Podcast

Philip Masiello of 800razors.com

The beauty of e-commerce is you can run the company virtually. 

What are things that people use the most? Target that market.

There's a certain amount of risk, you can test before you throw money into it, but at some point you have to trust in your research.

Baby boomers can start up a website, they can start out small.

If you are reselling a new product that is readily available in the marketplace then all you are competing on is price. However, when you are offering a private label, you take away the price point, you have to be priced correctly, but you don’t have to be matching prices every single day. You have more flexibility. The downside to that is it’s not readily available and you have to make a bigger investment in inventory.

Ask yourself, "If my business works, who is going to benefit the most from it, besides the consumer?"  Those are the people with whom you go to and try to form partnerships.

What you are trying to do is come up with the idea to sell a product, but minimize your risk and minimize your investment and inventory.

Accountants and bookkeepers can create an online business.  Look at your expertise and see how you can help your customers virtually.

Elance, Guru, CrowdSpring: places where you can offer your services in a virtual setting.

For any business, baby boomers should find out who the customer is, what the customer needs, and where they are not being serviced.

Philip Masiello Contact Information

www.800razors.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Tom Corley is the author of Rich Habits – The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals.  He is also a dynamic and empowering speaker.

You know you have found the main purpose in your life when you know you're going to do it for the rest of your life until you die, no matter how much money you make.

Goal is different than purpose.  Purpose is something that reaches deep down inside of you, those roots go very deep and you can´t pull yourself out of it, even if you try.

While doing research for his Rich Habits study, he found that the self-made millionaires had at least three streams of revenue. 65% of the wealthy in his study had three or more revenue streams and 45% had four or more.  Develop revenue streams by taking action.

Pursuing success is about overcoming a mountain of mistakes and failure.  The more mistakes and failures that you have, the higher your mountain is and greater your success.

Being successful is not about the event. It's about growing into the person you need to be in order for success to visit you.

By the time you are successful, it doesn't really matter if you lose all your money the next day because the person that you became doesn't evaporate with the money. So you can take what you know and apply it to something else and try again.

Avalanche of Success Event: When you pursue things and nothing happens, you get depressed, but because you are passionate about it, you keep at it and eventually something happens.  This refuels you, you fail some more and then something happens. It's a cycle.  Eventually you will figure out what not to do and figure out what to do.

Success is very shy, hiding around a corner behind all your failures and mistakes and it only shows its face when it realizes you are never going to quit.

Have persistence and passion for something.

Take action, passion bubbles up, you become enthusiastic and then there´s no turning off the switch and you keep at it.

If you are doubting yourself and you quit, that wasn’t your main purpose in life.

Every six months pursue some new initiative that has the potential to earn money and has some creativity in it. Creativity keeps the brain active.

Find something that puts you in a positive emotional state.

When you succeed everybody becomes a cheerleader for you. They stop questioning you, they stop challenging you because success is the ultimate proof that are on the right track.

Look for a creative pursuit.  When people are engaged in a creative pursuit that is when they are truly happy.

The brain loves novelty.

If you are interested in writing, start a blog and start writing every day. Your goal should be to post one blog article every day. You should write about things that you read or research. You start developing an expertise in an area and you become a leader in the industry.

Practice, practice, practice.

With a large extent in writing, your success is outside your control.  The only control you have is the ability to persist every day in trying to get publicity for your book.  Selling a million copies will eventually come!

Your book only needs to be good enough.

Writing a book is like the first start in tennis, the rest of the match is about publicity.

There is a correlation between the number of books you sell and the number of speaking engagements you get.

Forced focus depletes your energy. Unforced focus is when you don't utilize a great deal of glucose and oxygen in the brain because it is something that you enjoy doing and the brain, when it likes doing something, gathers all it resources to do that one thing.

Tom Corley Contact Information

Website

www.richhabits.net

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Hugh Culver - International Speaker

Start by looking at what you need or look at what your friends need. Look for something more personal and perhaps smaller scale.

What would be a solution that would help me get to where I am today or to where I want to be, less painfully and less expensively, and faster? 

