Traditional higher education is a scam and a waste of time because of double inflation:
More and more degrees are produced every year, which decreases their value.
The price of higher education goes up every year, further making degrees less valuable. If more degrees exist, then the law of supply and demand states the price should go down, not up.
The amount of time and money you spent working towards getting your diploma could have been spent actually making money and building legitimate experience, which is what employers and clients really want.
More and more companies are committing to remove degrees as a prerequisite for hiring.
These lessons presupose you don’t want to be a CEO of a company; you want to be a hustler who makes millions a year.
1. Speed is important, nothing about your businesses can be slow.
Work and react quickly. Everything needs to be done fast; and that doesn’t mean done inexpensively or cheaply. It must be quick, inexpensively and of high quality.
Professional fighters learn to punch correctly, then more quickly. Punching more quickly doesn’t mean degrading the quality of your punch. Keep the same quality of your punch, and do it more quickly.
When an airplane’s engines fail, the airplane still flies forward due to forward momentum. It doesn’t stop and fall out of the sky.
Don’t accept unrealistic, stupid timeframes. Everyone is slow, and being slow is deadly.
The longer it takes to get a business running, the less you make in the long-term.
Companies say in their job descriptions they “require” a university degree to get a trial period at a company which may or may not lead to a job. But if you’re ‘willing to offer them them to work for free for one week, and if they’re not happy with your performance not to give you the job.
Having a lot of clients adds to your credibility and reputation, even if you’re ultimately losing money.
2. A business is only money into your bank. That is all.
Your business is not your logo, not your accountant, not your lawyer, not your office space, copyright, etc. All of these things cost money and do not make money. You’ve no money, you’ve no business. Cash is first.
You can eventually us your reputation and results to upsell current clients and increase margins with new clients.
Expenses are problems. Money can fix those problems. Money in is a business. Money out is a vanity.
Don’t spend money until you’re already making money.
What matters isn’t what you sell, but that it sells. If it sells, sell it and get rich.
Be passionate for profit.
You don’t need to know about things to sell things. You need to know about selling to sell things.
3. Start ideas for free.
You don’t need investors.
You can make a simple free website with photos of products you don’t have yet but can obtain once orders come in, and you’ve a way to get paid. First get paid then figure out how to provide the product quickly afterwards. Worst case scenario give them their money back.
You only lose when money isn’t coming in. Create your front-end first; worry about backend later.
When a businesses cost nothing to launch, you can launch many and then invest only in those that show revenue. It costs nothing to set up a new revenue stream.
4. Family and friends you trust are the best staff/collaborators/cofounders you can get.
Collaborate with family when possible.
Collectively owning and sharing expenses with people you trust keeps costs down.
Recruit 15-year old cousins, brothers, or neighbors who have nothing better to do and who knows more about Photoshop than you do. Let them work for free for experience and if they do a good job pay them.
Young people have nothing to lose. Adults have expenses and a lot more to lose and so require a pay check.
5. Command respect.
Take advantage of physical presence. At the beginning of business all you have is your word, your reputation and your presence.
Being physically fit, intelligent, attractive, and well dressed favours success and respect in other people’s eyes.
Being in good physical shape assumes discipline and willingness to do hard work. This is the Halo effect.
Even if commanding respect leads to just 10% more business, that could mean 100,000€/year additional income.
6. Resell to current satisfied clients easier than selling to strangers.
It’s harder to sell to strangers than it is to satisfied customers.
Upsell extra packages to happy clients. Selling strangers a 25K€ package is hard. Selling strangers a 15k€ package and then upselling another 10K€ is more likely.
Don’t upsell AFTER you’ve shown them the final product. Sell them and then offer an upsell just before you show them the final product, before they’ve seen the results of your work.
Don’t seek outside invesment until you’ve exhaused all upsell opportunities from current clients.
7. Don’t get legal before you get rich.
Register company, hire accountant, open business bank account, register with government are all expenses.
Don’t pay $1000s for legal on a business that fails? First prove the viability of your business model, then invest in legal.
This allows you to open 100 businesses, and if only 10 make money, why throw away time and money on 90 failed business ideas?
Making money is hard. Spending money is easy.
You can fix legal issues after you have money.
8. Use what/who you’ve got access to.
Got a brother who can create websites? You now own a website creation company. Make a list of everything you have and how you can use it to make money.
“How can I bring money in without spending any money out.” Always ask yourself “How can I increase revenue AND decrease cost?”
If you’re talented and your idea is good, you don’t need investment money to launch.
9. Staff either make you money or save you time, or you don’t need them.
Sales staff bring money in. Personal assistants can save you time.
Coming to work late and leaving early… Sick days… lunch, coffee and cigarette breaks, browsing social media all cost YOU money. Inefficient staff waste a lot of your time and money.
Evaluate staff productivity frequently and fire staff who no longer safe you time or money. Especially if they don’t even cover their wage. Staff who are doing a great job meeting targets need to work on meeting them more quickly.
“It took you 2 weeks. How can you do it in 1 week?”
For time saved such as personal assistants, include how much money you could make instead of doing those tasks yourself.
There’s always more work to do, especially for startups, and finding work to do adds up. The more work a staff member gets done, the more valuable they become.
10. Outsource cheaply.
Hire students, Independents on Fiverr… Nearly anything you need done a student can do for you.
Avoid hiring another company with their own employees to do your work for you because companies have added expenses and their goal is to get as much money out you that they can and to look out for their own interests; not yours.
Your relationship with people will always be better and cheaper than working with companies.
11. Work with people who have a vested interest.
Companies take on new clients to generate money, even if that means missing deadlines they promised you.
Once that company collects their money from you, they don’t care if you fail, but employees who have a vested interest in your success will do everything they can to make sure you do not fail.
Companies are not interested in making you rich, they’re interested in making themselves rich. A person can create a website for $100. A company will charge you $1,000s and try to upsell you while also looking for new clients.
12. Business won’t last forever, so when you find a money-maker get rich quickly and ruthlessly. Look out for yourself while it makes money.
The only goal of your business is to make you rich.
Put yourself above your business and pay yourself first.
Don’t keep reinvesting 100% of revenue back into keeping a business barely afloat, and don’t keep your business alive at your expense.
After you’ve gotten rich, you no longer need to care if that particular business fails because you should already have a few other businesses up and running.
CEOs when they see their business is failing, protect themselves first while they still can, even though all their employees and clients will get screwed.
13. It’s very hard to fail if you don’t spend money.
Spending money is how most businesses fail because they spend it on the wrong things or without sufficient future revenue coming in to offset the expenses.
Once successful, spend your money strategically to stay competitive and up to date.
Only spend money on things that bring money in or save you time.
14. When you do need to spend money, only spend in a way that will directly bring more money in.
You don’t NEED an office; you’re already making money without an office. Instead of spending your money on an office, spend that money paying Youtubers to talk about you and bring in money.
15. To control your reputation, do more good than bad.
You’ll always have people who hate you.
Most people who dislike you won’t go aggressively public against you.
One of the best ways to create a bad reputation is to ignore unhappy clients. As long as they’re emailing you privately, their not posting publicly on social media.
16. Change the way you think about money.
Your only objective is to get rich. Make thinking about making money all the time a reflex; a philosophy.
Everything you do comes from a business with a business model designed to make you money. Therefore with everything you do, experience it from the perspective of a business person.
Keep your business mind sharp. When you go to a coffee shop or visit a website, ask yourself:
‘How could I run this business and make money?’
‘What is their pitch?’
‘What are their prices?’
‘How busy are they?’
‘How much is rent?’
‘What are upsells and cross-sells?’
‘Who are their target customers?’
‘Who are the owners?’
‘Who’s making the money?’
‘What mistakes are they making?’
Doing this trains your brain to be creative and identify mistakes in your own business model as well as opportunities you hadn’t thought about before.
17. Always focus on identifying how you can do your job better.
Don’t just do your job bare minimum. Make a complete list of all the things you could be doing to do a better job, then ask yourself why you don’t do them. Usually the answer will be because you’re not incentivized to do so.
With that list, calculate the revenue you could earn if you did all that, and now negotiate with your boss.
“Boss, I want to do X and Y, and I calculate if I do X and Y the company could save Z€ and earn A€. Give me B weeks to prove it to you, and if I do and meet my objectives, reward me for it by giving me C. Deal?”
18. Don’t quit your day job until it is costing you money.
As long as more money is coming in than going out, don’t quit your day job.
Once your side hustle starts making enough that by working your day job you’re losing money on your side hustle, only then quit your day job.
19. People don’t buy on price, so don’t sell and compete on price.
Amazon and Walmart compete on price, and they will beat you. So sell on brand and reputation and value.
You’re not going to get rich off of selling 17€ products. If people won’t buy at 17, or they will only buy at 17€, then your reputation is the problem; not your price.
Be recognized as an ‘expert in your field.’
When you sell on cheap, you have more complaints and difficult customers. Constantly increase your price by constantly improving your reputation.
20. Learn to shut up and listen.
Most people won’t shut up about their business once they start one. You learn nothing that way.
Surround yourself with people who make money, and then shut up and listen. People who make money know something you don’t know, there are lessons to be learned everywhere.
There is nobody you cannot learn from. Sit, listen and adopt.
21. Have multiple approaches to a client.
If you reach a deadend with a specific salesperson or strategy, bring in a new sales person with a different strategy.
22. Attention is free advertising.
Do whatever it takes to get attention. There’s no such thing as bad attention today.
YouTube has proven the attention economy: complete idiots on YouTube making millions with useless content.
Advertising is simply paying for attention. Find ways to get attention then monetize it.
Andrew Tate’s Star Wars Twitter thread provoked millions of Star Wars fans, then he shamelessly promoted his “How to pick up women” training in that thread, which lead to 1000s of new sales.
How do you get the attention of clients that have millions of distractions? By remembering their names, being friendly, making them feel valuable, and using quality thumbnails on social media
23. Play on people’s insecurities.
Everybody has vices and insecurities. Twist and use them to make money.
Tell them what their problem is, show them your product and promise them you’ll make things better for them. Are you selling a protein shake? Don’t sell “great taste.” Tell them:
“You won’t be strong without my product? Get in better shape with my product than without it.”
“You need protein shakes or your time in the gym isn’t best spent.”
24. Your network is everything.
You help people and they help you.
Surround yourself with other business people who also think about money and analyse business models. Your brainstorming and collaborations will make you all money collectively.
You cannot surround yourself with losers and expect to become a winner. Even if you’re the winner amongst losers, you’re still a loser.
If winners won’t accept you, then your reputation is the problem.
Your network probably needs to change for you to move up in your life.
25. Don’t get excited about money.
Learn emotional control. Until the money is in your bank account, it is not in your bank account.
Business is just monetary exchange. Don’t be giddy and pathetic.
Don’t live in the past. Always look to the future for new money. Money earned yesterday doesn’t count towards today.
Don’t take the next day off because the day before was so good. The revenue clock resets at midnight.
The time you waste being happy is time you could have invested earning more money.
26. Send people their money back.
Sell your product to a client. Once they pay in call them and tell them “Listen. Things have changed and now is not best time for you to buy X. We could still do the campaign but it won’t be best for you or I. It’s better to wait Y days. So, I’m sending your money back and I’ll let you know when the time is right.” Then in Y dayscall them back and say “Hi, the time is now perfect! And for Z€ more than previous purchase you’ll maximize your offer.” Doing this can effectively double your turnover with no additional effort.
27. People don’t buy things until they are hard closed.
Soft closing is nice, but it takes longer and you lose a lot of time.
It is better to just to just go hard and either get the business or not. Out of 10 prospects: it’s better to close 5 and lose 5 in 12 hours than it is to than waste 2 months selling to 10 ‘maybes.’
People either want to do business with you, or they don’t. Don’t let ‘Maybe’s’ waste your time.
28. Business isn’t real until they have paid.
Even if the contract is signed, until the money is in the bank they can always back out.
You could take them to court, but that takes so much time and costs so much money in legal fees that it’s usually not worth it, especially considering the money you could have earned at the same time. Focus on speed. Legal is slow.
29. Convince people they need whatever it is you sell.
Don’t sell your product, sell their need and your solution.
It doesn’t matter how many pages your book is or how many hours of videos your training is.
Coffee shops sell you on price of coffee, on the type of coffee beans, on comfortable chairs, on free wifi… They rarely sell the need. You NEED coffee because you’re tired.
30. Contracts and legal paperwork are useless.
Contracts may make you sound smart and intimidating, but until you’re rich and making million-dollar deals and have enough revenue, contracts and legal paperwork are not real.
Legality defies lesson 1: Speed is important. Legal is slow.
Do business based on trust and mutual, vested-interest.
31. Make sure your partners need you, and you need your partners.
When you’re no longer needed, you’re discarded. Always be needed; not wanted.
When you no longer need your partners, move on. Find new partners or outsource independents
32. Every purchase is an impulse purchase.
A house, an insurance policy, even if it takes a lot of time, at the point of buying it is an impulse purchase.
This is why you must hard sell. If I can buy your product any time I want, then I’ll put it off until later, and later will probably never buy.
33. Sell your clients a future.
When you talk about the future, you’re presuming the present. Sell the future.
34. Always sell the results of a product, not the product itself.
35. Image sells.
The quote “It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you save” is bullshit.
To sell, you need to present a nice image; your reputation. To present a nice image you need a nice car, watch, clothes, and to be in good physical shape.
When you look wealthy and successful, people take you more seriously and will more readily give you their money.
36. Speak professionally and convincingly wihtout sounding like a moron.
‘Um…’ and ‘Er…’ as placeholders in conversation indicate low confidence and will lose you deals. Instead, repeat their question to give you time to think.
37. Develop a high stress tolerance.
Everything will go wrong all the time.
On the extremes, you have people who don’t care about anything, and you have people who care far to much about everything. You need to be in the middle: care about things mentally but not emotionally.
Money making is stress tolerance; you’re taking on someone else’s stress in exchange for cash.
Life is stressful. Being rich is stressful.
38. When you find a loyal person, find work for them.
Don’t have a job and then find an employee.
Companies never run out of work to do.
If you’re running a business and can’t think of work for a employee to do, you don’t deserve to run a business.
If you’re an employee and can’t think of work to do, you don’t deserve your pay check.
39. Never be content.
It’s never good enough. Be realistic.
Don’t be delusional, but aim way too high. The higher you aim, the higher you’ll get.
If your product is good, and you’re doing a good job, and you’re selling it to the whole world, then why don’t you deserve a high goal?
40. Have irrational self-confidence without being a bullshitter.
People like, trust, and will spend money on confidence.
Be able to say “I’m the best at what I do. You’re not going to find anyone better that me in this industry at this price point.”
Niche down until you can confidently say this.
41. Money cannot be made, only taken.
Only governments ‘make money.’ You take money from someone else.
Answer their question: “Why should I give you my money?”
Money is like water; it is always moving. Be in the right place at the right time, and you’re gonna get wet.
99% of people are middlemen.
42. Never make anyone irreplaceable.
If you cannot survive without a specific person or thing, you’re in trouble.
Know your own passwords, calendar, your best sales people.
Have your best employees train the other employees in exchange for compensation.
43. Get people to confirm what they need, then tell them they cannot have it.
Tell people they cannot have things. When they can’t have things, they want it. Scarcity can be artificially created.
Example conversation:
“Hi, I want to buy two flux capacitors.”
“Sorry, I don’t have any right now due to high demand. What do you need them for? Maybe we have a better solution (to reconfirm in his mind why he needs it).”
“I need them for X and Y.”
“I’ll get back to you quickly.”
LATER
“Okay, I can get you two flux capacitors. Are you looking to purchase right away?”
“No.”
“Okay, then I’ll give them to someone who wants them right away. ”
44. You already know what you should do for your business and how ot make money.
You’re just being slow and lazy. If you really wanted it, you’d have it.
Too much waiting. Too much talking. Not enough action. There is nothing to wait for.
Your idea should be ready same day.
45. War is profitable, but not always.
You need a strategy for going to war.
Before going to war with competitors you need to really decide if it is your best course of action. What are your end goals and how are you going to achieve them?
To sell products? Why? How?
To defame an opponent? Why? How?
To get rich? Why? How?
46. Instill FOMO the correct way.
Instead of artificially creating scarcity (sale ends soon, limited supply…), talk about how many other people have already bought your product.
“I’ve had 50 people sign up in last 2 weeks.”
“I had 2 job interviews last week.”
“I’ve worked with companies X and Y.”
“March is a really busy time of year for us, our clients are already preparing for Christmas.”
47. Chaos and opportunity are the same thing.
Every cloud has a silver lining, so develop a high stress tolerance.
Apply speed to fix problems and find a way to profit from it.
48. View all of your offers from your buyers’ eyes.
Never assume the buyer has knowledge. The general public won’t know if a massage oil is ‘the best.’ They won’t care. Massage oil is just oil to them.
So either you educate them in your advertising about why your massage oil is worth buying over alternatives, or you remove price barrier and sell something cheaper to save them money.
49. If you want an unbiased opinion on your product or company, ask your mother.
Your mother will be an example of a typical consumer.
If the average unaware consumer says “It’s too expensive”, then you’ve got a reputation problem.
Conversations with incompetent people will help you identify all of your problems straight away. There is a level of intelligence which comes from absolute stupidity.
51. Money will never motivate your staff.
Pay them, but there are better ways to motivate them.
Money is numbers and numbers never end.
People give their time and money away for free all the time., but you have to pay people who don’t like you a lot of money.
Find people who enjoy what they do when they work with you, and they’ll do it for cheap.
When you’re hiring on commission only, you can hire anyone who applies. Those who provide true value and like it will stay. Sell them on respect and future goals.
Don’t pay staff ‘the most’; pay them what they deserve based on ROI.
52. Success is exponential
One success leads to far more successes and far more quickly.
It’s hard to make a million, but it gets easier from there.
The problems change as you get rich, but it gets easier.
Develop a high stress tolerance.
Through time and deliberate practice, you get quicker and better.
53. Nobody is broke.
They’re simply just buying other stuff and decided they want that more than they want your offer. They don’t want your stuff enough.
To make your stuff more important, promise it will lead to more X later.
“You don’t have money? Buy my product and it’ll make sure you have money.”
Some businesses are recession proof: religion, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, porn… vices.
54. Nothing ever fixes itself.
Fix things quickly before it gets worse. Speed. The longer you wait, the worse it compounds.
Don’t be afraid to be a hard ass with people on broken things.
Always be on the lookout for problems that can be fixed before they become too costly.
You can have your best ideas in panic mode. 2 or 3 days of no new sales should put you in panic mode.
55. Never say “No” to money.
“We don’t take Bitcoin.” People have loads of unique ways of paying.
Create a golden bridge to make it easy for anybody to pay you money.
If you’re prepared to pay the price I’m asking, I’m prepared to get your job done.
56. Diversify your income to become antifragile against attacks.
Especially about big tech and how you get paid.
Be near impossible to stop. Don’t go ‘off grid’; be on so many grids that no single entity can stop you.
Prevent a single government or person or thing from having total access over your entire life and revenue.
Opportunities don’t last forever and things get destroyed.
Nothing is stopping you from going to another country and applying to get a foreign driver’s license along with an international driving license or a second citizenship. Then if you get a speeding ticket in the US and pull out a Polish driver’s license, what are the police going to do? American police cannot legally revoke a driver’s license from a different nation.
57. Debt in many cases isn’t real.
Some business people will not pay an invoice until you take them to court, knowing most people will write the debt off.
You can always move on and find a new supplier.
It takes a long time to collect debt from a person.
If you never want to do business with that person again, there’s no point in even paying them at all.
Once people get desperate for money, you can give them an ultimatum and negotiate a good deal from your initial debt.
Don’t worry about debt, worry about money coming in. Get in debt if it brings money in.
Don’t have debt in your own name, have it in a company’s name you can close.
58. Don’t pay unless you have to, but don’t damage your reputation.
59. Human Resources is bullshit.
As the leader you do the most work so people respect you.
Be positive and focus on the future. Not threats.
60. It doesn’t matter what you sell, it matters how you sell it.
Be antifragile. Control what people know about you, then use what people know about you to sell. If your narrative is not selling, then change it.
61. Play to people’s strengths, with staff and clients.
Details matter. Some people are more adaptable, more stress resilient, a harder worker, more attractive…
Outsource your weaknesses.
Exploit your clients’ and opponents’ weaknesses.
62. Satisfy immediate needs because people are lazy and prefer short-term gain to long-term.
You haven’t got a sales pitch if you haven’t got an immediate need.
63. Never assume work has been done.
Check on your clients and your staff.
Deadlines mean nothing. Thin binary: Is it done? Yes or No.
“If I didn’t see it get done, then it didn’t happen.” Until it’s done, it isn’t done.
64. Everybody loves winners.
Nobody likes or trusts losers.
Never admit a problem, and never admit your struggling.
Winners in life are brash.
65. Keep an eye on competitors and steal their ideas.
Especially before the competitor’s idea gets traction. Then go for speed! Better pictures, quality, etc.
Even if you don’t beat them, just take away as much of their momentum as you can.
66. Money and business is your life, meaning it is all you do.
Mix business and pleasure wherever you can and surround yourself with people who share this mentality.
Participate in hobbies with people who are also into making money.
Wherever you go, turn it into a business trip.
67. Develop a phone addiction.
Social media and online content created gets you visibility and grow.
Burnout doesn’t exist.
Going online periodically doesn’t get you rich, you have to live online.
Put all apps that generate money on your phone’s homepage. All other apps, delete or hide them.
68. Nothing that you sell is too good to be true.
Everything you sell ‘the best in that industry at your price point.’
Soft selling won’t get you want you want in life; go for the hard sell.
People want the best at an affordable price? Okay, then you’ve got ‘the best’ for them.
69. Spot bullshitters.
Find out if people actually have money or if they’re pretending they do. Symbols of money are important in life, which is why so many people try to lie about it.
The car they drive is a good starting point.
Rich but greedy and stingy people won’t make good clients or partners.
70. Understand how, where and why clients bought.
Understand how they found you., but the most important is WHY they bought you. ONLY care about the WHY. WHY are the triggers you need to incorporate into your sales and marketing pitch.
71. Everything is a sell.
Always make sure you get credit for work you’ve done.
Every clienet request is an opportunity to upsell them or to sell them more and make it look like you did more work.
Example conversation:
“I need to change my reservation.”
“Okay, but you were booked months ago. Let me see what I can do and I’ll get back to you.”
“We can change your reservation, but you’ll need to decrease reservation time from 2 hours to 1 hour for the same price or increase price by $X. Which do you prefer?” At the very least let the clientknow their modification of promised deal is inconveniencing you and you’re doing them a favor.
72. Take every offer seriously.
Let people talk. If people want to give you free important information, let them teach you for free. Always let people talk to you. Even if you have no intention of ever giving them money.
Don’t e afraid of going over a prospects head and selling to their superior. If the Marketing Manager turns down your great offer, call the Marketing Director and tell them you offered the Marketing Manager an unbeatable offer and he turned you down. Don’t be afraid to get him in trouble.
73. You don’t have to understand it to make money.
Crypto-currency, for example. No matter how many videos you watch and how much you learn, you’re not going to change the global Bitcoin market. Some things are out of your hands. Just be sure you understand the important things.
All the time you spend learning about something is also time you could have spent earning money elsewhere, so even if your investment money is lost, it will have been offset by the money you made in the meantime.
Need to know a subject deeply? Hire and pay professionals to know for you.
It is possible you could learn enough to replace those paid professionals and make money yourself, but weigh the time lost with the amount of money you could have earned at the same time.
74. Politics is for big boy business. Not you, you’re a hustler.
Politics is a mental trap. Better be a multi-million small-timer and not have to worry about politics.
Until you’re so rich that politics matters, don’t care about it and instead diversify your wealth so political change doesn’t affect you financially.
75. Sales is always urgent.
Get commitment by deposit ASAP. Until the money is in your bank account, it is not in your bank account.
76. Rules don’t make people rich.
Rules are to be broken.
Don’t say you can’t do something. Say you can do it if they pay you $X. Make them pay, then find a way. Worst case give them their money back and blame external factors unrelated to you.
77. Stick to your tools and always keep the sharp.
Stay ready and ahead of the game. Assume your competitors are.
Roleplay and practice your sales pitches and conversations and alternatives to every possible scenario that deviates from your script.
78. Good salespeople are thorough and follow their script to the letter.
Once good, they become lazy.
When Instagram launched, no companies thought ‘we need to optimize our television commercials for social media.’ Now teenagers have more influence than multi-million $ brands.
79. Create problems and instantly solve them.
Tell the client they don’t understand X, and that you’ll fix it for them.
Combine created problems with the WHY the client wants to buy, and you’ll never run out of sales. “You’ve a problem because your flux capacitor valve doesn’t work efficiently and you’re wasting money. I’ve the solution that will save you money.”
80. Buying from you should make people feel happy and important.
Make them feel happy and important and they’ll never stop buying from you. Most people don’t feel happy and important.
Make them feel prestigious and they’ll pay retainer fees to keep working with you, and to keep you from working with their competitor.
242. 26 Hours with Armin Trost: Human Resources Mgmt: Attracting, Hiring & Retaining Top Talent
179 Questions to test your mastery of lesson 242
Vocabulary
What is:
a resource?
a human resource?
human capital?
a talent shortage?
globalization?
life-long learning? Is it important? Why or why not?
a brand strategy?
supply chain management?
employee value proposition?
an executive search?
headhunting?
WIIFM?
line engagement?
employee referral program?
A-list employees?
B-list employees?
C-list employees?
a job analysis?
de-jobbing?
the primacy effect?
intelligence?
correlation?
validity?
test-retest reliability?
objectivity?
distributive equity?
procedural equity?
total reward?
one-time performance bonus?
piece-rate system performance award
target bonus system?
onboarding program?
unconscious incompetence?
blended learning?
learning transfer?
competency?
learning curve?
potential?
mentor?
action learning?
employer attractiveness?
turnover performance relation?
exit interview?
change management?
learned helplessness?
outsourcing?
offshoring?
equality spread?
internal placement rate?
span of control?
Bradford Factor?
The recruiter’s perspective
People give their _____ in exchange for _____.
What are some problems with resources?
What happens to companies (and people) who don’t adapt, change and innovate?
By 2020, _____% of work will be knowledge-based and roughly _____% of work will be predominantly thinking and communicating.
How do smart companies create the right working conditions be innovative and attract and retain the right people?
Is innovation and business strategy created by focusing on saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No?’ Why?
What are the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?
Which is more important to business strategy over the long-term, focusing on the specific or the generic? Why?
What are the 7 core management functions? Which one(s) are the most important?
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Are small- to mid-sized companies in a small, insignificant city considered global companies? Why or why not?
What are some differences between a critical function and a non-critical function in terms of strategic relevance? How should companies hire for non-critical functions? For critical functions?
What are some differences between attracting the right people and selecting the right people?
Your company’s _____ and _____ are your promise to specific people to attract their attention and convince them to want to work with you.
What are the 3 categories of job-seekers? Which category is preferable for recruiters?
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Should companies recruit passively or actively? Which offers the greatest ROI? Why?
What are 4 reasons why traditional job postings are not the optimal recruitment strategy?
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What are the 6 elements of an employee value proposition?
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What is the 4 step process to identifying your company’s employee value proposition?
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What are the benefits and risks of your company not appearing in online job boards, career fairs and university open houses?
What are the opportunities and threats of recruiting internally and externally?
What is social engineering and how can it be a danger to companies?
What are some characteristics of high-level, highly-qualified, A-list professionals?
How much more productive are A-list professionals over B-list?
How do can you recruit A-list professionals away from their current employer?
What is the difference between a company’s brand image to consumers and employees?
What are some differences between future-actual and current future-perceived performance?
What are the 4 categories when judging new recruit performance?
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What are some problems when recruiting via job descriptions over time?
When writing a job announcement, what is an important element to begin with?
How does an ‘it’s not my job’ mentality develop, and what are some risks?
What is the rule of thumb to estimate how many applications a company receives each year?
What are some efficient and cost-effective ways of evaluating a large candidate pool?
Approximately how many seconds does an experienced recruiter spend on each CV/resume? What are recruiters looking for on CVs?
What are some major problems with personality tests? What are some advantages of online personality & intelligence tests? Weaknesses?
What are 4 competences recruiters should assess during interviews?
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What is the difference between distributive equity and procedural equity?
What are 9 factors when determining compensation?
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What are some differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?
What are some benefits of implementing an employee onboarding process?
