The primary purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Marketing and innovation produce results. All other business functions are costs. Prospecting and increasing the average value and frequency of sales are the bedrock of marketing and business.
The surest way to accomplish your business goals is making service to others your primary goal. The key to success is adding value to others’ lives.
Prerequisites for Success
Never start or invest in a business without a solidly researched and written plan.
Develop great powers of intense sustained concentration
Ask focused questions
Execute the plan with passion and precision.
If it’s not proprietary, it won’t work.
Whatever you reinforce or reward, you get more of.
Competence starts with guaranteeing your work.
Find out what works, and then do more of it.
Focus first on doing the right things, and then on doing things right by mastering details.
A few basic moves produce most results and income.
Use leverage with ideas (the ability to generalize is the key to intellectual leverage), work, money, time and people.
To maximize profits, replicate yourself. Earning potentials become geometric rather than linear.
Always have lofty explicit goals and visualize them intensely
Assume the attitude that if you don’t reach your goals, you will literally die! This type of survival pressure mindset, no matter how briefly used, stimulates your mind, forces you to use your time effectively… and illuminates new ways of getting things done
Be Enthusiastic as Enthusiasm covers many deficiencies – and will make others want to associate with you.
Remind yourself that working for someone else may be easier but by owning your own business, you only have to be good to become wealthy.
No dream is too big. It takes almost the same amount of time and energy to manage tiny projects or businesses as it does to manage massive ones… and the massive ones carry with them – proportional rewards.
Take full responsibility for your actions or lack of action. He who errs must pay.
Keep your overhead to a minimum.
Rely more on brains, wit and talent… and less on money.
Spend more time working “on” your business than “in” your business.
Don’t enter into a business relationship with anyone unknown to you without being furnished with references dating back at least 10 years.
You can get any job done through the sheer force of will when combined with uncompromising integrity and competence.
Strong leadership is the key.
An hour of effective, precise, hard, disciplined – and integrated thinking can be worth a month of hard work.
Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in business and in life.
For maximum profits, identify and market universal needs, wants and trends.
Creating desire, satisfying needs and wants and replacing problems with creative innovations are the essence of profit generation.
To maximize opportunities, seek and master the complicated. The major solutions you find will be surprisingly simple, and the competition is minimal.
Patience is often profitable.
Achievement comes from the sum of consistent small efforts, repeated daily.
Persistence is a sure path to success with quality activities.
Never, ever, ever give up.
“I will do this” is the only attitude that works.
“I’ll try” or “I think” doesn’t work.
Keep fully insured physically and materially and keep hedged emotionally.
Insurance is not for sale when you need it.
How to Negotiate
Learn the other side’s needs, offer as little information as possible,
Never underestimate your opposition
Never show weakness when negotiating.
Do not compromise if you are right.
Hold your ground, show no fear, ask for what you want, and the opposition will usually agree.
Out-think, out-innovate and out-hustle the competition
Vividly visualize yourself as winning before entering into every deal or competitive situation.
Maintain a blood-smelling, fighter pilot life-or-death attitude when any deal gets near to a close.
First impressions are lasting impressions. Put your best foot forward.
People treat you like you teach them to treat you.
A success key is positioning yourself at the top of their agenda.
Remember that the value of any service you have to offer diminishes rapidly once it’s provided. Protect your compensation before performing.
The right thing is usually not the easy thing to do. You may sacrifice popularity for rightness, but you’ll lose self-esteem for wrongness. Don’t be afraid to say “no”.
If someone lies to you once, he’ll lie to you a thousand times. Lying is for thieves and cowards.
Have strict and total respect for other people’s property.
Producing results is more important than proving you’re right
To get things done, try to understand others’ frames of references, points of view, needs and wants.
Determine what is honest, fair, effective and rational… and act accordingly.
Long term success is built on credibility
Establish enduring relationships with quality people based on mutually earned trust
Be explicit and semantically precise in all communications, agreements and dealings.
Summarize and write down important discussions… and make sure all sides agree.
Putting agreements in writing avoids misunderstandings.
Memories are fallible.
Skepticism is a key to rational thinking.
Be especially skeptical of your own cherished beliefs.
Anxiety is usually caused by lack of control, organization, preparation and action.
The first rule of sharpening your mind is to be an alert and sensitive observer. Assume nothing.
If it can’t be observed, it’s not true. Never act on blind faith.
Whenever something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.
Refuse to be swayed by emotion when it conflicts with reason.
Observation is the genesis of all knowledge and progress… and is the first and last step of every thinking man’s tool – The Scientific Method.
Always have options. Options are a primary source of power.
Power also comes from stripping away appearances and seeing things as they really are.
Nothing wins more often than superior preparation.
Genius is usually preparation.
Always work on increasing the size of the pie, rather than just your portion.
A little caution avoids great regrets.
Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.