Strategy to Success – Why and Who
Why strategize?
By developing and executing a strategy, you will save yourself money, time, and energy. Strategizing is the intelligent way to go about accomplishing your ends. It sets you up for success because of its inherent structure and organization. By strategizing before you barrel through aimless steps that might create desired change, you can avoid unnecessary frustrations and potential disaster.
What other reasons do people strategize?
Strategy opens up the possibility of achieving MORE than you anticipated. By working through the steps of strategizing, you can force yourself to realistically achieve loftier goals. Maintaining structure and organization will become second nature and you will see your potential outcomes thrive.
What types of goals should have a strategy?
ANY goal deserves a strategy! A strategy is not something that is only relevant to your most pressing goals. It is an innovative way to meet any and all of your expectations.
Is there a “right” strategy for my problem?
The short answer is no. There is a vast quantity of viable strategies for whatever position. Just as there are many different ways to get to New York City, there are many different paths to success. These paths, your strategies, can be adapted to fit your personal needs and enhanced by your personal strengths and talents.
Who can strategize?
Anyone can strategize. Strategies are appropriate for personal goals, financial goals, business success, and professional success to name a few. The possibilities are limitless. If you can think of a goal, you can develop an appropriate strategy for success.
Why strategize?
By developing and executing a strategy, you will save yourself money, time, and energy. Strategizing is the intelligent way to go about accomplishing your ends. It sets you up for success because of its inherent structure and organization. By strategizing before you barrel through aimless steps that might create desired change, you can avoid unnecessary frustrations and potential disaster.
What other reasons do people strategize?
Strategy opens up the possibility of achieving MORE than you anticipated. By working through the steps of strategizing, you can force yourself to realistically achieve loftier goals. Maintaining structure and organization will become second nature and you will see your potential outcomes thrive.
What types of goals should have a strategy?
ANY goal deserves a strategy! A strategy is not something that is only relevant to your most pressing goals. It is an innovative way to meet any and all of your expectations.
Is there a “right” strategy for my problem?
The short answer is no. There is a vast quantity of viable strategies for whatever position. Just as there are many different ways to get to New York City, there are many different paths to success. These paths, your strategies, can be adapted to fit your personal needs and enhanced by your personal strengths and talents.
Who can strategize?
Anyone can strategize. Strategies are appropriate for personal goals, financial goals, business success, and professional success to name a few. The possibilities are limitless. If you can think of a goal, you can develop an appropriate strategy for success.
Coming up: “How to Strategize”
Strategy to Success
In our fast-paced world, how we achieve our goals and succeed can seem like an insurmountable challenge. Long gone is the era of simple action plans and typical conference calls. With accelerated advances in technology popping up with every tick of the clock’s second hand, we frequently see ourselves scrambling just to keep up.
The answer to how to keep up and get ahead?
Strategize.
You can have control over your goals. It just takes a bit of finesse, a dash of patience, and a heaping ton of strategy. Learning how to strategize is not only empowering and liberating, it’s essential for your ultimate success.
What is strategy?
To strategize is to determine how you will execute what you want to achieve. It is the solution to the looming “how am I going to manage this?” question.
What makes strategy different?
Strategies are NOT the same as plans, goals, outcomes, purposes, missions, or even visions. Let’s break it down.
Plans: Plans are developed to sort through what is needed to complete a goal. Plans can be lists of resources, milestones, and timeframes.
Goals: Goals are quantifiable results. The goals are the measurable portions of what you want to achieve (think numbers: for example, a set percentage profit gain).
Outcomes: Outcomes are the aftermath of reaching your goals. These are the things that happen or result from achieving your ends.
Purposes: Purposes answer the “why am I answering this?” question. They are ultimately the motivating force behind the action.
Missions: Missions combine your values and your purposes. Missions are most simply what makes you YOU and your business unique.