What is the difference between a job analysis and a needs analysis?
What are 3 steps to developing an onboarding program?
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What are 4 ways training programs should be evaluated?
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What are 8 limitations with training participants, programs and environments?
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What are some differences between informal, peer and formal learning? Which offers greater ROI? Why?
The 4 promotion levels:
A newly-graduated person usually gets a first job which only requires you manage _____.
If promoted to manager, you are responsible for _____.
If promoted to director, you are sandwiched between_____ and _____ and are responsible for _____.
If promoted to executive, you are responsible for _____.
Is succession planning important? Why?
What are some differences between performance management and performance review?
What are two fundamental concepts of a learning curve?
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What are 3 primary ways HR can evaluate an employee’s potential?
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“Ideally, a company will promote _____ and whom _____ and_____ – the one who serves as the company’s ideal role model for others.”
What are some benefits of 360° feedback?
What are the 2 types of career goals?
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“Ideas are crucial to _____ through _____… employees should be paid _____ rather than being paid _____.”
From a legal perspective, why is it advised companies track their employees’ working hours?
What are 3 things employees are always guaranteed to complain about on employee surveys?
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When filling out employee surveys, employees in:
Latin American tend to _____
France tend to _____
Asia tend to _____What are
4 ways to interpret survey results?
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As a employer should you aim to be attractive to as many employees as possible? Why?
What are 2 important turnover rates you want to understand? Why?
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What are 6 visible and hidden costs of employee turnover?
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Depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position, how much can it cost an employer to replace an open job position?
Demotivated employees and employees who are leaving can be as much as _____% less productive during their last 1 to 3 months of employment.
New employees will perform at roughly _____% capacity during their first 6 months as they learn to do the new job.
What are some consequences of ROI or performance-based reward systems that sabotage the company over the long-term?
“Employees join _____, but leave _____ and _____.”
What are 5 perspectives from which people are generally driven to make decisions?
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What is an exit interview? What are some problems with exit interviews?
What is the relationship between change management and turnover performance?
What are some differences between formal and informal leaders?
What are the 2 types of resistance? What are some productive ways of dealing with resistance?
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What are the 6 predictable responses to change?
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What are 9 causes of complacency in change?
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What are the 7 stages of top management sponsorship?
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What is the difference between acceptance, investment and commitment? Which is necessary for successful change management? Why?
What are some strategic ways of dealing with influential opponents of change?
During change management, what are some opportunities and threats associated with being open and transparent? With secrecy and waiting until the last minute?
What are some differences between national, international, multinational, global and transnational organizations? How can they be distinguished?
Human Resources responsibilities can be divided up into 9 different tasks:
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How will traditional Human Resources evolve into future HR?
What are the 4 P’s of Human Resources?
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What are some differences between centralized and decentralized recruiting processes?
What are 4 reasons why companies outsource?
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When operating your business for growth, what are the 2 basic types of employees? How can you identify them?
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What are 6 ways companies use social media?
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What are the 4 steps in the employee ROI control loop?
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The employee’s perspective
People give their _____ in exchange for _____.
What are some problems with resources?
Is it necessary to your career to spend time abroad? Why or why not?
What happens to companies (and people) who don’t adapt, change and innovate?
By 2020, _____% of work will be knowledge-based and roughly _____% of work will be predominantly thinking and communicating.
What are the 7 core management functions? Which one(s) are the most important?
_____
_____
_____
_____
_____
_____
_____
What are some differences between a critical function and a non-critical function in terms of strategic relevance? How should companies hire for non-critical functions? For critical functions?
What are the 3 categories of job-seekers? Which category is preferable for recruiters?
_____
_____
_____
What are the opportunities and threats of recruiting internally and externally?
What are some characteristics of high-level, highly-qualified, A-list professionals? How much more productive can A-list professionals be over B-list?
What is the difference between future-actual and current future-perceived performance?
What are the 4 categories when judging new recruit performance?
_____
_____
_____
_____
What is the difference between a job and a position?
How does an ‘it’s not my job’ mentality develop, and what are some risks?
What are some major problems with personality tests? What are some advantages of online personality & intelligence tests? Weaknesses?
What are 4 competences recruiters should assess during interviews?
_____
_____
_____
_____
What are some differences between distributive equity and procedural equity?
What are 9 factors when determining compensation?
_____
_____
_____
_____
_____
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What are some differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?
“_____ is a very important basis, but _____ comes from _____, _____ and _____. _____ means _____. You can read how-to books and memorize the ’50 things you need to…’, but that doesn’t make you _____.”
Malcolm Gladwell points to _____ hours needed to become a professional. Josh Kaufman points out that nearly everything can be learned in the first _____ hours.
What are some differences between on-the-job and off-the-job training?
What are some differences between informal, peer and formal learning? Which offers greater ROI? Why?
The 4 promotion levels:
A newly-graduated person usually gets a first job which only requires you manage _____.
If promoted to manager, you are responsible for _____.
If promoted to director, you are sandwiched between_____ and _____ and are responsible for _____.
If promoted to executive, you are responsible for _____.
Is succession planning important? Why?
What are some differences between knowing and doing?
What are some differences between performance management and performance review?
What are 3 primary ways HR can evaluate an employee’s potential?
_____
_____
_____
“Ideally, a company will promote _____ and whom _____ and_____ – the one who serves as the company’s ideal role model for others.”
“Intelligent kids with high potential forced to learn in a typical class with other less intelligent kids are _____. The teacher either _____, or _____. People with high potential but low performance are likely _____, dislike their _____. This person is working for the wrong manager.”
What are the 2 types of career goals?
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“You cannot _____ and expect _____. It is imperative to your success that you _____ and _____. It’s not about _____, it’s about _____.”
“Ideas are crucial to _____ through _____… employees should be paid _____ rather than being paid _____.”
What are some differences between writer’s block and reporter’s block? What should you do when you have them?
What are 3 things employees are always guaranteed to complain about on employee surveys?
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What are some reasons why you only include positive feedback in survey results?
Depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position, how much can it cost an employer to replace an open job position?
Demotivated employees and employees who are leaving can be as much as _____% less productive during their last 1 to 3 months of employment.
New employees will perform at roughly _____% capacity during their first 6 months as they learn to do the new job.
“Employees join _____, but leave _____ and _____.”
What are 5 perspectives from which people are generally driven to make decisions?
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What are some differences between formal and informal leaders?
Don’t be a messenger of bad news: “Never _____ unless you _____.”
22 videos. 104+ links. 182+ takeaways from this 10 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 26 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from a Human Resources course taught by Armin Trost at Hochschule Furtwangen University blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
00:00:20 A resource is something you need to produce something else. A human resource is ‘all planned and controlled activities of an organization to build and maintain the relation between it’s employees and the organization in order to meet both business objectives and employee expectations.’
The problem with resources is that they become exhausted. Therefore a better term for human resources is human capital because capital, used in the right way, grows and develops.
00:02:45 Innovation. The iPhone, or the ‘Smart phone,’ is not the last thing. In 10 years we will have something totally different. If Apple doesn’t invent something that goes beyond the iPhone, Apple will lose. Don’t think that Google is the last search engine. This means that for Apple (and for Google), they must invent new products now.
00:06:10 Demography. In 2020, it is estimated that 75% of work will be knowledge-based, leaving only 25% of work done by hand – moving things, combining and assembling things, etc. By 2020, therefore, 75% of your work will be predominantly thinking and communicating.
00:07:10 You can order, control and pay an employee to assemble 100 things per hour, but can you order a person to ‘come up with an idea in the next hour?’
00:10:24 Talent Shortage. Companies lose experienced employees (through retirement, job changes, etc), and you have to have new people to replace them. Companies need more and more qualified people because the world is changing – where more and more people are knowledge-based. An inability to find replacements is called a talent shortage.
00:12:10 Globalization. Even small- to mid-sized companies in the middle of nowhere have to think, plan and act globally because their customers are beyond their own borders.
00:13:20 You’re in the McDonalds drive through and you are giving your order to a person through the microphone. Give me one good reason why that job taking your food order cannot be outsourced to a person in another country. – Referencing The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman.
00:14:20 It’s imperative to your career to spend time abroad.
00:14:42 Web 1.0: Institutions produce content, and users read content. Web 2.0: Institutions such as Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter provide the platform, and users both provide and edit content – user-generated content.
00:17:55 Web 2.0 has thus really changed the way companies hire people.
00:19:48 Value change. What is important to people changes from generation to generation.
00:23:45 Life-long learning. Obtaining your diploma doesn’t mean you’re finished and that you now have the entire qualification needed for the rest of your life.
00:24:40 Combine innovation and knowledge to shape the right work conditions so that you attract and retain the right people.
00:27:50 The start of a relationship – You want to work for a organization, or a organization wants you to work for them – and you work with the organization by giving your health, time, performance, talents and skills in exchange for privileges, money, etc. It’s always about the relation. If you are strong, the organization wants to retain you/doesn’t want to lose you.
How Branding Strategy Affects Recruitment
00:00:55 Long-term strategy. What is of key importance for your organization: Research & Development? Marketing? Sales? What are your strategic priorities: Innovation? Brand? Price? Design? Quality? Other?
00:02:45 Resources are limited. Therefore strategy means being focused and saying no. You cannot be the leader in everything: Innovation, Brand, Price, Quality, Other.
00:03:50 As an brand, what is of highest importance for you so that you will still exist in 5-10 years. Your strategy is your answer. In the long run, Innovation and then Brand – people know you, like you, and have very clear associations with your name, logo (Specific) – will win out over Price (Generic).
00:06:40 How you define your brand’s strategy requires certain competencies. If your company’s mission is to offer ‘the best possible quality at the lowest possible price,’ what does that mean for your employees? That they have to be friendly and polite, efficient, well-informed, able to cope with demanding your clients. Very simple competencies.
00:17: 44 What is your brand strategy? What does that mean for your employees? How do you attract those kinds of employees necessary to relay your brand strategy?
00:19:20 If your business strategy is to grow and expand to follow your customers, then your employees will have to be capable of working globally. This involves more than simply being able to speak the language.
00:20:40 Core Management Functions: Product Management, R&D, Production Planning, Production/Engineering, Marketing, Sales/Key Account Management, and Service/Support
00:23:36 Of these functions above, what is the most important function? R&D because if they don’t do well, you cannot be innovative and competitive. But even with the best product, without marketing you will lose. And without salesmen and customer service there would be no way to sell the product you’re marketing. And without production there would be no way to make your product. Production is where value is actually created.
Ultimately, your brand strategy determines which of these functions are of high strategic relevance, and which of these functions is of lower strategic importance. From the HR perspective, this determines where you must hire excellent people, and where you can hire good people.
00:40:20 Non-critical functions of low-strategic importance which are relatively easy to fill and for which there is a large candidate pool don’t require much investment in recruitment – take out an ad in the newspaper or online or post a sign on your front door.
Critical functions of high-strategic importance which are very difficult to fill and for which there isn’t a large candidate pool require much more investment.
00:50:00 Some companies, using supply chain management, can tell you precisely how many 30mm screws they have on stock, but struggle in telling you precisely how many employees they have working for them.
Attracting & Selecting the Best Candidates
00:00:40 Attracting the right people and selecting the right people are two different problems.
00:01:45 Most companies really suffer from a significant talent shortage. This problem will be more tramatic in the future. Your employer brand, congruent to your brand strategy, is your promise to specific people in order attract their attention and convince them to want to work with you.
00:03:20 In terms of employment, people move in and out of three categories:
Actively-seeking – despirately wanting to find a (new) job
Passively-seeking – already employed and not actively seeking but open to opportunities that are presented to them
Non-seeking – are happy with current situation
Institutions are required to be active because the most talented, well-qualified and motivated job candidates are rather passive in the sense that he or she isn’t attending career fairs, browsing job ads, or actively looking for a job.
00:06:30 Traditional job postings (Monster.com, Linkedin Job board, newspapers, etc.) typically emphasize an employee value proposition – selling points that your brand offers employees that other companies do not, why this is a great job, and the requires the candidate must have to be considered for the job. Listing requirements is generally the wrong way to post a job because:
There is a talent shortage.
You cannot assume everybody wants to work for your company.
Qualified people, the ones you want to attract, aren’t actively searching for a job
The ‘requirements section’ dissuades many qualified candidates from applying
How to identify your unique selling proposition as well as your unique employee value proposition and find the one single argument why you are a great employer:
Identify your company’s strengths and what makes you authentic
Identify and understand what is most important to and relevant to your ideal candidate
Identify your competitors unique selling points and how they are pitching their employer branding
Market your employee value proposition with the strengths competitors have not claimed.
00:16:50 Of course every human connection is useful, but recall that the candidates you want aren’t actively seeking a new job. Therefore for your company, the ROI of career fairs where you pay to set up a booth, display job positions, collect CVs and even conduct on-the-spot interviews is more in public relations and brand exposure than actually finding qualified candidates. Not appearing at a career fair alongside your competitors sends a bad message about you and gives your competitors leverage, and hints of potential financial difficults since your company doesn’t appear to be hiring or growing.
00:24:55 Executive searches involving secretly contracting a headhunter to fill a specific high-level position or to replace an existing executive not only help you steal the best people from your competitors and other leading companies, ‘off limit companies’ and conflict-of-interest clauses prevent that headhunter from stealing your best people from you; a modern-day equivalent of paying the mafia not to set your business on fire.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Headhunting people only from your industry aren’t necessarily the best solution to filling a position. In his book Best Practices: Building Your Business with Customer-Focused Solutions, Arthur Andersen talks about how people from external companies, industries and cultures can provide fresh and often times innovative insight to improve your current business model and practices.]
00:36:00 Headhunters use not only their vast database of connections to find potential candidates, they may even use social engineering techniques to find information they currently don’t have access to, for example the cell phone number and email address of the CEO of a ‘target company.’
00:40:00 High-level and highly-qualified people are ambitious, and are always in search of something bigger and better. Therefore, sign-on bonuses are usually included because so much time and money has already been invested in recruiting the person that the company would rather pay additional money to prevent the person from changing his or her mind and having to start all over from zero.
00:45:40 What is your company’s image to consumers as well as to employees? If people don’t know who your company is, they will not apply to work for you. If people do know you exist, then the question becomes ‘Would I love to work there? Would this company look good on my CV? Does this company have a great image and reputation – as a brand as well as as an employer?’
00:48:20 ‘Why should I buy you product?’ versus ‘Why should I work at your company?’
Your brand is “a name, term, design or other feature that distinguishes one seller’s product from those of others.” Every brand is linked to something and this is intentional. Companies invest a lot of money linking their name and logo to some very concrete ideas and promises. This is the job of marketing.
Building your company’s employer brand is crucial to attracting the right kind of people to work for you. The copy you write on your career website determines who you attract.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on how to build a creative brief to identify how to best speak to your target demographic (in this case employees), refer to my interview with Ivan Pejcic.]
01:14:44 In human resources, line engagement refers to the total amount of persons in your company who is actively involved in recruiting.
Weak ties are important. Weak ties are people you know and perhaps haven’t seen for a while, but there has been a little level of trust established. You may not even be sure you’ll ever meet these people again in life, but they are there and you know them.
Put all this together and we know that people have huge networks, and there is this law of small world that every person knows every other person in the world by a very few instances.
High line engagement would include offering bonuses and incentives to employees who convince qualified friends and contacts to apply for employment with your company.
01:18:20 If you have limited resources, you have to focus on identifying, prioritizing, building relationships with and marketing to just a few key places. It’s all about personal and mutually-beneficial relationships and partnerships.
01:21:20 A Players are the best, B Players are average, and C Players are below-average. In terms of social networking, A Players know A Players. Strong people know other strong people. Humans try to build relationships with people who are more or less equal to ourselves. We know this from research.
This means that once you have great people in your company, they probably know other great people outside of your company with similar mindsets, attitudes and work style.
01:34:10 Aggressive, low cost and high impact; this is guerilla marketing/recruiting.
Recruitment From Application To Offer
00:00:25 Which parameters, tests and selection methods best enable you to predict future performance? When more than one person applies for employment with your company, you inevitably have to make a choice. Why and how you conduct the interview process…
00:04:10 Future-actual performance versus current future-perceived performance. If you think the person will perform very well, you’ll hire the person. You hire the one where you think performance will be the best. One year later after hire you’ll know whether or not the person has performed well or not. Four decisions, half of them yield negative outcomes:
Right Negative: Based on what I have learned about you, I believe that if I hire you, future performance will be low; so I don’t hire you.
Right Positive: Based on what I have learned about you, I believe that if I hire you your performance will be very high; so I hire you.
False-Negative: Based on what I have learned about you, I have predicted that your performance will be low; so I don’t hire you. But if I would have hired you, your performance would have been high.
False-Positive: Based on what I have learned about you, I predict that you will be a star and will really out-perform, but later on you become another ‘warm body’ in the office. In some countries, ‘getting rid’ of employees is costly and time consuming, further compounding the damage done by choosing to hire this person.
At the base, candidate selection is about increasing the right decision and decreasing the wrong decision.
00:08:54 There is a difference between a ‘position’ and a ‘job.’ A job is merely defined as your set of responsibilities. Many people, from superiors to subordinates, may have the same job, but they don’t have the same position. A ‘position’ is simply a box allocated somewhere within your corporate tree structure.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE:The Rules of Work 2nd Edition by Richard Templar is a great book that provides 108 effective rules to increase your ‘position’ as effectively and efficiently as possible.]
00:10:38 The obvious first question in a recruiting process is: ‘What are we looking for?’ This is usually defined through a job analysis – an attempt to understand the scope and nature of the job by identifying:
The critical requirements related to a job, and
Attractive aspects of the job
In times of talent shortage, it’s sometimes obligatory to ‘sell’ a job to people.
00:12:40 Look at current job ads and you’ll find that the largest part of them are about job requirements, whereby the company gives you permission to apply if, and only if, you meet the requirements set forth by the job announcement.
But many jobs change over time and responsibilities may become outdated after a few years. A software developer must develop software, but the requirements and the environment is constantly changing. To understand the critical requirements of a job position, you must look at the critical incidents: the extreme problems and challenges a person in that job position must regularly face.
00:13:10 The more important element to begin with in a job announcement is the attractive aspects of this job: ‘Why is this job a great job?’ Every job has good and bad sides. ‘Magic moments’ are the defining moments that make you say ‘That is why I love this job. That’s why I get up in the morning and go to work.’
00:19:44 ‘De-jobbing’ is a modern approach where more and more people are creating their own job. You and your colleagues may have the same ‘job,’ but each person is defined by his or her talent, preferences, approaches, motivations, work style and skill set, and may therefore do and be responsible for something completely different.
00:21:00 If you have a company where people always refer to their job description, a ‘it’s not my job’ mentality sets in and your company is in a bad situation. Providing the service the client is requesting isn’t in my job description so I won’t do it. Organizing the christmas party isn’t something I’m being paid for, so I won’t do it. When you have people like this, your company is in deep trouble because success means attracting and hiring people willing to walk the extra mile.
00:21:53 Relevant Candidate Dimensions. When humans try to make a judgment about other human beings, we unconsciously try to create a wholistic picture – the person as a whole rather than isolated attributes of the person.
00:30:00 When you make a judgment about another human being, certain biases influence your decisions and can lead you to make wrong or incorrect judgments. This can lead you to rejecting the right candidate or hiring the wrong one.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE:Dr. Frank Bernieri and psychologist Alexander Todorov have conducted studies into first impressions – the primacy effect – and have found that the judgements made about you within the first few seconds heavily influence that person’s final judgment about you.]
00:39:00 There are some systematic changes that happen from the beginning to the end of the recruitment process:
A rule of thumb is that a company receives as many applications in a year as they have employees employeed. (10,000 employees? Expect to receive roughly 10,000 job applications = nearly 30 CV’s every day.)
On average, research has shown that experienced recruiters may spend about 11 seconds on each CV/resume. Because you cannot effectively evaluate the candidate within this timeframe, the recruiter focuses on certain critical cues. At the beginning, this is an efficient and cost-effective way of evaluating the candidate pool.
The closer you get to offering the position to the final pool of candidates, the quality and cost of the selection method increases.
00:46:32 The biographical questionnaire is based on the idea that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior; the belief that people don’t change very much.
00:54:50Personality is has to do with individual differences among people in behavior patterns, cognition and emotion depending on the situation in which they find themself.
01:01:20 The problem with personality tests is that the candidate will base his or her answers on what they believe the recruiter considers to be the ideal profile for the position. Therefore, good personality tests include questions that also measure your tendency to draw a positive picture of yourself.
01:04:10 Personality is as it is, but with skills, competence, ability and aptitude there is a strong-end and a weak-end.
01:09:30 Intelligence is being able to explain something, even if you don’t believe it.
00:00:06 Intelligence tests are designed in a way that you can really tell from the overall test score how good you are. The question is, if you have a 115 IQ, is that good or bad?
Classical tests are designed in such a way that the average IQ score of every person on the planet should be equal to 100.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Are we getting smarter as a species? James Flynn addresses the Flynn Effect this important question in this TED Talk:
00:05:18 You can measure personality, you can measure skills and competence, can you also measure motivation? Projective tests such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and the Rorschach Test attempt determine underlying themes and motivations that drive.
00:14:00 Several advantages of online testing is that:
Adaptively it can very quickly determine the person’s IQ by skipping from difficult > more difficult > easier questions based on the person’s performance, whereas a paper and pencil fill-in-the-blank test would most likely start easy and become harder.
Lower operational costs
Different tests and selection measures can be combined according to the position being tested for
Candidates can be easily compared and categorized
A major disadvantage of online testing is that you have no idea of the situation and condition in which the person is taking the test, or if the person for which the test is given is the actual person taking the test.
00:18:00 Over the course of a professional job interview, it’s not just about you convincing the company to hire you, it’s also about the company convincing you to work for them. Thus, it’s as much about questions the hiring company has about you as questions you have about the company you may work for.
00:54:10 Coorelation ® is the linear relationship between two different varieties: “Are people with more money happier than people with less money?” Whatever you measure, you almost never get a perfect correlation of r=1.0 or absolutely no correlation of r=-1,0. Coorelation will almost always fall somewhere in between.
01:00:00 Validity is whether a method really measures what it is supposed to measure. Do intelligence tests really measure intelligence? Does a personality test really measure a personality test or something else?
What we know is that success in school doesn’t only depend on intelligence (IQ). But what we really believe in a test that is supposed to measure intelligence, and the results don’t show any relation to school grades, would we believe in this IQ test? Probably not. Validity testing is how to prove it.
01:05:24 Test-Retest reliability is the ability of the test to come to the same results through numerous testing.
01:08:30 Is it possible for a test to be reliable but not valid? If I measure intelligence by measuring the size of your head, I’ll certainly find reliable results, but that doesn’t necessarily measure IQ.
01:09:40Objectivity is the ability to disregard, or minimize, personal expectations, criteria, frames of reference and perspectives. Whenever two extreme scores are given to the same scenario, it is said that the test or decision-makers lack objectivity. If the scores are similar, then the decision-makers can be said to be objective.
01:14:14 To test objectivity, once again we refer to correlation analysis to compare the decision-makers in the test.
Motivating Employees with Compensation & Benefits
00:00:32 Equity is extremely important when detemining compensation. Distributive equity is compensation relative to others. Procedural equity addresse whether procedures and policies lead to faire compensation and results.
Person ‘A’ below gives very little and gets a lot in return for working for the company, while person ‘B’ below gives a lot to the company, yet receives very little in return. People are not dumb, and they can see what they are making relative to their colleagues and relative to to other people in their industry.
00:05:30 If I am a small- to mid-sized company with 100 employees and a salary budget of 5M€, a very simple compensation system would be simply to divide 5M€ by 100 = an annual salary of 50,000€/year for everyone in the company. But Responsibility within the organization? Performance among peers? Qualifications & credentials? Tenure at company? If I want to attract the best candidates, how can companies determine their salary budget when simple isn’t always fair.
00:16:00Total reward is how you balance the different components (above) to create a ‘fair and balanced’ salary budget for your company; the sum of all the financial and non-financial rewards employees get in order to acknowledge their work and contribution to the company:
00:20:00 To develop your base pay structure, begin by conducting a job analysis – a combination of the key responsibilit(ies), where this job position lies relative to the other job positions in the company, and how much other companies pay for similar job positions within the market.
Where:
Job grades 1-8 is your position on the company’s corporate ladder
Pay rate is how much that person is paid
The market is the average pay rate for the industry
Doing this simultaneously creates a transparent, fair and balanced salary pay scale your company can now use to justify it’s job offers while giving the potential candidate room to negotiate his or her pay based on his or her unique education and work experience.
While performing your company’s base pay structure is a simple math-based calculation, actually implementing said pay structure is rife with potentially emotionally and politically-charged dilemmas, as this has immediate effects on people’s lives and their resulting motivation to do their job. It is therefore crucial to allow for flexibility in the process and to identify and reward employees who are required to do more than their ‘job classification’ says they do.
In the above chart, employee ‘A’ isn’t earning enough relative to his or her job position relative to the market line, meaning that you risk losing this person to a competitor. Therefore a salary increase for this employee would be in order if you want to keep this employee.
In the above chart, employee ‘B’ is earning more than the market level, and therefore the company may either:
do nothing and find other ways to balance your pay structure
give this person more responsibility to match his or her pay
let the person go and hire another person at a lower salary
reduce the person’s salary to fit your pay structure
00:59:10 With regards to compensation and determining base pay, the median is the salary where 50% of the population earn less than the median, and 50% of the population earn more. Knowing the median is important because with the average, one single person in the highest- or lowest-echelon of the payscale can significantly raise or lower the total average, whereas with the median this number isn’t as affected.
01:03:28 One-time performance bonuses are very effective because they can be given to employees directly related to the reason why they are receiving the bonus in a timely manner, and thus can keep the employee motivated at a time when you need them the most.
01:03:51 Piece-rate system performance awards with additional pay all performance which is over and above the fixed performance requiremants for a job.
01:06:44 A target bonus system is where the employee and employer agree on a certain bonus based on a pre-defined target achievement: Meet this objective by this time and you will receive this bonus.
01:13:55 It’s understood that the more I pay, the more I expect, but you can’t always only motivate people through rewards, pay and bonuses.
01:20:40 If you have a simple task where you aren’t required to think, such as working with your hands in exchange for a reward, you work faster when you receive a reward. If you have a task that requires you to think, be creative and solve a complex problem, then a reward actually damages motivation. Rewards only work if you don’t need to think.
01:24:20 There are two different types of motivation:
intrinsic – doing something because you loving doing it (internal forces)
extrinsic – doing something you wouldn’t normally do because you are paid or obliged to do it (external forces)
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more case studies and interesting findings on this topic, read the book Redirect by Timothy Wilson.]
Training Employees To Stay Competitive
00:00:29 Once the employee has been attracted, recruited, and hired they now perform and learn – for the rest of their life. Business, competitors, the market, products, technology, etc. is constantly changing, and employees have to learn and adapt constantly to this. Learning is a major factor for a compay’s competitiveness.
00:04:10 As an employer, how can you be sure that what your employees learn in training really transfers into real life?
00:05:00 People’s way of learning has changed. It no longer makes sense to memorize things like it did years ago. Now, you have the entire world of knowledge in your pocket. The question is learning how to leverage the internet and your social networkds to benefit from them at any point in time for any problem in time.
00:06:50 Knowledge, Competence, Talent, & Intelligence. Having knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean that you can solve problems. Knowlege is a very important basis, but problem-solving comes from experience, practice, and reflection. Competence means that you are able to solve problems. You can read how-to books and memorize the ‘50 things you need to…,’ but that doesn’t make you competent.
00:09:29 When do talented people acquire talent? At the early age of two, Tiger Wood’s father saw talent in Tiger’s swing, and he fostered it. But when did Tiger actually acquire this talent? At the point of conception when his DNA was defined. This is the idea of talent and intelligence; that you are genetically pre-dispositioned to have to the potential to excel at something if it is identified, detected, and leveraged.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, points to 10,000 hours needed to become a professional. But if you are not naturally talented at something, you are probably not willing to spend 10,000 hours in doing the practice needed to become a professional.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Josh Kaufman gives an interesting TEDX Talk and points out that nearly everything can be learned in the first 20 hours…
00:14:15 Some things you can change through training, other things must be developed through experience; some things cannot be changed at all.
00:14:51 Training is a big business; many companies have internal training departments dedicated to improving their employees’ professional competencies, behavioral skills and techniques and methodologies. These trainings are offered as long as employees ask for it.
