you an example. When I was writing my book How to Out-Sell, Out-Market, Out-Promote, Out-Advertise…  I wanted to know what title appeal would spark the greatest fire in the imaginations of business owners worldwide. Just as is true of headlines, the title of a book dramatically affects sales. A provocative title will cause sales to leap. A dull title will kill sales. Same book, very different sales results.

So before the book was published, I tested about ten different titles. I placed small, four or five line classified ads in The Sunday Times and The Mail on Sunday, two at a time in a North/South split, one headline published in the Northern edition, an alternative headline in the Southern edition each time.

Each line ad consisted of the headline title I was testing, plus a phone number people could call to receive pre-publication details of the book. By the number of responses I received for each title test, I discovered which titles were more appealing to business owners, and which were not.

Some of the alternative titles I tested were: “21 Powerful Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business” — “Scientific Marketing” — “Mega-Marketing” — “The Science And Methodology Of Growing Your Business” — “How To Increase Your Sales, Multiply Your Profits, And Gain Almost Overnight Competitive Advantage.”

No prizes for realising that “How To Out-Sell, Out-Market, Out-Promote, Out-Advertise…” out-pulled every other title test by numbers of business owners responding.

But the interesting thing is this: it pulled more than three times greater response than the nearest other highest responding test title.

Had I failed to realise the importance of testing, and simply went ahead and used an alternative title I thought was good, I would have unwittingly left at least 300 percent higher sales of the book on the table for life, for the same effort, the same investment, the same time it takes to print, market and deliver that book to you.

That’s the power and result of testing!

I watched an interesting documentary one night on Hollywood, and how directors now test finished films on cinema audiences before releasing them, and before investing what is now commonly $30 million dollars on marketing.

P.J. Hogan – the director of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” starring Julia Roberts, was being interviewed on the programme. He was saying how, when they finished filming, and thought they had a hit film in the can, test screenings revealed that audiences were not enticed by the story.

If you’ve seen the film, you know that Julia Roberts plays a pretty backbiting, snide, conniving character because she just found out the guy she loved was getting married to someone else in three days time, and she had to stop him, proclaim her love, and marry him herself.

She spends the whole film spreading rumours about the bride-to-be, and basically trying to mess up the wedding, by quite underhand methods!

At the end, she realises the error of her ways, and publicly apologises to the girl, and let’s the wedding go ahead with her blessing, with tears all round. Her character is redeemed, and everybody is endeared to her.

Well, the original film didn’t end like this. It left Julia Roberts character snarling as she watched the wedding go ahead. Her character was never redeemed.

When test audiences were shown this ending, they hated it. They wanted to love Julia Roberts, they wanted her to emerge as the lovable character.

So P.J. Hogan re-shot the entire ending of the film, at great expense, and that’s the ending you see today.

He said, “It’s critical that we test a film to watch audience response. If initial tests show that audiences don’t like it, we daren’t go ahead with releasing the film because it is certain to bomb. With typically $30 million spent to market a film these days, we can’t afford to ignore audience reaction. We have to re-shoot scenes until audiences like it.”

Interesting! “My Best Friend’s Wedding” went on to become one of the highest grossing films of the decade, in 1997. But it could easily have bombed had Hollywood not revered and relied on, and acted on, the strategy and results of testing.

The greatest marketing mind whoever lived, Claude Hopkins, says in his classic book Scientific Advertising, “We let the thousands decide what the millions will do. We make a small venture, and watch cost and result. When we learn what a thousand customers cost, we know almost exactly what a million will cost. When we learn what they buy, we know what a million will buy.”

Let the thousands decide what the millions will do, or the hundreds decide what the thousands will do, in your market, with each new product or service you’re interested in selling, and each new selling appeal and approach you think will capture the highest numbers of customers.

I don’t want you to go another day without adopting this almost miraculous principle of testing in your every activity, in your every thought process, and your every decision-making procedure.

I’m going to explain how to test, then what to test, then how to react and move forward on the feedback of each test, and guarantee you grow and profit from move you make.

First, how to test. Number one, A test only provides trustworthy results when it is a real event. If you want to know whether your new brand of toothpaste will be a hit with the public, you must manufacture a test batch, market it to a test segment of demographically targeted consumers, and track and compute real sales results.

Real sales response is the only dependable result. I see large corporations waste millions of pounds and dollars on market research surveys, that ask, for instance, “If this new toothpaste were available on the supermarket shelves, would you buy it?” Or, “Take this free sample tube of new toothpaste, use it for a week, then fill in and return the questionnaire telling us whether you would buy it if it becomes available.”

This type of test survey is a waste of time, effort and resource. Survey results may well indicate that a sufficient number of the test segment of consumers like the toothpaste, and say they would buy it. But what people say they will do, and what they actually do when they are asked to get money out of their purse, or write a cheque, or provide their credit card details, are two entirely different things.

Many large companies have lost countless millions because they got excited about a survey response, raised the green flag on manufacturing tens of thousands of units of a new product, excitedly anticipated having a winning new product on their hands… only to drown in their sorrows and financial blunder when sales proved sluggish or non-existent.

The smart way to test whether your new toothpaste will sell – the same applies to almost all products – is to manufacture a small, test quantity, create marketing to sell it, place it on the shelves of a test number of retailers, or devote some test space in your catalogue – or whatever your prime selling method will be – then launch it and track actual sales response.

If the market tells you they like your product and you marketing approach, by buying sufficient quantities to produce for you an acceptable to good sales response, you can be fairly certain as you roll production out, and make your toothpaste available to a wider geography, sales will remain good.

This is what I did with the book. First I tested various titles, with a real sales offer – the pre-publication offer – and found the winning title. I then printed a small batch of 500 books. I still wanted the market to tell me if they appreciated the actual book, not just the title.

It would have been foolish to print thousands of books before the market test was complete. I would rather pay more for each book to be printed on a low volume run, than tie up thousands of pounds and warehouse space, even though the printing price per book would be considerably lower, before business owners told me, with no uncertainty, that they value the information the book imparts.

So we had 500 printed, we produced a marketing package, we placed some test ads in The Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday again, and response was good. The 500 sold quickly. So we printed a thousand more. They sold quickly. Then we printed 5,000, then 10,000 at a time.

You see the point. Real sales testing provided me with the question I wanted an answer to: will the book prove popular, or will it not?

Test any new product using a similar approach. Never take on a large consignment, or agree to an ongoing supply, or manufacture a large batch, before you’ve tested by asking your customers or clients themselves, whether they value and appreciate the item or service, by their purchasing response.

