(This originally appeared in the Success Draft Blog)

By Michael Masterson

If you want to be important to your business, make the goals of your business important to you.

Don’t wait to be given the challenge. Take it upon yourself to figure out how your company can grow its profits — and how you can make a contribution to that goal.

This is what good business leaders do. They face problems, seek out opportunities, and take responsibility for moving the business forward. If you are “just an ordinary employee” right now, don’t let that stop you. A fundamental rule for success is this: Do the work today that you hope to be doing in the future.

So how do you — a mere cog in the machine — contribute to the future of your business?

Start small, with a single problem-solving idea. Like a way to fix a machine that keeps jamming. Or a better way to report your marketing results. Or the name of a cheaper vendor to print your marketing literature.

Start looking for ideas in your own area of expertise first. If you are in accounting, look for bookkeeping or reporting ideas. If you are in product fulfillment, look for shipping or packaging ideas.

You’ll eventually notice something that is not as good as it should be. When you do, ask yourself, “How could this be better?” Chat with your colleagues. Refine your idea. When it feels right, write a memo to the person who would be in charge of executing it. If the idea is positively received, push to make it happen.

Then get on to another idea. And then another one.

Meanwhile, get in the habit of documenting all of your suggestions in writing. That way, when one of them changes the company’s future and everyone else is trying to take credit for it, you’ll have proof that it was yours.

You’ll notice that each time you present another small-but-good idea, two things will happen:

1. It will be easier for people to accept it as good.

2. It will be easier for you to come up with your next one.

Now, try a medium-sized idea. Maybe one concerning a problem with a process — answering customer-service complaints, dealing with late shipments, overcoming the objections of a perennially cranky but important customer. Bolstered by the success you’ve had in solving small problems, you’ll have little difficulty finding a good idea at this medium level of difficulty.

After your first medium-sized good idea is communicated, come up with more. You can still suggest the occasional small-idea solution — but not as often. At this point, you will have moved yourself up on the ladder of company problem solvers. Most of the smaller problems should be delegated to smaller thinkers. Don’t say so directly. Just imply it.

Once you’ve secured your position among the medium-level thinkers, you will be ready for a major challenge: your first Big Idea.

Coming up with a Big Idea is a big task. It must be important enough to make a difference in your company’s bottom line. It must provide significant benefits for your customers, your employees, and yourself. It should also be cost effective.

Recognize that some people will resent you for your chutzpah. Those who do will be from every tier of the business: your subordinates, your colleagues, and even your superiors. But you will win out over them in the end, because what you are doing is essential for the company’s long-term profitability.

To become (or maintain yourself as) the Big Idea man in your company, focus your thinking on the two or three areas that are critical to your business. For most businesses, these are:

1. generating efficient new sales to produce growth

2. creating vertical, back-end sales to boost profits

3. improving product quality to ensure customer retention

Each of these areas demands a different approach.

1. To come up with new selling ideas, you have to become a student not only of your own company’s selling strategies but also of the selling strategies of your competitors.

When I consult with a business, I make it a policy to study every advertising campaign they have done in recent years, how it performed, what kind of customers it brought in, how much they spent, how much they refunded, etc. I do the same thing with their primary competitors.

In the process, I begin to see the invisible links that support the most successful efforts. And ideas come to me. I wonder what would happen, for example, if A company used the pricing strategy of B company but with the copy approach of D company.

2. To come up with ideas for possible back-end products, focus on the initial advertising campaign — and try to understand what, exactly, the customers responded to.

Were they interested in something that allowed them to work more productively? Or did they want a product that would project a certain image — powerful, professional, or creative? Once you’ve discovered the foundation of those initial sales, you have a psychological basis on which to create many back-end products.

I begin with the premise that what a customer bought once, he’ll buy a second time. And what he bought a second time, he’ll buy again. So I create back-end products that have the same general appeal as the lead-generating product but are different in respect to other factors: pricing, packaging, size, quantity, frequency, etc.

For example, a book that promises to make you feel better about yourself can be repackaged as:

• a $79 audiocassette program
• a series of $15 lessons
• a $599 home-study program
• a $1,950 two-day seminar

By constructing a simple grid with different prices along one axis and different packaging formats along the other, you can often come up with a dozen or more good back-end product ideas in a single sitting.