00:22:10Onboarding is the process of quickly getting new employees up to speed with how the company works and how they can most effectively do their job. Without onboarding, productivity at the beginning is stifled and more than normal mistakes are made.
00:34:00Unconscious incompetence is not knowing what you don’t know. From where you are currently, you cannot tell what your needs are; you must first reach a certain level of competence for you to understand what you did not know in the past. Therefore, with onboarding and other needs-based trainig systems, you cannot ask newly-hired what they need because they can’t tell you want they need.
When developing an onboarding program for your company:
Begin with a needs analysis by asking managers about actual and critical situations and problems that occurred to discover how and where employees failed to meet objectives or were inadequately prepared to complete a task. This will give you a list of needs to address
Design a training program that best meets those needs.
Evalute how well the training program has met the pre-defined needs.
Unconscious competence is knowing how to do something well, but not knowing how to tell others to do it.
00:42:55 On-the-job training is good because you learn something relevant and then can immediately apply it, so learning transfer is most efficient. Off-the-job training tends to be away from the office environment in a more professional learning environment with professional coaches not usually available to you on-the-job which allows you to just focus on training.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on how to use on- and off-the-job training to your career advantage, read The Rules Of Work by Richard Templar.]
00:51:56 Blended learning involves combining different learning techniques to create one well-rounded and comprehensive training program.
00:53:32 Training programs can be evaluated on four different levels:
Reaction: Did the participants respond positively to the training? The problem with this sort of evaluation is that the responses will be subjective, the trainer can manipulate the participants into positive evaluations of the training, and there is no way to ensure that the participants learned what they needed to learn.
Learning: Did the participants acquire the knowledge intended during the training? Tests can be conducted to ensure the information was learned.
Behavior: Have the participant’s behavior changed positively since the training? Monitoring and job-shadowing can ensure the information was assimilated and applied.
Results: Did the training program meet the organization’s goals? Have the participant’s behavior really improved revenue?
00:58:50Learning transfer is how much of what is learned during a training is actually applied. The training only pays off if the participants apply what they have learned.
01:00:04 Accept that some participants:
Attend trainings out of curiosity and without expectations and to take advantage of free time away from work.
Have critical problems and need a solution otherwise they fear they will fail, and are attending the trainings seeking actionable solutions
Aren’t intelligent enough or lack the cognitive abilities to learn the information and follow and apply the content
Aren’t motivated or ready to learn the content
Are comfortable with their old habits and just don’t want to/can’t change, no matter how much you want them to.
Accept that some training:
May not fully address the critical needs of the participants
May lack the trainer, media, structure, methods, material, and environment necessary to address the critical needs
Accept that some work environments:
May not have management and colleague support and appreciate the training
To improve learning transfer:
The training must offer the participant the possibility to apply training.
Show participants how the training is important to them and how it will make their lives easier.
01:05:09 Learning in companies, and the way employees acquire knowledge, has dramatically changed in the last few years because the environment has changed – the internet, social media, etc.
01:05:46Informal learning is improved performance just just happens through experience, trial and error. Formal learning is improved performance that happens through an institutionalized context. People primarily learn informally. The dilemma is that 80% of a business’ training budget yields only 20% of learning. The remaining 80% of the person’s learning happens informally.
01:12:01 Today, things have become so complicated these days and projects become so complex that people work with their brain and become ‘experts’ in their particular field, and will know much more about their work than their immediate manager. Managers typically cannot possibly know everything, therefore must have a broad knowledge of things under them and are surrounded by experts who spend most of their time learning from each other rather than from their boss – peer learning.
Performance Reviews & Talent Development
00:00:24 Training is about short-term knowledge acquisition. Employees need knowledge about project management, for example, so they take a course on it.
Talent development, on the other hand, is more long-term.
00:01:24 High potentials are the promising employees whom they have identified as having the most potential to move up in the organization quickly Once companies have identified their high potential employees, the next step for the compay is to develop these people over the long-term into those high-level positions.
This form of development involves significant, large scale programs and investments.
00:04:20 A newly-graduated person usually gets a first job which only requires you manage yourself: you, your job, your responsibilities, etc.
If you are promoted to manager, you’re no longer responsible for yourself and your own operational tasks as you were before, you are now responsible for coordinating and managing a team and the team’s operational tasks and performance against objectives and deadlines.
If you are promoted once again, you are now responsible for managing managers who must manage their own teams. You are now sandwihed between lower- and upper-management, as well as other related departments. You neither make the strategic decisions nor make the product/service.
If you are promoted once again, you are now managing organizations: you are responsible for the future, survival, and culture of the company. Business strategy and market positioning, re-branding the company image, merger and acquisition, etc.
00:11:40 The above transition in the company is important because companies cannot simply wait until they have vacancies in upper-management to recruit; rather they must pro-actively prepare people so that they are ready to move up at a moments notice.
00:12:29 If you want to succeed in your career and move up quickly in an organization, it’s imperative to know how the promotion and talent development process works.
00:13:30 What would the company do if a a key position (The Director of Finance, the CEO, etc.. ) in the company were to suddenly become vacant: the person dies, falls ill, is head-hunted by a competitor and leaves the company… What can the company do now to prepare for such a worst-case scenario? A competency model is a list of competencies Human Resources believe a candidate must have to succeed in a job.
Competency is the possession of experience, knowledge, genetic predisposition, and personality to effectively problem-solve. Knowing and doing are two different things.
One is not necessarily better than another, just better or worse suited. A shy or pessimistic personality would not be as suited to a position in sales as an out-going and optimistic personality would be.
Performance managment via performance reviews involves an annual meeting between a manager and the employee measuring the employee’s performance and future objectives.
Talent review involves top managers deciding together who their high-potential employees are; their top 5 or so percent of employees the company should invest in and ready them for key positions.
From there, potential assessments are conducted to further refine and categorize their top 5% of high-potential employees are further narrowed down and assigned training courses and programs (on- and off-the-job) relevant to their key position.
00:31:10 The question becomes: “Is this form of assessment reasonable?” At first look creating a list of competencies for key positions, evaluating high potential employees’ competencies, and then training them for that position makes sense, particularly:
Stretch roles are challenging positions and projects designed to test the employee and prepare them for future key positions.
00:36:30 You can’t always ask customers what they want. Sometimes you have to define what customers want.
00:38:30 Some people succeed because they have one sort of competency; some people succeed because they do not have that same sort of competnecy. People are different and there isn’t always one solution to a problem that can be solved by one set of competencies.
00:45:10 Performance management looks at successes and shortcomings the employee’s past and present, and how shortcomings can be addressed in the future. It isn’t about ‘what should be improved,’ it is more about ‘What should YOU improve.’
00:58:00 But what if…
Identifying & Developing Key Employees
00:01:20 With each career step and moment in your life, humans develop quickly and learn alot at the beginning, however as you progress you get better slowly, and so must move on to the next step to once again approach learning something new.
00:02:30 For EVERY activity there is, there is a predictable learning curve.
This learning curve leads to two fundamental concepts:
Potential – theoretically, there is an invisible maximum level which you can achieve, regardless of competence. This level differs from person to person. If everyone invested an equal amount of time on one subject, there would still be a hierarchy of competence and skill. Right from birth your potentials and talents are defined for you in your DNA. If your individual potential for an activity is very, very high, then we call it a talent.
Talent means that you have at least the chance to excel extra-ordinarily well in an activity. This means that your talent must be identifed and then trained.
00:05:54 Potential is, then, the difference between your current skill, performance level and talent and where you could achieve if you use all of the appropriate means available, and if you are lucky.
There are thousands of people all over the world which have the potential to become a professional in a particular activity, but they will never have the chance to reach this level because their talent will never be identified or because they don’t have what is needed to develop their talent.
00:07:30 How can human resources assess the potential of each and every employee?
00:09:00 When evaluating the potential employees, there are at least three criteria which are absolutely key to the success of a company:
Ideally, a company would promote the person who demonstrates extraordinary growth and ability by learning and improving his or her skills the quickest, assuming that this growth and talent will continue into the future.
00:11:50 The general assumption here is that “if somebody developed very quickly in the past, he or she will develop very quickly in the future.”
00:12:27 Ideally, a company will promote the person who surfaces as a natural leader and whom people listen to and look up to and go to for questions and problems – the one who serves as the company’s ideal role model for others.
00:14:17 Ideally, a company will promote the person who is not only motivated and hungry for more, but takes the initiative and begins doing it before he or she is asked to.
00:17:00 Intelligent kids with high potential forced to learn in a typical class with other less intelligent kids are underchallenged. The teacher either doesn’t see the student’s potential, or does but cannot adequately address it. People with high potential but low performance are likely demotivated, dislike their current job, team, or boss or boss’s management style. This person is working for the wrong manager.
00:18:40 “Work horses” is the term used for people who consistently exceed expectations, yet lack the potential to do better or handle more responsability. They have reached their full potential and there is no more room for improvement. With this kind of employee, the best action is to keep him or her where he or she is.
00:19:35 There are many talented people in the world who are overlooked because they don’t get the chance to show themselves. People with low potential and low performance should be either:
“Managed out” (fired)
Demoted to a job where they have more control and can perform
Transferred to a job where the person can at least have the opportunity to improve
…because generally people have financial responsibilities and family obligations and so want a job and want to work.
00:20:47 People with great potential and high potential usually undergo a more comprehensive assessment of the person’s strengths and weaknesses and then further trained and developed for future roles within the organization.
00:28:30 Your customers are the ones who live and work with – and therefore benefit or suffer from – the result of your employees.
00:32:50 There are two types of careers goals:
Traditional management career – wanting to be promoted as high up in an organization and make as much money as possible
Self-fulfilment expert career – wanting to excel in what you do, make your mark and become known for your accomplishments
00:35:41Research Fellows – the equivalent of professors inside of a company – are highly-respected, highly-intelligent and autonomous people within an organization who are free to work on whatever they wish.
00:38:20 ‘What is my talent?’ is the most important question you must answer for yourself. Some people are fortunate enough to realize this early in their life, while others struggle with this question their entire life.
00:44:50 You cannot hide yourself and expect people to find you. It is imperative to your success that you actively build strong networks – strong and loose ties and sell yourself. Also, it’s also not about who you know, it’s about who knows you.
00:45:00 People don’t have to like you, but do they like to work with you and benefit from you? Find and work with other high potential people.
00:47:30 Work with people who compensate for your weaknesses. Robbie Williams is an excellent singer and entertainer, however he isn’t a strong song writer, so he always works with people who are excellent song writers. So Williams collaborated with Gary Barlow and others who where strong where he was weak.
00:50:00 As a rule of thumb, common belief is that people develop their talent through experience, from others, and through training.
00:51:10 A mentor is a more senior person you belive to be wise and competent and who you allow to guide and teach you and give advice in exchange for money, prestige, etc… There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the mentor and the mentoree. A coach doesn’t give advice. Instead, he or she simply asks questions, forcing the person being coached to articulate and answer the questions clearly.
01:16:07 Action leaning is a combination of training and practical work. I receive input and knowledge, and I reflect my knowledge into a very precise situation.
Managing Work Hour Models & Productivity
00:00:51 Traditional work is when you clock in at a precise time and work, and then clock out at a precise time and go home. Modern work has become a blend between private and professional life.
00:02:00 Employee surveys are there to help the company understand how they can improve their employee’s work experience.
00:06:01 Ideas are crucial to competitive differentiation through innovation, yet studies show that people have their best ideas outside of their original workspace, namely in environments and situations where they are the most comfortable.
Then it goes to follow that employees should be paid for their ideas rather than being paid for their working hours.
00:11:24 Scheduled working hours are necessary when employees’ productivity are tied to machines which cannot be removed from the company’s workspace – such as pilots, cashiers, lecturers, etc. The higher up your position, the more your job reponsibilities are to think and to communicate, which is something that can be done everywhere.
00:15:55 Specific jobs dictate specific working hours models. Working hours models outline when you work, how much you work, and how much flexibility you have in the process.
00:23:00 Your company’s leadership culture, level of trust in your employees, and labor laws are three extremely important things that determine how flexible your company’s working hours model is. From a legal point of view when it comes to labor laws, it’s advised to track your employees’ working hours even if their compensation is performance-based. Having this information may help you avoid lawsuits should someone claim that you were forcing them to work unpaid overtime, etc.
00:24:28 If you’re company and industry suffers from a talent shortage, then you must do what you must to attract qualified candidates.
00:02:15 Employee surveys are cyclical evaluations about job, company communication, and employees and bosses satisfaction with the general understanding that the greater the satisfaction, the greater the productivity. This of course isn’t always true.
00:05:47 Many companies do a pre-study before they actually create and administer their survey or questionnaire. Simply sitting down and thinking about the questions you want to ask based on your opinion of importance is wrong. In truth, you shouldn’t try to write anything until you know what to write. Writing starts with thinking. If you don’t have your information already thought out in your mind, you cannot write. Once you understand what to write, writing is a piece of cake.
Whenever you prepare questions for a survey, you must understand one important thing: people will not understand your questions.
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a survey with the question “Have you had abdominal pains in the last four weeks.” What they failed to take into account is that all over the world people have a different understanding for what exactly the ‘abdomen’ is, even though it is a universal and simple concept to understand. Ask people about ‘innovation,’ ‘profitability,’ ‘business strategy,’ etc. and the average person will not understand what you mean. People don’t not understand your questions because they are dumb, they don’t unerstand your questions because they are normal. This is why it is important to conduct pretests (asking individuals to define words and paraphrase your question in their own words) and adjustments before your survey is officially released.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Susan Orlean, staff writer for the New Yorker is quoted as saying “If you’ve got writer’s block, you don’t have writer’s block. You have reporter’s block. You only are having trouble writing because you don’t actually yet know what you’re trying to say, and that usually means you don’t have enough information. That’s the signal to walk away from the keyboard, think about what it is that you don’t really know yet, and go do that reporting.”
Lastly, for great information on how your surveys can actually manipulate consumers and cause your research to become useless, read Redirect by Timothy Wilson.]
00:17:00 The previous 12 questions form the foundation for high-quality surveys.
00:22:30 Whenever you look at the results for any employee survey, you will almost always find negative results with regards to compensation, communication, leadership and career opportunities. Nobody is ever 100% satisfied with:
How much you pay them
How you communicate with them and whether or not the employee is well-informed
How quickly your employees can advance within your company
This is almost always the case, regardless of company or industry.
Therefore you will receive a better understanding of the results by comparing them with the whole instead of looking at each survey result individually.
00:24:39 There are several different ways to read and interpret statistical results, and you must be careful in your interpretation of the results so as not to come to the wrong conclusions. This is especially imperative when comparing results from different countries and cultures because there is a bias – certain cultures tend to repond more positively than others, while other cultures tend to respond more negatively to the same questions.
In Latin America, for example, people almost always say they are posistive. In France, on the other hand, people tend to evaluate more critically. In Asian culture people tend not to select the extreme ends of a scale.
00:33:10 It’s important employees see the results of a survey they contribute to, even if the results are negative. How demotivating would it be for you to constantly fill out surveys only never to hear about it again or understand how it is improving your job? You likely wouldn’t fill out future surveys, would you?
00:34:40 Although challenging to orchestrate, it’s important that each team and department receive their own relevant version and results of the survey.
00:40:00 Not all topics covered in the survey are important or necessary. The company may not necessarily care, nor is it relevant to the company, whether or not you have made close friends within the company (referring back to the Q12 Gallup slide above).
00:49:31 Unless there is some form of motivation, things which are not important before a survey, will not be important after a survey, independent of any result of the survey.
00:50:40 Another important shortcoming of employee surveys, management appraisals, 360° feedback, etc. is that it isn’t clear why we are doing this, and for whom (who is the customer of this survey?).
01:06:49 Employer attractiveness refers to how attractive a company is for high-quality recruits. You must be attractive to high-quality employees if you are to compete in the labor market and capture and keep a competitive advantage on innovation.
01:15:54 You cannot be attractive to everybody in everything; therefore you must choose strategically how you will be attractive for whom and what.
How To Keep Quality Employees
00:00:28 It’s important you attract, hire, and develop the right people, but it’s equally important that you know how to keep them. This is employee retention. In every department the boss knows that there are at least 1, 2,or 3 people that the boss knows that were this key person to leave, their department would be in deep trouble.
00:01:39 Companies have departments who deal solely with recruting, departments who deal solely with training and development, and departments dealing solely with compensation and benefits, yet you almost never find a company with a department whose sole responsibility is dealing with employee retention.
To say Human Resources is only about the people management is soft; you can, and you must, calculate certain things about the cost of employment:
00:15:47 In companies, studies have shown that it is the high-performing, and the low-performing employees who voluntarily contribute most to your turnover rate.
Low-performers tend to leave companies because they can’t adapt and fit in with the company culture, which results in a limited loyalty to the company, and low-performs usually have conflicts with their peers, as it is their peers who must constantly do that person’s work. Once that person has been branded as a loser, they prefer to change companies than try to overcome their ‘reputation,’ etc.
High-performers tend to leave companies because they have more options available to them, are likely to be more mobile and flexible, well-networked,etc.
An important thing to note is that when a company claims that their turnover rate is 1%, this average really tells us nothing about the company.
The two important turnover rates you want to understand are:
‘What is turnover with your high-performers?’ It’s very likely that the turnover rate for your high-performers is much higher than your company average turnover rate.
‘What is your turnover rate in your most important, critical functions?’
00:21:10 What are the visible and hidden costs of employee turnover?
The price of this person taking his or her knowledge away from your company and bringing it to one of your competitors
All the training and development invested in the employee
The cost of recruting a new person to fill that person’s shoes
Paying for headhunters and consultants to assist in the hiring (approximately 1/3 of the person’s annual salary)
The cost of training and developing that employee
Decreased productivity during onboarding
The total turnover cost of employee retention can range from 100%-400% of that position’s salary, depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position.
00:26:48 There is a rule of thumb which states that employes who are leaving have a lower motivation (perhaps as much as 50% less performance) to getting things done during their last 1 to 3 months of employment. Likewise, new employees will perform perhaps as much as 50% during the first six months of employment as they learn to do the new job.
00:27:55 Another major assumption is that the value added by an employee is at least equal to his or her pay. If you are paying the employee more than that employee is bringing back into your company, then you are losing money. If you are paying your employee much, much less than the employee is bringing back into your company, then you risk:
Demotivating the employee – which reduces productivity
Losing the employee to a competitor who offers more money for the same work
Employee strikes and/or organized unions stepping in
…so what can we do about retention?
00:33:39 Turnover risk is evaluating the likelihood of each employee’s leaving the company and how much of an impact upon the company this person’s leaving would cause – what are the consequences?
00:35:50 Ambitious, high-performing and high-potential employees either currently in a key positition, or striving to be in a key position are always likely to leave; especially if this person is not receiving the recognition or training he or she wants.
People who constantly complain – through meetings with upper-management or amongst peers – are likely to leave.
00:39:55 According to a study conducted in 2008, 1,000 top-managment polled believe that employees tend to leave because they feel there is (in order of importance):
A lack of career opportunities and development paths
Salaries do not compare favorably with industry peers
Undesirable work-life balance (long hours, frequent business trips, etc.)
Lack of challenging, exciting tasks (job fulfillment)
Lack of leadership/support from senior managers
Benefits do not compare favorably with industry peers
Image problem of the industry/company
Lack of training
00:44:00 The traditional perspective on work is that people work because they need money to live and feed their family. But studies have shown that work is based more on a hidden, implicit, give-and-take psychological contract between the employee and the employer.
Further, these psychological contracts change in your own lifetime, and they change from generation to generation.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In our interview, Product Designer Timoni West points out that the way many companies set up rewards systems means that they are sort of doomed to lose their talented people after a certain number of years. They won’t keep innovating forever, people will move to other companies, and their product will slowly lose value.]
00:07:13 One of the most important things for Millennials are their peers. One of the best things companies can do to retain their employees is to let them become friends.
The boss is also a very important factor with regards to whether an employee stays with your company. You could have the best company reputation which attracts all the best job candidates, but if the boss or the peers aren’t compatible, then your employees will leave; employees join companies, but leave bosses and peers.
00:13:28 Low involvement decisions are made with spontaneious, very minimal thinking involved; decisions such as which type of toothpaste, coffee, etc will I buy. High involvement decisions are made with intense thought and reasoning; decisions such as should I leave my current job for a new one? Should I change cities or apartment?
00:16:01 People are generally driven to make decisions from the following perspectives:
To move away from a current situation they dislike or hate
To move towards a future situation they want
To solve a problem that has presented itself
A strategic manoeuver to improve one’s current situation
To move with their partner
00:22:32 An exit interview is “a survey conducted with an individual who is separating from an organization or relationship such as with an employee, a student, or a member of an association” with the intention of understanding the motivations of why the person left to solve problems and avoid future turnover.
The problem with the exit interview process is there’s no guarantee of truthfulness in the person’s answers and subjectivity in the questions asked.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information about how to conduct consumer research and exit interviews, read my interview with Peter Spear, Brand Listener.]
00:33:04 Recall in the lecture How To Keep Quality Employees, the total turnover cost of employee retention can range from 100%-400% of that position’s salary, depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position.
Companies therefore need to proactively tackle employee turnover to avoid losing all of their best employees.
Always begin by asking “What is the problem?” Then you can ask “Where is the problem?”
00:38:21 Once you have identified Where the problem is, you can then begin resolving it, be it an incompetent boss, peer personality problems, company procedure issues, etc.
Surviving During Changes In Management
00:00:27 Branding strategy changes, moving from a function-oriented business model to product-oriented business model, re-structuring, re-engineering, mergers and acquisitions, cultural changes, payscale and bonus changes, down-sizing, right-sizing, change in leadership cultures… All of these are examples that require significant change management.
Change management is “an approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations to a desired future state.” The changes are specific, significant, strategic changes made to the company of which many, if not all of the employees are impacted. Be it as a victim or as a leader, but this is something that everyone will experience at least once over the course of their career.
People like change, but they don’t like to be changed. Change requires modifying existing behavioral patterns, processes, procedures and attitudes. As a result change always comes disfunctional resistance. Companies don’t want employees who are resistant to change.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in the lecture How To Keep Quality Employees that high-performing employees tend to leave companies because they have more options available to them, are likely to be more mobile and flexible, well-networked,etc. and that low-performing employees tend to leave companies because they can’t adapt and fit in with the company culture, which results in a limited loyalty to the company, and low-performs usually have conflicts with their peers, as it is their peers who must constantly do that person’s work. Once that person has been branded as a loser, they prefer to change companies than try to overcome their ‘reputation,’ etc.
This means that it’s usually it’s the mediocre employees that are the most likely to stick around]
00:20:49 People’s lives are always impacted by decisions, both by your own and by others around them – subordinates, colleagues, bosses…
Whenever people are faced with change made by others that affect them, they tend to respond quite predictively:
The middle stages (immobilization, denial, anger, bargaining, and depression) in the chart above are dysfunctional and can really lead to problems for your company.
Humans need to feel in control of their situation, and the fact that you cannot control something drives you crazy; often more so than the problem itself:
Being trapped in an elevator
Having an annoying dripping sound coming from the pipes somewhere inside the wall above your bedroom
Neighbors who go away on vacation and forget to turn their annoying alarm clock off
00:27:43Learned helplessness is “a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation,” and a behavior in which a human is forced to endure painful or unpleasant circumstances, and yet unwilling to take actions to avoid or overcome the unpleasant circumstances, even if it is in their power to do so. Depression is a common consequence of severe learned helplessness.
00:33:03 You need to plan ahead and address this resistance.
Change is seen as subjective. People worry about change and you have to take their concern seriously, even if their worry is unfounded. Accept their reality and address it, and they will take you seriously and be more open to listening to and reasoning with you.
00:40:22 Formal leaders are those who, on paper, are granted by the company the authority to persuade. Thought leaders, or opinion leaders, are the naturally persuasive people who other people look up to and consider their opinion to be important, both for good and for bad.
When it comes to handling resistance, managing the discourse of the opinion leaders plays a significant role in change management.
00:42:23 There are essentially two types of resistance:
Overt resistance – when people speak up about it and discuss their resistance openly and publically
Hidden resistance – when people work in secret to prevent change, or actively manoeuvre to sabotage the change without anybody knowing
Active involvement is probably the best way of dealing with resistance. Involve all parties in the discussion and decision making process, even if the decision still stands, and the people are much more likely to go along with it.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more about involving people in the decision making process, even if they won’t be officially involved, read the book 27 Powers Of Persuasion by Chris St. Hilaire.
Also, in the documentary Human Resources Management: Social Engineering In The 20th Century, “Researchers found that the very act of allowing workers to talk about their feelings reduced the possibility of aggitation and rebellion. It made workers feel as if they mattered. Even if the social relations remained fundamentally the same.”
“The Hawthorne Experiments found was that no matter what changes were made, everytime they had made a change after having discussed it with employees, production went up and employee satisfaction went up.”
-Stephen M. Sachs, Political Scientist]
00:46:21 Just as there are predicable responses for change beyond the control of the individual, there is a preditable response for change made within the control of the individual.
Uninformed Optimism – naivité: At the beginning of a project you are quite optimistic and ready to take on the world
Informed Pessimism: As you begin the daunting task,you begin to realize the mountains you are up against and the difficult decisions you must make, you become discouraged, even regretful
Checking out – You reach the point where you feel like giving up but continue despite
Hopeful Realism – The hardest parts of the project have been overcome and you can begin to see the end in sight
Informed Optimism – You are now able to predict, and even taste the end of the project.
Completion – You successfully accomplish the project you set out to do.
00:51:04John Kotter, one of the leading professors on change management identified the top 8 essential ingredients in a change management process that help improve the rate of success in your change projects:
Reaching, or being able to create, a level of urgency is a key trigger in change. Until people feel that the change is absolutely necessary, they have no reason to get behind it.
00:54:51 Complacency is a major roadblock to change, often caused because:
Human nature is to deny
Upper-management is overly optimistic
Company has a kill-the-messenger or a low-confrontation culture
Too many visible resources seem readably available
Employees have narrow functional goals
The wrong performance metrics are too important
Lack of sufficient feedback from external sources
Low overal performance standards
No proof of an impending crisis
00:56:58 Never talk to a manager about a problem unless you have a solution you can propose. Presenting only problems enough times earns you the reputation of being the ‘messenger-of-bad-news.’
01:00:12 Along with creating a sense of urgency you need to have a well-defined vision to communicate.
Change Management Framework
01:05:52 The first step in the change management framework is initialization: The birth and development of an idea to improve the company. The initialization phase ends when the person in power makes a final ‘yes/no’ decision.
If yes, then the scope, objectives & vision are established. Then the setup, principles and budget are outlined and the appropriate team is brought together.
01:10:21 Guiding principles ensure that the project runs smoothly, efficiently and on budget. It’s imperative to choose at least one principle right at the beginning of the change process and keep it as your most important metric. For example, focusing on speed, knowing that quality may suffer.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In our interview, Isabelle Nancy, Global Accounts Manager points out that some guiding principles cannot be done together; that, for example, you cannot have advertising that will solve all your problems as well as be:
High-quality
Quick, and
Inexpensive
Advertising agences do their best to provide all three, and there are those few magical creative ideas that accomplish all three, but more often than not brands have to choose between two of them rather than having all three of those options.
Those in advertising know that if you want inexpensive, your campaign can be quick, but it probably won’t be as high-quality as you’d like it to be. If you want it quick, then it will be expensive and maybe not as of high-quality. If you want high-quality, then it probably can’t be done inexpensively.]
01:16:32 Change can be instantaneous – Starting January 1st, all employees must use the new software system – or gradual – Over the next four months, each deparment will make the software switch.
Of course, no change is without it’s setbacks and chaos. This requires a stabilization phase so people can get accustomed to the change and work through any bugs.
00:00:25 Executives play a critical role in the corporation, however critical they are varies from company to company. In some company structures, executive decisions are made and those decisions are acted out religiously, whereas in other companies, executive decisions act as starting points for discussions within the company.
Regardless, change only works when there is ‘across-the-board’ committment on the executive board level.
Top management sponsorship refers to the point at which executives not only agree and are convinced that an idea or decision should be made, but actively unite behind the idea and actively push for it to be implemented.
For example, the different responses (from worst to best) from the decision-making executives include:
No idea: Not listening, ignoring the speaker and/or checking his or her email while the speaker presents the idea.
Attention: Listening but not understanding either the idea or the gravity of the idea.
Feigning a positive reaction to the idea.