Number two, test adverts in the following way. Even if you’ve got a million pounds or dollars in the bank, begin with small ads to test headline and basic appeal response. It’s wasteful to throw money at anything before you know how to garner the highest yield from every pound.

I very rarely start with large ads, even though I can. I test small first. So should you. If or when your small ad responds well – and you might have to test a number of different headlines and basic sales appeals before your ad responds well – but when it does, only when it does, then double the size, tell more of your sales story, and test your larger ad for greater responsiveness.

When the larger ad responds well, after a few further tests, double the size again. Follow this procedure until you’re running a full page ad. In most cases, a full page ad produces the highest response per pound invested, so it’s the size every business should reach, through testing.

Code every ad individually and differently, and attach the particular ad code to every responder’s name in your database, so that you can look back and analyse the exact responsiveness of each ad, when response has died down. For instance, I can look on our database and see exactly which ad or sales letter you first responded to, by the code attached to your details.

That’s important for two reasons. First, I want to know precisely how every ad I place, or letter or catalogue I send out, responds – right down to exact figures – so that I am made aware of whether that particular approach is producing a worthwhile response, or whether I need to improve my approach.

That’s what I’m teaching you, and it’s critical if you want to accelerate your growth, with the lowest expenditure. Your aim should be to fine-tune every activity you undertake, to always garner maximum performance and yield from it.

Second, I want to know how each group of responders – from each particular publication or mailing list – pan out, long term, as regular buyers. It’s often the case, that one publication pulls a high, front end response, but subsequent sales are low. It’s because the demography of reader is wrong. Or you didn’t effectively appeal to that demography. Whereas, other publications produce very targeted, ongoing buyers.

Your emphasis should not be on response only, it should be on profit. High response and high profit are not always linked. By simply coding, tracking and computing every result, you quickly discover the combination of activities that produce the highest and fastest profits for your business.

“What combination of activities do I have to perform to generate the highest profit results within a month, or three months, or a year?” That’s the question you should constantly ask. Then design your marketing activities and tests in accordance.

Coding of ads and letters is straightforward. You can use unique department numbers in your address, for instance, “Department one, Department Two, Department Three” and so on, in each successive ad or letter. Or you can use the initials of the publication or mail list, plus the series number of your ad or letter, for instance, FV6 stands for, “First Voice, advert #6”. Or you can use the date backwards, like ST020730, which tells you that particular ad ran in the Sunday Times on the 30th of July, 2007.

Building the size of a company’s ad, is one of the methods I use with small or fledgling businesses, to engineer rapid growth. Don’t make the mistake thousands of businesses make with advertising, by running the same small or medium size ad repeatedly, for months or years on end.

That won’t grow an enterprise by any exciting degree. The larger your ad, the higher response you’ll receive from it, as long as you’ve tested your approach and discovered it is a winner.

The method I apply is this. I write a small ad first, test it, and tweak it and retest if I need to. Then I get the company to immediately reinvest the profits made on the small ad, on a larger ad, usually double the size. I get them to keep doing this until they’re running full page, tested ads. You’re never more than just eight or ten or so steps away from running full page ads, and receiving multiple streams of new income every week or month from your advertising.

Most businesses ignore this opportunity. Always look to reinvest in increasing your activities, to generate higher response and higher revenues. If you need to stop and consolidate, simply turn the marketing switch off until you’re ready to take the next growth step.

What level of response can you expect from advertising? As a very rough guide to the ‘maximum’ response you can draw from a full page ad, in a targeted industry or consumer magazine, multiply the paid circulation, by 0.003. So if the magazine has a paid circulation of 100,000, the maximum response you might get from a full page advertisement is 300. I have seen higher response than that, and lower, so it is not by any means a scientific calculation – there is no such calculation when it comes to advertising – but it is a handy guide when you are figuring out whether an advert is worth testing in a particular magazine.

Be cautious, your ad has to be very good to produce this level of response. And it can be, if you test all the way up to full page size, and your headline, body copy, offer, and guarantee are strong. Revisit the Winning Advertising segment a good number of times to keep sharpening your ad-writing skills.

Number three, test sales letters and brochures by producing a small test number – 5,000 is the most scientifically sound number, but if you have to test smaller quantities because of market area or financial restrictions, then test whatever number you can, right down to 500 or 200.

In the early days, I used to scrape together my last pounds to send 100 or 200 letters. I used to stay up all night printing and signing them, and stuffing them into envelopes. Was it worth it? Did it work, even though the quantity was very low? You be the judge!

But realise, with numbers that low, results may not be indicative as you roll out to larger numbers. So test again, with a larger number, say double the number, as soon as you’ve generated some revenue. Usually, the larger the number of prospects you test to, up to five thousand, the more reliable your results will be as you roll out.

That gives you a pretty good knowledge of how to test.

Now, here’s what to test.

Number One, your headline or opening gambit. Understand this. One headline can pull up to hundreds of percent more response than an alternative headline.

I shared with you the results of my book title testing. The winning title - How to Out-Sell, Out-Market…- pulled three hundred percent more response than the nearest, best-pulling alternative title. I could never have known that without testing various alternative titles.

An insurance company tested two different headlines for a lower cost insurance for drivers with a good driving history. They were, “Auto Insurance At Lower Rates If You Are A Good Driver” and, “How To Turn Your Careful Driving Into Money”. The first headline pulled 1,200 percent higher response than the second.

A company selling English language courses tested these two alternative headlines, “The Man Who Simplified English” and “Do You Make These Mistakes In English?” The second headline pulled three hundred percent more response than the first.

Always test headlines and opening gambits first. They are the largest results dynamic. You can quite literally double, or triple, or quadruple, or quintuple your sales overnight – if your logistics can handle it – by creating and testing alternative headline appeals.

Number two, your sales appeal. One appeal versus another can make a significant difference to response. A test appeal was written into an ad for the Dale Carnegie book, “How To Win Friends And Influence People.” The ad tried to appeal to married couples in difficulty. The headline was, “How To Ruin Your Marriage in The Quickest Way Possible.” The ad copy explained how many marriages are breaking down, not because couples want their marriage to fail, but because they don’t know how to avoid it.

The appeal failed and the ad bombed. When the appeal was rewritten around the title of the book, “How To Win Friends And Influence People,” with the ad copy concentrated on how to successfully deal with people, it broke records, selling over 100,000 books by direct mail, and starting sales in bookstores that have amounted to over 15 million copies sold to date.

Don’t give up on a product or service if your initial tests fail to produce good sales. Test different headlines and appeals.

