Loving Too Much... Sidebar Madness... the Hidden World of the Hardworking Copywriter... and Much, Much More
By Michael Masterson
Your employees want to work less and get paid more. Your vendors want to charge more and deliver less. Your customers are tough to please. What should you do? In today's main essay, I'll give you my view. Also in this issue, I talk about why you should not hire a business expert to run your business and what you should not do on your next business trip. You'll also hear from Total Health Breakthroughs' Jon Herring on why you should cheer when doctors go on strike. Later this week, you'll hear from marketing superstar Dan Kennedy. He'll tell you how he makes a seven-figure income working from his home office -- often for just a few hours a day. On Wednesday, Robert Ringer talks about the role of faith, not necessarily religion, in your success. On Thursday, Clayton Makepeace, one of the featured presenters at ETR's Info-Marketing Bootcamp (and recipient of our Lifetime Achievement Award), talks about sidebars. He'll show you how to use them to keep prospects reading your promotions. And on Friday, veteran copywriter Bob Bly explains how he overcomes writer's block. He also reveals how he's been able to write blockbuster promotions -- over and over again. It's so simple it's almost like stealing, he says. But it's not stealing. Not exactly. -----------------------------------------------------Highly Recommended ----------------------------------------------------- Using flying time to come up with enriching ideas is what successful people do. - Wealthy entrepreneurs and executives know that that time really is money. It's part of the Billionaire Mindset.
"Fit no stereotypes. Don't chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team's mission." Colin Powell How My Biggest Client Built His Empire Without Managing Anyone
By Michael Masterson
"We don't talk much about office morale," my main client said in a memo to his top execs recently. "Why not? Partly because we don't know much about these things. Another is that we don't think about it." (Note: When he says "we," he means "I.") As far as I know, this has always been true. When I first met him 30 years ago, he showed no interest in management issues. And when I began consulting with his company 10 years after that, he hadn't changed. "We practice a form of management called spontaneous order," he'll say right now if you ask him about his management style. (I call it "benign neglect.") "There are some things you can't ignore," I used to tell him. "Like P&L statements." But he was never interested in the operational aspects of his business. His solution to an operational requirement was to put an ad in the local newspaper, hire a warm body, and let them figure out how to do the job themselves. When the head bookkeeper came in and plopped the latest P&Ls on his desk, he'd look up from his typewriter suspiciously. I never saw him go through those meticulously detailed reports. But the next day, the stack was always sitting neatly in his trash basket. He gives his full attention to only four things: - The quality of his products
- The satisfaction of his customers
- Writing good copy
- Reading marketing results
It's not that he believes the other aspects of his business don't matter. It's just that, as he says, "We don't know much about those things." (Note: "We don't know much about" means "I am bored to death by.") But he's always surrounded himself with smart people -- accountants, bookkeepers, marketers, and, eventually, even lawyers -- who cared about "those things." And he hired me. I was eager to "take charge." And one of my early contributions to the business was getting operations to run properly. But I never tried to change his management style. I recognized that it was working very well with the six or seven people he interacted with every day. And I realized that he was paying attention to the most important things any business owner can pay attention to: finding the best ways to bring in new customers and keep old customers buying. This gets us back to his recent memo about the issue of office morale. "Early on," he wrote in the memo, "I would get questions about office morale. I remember a trusted employee came to me and said: 'Morale is very low in the office. The other employees aren't very motivated. We need to do something.' "Instinctively, I replied: 'Find out who has a morale problem and fire him!' "I didn't know whether this was a good idea or not. It was just a grumpy reaction, not a well thought out business strategy. But later I realized that this approach works as well as any other. Probably better." (Note: I've never seen him fire a single soul. And that person he referred to with "a morale problem"? He wasn't fired. Perhaps ignored.) He cited a study in the memo which found that an organization of as few of 100 people could spend 100 percent of its time merely working out internal issues. And that, he pointed out, is exactly the opposite of what you want. Business builders want their employees to be figuring out marketing angles, improving products, and writing better advertisements. They don't want them "worrying about where to put the coffee machine... or why so-and-so doesn't get along with so-and-so." "The last thing you want," he said, "is to open the door to a discussion of 'morale.' It's like going to a marriage counselor. When he asks you what's wrong with your marriage -- you're bound to find something!" He's right, of course. As I've often said in ETR, the purpose of a business is to make a profit by providing or selling a product/service. The way to make the business work is to focus all your energies on making the product/service better and the selling more effective. You do those things by learning and caring about the customer. Not by concerning yourself with whether or not your employees feel appreciated. It's the difference between having an outward or an inward perspective on running your business. If you want to be a great business leader, you have to teach your employees, too, to focus outwardly, on their customers -- not inwardly, on themselves. It's the customers, you must remind them, who keep you in business... and pay their salaries. Effective managers don't spend their time trying to make their employees happy. Why? Because it doesn't work. Like most inward goals, it is nugatory and self-destructive -- more likely to cause dissatisfaction than to motivate. This doesn't mean that you should be insensitive to your employees' working conditions, benefits, and compensation. My rule on that: Give as much as you can. Having a healthy business means retaining good people. So pay them as much as you can afford and give them plenty of "extras" -- so long as you have the profits to pay for it and they have helped earn those profits by making your customers happy. [Ed. Note: Michael Masterson was the keynote speaker at ETR's Info-Marketing Bootcamp last week. And he revealed dozens of business secrets just like this one. Secrets -- invisible to outsiders -- about how business is really done. He was joined by more than a dozen other expert business builders, Internet entrepreneurs, and marketers. And every minute of their presentations was recorded. Go here to find out more about the Bootcamp Home Study kit. -----------------------------------------------------Highly Recommended ----------------------------------------------------- Earn thousands a month in online revenues by May 2010 You've thought about it. You may have even set up a website. But if you are like many of the would-be entrepreneurs we talked to at ETR's Bootcamp this year, you haven't yet gotten your business going. That could change today. Let us show you how to bring in thousands of dollars a month, working from home, by May 2010. ... even if you've never made a single penny online before. Our system is proven. It is unique. And it is very, very fast. Find out right now how hundreds of our smartest readers have jumped over the hurdle of "not yet." Here's how to get started... (The price for access to these experts is going up at midnight tonight. Don't delay.)