Understanding: Having a positive reaction to the idea and “We’ll look into it.”
Acceptance: Acknowledging the idea and saying “You’re right, we should implement it,” thus investing in the idea, but then leaving the meeting without committing any further support.
Investment: The difference between accepting something and investing in something is the presence of an active acceptance towards the idea, for example investing money and time, and not only saying “We’ll look into it,” but actually meaning those words.
Commitment: The burning power behind the idea that pushes it to be incorporated throughout the company up to the point where managers publically state that “I’m willing to link my professional future with this idea so much that if we do not incorporate this idea, I don’t know how I can continue being a manager for this company.”
From this point on, in every persuasive position you find yourself in you must be able to distinguish where on this graph your argument for or against an idea lies, and then act accordingly.
Once the executives have reached “commitment” level, change agents – or brand ambassadors – are needed at every level and in every country within the organization to follow through in their respetive areas.
00:10:02 The ‘project lead’ is the person whose neck is on the line for both the success and failure of the project’s implementation. This project lead reports on the status, risks, issues and % completion of the project to a ‘steering group’- an executive or two, a head from Human Resources, top managers… – who implement the idea and actually make the decisions about the major principles (do we go for speed or quality, etc.)
The overall sponsor above the ‘steering group’ may be the CEO who decides on the budget for the idea’s entire project; the one who ultimately wanted this change to happen.
When dealing with influential opponents of a change strategy, put that person in charge of the steering committee or in another leadership role; make that person responsible for the success of the project. Once that person is responsible for the project’s success, even though he or she is against it, you’re in a better position. This is politics.
00:13:29 During change management, external consulting teams are there because of their expertise. They have helped so many other organizations undergo change management that they instinctively know how to implement it; companies are essentially renting intelligence and experience for a limited period of time.
00:15:41 During change management, it’s important to have a sounding board: a designated group of people who oversee the project, provide feedback, and point out the concerns to address.
00:18:46 It’s important to know and utilize the differences between one-direction communication:
Newspapers
Email newsletters
Brochures
Posters
Videos and webcasts
Powerpoint presentations
and a more conversational, interactive communication:
Social media
Department and individual meetings
Open space events
Workshops and conferences
A designated hotline
00:20:01 Should you immediately and transparently begin communicating about the impending change, or should you wait until the last minute? This answer depends on many factors such as your company culture, the type of change being conducted, the type of industry you’re in, how the news will/could affect the market and your share price, and how competitors might react to this change.
A downside to communicating early on is that rumors can get started which can quickly derail the project and confuse the employees involved. Consequently, the downside of communicating late can also have the same adverse effects of confusion and distrust. Point is, you can expect to have problems regardless of when you communicate.
Corporate communication is very difficult and a lot of things can be done wrong; Once things have been said, they cannot be unsaid. Corporate communication is an art.
00:02:01 For small companies, you will likely have a few people who can be defined as “The Human Resources Department,” and they take care of everything “HR-ish.” But for larger companies, this structure is impossible, as there will be HR people spread throughout the organization’s headquarters, regional headquarters and subsidiaries.
When it comes to such an international Human Resources Department, the question becomes who does what. Internally, HR recruitment and internships for the same organization will function completely differently from Hong Kong and Barcelona, and anywhere else in the world.
00:05:12 Every organization has a headquarters based somewhere in the world, and there are historical, logisitical, branding, etc. reasons why companies choose to have their companies headquartered in a specific city.
Adidas and Puma, founded by Adolph Dassler and Rudolf Dassler respectively, are both headquartered in their little home town of Herzogenaurach, Bavaria because, according to a Tuesday, August 13, 2011 article in Time.com, as the “…result of miscommunication. After an Allied bomb attack (during WWII), Adolf and his wife took cover in a bomb shelter already occupied by Rudolf and his family. ‘The dirty bastards are back again,’ Adolf said, apparently referring to the planes, but Rudolf thought the comment was an attack against his family.”
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his lecture Human Behavioral Biology: Where Game Theory & Evolution Collide, Robert Sapolsky points out that one of the major factors of Darwinian evolution is kin selection ‘the idea that traits have a higher probability of making it into the next generation when relatives and family members cooperate with each other concerning reproduction.’ The overwhelming success of both Adidas and Puma are perhaps a smack in the face to kin selection.
00:11:49 Typically, a company starts out as an idea in a garage somewhere… and then grows: locally, regionally, nationally… Once you have one single, tiny customer in another country, at what point do you identify yourself as ‘international?’
You’re an international company as soon as you’ve begun doing business across borders.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his talk Integrated Product Design: Building A Generalist/Specialist Business, Dror Benshetrit admits that when he was just starting out with no clients and working alone, he referred to his company as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ as a branding strategy to give his potential clients the idea that his company was, and would become, an internationally-minded company. Eventually, it did.
As an online business and/or application, your very first customer could make you an ‘international’ business. In my interview with Derek Banas of New Think Tank, Banas points out that at least 60% of his users and website traffic are from outside of the United States.
Lastly, in her talk Growing From Zero To Many Users, Adora Cheung explains that first and foremost you should identify all relevant customer segments and the products they are using and know what they all have in common that you can build your business on, but then also optimize your product for one specific customer segment so you can focus your marketing efforts on making that niche customer segment loyal before expanding.]
00:13:36 As a small but expanding business, even as you begin expanding internationally with subsidiaries, you still tend to be very headquarter-minded. But as your number of employees in your subsidiaries begin growing, you’ll need to begin hiring more Human Resources people to manage those people and daily business operations. Eventually, subsidiaries will grow so large that the headquarter-minded Human Resources department will no longer be the optimal model, as each country has its own culturally-based recruiting, training, and business practices.
Sooner or later, the organization realizes that it’s entirely too complex to keep a headquarterly-minded business model, and so moves through the stages from an International > Multinational > Global > Transnational model…
…as salary and compensation packages, recruiting and job ads, and even job position responsibilities vary from country to country.
00:17:42 Very quickly, you can tell whether a company is a national, multi-national or a global organization simply by:
how many languages the company’s website has been translated into
how many different website layouts
whether or not the ‘career recruitment’ section automatically lists job positions by country, revealing that there is one HR database behind it, revealing that the entire world is seen as one, single market
When company culture no longer distinguishes it’s employees by location, it has evolved into a global company mindset.
Should employer branding be done globally or locally?
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in his lecture How Branding Strategy Affects Recruitment, Mr. Trost explains that when resources are limited, you cannot be the leader in everything: innovation, brand, price, quality, other… and that in the long run, Innovation and then Brand – people know you, like you, and have very clear associations with your name, logo (Specific) – will win out over Price (Generic).]
Should employee selection be done globally or locally?
00:24:11 Candidates for a particular production location would most prudently be selected locally, not at the headquarters, and top executive compensation and salary would most prudently be selected by headquarters; this leads to a transnational approach – finding the right balance between the global and the local markets.
00:27:20 Human Resources responsibilities can generally be divided up into several different tasks:
00:28:44 Traditionally, Human Resources deals mostly with administrative tasks, however in the future, Human Resources will likely take on more of a consulting and supportive role, such as interpersonal communication and managerial skills or managing large employer branding projects and in-company employee programs.
00:35:01 Known as the 4 ‘P’s of Human Resources, modern and future HR will be tasked with being:
Polite: The politest people in the company
Police: The protectors of company policies and procedures
Partner: Helping the business lines solve their human issues
Player: Critical role in helping to develop any business strategy
00:42:13 In the late 90s, David Ulrich wrote the book Human Resource Champions outlining his HR Role model. If you work in HR, this book is a must read.
Ulrich explains that HR must be strong both in administrative procedures first, and secondly strategy: if payroll doesn’t work well and people don’t get the correct salary, you’ll never be in a position to talk about strategy.
00:48:02 In modern business the ‘know all HR Generalist’ is dying and a new role in Human Resources has emerged: The “HR Business Partner.”
00:55:52 Technology such as virtual assistants (such as ‘Ask Anna!,’ Ikea’s virtual assistant which helps you navigate Ikea’s vaste website of products) and employee self-service (ESS) automate the Q&A process as much as possible so less and less human interaction is required for mundane, repetive tasks and questions, freeing your qualified and trained employees to work on more important matters.
00:59:01 Companies used to have an expensive and inefficient decentralized recruiting organization, whereby each location had its own application data base, and each location managed every aspect of its recruiting process. This meant that job applicants were required to apply for job positions at each individual location.
Centralizing these redundant processes – publishing job offers, pre-selection, etc. – is less expensive and creates more synergy among the different locations.
01:14:53 You can’t be an expert in everything and a generalist in everything; you need both to maximize the Human Resources process.
01:16:38Outsourcing is “the contracting out of a business process to another party,” and offshoring is “the relocation of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting.”
Referring back to generalization versus specialization, companies prefer to outsource when a particular responsability isn’t a part of its core competencies, and financially it makes more sense to contract a professional to handle those responsibilities than to invest in the time and money making it a core competency.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his lecture Choosing between B2B & B2C business models, Aaron Levie encourages startups to do things that competitors and incumbents can’t or won’t do because it’s economiically or technally infeasible:
Find out where in an incumbent’s business model and financials that they absolutely cannot afford to compete on price (or time, or quality), and then undercut them, or find unusual or unique ways of monetizing customers, and thus not really practial for anyone else to do.
Identify your company’s strengths and what makes you authentic
Identify and understand what is most important to and relevant to your ideal candidate
Identify your competitors unique selling points and how they are pitching their employer branding
Market your employee value proposition with the strengths competitors have not claimed.]
01:28:52 The absence of, or perceived absence of, competition tends to lead to lousy work.
Software to Manage Your Entire Company
00:01:20 HR Software providers (as of Oct 9, 2013) Go to their individual websites and have a look at, and get the feeling of, what these kind of systems can do.
Typically, most overall HR software architecture looks something like this:
To summarize:
These systems allow you to maintain and organize your entire company organization and structure, always allowing you to see who works for who and who is the manager of who. This is important to know for performance reviews and appraisals, salary, approval for vacancy requests, etc.
Tracking the career of each employee from first interview to hire date, promotions, special projects, to when the employee leaves the company.
Desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone friendly
Succession – knowing who could step into a position with little notice were a high ranking employee, such as the CFO, were to leave.
00:07:32 User-systems are consumer-facing software which have an impeccable and intuitive user interface which the average person can use immediately and without any required training: email, facebook, twitter, learning portals…
Expert-systems are extremely difficult to use and require formal training to effectively use it: HR software, Photoshop, Microsoft Excel…
HR software as a recruiting tool
00:20:02 On the job candidate’s side, the employee fills in the required information on a company website, hits ‘send,’ and then they wait. On the backend of the website, however…
A manager posts a vacancy request on the company’s internal software.
That vacancy request is sent to the recruiting department, which creates an advertisement for the open vacancy. This online job posting is submitted to online job boards.
Job applicants can then see the open vacancy and apply for it.
All applications go to the recruiter for pre-selection.
The recruiter’s shortlist of potential candidates is then forwarded to the manager who made the vacancy request to set up job interviews.
After the candidates have been interviewed, a final candidate is selected to fill the vacant position.
The work contract is negotiated, prepared and signed by both parties
00:24:42 A ‘portal’ is a user’s personalized entrance into a system. It is the user’s administrative screen which gives that user access to every relevant part of the software. Sales representatives would not have the same portal page as an accountant or a HR employee.
These portals can be:
Personalized – based on your previous consumption and usage: For example your Amazon page.
Unpersonalized – the same for each user, regardless of their previous consumption: For example Google’s page.
00:27:43 The Hype Cycle for Human Capital Management by Gartner offers comprehensive reviews on existing HR systems. Each year, this hype cycle shows the level of ‘importance’ and ‘hype’ a particular HR tool has, as well as where it it is expected to go in the near future.
Video recruiting, considered a technology trigger in this 2012 cycle, was an up-and-coming tool used by HR recruiters during candidate selection. According to the hype cycle, video recruiting’s popularity will only increase in the near future as HR overestimates it’s usefulness before reaching a plateau and then falling drastically to the point where it becomes underestimated. Eventually it will likely be accepted as just another option in HR recruitment.
HR software Trends (As of Oct 9, 2013)
00:32:32 Popular trends in HR software include:
Bring your own device which entails employees using their preferred technological device to do their job: iphone versus Blackberry, laptop versus desktop versus tablet…
Social where social media platforms such as Twitter and Linkedin are used for collaboration and communication at work. For example, candidates can apply for a job with one click of a button using their already created Linkedin profile instead of having to input that information into the company’s unique system.
Mobile where employees and managers can do business using their mobile phones. For example conducting pre-selection of candidate applications while the manager is at the airport waiting to board his or her plane.
Cloud computing where data storage space is stored externally and backed up at massive storage facilities, allowing access to the information anywhere in the world at anytime.
Big data is value creation where unstructured, quickly changing data is mined and sorted to extract highly-potent and usable information about customers and other relevant information.
Managing Social Media
00:00:50 Five years ago, nobody would have considered social media as a part of Human Resources. The debate today is how companies can effectively use social media to help Human Resources best do its job.
00:02:50 There are actually companies out there who shouldn’t use social media because their company lacks the culture, legal conditions, and openness required to be successful on social media.
00:03:36 Web 1.0 sites are very simple websites where a publisher such as a newspaper, a consultant, a small business, etc.posts content and consumers read it. With Web 2.0, ‘consumers’ become ‘prosumers’ (producer/consumer) and both produce and use content. Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Ebay, each provides the platform, and prosumers work together to provide the content.
Social media is web 2.0, however what you find on social media are people, their social network, and the individual content created and shared (liked, pinned, tweeted, etc.) by the people. The importance of content depends on how many people like it.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in my interview with Web Developer John Foland that Google’s algorithm is like a voting system, and every link is considered a vote. But not all votes are equal: higher PageRank-ed websites have more heavily weighted votes.
So if website A is important and has hundreds of backlinks and links to B, and website C also links to B, but C is but a small site, then if B links back to A, that diminishes A’s vote to B by a little bit. And if B reciprically links back to A that diminshes the vote a lot more.
So from a selfish point of view, blogrolls and link sharing are a bad idea. If you want to be number one, you want a lot of people linking to you and you want to link to very few.]
This knowledge is important because markets change. When you’re happy or unhappy about a particular product or brand or event, you want to let everybody know.
Many Human Resources Marketing resources were written prior to Web 2.0.
00:33:43 An error on a retail website was selling Apple mac book online for only 49.99€. A man with a large Twitter following bought a couple and then tweeted the deal to his followers. This sale went viral and within minutes 1,000s of Mac books were sold. In the end the company didn’t honor the sales, but gave vouchers and held a lottery so some of the buyers did get a Mac book at that price.
The customers understood the mistake and appreciated how the retail website handled it.A potential social media public relations nightmare turned into a success.
There isn’t anything in Human Resources which cannot be supported via social media.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture How to Keep Quality Employees that one of the most important things for Millennials are their peers. One of the best things companies can do to retain their employees is to let them become friends.
The boss is also a very important factor with regards to whether an employee stays with your company.
You could have the best company reputation which attracts all the best job candidates, but if the boss or the peers aren’t compatible, then your employees will leave; employees join companies, but leave bosses and peers.]
00:41:13 When employees have work-related questions, they will more likely find solutions online or with their colleagues than immediately with their boss.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture Identifying & Developing Key Employees that ideally, a company would promote the person who demonstrates extraordinary growth and ability by learning and improving his or her skills the quickest, assuming that this growth and talent will continue into the future.
Ammunition – these employees are good at doing things and getting the job done. These employees are important to the success of your business.
Barrels – these employees are good at focusing and shooting the ammunition. These employees are crucial to the success of your business because they can take an idea from inception to production and because no matter how much ammunition you have, you need the barrel for the ammunition to be useful. Barrels are VERY hard to find, and when you find one of these kinds of employees, make them a priority. Find barrels and then stock them with ammunition.
How to identify the ‘barrels;’ the people to promote in your company:
Watch how they handle simple, stupid, mundane tasks such as having cold, fresh smoothies delivered to a group of hard-working engineers at 9:00 PM every night. Expanding the scope of responsiblity of your employees until they break shows you how much responsibility each person is comfortable with and ensures that that person is being used to their full potential.
Watch which person in your office has the most people approaching his or her desk, particular people that aren’t responsible for. In a working environment, people approach people who they believe can help them. If one employee has more and more people approaching him asking for help or guidance, then that person is perhaps a barrel; promote them and give them more responsibilities.]
00:47:26 Don’t just launch a Facebook fan page. Look at the company strategy and the define the target demographic the company wants to reach.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in my interviews with Data Consultant Thomas Palugan and Digital Consultant Aurélien Pécoul that one mistake a lot of brands make is thinking that social media strategy is easy to set up, but thinking it’s easy is not good. As soon as you have a facebook fan page, you suddenly have to handle important issues like:
“What is my community management style?”
“What is my conversation calendar?“
“What is the real value for the consumer of becoming new fan?”
“How can I distinguish between fans who are merely fans and fans who are also buyers and owners of my product, service, or royalty program?”
As soon as you have a fan page, you also have to have a crisis strategy. Because as you’re opening a page, you’re letting the possibility for everybody and anybody to talk with you, but also to critique or insult you. You need to find a way to be reactive and manage these kinds of situations. Opening a facebook page and simply posting things isn’t a safe solution.
Also, considering which and how many social media platforms you communicate on is also an important decision that depends on: Your demographic/target audience, the market you’re in…
Some brands think in terms of channels and not content. You ‘need’ a facebook page but don’t know what to do with it. You ‘need’ a website but don’t know where you want to go with it.
There was a time when everybody ‘had to’ be on facebook – no matter what – as it is a popular social network. Steven Brinlee, Senior Creative Director of AR NY points out that brands can get so “caught up in this forward momentum, it can become a sort of ‘me too’ default reaction for brands, causing them to be easily enticed into jumping headlong into the pool before taking the time to define what they actually want to be in that digital space.” But it’s important to remember that without a goal and a clearly defined brand objective there’s no reason for you to be on facebook, or any social network for that matter.
Finally, it’s really difficult to have a consolidated view of your market. If you’re a brand and you have 20 platforms, it’s not impossible, but it’s difficult to have a consumer-centric view. It’s also very important NOT to have a vertical strategy for each social media platform, but to link them all together. If you’re going to have that many platforms, you’re going to need an approch to help you organize all your data into one easy-to-read location so you can collect and analyse the data from the different social media platforms.]
00:48:22 Some companies are so out of date that they’ll need to be explained what all the different social media sites do and who they are for. In most companies the DRH is in his or her 40s-50s, and so wouldn’t be ideal for choosing the content for a Facebook page created to attract university student graduates.
A good blog is a blog which is read by many people.
01:05:11 Companies use social media in so many different ways that it’s difficult to classify, but can be boiled down to six basic types.
00:02:37 Control loop is the fundamental process of employee ROI monitoring:
Target/actual deviation – checking progress of employee based on expectations
Causes analysis – determining why any deviation or underperformance by the employee has occurred, or is occuring
Corrective actions – make the appropriate modifications to ensure employee meets target or that target is realigned to be more reachable
Repeat
00:04:46 Every number tells you something about your business, and there are many performance indicators HR managers can keep track of, depending on the company’s needs
00:07:18 Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture on Recruitment From Application to Offer that as a rule of thumb a company receives as many applications in a year as they have employees employeed. (10,000 employees? Expect to receive roughly 10,000 job applications per year = nearly 30 CV’s every day.
Take the following indicators (as examples among many) and then think a level deeper: How do you really evaluate these indications? It can be very complicated and subjective.
Employer branding – what is the number of applications you receive compared to actual employees? Are you viewed as a ‘desired place to work’ for job seekers? The question then becomes distinguishing quality job applicants applying for a position in your company versus a person informally looking for any kind of work they an find as quickly as possible.
Cost per hire – the dollar amount it costs (advertising or hiring an executive search company, screening, interviewing, psychological testing, sign-on bonus, relocation, onboarding, training, etc.) to go through the entire recruitment process? Recall from the lecture How to Keep Quality Employees that the total turnover cost of employee retention can range from 100%-400% of that position’s salary, depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position.
Time to fill and early turnover – how quickly can human resources fill an empty position? When does human resources consider the position officially ‘filled?’ How many new recruits quit before their trial period is over?
Employee training – How many days do your people spend in training?
Talent development – How long do your identified high performers – your company’s future leaders – stay in a position before they are promoted? Are they fast tracked or stuck in the same position for years?
Equality spread – What percentage of women, race, and ethnicity are in a leadership position?
Internal placement rate – How many key positions are filled by existing employees rather than hired externally?
Span of control – how many employees report directly to the same manager? Is your company too top-heavy or bottom-heavy?
Bradford Factor – How often are your employees not showing up for work, or absent from their post due to sick leave? For example, employees A and B may both have a total of 10 sick days for the year, but employee A who was sick one time for 10 consecutive days would be considered a more reliable and motivated employee than employee B who calls in sick 10 distinct times during the year, for example ‘sick’ the day following holidays or who are always ‘sick’ on Fridays…
There are so many performance indicators to choose from, that it’s necessary to look at them from several dimensions:
Ask yourself:
What performance(s) you want to indicate?
Why is it important?
For what reason is it really imperative – branding, legal obligation, etc. – to the success of your company?
As the leader, what personal values are most important for you?
What are the most important values for business success?
What values will you look for in employees?
What could never be tolerated? (Consider the opposite as values)
Remember to incorporate your mission into your core value.
The answers to these 5 questions should leave you a list of anywhere from 3-20 generic core values you want your company to be known for such as: honestly, integrity, service, teamwork…
You must then work to very precisely define what your company means by each of those core values, and how you can define them to stand apart from your competitors.
Thirdly, recall in Armin Trost’s lecture Identifying & Developing Key Employees that ideally, a company would promote the person who demonstrates extraordinary growth and ability by learning and improving his or her skills the quickest, assuming that this growth and talent will continue into the future.
Ammunition – these employees are good at doing things and getting the job done. These employees are important to the success of your business.
Barrels – these employees are good at focusing and shooting the ammunition. These employees are crucial to the success of your business because they can take an idea from inception to production and because no matter how much ammunition you have, you need the barrel for the ammunition to be useful. Barrels are VERY hard to find, and when you find one of these kinds of employees, make them a priority. Find barrels and then stock them with ammunition.
To identify the ‘barrels;’ the people to promote in your company, watch:
How they handle simple, stupid, mundane tasks such as having cold, fresh smoothies delivered to a group of hard-working engineers at 9:00 PM every night. Expanding the scope of responsiblity of your employees until they break shows you how much responsibility each person is comfortable with and ensures that that person is being used to their full potential.
Which person in your office has the most people approaching his or her desk, particularlt people they aren’t responsible for. In a working environment, people approach people who they believe can help them. If one employee has more and more people approaching him asking for help or guidance, then that person is perhaps a barrel; promote them and give them more responsibilities.]
00:27:17 a balanced scorecard reflects how the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your company’s financials, processes, employees, customer management and customer satisfaction relate to your company’s unique vision & strategy.
One principle vision of your company should be growth, therefore your scorecard should measure and track performance indiators for that.
00:32:09 When implementing an indicator system, you need to inact early warning signs so you can see when things are going wrong before they become a serious problem, for example being able to determine how many emloyees may leave the company in the next year. It’s better for you to have potential recruits to immediately step empty positions than to have several open positions and nobody to fill them in the immediate future.
00:38:52 To be truly efficient, everything you do must as a starting point relate to solving a problem. Problems lead to certain costs which can, and must, be represented by a tangible dollar amount in order to be able to convincingly explain it to decision makers. An employee survey should be made with the intention of solving a specific problem. Going around doing things without knowing which problem(s) you want to solve is not only inefficient, but is expensive.
How much is something worth? You can’t simply predetermine this. It is worth as much as somebody is willing to pay for it.
How much would you pay for a bottle of water? How much would you pay for a bottle of water if you were stranded in the desert? The price (worth) of a product is made up of the components of:
The material used to make the product
The material used to run the business (labor & infrastructure)
The profit made from the sale of the product
00:47:55 Human Capital Value Added is equal to the company’s revenue less total costs less labor costs. The more knowledge- and people-intense a company is, the higher the human value capital added will be.
01:00:03 In key functions in your company, such as in managerial, sales, and R&D departments, for example, their average added value should be worth twice that of non-key job functions. Ideally, managers should be to your company at least twice as valuable as the manager’s employee. If your highest performing employee has the same Human Capital Value Added as your lowest-performing manager, then you’ve identified the employee to promote, and the manager to demote or let go.
The performance of an above-average software developer is 10x the value of an average software developer.
The above chart shows the Human Capital Value Added (HCVA) for each type of employee: How much each employee actually brings into the company after revenue and labor costs have been taken out. In the above example below-average performers both in key functions and non-key functions actually cost the company money, -11 and -25 respectively, while the above-average performers in key and non-key functions bring money into the company, 88 and 14 respectively.
With the above information, you can then calculate the cost of increasing the efficiency of your employers, as well as your ROI of those costs:
01:07:40 In the above slide the benefits of attracting and recruiting above-average A players becomes visibly obvious, and shows the importance of your company’s employer branding strategy and talent recruitment processes.
241. 30 Hours with Grant Cardone: Mastering the Business Cycle, Sales Cycle and Becoming Wealthy
82 videos. 101 links. 563+ takeaways from this 30 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 30 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from Grant Cardone’s Youtube Channel blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ENTOURAGE, HARD WORK, SACRIFICE, LUCK & POTENTIAL
An entrepreneur is “a person who organizes and operates businesses taking on greater than normal financial risk in order to do so.”
By this definition most ‘entrepreneurs’ aren’t entrepreneurs at all because they are too afraid to take on the risk. So they have a business idea yet hold on to their money out of fear. You cannot be an entrepreneur who also saves for retirement.
Bad products exist because people quit, gave up on their goals and settled for less.
Simon Sinek‘s question “What is your WHY?” is a great leadership philosophy, but it is missing the major point that nobody ever wants to talk about: Money. Everybody’s WHY is money. Nobody cares about the WHY of a person who doesn’t have any money.
Spend 30 seconds each day setting goals, then spend the rest of your day taking action:
Taking action: Goals ALWAYS take longer to achieve than expected because humans tend to grossly underestimate planning and execution as well as external, uncertain forces they are up against.
Setting goals: When setting your goals, don’t settle for ‘realistic’ goals because that is what they were taught to do, because ‘failing’ has a bad meaning in society, and because it feels good to reach goals.
And when setting your goals and timeline avoid the error of seeing your ‘goal’ as the end result and forgetting that after that goal comes another goal. Therefore, rather than set a goal of having 500,000€ in investments, set for yourself 5,000,000€ in investments. Even if it takes you 30 years and many failures along the way, you’re far better off financially and psychologically by failing to reach the larger goal than you are the smaller goal.
And don’t worry about what people might think of you. People don’t pay attention to you until you break through obscurity and stand out. Luck will always play a role in your success (and failure), however the majority of people who see your success don’t acknowledge all your hard work, sacrifice and learning but are quick to call you lucky. But the few who understand and have wealth will want to collaborate with you. Breaking through obscurity and attracting their attention is what brings you closer to your goals.
Good things don’t just happen without a lot of hard work and sacrifice. If you want something it’s going to cost you. This is why you must be clear on your dream and vision, and not let anyone get in your way.
When you see an opportunity don’t just sit there and watch it happen. Do something! Spectators pay and watch. Players perform and get paid.
Sometimes the clients, roles, projects, and opportunities you get are ONLY because you happen to be in the right place at the right time, and had you not been at that specific place at that specific time, the decision-makers would have simply chosen someone else. The world continues without you.]
You let fear demotivate you out of taking action – fear of rejection, failure, judgment… – which is how the majority of the world have been raised to act. This is one reason why most people are poor, risk-averse and unhappy with their lives.
You let fear motivate you into taking action toward whatever it is that is causing fear. You’re afraid of asking for a raise you feel you deserve, so you set the meeting with your boss. Very few people in this world have been raised to act this way. This is one reason why those few successful people would say they are happy and why they have accumulated so much wealth.
Nothing comes for free, and to accomplish anything of value in life you must overcome your fear. Everybody experiences fear, and you have two ways to approach fear:
Entrepreneurs do not take the risk to save the world. They do it to get money, and they save the world in the process. If you have influence, money, courage and you are unselfish, there is no limit to what you can do.
When people want to pay you through assets (money, crypto, property, professional network, exposure…) other than money, don’t tell people ‘No.’ Barter with them! Figure out what you need to do to say “Yes” because anything is better than 0€.