Number three, price. Most prices are arbitrarily picked. There is no logical science to pricing founded on market response. Price is usually determined by a mark-up figure that somebody, somewhere, in their wisdom, decided was the right mark-up to apply in a particular industry.

The right price, is the price the largest number of customers or clients perceive it to be, for each particular product or service offered, and the value the customer sees it to be worth.

I’ve seen £29 pounds outpull £31, three to one. I’ve seen £39 pounds produce nearly twice as many sales as £49. I’ve seen £97 pounds out-sell £69 pounds by five times. Incredibly, I’ve seen no substantial drop in response between a £3,500 programme price, and a £25,000 price. Price is directly linked to perceived value or joy, and perceived result to be gained.

By simply running A/B split price tests, you can quickly discover what price pulls greatest response. And remember, you are testing for highest bottom line profit, not necessarily highest quantity of sales.

The trend today is towards higher pricing. People want quality and are willing to pay for it. Don’t cut yourself short by being afraid to test higher pricing. The worst that can happen is you receive a low response if the market perceives your high price to be too high. But what if higher pricing – or substantially higher –makes little or no difference to your response? Or increases response, as my £97 did over £69 – a five times higher sales?

Always test prices.

Number four: guarantees. One guarantee versus another can prove more persuasive. Try to place yourself in your customer’s mind, and ask, “What guarantee would make me buy?”

You’ll discover my best guarantee types and techniques in a later session.

Number five: bonuses. Bonuses always increase response. But one bonus can have a marginal effect, while another can have a dramatic effect on sales.

The most effective bonuses are usually items or information linked in some way to the product or service being purchased. The closer the link, usually the greater the response the bonus will generate. Free pens, mugs, calculators, reports, books, desk clocks all work well if used intelligently.

Or be industry specific. A clothes retailer client offers a free belt with trousers, or a free shirt with an expensive suit, or free shoe horns with an expensive pair of shoes. Simple tests will reveal what bonuses your customers or clients respond to.

Number six: the call to action. One call to action can motivate customers to respond in droves, while another leaves them uninspired.

The key is usually to make your call to action as specific and as urgent as you ethically can. Tell the truth… in the most persuasive way possible.

Number seven: is, of course, your product or service itself. Like the toothpaste example, sometimes no matter how skilled your marketing is, customers don’t find a particular product or service appealing. The biggest example of this is the book and music publishing business. Thousands of books and CD’s are put onto the market each year, at huge costs, without one market test ever being conducted to discover whether customers are even remotely interested.

The result? Five to seven percent of the books and CD’s that make it to best-seller status, pay for the other ninety-three to ninety-five percent that never sell more than a handful. The book and music publishing industries should learn to revolutionise the way they select and sell titles, and dramatically multiply their profits as a result, by emulating Hollywood’s savvy testing procedures.

I’ll stop here. You’ve got a wealth of reason and information on how and what to test.

In essence, test everything. Test product or service, test marketing, test staff, test alliances, test suppliers, test prices, test merchandising, test design, test layout, test timing, test colour, test titles… never stop testing… always looking for, and demanding the highest performance from everything you do.

Action Step.

Create three test alternatives for each of the categories I discussed in detail in this session. They are the elements in your enterprise and marketing that will produce the largest leap or dip in results.

They are again: Headlines, sales appeal, price, bonuses, guarantees, and call to action.

Finally, I have a golden rule I never break. It has saved me from many a financial disaster over the years, and enabled me to grow my and client businesses with little or no risk. It is this: Never spend more money than you can afford to LOSE if your test fails entirely.

Never be tempted to break this rule by being overly excited or enthusiastic. I have the occasional client who ignores it despite my urging to the contrary, and they almost always end up losing an amount of money that damages them.

Don’t risk the farm! Test everything you do, never spend more money than you can afford to lose if your test bombs, grow to the next, larger step on the profitable results of each previous test.

There you the rapid growth formula that never fails! Use it, and enjoy the great revenues and profits your enterprise makes!

Let’s get straight into methods six to ten of attracting perpetual streams of new, paying customers or clients.

Method Six is signage. By signage, I mean any physical sign – on your premises; in your window; in front of, or attached to your merchandise; at your trade show booth; on your vehicles; in your forecourt; on your A-board; at your cash register; on your staff’s uniform; on your shopping trolleys; on your suspended promotional signs; on your flyers, sales letters, brochures, web pages.

Every one of these signs has the potential to do three things in your business: One, attract new customers or clients to buy for the first time. Two, spawn an increase in sales by making your product or service more alluring. Three, increase your average sale amount by up-selling or cross selling additional product or service.

Realise this. Everything your customer or client, or prospective customer or client sees or hears, influences their buying decision, positive or negative.

Put differently, every sign you can put in front of customers, is an opportunity to positively influence their buying decision.

Most companies I see, overlook or waste this very powerful influencing factor. Let me give you some examples.

How many retailers do you walk into, that simply have price tags displayed in front of their various products? Or, how many retailer windows do you pass that do little or nothing to lure you inside? How many times have you searched for a staff member to help you, but you can’t clearly identify staff from customers? And when you can, there is no badge or embroidered little message that makes you feel welcomed, and invites you to ask a question?

How many company vehicles do you see that have only the company name emblazoned along the sides and back, rather than a compelling message or invitation to inquire to that company, or telephone them for a free brochure, or visit their store, or website?

I could give you dozens more examples, but you get the idea. Here’s a table of signage types that work to assure, to influence, to persuade prospects, customers or clients to buy, to buy now, and to buy more from you.

If you’re a retailer, the sign above your window can either leave customers cold, or interest and motivate them. For instance, “Harper’s Kitchen Utensils” is institutional only. By adding a “uniqueness”, the sign becomes a lure. “Harper’s Kitchen Utensils – the greatest little kitchen supplies shop in the world.” Or, “Harper’s Kitchen Utensils — over 5,000 of the world’s best kitchen utensils always in stock”. Or, “Harper’s Kitchen Utensils – the best kitchen utensils from all over the world, all under one roof.” Or something similar.

If you were passing that shop, and you were even the slightest bit interested in cooking, that added line could well make the difference between you stopping your car and visiting the shop, or driving on by, because the sign failed to extend a benefit to you.

The shop can attract thousands, or ten of thousands of pounds additional sales revenue each year, simple by making their sign act as a salesperson for them.