Visions: Visions are the realization of the endless possibilities. They are the “feel” of what you wish to accomplish. Visions, unlike goals, are intangible and cannot be scientifically measured.
Coming up: “Why Strategize?” and “How to Strategize”
Mind Your Own Business!
The concept of minding your own business means that while you are grinding away at your day job you need to be investing in your future and minding your own business. Pretty soon you’ll be able to walk away from that day job and mind your own business full time.
The #1 way to do this is through the acquisition of real estate.
Let’s take a quick look at where you are losing a great deal of your money. Taxes. Taxes have been around since 1913 in the U.S. (earlier in England). While the original intention was to only tax the wealthiest of the population, obviously that’s trickled down to the masses, including those in poverty.
Now, keep in mind the more money you make the more taxes you pay. The wealthy know a way of getting around this – form a corporation. Corporations offer tax benefits and protect you from lawsuits. To learn more about this talk with one of our business coaches or your attorney.
We’ve all heard the golden rule of: Pay Yourself First.
But many of us don’t do it. Until you learn and put this rule into effect, you won’t have any chance of getting out of the rat race. What this rule does is force you to come up with more income to pay your expenses.
There are some key areas of finance you should learn about, taking classes is one of the best ways to do this. Here are the basics you should learn:
Accounting
It pays to know how to read financial statements. When acquiring businesses or assets you need to quickly see the financial standing of the company you are acquiring.
Many do not know how to balance a balance sheet. In the long term, this knowledge will pay off for you and your business.
Investment Strategy
This skill will sharpen with experience. Talk to investors and observe how they play the game.
Market Behavior
Know the laws of Supply and Demand. No business owner can do without understanding these basic principles of the market. Bill Gates saw what people needed. Open your eyes to opportunities. Look at what sells and who buys.
Law
Do everything you can to grow your business within legal boundaries. Know your corporate, state, and accounting laws.
Once you know these areas of finance you can make them WORK for you. The wealthy practically invent money, and that’s many times through investments. You have to know where to find a great deal. Let’s continue with real estate. Look for houses in trouble or find the court in your area that handles foreclosed, police impounded or other real estate situations. You can either renovate and sell or rent for residual income.
So, essentially there are two main types of investors:
- Those who buy pre-packaged investments
- Those who create their own investments
You know which are the most successful. In order to be one of those people you need to know what to look for and how to respond.
You must:
- Find a good deal other people have missed.
- Raise the capital needed for the transaction.
- Put together a high-performing team to execute the plan.
There is risk involved in every acquisition. The goal is not to avoid the risk, but to respond to the risk with confidence and a steady hand.
If you need help identifying potential money-makers, where to get the capital you need and how to put together a smart team, try our FREE test drive to gain access to our resources and tools.
Get Out of the Rat Race
We’ve all worked jobs we hated. We were underpaid, underappreciated and bored out of our minds. We either quit these jobs or were let go due to poor performance or poor motivation because we just gave up. Instead of taking that approach you need to consider every job an opportunity to learn something new that you can apply down the line to find success.
When you give people the tools they need to come up with unordinary solutions, you are enhancing their lives for the long run. You need to take this approach. What if one of your terrible jobs had been one with no pay at all and you needed to come up with some ingenious ways of making money? I bet you could have found a diamond in that rough. This idea can also be used in your own company.
I don’t recommend going into the next meeting declaring that no one will receive pay anymore, but you can tell them that their potential raises, bonuses and other perks are now dependent on their creativity in ways to enhance business.
Let’s talk about a great concept called financial literacy. This certainly isn’t something they taught you in school but is still essential to know. So, what is financial literacy?
The old school way teaches people to be good employees and not employers. This mindset will never make you wealthy. You need to focus on becoming a good employer. You also need to learn how to not only attain wealth but sustain wealth for generations. This is what financial literacy is all about.