Everything you have today is the result of how good you were at selling yourself. Unhappy with your current station in life? It’s because you’re not good at selling yourself. Get better at sales.
Are you in a situation or in a job you hate? Good. Now condition yourself to endure it anyway, and learn to do it well and even be respected for it. Instead of hating it, accept you are there because of your past decisions in life and start learning your lessons so you can change for the better: get great at what you hate and learn as much as you can as soon as you can so you can then evolve for something better that you won’t hate. Every day you’re required to do things you hate. You have to do things you hate to get where you want to go; success is built on the foundation of enduring things you didn’t like or want to do. You hate interviewing for jobs? You better get really good at it if you want to get a job.
Sales people have control. Buyers don’t. Never be a buyer. Always be a seller. Even when you give your money to someone else, you should be able to take what you get in return and extract greater value than what you paid.
Even if a poor person’s ‘Why’ is to make the world a better place, poor people are unfortunately selfish because their lack of money and resources forces them to concentrate only on their own immediate, short-term expenses: food, shelter, clothing, debt… Rich people have the money, resources and professional connections to literally change the world.
Bad people do certain things, and though they try they can’t hide it; there are always clues and red flags. When choosing business and life partners, pay attention, develop your intuition, and trust it.
Potential is “having or showing the capacity to develop into something in the future.” It is “latent qualities or abilities that may be developed and lead to future success or usefulness.” Potential is always more than you are currently doing, and is something you will never fully reach.
Potential is not about managing your time or money, it is about creating time and money. Why spend an hour each day optimizing your day and controlling your finances if at the end of the day you haven’t earned more money from it? You could have spent that hour earning revenue or value.
Most entrepreneurs seek get attention online by starting an Instagram account or a Youtube channel only to be surprised at how little content they have, or how poorly adapted their content is across platforms. For example, a trainer may be great providing small, face-to-face training, but uploading the recording of those trainings may fail tragically when viewed as a video on Youtube.
You must be recognized and respected for what you do, and what you offer must be of equally high quality across platforms.
If your friends aren’t changing, you’re not improving. Potential is what pushes people away from you and attract others towards you. You want to fulfill your potential? Don’t expect to have the same friends in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years… Friends easily come and go, but your wife and kids you better choose very wisely because you will pay very dearly if they leave.
Awareness and curiosity lead to wealth. You need mastery of who you are, the environment you’re in and the players and decision-makers around you: who is sincere, who is a fraud, who is a thief, who has money and opportunities for you and who doesn’t…
Compared to Elon Musk, yes, you are doing nothing. Compared to Henry Ford who “pioneered a system that launched the mass production and sale of affordable automotives to the public” when nobody understood them nor wanted one, yes, you are doing nothing. Rather than become discouraged, allow other people’s success inspire you to reach potential.
Spectators don’t win. To reach your potential you have to spend money and take risks to break through obscurity and get access to people who can offer opportunities.
Successful people are constantly being offered opportunities, or they are creating them. That is one of the upward spiral benefits of being successful. Success attracts opportunities. Success creates success.
Successful people will not close or turn down opportunities because they don’t know how the world will change tomorrow. They may “not be available to take your call or interested at this time,” but they won’t close doors and opportunities that may come back to haunt them in the future.
Successful people will never tell you your goals are ‘too big’ or ‘unattainable.’ They won’t say “You can’t do that,” instead they’ll say “How are you going to do that?” It is the lower level employees and managers who say ‘that is not possible’ and ‘that doesn’t exist.’ Don’t surround yourself with people who say “You can’t do that.” Surround yourself with people who ask “That is a worthy goal. How are you going to do that? How can I help?”
Successful people assume their position and status by not accepting tasks that aren’t equivalent to what they are paid. Intelligent companies don’t pay their director 10K€/month and then have him/her clean the toilets, mop the floors and mow the grass. Intelligent companies pay their employees what they are worth and push them to reach their full potential and perform more.
Thing is, all of your hard work, sacrifice, luck and potential amounts to NOTHING if you do not surround yourself with people who inspire you, support you and propel you forward.
If you had more money as a 12 years old than did as a 28 years old, WTF happened?!
If you liked yourself better when you were younger than you do now, WTF happened?!
How can you convince other people to believe in and invest in you when you don’t believe in and invest in yourself?
resistance
HOW (NOT) TO HANDLE GROWTH, SUCCESS, FAME AND RESISTANCE
Start by looking hard at what you waste your time and money on, and why. What real value do social nights and weekends for?
A pack of cigarettes cost 10€
Entrance fees to most clubs & entertainment venues cost 10€-200€
Alcoholic drinks cost 30€-200€, and the more you consume the easier it is to spend money
Food to accompany your alcohol costs 25€-200€.
A taxi/Uber ride home afterwards costs 20€.
A hangover ruins most of the following day’s productivity.
A box of condoms cost +6€
Chlamydia treatments start at 150€
COVID-19 treatment costs 14 days of self-quarantine and +200€ in treatment
A weekend out with your friends and a bad scenario can realistically cost you +400€. And what do you have to show for it?
That said, money is not the end goal. Money provides control. You need control of your wealth and your environment. Even in difficult circumstances as long as you have control, you will be okay.
Money gives you choices. Control and choices are what you really want in life. When you don’t have any money you have little control and very few choices. As you start earning money, don’t let the money control you and limit your choices. Rich or poor, if you don’t control money, it will control you.
Easier said than done, but don’t live paycheck to paycheck. From every paycheck before paying any other bills commit to setting aside some money for when you inevitably need it you don’t have to start over again broke. Aim for 6 months of living expenses in a savings account as quickly as possible.
Start your career by finding a line of work that favors growth and wealth. Then use your wealth to make a difference. Go into an industry that is big and where there is ‘a lot of scale and growth potential.’ Then specialize and establish your reputation.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Grant’s advice appears to be different than Peter Thiel’s advice in Lesson 91. Competition is for losers, aim for monopoly, where Peter argues you should avoid competition; it’s better to have a big piece of a small pie. The bigger the pool, the more the competitors. The more the competitors, the harder it is and the longer it takes to stand out from your competitors and the greater the risk of a price war, where competitors race to offer value at the cheapest.
Treat everyone with respect. Don’t aim to be ‘middle class.’ Don’t compare yourself to others.
You must become a better public speaker, however you will never be able to always express yourself and get your points across perfectly. The camera is always rolling and people are always only hearing what they want to hear. Quite often, you will explain yourself and your ideas terribly. People are going to hate you or be offended, that’s their decision, which has nothing to do with you.
Branding as a form of free advertising is imperative to grow. Develop a distinguishable brand signature that gets attention – a style of speaking or dressing, a catch phrase or motto… – and make sure it is evident on everything you touch.
Online visibility is important to break through obscurity and keep your sales funnel large, but don’t let ‘likes,’ ‘shares,’ and ‘comments’ define who you are. And don’t let insults and complaints hurt your feelings either. You must be stronger than that if you want to survive in business and become wealthy.
We live on a broken planet who aren’t necessarily lazy, they just don’t know how to improve and optimize because they have never been taught. So it is hard for them to find high-quality, highly-productive, above-average performers because they are in such high demand and because there are so few of them. Distinguish yourself as one of those rare professionals, and you’ll have no trouble standing out. Smart companies who have difficulty attracting and hiring these rare people grow your own high-performers internally. And of course, very shortly thereafter headhunters will start circling your business.
When you start reaching some level of success and fame, do not make the mistake of growing slowly. This is your once in a lifetime opportunity to seize the moment while you have everyone’s attention and showcase your potential: not what you have done in the past, but what you can do in the future. Go all in. An opportunity like this will not happen again.
This is because the world is too small to for you to build a reputation based on your past successes and expect to stay on top for long. Somewhere in the next city, state, or country there are:
Startups about to launch a software that will undermine the way you currently do business.
Unknown competitors willing to provide similar quality for a cheaper price and steal your clients.
Even more aggressive, strategic, and better equipped companies who sooner or later will stumble across your market and monopolize it.
One negotiation strategy companies use to demonstrate power is to shield their final decision-makers by placing levels of other negotiators in front of them like a labyrinth that must be navigated or an army that must be conquered. The downside of this strategy is that you can miss out on extraordinary opportunities that require quick responses, and you lose power to a competitor who brings their final decision-makers into negotiations early. Being able to tell the client “I want to do business with you. I don’t have other people in my team to convince. I am the final decision maker” is a very powerful sales and negotiation strategy.
No matter how much work is thrown at you, never allow yourself to be or appear overwhelmed. You become overwhelmed when things that happened or information you received in the past you allow to control your present because you weren’t prepared. You lose when you are overwhelmed.
The problem with success and growth is it is so hard to obtain that once you’ve gotten it you become afraid to lose it, so your confidence in yourself to take risks to continue growing reduces. So you start bragging about your successful 9,000€ deal (past events) and looking for other familiar, easy 9,000€ deals when you should instead be preparing to do 90,000€ deals.
Don’t focus on what you did. Focus on what you can do.
When you were just starting out you had nothing to lose. With a couple of wins and a reputatio, now you’ve a lifestyle, you’ve debt and obligations, you’ve a taste of success and the fear of losing everything you have worked for can be very intimidating. You always need more and more courage.
With fame and success comes the important responsibility of balancing your personal and private lives. What good is gaining a lot of money if you lose everyone you love in the process?
Now choose only two. If you’re launching a startup, then you must choose only one more and forget the rest. You’re launching a startup and have a family (wife and kids)? Then forget your friends, hobbies and everything else. Once your startup gets moving on its own, then you can replace ‘work’ with another fundamental element, such as friends or hobbies.]
There are no bragging rights for ‘working hard.’ Everybody can always work a little bit harder. You’re either optimally productive or you aren’t.
Balance in life is imperative, but don’t be in search for balance. Create the life you want so you can have balance. Invest time with people not because they are good for business, but because they make life for you better, and vice versa. There should be an exchange of value.
Have your priorities clearly defined right from the start. Time management is yet another activity and responsibility. What if instead of figuring out how you can better manage your time to accomplish more in a day in all areas of your life, why not start by extracting more value from the responsibilities you already have on your table?
Are you a father/mother? Don’t aim to be with your children 24/7. You’ll hate each other. Instead, give them liberty and instead control the time together so it is always a great time under your own terms. Same holds true for bosses, partners…
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Lesson 229. Becoming a strategic advisor to your clients that your client/romantic partner must have access to you all the time. Work/life balance is good, but it is also a very competitive world. Especially when you are just starting out in your career – your work and clients must take priority. If you’re not there when the client/partner needs/calls you, somebody else will be. Rather than thinking of work/life balance on a daily schedule, try to manage it on a weekly or monthly schedule: working extremely hard, but periodically building in long weekends.]
As you grow and gain more expertise, the notes you take at meetings change. You’ll already know 95% of what other professionals say, so your notes become a list of good reminders.
Lastly, with fame and success comes easy access to the lifestyle of alcohol, drugs their addiction. These can steal your potential, years of your life and leave you with a lifetime of regret and ‘what ifs.’ Don’t abuse drugs and don’t accept that behavior in your entourage.
If you’re not happy, don’t complain. Change. Adapt.
Starting something new and starting over are not the same things. You must always be building, learning lessons and making improvements so each project you launch benefits from your assets created along the way.
There will times when you must abandon projects, quit jobs, leave relationships and cut your losses. But that should always be immediately followed by starting something new the very next day. And before you even consider quitting, start adding more of what you like to the project, job or relationship.
Before you quit your job you hate, what would happen if you took control and just started aggressively adding on responsibilities you enjoyed doing and excelled at to the point your bosses pushed the responsibilities you hated onto other people?
Before you ‘fire’ a client who doesn’t pay you what you feel you deserve, what would happen if you found 5 more clients that paid you what you feel you deserve? That other client will either choose to stop working with you, or start paying you more.
Before you leave your partner because you’ve ‘grown apart,’ don’t let yourselves fall into a boring routine that allows you to take each other for granted.
Don’t quit as long as you can add, change, recreate, redefine and evolve.
Aim to be more successful than 51% of your competitors locally (or in your target niche). And as you strive for this goal ask yourself how you’ll achieve this and why you’ll have actually achieved it. Your ‘how’ should be by setting up superior technical and implementation processes as well as referral programs that are better than 51% of your competitors. Once established, you’re now in a position to strategically partner with other ambitious companies, license your superior processes to further dominate your market, offering them access to your solutions if they pay you 20K€ + 3% of annual sales.
Inversely, if you’re trying to break into an existing market, find that local company that has the superior technical and implementation process and partner with them, even if it requires paying them 20K€ + 3% of annual sales to use it.
methodologies
THE PROBLEM WITH MAINSTREAM SALES METHODOLOGIES
Grant Cardone : What is the Business Cycle?
All knowledge is not created equal. A lot of it is garbage that will limit your potential. More people are mis-educated in this world than they are uneducated.
All access to knowledge isn’t created equal. Spending +10,000€ to fly your sales team across the country for a 2-day conference with information and strategies they will not remember and probably won’t apply not only costs you money, your business just lost two days of sales prospecting and subsequent revenue.
If your revenue isn’t increasing, either you’re not doing what you’ve learned, what you’ve learned is no good or the amount of time and money lost learning it exceeds the value it brings.
+80 percent of salespeople have no playbook. If they do have a playbook it is likely subjective and unreliable. Give your salespeople a playbook they probably won’t read it because people don’t read anymore. If they have read your sales playbook they’ve either forgotten most of it or probably don’t do enough deliberate practice and roleplay to improve and perfect their art to provide consistent results.
Every human’s DNA is embedded with the desire for ‘greatness’, but 98% of people never learned what ‘greatness’ means.
People were never shown what ‘greatness:’ – Looks like internally – Feels like emotionally and spiritually – Is expressed like – Is received like
What greatness looks like in different areas: – Mother or father – Leader or manager
People were never shown the path to ‘greatness:’ – With sincerity and being natural – Not being manipulative or superficial
Jay Abrahams on Greatness
That said, aggressive half-day ‘pump and dump’ training workshops where professionals unload a ton of ‘knowledge’ on to your employees and then push them out the door lacks the slow, relaxed training and role-playing getaways necessary to boost confidence, lower defenses and open up, internalize the information and convert learning into the knowing necessary to return home and properly train their colleagues.
According to a LinkedIn survey directed at sales people:
80% of sales people have no playbook
82% of managers have no time for sales training
52% of sales people never follow up on leads
65% of sales people’s time is spent on non-sales related activities
44% of salespeople noticed an increased sales cycle from previous years
55% of salespeople anticipate a decrease in their sales pipeline
51% of salespeople say their clients have had significant budget cuts or were suffering layoffs and high turnover
business cycle
“A properly trained sales team results in 192% increase in sales, 32% increase in profits, 94% decrease in turnover and 600% increase in customer satisfaction.”
First master the business cycle then the sales cycle which is a part of the business cycle. Sell or be sold: every conversation is a sales pitch and you must instinctively now where in the sales cycle you are. Conversations, like a street fight, are a constant battle for control and advantage. The person with a strong defense and the most versatile offensive strategy wins. In every conversation look for the other party’s defense weaknesses and use that information to position yourself.
Marketing & Advertising. Many companies keep this process a secret, making decisions internally by relying on ‘professionals’ who may or may not organize small controlled focus groups. While this process maintains confidentiality and protects the company’s marketing strategy secrets until launch day, it’s slow, expensive, time-consuming and keeping your advertising circle small isn’t be the optimal way to design your advertising strategy and achieve reliable results. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more refer to How to Shape Human Behavior 2nd Edition for Advertisers and Lesson 55. Peter Spear on Brand Listening vs. Consumer Research & How To Develop A Brand Strategy.]
As an alternative, considering exploiting social media by sharing your advertising projects online and letting the internet decide immediately through likes, shares and comments. If in doubt, put it online and let your best content rise to the top.
Create Leads & Prospects. Every time a buyer takes time out of their busy day to sincerely contact you either to complain or verify information such as product delivery date, your sales team should be equipped to turn it into an upsell opportunity.
Whenever a client calls to complain their product wasn’t delivered on time, the sales person should be trained to respond: “I’m very sorry about this inconvenience. As a way of making it up to you can we offer you a 30% discount on your next purchase of any of our products?”
Whenever a client calls for any reason, the sales person should be trained to respond: “Hey, since you took the time to call us, we’d like to offer you a 30% discount on your next purchase on any of our products.”
Then, master the sales cycle which is simply to read a customer, qualify them, close the deal and follow-up.
Sales is the foundation all other soft skills are built upon: the ability to capture people’s attention, convince them of your value, and get them to invest in you.
Ironically, look at all the bad yet popular sales psychology techniques they teach you:
“God bless you,” but God has already blessed you by giving you all the wealth and opportunities you have today. Now go out there, prove God has blessed you, and use your blessings to your fullest advantage. Don’t be ‘blessed’ and spend your entire life doing nothing with it. You can do more with what you have.
“Work hard,” but wealthy people don’t ‘work hard’, they work smart (which sometimes means working hard for moments at a time) and invest their money wisely.
“First impressions are the most important,” but making a bad first impression ruins the deal; failing to follow-up is what ruins the deal.
“Be seen and not heard,” but what is the point of catching people’s attention by being seen and then not selling yourself, boasting of your offer and how you make other people’s lives better? You need to be seen and heard, nonstop. Attention is money.
“Always start by finding common ground,” but you don’t ‘need’ common ground to close a deal, you need to solve their problems. Compared to solving their problems, common ground is the last thing the buyer cares about.
“People buy from people they like,” but people buy solutions from people they don’t like all the time just to get a problem solved.
“Competition is good for business,” but competition only benefits consumers, not entrepreneurs. Intelligent businesses understand competition is for losers; aim for monopoly.
“Patience is a virtue. Slow and steady wins the race,” but technology in the modern world changes from second to second. You literally go to sleep and wake up in a different world. Yes, patience over the long-term, but quick decisions in an environment you control.
“Build a relationship with the client first,” but your priority is to produce revenue, not build relationships. Build a relationship with someone by offering them value and solve their problems. Income, revenue, sales are your top priority.
“Practice makes perfect,” which is true but is missing the most important element: “DELIBERATE practice makes perfect.”
“I’m a perfectionist. Six Sigma: 1 error per million.” (see Lesson 237. with Tai Lopez) but again technology in the modern world changes from second to second. Yes, patience over the long-term, but quick decisions in an environment you control. ‘Perfectionist’ is an elegant word for ‘slow’ and ‘lazy.’
“The longer you spend with someone the better off you are,” but for most people the longer you spend with them the less they like you because you’re taking away from their time on other things and people they consider more important than you, a stranger. Learn how to compress time so you can communicate the same messages – verbally and non-verbally – in shorter amounts of time so you can give the client room to breath and think while you simultaneously use the saved time to grow your pipeline.
“Don’t mix business and family,” but if you can’t raise money from your family who say they believe in you, then how bad is your business idea and/or professional reputation?
“I love you just the way you are,” but what got you to where you are today will not get you to where you want to go tomorrow. Staying “just the way you are” is lazy and in the long run you will lose.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” but how do you know what you can’t do, given enough responsibility. Over-commit and figure the rest out later. Schedules, deadlines and budgets are constantly changing, especially with decision-makers. A genuine promise made on Monday to meet a client at their office on Friday can be understandably canceled if the government declares COVID-19 confinement on Wednesday. You don’t know what promises you can’t keep, so always over-commit.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” but only professionals willing to commit and make promises make it to the final decision-making table. 1 job opening, 100 candidates. Make the promise you will succeed to stand out or stand in line with the other 100 candidates.
“Don’t pressure a client,” but if you truly believe and are 100% certain in your product’s or service’s ROI and you like the client, then shame on you for not insisting they take this offer before it is lost.
“Don’t talk to strangers,” (said to children) but it is the strangers who have everything you want: money, promotions, job opportunities and everything else you need to be successful in life. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. This is why the idea of the solopreneur is nonsense.
“Be careful,” but you don’t win by protecting yourself, pulling back and retreating; you win by attacking and taking risks.
“I’m not good at sales and negotiation. It’s not who I am. I’m shy/introverted,” but maybe who you are is a part of the problem. Maybe it’s not who you are, but who you let yourself become. Will you not change your mind and who you are as you experience and learn new information? Don’t be who you are; be who you need to be. Learn to be interested in and curious about people.
“Buy low, sell high,” but that is not how business works and not how you make money in the long-term. “To build long-term wealth, you’re better off buying a great product at a high price than an average product at a ‘good’ price.” -Warren Buffet
“You need an education,” but the education system doesn’t teach you how to make money, keep money, nor how to make your money grow. All knowledge is not created equal.
“Money won’t make me happy,” but you don’t have any money now and you’re not happy.
“Do something you love and the money will come to you,” but you must first do things you hate to find or afford to do what you love. You have to be willing to do the hard, thankless dirty work before you can do what you love.
“Settle down. Less risk is safer,” but if you aren’t growing, you are slowing going out of business or losing your job to someone else willing to take risks.
“I don’t need to be rich,” but that is a selfish mentality because you could have earned more money and used it to help others in your community or a non-profit organisation that actually does good in the world. Rich people can literally change the world. Poor people can’t even cover their own expenses because they are so consumed with their own basic needs to stay alive.
“Don’t take risks. Diversify your investments,” but to build wealthy quickly you must find one or two intelligent investments and go for broke; go all in. And then start over. The only people who benefit from diverse investments is Wall Street.
“Save your money,” but you cannot become wealthy by saving; it requires debt and sacrifice. Any money you have ‘saved’ quickly goes to $0 with inflation.
“Work within the client’s budget,” but a budget really is just some subjective, unverified number the client set in place as an attempt to limit their own impulse to spend, likely because they have already spent so much money on so many other things that didn’t meet their needs.
“Work within the client’s budget,” but a budget is approaching solutions as an expense rather than as it should be: an investment. A purchase should be focused on the return on investment, not the price. [Refer to Lesson 228 : Anatomy of a top candidate salary negotiation.]
“Smaller is better,” but you’re either growing or going bankrupt. Which means if your competitors are getting bigger, you’re going out of business whether you recognize it or not.
“Only offer your customers the best,” but ‘the best’ is subjective and nothing stays the best for long and is quickly replaced by something or someone who is better, stronger, smarter and/or more financially-backed than you. A well-written business book may be useless 5 years after it is published, and a poorly-written book with grammar errors might provide golden insights that still work 20 years later.
“Listen to customer complaints” and “Handle client objections,” but how do customers know what they want/need? People complain because it is not their ‘ideal,’ but people change their mind all the time; especially as they age and learn.
“In sales it takes two to do business,” but in reality it only takes the sales person to make the decision to sell, and eventually the buyers will come. Apple did not build the smart phone because people wanted it. Henry Ford did not build the first car because people asked for it. Howard Schultz did not did not create Starbucks coffee because people wanted an expensive coffee shop.
“Your business must stay up-to-date technologically,” but while you need technology to attract the younger generations and the mass population, the ultimate buyer’s decision is human to human, not technological. Technology is just another tool to get you face-to-face with the buyer.
“Protect your product/service/content so people can’t steal it from you,” but it shouldn’t matter that people are getting your stuff for free because those people wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. What matters is that your ‘stolen’ or ‘bootlegged’ products become free advertising for your future products and services, which you can monetize. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: Refer to Lesson 30. with Roc Chaliand for more.]
It is human nature to complain and be unhappy. Comments such as “You’re too expensive,” “Your product doesn’t do X or Y,” and “Your product should have been delivered a week ago.” are complaints. If you have a great product, instead of listening to customer complaints, increase your sales pipeline and get more clients. There are +7 billion people on this planet, don’t waste your time apologizing.
If something is popular, assume it is wrong and already too late. At best, take it for directionally good advice (Lesson 89). If what you sell isn’t popular, or goes against popularity, understand people will naturally be reluctant to change and that you will be ignored or attacked.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in my interview with Rory Sutherland that “Bad models, once they’ve become widely accepted, have an extraordinary capacity to survive – through a kind of lazy consensus” and that many people have careers, advancement, and promotions dependent on basically these widely accepted methodologies. Once you’ve invested a lot of effort in learning the lingo, you’re pretty reluctant to abandon it.]
Know the difference between an objection and a complaint. In sales, complaints are features they dislike about a product. “It’s too expensive.” “I don’t like it.” They are the prospects showing reluctance about what they don’t like. Complaining says more about the person complaining than it says about you.
Social media is NOT for direct sales. Do not expect to get paid much through it. These platforms were designed to distract and discover. The ONLY reason to be on social media is to meet people, and to meet them frequently. Quantity before quality.
middle class
REASONS WHY THE “MIDDLE” CLASS IS A LIE
Most people underestimate just how much money is required to be ‘free’ in America.
In the court of law in America, $1M is not enough for an innocent person to defend themselves against an ugly divorce or a frivolous lawsuit.
Assuming no problems and health emergencies and no inflation, $1,000,000 in your savings account and no additional income:
A retired 65 year old with a total monthly living budget (rent, utilities, groceries…) of $4,000 (3,300€)/month will be broke within 25 years, or 90 years old.
A 27 year old with 2 children that you want to offer a good university education to, you’re already broke.
Truth is being poor, living paycheck-to-paycheck requires an insane amount of creativity and entrepreneurship.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In a LondonReal interview, Robert Kiyosaki explains that poor people will always be poor because being poor is a mindset, a mentality. The poor person says “I can’t afford that.” The rich person asks “How can I afford that?”]
Average employees exist because people give up. The reason the ‘middle class’ exist is because they lowered their target and how much value they can offer. You are either driven by your own goals, or you’re an employee working for someone else who is.
The poor are poor no matter what happens. The ‘middle class’ are comfortable until the economy worsens, then they realize they have been poor all along. It is the rich who get richer when the economy tanks.
Politicians only ‘care’ about the middle-class during election time.
Everybody complains about the unemployed people who can’t find work, but nobody is talking about the millions of employed people who don’t work hard enough to deserve their job.
Life is an unpredictable and continuous transition and so there are three types of people:
Cannot adapt, will only suffer. For an unfortunate percentage of the population, they were born into a cruel, hard, painful life, and that is how they will die. Regardless of how much potential they have.
Half awake, eyes half open. For the majority of the population, life will be relatively good… until it isn’t. They were born into privilege because their family did the hard work, or they themselves worked hard and suffered to reach their status. Unfortunately the world’s constant transition of priorities and wealth mean they could lose everything they have tomorrow and finish life with a cruel, hard, bitter existence. Maybe they realize this, maybe they don’t know it yet. This is the majority of the modern ‘middle’ class.
Awake, eyes wide open. For a small percentage of the population, nothing shocks them. Their eyes are open, looking around at the world for opportunities and threats. They are curious, researching and understand their environment. Ready to go when needed. These great people are always valued in the marketplace.
There are 4 levels of action:
No Action – doing nothing and letting the world and opportunities pass you by. Not applying for a better job. Not improving your skill-sets. Not calling your friends and making plans.
Retreat – reducing your spending and activity as a form of self-protection from a perceived threat.
Normal – the trickiest and most dangerous – giving the appearance of success and productivity, however because you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck or not living up to your potential, the first sign of problems or market inflation you retreat and risk losing everything you’ve obtained.
Massive – say “Yes” to every opportunity and risk being overwhelmed with responsibilities and commitments, thus having new problems to solve.
You could be more productive being 100% committed on incomplete information than you would if you were partially committed on reliable information. I (Grant Cardone) encourages debt to grow financially, Dave Ramsey advises you to avoid debt at all cost. Both (of us) are successful, and both offer conflicting, contradictory advice.
You have free access to millions of euros of training and knowledge from world-leading experts around you every day. Find the ones who you understand the most and commit 100% to one strategy and listen to it over and over again until it seeps into your unconscious. Decide and commit. Bet the rest of your life and go all in on that strategy.
There is so much money available on this planet it is unbelievable. The US alone prints at approximately $541M each day.
The problem with the majority of the population is they don’t know how to make more money than what they are currently being paid.
This is why the middle class is becoming the poverty line. The median annual income of the ‘middle’ class is in decline, and this trend is irreversible because there are too many people involved. Yes, your currently better off than a 3rd world or a developing country, but for how long?
Yesterday’s definition of “middle class” is no longer accurate today, and the hundreds of millions of Americans who follow the “middle class” financial strategies such as ‘save your money’ are screwed. It is a lie perpetuated at the poor’s expense.
