From Mediocrity to Millions in Five Stages

During a live teleconference workshop on April 5th, I was interviewed for two straight unrelenting hours about my money-making marketing methods and my key fortune-building business lessons. It was a unique experience – and not just for those people listening but for me as well.

Why?

Because to prepare for the rigorous process of letting someone else tackle the job of taking my methodology apart, I had to look at “why” my marketing approach works so much better than almost anyone else’s.

What emerged from one of the most diligent self-assessments I’ve ever done was an awareness that the key to the greatest marketing successes I generate lies in engineering a five-stage dynamic.

Specifically, I get business owners, entrepreneurs, professionals, startups, and opportunity seekers to systematically master five critically linked forces.

They are:

1. Skills and Mindset

2. Process, Structure, and Commitment

3. Quarterly Review and Improvement, Reassessment and Restructuring

4. Motivation and Authentification

5. Mentoring and Masterminding

Understanding and mastering any one of these elements is highly profitable. BUT once you recognize the combined interrelationship that each one progressively builds on the others – your business results start to soar, exponentially.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, let me mention a few of the more interesting points that were brought out during the April 5th workshop. (This doesn’t do the actual teleconference justice. But it DOES demonstrate how, why, and THAT my five-stage methodology transforms businesses from mediocrity to millions.)

STAGE ONE: Skills and Mindset

I am all about maximizing. What this means is that for the same money you’re already spending, you can get 10 times more yield … or even 110 times more.

One guy opens a small hamburger stand and 30 years later it’s still Joe’s Hamburgers. Another guy opens a hamburger stand and 30 years later it’s McDonald’s, with 12,000 units worldwide.

Guys, it sure wasn’t the hamburger meat that made the difference. It was the marketing skills of the entrepreneur – in this case, Ray Kroc. He didn’t know anything about technology, but he was a master marketer.

There are two kinds of business owners.

First, there are those who don’t really have a business, they have a job. They’re never going to be successful, because they don’t look at their business the way I teach you to do it here – that it’s something you work ON, so that you won’t have to work IN IT your entire life.

The second type of business owner is someone who is strategic. A bad military leader turns to his troops and says “Go fight the enemy.” A great military leader plans, thinks about and maximizes resources, thinks through his objectives, looks at every angle before he spends a dime.

So that’s what Stage One is all about: business growth, skill-building, the mastery of marketing – and the Jay Abraham, possibility-based mindset to help make you a far more strategic thinker.

STAGE TWO: Process, Structure, and Commitment

Most of the business owners reading this are already working 60-hour weeks. Given that, what should YOU be doing to BUILD your business? And how much time will it take you?

Surprise!

Twice per week, sit down and work ON your business for just a few hours.

That’s all it takes if you use the time right. Be consistent and you will achieve never-ending, staggering levels of business improvement.

I get business owners to have greater expectations for themselves, their businesses, and most importantly for their income – their money-making and wealth-creating capabilities – when I put them through Stage Two.

I get them to substitute their limited thinking and low-yielding activities with higher-performance, possibility-based thoughts, so they can become unbeatable – unstoppable in their money-making ability. But more important, I get them to recognize the need for a commitment to a regular, systematic, strategic marketing process.

You must commit to a regular process of improvement and engineering breakthroughs. So make that commitment. It can change everything. Most people don’t spend nearly enough time growing their business. They say that if you’re the one responsible for growing your company, you need to COMMIT to 2.5 hours per day. I’m just asking you for two sessions per week. And if you commit to that, it can change everything – giving you exponential growth and profit.

STAGE THREE: Quarterly Review and Improvement, Reassessment and Restructuring

90% of business owners don’t get what they want, because they don’t KNOW what they want. So you need a process and fail-proof system to first establish and then reassess and possibly totally restructure your offers, your marketing performance and results, your approaches, and even your business model. Time doesn’t allow me to elaborate fully here, but this is a really major stage of business growth and profitability.

Quarterly review and improvement, reassessment and restructuring. In other words, once every three months, look at your model. Is it the best model it can be? How can it be refined, improved, replaced? Have you created a business with recurring revenue streams? Have you looked at how you can build a better relationship with your clients?

STAGE FOUR: Motivation and Authentification

Unless you continuously motivate yourself to commit to and execute the previous three stages, your business can’t maximize its marketing opportunities and profit potential.

This requires one of two approaches: Either you struggle through it yourself … or you borrow the success processes from other businesses and industries.

For example:

You can try out 30 different phrases to use when greeting a retail buyer at your front door … or I can tell you the one we used with a furniture store that tripled their closing ratio and saved them a year’s worth of costly advertising tests. (“Which ad brought you into the store today?”) Same goes for dozens of other lucrative areas of upside marketing leverage your business is sitting on but not tapping.

In Stage Four, you need to:

• See that (and how) other people outside your myopic industry do it. Travel outside your industry. Master what I call “funnel” vision instead of tunnel vision.

• See what really works, how it really works, and what the bottom-line impact of it really is.

• Understand that the approach you’re currently using is not usually the best, most productive, or profitable – and what is.

Look at other models. See how others are doing it. Look for marketing shortcuts, selling shortcuts, advertising shortcuts, lead-generating shortcuts, sales-cycle-accelerating shortcuts.

Finally,

STAGE FIVE: Mentoring and Masterminding

Most great achievers have had someone to direct them, someone to advise them, whether it be a mentor, coach, board of directors, kitchen cabinet, etc. So find an adviser or a group of like-minded people that you can get together with in a regular, organized way to creatively collaborate on all your business-building issues.

I have clients who meet every single month to talk about their businesses. I can’t tell you how helpful it is to be able to talk to someone outside your own circle. Hearing the perspective of others can make a HUGE difference in what happens in your business. That’s why I like going to training programs. Not only is the training great, but you also get to interact with other business owners. And you can learn as much from them as you can from the trainers.

Again, it’s all about WHO you want to be much more than it is WHAT you do. If you commit to being a learner, someone who seeks out better and better ideas, you can change your life overnight.