3. Coming up with good ideas for improving your products is relatively easy. All you need to do is ask.

Ask your customers by phoning them, writing them, e-mailing them, and surveying them. Keep in mind that sometimes they will give you answers that they think are “good answers” rather than truthful answers. So read between the lines.

Ask your customer-service people, too. They understand the major gripes, nagging issues, and market trends that influence your customers’ decisions to buy (or not to buy). And ask the people who make your products, especially those on the manufacturing line. Ask them, “What are the three best things about this product?” and “What are the three worst things about this product?” What they say might astonish you — but also inspire you.

By doing your homework in these three critical areas — front-end sales, back-end development, and product improvement — a constant stream of ideas will keep popping into your head. Run these ideas by trusted colleagues to get their support before you announce them publicly. Based on their feedback, do some refining. And as soon as you have the wrinkles ironed out, present them at company meetings.

Standing up in front of the company and making an argument for change takes guts. And wise men derive their courage from thinking, planning, and testing.

So don’t just shoot from the hip. Carefully plan what you’re going to say. Memorize the first and last sentences of your presentation. Make sure you have impressive and persuasive data to support your claims. Explain how the customer will benefit from the idea — and then explain how the company will too. Summarize your main points succinctly.

Be prepared to have your Big Ideas rejected when you first suggest them. (Almost every one of the Big Ideas I’ve come up with has been.) But if you can be open to criticism and flexible enough to make sensible modifications, your Big Ideas will get better and better — and your critics will eventually become your supporters.

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This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

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(This originally appeared in the Success Draft Blog)

By Ehtesham Mirza

Success is a sound sweet to ears and enjoyable if it is achieved within the bonds of morality, ethics and honesty. The successful stories are encouraging and effectively improve the personality of individual or group. However, it requires efforts, dedications, determination and a will to follow the path of successful personalities.

It is interesting to note what Edward Bliss says, “Success doesn’t mean the absence of failure, and it means attainment of ultimate objectives. It means winning of war, not every battle.” But it is also established evidently that success doesn’t come without failure. Though a focus on failure can lead to success, too great a reliance on successful precedents can lead to failure too.

A very profound and thought provoking quotation has an immense impact on those individuals who followed the advice in totality with sincerity. These thoughts and motivations just don’t come into the one’s mind without ability and dependability, to comprehend and execute effectively. A little deviation of thinking and motivation could have divergent effects.

In feudalist society the gap, between have and have-not, is very big, which has translated into different groups of variance. The basic human values have not only been suppressed and crushed but also ensured that means of attaining decent living is denied. The irony is that in this modern era the most under developed and developing countries population comprises of under privileged, economically backward and socially deprived people who suffer the most. The result is the crushing of talents of many individuals who, otherwise, could have become effective successful individual, families and nations. However, those who possess talents, determination, passion and desire can reach the dizzy heights of sublimity and success. The majority of the great personalities viz; sportsmen, scholars, scientists etc. come from the very humble background.

I, therefore, conclude, by emphasizing that let the fire within the self should continue and should also be encouraged so that the younger generation should excel enabling to build a successful, well educated and knowledgeable nation.

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(This originally appeared in the Success Draft Blog)

By Craig Garber

Lots of people miss out on success because they’re waiting for someone to approve what they do. And this is surely a sad mistake.

Here, listen to this story and you’ll see what I mean. A while ago I met with a doctor — a plastic surgeon. The meeting had nothing to do with business, or with plastic surgery. It was a completely off-topic random meeting.

Frankly, this guy was brilliant, and I don’t say that about a lot of people. Not only is he a dedicated surgeon, but he also happens to be an artist. His real love is sculpture, and I’ve seen his sculptures — they’re outstanding.

He’s an artist first, in fact. Goes to museums all over the world just to check out the art, and he’s really into the integrity of the message the art is trying to deliver. Meaning, he’s basically a creative, and his creativity in his profession, is expressed through the results he gets in his surgery.

The human body, effectively, is his media.

So he tells me his story, and it goes something like this:

He’s been working underneath some guy who’s close to retirement — maybe he’s 5 or so years away. He also teaches, because he says, “Teaching residents is really good for your career.” It’s kind of “what’s expected of you, if you’re good.”

O.K., I buy that. Kind of like “paying back.” I can dig this.

But with respect to his business, I imagine in his mind, he’s going to wait until the old geezer either retires or keels over one day, and then he’ll take over the practice. In reality though, every single minute between today and whenever that time comes, he’s wasting his time.