Are you better off earning 100K€/year as an independent or earning 100K€/year as an employee? Neither! 100K€/year is nothing! 100k€/year is poverty after taxes and expenses!
People lie, but the numbers don’t. 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck because few people save and most of their assets and expenses are purchased using (bad) debt. The housing market and college debt are the two major scams in the United States.
The ‘middle class’ is just as worried about money to the point of being a miser because they’re in so much risky debt and in a volatile global market that they’re afraid to give anything away for fear of losing it so they spend as little as possible. The COVID-19 pandemic has bankrupted so many ‘millionaires’.
You’ve spent so much of your life around the wrong people, you need to get into the room with the right people. And usually to do that you have to pay to get in: Conferences, Bootcamps, university, clubs…
And once you’re in your networking skills and sales scripts better be on point because you didn’t invest all that money getting into the company of professionals only to sit alone at the bar watching others make business deals without you.
Don’t go to university to learn. Go to university to build a quality professional network. Which means chose your university wisely.
That being said, don’t model your life after millionaires. Millionaires appear to be big, successful business players in comparison perhaps to where you are currently in life, but they can disappear with one bad investment, one lawsuit, and in the next economic downturn. Model your financial strategies after billionaires.
Billionaires don’t worry about quarterly improvement or saving money. Yes, a Starbucks coffee costs 5€. And if you saved that 5€ everyday for 30 years, you would have saved 55,000€. Now adjust for inflation and taxes and your savings will actually be closer to 20,000€. How is 20,000€ saved over 30 years a good investment strategy?!
Billionaires buy personal jets because they understand the ROI of buying time. Yes a personal jet depreciates in value quickly, but the amount of time you save traveling, plus that you can travel with and enjoy your family and friends, use it for establishing a professional network to set up future deals. The amount of money you can make thanks to having a jet is worth more than the price you negotiated.
Just like buying a car versus relying on public transportation. A car is more expensive but you have more freedom and mobility, and the amount of time saved during the commute can be better spent.
Start earning and using money and assets as early in life as you can, and only invest in things you understand, where you have total control and in what is indestructible. As much as you can invest in yourself – education and training, gaining knowledge and experience and building a powerful professional network (talk to strangers).
If you’ve done a training and you don’t immediately see results, either the training is the problem, or you are the problem.
If you’ve done multiple trainings and you don’t see results, you’re the problem.
Don’t start looking at financial investments until you have at least 100,000€ to work with, and don’t invest in ANYTHING where you aren’t 100% sure of it’s financial stability and future reliability. This 100% certainty requires you to research and learn about all investment options available to you.
Financially sound real-estate loans you can qualify for:
Residential loans, where you put a small percentage down and buy a 4 apartment property where you live in 1 apartment and rent the other 3 out at a price that at least covers the monthly loan payments.
You and your ability to cover the loan payments are the bank’s priority.
Banks will take the largest profit, but lenders tend to be very lenient with you and willing to work with you though you may have bad or no credit as long as you meet minimum basic requirements.
Commercial loans, where you buy a large property with many, many apartments that you don’t live in and rent out at a price that far more than covers the monthly payments. The larger the commercial property, the less attention is on you and priority is now on the income potential of the property. However they will still look at your:
Net worth equal to the loan amount.
Credit score, however as long as your net worth is large enough for the lender to recover their losses, a poor credit score will not disqualify you.
Track record, how many successful deals you have completed in the past and how reliable you are at managing your properties.
When money can solve a problem, it isn’t a problem anymore. That is the purpose of money, and debt. Money is to be strategically used, not saved. The best ROI you can get saving your money is nowhere near what you can get strategically investing it.
From a purely financial point of view, you need at least €20 million to be go beyond ‘middle’ class and be considered “rich.”
Millionaire is the modern day ‘middle class’. If you’re a millionaire and you’re driving a $100K+ car, you’re in trouble.
become rich
HOW TO BECOME RICH
STEP 0: Get from cash negative to cash positive.
Suffer mode is when you ruthlessly cut every expense – essentially living in poverty – until you have gotten yourself out of debt and can begin building.
If it takes you years of being in suffer mode because of your past financial decisions, then that is the price you must pay and lesson you must learn.
have love
STEP 1: Nobody starts from nothing. Build with what you have & love
Being simple means you can move fast. The more you have, the more you are responsible for, the more decision-makers you must manage and the more decisions you must make, the slower you are and the more opportunities you lose. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Lesson 138. The Next Revolution Will Be Psychological Not Technological that people tend to believe that complex problems require complex and expensive solutions, when in fact no budget with the right idea can do the job.]
Everything you see, hear and have, use to your advantage. This begins with how you talk to and about yourself internally; your self-talk. You could take the greatest training, access to the best professional network of people willing to help you and be set up for success, but if you let yourself talk bad about yourself, insult yourself and doubt your abilities, and surround yourself with other people to put you down, you’re doomed to fail before you’ve even begun.
If your target is money, you have the wrong target.
Change your target and you change your entire psychology and outlook on life. The goal is NOT to ‘be rich’ or ‘have $1,000,000 in the bank.’ Your goal is to be free and financially independent.
Every ‘verified’ account on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter account are people who aggressively want publicity and financial independence. Most of them also understand this publicity doesn’t come for free and are willing to invest if you can guarantee results. Better yet, don’t promise, first show them by offering them a gift: something of value which is quick and easy you can offer them that provides immediate results and gets them thinking about how you can solve their other problems. You now have a client.
A sample cold calling script for a copywriter contacting a company’s marketing director: “Hi! I’m Joshua SMITH, I’m contacting you because love the work you do and follow your company’s work for a while. You’re strong on Instagram but in my experience your value isn’t being properly showcased on LinkedIn. I’d love to fix that for you for free if you’ve 20 minutes for a virtual meeting I’ve 5 improvements I’d recommend which would increase exposure by as much as 20%.”
With a 40K€/year annual salary, it will take you 25 years to earn 1,000,000€ (gross), but you and all the other 40K€ annually employees are directly contributing to your boss’ future. Even if you are both lucky and skilled enough to negotiate your salary from 40K€ to 80K€/year, this only means you’ll have reduced your road to 1M€ from 25 full-time years to 13 years, assuming you don’t increase your expenses.
You suffer and you grind because you have no real assets other than your drive, your idea and your potential and you’re starting from zero. But what you have is not zero; nobody starts from nothing. So stop working hard to collect pennies and stop thinking that collecting pennies is you being productive. Stop selling your time/product/service for 50€ and start offering it for 5000€. Then figure out as quickly as possible how to attract people able to pay 5000€, and then create an offer worth paying 5000€ for. As soon as you’ve 1 client paying 5000€, immediately raise your offer to 10,000€ and repeat.
At the very least you need an online presence, a product or service you offer and a way for people to send you money.
All communication and online presence must be built to sell. Not built to use. Your beautifully designed website which is extremely easy to navigate is a waste of time and money if nobody uses it to give you money.
Regardless of your race, age, gender, social and economic situation or whatever other category you chose to focus on, nobody starts from nothing. Look around you for what you already have to build from: your assets, your liabilities and your story. In fact…
From a sales perspective, a panhandler asking for money shouldn’t change his dirty clothes or his location. He must change his ‘ask.’ He could earn far more money confidently asking people for 100€ than he would asking for 25¢.
Your parents/guardians meant well; they did the best they could with what they had available to them. But the best they had to offer doesn’t mean it’s still the best available to you today. In fact, most of it is useless to you today. You have this in common with billions of other humans on planet Earth.
Assets include far more than money. Money is the smallest of your assets.
Recognition is imperative. Your professional network and potential client base are your greatest asset. A deep network is nice, but you really need to scale so everybody knows who you are. Thinking you’re going to have a small, closed network of clients – or 1 full-time job – that you’ll take very good care of is middle class thinking.
ASSETS
OPPORTUNITIES
DEBT
Free time: – Work for free temporarily if you have no other choice: prove your value, made them dependent upon you and gain some experience and respect because you did the job well. Or refuse to work for free and go back to sitting on your couch at home doing nothing, don’t make any money and have nothing to show for yourself. The time has slipped by either way.
Network connections (deep and wide): – Professional connections – Social connections – Reputation – Family and supporting partner
Values: – Working hard – Being nice – Defending yourself – Morals and religious beliefs – Purpose & intention
Physical: – Money (cash, stocks, bonds…) – Property (houses, land…) – Equipment (phone, car, clothes, appliances…) – Internet access: billions of people are online. With and with a good offer and persistence you can speak directly to every one of them. – Free content: 500 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every hour. 98% of it is entertainment or useless to your future, but the remaining 2% will change your life for the better.
Personality traits: – Autodidact: Learn online and off and internalize quality content every day and. – Persistence – don’t give up despite setbacks – Tenacity – work hard without slowing down – Curiosity – everything is an opportunity to learn – Commitment – set goals and don’t lower your standards – Emotional maturity – stay calm during rejection – Dedication – go into the world and test what you have learned so far, improving your abilities as you practice
1. Anytime someone contacts you 2. Anytime you contact others, which is free to do 3. Upselling existing clients 4. Getting referrals from clients and employers 5. Recontacting clients who said ‘No’ 6. Tracking visitors to your website 7. Selling through your website 8. Tracking followers on social media 9. Following-up on complaints 10. Email campaigns 11. Contacting competitor’s clients
Debt: – Car payment – Rent and utilities – Living expenses – Upcoming expenses – Student loans
Addictions: – Alcohol – Cigarettes – Social life – Starbucks coffee
Now that you’ve assessed your current assets, opportunities and liabilities, your business model can be further divided into 2 parts:
What you are doing now to generate revenue, even if it is sub-optimal and downright dumb. Most businesses could realistically increase revenue by 50%-300% simply by researching, identifying and improving their existing offer and business processes: marketing, advertising, seeking referrals and extended relationships such as suppliers, reconnecting with former employees and suppliers, upselling existing clients…
What you aren’t doing, or are doing but could do better
A word of advice before you start contacting your professional network with business opportunities: Pitching your professional network is different than pitching strangers. With people who know you, you get one shot to pitch and if they are not convinced or are disappointed afterwards, you’ve damaged the relationship – and possibly access to their network as well. Don’t take your hard-earned relationships lightly!
decide
STEP 2: Decide, launch and learn as you go
Transitioning from a full-time employee working for someone else who gives you a paycheck to an obsessed entrepreneur working for yourself and earning your own paycheck is a different world which requires a different mentality; a mentality not taught to you in higher education.
When faced with multiple creative business ideas and don’t know what to do, start with the quickest & easiest to monetize
Never talk about (advertise) a product/service before you’re ready to sell it, and wait until you have everything ready to go before you offer it for sale.
Always sell a product/service before you have it. As soon as everything is lined up to be able to offer it, advertise the hell out of it. Promise first and figure out how to deliver it later. Demand for your product/service should outweigh supply.
Key performance indicators you must prioritize are:
Quality – how well your products/services exceeds the buyers needs & wants, how dependent upon you you can make the buyer, and how much money they have available to solve their problem(s).
Volume – your sales funnel – how many buyers you are attracting and who go on to buy. The buyers who find you and buy without much work is great, but they are the easy demographic. To get volume you need to convince the people who don’t yet think they need what you offer, and you’ll likely need to steal them from competitors.
Margin – how much money you have after each sale after all expenses have been paid. Given that quality, wealthy buyers demand quality and tend to have more money than they know what to do with, your margins can be exponentially higher if you can meet their needs/wants.
For every 1 person who buys your product, there are at least 12 others you haven’t yet found who would also buy.
When a few buyers control your volume and/or your margin, you are in a weak negotiation position. You have no options. You cannot walk away. You need them more than they need you. If the buyer knows they control you, you’re in even bigger trouble.
Ideally, you should have such a large volume that you can turn down opportunities, you should have a large enough margin that turning down opportunities does not create financial problems for you, and by making the buyer dependent upon you and your product/service to succeed, you are now in a strong negotiation position. you have options. You can walk away. They need you more than you need them.
You can always contact them later.
obscurity
STEP 3: Break through obscurity and get noticed
Nobody can be of value without first getting attention.
When nobody knows you or cares about you, your name is not important; therefore don’t start your sales pitch with your name; start with how your product/service meets the buyer’s needs/wants. What is important is your demonstrated knowledge of the person’s problems and your solutions you offer them to their problems. When you know something others don’t, they respect you, fear you and look up to you.
Understand who your target demographic is, but don’t limit yourself to just that demographic. Also consider proximity. If your ‘target demographic’ is hair salons, go to the hair salon closest to you and pitch them, but before you leave the neighborhood to find another hair salon, test the market by also pitching every business within a 5 minute walk from that hair salon. Make your offer available and highly-visible, then see who buys it. Don’t turn down opportunities because they don’t fit with your preconceived “target demographic.” [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more on identifying your target demographic refer to Lesson 237: 20 hours with Tai Lopez to learn how to create a turn key business with robotic income.]
Everything you do and say must be promotion, buy-in and leverage. You cannot get noticed without taking massive amounts of risk and action:
Internally. Your colleagues and superiors cannot promote you if they don’t know who you are and what you’re capable of.
Externally. Competitors cannot complain, hate or be afraid of you if you don’t threaten their revenue.
Externally. Strangers cannot like you or hate you or buy from you until they know you exist.
At minimum start with a website you can fully control and put as much information as you can on it because with such easy access to the internet buyers are easily distracted and prefer to passively search about products and their alternatives at their own speed before buying. Being on social media is good for exposure, but you cannot control the user journey and social media sites are designed to distract users with new content. You cannot control users on another company’s website.
In fact, assume your buyer is more knowledgeable than you in your own domain. So don’t expect them to do all of their research online and then go offline to meet you and buy your product; especially when your competitors sell one. Give them the option of buying from you directly on your site without having to meet and speak to you.
Once you have a good, solid, scalable business model that can bring other investors in without breaking or diluting or damaging the existing other investor’s confidence, a very quick way to rapid exposure and growth is to identify potential partners and investors who already have access to influencers and businesses who have direct access to your target market and who are not intimidated or threatened by what you do. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more refer to Lesson: 4. How your quest for identity & connection is subtly manipulated.]
Focus first on traffic, then on your sales technique. 100% of your traffic will not convert, and buyers may visit you many times before they buy. And during that time you’ll change your sales pitch and strategy many times. So focus on traffic so people know you exist.
Amazon doesn’t ‘sell’ you, they maintain a website that is easy to use, has millions of combinations of products and they focus on staying top of mind and keeping their sales funnel full: making sure all roads lead back to Amazon.
People who already have built up a following of your target audience are open to collaborating to create content. Going ‘live’ to answer questions on social media is a great way to ask a question and perhaps get air time on their live session. The comments section of those live sessions are great places to connect and collaborate with others also seeking to break through obscurity.
The risk of breaking through obscurity and increasing your sales volume is that your competitors will eventually notice. They may concede and let you take their client base from them, or more likely they may retaliate and fight back. You win either way:
The mere exposure increases which you didn’t have to pay for
To compete with you competitors will have to adapt and offer more, or concede
The already passive, weak competitors will fall even more behind and their clients will start looking at you
When you’re just starting out say ‘Yes’ to every opportunity that presents itself and that aligns with your long-term goal; even if isn’t what you want to do. You can’t enjoy the big opportunities without first doing the small opportunities. Think of the small opportunities as practice so you can handle yourself when the large opportunities present themselves. Saying ‘Yes’ to opportunities does not mean compromising your message and values. In fact, you are standing up for your values, which makes for interesting content.
Donating to non-profits and good causes is an honorable thing to do – and usually tax deductible, but don’t give donations anonymously; make your donations public so both you and the association benefit from as much exposure as possible. Professional exchanges are always about mutual benefit. As an added value, your clients can see where part of their money goes and potential buyers who align with your values can discover you and do business with you.
criticism
STEP 4: Welcome criticism because you’re going to get it either way
Intelligent buyers see through the manipulative ‘this is what I’ve accomplished for clients in the past.’ They take negotiation force by countering ‘I don’t care what you’ve done, what can you do for me today?’
Criticism is always constructive: Either it tells you how you can improve your product and sales pitch until the person buys it, or it shows you who your client is not so you don’t waste your time where you shouldn’t. And remember complaints are subjective. The people who complain today may be buyers tomorrow.
In fact, the more criticism you get, is what you need to do even more of. This way you have ‘haters.’ Haters offer you free advertising and visibility t han happy customers usually do. With haters comes admirers: Those 1 in 10 people who not only buy from you but promote you. Brand ambassadors, if you will. With ‘haters’ comes money.
Half of The United States of America hated Donald Trump, and that is one of the reasons why he became 45th president.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE:Sir John Hegarty and Dave Trott agree it’s more lucrative to have 9 people hate your work and 1 person absolutely love you than to have 10 people who think you are ‘okay.’]
Don’t set out to ‘prove’ people wrong when they insult and complain about you. They are merely judging you based on their reality as they see it in that moment of their life. That is not your problem. When someone judges you and you determine it is a judgment not worth taking seriously, say ‘Thank you’ and move on.
dominate
STEP 5: Control & dominate. Commit to the right things, no matter how “overwhelmed” you are.
The wealthiest 1% did not get there by being nice. They were ruthless, calculated killers who, once they became wealthy, changed their branding and backstory into diplomacy, community and giving back.
Control & domination begins with what you focus your attention on. You should be living in the present yet making future-oriented decisions. Letting bad memories and emotions of past failures and fears guide your thought process sabotages your ability to take the risks necessary to become successful and find happiness.
Professional athletes, when they are behind in points in a game, focus only on scoring points while trusting the unconscious strategy they spent countless hours practicing. Your business should be no different.
Control & domination begins with your business strategy and what makes you happy and enjoy living. Competing with others is not how you become happy. Enjoy life because there will always be somebody who is stronger, better, faster, cheaper, more intelligent, more attractive, wealthier, better networked, more aggressive… ready and willing to take away from you to protect themselves. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more refer to Lesson 91. How to Start a Startup: Competition is for Losers; Aim for Monopoly.]
Control & domination begins with the clarity of your communication; notably your introduction. “If your assumptions are incorrect, everything that flows from it are incorrect – your communication included. If you focus on the symptom and don’t know the cause, then you’ll pursue a bunch of tactical activities that will never get you anywhere.” –Jay Abrahams
Control & domination means building a strong relationship with the client and then sending other people to do the work on your behalf. The person you contracted to do the work on your behalf should not have the opportunity to then steal your client from you. Immediately after the work has been completed you send another person behind them to do quality control on your behalf to make sure your client is happy with your work and to up-sell them on future work with you. If the contractor you sent to do the work on your behalf steals your own client way from you, it is your fault because you let them. You were not present and didn’t maintain the relationship with your client.
“Most people, when they are stressed or growing, dig holes – either to hide in or to hunker down. Should you dig a hole? If yes, where? How deep? With which equipment? Should it be somebody else and not you digging the hole?” –Jay Abrahams
Technicians know how to use tools and work practically to accomplish goals as defined by the strategists. However they focus on earning short-term revenue to keep paying the bills.
Strategists are long-term oriented thinking about the long-term, end game. They will accept losing money for years knowing their actions will lead them to win big.
When managing large crowds of people, for example, think like a strategist: rather than have a single microphone for individuals in the crowd to walk up to and ask a single question, understand the population make up of the crowd, divide them into equal groups based on their skill-sets and background, and have each group collaborate to submit a set of questions which will provide greater benefit to the whole crowd, rather than to just one person – and by default – one demographic of the crowd at a time.
You determine your value and worth, not the market, not your employer or potential client. As long as you let other people determine your worth, you will never be paid what you’re worth and you’ll never reach your full potential.
Point is, you must have control your life and influence on the decisions made that concern you.
Independent or own your own business? You need to know everything about how your business works, even if eventually you pay someone to do certain tasks for you. Allowing others to make decisions on your behalf and without your knowledge and a defined protocol is setting yourself up for failure.
Raising children? Don’t spend hundreds of euros putting a fence around your pool to prevent your kids from drowning. Teach them how to swim and be comfortable around water.
“To build long-term wealth, you’re better off buying a great product at a high price than buying an average product at at ‘good’ price.” -Warren Buffet
Wealth, health, happiness and success each require hard work. But it is far more difficult and painful to be successful in a few things than it is to be successful in all of them. So you’ve amassed plenty of money, but is that considered success if you’ve lost your family and health to obtain it?
You are who you are based on your upbringing and your environment, and you attract what you are. If you’re angry and vengeful, you attract anger and vengeance. Jealous, you attract jealousy. You have to learn to identify, let go of and get above whatever it is that is holding you back.
Don’t sell your past achievements; it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Don’t sell your skill-sets; they could be useless tomorrow. Enjoy the present and understand it is temporary.
Also focus on the future: “What’s next? What’s new?”
Good and bad, the world is constantly in transition:
Today’s high school students are transitioning to university
Today’s university students are transitioning to a full-time career
Today’s military personnel are transitioning to civilian live
Today’s singles are transitioning to married life, and vice-versa
Anticipate, plan ahead and prepare for inevitable worst case scenarios so when the time comes you’re already at an advantage.
Too much responsibility and workload on your plate? Add more. Prove to yourself that you’re stronger than you think, and that you are able to rearrange and commit your time to get fulfill your responsibilities. Your colleagues and superiors must rely on you to agree on and then meet deadlines.
When you’re bored you risk becoming destructive. Drug addicts are committed to drugs. ‘Get rich quick’ entrepreneurs are committed to ‘getting rich’ even at the expense of other people. Commit to the right objective(s) and then go all in.
To effectively manage your time and workload, micromanage your time and track all the right statistics. What gets measured gets managed. Don’t highlight the negatives; communicate all statistics that validate and remind you of your successes.
Do not tolerate flat numbers and breaking even. With inflation and hyper-aggressive competitors around you, you’re either growing or you’re dying.
The sales process is a machine and money is cyclical; continually being passed around from person to person. Master the art of sales and attracting audiences and make it an unconscious part of your everyday life. Whether you are selling stickers for 2€, cars for 15,000€ or businesses for 200 million€.
If you’re uncomfortable with sales, there is something/ someone in your past and/or your present blocking you.
You were embarrassed when a girl you liked rejected you so you retreated deeply within yourself
A friend got mugged at gunpoint in a foreign country so you refuse to travel abroad or meet strangers
Your parents went through an ugly divorce so you avoid commitment and so ‘choose’ to live alone
Someone you know went bankrupt and so you refuse to make any investment whatsoever
here! Your parents have limited data, so they teach you good stuff and bad stuff. You have to know which is which. The super-rich you see today, they are probably doing all of the ‘bad’ stuff your parents told you not to do.
In sales it doesn’t take two. It just takes one who is committed to the other. And commitment involves turning down many other, possibly better, options.
Be ethical, keep your hands clean and be in control. Only promote and stand behind products you trust and you know benefit other people. How can you expect to convince others to buy a product you don’t like, trust and wouldn’t use yourself? Once you’ve done this, have full confidence to unapologetically sell as aggressively as you want.
selfish
STEP 6: Stop being selfish and start building your entourage & audience/sales funnel
The money in your pocket now was given to you by somebody else, and you will give it someone else who can offers you greater value in exchange.
The money in everybody else’s pocket should be yours, and you can prove you’ll give them greater value in exchange.
“If you can sell (pitch, promote and market). You can do anything.” Now is the time to be aggressive and go after what you want, because your success in 10 years depends on the decisions and actions you take today. Everything depends on now.
Don’t start small. Go big or don’t.
If you are currently small, stop and go big.
Get your spouse and family involved in your business and your targets. Include them in as many activities and decisions as you can. Bring them to workshops, training and conferences. When they don’t agree with you, you’re potential and opportunities are limited.
Set ambitious targets, write them down and then figure out step-by-step how to reach them. Exceed or fail to meet targets. Do not simply ‘meet’ targets like the +66 million US business do annually. Do not lower your targets once you have set them. Do not confuse your list of targets with your ‘to do’ list.
Micro-manage and be a control-freak to improve decisions. Live and die by the graph. People lie, numbers don’t.
Increase your activity and revenue streams. Don’t put all your revenue streams in one basket. Even if it is something you hate doing. Your first revenue stream funds your second, and your first and second revenue streams fund your target, long-term, scalable business.
Now that you have passive, steady income, routinely fire employees and people in your life who hold you back from meeting your targets. You can’t fire mediocre employees when they are your only source of income, but you can when you lower their power over your revenue.
Reinvest heavily in upskilling to better understand your market, demographic and environment, help you meet your targets and to attract leaders who offer greater opportunities. Ask questions. The more and better questions you ask, the more data you collect to make better decisions.
Learn and conduct due diligence until the right decisions become instinctive, then trust your gut feeling.
Treat mentors as introductions to other, bigger players’ and find as many as you can.
Focus on business automation so you can step away for weeks and focus on the next steps.
Simplify your choices whenever possible.
Reinvest heavily to get attention so you don’t stay small. Go for broke.
Use your network and skillsets to go where the leaders are and build relationships.
Dominate or collaborate. Don’t compete
Focus on making other people’s lives better, not making yourself wealthier.
The first thing you must do is get attention. Attention equals freedom. Even bad attention is good because you can control and redirect how your story is presented.
It’s not the other person’s fault if they don’t pay attention to you. It’s your fault your presentation isn’t interesting. Get attention, then ask for more.
Win without pitching. Your reputation precedes you and strangers contact you with opportunities.
Derail the pitch. Your professional network and accomplishments push you to the front of the line.
Gain the inside track. Connections of connections can be contacted to give you an advantage, such as contacting alumni from your alma mater or employees of former companies you’ve worked with.
Re-evaluate objective/approach. Find out what information you’re missing or angles you’re not exploiting.
Leave with your integrity and try something different.]
You’re not only in competition with your direct competitors. You’re in competition with noise: television personalities scaring consumers into not spending their money, husbands and wives complaining about not having enough money around the house, the entertainment industry pushing consumers to relax and be lazy rather than invest, Starbucks coffee who pushing people to spend all their money on coffee.
And even getting attention isn’t enough if the buyer doesn’t remember you at the strategic moment they decide to buy. You must stay top of mind so they don’t forget about you.
If you don’t go fast and you don’t get big, you’re dead next to the others who are moving quickly and growing. There is why being a solopreneur – “Working alone and for yourself, running your own business and doing everything on your own, keeping 100% of the profit…” – is stupid.
Don’t take the advice of ‘business gurus’ who build businesses that are dependent upon the ‘guru’ to succeed. Those ‘business gurus” principle source of revenue is selling their business advice in the form of books, conference tickets, monetized YouTube videos, etc. In fact, it is statistically likely they are living paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t take advice from quitters. Bad products exist because people quit, gave up and settled.
Be wary of advice coming from people who don’t practice what they preach; who provide a service for other people but don’t actually do it for themselves. Don’t take a financial investment class from a professor who doesn’t have his/her own successful portfolio. Don’t take for work a real-estate agent with years of helping others buy and sell property but own their own property.
How can people buy from you if they don’t know who you are?
Selfish, egocentric, self-defeating excuses
Selfless, allocentric challenges to overcome
“Iam introverted.” “I am too busy/tired...” “I‘m not smart enough.” “I‘m not comfortable talking about myself.” “That is not whoIam.” “I‘ll do it one day.” “Idon’t need money.” “Idon’t like sales.”
“Theyare people you haven’t pitched correctly to (yet)“ “Its not the right time for them(yet).“ “Theyhaven’t seen the right product forthem(yet)“
These are excuses and they are selfish and self-defeating. Don’t speak like a selfish, egocentric, self-defeating person, and certainly don’t work with and surround yourself with people who do.
Vincent Van Gogh loved art, but never told anybody about it; never sold any of it. That is a damn shame! That is completely selfish. By talking about ‘your’ introversion or ‘your’ lack of confidence, you’re assuming you’re special and that nobody else is like you. You’re saying it’s not easy for you but it is for everybody else. Do it because you can.
You hear statistics that people “prefer” video and audio content. What they don’t tell you is that 21% of Americans and 9% of French are functionally illiterate, and a large percentage of people who can read prefer not to.
The average person reads 1 book a year, and half of those books are romance novels.
Build an audience and be strategic about it. Done right even people who follow you yet never buy from you bring value bring you value. Apply this to online business strategy, your enemies will even bring value to you by following you on Youtube, watching your content, and complaining about you in the comments section.
The problem with exposure and success is that headhunters and recruiters want to steal your best talent from you, so you must also protect your business as you grow. Executive recruiters play chess with the corporate world. A competent, calculated recruiter could steal your best talent, tearing your empire to the ground. It’s your fault your employees leave, not the employee’s.
