Without a doubt, question your decisions – Harvey Mackay

Harvey Mackay’s Column This Week

Without a doubt, question your decisions

Will Smith is a success by any Hollywood standard. He is a Grammy Award-winning rapper. He starred in a hit television sitcom. He was nominated for two Best-Actor Academy Awards. He’s had eight consecutive films that grossed more than $100 million. He’s also a film and television producer. And you may not know that he was accepted at, but did not attend MIT—yes, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

One of the secrets to his success might surprise you. It’s self-doubt.

Smith can’t run away from his fears. Whenever he feels fear, he faces it head-on. He tells a story about being in Jamaica as a young man, where he watched people jump off a high cliff into the water below. He was fascinated, but also terrified because he didn’t know how to swim. He wasn’t going to let that stop him, however; so he walked to the edge of the cliff. Several minutes later, he jumped and obviously lived to tell the tale.

Much of his behavior is in response to a fear that he couldn’t live up to the high esteem in which he was held by his mother and grandmother. He concentrated his efforts on trying to meet their expectations. Smith still has some self-doubts, especially in terms of fulfilling the perceptions of those he loves.

Of his fear, Smith said in an interview, “I’ve learned to use it; to flip that negative energy around and make it a challenge. I keep going because I doubt myself. It drives me to do better. I’ve learned that the mastery of self-doubt is the key to success.”

I’ll admit that there have been times when I have questioned a decision or approached a problem and responded more out of fear than reason. I maintained a pretty calm façade, but truth be told, I had all my fingers and toes crossed for good luck. Most of the time, the result was exactly what I had hoped for. A few times, I got fooled.

Those less-than-desirable outcomes serve as a vivid reminder that we cannot get too arrogant. A measure of self-doubt is a healthy part of management strategy. In fact, it’s a necessary ingredient. As French author Jules Renard said, “There are moments when everything goes well; don’t be frightened, it won’t last.” How true!

The trick, then, is to be able to adjust to the peaks and valleys, and still keep your business or career on track. When should you let your doubts rule your actions?

Always! Yes, always. It’s good to question things you have always taken for granted, and things that have never been tried. Never confuse confidence with arrogance. Confidence allows you to proceed with some reason to believe that you will succeed. Arrogance prevents you from really examining your decisions, and is almost always a recipe for disaster.

Eleanor Roosevelt had an interesting observation: “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

How else will you know whether you can succeed if you always take the easy and proven route? How will you find what needs to be changed if you do not question the way things are done?

Perhaps the experience of Tony Verna, the television producer/director who invented instant replay for sporting events, will shed some light on the importance of being able to doubt yourself.

Instant replay was used for the first time in a 1963 Army-Navy football game. “The idea came to me out of frustration,” Verna said. “Before replays, football telecasts were filled with dead spots. . . It really destroyed the momentum of the telecasts. Replays gave you something to show during the pauses. It seemed to make the game go faster.”

Today, instant replay is a permanent fixture of sports telecasts. And now, it’s used to review questionable officials’ calls, which can cause long delays, contradicting the original purpose of instant replay’s creation.

Verna said, “It’s ironic. The reason I started instant replays was to keep the momentum going. Now the replays are slowing the whole thing down.”

The other irony is that now, Verna doubts that his invention improved the broadcasts in the way he envisioned. But they are also removing doubt from the game’s officiating! Go figure.

Mackay’s Moral: Reasonable doubt helps you work the bugs out.

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categories Entrepreneurship, Motivation, Other Recommended Authors | Rich Uhnavy | November 22, 2008 | comments Comments (0)

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How to Build an Instant Business

By Paul Lawrence

If you read the advice of many “small-business experts,” you’ll be told that you should expect to wait at least a year – possibly more – before your start-up can begin to see a profit. That’s what I was taught when I studied business administration in college – and it turns off a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs. “I can’t afford to wait that long,” they think. “I need to make money NOW.”

If the prospect of unpaid bills, astronomical credit card balances, and endless meals of ramen noodles is keeping you from starting a business, read on. Because today, I’m going to tell you how you can have a profitable business in as little as 30 days.

As Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby point out in their book, Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business, the Internet has changed the way everyone does business. But, they remind us, anyone who thinks that the Internet has made traditional direct mail obsolete is quite mistaken. They note: “In fact, in 2007 direct mail spending grew 5 percent. That translates to $58.4 billion dollars being spent on direct mail.”