What you do in, and how you employ your window will have a direct and proportional affect on sales, if you’re a retailer. Here’s a quick short course on window marketing. First, always have a tempting offer displayed in your window, designed to draw customers in. Once they’re in, your merchandising and internal signage will, in a good percentage of cases, motivate them to buy additional or different items.

Travel agents are quite good at this. They’ll display a list of last-minute holiday bargains on the window, that draw people into the shop. Once they’re in, some will book one of the last minute deals. Others will start looking at other holiday brochures the agent has attractively displayed all around, and end up booking a more expensive holiday.

Second, change your window regularly, every two weeks or every week. Change attracts the eye and the interest of customers, who otherwise will quickly become familiar with your display. You’ll tend to notice a flurry of new buying every time you change your window display.

Third, use your window to inform and educate, not simply display. Instead of a price ticket only, tell a story about your product, or list the five biggest reasons that product makes customer’s lives easy, or more enjoyable, or faster, or more comfortable, or tastier… or whatever.

Facts simply tell. Stories sell. Create A4 or A3 size delightful cards, that share the interesting history of your product or service: who invented or designed it, how it came about, how the design was conceived, why it’s an improvement, why it’s more comfortable than alternatives, why it is more delicious, why it’s stronger, faster, cleaner, richer, more effective.

The more you tell about what you’re selling, the more you sell, because people are interested. When you share fascinating detail, what you’re selling becomes more meaningful, interesting and valuable to buyers, therefore more buy.

Fourth, get movement into your window. Movement catches the eye and evokes curiosity. I advised a smart men’s clothier to install an old fashioned train set in his window, when he displayed a range of casual outdoor country clothing, for hiking and leisure.

The old model steam train meandered through a country set, in amongst this shop’s window display. We attached an interesting four or five paragraph description of each piece of clothing in the window, explaining what was specially good or advantageous about it – like thicker cloth for warmth, double-stitched seams for strength, water-proof coating, and so on.

The train and the individual descriptions increased sales from the window alone, by over 30 percent.

You can have a television screen in your window, showing your product or service in use. You can have live models on Saturdays, modelling your clothing, or demonstrating your product. You can have a train set, or a car racing set. You can hire a robotics actor. You can do anything. Use movement intelligently. Link your movement item to your product or service in some way. The model steam train depicted outdoor country life, and was a charming link to country clothing.

Five, use your window as a call to action. Invite or lure shoppers into your store. Most windows I see are static. You will make far more money by first attracting passers-by to your window by using the methods I’ve explained, then capture them and draw them into your store.

Here’s what I did with one shoe shop client. They made a pair of incredibly comfortable, smart casual shoes. But sales were, not disappointing, but lower than the quality of these shoes should have demanded.

So I had them do one, very simple thing in their windows. First, we described the shoe and why it was incredibly comfortable, the construction. Second, we put a sign saying, “The most comfortable shoe you’ve ever worn, or we’ll give you a £2 gift voucher against any pair of shoes you buy in this shop, this month. Come in and try them on now!”

Three improvements resulted. One, we got a surge of additional customers coming into the shop after reading the window invitation, trying on the shoes, agreeing that they were very comfortable, and buying a pair. Two, friends and colleagues and other family members came in and bought pairs for themselves, because people were talking about them and recommending them everywhere they went. Three, the people who didn’t agree, received our £2 gift voucher, and… guess what?… many came back and used it as money off buying a different pair of this company’s shoes. This simple sign was a winner all round.

If you attend trade shows, you can spiral the response you attract by optimum use of signage. I’ll talk about trade shows in a minute.

Vehicles are an advertising medium, or should be. I advised a frozen food company to add a benefit-oriented USP over their logo on every vehicle. It said, “Delicious, flash-frozen food. Impossible to tell it’s frozen.. or your money back. Call 0800 for free sample meal.”

I had them place this message on the sides, back, and top of every delivery vehicle – the top so that tower office staff, looking down out of their windows in cities, would see the message. Inquiries and resulting sales shot up as a result.

Never only place your logo or name on your vehicles. It doesn’t extend any benefit. Always portray your biggest benefit, your biggest reason for being, clearly visible on your vehicles, and watch as people respond, and sales increase.

A person walking up and down the high street with an A-board, proclaiming an immediate benefit-to be gained, can bring you a worthwhile amount of extra business that day.

“FREE Olive-Lover’s bread loaf, today only. Collect yours now at David’s Continental Bakery, 31 High Street.” A simple A-board message like this can drive many, many people into your store, as a new customer acquisition vehicle.

Or, “FREE 17” TFT screen upgrade with every £500 computer ordered today!” Or, “Oil change just £7 today”. Or, “40% off top 100 hardbacks this weekend only.”

Adapt these ideas to your retail business. The cost of having a student, or a casual person, walk up and down all day with an A-board message like this is no more than a hundred pounds or so. Or you can pay a very low basic and then give the person 5 or 10 percent of every sale that results from it. It’s a small cost to you because it can bring in hundreds of pounds of new, immediate business it will usually produce, and thousands of pounds of additional, lifetime worth.

Point of sale signage is one of the biggest no-brainer opportunities every seller has, yet hardly anyone make use of it. Realise that when any buyer is at the point of purchase, he or she is at their hottest, their most excited, most positively expectant of the result they’re just about to gain by owning your product or service.

It’s at that point that it is easiest to offer them an upgrade, or an additional item for an advantageous price because they’ve already decided to buy your “X”, whatever “X” is. They’re at the till, ready to pay, or they’re on the end of the phone ready to pay – you just verbalise what you put on a physical sign).

At your till, have signage inviting customers to take advantage of additional items. I’ve helped hundreds of retailers increase sales with a simple sign that says, “Spent over £30 today? Buy any of our new £50 “X’s” — and “X” can be anything you like — for just £29.99”.

Adjust the pricing dependent on what you sell, and your margins. But if you make another £5 or £10 or £15 profit from this extra sale, and if twenty to thirty percent of customers accept your offer, it soon adds considerable, freely-earned profit to your bottom line.

You’ll discover the quite enormous opportunities available to you by up-selling and cross-selling, in the Up-Selling and Cross-Selling segments.

Staff uniform is another great signage opportunity. First, if you’re any kind of retail, or service, or delivery organisation, or treatment provider, having your people and, if you’re on the front line, yourself, wear a uniform, instantly portrays professionalism. It’s bewildering to me, how many organisations miss this opportunity to impress and instil the perception of solidness and professionalism in the minds of their clientele.

It also provides you with another opportunity to influence customers or clients. Use your uniform to broadcast a message. It can be anything from an invitation to ask a question. “Please ask my advice about any product in this store.”