How can people buy from you if you don’t sell anything?
You have to have a product or service for sale if you want to make money. You might survive off donations and the ‘kindness of your fans,’ but you’ll never get rich from that business model.
And you cannot have just one product/service because you don’t know what people want, so offer a range of products and services that can be put together and taken apart and let the consumers tell you what they want. Grocery stores are experts at this. You run in to buy some some apples, and you leave with 80€ in groceries.
Why should people believe in your product if you don’t believe in it?
Don’t create shit and put it into the world. Create the greatest value you possibly can that solves people’s real problems and makes their lives better, and always be improving on your offer. You don’t want to “push” your products onto other people? It is a shame you feel so poorly about your own products and yourself.
Why must you make money on ‘every’ deal to win in the short-term if you lose in the long-term?
Smart businesses know how to lose money. They understand they are probably losing money right now and don’t know where they are losing it. So control how you lose money. You could spend 1,000€ in LinkedIn advertising and gain 500€ in sales, or you could lose 1,000€ on a single contract with a new client which turns into a long-term relationship where the client gives you 100,000€ over the next 10 years.
Know how to lose money so that it is good for your business.
To find a job, team or investors in under 72 hours:
Focus on the 5 companies you want to work with and do deep research into those companies. You don’t want to be in an industry, you want to work for the best companies in the industry who reward you the most, be it pay, promotional opportunity, or whatever else your’re after.
Find out who the real decision-makers are go sell yourself directly to them. Don’t waste your time sending your CV to strangers and applicant tracking systems who discriminate against you and waste your time.
Don’t play their job interview game and try to convince them that you have ‘skills’, show them you have ‘whatever it takes’ to get the job done.
You sent your CV to 40 companies and 3 called you back for a job interview offering you 50,000€/year. The last generation 20 years ago was happy with 50,000€/year. You need to change the way you think.
How do you know another company who didn’t call you back is paying their employees 80,000€/year?
As a manager or business owner, push your employees to their full potential. If they aren’t living up to their potential let them go. It might be difficult working short staffed but it’s hard to attract and keep people with potential when their colleagues aren’t.
Workers excel at doing their job and getting things done. These employees are important because they get the products and/services made, but without direction and guidance they can only do so much
Managers are the leader-type employees who excel at positioning and directing the right employee(s) at the right problems at the right time to ensure everything runs smoothly and gets done correctly, on time and on budget
Perhaps the most reliable way of identifying the high-quality employees to invest in and promote is to:
Continually expand the scope and responsibility of all employees until the employee reaches his or her limit, and is not willing/able to take on more
Look at how employees utilize their office space. Powerful-looking offices tend to be either very large and intimidating or very clean, orderly, and optimized if the office is small – an office where decisions are made and work gets done
Observe which employees’ office space is the most heavily-trafficked. Employees usually gravitate towards colleagues they know can and will help them with their problems. Find the employees whom the most employees go to most for help, and promote that employee to manager. Promote them, reward them, and then expand their scope and responsibility until they reach their limit.]
Following the traditional recruiting process, Grant Cardone posted a job announcement which resulted in 800 candidate responses and 6 hires, of which 4 turned out to be mis-hires. An enormous waste of time and resources. So Grant abandoned the ‘traditional job interviews’ and created the 6-part Whatever It Takes: The Ultimate Job Interview series as a creative recruiting solution to attract high-quality people and to avoid discrimination lawsuits as a result of asking the hard questions needed to identify top performing talent.
As a result of this recruiting series we hired 8 people, we hired all eight of them and got millions of views and additional recruits and counting.
Don’t hire employees, especially those who work on a commission, and push them to reach their sales targets. Instead, show them step-by-step how they can achieve financial independence, and then tie that to their performance at your company.
The US is the wealthiest country on Earth. Before COVID-19, 53% of Americans surveyed lived paycheck to paycheck. Since COVID-19, 63% of Americans have been living paycheck to paycheck. +60% of +22M companies either lose money or break even.
21% of Americans and 9% of French are functionally illiterate, and a large percentage of people who can read prefer not to. The average person reads 1 book a year, and half of those books are romance novels.
Monday’s hashtag is #ihatemondays. Wednesday’s hashtag is #humpday. Friday’s hashtag is #tgif (thank God it’s Friday). Sunday’s hashtag is #thelordsday. These are the people working in companies and looking for jobs. These are the people you are hiring, and if you’re looking for a job, these are the people you are competing against. They are either complaining about having to work, happy that they don’t have to work, or refusing to work.
Recruiters are hiring from a broken planet and most hiring strategies are useless. At the end of the day even the most refined recruiting process is essentially “giving the person a shot.”
If you say “there is too much competition out there to find a job,” what you’re really saying is “I’m an idiot.”
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Lesson 240. Post-COVID-19 job interview strategies & response templates for mid-level to senior executives that every company has their own hiring guide: selection methods to attract, identify and select ‘the best’ talent. If you don’t meet their guidelines, you don’t get the job. Unfortunately most of those selection methods are unethical, illegal, and not very accurate. The problem with the interviewing process is that it is tremendously biased and does not accurately predict long-term performance.]
By making a commitment publically that upon completion of a future accomplishment, you can then use that commitment and the resulting incredible exposure and public relations which will be crucial in making your promise a success. For example, one hour into Grant’s June 14, 2017 interview with Lewis Howes Grant commits to:
Raising $225 million to put down on the project and attract investors
$900 million worth of property available to buy (approximately 9000 apartments)
Finding enough investors willing to go public when the rich usually prefer to be discrete
Signing the deal live on Lowis Howes’ Youtube channel
Doing an interview afterwards to discuss the process and lessons learned
The amount of goodwill and free publicity involved for all parties in this transaction is so great that it should be easy to find enough investors to get the deal done. The advertising and exposure would almost pay for itself.
Point is, they should need you more than you need them. Recall in Lesson 189. Conducting effective negotiations when you ‘have to’ have the deal that you should never allow yourself to be put into a position where you ‘have to’ have the deal. Keeping a deep sales pipeline of many prospects with multiple streams of income puts you in that position of not ‘having to have’ any one single deal.
The economy is basically a monetary ecosystem of people who either have confidence or don’t.
Develop confidence and risk-taking. Don’t sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. Go out there and walk into a stranger’s office and offer them a job interview.
When you start getting comfortable and complacent, it’s time to leave.
passive revenue
STEP 7. BUILD MULTIPLE PASSIVE REVENUE STREAMS ON TOP OF ONE ANOTHER
Which is the safer financial model: 3 revenue streams earning 10K€/month or 1 earning 30K€/month?
Don’t start a business just to pay yourself 160,000€/year. For that amount of money you could get a comfortable job in a corporation with less stress and risk. Start your business and make decisions to pay yourself closer to a 1M€/year as quickly as possible.
You can have a polished CV, brand, storytelling and even presentation, but as Grand Cardone repeatedly explains: “The numbers don’t lie, people do.” If you’ve no seed money, no financial backing, no income, no measurable results, no case studies, no track record, your story is nice but not important because there are billions of others on this planet with equally beautiful stories and nothing to show for it.
Don’t spend your hard earned money on ‘stupid’ expenses such as expensive watches and first class flights. Protect the money you work hard for by putting it into businesses that earn passive revenue, an then buy the ‘stupid’ expenses with your passive income.
Be aware, curious and creative, and starting from your first revenue stream, be it a job – business or side project – immediately begin adding other revenue streams; as many as you can effectively manage. Your first revenue stream should feed your second, which feeds your third, and so on. Only after you have multiple revenue streams are you able to ‘quit’ jobs, businesses and clients which are no longer in your best interest.
The most difficult step to becoming financially independent is by both cutting costs and increasing income until 40% of your gross revenue can be stored and then invested.
Millionaire status in
Monthly Expenses
40% Monthly Storage*
50% Monthly Taxes
Monthly Gross Income
5 years 2 months
4,000€
16,000€
20,000€
40,000€
10 years 4 months
2,000€
10,000€
10,000€
20,000€
20 years 8 months
1,000€
5,000€
5,000€
10,000€
*Storage is not savings. Inflation reduces the value of your savings each year. Your ‘storage’ must invested in financial vehicles that yield a ROI such as real-estate and the stock market that appreciate in value. Do not invest your storage money in risky ventures; only in absolutely certain investments. Do not stop until your monthly passive income exceeds your monthly income.
To adequately provide for your family of 4 AND save 40% for your future, your combined household income must be +300,000€/year.
How do you find a job/business earning +300,000€/ year? You have to be good at what you do, have multiple streams of revenue, obtain consistent exposure, and you need to be a strong negotiator.
In reality, you should be more worried about personal development than you are in food.
“Starving creates time. Work an 8-hour/day job you get $0.55/hour. If you stay home you’re not going to get any money buy you’ll have time to write things down on paper.
I did starve for my art to have a 24 hr day unintruded upon by other people. I gave up food & everything. But dedication without talent is useless. A dedication nut without talent starves and dies in the gutter; thinking they had talent.
Everyone believes they have talent; that they are ‘the one’. How do you know that you’re the one (who has talent)? You don’t know; it’s a shot in the dark. You take it or you become a normal, civilized person from 8 to 5.
If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean derision, mockery, isolation.
Isolation is the gift. All the others is a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.”]
invest wisely
STEP 8. INVEST WISELY, USE DEBT STRATEGICALLY & MAINTAIN YOUR LIQUIDITY
When a bank is willing to loan you money, they want to be your partner. It doesn’t take money to make money, it takes courage to make money.
Only invest and take out loans on things you are competent in and know for a fact will be around over the long-term.
If you don’t know anything about crypto-currency, either be willing to pay a professional to do it for you or leave it alone.
Don’t know anything about social media platforms and their stock? Pay a professional to do it for you or leave it alone.
Favor monthly ROI. The difference between quarterly stock dividend payments and monthly dividend payments amounts to 100s of millions of €.
But before you think you’ve found a financial partner, remember this:
Banks will lend you money to buy real-estate, but won’t lend you money to invest their own stock.
Universities will sell you their diploma, but make no guarantees that you’ll be able to use their diploma to find a good job afterwards.
This gives you a good idea to what they believe in: cash flow into the future.
If you’re going to invest in real-estate, don’t invest in 1 or 2 doors (single homes and apartments or duplexes); invest in 32+ doors (residential buildings).
There are so many ways to make money that you have to stay nimble, well networked and skilled up, ready to spot opportunities when they arise. Every decade disaster strikes, financial bubbles explode, economies retract, and recession happens. When this does, those with enough liquidity are in a rare position to buy investments for pennies on the dollar.
Buying a single house address to live in is a terrible investment because:
Owning anchors you down and limits possibility. What happens if a huge opportunity arises somewhere else and you have to turn it down because you can’t sell or rent your house in time? What happens if the state or country you live in increases your taxes to the point you can no longer pay rent, or as a business be profitable? If you cannot leave. You are no longer in control of your own life.
Property appreciates very slowly over time compared to other investments. “Adjusted for inflation, over the last 50 years the average house has returned 1% each year.” 3.8% (before inflation) over the last 10 years according to SFGate.
Property requires constant attention and money. Maintenance, repairs, furnishing, landscaping…
You must pay even when property sits vacant. If you move out and rent it, you’re not only paying rent, you’re also paying for the house for every month you don’t have someone paying rent.
Rent where you live, and own addresses so you can rent them out.
This is so you are location independent. Being location independent then allows you to become financially independent. If you’re current city or state wants you to pay more taxes, you can move to a city or state where taxes are lower. If your employer changes their compensation and bonus structure and you can’t earn more or receive promotions, you can move to another employer who values its employees, or launch your own business on the side.
You can’t easily change locations when you are committed to a 25-year mortgage payment.
You can’t easily change jobs when you are committed to a 25-year mortgage payment.
The Grant Cardone sales strategy reverse-engineered
Sales basics
People are investments, not expenses. People do not cost money. Mistakes cost money. Lack of sales, appointments, production cost money. Quality people are investments when you have a sales pipeline, sales and production. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more check out Lesson 228. Anatomy of a top candidate salary negotiation.]
Define your SMART goal and budget before investing any time/money. Spending time and money on content and advertising without a clearly defined goal will increase your basic metrics like website traffic, likes and maybe signups over the short-term, but long-term the result will be “I spent all my time/money and the ‘campaign’ didn’t work.”
“Here is some money, I want more X” is not a SMART goal because ‘more’ cannot be defined precisely or objectively.
“I want 3 new appointments a day”
“I want 10 new clients per month.”
“I want 10 existing clients to upgrade per month.”
Frequency breeds familiarity which leads to patterns, habits and trust – Your target stranger must see you a lot in order to break through the noise and catch their curiosity. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: Refer to Lesson 44. Rory Sutherland and Lesson 237. 20 Hours with Tai Lopez on the benefits of building trust.]
Always demonstrate value. Sell or be sold – Which also increases trust. An educated, well-informed prospect is more likely to give you money than an ill-informed prospect with a ton of unanswered questions.
Offer to solve their problem for them – The underlying message should always be “Here’s what you need to do it by yourself if you have the time, or if you have the money you could pay me (an expert) and save you a ton of time.
ALL sales estimates are by default subjective; a starting point for negotiation. So use them in your favor. Quote outrageously high and do it confidently. Your confidence in the value you offer is what convinces the buyer, not the price.
Grow your pipeline: get 3 appointments a day, whether or not they buy. Have 3 consistently? Now aim for 6 appointments per day.
Increase productivity through practice and training: Anyone client will say “Yes” to anything if the seller is sold on the deal. But getting everyone to say “Yes” takes a lot of training and motivation.
Always say “Yes*”: Always say yes then negotiate the conditions of the “Yes.” Your pricing strategy and product/service offer should be structured so that every prospect who walks through your door and is willing to sign a contract should be 100% approved, and then negotiate the conditions. You’ll always have delinquent payments and ‘difficult’ clients; you’re working with broken people on a broken planet. But as a business owner if your problem and revenue depends on clients who have difficulty paying, then you don’t have a collection problem, it means your sales pipeline isn’t big enough.
Comprehensive management involvement: Employees need room and authority to negotiate, but employees need guidance and control and should not have authority to make final “No” decisions. Trusted, vetted, experienced employees (managers) must be aware of and involved in every client decision; no exception, no excuses.
Immerse your clients & employees. Immersion is the ultimate client & employee satisfaction. As often and as quickly as possible, put your product/service in the prospect’s hands and let them use it, feel it, experience it.
Expect sales and income to fluctuation, what matters is your sales and income should rise over time.
the buyer
Understanding the buyer
Begin by creating an in-depth profile on each of your optimal users. Facebook, Google and LinkedIn have stalker-level capabilities which allow you to explore their advertising algorithms for free to create an advertising campaign for them. Even if you don’t actually launch a paid advertising campaign, use their free software to understand and quantify your target demographic. Take advantage of them.
Potential buyers in general:
Buy to solve a problem – real or perceived
Overpay for junk and underpay for quality everyday
Carry their phones with them 24/7 and spend most of their day on it
Each technological device has it’s own unique ‘device ID’ which allow millions of of applications (free and paid, downloadable and pre-installed), which is what makes it so addictive and useful
Every technological device has a unique ‘device ID’ that
Accept almost unconsciously to have cookies downloaded and their data collected
Believe they know what they want but are curious and willing to try new things out
Move between:
Today-buyers – The highly-competitive market of strangers ready to buy from the first person who catches their attention.
Tomorrow-buyers – Strangers who aren’t yet ready to buy, but their time is approaching. This is the mid- to long-term market you want to target
Will impulsively give you their contact details if you promise something attractive
Blindly agree to terms and conditions
Real decision-makers purposefully make themselves hard to get to. The harder they are to get to, the easier they are to sell once reached.
Potential buyers in specific:
Have needs and wants according to their current situation
sales process
The sales process
3 Rules for Making the Internet Give You Customers: The Lead Magnet with Frank Kern & Grant Cardone
Understand which of the 4 sales processes best fit your business:
Classic – client decides they have a need, and they go to the quickest, most accessible location to buy something that meets their need. Example: “I want to have red wine for dinner.” or “It just started raining and I don’t have an umbrella.”
Information gathering – client decides they have a need, and so set an appointment to ‘learn more’ to help them in their decision-making process. They then become a client or not. Example: “I want to work with a career coach.” or “We need to buy a new car.”
E-commerce – client decides they have a need, and they go to a site (hopefully your site) and buy it directly from you. Example: “I don’t feel like cooking tonight, let’s have food delivered.” or “I need to buy more ink for my printer.”
Funnel – client decides they have a need, and they passively search, fall onto your website and give you their contact details so you can periodically send them relevant content to aid in their decision-making. Example: “Nearly every business with an online presence.”
Test to find your sales process works best for you, and commit to it. Focus all your attention on that sales process and build your marketing around it.
When headhunting sales people, create a compensation package with no ceiling that allows them to become millionaires if they’re willing to work hard enough. With sales, paying ‘attractive’ or ‘competitive’ salaries with bonuses is not attractive enough to keep them fully-committed to your company and not leave for a competitor’s ‘more attractive’ offer.
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his book This is Marketing, Seth Godin quotes Jay Levinson saying “Don’t change your ads when you’re tired of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.””]
Have disposable time & money before investing in advertising. Until you discover which advertising campaigns work, who your right audience is and what their conversion rates are, you need to test. And to test you’ll need money set aside that you’ll probably lose as you learn what works.
Once you’ve a reliable sales process that predictably generates money, invest 100-300% into marketing and advertising to drive strangers to your reliable sales process.
Differentiate sales and marketing. Sales is knowing how to lead prospects through the sales cycle to the ultimate purchase. Marketing is attracting prospects into your sales process. Do not believe you a marketing campaign can replace sales.
Drive complete strangers into your sales process: It is better that people not know you, but you want to control the impression they have of you whenever they do see and interact with you.
Stranger must feel like they know you.
Stranger must like you.
Stranger must trust you.
Stranger must want what you have.
Drive buyers to a landing page, not simply to your website. As previously explained, you don’t know what buyers want so you want to offer many different types and combinations of products, but you always want to drive traffic to a specific landing page that advertises one particular product/service with maximum 2 options and only one call to action. Buyers may explore your site on their on and that is fine, but traffic should be targeted and intentional. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more, refer to my interview with Benjamin Descazal.]
Sales process determines marketing. The way you sell determines how communicate in your marketing; not the other way around.
If you’ve an E-commerce sales process, don’t push your visitors into a sales funnel by asking for their email because you’re goal is sales.
Diagnose your social media posts (organic) & ads (paid).
Track ROI – How many direct clicks to your website do you get for each of your content sources compared to what you get in return. You might for every 10€ spent gain 1 email address in return,
Just because a person is willing to give you their email for a ‘free ebook’ doesn’t mean they will give you their money. Return to your SMART goal.
Just because a person ‘likes’ or even ‘shares’ your Instagram content doesn’t mean they will follow you or give you their email or give you their money. Return to your SMART goal.
Use paid advertising to amplify what already works organically – Once you can turn a stranger’s click into revenue, invest heavily in that content until you stop seeing that ROI. Your first advertising campaign should start from your best organic content.
Hone what worked – As you invest your money learning through trial & error, track your efforts and results to develop an advertising playbook to help you further improve ROI.
A good advertising campaign is the best investment you can make. 1€ in good advertising could realistically yield 1.20€ a month later. Warren Buffet only averages 20% ROI a year. Compared to every other investment vehicle, advertising is a sound investment.
Always leave a well scripted message. When you call their office and it goes to the secretary, or goes to voicemail, leaving a message with a promise to call back puts you back into their top of mind so they remember you. Calling and not leaving a message, you just wasted a minute of your time.
When it works, advertising is a profitable mid- to long-term investment. Advertising is only an expense when it isn’t reaching your SMART goals.
4 Ways to Dominate Any Market – The Lead Magnet with Grant Cardone and Frank Kern
Online advertising strategies to dominate any market:
Geo-hunting allows strangers to see your advertising based on locations they visit. For example a vitamins supplement store can target cell phones that visit local gyms, sports clubs and even competitors.
Browsing behavior allows you to target strangers (local and international) who perform specific actions while online. For example the US military could launch a targeted advertising campaign at anyone who watches certain movies glorifying war and superheros.
Search retargeting allows you to target strangers within a certain location who search for specific type of information. For example an H&R Block’s expatriate tax division could launch a targeted advertising campaign at any US citizen living in Europe who searches for “pay taxes” between 1 January and 15 April.
List retargeting (your own list or purchased from someone else) allows you to target a pre-defined group of people in a certain location who all have specific traits in common. For example, a university could target alumni having graduated 10+ years before and invite them to make donations to the university.
Advertising methods you can use once you’ve aligned your SMART goal(s), target audience, sales process and market domination strategy:
Display ads and banners are those obvious image or text advertisements on the top and side-bar of monetized websites. These are the cheapest and most popular.
Native ads are content typically posing as blog posts designed to peak your curiosity and bring you to an informative sales page.
Video ads are shown pre-roll and in-stream
CTV (Connected TV) allows you to exploit all of a stranger’s technological devices to show them ads on their television based on their travel and browsing behavior as well as search and list retargeting.
Before you throw your budget into advertising, consider the strategy of investing your time and reputation by making serious recommendations and referrals upon successful completion of your contract by offering a unique ‘referral’ offer:
Offer with referrals: “If I provide you everything I’ve promised and you are 100% happy, will you commit to within 6 months provide me with serious referrals of 2 companies in your network of similar size and profiles?”
Offer without referrals: “If not, then here are two other price points we can offer you based on your needs…”
Consider in fact a branding strategy where the buyer pays you 5,000€ for a 1-hour, one-on-one coaching that is recorded as a satisfied customer so they have ‘unlimited access to the coaching you offered’ provided contractually you ‘reserve the right to use parts of the recording for promotional purposes only.’ Now use those ‘parts of the recording for promotional purposes only’ to create a Youtube playlist where clients promote you, seek your advice with the best parts edited into a brief video which mutually-benefits both you and the client use the video for self-promotion.
closing strategies
Theory of closing & closing strategies
Every purchase involves a proposal and a price. So get these to the prospect as quickly as possible after the meeting, even if they don’t want it. That way they have it and they’re free to change their mind and buy from you later if they want, or recontact you and renegotiate the terms of the sale.
Yes, the prospect might not call you back, but they wouldn’t have called you back either way.
Yes, the prospect might take your proposal to a competitor and negotiate a better deal with them, but without your proposal the prospect would have gone to a competitor anyway.
You don’t blow deals because of thing you said or did. You blow deals because of something you didn’t do or say:
You didn’t call the prospect
You didn’t make the prospect feel comfortable and get them laughing
You didn’t get the prospect exited about the benefits of using your product/service
You didn’t follow-up when you said you would
You didn’t identify the prospect’s needs before demonstrating your product/service
You didn’t qualify the prospect to be sure your product/service was relevant to them
You didn’t ask the prospect who influences their decision to buy and what information they would need to advise the prospect
Don’t take longer to close than needed. Create a modular sales script and presentation. You don’t need to give the prospect all the information you have to get them to buy, you just need to give them enough information to convince them to buy.
Map out your entire sales script and presentation from start to finish
Break it down into modular 10-15 minute self-sustaining presentations
At the end of each modular ask the client “Have you seen enough to buy yet?”
If Yes, then sell. If no, then continue the next module of your sales pitch.
incoming calls
Incoming calls
Grant Cardone Ghost Calls Company Live from Miami
Grant Cardone : Live Sales Call
Every person who has direct contact with the public is by extension on your sales team, and therefore imperatively must have at least minimal training, authority – and incentive – to control a basic sales call, collect the necessary information, promise the caller a prompt response and after the call is over a system must be in place to quickly forward that information to a salesperson who can promptly follow-up with an accurate proposal. Giving an employee a telephone without basic sales training is foolish. At the minimum:
“Thank you for calling, what can I get you information on?”
“We have a solution for you! How many X do you have…?” (Gather relevant information)
“Let me send you a proposal. Where can I send it to?” (forward relevant information to appropriate salesperson for immediate proposal follow-up)
The correct sales close must be “Let me send you a proposal.” not “Let me get your information so I can have a sales person follow up.” In this situation time is subjective. Even if the person doesn’t have all the information or authority to immediately send a proposal, the person should be trained to capture the relevant data to forward to an ‘authorized’ salesperson who will quickly respond with a proposal.
Patent responses to questions such as “What does your company do?”
internet response
Strategies for internet response
If you are not advertising and you’re still able to find clients, earn money and pay your bills, then you don’t ‘need’ to advertise or brand; you’re obviously fine without it – for the moment. But you need to advertise and brand if you want you want to:
Protect your revenue base against competitors
Be prepared for the next global recession or pandemic
Secure your financial future
Aggressively retarget online. Retargeting is repeatedly showing advertisement or content to a person who has already performed a specific behavior, such as watch your video, visit your site, click on your advertisement, give you their email address, follow your social media page, etc.
At the beginning of your campaign the smaller your target audience, the more expensive it is to reach that audience because they see your advertisement one time and immediately forget, so you must pay to repeatedly advertise for them to notice you exist.
Over time as your audience expands and become familiar with you, retargeting doesn’t have to be so aggressive.
Consistent, passive follow-up. Once the stranger becomes a prospect and enters your sales cycle, don’t continue to aggressively sell them. Instead, consistently but patiently follow-up – through their objections – showing them the benefits you offer to their real problems. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: In Lesson 169. 20 tips to better negotiate your job offer and compensation package, Deepak Malhotra argues you should end every meeting with an 11/10 rating. The other person may not buy or agree with you, but they should respect you as a competent professional.]
staying motivated
Strategies for staying motivated
Success is your duty, obligation and responsibility :
Your clients need you to get their needs/wants met.
Your local community needs you to be successful to bring investors, tourists, commerce and hope.
Your local church and non-profit organizations need your donations so those less fortunate can have their basic needs met.
Your local government needs your tax money to pay law enforcement and other employees to keep the community safe, the transportation systems up and running, the garbage collected…
Your federal government needs your tax money to make foreign investments and keep the military that protects you strong and equipped.
salespeople
Traits of great salespeople
Grant Cardone. Don’t Make Sense of Failures
Dress to their audience’s expectations. Buyers who don’t feel comfortable, don’t buy. They therefore expect you to dress your part and fit in with the buyer’s environment.
Trusted, credible & experienced.
Networked. Even cold sales calls to strangers are networking opportunities. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Lesson 239. 10 hours with recruiters that A-list, top quality professionals constantly have headhunters and job opportunities available to them. Every employee is 1 second away from quitting, 1 minute away from formally turning in their letter of resignation and 2-3 weeks away from leaving.]
Can laugh at themselves. Because society at large dislikes ‘sales’ people, being able to take insults and not take yourself too seriously gives you the emotional maturity needed to excel in an industry that is disliked so much.
Are not erudite. In business being a ‘genius’ is not using complex words and theories most people don’t know; In fact, in business being erudite is a sign of arrogance and stupidity. In business ‘genius’ is using the right words with the person in front of you to get them to do or give you want you want.
Lead by example. Your executives and leadership must have clear missions and objectives and must never settle.
Continuous initiative. People burn out, get lazy, demotivated or bored, forget… They need constant reminder of their objectives, proper training to achieve them and financial incentives to reach them.
Autodidact. Receive daily, ongoing training, from their employer and/or on their own time. Deliberate practice makes perfect, and skilled salespeople are trained to close.
Don’t learn. Know. Education and learning must lead to certainty – either confirming or dis-confirming and replacing what you ‘know’ to be true through experience.
Train daily. When selling to people, you can become lazy and out-of-shape in less than 24 hours. So in addition to learning new strategies, theories and about your target audience as well as the environment you’re selling in, spend 20 minutes each day role-playing and deliberately practicing to automate your responses to handling objections and closing sales. Don’t learn. Do until you know.
Predict, anticipate and overcome objections. Through experience, you’ve reached mastery when you can predict what the person’s objections before you finish your sentence. “The price is X€, now before you say it’s too expensive/cheap, let me tell you what comes with it. Okay?” [JOSHUA’S NOTE: In the world of fortune-tellers and, this is level of mastery is called a ‘shut eye’. Refer to Lesson 127. Linguistic tricks con artists use to manipulate you.]
Prioritize productivity, not planning. Having a direction to move in allows you to cover ground quickly, but things change and you must constantly adapt so it is production and actually earns money. A business idea is only valuable if it can be monetized, and the quicker the better. If you’re going to be wrong and the idea doesn’t earn money, better to learn that quickly than to waste time planning.