It's a common story. Entrepreneur starts company. Company gets too big for one man to handle. Professional managers take over. Business tanks. Original (or new) entrepreneur takes over. Business is saved. I've seen it from afar and have experienced it firsthand. Here's what you need to remember. At some point in the growth of your business, running it yourself will be "beyond" you. (That point usually comes when you have about $10 million in annual sales or more than 50 employees.) Your overwhelmed operational people will fall behind, your overburdened marketers will start making costly mistakes, and your customers will complain more and respond less. Refunds will rise. Sales will slip. Profits will dip. You'll be swamped with problems, complicated problems, and you won't have time to solve them all. You will feel the need to bring in a strong administrator -- an MBA or experienced accountant -- who can bring order out of chaos and rescue you from the stuff you hate to do (and don't do well). This is a good instinct. But don't make the mistake of putting that person in the CEO position. An MBA can do a great job of managing the business for you -- but make him or her CFO or COO, not CEO. You are the person who best understands your business and your market. So the CEO position must be yours. A business manager's job is to create efficiency. A CEO's job is to keep the business profitable. What Happens When Doctors Go On Strike?
By Jon Herring
Managing Editor, Total Health Breakthroughs When Israeli medical doctors went on strike in 2000, the number of deaths in that country went down. They went down so far, in fact, that funeral directors were protesting the strike! Emergency care and other vital services were not disrupted during the strike. What decreased -- drastically -- were visits to outpatient centers. That meant fewer prescriptions were written. And most elective surgeries were cancelled. Maybe not a bad thing. Dr. Joseph Mercola put it well when he wrote: "There is no question that traditional approaches for acute traumas (heart attack, stroke, accidents, etc.) are valuable and should not be abandoned. However, overall, when drugs and surgery are used to address chronic illness, it is generally a prescription for disaster." Hospitals and doctors are invaluable for traumatic injuries. But when it comes to maintaining robust health and preventing illness, healthy living and personal responsibility is the key. DL, a senior executive, sat next to me on the plane ride to LA. During the four-hour flight, he read a detective novel. It relaxed him, he said. I wasn't impressed. My view is that business traveling time should be spent on business. It's only fair. After all, the business is paying for your ticket. There's no better time to catch up on paperwork than during a plane or train trip. What I like to do is: - knock off accumulated e-mails
- write "personal" business notes
- review my daily journal for new ideas and forgotten promises to myself
- plow through accumulated reading matter
While I'm doing this secondary stuff, I find myself thinking of "the big picture." In fact, some of my most important business decisions have been made on airplanes. So forget the junky novels and video distractions. Get something done. Then enjoy the feeling of stepping off the plane free of the burden of a ton of backed-up work.
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We sent you lots of useful tidbits about Info-Marketing Bootcamp last week. But you didn't get the whole story. We just got out of an intense, two-hour meeting with the ETR staff that resulted in at least a dozen million-dollar ideas. We can't wait to put them into action. You can do it too -- with the Bootcamp home study program. And one more thing... the discounted price expires tonight at midnight. Check it out here.
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Today's Words That Work: Nugatory Nugatory (NOO-guh-taw-ree) -- from the Latin for "trifling" -- means worthless or ineffective; of no real value. Example (as used by Michael Masterson today): "Effective managers don't spend their time trying to make their employees happy. Why? Because it doesn't work. Like most inward goals, it is nugatory and self-destructive -- more likely to cause dissatisfaction than to motivate."
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