Monday, March 31, 2008

March 31 Jordan Adler Call on Leverage

Doing more and more with less and less.

Gain leverage with yourself, with other people, with money, and with technology.

The smallest change can impact the greatest result. A minor small shift in a bunch of different areas.

Leverage belief and take 100% responsibility around your emotions - around your personal circumstances and situations. Personally and with your current business. When you can't manage your emotions, you lose days, weeks, months. That little 2 degree difference ultimately costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Will those emotions shut you down? Consistency, the importance of being consistent.

Leverage with people. Creating more value for others.
1. Send a book to your top 10 people.
2. Take your top 3 people with you to a seminar.
3. Have lunch with your team.
4. Promote all the Monday night calls.
5. Get your entire team to the Convention.
6. Promote the Treat 'em Right seminars and EFTBN meetings.

Leverage with money. Take 10% of your income for personal development. Send out your greeting cards and DVDs - those are your workers. Make them go to work the way they're intended. Make somebody's day.

Leverage with technology. Sending cards is much easier - what would take 2-3 hours, now takes 2-3 minutes. Conference calls, webcasts.

The difference between good and great, plodding along and having an exploding organization, $10,000/month and $100,000/month is 2%. Like baking a cake, putting in the right ingredients in the right order. A small shift can turn a minimum amount of work into hours, days, and months worth of results.

It's not you against the world, it's you leading the world.

Team Call on Beyond the Basics

Make it convenient for your new people to send cards - help them with importing their contacts from Outlook or Excel. That'll be 30 minutes well spent in the beginning with them, to set them up to being more likely to use the system.

If they have their database in Act, then send them to Customer Service to get a file of how to import their contacts from Act.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Daily 8 Training Call on Building Your Contact Manager

Awesome call! They went over 8 methods you can use to build your contact manager, and of those 8, they suggest we choose 2-3 that work well for you.

The 8 methods are: warm market list, lifestyle marketing, swap & drop, reciprocal marketing, networking meetings (such as B.N.I.), event marketing, internet marketing, and niche marketing.

The 2-3 that catch my attention are: reciprocal marketing, networking meetings, and niche marketing. Maybe swap & drop, and initially, warm market list to practice with.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Tidbits of Info

This past Monday's Team Call from Jordan Adler, he interviewed a lady who lives in a small town in Arizona. She mostly built her business with cold calls, and the thing that I was reminded of from that call was to follow up with people to whom you've sent a card. And have a way to keep track of who you sent a card to and when, so that you can follow up with them in a timely manner.

I recently read some things from a book called "Lower Your Taxes Big Time!" by Sandy Botkin, and it had some great nuggets of information on how self-employed business people can take tax deductions. The main thing I can apply is to get a tax diary, or tax organizer, and keep really good records about income and expenses.

The last thing I want to mention was from listening to Dani Johnson's Spirit Driven Success CD #7. She talked about how life and death are in the power of the tongue, because the speech center of the brain has complete dominion over your entire reality.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

SOC Basics BBB Team Call

Today I listened to this call and it went over:

1. Sending a card
2. Submitting your handwriting font form
3. Ordering business cards
4. Setting up a gift account for someone in your contact manager

I also found out that you can click on the Card Shop at the bottom of the Card Catalog and it will take you to more cards created by other artists who use SendOutCards. Pretty cool stuff.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Biz Strategies BBB Team Call

From the first team call on March3, these are some highlights that I wanted to remember.

Within a 90-day period, have a goal to have 6 new team members - which translates to 2-3 gift account walkthroughs each week. That is not too difficult to shoot for.

So what would be stopping me?

It would be the fear of being able to balance work and family. I continue to work towards believing that it is possible for me to work this business part-time and still keep my family as my priority over my business.

Sending Out to Give

When I first learned this concept from SendOutCards, I thought of the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or, as my daughter's Sunday craft from church says, "Treat others as you would like to be treated."

I have always believed this to be true, but honestly, have not had a way to implement this in a practical and tangible way every single day. There was a time that I thought about calling a different friend every day to chat at length, but I couldn't practically do it. I had always wanted to keep in touch with people, but was not very good at it.

Initially when I started with SendOutCards, I started with wanting to build a business right away, because I loved the company's corporate mission statement, "Changing lives...one card at a time." I think it is a very needed service and everyone can benefit from giving and receiving words of encouragement and affirmation from the people they love.

However, to be honest, I did not follow directions from the company very well. They recommended sending an unexpected card every day to someone. I thought this would be a waste of time and money. And I did not think it would do much for my business. But I was focusing on myself and what I could gain.

It was not until I shifted from actions of focusing on myself to focusing on others on a consistent daily basis, that I began to send out a card every single day, for the purpose of giving encouragement and affirmation to others who crossed my paths or my thoughts.

I cannot begin to tell you the difference it has made in my daily thoughts as well as what is starting to come back to me. So the "sending out to give" or the "treat others as you would like to be treated" philosophy is true! And it is not just a philosophy; the Scriptures itself has said it through the words of the greatest teacher Jesus.

I have not only been keeping in touch with friends and family that I haven't talked with in a while, I have begun to befriend new people and gotten so many invitations to playdates, birthday parties, and special parties than I could have ever imagined! Now I can barely keep up with all the activities and friendships that are sprouting up from my consistent action of sending out a card every day just to give.

Not only do I get a chance to connect with people in the community, it just plain feels good to send out positive words every single day, knowing that I am helping to affect someone's thoughts for the better that day.

My Why

Thank you to all of you who have supported me in my journey so far :).

What prompted me to take the action to start this blog? It's the need to write down my goals and dreams relating to my business. I have had quite a journey in becoming an entrepreneur and believing that working from home is truly possible.

What started as a desire to make a supplemental income working from home so that I could continue to stay at home with my kids, formed into a desire to incorporate my life mission into my business. What I do with this business has to be bigger than making money, and it is now a rising conviction to help change lives by encouraging and affirming people each and every single day. To offer hope, encouragement, and a listening ear.