Healthy Business » Challenges

Be strong or carry on as you are

wbhawkins — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:15:51 +0000

Transform yourself into a pack horse

The three principles of this business are to be consistent in your activity, to replicate the business and to give it time. It is simple. The business is simple. The products are great and they work. Retailing them at events is a doddle. So, what is the challenge?

Being consistent is a key to being successful in this business. You have to be a pack horse and just keep moving onwards towards your goals. I have not yet been consistent in my activity. I have carried out short sprints of emailing and calling. Then I have stopped because it is easy to let ‘life’ get in the way.

But the life that gets in the way is not going to help me to reach my objectives. Being stressed in my day job, or being away at the weekends when I could be building my business or putting things off because of Christmas are easy excuses. In this business, there is no room for excuses. You do well in this business by doing simple things often and regularly. This business needs discipline.

And being disciplined in your activity brings you wealth. Not just financial wealth. It will be bring you wealth in your spirit and relationships too. I have tried to be clever in this business by doing things which are not simple. I have run email campaigns when I should be just picking up the phone and talking to people. I have carried out activities in Twitter and Facebook when I should be just talking to people.

This business is not difficult at all. It is simplicity in its essence. But it is easy to make it complicated. To be successful you have to make a choice. Am I prepared to carry on with being where I am? Or am I prepared to be strong, get my head an plod on steadily towards where I want to be?

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Three principles for success

wbhawkins — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:19:00 +0000

Follow the principles to succeed

I think it was Eddie Cochran who said that there are ‘three steps to heaven’. His three steps were finding a a girl to love, followed by getting her to fall in love with you and ending by kissing and holding her tight. It sounds easy and romantic.

But finding a girl to love is, generally, quite hard to do when you are young. Some people don’t achieve it at all. Many keep their girl for the shortest of times. Getting her to fall in love with you is the next challenge. How the heck do you do that? You take her out, make her laugh, make her feel special and hope one of these methods sticks, because you know that prize of her kiss is waiting for you when you succeed. Eddie Cochran knew that holding her tight was important because you have worked so darned and invested so much of yourself in the process that you don’t want to lose her. That would be a disaster.

In this business, there are three steps to heaven too. They sound easy. They are easy to understand. They make sense. But like anything, anyone following the principles needs to follow them religiously to get the prize.

The first success principle is ‘consistent effort‘. This business needs you to do certain things each day and everyday. You need to put the business in front of people every day through phone calls, meetings, presentations and training. By doing this, you make sure that you increase your chances of selling products and recruiting people to your team.

The next principle is ‘duplication‘. Over several decades, Forever Living has fine tuned a business model which is easily duplicable. That sounds odd to most people but it is a sound principle which ensures that the business model is easy to learn and to follow so that people can get going quickly when you recruit them and train them in the business.

Finally, you have to ‘give it enough time’. Most people think this business is either a get rich quick scheme. It’s not. You need to be patient and work it along building it up steadily through hard work and following the plan. That’s why many people drop out just at the point when they could have seen it grow hugely.

I am at the early stages of my business and I am already getting success. Following the plan takes discipline, dedication and some sacrifice. But when you have worked hard and remained patient you will reach that goal which compelled you to start the business.

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Why people are suspicious of network marketing

wbhawkins — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:26:26 +0000

People are prepared to accept the grind of life but not that there is an honest alternative

It’s a funny thing, the human mind. It’s prepared to accept and reject the most bizarre things sometimes.

For example, some people have faith in their god. I admire that because it shows that people are strong minded and they believe in something. They will have moments of doubt about their beliefs, of course, but they fall back on their values, their faith and their community to help them keep on track.

In our working lives, we are educated, trained and conditioned to work in a routine that revolves around our societies working in a routine which, in general, a day which starts at about 9am and finishes at about 5pm.

To get to our places of work or study, we all set off at about the same time and try to get through an infrastructure which cannot cope with the numbers of people who want to get through a space designed for fewer numbers. This is why traffic jams occur at the same time and place each day, and which many people just sit through because they think they have no other alternative to this routine. People accept this bizarre waste of time and only feel able to express their exasperation by honking their horn or swearing at other people in the same jam.

And yet, with small adjustments to your daily routine, you can travel the same way to work in much less time, be more productive at work and feel less stressed by simply, say, working from home for an hour in the morning when you would normally be in the car thereby missing the ‘rush hour’. Try it. If you have a job which allows a little flexibility then ask for it. It will change your life in a small but significant way.

When it comes to network marketing or ‘team marketing’ people dismiss it as ‘pyramid selling’. Their perception of network marketing is one of innocent or vulnerable people buying a stack of products from the top of the ‘pyramid’ and desperately trying to sell it to people lower than them in the pyramid. That could not be further from the truth.

Network marketing is a distribution strategy which cuts out the traditional route that products take to reach their market from the manufacturer such as agents, distributors, wholesalers, sales people and retailers and which provides a greater share of the profits to the manufacturer and the distributor.