Or a simple name and nicety, “Vicky Jones, Product Advisor. I’m here to serve you.” Then, of course, make sure you train your staff to be 100% customer-focused and oriented, so that when a customer does ask a question, Vicky willingly stops what she’s doing, and helps that customer.

Or you can use uniforms as walking billboards. You can have a badge that one week proclaims, “Try our delicious Farmer’s Loaf, just £1.50 this week.” Next week, change your badge to say, “This week’s special, fresh salmon steaks, just £2 a pound.”

This simple message, that costs you pennies, can produce hundreds of pounds worth of extra business.

At the very least, your uniform should denote your USP. “Harper’s — the greatest little kitchen utensil shop in the UK.” Every time a customer sees that message, it is reinforced in his or her mind, “Harpers is the greatest little kitchen utensil shop in the UK.” The more that message is at the top of their mind every time they think of kitchen utensils, and every time they use utensils bought from Harpers, the more they will buy, and the more they will recommend other people buy from Harpers.

Method Seven is trade shows. Exhibiting at trade shows can be a very effective way of targeting and acquiring new customers or clients. But most exhibitors fail to yield even a tenth of the business they could, because they present their booth institutionally, and they and their staff act institutionally.

The key to trade show success is to be pro-active and to evoke a direct-response. Here are the twelve approaches I have shown hundreds of clients how to adopt, to maximise trade show response:

One, mail targeted invitations to your booth three weeks in advance of the show. Buy mailing lists from your industry publication, and the trade show list, which most show organiser will provide to you as an exhibitor.  Provide an incentive for visitors to come to your booth first – a free sample or trial or test of your product or service, only available at the show.

Two, Send press releases to industry or consumer publications — depending on who you are targeting — plus radio and cable TV stations. Your press release should be about a benefit, or advantage, or superiority, or protection your product or service provides, not about the fact you are exhibiting at the ABC trade show. No one cares. They only care about what’s in it for them, and so do the publications, or radio or TCV stations you approach with your press release.

Three, at the shoe, offer free giveaways and free entry prize draws to lure as many targeted prospects to your booth as possible. But remember, you’re not interested in attracting just anyone. You want only targeted prospects. So make prize draws prizes only interesting to real prospects.

For instance, you could make as prizes, free bottles of champagne, or wine, or beer, or free sweatshirts, or holidays. These would attract everyone and their grandma. Smarter, would be, let’s see, if you’re a colour brochure printer, you could give away five thousand, 4-page colour brochures as a first prize each day of the show. Anyone not in the market for colour brochures won’t bother entering your prize draw.

Any marketing is not about highest numbers. It’s about quality. I would rather walk out with one hundred highly targeted prospects from a three day show, than a thousand mainly untargeted inquiries that will cost me a small fortune in time, effort and expense to work, and sift through and gradually whittle down, to find the one hundred who are serious prospective buyers of my product or service.

Four, offer special deals, or irresistible new account incentives available at the show only, to encourage immediate response.

Five, Give a workshop or seminar for attendees, presented by you or an expert in your field. Give the same workshop or seminar every day. Remember, each day brings a new set of prospects you will want to impact.

Six, if it’s suitable, create action activities at your booth to draw people in. Have a person continually demonstrating your product or service. Have a person handing-out free reports.

Joanie and I like going to a local country fair at an old, country manor each autumn. Every year we’ve been, in amongst probably two hundred stalls, is a guy carving wooden lamp stands, and candle sticks and bed posts and other trinkets, on a wood lathe. And every year, a crowd gathers around to watch him. He’s smart. While other stall holders simple display their wares, he understands that activity attracts people. If there is a way to intelligently or humorously link activity to what you sell, do it.

Seven, serve food and drinks to keep targeted prospects at your booth longer. And remember, the first and foremost aim at a trade show is to capture prospect’s name, company name, address and telephone plus e-mail and website if you can, so that you can continue to communicate after the show. If you can’t communicate after the show, it’s a waste of time and effort and money.

Eight, Place benefit-oriented signs at your booth. Everything I explained about signage applies at trade shows too. Revisit that advice if you need to.

Nine, Greet people in the aisles, with an enticing or provocative offer that draws them to your booth.

Ten, Dress in costume. Most exhibitors dress in smart suits. If you dress in fun custom, themed in some way to your category of product or service, you’ll stand out from the crowd. The first rule of marketing is to get attention.

Costume works well. I had a record company dress their staff in musical notes, with sample CD offers attached to each note, that people were invited to take and redeem at the booth.

I had an ice cream maker dress their staff in huge ice cream cones and offer samples at the booth.

I had a promotion gift company dress their staff in horse costumes, to denote a “gift horse”, with dozens of samples gifts attached to the costume. They invited attendees to take any sample gift they liked. Attached to the gift, was a certificate inviting them to accept £100 of free promotional gifts they could use in their business, that cost my client about £30. £30 was inexpensive customer acquisition, compared with the advertising and sales visits they normally had to put out, to gain new customers. Use you imagination, be creative, and you can do very, very well from trade shows.

Eleven, provide comfortable seating. When you identify and attract a targeted prospect, you want them to stay long enough, and be impressed enough, to draw meaningful information from them, plus contact details, and maybe even get an order on the day. It depends what you’re selling. But by providing comfortable seating, people will tend to sit longer with you, especially if they’re exhausted from walking miles around the trade hall all day.

Twelve, systematically and rigorously follow-up your new contacts immediately after the show. You will be dumfounded at the number of companies who exert effort, proportion time, invest not inconsiderable monies, exhibiting at trade shows, never to follow up their leads or to follow up once or twice if they’re unusual.

Follow-up intelligently and relentlessly, as I’ve explained, and you’ll optimise your conversions.

Method Eight is referrals. When a customer or client is happy or ecstatic with the product or service you have provided, their natural inclination is to tell other people about you, and to recommend they buy from you.

You’ll get natural word-of-mouth sales. But you can engender considerably more referral business by simply asking for it.

And realise, referred customers or clients tend to be easier to sell to, cost less to sell to, remain more loyal to you, and spend more with you, long term, because they’ve come to you recommended.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a simple, one-page letter to about a thousand of my most recent clients, offering first place to their peers, or colleagues or friends, to a limited number of consulting slots I had, before I made them available to my general list. This one simple letter filled all the slots within two weeks.

I wrote to a client’s clients explaining that she was in the process of expanding her interior design service, and had room for, I forget the exact number, but it was about thirty new clients that year. I explained that before she went ahead and offered the service they were receiving, to the outside market, it would be a nice gesture to first make the limited thirty places available to friends or colleagues of existing clients.