So, how do you get out of the rat race and start working toward a wealthier future? You need to understand the difference between an asset and a liability. Take a look at your own life and you’ll probably find the following:
Assets
- Real Estate
- Stocks
- Bonds
- Intellectual Property
Liabilities
- Mortgage
- Consumer Loans
- Credit Cards
You’ve probably been fooled into thinking things like your house, car and entertainment system are assets. They aren’t! Assets should be continuing to MAKE you money. When you continue to struggle, you are not building wealth. If your primary income is from wages and each time you make more money you pay taxes, you’re not really creating wealth either, are you?
So, if buying a house isn’t an asset (and it’s not because you spend about 30 years of your life paying it off), then what is? Here are some of the best assets to attain and when you can start to actually see wealth being created because of it:
Average time of holding on to an asset before selling it for a higher value:
1 year
- Stocks (Startups and small companies are good investments)
- Bonds
- Mutual funds
7 years
- Real estate
- Notes (IOUs)
- Royalties on intellectual property
- Valuables that produce income or appreciate
So, here are the steps to getting out of the rat race and onto your journey of creating wealth:
- Understand the difference between an asset and a liability.
- Concentrate your efforts on buying income-earning assets.
- Focus on keeping liabilities and expenses at a minimum.
- Mind your own business.
If you need help getting out of the poor mindset and into the wealthy one, try our FREE test drive and work with one of our experienced business coaches today.
We went through the first three and next time we’ll talk about how to mind your own business to keep your eye on the prize.
Prepare for Lift Off!
Last time, I gave you a laundry list of tips and tricks you can use to make your word of mouth program work for you. Hopefully you’ve taken a look and decided which ones are the best fit for your company, products, services and target customers, so you can put them to work in your word of mouth campaign.
We are going to wrap up this series on word of mouth where we give you the specific steps to create a word of mouth campaign.
Now, let’s take a look at those steps:
- Seed the market. Find some way to get the product into the hands of key influencers.
- Provide a channel for the influencers to talk and get all fired up about your product.
- Offers lots of testimonials and other resources.
- Form an ongoing group that meets once a year in a resort and once a month by teleconference.
- Create fun events to bring users together and invite non-users. Saturn, Harley-Davidson, and Lexus have all been successful with this approach.
- Develop clips on your website featuring enthusiastic customers talking with other enthusiastic customers.
- Hold seminars and workshops.
- Create a club with membership benefits.
- Pass out flyers.
- Tell friends.
- Offer special incentives and discounts for friends who tell their friends.
- Put the Internet to work.
- Do at least one outrageous thing to generate word of mouth.
- Empower employees to go the extra mile.
- Encourage networking and brainstorm ideas.
- Run special sales.
- Encourage referrals with the use of a strong referral program.
- Use a script to tell people exactly what to say in their word of mouth communication.
These are all amazing ways you can get the word out about your products and services and start a word of mouth campaign that takes on a life of its own. Before you can release your word of mouth campaign out into the world, you need to go through the checklist to make sure you’ve covered all the essentials.
Here’s your word of mouth campaign checklist:
- Are all of your communications sending the same simple message? If it can’t survive word of mouth, it’s not a compelling story.
- Is your product positioned as part of a category? ex.”A dandruff shampoo that doesn’t dry out your hair.”
- Are your examples outrageous enough to be shared?
- Do you enhance your materials with success stories from real people?
- Are you using experts effectively and in an objective manner?
- Have you created mechanisms so people can follow up on the word of mouth they hear, as well as simple ways of inquiring or ordering?
- Have you made the decision process easy for customers?
- Have you created events and mechanisms so that once a year your prospects hear about your product, and it is easier to try or buy?
These are all essential elements to keep in mind when taking a second or even third check over your word of mouth campaigns. I hope you’ve found this series on word of mouth to be a great resource and are getting ready to put it into action for your own products and services.
Remember, if you need help with anything in this series, try our FREE test drive to gain access to the best resources, tools and business coaches you can find.