Part of my working life in a traditional business involved me persuading wholesalers to buy a large amount of products of which I would only accept a small amount of their orders to be returned to our business if they did not sell it. My customers had to make a calculated risk on how much they thought they could sell to their customers knowing that mistakes in purchasing would cost them a lot of money. Far from being vulnerable, my customers in that business were very astute and had a lot of market knowledge which enable them to forecast their sales and, therefor, their purchases.

This is the vital factor for why pyramid schemes were so bad because innocent and naive people bought products, such as water filters, about which they had no information about the real market for these products compared to highly skilled and experienced buyers in professional companies.

In good network marketing companies, the manufacturer supplies all of its distributors directly at the same price at all levels of the team. Products are ordered by the distributor when a customer orders and pays for them. Anyone who has any business sense knows that this is good business. No stock is held by the distributor. Cash flow is good because no money is tied up in unsold stock. Distributors are rewarded for training other people in their teams who sell products as a consequence of the training. It’s a business, remember, and products need to be bought and sold.

So, why are people suspicious of network marketing? It comes down to two things. Firstly, the bad experiences of people who were scammed by pyramid schemes in the 1970’s still linger in people’s conscience. They have a blind reaction to something which was made illegal nearly thirty years ago and they have no desire to seek to understand how network marketing works.

Secondly, we are conditioned to believe that there is only one honourable way for businesses to work because this is how everyone else is carrying out business. People are more prepared to put up with the grind of their daily routines than they are prepared to get into a business which will allow them all to achieve all of the things that they dream about doing with their lives rather than what their employers allow them to do. People are prepared to take huge risks with new business ventures which fail more often than they succeed, and which run the risk of them losing their health, wealth and families than they are to get into a business which has no financial risks and which has a simple, proven business model.

So, if you are suspicious about network marketing and you think it is nothing more than a shoddy pyramid scheme, then I suggest you do two things. Firstly, contact me so I can show you what a good, honest and ethical business I am part of and running. Secondly, come along to one of our events and meet other decent, honest people I work with who will never put you under pressure to enter a business which you don’t first understand.

When you have done this, then you might grasp just how amazingly good network marketing business can be for anyone who is prepared to persist with a simple, proven business which changes people’s lives for the better.

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The Reason Why

wbhawkins — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:06:34 +0000

It's out there and I'm going to get it

Starting your own business is a brilliantly brave thing to do. Most entrepreneurs make calculated risks about their business start up or business take over which, from the outside, can seem like madness to employees.

I have started several businesses and, I admit, all of them have been failures so far. I started a cycle tours company which broke even on its first tour and broke up the weekend afterwards. I started to sell wine for a local vineyard but I could not make enough money to make it worthwhile. I started an online delicatessen which was getting sales but which wasn’t making profits. I gave up my full-time job to start a business with three other guys to train IT professionals over the internet which got great clients but not enough of them.

I lost money in all of them and I gained a whole load of experience, skills and lessons which I could never have done if I had just read about running a business. I failed magnificently.

At this point, I should have given up. But, no, I was inspired. I was lucky enough to spend six weeks working out in India at the end of 2008, training staff in a mobile phone company’s call centre. It was inspiring to see a country where the young people I was training were hugely ambitious and keen. Despite the contrasting poverty and wealth in the country, I saw how people were doing their utmost to get off their backsides and do something about their lives.

At the same time,I was working alongside an Irishman, who, as it happened, had also come out of running his own unsuccessful business. In our quiet moments during the courses we were co-teaching, we used to talk about our experiences. They were surprisingly similar. We both had debts, we had both lost money and we had put our family relationships to the test.

Nevertheless, the two of us were still determined to come out of our challenging time in our own businesses fighting. And it was at this point, that I became far more clear about my future than I had ever been before starting my own businesses. So, did my Irish cohort. We started reading business books and swapping ideas from them. We discussed types of businesses we would like to be in. We laughed at some of the decisions we had made in our own businesses.

But all the while, we were training numbers of keen students how to improve their ‘game’ at work bit by bit to make a huge impact on themselves and the business. And I loved every minute of it. Inspiring people to do better is one of the most incredible feelings.

I had not really considered network marketing before I was in India last year. Cora, my sister-in-law, had built her network marketing business for years and I had been keen to hear how she was progressing. But, it had never seriously occurred to me to get involved until I went along to a business presentation about it and it dawned on me just how incredible the strategy is for developing a sustainable, profitable and enormous business which has a start up cost of about £200.

So, here I am now. I have signed the paperwork and I have started to build a list of people to contact about the opportunity which network marketing offers to start a business which will transform their lives. It’s unconventional but that’s good. I like unconventional and I am wildly excited about this business. Because, finally, I have found a way that will allow me to keep focused on why I will put in the groundwork to make my dreams happen.

My other business ventures were training grounds for this adventure. My goals are clear and the way to achieve them is here. It might be a rollercoaster of a ride but I just have to keep focused on why I am doing it to succeed.

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