I explained that they knew the quality and skill-set she had, and one or two or more friends or colleagues would probably really appreciate being introduced to her. We made a complimentary, 2-hour design appraisal available to every referred person, and first option on her service. It filled all but two or three of her thirty appointment slots.

If you don’t have a systematic, referral system in place, you are losing 50 percent to 200 percent or more, of the business that is rightfully your just for the asking. Simply ask, or offer a gift for every referred customer or client. Test different scenarios and gifts, based on your average lifetime value. You’ll love the extra business you easily attract with a systematic referral strategy.

Method Nine is multi-mediums. Few companies ever net the largest available response because they fail to grasp that multi-hits, and multi-mediums, spawn the optimum attention, believability, and successive response.

The usual campaign a company will put out is a single advert, maybe repeated a number of times in the same publication. Or they’ll mail a particular list, and maybe repeat that mailing to the list once. Or they’ll put out a telephone campaign, or they’ll send their sales force, or they’ll advertise their web site, or exhibit at trade shows.

All this activity is good as far as it goes. But it inflates the cost of acquiring each new customer, and suppresses the number of new customers or clients it lures into your sales net.

A combination of activities and hits optimises response. If you run an ad to a targeted group of prospects, in a targeted magazine let’s say, then you mail that magazine’s list, and in the ad and the mailing, you direct them to look at your web site, and in your ad, mailing, and on your web site, you invite them to send for a fascinating free report, then a week later, you send the list a free cassette tape of you being interviewed, or you explaining the 17 reasons why your offer is worth looking at, and the benefits people will gain, or a recorded question and answer hour with 10 of your best customers, and then you invite them to listen-in to a free teleconference you’re arranging for people who would, in theory, like to take up an offer like yours, but have a number of questions they’d like answers to first… this is how you garner the highest successive response from each group of prospects.

For my last Marketing Protégé programme, we put out about seven different activities. I would have carried on but we filled the room at that stage.

We sent the initial invitation to attend the seminar. We sent a transcript of me being interviewed about how to grow a business. We sent a free, one-hour tape I recorded. We telephoned explaining the benefit companies would gain. We sent a last-chance reminder, and a couple of other things. Had we sent just one invitation, plus maybe a reminder, we would have sold only half the room.

Multiple hits and multiple mediums have three effects:

One, they grab the attention of prospects who saw your first announcement, but for some reason, got lured away by the activities of business, or family or personal life.

Two, the more prospects see your message, in different mediums, the more they believe that your offer is real, and can be trusted. You look like a substantial organisation with an offer to be taken seriously.

Three, every successive message garners successive response, until you saturate, and that’s the point you stop at.

I want to brand the strategy of multi-mediums firmly in your mind. Probably more than any other single approach I’m giving you, if you adopt the multi-medium approach, you’ll immediately increase response to every offer you make available, but you’ll gain new customers for less money because the accumulated effect of multi-mediums brings the cost-per-customer down and down.

Again, test every step, and roll that step out only when it proves to bring in more profit than it costs to put out. As long as each step achieves that, then keep putting more steps out, until you can’t squeeze any more profitable response from the list, then stop.

Method Ten is Advertising. I’ve left advertising until last because it’s the last approach I advise you adopt first, until you can become a master at writing winning advertising (see Winning Advertising section). Advertising is the most expensive, least targeted, most difficult method to master, yet the first method most businesses use, or think they have to use.

Advertising can work very powerfully. One ad can make you rich. But you can also lose your shirt quicker by pouring money into advertising, than any other marketing method.

So my message is to adopt as many of the previous nine acquisition methods before investing in advertising, if your cash resources are limited.

If you’re cash rich, certainly advertise, but religiously stick to the least risky path of testing small, increasing the size of your ad size increment-by-increment, and only as the profits produced by the previous ad can pay for the next size up, and never spending more money than you can afford to lose if your ad bombs.

Action Step.

Create a series of multi-medium steps for your current, or next offer. It can be seven, it can be ten, it can be thirty… it doesn’t matter. What matters is continued, profitable response. That’s the only measure that counts.

Here are eight responsive mediums I’ve found are worth their weight in gold:

• Direct mail.

• Tele-marketing.

• Advertisements — print, radio, TV.

• Audio and/or Video cassette or CD’s.

• Written reports.

• Consultation or interview transcripts.

• A landing page on the web.

• An information-rich web site.

By STEVEN BREWER

An objection, or unresolved issue, is either a request for more information or a point that has not been explained in the right way yet. A price objection, for example, merely means that the client has not yet understood how much more benefit they will receive than the money they will be spending with you.

Inoculation

Most objections or potentially problematic issues are predictable.

If you pitch to 500 clients and 450 raise delivery times and price, it seems reasonable to expect that a large percentage of your next 500 clients might have some issues about delivery and price as well.

So surely it makes sense to deal with these issues in your own time, in the most effective way for yourself, instead of waiting for them to be become more significant, certainly instead of waiting for the client to raise them as a significant issue.

As part of targeted sales training programmes we include inoculation techniques so they sound natural and effective That is what inoculation is about. It is designed as a tool that gives you the ability to remove the power of an issue before it is even voiced by the client.

Better still, if the client does raise the issue later it has lost its power and can be dealt with more easily.

Not every point needs inoculation

Only inoculate against issues which come up every time.

1. “Some people say……”
2. Voice the issue in a relaxed fashion.
3. “But you know…” or “But I tend to think…” or “Then they find out ….”
4. Confirm agreement.

We start by distancing the client from the objection, by talking about someone else. You can deal with ‘the other people’s views’ without risking any offence to the client. We are simply using quotations.

Remember, the way we represent something internally is what gives it meaning to us. If something sounds relatively unimportant then we will treat it as such. If something sounds serious again, we will treat it as such.

Lastly, we get their commitment and agreement that the objection has been answered convincingly.

For example, imagine the issue is price. Our company is 30% more expensive than the competition. However, we save all of that and more on the durability of our product. An inoculation might go:

Some people say “Steve you can’t possibly expect me to pay 30% more for something that’s just the same as everyone else’s”. “That’s a fair point, though not really true, because our products actually last 40% longer and so save money. Whilst they are a little more expensive

in the first place, they actually save a lot of money in the medium term. That’s what’s really important, isn’t it?”