Business Idea > Landing page > Buy button with price > Advertise it and see
A 1 week vacation is more than enough time to turn an expert sales person into a noob, at least for a few days until s/he gets back in to shape.
10x Growth Con – Grant Cardone & Jay Abraham Exclusive Business Coaching
Train others, and let them set control the role plays. Teaching others not as skilled as you is a great way to teach yourself.
Understand emotional intelligence (EI). You can learn as much if not more by putting yourself in the prospects shoes, in real life likewise in daily role plays.
Clear & concise. In today’s world you are limited to mere seconds to capture and keep attention before the buyer gets distracted. If you cannot do this, it is your fault you can’t capture attention; not the buyer’s fault they aren’t paying attention to you. Once concise format would be:
My industry is _______.
Our clients are _______.
We sell them _______.
We market by _______.
My biggest issue/untapped opportunity is _______.
Quality questions. The quality of the buyer’s answers depend on the quality of the seller’s questions.
Create a culture of continued training. Not only do they train themselves, they lead and inspire their colleagues to improve.
Commit then plan. People change their schedules last minute all the time, and when forced to chose they cancel the less important meetings. You do it yourself. There commit to the prospect’s availability and then figure out how to creatively meet your commitments without burning bridges.
Focus on income, not expenses. Without income you cannot afford anything and are forced to shrink, downsize and focus on cost-reduction, be it an expense or an investment. You can only reduce costs by so much until you become poor.
Focus on mutual-value exchange. Never give anything away for ‘free’ without gaining something of equal or greater value. Free trials with no commitment must include an exchange of some value.
Build certainty, not trust. Being unwaveringly convinced your product will help the prospect goes farther than building trust with them. If you’re not convinced in what you’re selling, it shows in your presentation. If you’re not convinced in what you’re selling, then why are you lying and damaging your reputation associating yourself with something you don’t believe in?
Strategists. Not technicians. Strategists see the bigger, longer-term end-game picture, see how all the pieces fit together for the future and set SMART goals to control & dominate the future. Technicians know how to use tools and work practically to accomplish SMART goals as defined by the strategists. Technicians are short-term oriented without thinking about the long-term, end game. Technicians focus on earning revenue to keep paying the bills. Strategists will lose money for years knowing their actions will lead them to win big.
SMART goals & priorities. Your employees are chasing the right targets and they are optimized in how they reach those targets.
Focus on wins, however small. Lack of success demotivates. Success is subjective. Reserve time daily to focus only on the positive and celebrate wins, however small.
Save the deal. Offer 3 solutions, with upsells and downsells for each solution – 9 ‘solutions’ total – and unlimited ways to be paid. This way no matter what price the prospect find acceptable, the sales person can either up- or down-sell, and can find a payment solution adapted to the prospect’s reality.
Follow-up. Potential buyers express interest because they are ‘primed’ to buy at that moment. That moment quickly fades and following-up ensures the person’s needs/wants are met. Employees lose initiative and therefore need follow-up and encouragement.
Closers. Calls-to-action close the sales process and generate revenue. Don’t expect revenue if you cannot close deals. Learn to close and you won’t have money problems.
Equipped. Are so well prepared they can send the correct proposal to the client before the phone call has ended, so you can ask them if they have received the email. Similar to getting a person’s phone number and calling them on the spot to ensure it is correct.
Understand everyone is a final decision-maker influencer. Even the seemingly least important, lowest person in the company can either ‘put in a good word’ and facilitate a meeting or block and prevent you from reaching the final decision-maker.
Autodidact. Receive daily, ongoing training, from their employer and/or on their own time. Deliberate practice makes perfect, and skilled salespeople are trained to close.
Quick, honed decision-makers. You must think and decide quickly then figure out how to make it work afterwards. Every day a sale isn’t made, every day spent on deciding whether or not to commit is not only a day wasted, it is revenue wasted that could have been made from your commitment.
Retrospective. Understand that sometimes your best solutions to objections come to you after you’ve ended the meeting, and so you have a system to incorporate those solutions into future sales calls, and preferably a way to recontact the prospect with your new solution.
Prioritize referral-generating systems to cold advertising. Word-of-mouth and recommendations are the most desirable form of advertising because they are the cheapest to attract and the easiest to close because the sales person has exploited the relationships and reputations of other people to do their work for them.
Ask risky, calculated questions. “You’ve shopped around and you’ve met my competitors. Now you’ve just seen my product demonstration. If the price were the same, would you rather do business with me or my competitor? Who would you sign a contract with?”
Ask ‘Why?’. Until you take interest in the prospect an understand their ‘Why,’ you’re not in a position to competently offer them a solution. You need to gather as much information as you can and qualify them before pitching them.
“Why do you need this product/service?”
“Why do you need this now?”
“Why did you choose to call us for a proposal?”
“Why do you need the price to be lower?”
Mitigate objections by focusing on positives. Asking the prospect “What do you like most about our product/service so far?” shows you what they are focusing on and what their pain points are. After having the discussion on your produce/service strengths, handling objections will be much easier.
Follow-up after demo. Potential buyers express interest because they are ‘primed’ to buy at that moment. That moment quickly fades and following-up ensures the person’s needs/wants are met. Employees lose initiative and therefore need follow-up and encouragement.
Follow-up after sale. Turning the prospect into a signed client is just the first step in a long relationship that could lead to upsells and referrals. Set up follow-up calls to check in with your client, gauge their satisfaction and solve any problems they’re having with their purchase. Show them they are important and not just a part of the sales process. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more, refer to Lesson 229. Becoming a trusted advisor to your clients.]
Anything worth doing is worth doing everyday. Do push-ups and sit-ups every day, it will change your body. Eat cookies every day, it will change your body.
handling objections
Handling objections
The best way to control objections is to control the story and the perspective. Aikido marketing involves taking the negative aspects about your product/service or industry and turn it into as much of a positive as possible. This is done through branding, storytelling, promising to work commission free if the buyer isn’t happy, and establishing your reputation so that you can make such promises and prospects will believe you. For example:
When you cannot offer a 100% money back guarantee, you can commit contractually to working commission free to solve their problem if the client is not happy. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more on client contracts, refer to Lesson 111. F*ck You, Pay Me: Client-Services Contract Tips.]
Periodically fund ‘Welcome’ parties and invite all your current and new clients. The good will, professional connects and referrals generated from this brief event will more cover the cost of hosting the event.
The second best way to control objections is to not let the person complain in the first place. When they complain “The price is too high.” Agree with them and then move on. Don’t allow the person to dwell on their complaint. Don’t try to justify yourself to the person, thus lowering your value. Agree with them and move on to the close.
“The price is too high.” >”Yes. I agree with you it is an investment.”
“The price is too high.” > “If my competitors price is better, why are you here talking to me and instead signing a contract with them?”
“The price is too high.” > “Would the price still be too high if we broke it down into monthly payments rather than a one-time payment?”
Most buyers bring their objections & complaints with them when they meet you. And still they chose to meet you. Which means their objections are just questions and apprehensions they need you to manage so they feel comfortable buying. [JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Lesson 169. 20 tips to negotiate your job offer and compensation package that when a person says ‘No’ it is usually temporary, not definitive. It just means that at this present moment they do not have enough information to say ‘Yes.’] Acknowledge their objection as a part of their reality, and then go back into closing the deal.
Most buyers have at least one other influencer they refer to before committing to a purchase. Those influencers may not be physically present with the buyer during the sales pitch, but those influencers’ voices are inside the buyer’s mind. When the buyer says “I need to speak to my wife, my operations manager, my CFO… first.” Take this opportunity to learn how those influencers think by asking the prospect: “What questions would your wife ask me if she were here now?”, “Why wouldn’t your CFO be willing to sign this deal as is?”
Buyers make time for what they consider to be important. Buyers don’t make time for:
Strangers they don’t know or have never heard of
‘Sales’ people
People who appear to only want to take and not give; people who don’t offer a mutually-beneficial collaboration.
Every objection boils down to four things:
Price – They consider your product to be too expensive or not expensive enough, therefore your payment structures should be flexible enough to:
Be bundled up into expensive, comprehensive packages
Be broken apart into smaller, cheaper packages
Be available on an annual, quarterly, monthly weekly basis
Be available on a barter system or collaboration based on mutual-value
Time – They don’t want to wait, or they want to wait longer
Stall – They aren’t the decision-maker, they don’t have time or don’t want to commit now
Product – They don’t believe your product will meet their need or is worth the price & time
The same person who tells you they don’t have time is the same person who takes a 2 hour lunch. You do it yourself, so don’t get angry at the prospect for using that excuse on you.
Every rejection has a multitude of possible responses:
Hypotheticals. “What would you do if [unwanted, unplanned scenario]. Would you be ready?”
What-ifs.“What if your [predicted objection], what do we do then?” or “We guarantee [X] or your money back. What if you signed today. In 90 days you’d either have [X] or you would have your money back and not have lost anything.”
Fact check:“Is this a real objection or are you just uncertain and unwilling to commit?”
Responses to avoid:
Don’t call the prospect and then ask for a telephone number to call or text them.
Don’t say “I understand [objection], let’s just go ahead and do it anyways.”
240. 10 Hours with Recruiters: Post COVID-19 Job Interview Strategies & Response Templates
60 videos. 85+ links. 200+ takeaways from this 10 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 10 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from professional recruiters and head hunters blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.
What is the term for when a recruiter hires you, then regrets it?
What is interview bias? Is it a minor or major problem? Why?
What is a mis-hire and how problematic are they to companies?
How often does the average person change jobs?
How is self-confidence gained?
Who usually validates the job interview strategy and questions asked?
What does “your current station in life” mean?
What is more important: Knowing how to do the job or knowing how the job fits into the company?
How far into the future do A-list professionals tend to goal-plan and forecast?
Do A-list professionals tend to focus long-term with one employer, or pursue frequent opportunities with other employers?
An identified top candidate applies for a job whose technical skills and responsibilities are not evident on their CV/resume. What does this suggest?
Should you target jobs or companies? Why?
Which is better to work for, a good boss or a good company? Why?
What is the difference between a job and a career?
What is the difference between an entrepreneur & intrapreneur? What are the benefits of being an intrapreneur?
What are some reasons why high-performers aren’t promoted?
“Your career plan should be detailed enough to _____ yet flexible enough to _____.”
How much can it cost the company to fill a vacant position?
What percentage of an average workforce are top-talent (A-list)? Poor performers? (C-list)?
What is a learning curve? How do smart companies protect themselves against learning curves?
Why do CVs/resumes typically list in reverse-chronological order?
What is the difference between a traditional chronological CV, a functional skills-based CV, a traditional & functional combination CV and a targeted CV?
What is recruiter hesitancy? You’re being interviewed for a job you’re not obviously qualified for based on your CV/resume. What are 5 strategies to respond to reduce recruiter hesitancy?
What is a productive, value-adding way to take advantage of unemployment in between jobs?
What is social proof?
“A-list professionals do not list _____ on their CV and instead focus on _____.”
“Successful people are successful because _____.”
What is an advantage of being an A-list professional with no other job interviews currently scheduled?
The only 5 reasons why A-list professionals should change jobs are: 1) _____ 2) _____ 3) _____ 4) _____ 5) _____
Which offers greater ROI: Improving your strengths or improving your weaknesses? Why?
“It is better to _____-promise and _____-deliver. But it is even better to _____-promise and then do everything it takes to live up to your potential.”
What is the difference between “following” and “knowing how to follow?”
What are the risks of accepting a job interview during working hours? How can you turn those risks into strengths?
What is maturity of defenses?
What is the difference between egocentric & allocentric?
“Leaders build more _____, not _____.”
What are the 5 basic leadership styles? 1) _____ 2) _____ 3) _____ 4) _____ 5) _____
What is the relationship between a critical job role and succession planning?
During your job interview
When asked a question: 1. Always _____. 2. When you don’t know the answer, _____. 3. When you cannot, then _____. 4. Never _____ 5. Never _____.
Should you take notes during the interview? Why or why not?
What are competency-based questions?
What are criteria-based questions?
What are personality-based questions?
What is the purpose of open-ended questions?
Should you ask questions during the interview or wait until the interviewer asks you if you have any questions?
“Judge a person by their ____, not their _____.”
During interviews, is it better to focus on the past, or the future? Why?
When answering job interview questions, should you answer top-down or bottom-up? Why?
What is more important than perfecting how you answer job interview questions?
Should the interview feel like a Q&A session or a conversation? Why?
What is the STARLA method to answering questions?
When asked a question you don’t know the answer to, what is the best response strategy?
During an interview you are asked “How would increase sales?”
As an A-list professional, why is “I would hire more sales people and expand.” a bad answer? What would be a good answer?
During the interview you’re asked in detail about current & upcoming projects:
What are the opportunities & threats of this question?
What is the best way to respond?
When asked “What motivates you?”, how can your CV/resume betray you?
How defined should your career path be?What is the difference between
“What you did” and “How you performed” in your previous job? Which is better?
You are asked the question: “How quickly do you see yourself getting promoted?”
What is a good strategy for responding?
What is one of the most persuasive arguments against a lack of experience or gaps in employment & short-term employment?
During compensation negotiation
Is asking about compensation during the interview ‘out of place?” Why? Why not?”
You don’t get what you _____, you get what you _____.”
“Negotiation is about creating _____, _____ solutions.”
What is concept checking & why is it important?
What is a “straw man fallacy?”
“Candidates _____ in how they are paid are _____.”
“A-list professionals convert conflict into _____.”
“A-list professionals focus the interview on ____, not on ‘proving’ _____.”
What are the 4 types of feedback? 1. _____ 2. _____ 3. _____ 4. _____
What is the risk of negotiation salary and not total compensation?”
60 videos. 85+ links. 200+ takeaways from this 10 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 10 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from professional recruiters and head hunters blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.
239. 10 Hours with Recruiters: Upgrade Your CV Template, Find Hidden Job Offers & 10x Response Rates
17 videos. 148+ links. 292+ takeaways from this 10 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 10 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from professional recruiters and head hunters blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
How dangerous can competent recruiters be to their competitors?
What is the difference between headhunting, recruiting & executive search?
What is a ‘conflict of interest’ clause?
“Recruiters are assessed by _____ and _____. The better the recruiter, the stronger their compensation package position.”
What are 3 basic reasons why recruiters don’t respond to job-seekers? 1. _____ 2. _____ 3. _____
“It’s about _____ at _____ to get _____ you need to _____.”
Why is recruiting during difficult economic times harder than recruiting during good times?
What is the difference between sourcing and assessing candidates? Which is more important? Why?
As a recruitment sourcing tool, what is the difference between Facebook, TikTok & LinkedIn? Which one is a better tool?
When sourcing, what are the two online recruiting profiles recruiters find? 1. _____ 2. _____
What is the benefit of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn… making people’s online information free and accessible? Who benefits? How?
What is the relationship between talent mapping and workforce planning?
What is the difference between single-loop and double-loop learning? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
What is scenario planning?
What is the relationship between supply and demand forecasting?
“If your talent sourcing searches _____, chances are you’re _____.”
What is the foundational reason why do people go to social media platforms?
What is more important to most people on LinkedIn, networking or finding jobs? How does this affect their online CV and profile content?
According to a 2014 LinkedIn Trends Survey, _____ of active users are dissatisfied with their job.
Which candidates do recruiters prefer: actively-seeking, passively-seeking, or non-seeking? Why?
Why is it so hard for recruiters to find highly-qualified professionals?
What is better than having more data than your competitors?
Why do recruiters tend to prefer people searching to published job descriptions? Why do advertisers prefer published job descriptions to people searching?
What are Boolean search operators?
What is an: 1. explicit search? 2. implicit search? 3. semantic search? 4. indirect search? 5. maximum inclusion search? 6. iterative search? 7. probabilistic search? 8. social graph search?
Why might a company use non-traditional job titles such as Chief Fun Officer?
What is the difference between “manage” and “oversee” from the recruiter’s perspective?
What is deductive reasoning? Inductive reasoning?
What are communication scripts and why are they important?
What is the ‘bait-and-switch’ technique? Is it a good strategy? Why or why not?
What is the theory of assortive mating (ladder theory)?
What are some problems associated with:
moving up the ladder?
being at the bottom of the ladder?
What must you do before asking for help?
Your competitive advantage lies in _____.”
What are some important reasons why job seekers will not discover job opportunities and networks online?
What is better than having more data than your competitors?
“You don’t get what you _____, you get what you _____.”
What is emotional intelligence?
What does “off the record” mean? If someone asks you to go “off the record?” When should you? Why?
What are the three imperatives to success: 1. _____ you know 2. _____you know 3. Your ability to _____ and _____
How do applicant tracking systems (ATS) analyze your CV/resume?
What are the 5 basic steps to creating an ATS-friendly CV? 1. _____ 2. _____ 3. _____ 4. _____ 5. _____
What are 3 categories your skills ability fall into? 1. _____ 2. _____ 3. critical _____
What are the 9 credibility markers imperative to all communication? 1. _____ 2. _____ 3. _____ 4. _____ 5. _____ 6. _____ 8. _____ 9. _____
How should you structure your CV content?
What is keyword stuffing?
Why should you be cautious about CV templates & companies who offer them to you?
On your CV, which comes first in order of importance: content or form? Why?
What are the 3 strategic objectives of your LinkedIn profile and online presence? 1. _____ 2. _____ 3. _____
With every communication – verbal and non-verbal – always assume _____.
Why should you always begin each meeting by verifying the amount of time the other party has available to meet?
What does it mean to “diagnose before you prescribe?”
What is illusory superiority?
Why do interviewers frequently begin questions with “In your own words…?”
For leaders, what critical task directly affects your career progression?
What are the 5 basic leadership styles? 1. _____ 2. _____ 3. _____ 4. _____ 5. _____
Why do people tend to be in a constant state of mild agitation?
Do people default to making decisions emotionally or rationally? Why?
What is a working interview?
What are the differences between benefits & features? Which are more persuasive? Why?
“A-list professionals are so in tune with their company & industry that _____.”
“Always make people ___ & ___ for having met you.”
17 videos. 148+ links. 292+ takeaways from this 10 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 10 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from professional recruiters and head hunters blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
How to Shape Human Behavior 2nd Edition – Book Preface
Thanks to Olivier Massanella for helping with the print cover of this 2nd edition (paperback available on Amazon), and a very special thank you to the professionals who took the time to answer my questions for this 2nd Edition of How to Shape Human Behavior as well as those who didn’t make this edition but will appear in future versions.
Originally, I set out to answer the question ‘How can startups create their own advertising campaigns on a budget?’ I envisioned a manual that outlined step-by-step the creative process professional advertising agencies use to create advertising campaigns. All my early research centered around answering this question.
However the more I researched, the more I realized that I was asking the wrong question; I was merely scratching the surface of a deeper, more important question. And so I felt compelled to deepen the focus of my research.
Humans prefer consistency and predictability. It’s evident in the products they repeatedly buy, the books they typically read, the beliefs they unquestionably defend. It shows in their logic and reasoning. In the short-term consistency and predictability make society run more smoothly. They make life easier and decisions safer. In fact, there are over a hundred other heuristics and cognitive biases that shape the way humans behave and make decisions. How To Shape Human Behavior 2nd Edition for Advertisers addresses each and every one of those biases from an entrepreneur’s perspective.
Why? Because successful entrepreneurs don’t sell products and services; successful entrepreneurs shape human behavior. And for entrepreneurs, shaping human behavior begins from inside the consumer’s mind. The more intimately you understand the mechanisms and complexities of human behavior, the more control you have over the future of your business decisions. In the hands of an entrepreneur, applicable knowledge of the human mind is priceless.
Whether you’re a new startup creating your branding strategy or an established business looking to add a fresh new perspective to your brand, How To Shape Human Behavior 2nd Edition for Advertisers takes you step-by-step through every phase of shaping human behavior needed to build a successful, consumer-centered business.
An important note. How To Shape Human Behavior 2nd Edition for Advertisers is intentionally written as a guide to building a successful business through understanding and using human cognitive weakness that shape human behavior. There will no doubt be times when the offensive and defensive strategies and techniques outlined herein will make you feel uncomfortable or go against what you consider to be ethical behavior. Humans don’t like the idea that they are being ‘manipulated’ into making decisions and giving their money to brands for any reason other than their own free will. But just because you may consider using this knowledge is unethical doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t mean that other entrepreneurs aren’t currently using them to their advantage. It is critical for you to be able to distinguish between manipulation and persuasion. More importantly, it is crucial that your consumers correctly distinguish manipulation and persuasion when it comes to evaluating your brand and integrity.
The research in this book is based on academic research and interviews and discussions with professional marketers and executives. Careful attention has been made to accurately cite every reference used. All references are denoted in superscript so you can both verify the research as well as conduct your own.
Another important note. Before implementing any of the advice outlined herein, always consider how your message will be perceived by your target consumer demographic as well as the short- and long-term positive and negative implications your actions will have on your brand image. Most importantly, never do anything that would cause consumers to feel like you’ve tricked them.
How to Shape Human Behavior 2nd Edition – Interview Index
The research in this book is based on academic research and interviews and discussions with professional marketers and executives. Careful attention has been made to accurately cite every reference used. All references are denoted in superscript so you can both verify the research as well as conduct your own:
Rémi Noel, Creative Director for TBWA\Paris
Dominic Dangerfield, Co-Director of Speechmark
Céline LePrince, Digital Producer for Ogilvy
Sabine Lenglet, Associate Director for TBWA
Jean-Baptiste Daudet, Data Consultant for Ogilvy
Ignacio Rodriguez, International Account Manager for TBWA
238. 10 Hours with Nathaniel Drew: Filmmaker, Photographer, Digital Nomad
50 videos. 152+ links. 156+ takeaways from this 11 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 11 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from Nathaniel Drew’s Youtube channel and Patreon blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
50 videos. 152+ links. 156+ takeaways from this 11 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 11 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from Nathaniel Drew’s Youtube channel and Patreon blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
237. 20 Hours with Tai Lopez: Investor, Entrepreneur & Author
17 videos. 184 links. 223+ takeaways from this 20 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 20 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from Tai Lopez’ Youtube channel blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
What is future pacing and how can it be used to influence?
What is norm of reciprocity and how can it be used to influence?
What is social authority and how can it be used to influence?
What is social proof and how can it be used to influence?
What is authority and how can it be used to influence?
What is scarcity and how can it be used to influence?
What is teasing and how can it be used to influence?
Why must there be losers in life? What are some consequences of claiming ‘everyone is a winner’?
“You should be sad & depressed _____ of your life. It means you’re learning from your lessons.”
What are some benefits of testimonials on your site?
What are the PASE psychological profiles?
What are the four basic human drivers?
_____
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“The more exposure you have to different cultures, the higher your _____, the less _____ and to _____.”
“The wealthier you get, the _____, and the less _____.”
What percentage of the population are gullible suckers doomed to always having their money taken from them by others?
What are the 6 domains of the HEXACO-PI-R?
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What are the 5 elements that comprise conscientiousness?
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What are the three types of people in the world?
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What are 11 ways to face your fears and rewire your brain?
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What are 3 ways people generally react when receiving large sums of money:
_____
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Where does happiness come from? What is memory happiness?
“I do not fear the man that _____. I fear the man that _____.”
What are some risks of optimizing for the wrong thing? What should you optimize for?
“Money can’t buy _____, but lack of money _____.”
What are some differences between hustling, working hard, practice, and deliberate practice?
“Plan your next _____ years, but optimize _____. Optimize around _____.”
What is self-sufficiency narcissism?
“No matter what you do people are going to _____. In fact ‘if at least _____ of your clients aren’t complaining, you’re a nobody.”
“If you _____, _____, and _____, people can’t be angry with you afterwards.”
What the the two main human philosophies, and how do they differ? Which is better for long-term success? Why?
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_____
What are the 3 limiting beliefs you’ve been conditioned by society to believe?
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What are some reasons why users complain about a product and believe they’ve been ‘ripped off?’
What are the 3 steps to change?
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What are 6 advantages of looking back and identifying crossroads, key turning points and landmarks in your life?
What are the 5 steps to reinventing yourself?
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_____
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Which is more powerful, internal or external motivation?
What are two reliable personality tests you can take for free?
_____
_____
“You should treat others as you’d like to be treated, but _____, which is imperative if you are going to _____.”
What are some reasons why ‘being lucky’ is a crutch?
What is ‘pattern interruption’ in videos?
What is the ‘availability bias?’
What is self-depreciation?’
“Most people underestimate what they can do in _____ year(s) and underestimate what they can do in _____ years.”
As an entrepreneur, what are some benefits of contacting people who invest heavily in advertising?
“If you aren’t afraid of _____, you’ll always have money in your bank account.”
What are some benefits of having long-form sales pitches? What are some benefits of offering a lot of free, quality content?
How does ladder theory help or hurt professionals?
“You can’t stand out by _____. You’ve got to _____.”
What are some examples of fear-based questions? What is the best way to overcome crippling fear?
What is a better strategy than merely ‘trying to grow a successful business’?
“Most businesses fail not because _____, but because _____.”
What are some differences between optimizing for your startup versus optimizing for you?
What are some respectable strategies for dealing with haters, trolls and people who seek to discredit you professionally?
What are some benefits of an entrepreneurial CV/Resume?
What counts isn’t your first startup; what matters is:
_____
_____
_____
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_____
“Most millionaires earn their money through _____. Most billionaires earn their money _____.”
What are some limitations of the traditional university cursus?
For entrepreneurs
“Spend as much time as you possibly can in-person with professionals who are _____ years ahead of where you are in your career right now.”
“You need a business partner that _____, that way you can both _____ and both of you win.”
What are some benefits of the plus, minus, equal system?
What is are some consequences of the Pareto rule?
How many mentors should you aim to have?
“Don’t focus on _____ and _____.’ Focus on _____. Then wealth and success will come naturally.”
What are some pitfalls to self-sufficiency narcissism?
You don’t have to be the smartest person, but never let yourself be seen as _____.
What are some differences between the 2 imperatives to success?
_____
_____
Which is preferred, quality or quantity of knowledge? Why?
“Without _____, _____ & _____, all your other tools are essentially useless.”
What are the 5 principle phases of sales:
_____
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What are some major benefits of going to events and conferences?
For your first business venture, is it better to start with a product or a service? Should you seek upfront capital & inventory? Why?
What are the 12 steps to creating a turnkey agency with robotic income?
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Is it better to spend money learning others’ business shortcuts and lessons, or spend time and discover them for yourself? Why?
What are some differences between a red ocean and a blue ocean?
What are some business benefits of having competitors? What are some risks of not having any competitors?
“The airline industry is in competition with _____.”
Why do smart businesses have a marketing budget?
What are some benefits of performing a free audit to capture a prospect’s attention and providing value before they have even asked you?
What does the phrase “Be the flame, not the moth” mean?
What is a white label?
When offering a service, price yourself _____ enough so people take you seriously. Setting _____ is imperative to your reputation and your lifestyle.
_____% of all self-made billionaires started in the _____ industry.
What is bootstrapping?
How many seats does the New York Yankee Stadium have? How many people could your little live stream potentially reach?
How much free marketing did Donald Trump receive during his successful 2016 presidential campaign?
Statistically, how often do global recessions occur?
How many minimum revenue streams is ideal to hedge against economic downturns and bad times?
“Even with deliberate, calculated practice, it’s probably going to take you _____ years to become a millionaire.”
What is the minimum # to be considered a good credit score?
What are some great advantages of paying using a credit card rather than a debit card?
“The average person spends _____/year on Starbucks.”
What are 7 steps to maximize your offline time for your online content?
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According to the Dalai Lama, what are the three types of knowledge?
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What is Kylie Jenner’s major business accomplishment?
What are five foundational lessons your education should have taught you, but didn’t?
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What are five things children should learn growing up?
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What is ‘strength-based time management’?
What are some differences between active and passive investment?
Working hard vs working smart. You shouldn’t start working hard until _____.
Which offers greater ROI, focusing on one business idea at a time or experimenting with 12 different ideas per year? Why?
Once you’ve finally found ‘that one idea’, what should you do?
Which strategy offers greater ROI, paid online advertising or hiring a photo- and videographer to shoot your event and post them online? Why?
When dealing with data-driven algorithms, what are some differences between Netflix’s and Amazon’s approach?
What is optimal stopping?
What is the process of scaling from making 100K€/year to 1M€/year?
17 videos. 184 links. 223+ takeaways from this 20 hr training lesson:
[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 20 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from Tai Lopez’ Youtube channel blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]
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