This is a brilliant guy, with a tremendous work ethic, with literally hundreds of proven cases and surgeries under his belt. In reality, he’s probably far more qualified to run his own practice than many surgeons currently doing so, simply because of his competence, his experience, and his actual skill-set.

Not to mention his enthusiasm, which is quite infectious — and that’s rare for a physician. Doctors are, for the most part, pretty stoic.

But instead, this fellow’s sitting around “waiting” to take his next big business step forward because of one reason only: This is what his profession expects of him.

He’s programmed for conventional growth. And he’s SO wired to do what’s expected of him, if I ever tried to even suggest to him otherwise (which I wouldn’t — I’m not interested in wasting my time or his), he’s be offended and he’d probably tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. That what I’m suggesting just isn’t “the way things are done.”

Of course it’s not.

But the truth is, if you’re waiting to do things “right,” chances are you’re waiting for someone else to control and determine the outcome of your destiny.

This kind of “conventional wisdom” is a well-meaning but extremely foolish viewpoint of life, and especially of business. It’s the “if I’m not comfortable with it, it must not make sense” principle, that too many people follow.

In reality, what’s expected of you is often not necessarily what’s good for you, and it’s certainly almost always not what’s best for you. This is because the masses make conventional standards, not the leaders. That’s why it’s called “conventional” wisdom and not “exceptional” wisdom.

See, leaders are far too busy working and leading and doing, to care about setting standards for others.

Most truly successful people could care less how others perform. “Approval” for them isn’t one more step in the validation process, it’s usually not even part of their process at all.

Not being willing to take destiny into your own hands, and instead following conventional programming, is really a crime against yourself in most cases. It holds you back and prevents you from accomplishing anything meaningful and on your own terms.

At the same time, dogged determination and pursuit of excellence and success on your own terms, and refusing to accept anything but that, can propel you to heights you’ve never expected. And often times, the fuel you need to get there, comes precisely from those who doubt you and who foolishly believe “conventional wisdom” is the only way to get where you want to go.

For example, I’ll never forget a conversation I had with an uncle of mine, back in 1990. It was right before I got divorced, and in general, things around me were falling apart and my life was in shambles. He’s a college professor (most people in academia are highly programmed for conventional wisdom) and he looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Gee, if you had better parents and if things had turned out differently for you, you really could have been something and made something decent out of your life.”

He respected my intelligence, but being an academic, he made the mistake in thinking this is the only way people become successful. He wasn’t able to look at the world through anyone else’s eyes other than his own.

At the time, I knew things weren’t going well for me, and frankly I didn’t know how to make them better, but I also knew that to write me off at the ripe old age of 27 was premature. I knew what he didn’t know — that once I found out what I needed to know, I’d be able to do things on my own terms, the way I wanted to. Not his way, which by my rebel standards was ridiculous, but MY way, which was “different” but much more effective, explosive, and decisive.

Today, I make more in 30 to 60 days, than this guy does all year. I’ve thought of his comments from time to time, and the sense of righteous indignation that consumed me when I heard those words in my mind, was often the fuel that kept me moving forward back in those early days.

See, I knew I would prove him wrong. I felt, “How dare he write me off.”

Once I started becoming successful and expanding my own consciousness, and once I understood why I’d been unsuccessful in the past, I also understood his comment was made out of ignorance, not malice.

No one knows what they don’t know, but being ignorant about this fact is what tales away years of productivity and short-cuts you can otherwise leverage to your advantage, in many different, and many productive ways.

Being keenly aware of this, and always trying to expand your mind, on the other hand, puts your destiny much more in your own hands, and gives you power you didn’t even think existed.

So don’t ever bet the farm on conventional wisdom, and keep shooting for the stars. Even if it takes you over a dozen years to get there, like it took me — there is far greater satisfaction in ultimately doing what you want to do, and doing it on your own terms, than doing what someone else wants you to do, on theirs.

No one has more of a vested interest in your life, than you do — but only if you make a conscious decision that this is how it should be.

So ask yourself what’s more important — beating the system, or obeying it? The choice is yours.

I urge you to take this message very seriously. Because it is far sweeter to gloriously write your own rulebook, than to steadfastly obey someone else’s.

Approval? The only approval for success, that you need, is your own — because that’s… the only person… who counts.

Now go sell something, Craig Garber

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