The Shortcut

There is a fabulous tool for shortcutting the entire objection process and getting the client to where you want them to be. Delegates attending our sales training programmes rate this very highly. Simply follow the structure:

1. Empathise.
2. And
3. “What would have to happen for you to….?”

The last question immediately takes you in a more productive direction. It might be “What would have to happen for you to go ahead right now?”

The precise slant you put on it depends on where you want the client to head.

“I understand you have an existing supplier in place, what would have to happen for you to change/take on an additional supplier?”

“I appreciate that the price is above your budget. What would have to happen to make it worth the investment?”

Feel, Felt, Found, Find, Because

This is an extremely powerful technique.

Feel, Felt, Found, Find, Because is a structure based on using a story about a customer or customers just like them. Put the problem into the past and focus them on getting something positive in the future. You then justify the case you are making very credibly, wherever possible bolting tangible results onto the back of the process.

So, if the client’s issue is that you are too expensive, the reframe with this technique might be:

“I understand how you feel. A lot of our customers felt the same way initially. What they actually found was the value of working with us really outweighed the up-front costs. I am sure you will find the same as we have really focused on the quality of our delivery which will reduce your stock holding by 30%.”

In stages the process consists of:

1. Say you understand/appreciate how they feel.
2. Tell them about customers/a customer who felt that way at one time.
3. Tell them what your other customer/s found after working with you.
4. Reassure them they will too.
5. Give them a reason.

It is a good idea to have a number of effective ways to overcome objections as you may have a number of different objections to tackle in order to secure the deal. The techniques described in this article are very effective. However, they cannot be used effectively time and time again. Try to use them sparingly and effectively.

NOTE: As part of Steve Brewer’s in depth sales training programmes he introduces delegates to a number of different techniques and they choose which suit their own personality and selling style.

Get Steve Brewer’s free Sales Wisdom Weekly here

Every day I see businesses vying to gain a dominating position in their market, to achieve a competitive advantage. They put out press releases, spend small fortunes on glossy brochures, logos and letterhead, dress their staff smartly, lease new cars, create web sites, dispatch sales people, design PowerPoint and printed presentations, and so on. You are familiar with it, you see it everywhere.

All of this activity and creation, surprisingly to the traditionally educated business owner, has little effect. Often, it has a negative, harmful, off-putting effect. Why? Because, on the whole, it is an attempt to capture the interest of prospective customers, and persuade them to buy. It is mostly vaporous sales rhetoric that fails to do much than persuade the minimum, keenest numbers that your company is the one to trust and buy from.

Put bluntly, it is little more than a bombardment of “Buy from us… buy from us… buy from us…” messaging. If you are experiencing less than an affluent flow of high value sales each week and month, look critically at your marketing and selling approach, and be honest about how close it comes to the kind of style I am describing.

Here’s The Magic Marketing Key

Always remember: your customers and clients do not want to be ‘sold’ to. In fact, being sold to creates an unexplainable barrier between you and them. They don’t like it, don’t want it, and largely do not respond to it. They mostly will be unable to explain why they don’t buy from you. They’ll just feel it isn’t right, something doesn’t gel. Or they are left wondering whether they have been told the whole truth about whatever it is you are selling, the impartial truth and advice they silently seek.

But I will tell you why. People yearn to be informed, advised, and led. They cry out for an organisation that provides impartial, truthful, transparent information and advice. They don’t want a salesperson, they want an advisor, an expert, a leader. The moment you understand this facet of human nature, and adjust your marketing accordingly, you own the universe in which you operate.

The most effective way of positioning yourself as a leading authority in your field is to publish a report or book, or to have an article or series of articles published in a prominent industry publication. Of the three, a book is by far the most influential.

Why? Because there always has been—and still is today, even with easily-produced DVDs, CDs, mp3s, and web video broadcasts—something magical about being the author of a real book. Anyone can easily and cheaply publish a book these days but only the tiniest minority do. So there is an aura of grandeur and authority about being published.

If you want to jettison yourself to the top of your industry or profession, I can’t stress enough—write a book!

Do you think writing a book is out of your reach? Nonsense! If you can write a sentence you can write a paragraph. If you can write a paragraph you can write a chapter. If you can write a chapter you can write a page. If you can write a page you can write a book! Joanie and I have brought up out two children to believe that writing is easy and fun. Guess what? Tristan (age 9 at the time of writing this) has already written a twenty-page book, a few poems, and half a dozen songs. And they’re good. They have substance, feeling, character and flow. We are very proud of this but the truth is writing is a natural as talking. In fact, the best writing is ‘talk’ written down. Do not try to write but simply write what you talk. This is the greatest secret of effective writing I can share with you. Simply let loose on paper as you would let loose an explanation of your particular product or service to a customer face-to-face.

Your book need be no longer than fifty or sixty pages in length. The fact that it is perfect bound with a jacket (a ‘proper’ book) will instantly lift you to the dizzy heights of being an ‘author’. Call my office 01233 633313 to get names of book printing companies I use or know of. It will be a pleasure to share them with you.

Then, as you sell and promote your book to your market, customers see you as an expert in your field.

Am I suggesting you rush together any old, little-researched information, and publish it? Of course not. But understand this: you probably know far more about your particular field than do 98% of your customers or clients. All you have to do is put that information into words, in a reasonably succinct and interesting way (almost exactly as you speak it face-to-face with customers), publish it, and you instantly elevate yourself above every competing business that has not gone to the trouble of publishing a book. It works like magic.

Given a choice, everybody wants to do business with the expert in the field. Are you beginning to see that nothing but nothing achieves that expert recognition and reverence than a traditionally published book with you being the author?

Still not sure you can write? Here’s how to write a book ‘automatically’.

Get together with some business associates or clients, or family members or friends who understand your product or service, sit around a table, leave a dictation recorder on, and just talk—in detail—about every subject you can cover about your product or service or expertise. Go deep. Don’t leave anything out.

Then give the mp3s to a typist to transcribe (with double or triple spacing) and—with a little editing and rearranging—you have the transcript of an interesting and valuable book. Just get it typeset and traditionally printed and you’ll have a lifelong tool that works tirelessly bringing in new customers or clients.

Give your book or report a compelling title like:

“Why Starting Your Own Franchise Business Is The Greatest ‘Safe’ Money Making Opportunity For The ‘Average’ Entrepreneur”

or,

“The 10 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Booking a Holiday… And How To Avoid Them”

or,

“What You MUST Know About Washing Machines And How They Clean (Or Sometimes Don’t Clean)”

or,

“How To Choose A New SMART Mortgage And Save Thousands Of Pounds Each Year”

or,

“The Greatest Weight-Loss Breakthrough This Decade”

or,

“The Greatest Opportunity For The ‘Ordinary Guy’ To Get Rich Today — How To Select, Start And Make BIG Money From Property Investment… Starting From Scratch”

I can give titles all day long but you get the idea. The theme and title promise of your book should reveal a specific and tangible pledge of result in whatever field you are in.