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if this kind of money is being spent, the profits from direct mail can be enormous. And as someone who has spent his entrepreneurial career focusing on small businesses, I’ve had quite a bit of experience with this marketing channel. I’ve proven firsthand that it’s a way to create a profitable business without a ton of capital – and to do so almost instantly.

I’ve used direct mail to start small local businesses with only a few hundred dollars, and I’ve operated larger businesses that mailed hundreds of thousands of pieces each calendar quarter. What I’ve discovered is that, regardless of the size of your business, you can use direct mail to win customers and make sales.

What’s more, as soon as you find a direct-mail formula that works for you, you will have a profitable business in less than 30 days.

Let’s say your business idea is to sell and install generators that work on solar power. Considering current concerns about energy and the environment, you’re confident that it is a very marketable idea. So now, if you can come up with the right direct-mail formula … you’ll have an instant business.

Here’s how to do it:

Instant-Business Step 1: Choose Your List

As MaryEllen has pointed out time and again, the list of names you mail your promotion to is your most important asset. You can have a top-notch product (a high-quality solar-powered generator) and an incredible offer (a low price and tons of bonuses)… but if you send that offer to a sub-par list, you won’t make a dime. On the other hand, if you have the right list, you don’t even need good copy. Mediocre copy to a great list will always out-pull great copy to a bad list.

If, for example, you mail your promotion for your solar-powered generator to a list of people who have recently lost their homes to foreclosure, you’re probably not going to find many buyers. But if you send it to a list of homeowners who have recently requested information on environmentally friendly energy devices, you could easily make a healthy profit.

To get a good list, you’re going to need a skilled and reputable list broker. If you don’t know someone who can give you a referral, you’ll find many possibilities listed in direct-mail trade publications.

Instant-Business Step 2: Create Your Offer

Your offer is another important part of your direct-mail formula. Even if you have a skillfully written promotion and you send it to the perfect list, if the offer doesn’t appeal to your prospective customers, you won’t be successful.

No matter how many impressive features your solar-powered generator has, it won’t sell if you price it too high or you fail to position it as a good deal (by adding value with your bonuses). So make sure you study your competition to see what’s working for them… and make your offer even better than their best.

Instant-Business Step 3: Come Up With a Blockbuster Sales Promotion

A strong direct-mail promotion can be as simple as a well-written postcard or as complicated as a 30-page sales letter.

Again, study what your competitors are doing… what’s working for them. To get your hands on their promotions, just get yourself “seeded” on their mailing lists. Contact a few of them and ask for information. Or go to their websites and “opt in” to receive information from them. (If it’s not too expensive, you might even want to buy one or two of their products online.) Before you know it, you’ll be added to dozens of related mailing lists and inundated with good (and bad) sales copy that you can learn from.

Instant-Business Step 4: Test

The golden rule of testing marketing copy is to spend the least amount of money possible to determine if the formula works. Most well-capitalized marketers will do a test of 25,000-50,000 names (compiled from an assortment of 5,000-name lists).

If you are that well-capitalized, good for you! Go for it! If you’re not, don’t sweat it. You can test with a lot less.

Some years ago, I was a partner in a mortgage-brokering business. I created an offer and a promotion. And I chose one list of 5,000 local names that were in the income bracket I felt would be most receptive to the offer.

To mail to all 5,000 names on that list would’ve cost $2,500 – which I was reluctant to spend until I knew that the formula worked. So I tested the list by mailing to 500 of the names – at a cost of $250. Well, there was a good response to that test – and we made a thousand-dollar profit. So I mailed to all 5,000 names – which, again, made a profit. Eventually, I sold my share to my partner so I could focus on other interests. But I had established a formula that worked for that business. And he was then able to use that formula to keep expanding it.

Because it is so easy, and inexpensive, to test every element of a direct-mail package (the list as well as the copy), this gives you a mechanism to quickly start a direct-mail business with minimal risk and capital.

And once the formula proves successful, there is no other business I know that can be expanded as easily.

[Ed Note: Starting – and growing – a direct-mail business doesn’t require tens of thousands of dollars. Entrepreneurial expert Paul Lawrence has created a program that reveals how anyone can get started in direct mail with limited capital. For more information, follow this link.

 This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

categories Entrepreneurship, Motivation, Other Recommended Authors, Wealth Building | Rich Uhnavy | November 21, 2008 | comments Comments (0)

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