A professionally, traditionally published hardback or paperback book will do you more good than any other type of publication or activity.

TIP: Never attempt to sell anything in the main body text of your book. Keep it impartial and fascinatingly informative, immediately useful and actionable. Then insert a “FREE OFFER” card, or page to generate inquiries. Those inquiries, by their very nature, will be highly targeted.

You can print, publish and market your book yourself (using the direct response strategies you are learning on LeaveThemInTheDust.com. Or you can approach prospective alliance partners and or publishers to do it for you for a share of the sales revenue you generate behind your publication.

Last word: I have seen first-hand what a book does for your career in business. Almost as soon as my first book How To Out-Sell, Out-Market, Out-Promote, Out-Advertise Everyone Else You Compete Against… Before They Even Know What Hit Them was published, company owners were calling seeking my advice. Not only did the book sell well but a good number of business owners liked what they saw so much that they sort my private advice and counsel. Many of my best and most lucrative private clients came straight off the back of that first book. And I am pleased to say that many, many millions of pounds of increased revenues and profits have been achieved for them by putting into place, and broadening, the very strategies and tactics I revealed in the book. I know I would have acquired just a fraction of the number of these high quality clients, with very much greater effort and expense, had I not published the book.

When I wrote The Game of Business and How To Play It my ‘ranking’ as an expert in the field of rapid business growth shot up even further, with the result that more entrepreneurs flocked to my seminars, invested in my specific home study programmes, and again sort private counsel. I tell you this not to boast but to be honest: Writing and publishing a book makes your life as an expert business owner easy!

But here’s the thing: For over a decade I have advised business owners to write a book. Thousands of entrepreneurs have heard my advice at seminars, on home study programmes, and in my writings and recordings. Not more than half a dozen, that I know of, have taken action on that advice. That is the craziest waste of opportunity I have witnessed.

How about you? Are you going to commit to writing your own book (or more than one) and watch your business, profits and wealth soar as a result? Or are you going to be like the majority: happy and excited to read how to be a success without ever actually taking action to do it.

Don’t be a theoretical entrepreneur. Be a relentless doer. It’s actually far easier, more fun and greatly more profitable to be a doer than a non-doer.

Send me a copy of your book when you’ve published it. I love to receive news from business owners following and profiting from my advice. Mark it for my private attention: Paul Gorman, c/o Big Sur Publishing, 212 Piccadilly, London W1V 9LD. I promise to write back to you with my congratulations… and encouragement to go ever higher in business!

By Max Eames

Who doesn’t like going out for a meal? Who thinks they can do it better than the local gastro pub down the road?

Lots of us like making meals for our friends. A fair few of us are a dab hand in the kitchen, and we know how to create a bit of theatre in the dining room as the plates arrive. And yes, pretty much everybody has fleetingly dreamt of opening his or her own restaurant.

But there’s more to a restaurant than serving good food and knowing how to give it a bit of style on the plate.  If you get it wrong, the ‘dream’ can easily turn into a nightmare.  I should know.

Not one to boast, but I’m a half-decent cook.  I know how to create atmosphere. And I’ve got a bit of flair in terms of what goes out the kitchen door.  As an architect, I’ve even designed restaurants and commercial kitchens for a living. But it turns out, I didn’t know my backside from my beef brisket when it came to starting my own business. Nonetheless, the School of Hard Knocks ran me through its curriculum at breakneck speed, and I was able to beat the odds by “graduating” with a full set of gnashers.

In every business sector, very few hopefuls escape without losing a few front teeth along the way. Maybe that’s why I’ve recently been asked to share my experience by preparing a workshop series for entrepreneurs who are part of London’s vast hospitality and foodservice industry. In essence, if you’re in business, what you’re selling is pretty straightforward:  it’s either a product, an experience… or hopefully both. What’s tough about the foodservice industry in particular is that the product and the experience are inextricably entwined.   There’s no other way of seeing it: you’re only as good as your last meal.

And let’s not pretend that the cards aren’t stacked against us, no matter what we offer our customers. Making it in business is like playing a mean game of poker. You’ve got to know the true strength of your hand, you’ve got to make mistakes in order to grow… but you’ve got to remember that too many mistakes will cause you to fold your hand and be forced to walk away from the table.

My three top tips for successful entrepreneurship – in these difficult times – are these: 

TOP TIP NUMBER 1:  It doesn’t matter WHAT kind of business you’re in, you’ve got to “sweat the small stuff”. The newspapers are saying that a recession is on the horizon; whether you agree with that or not, this is a great time to draw up a blueprint for optimum customer service. In these times, the canny entrepreneur pulls over, has a look under the hood, fiddles with the machinery, and adjusts a few things before hitting the road again.

TOP TIP NUMBER 2:  Know where the best money tends to come from in your particular enterprise. If the 80/20 rule applies to much of life, it probably applies to your business as well. Ask yourself a series of questions about what’s happening in your marketplace right now, and anticipate what might happen if the economy continues to decline. Knowledge is power; make sure you have it at your fingertips.

TOP TIP NUMBER 3:  Be willing to helicopter above your business and make tough decisions on cash flow, revenue and profit. Know where your revenue and profit will come from over the next twelve to eighteen months. Get your calculator out, and ask yourself if the money coming in is PROFITABLE money.   This isn’t a time to focus on revenue so much as it is to turn a steely eye on profit – and on the cash flow situation that could bring things to a halt in short order.   It’s not uncommon to see turnovers of a quarter of a million pounds with so little profit that the business-owners aren’t even paying themselves a wage!  That’s not a healthy situation, and not a situation with a lot of “wiggle room” if things get tough for a while.

Over the years I’ve helped families, individuals and businesses arrive at a ‘Financial Fix-it Formula’ that WORKS.  And there’s one thing I know: businesses are all about people, and people have to make mistakes in order to experiment and grow.  But it’s worth remembering that tough times are all about opportunity.  So if you think there might be tough times on the horizon, it’s probably time to roll up your shirt sleeves and get to work.

Max Eames is a psychotherapist and coach, and author and creator of the WEALTH MECHANIC programme. Get Max’s breakthrough Wealth Mechanic book here: http://www.wealthmechanic.com/