You will create a product or service that you care about and it will be much easier to put in the long hours to actually create that kind of product.

There are courses and retreats that can help baby boomers become speakers.

Go on Amazon, Kindle books, type in your topic area and find books that come up in your topic area. Scroll down and go through the details of the books. Look for the Amazon market rank. It tells you how popular that book is among all Amazon books in Kindle. If it is under 100,000 chances are that market niche is very popular.

Go online and type plumbing associations. Look for events and agenda. The agenda will let you know what topics are being talked about, popular.  Develop your speaking topics around those platforms.

Go through your circle of influence and let them know what you do.

Build a platform online: videos, blogs, program description of what you talk about, and a biography.

If you want to be a speaker, you need to put in a lot of time to get noticed.

Do your base-work. Develop a really good speech that actually delivers content; that is relevant.  Be willing to customize, be willing to create a platform.

To become a successful speaker, you have to please your two types of clients:

The audience that wants entertainment, relevance and content.

The event planner that looks at if you were easy to work with, did you deliver what was on your list and does it look like the audience likes you? 

Start your website right from the beginning.

A written blog is more successful, use keywords.

Baby boomers can put together a slide deck on SlideShare. 

For images you can use Flickr, Unsplash.com, pixabay, dollar photo club, which is $1 per image, 123RF.

Create your own framework. Figure out your own unique way of packaging your message and then you can become recognized for that solution.

For B2B, very useful to have Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter for building up following and LinkedIn for making contacts.  LinkedIn has a publish feature which allows you to publish your articles directly in LinkedIn.

Your number one goal should be to get opt-ins. It is all about being to get into people's inboxes.

It's an amazing privilege to get on stage and to have a captive audience that you can share your advice, your humor, your insight; people need that.  If you can help people get from where they are to where they want to be faster, cheaper or easier then you got a business. You just have to figure out how to put that into a package that people can actually buy.

Recommends Business of Speaking School (Boss) Program with Jayne Atkinson.  It is an eight week comprehensive program that takes people through the entire process of building a successful, sustainable speaking business.

Hugh Culver Contact Information

Website

www.hughculver.com

Business of Speaking School (Boss) Program with Jayne Atkinson

www.BusinessofSpeakingSchool.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Bob Burg is the co-author of the Go-Giver Booklet and author of Endless Referrals: Network Your Everyday Contacts into Sales.

Selling is determining what someone does want, need or desire and helping them to get it.

A great sales person simply connects the benefits of their product or service with the needs or wants of their perspective customer.

Baby boomers wanting to become a speaker should join the National Speakers Association, an association of paid professional speakers. It's not so much learning how to speak, but it's more the business of speaking; its need to be run and marketed as such.

The first thing that baby boomers should do when starting out a business is to find out what the people who are successful in your field are doing. Find out what they've done.

Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. Learn the system, the process of predictably achieving a goal based on a logical and specific set of how to principles.

Start to speak for free at every civic club, group, organization, etc. anywhere you can and do twenty to thirty minutes talks as you can. 

Before the end of your presentation, explain the benefits of what you offer and ask for any person that is interested to hand you their business cards.  This qualifies them as persons that are interested in your product or service.

Bob recommends Jayne Atkinson.  She is a premier expert on how to market yourself as a speaker.   You can obtain more information at www.burg.com/jane

Have a blog that gives bite size pieces of advice for your industry.

Get a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn provides great value based information.

Contact organizations and speak wherever you can.

Communicate your value.

Focus on quality to build great relationships.

Be consistent with the amount of blogs. 

Giving value to the market place begins the receiving process. 

Money is simply an echo of value.  The value must come first. The money you receive it simply a natural and direct result of the value you've provided.

Positive Persuasion is the ability to obtain the result you want when dealing with others in such a way that the other person feels genuinely good about themselves, about the situation and about you. The person who masters this skill is nine steps ahead of the game in a ten step game.

Recommends Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Bob Burg Contact Information

Website

www.burg.com

Books

Adversaries into Allies: Win People Over Without Manipulation or Coercion

Booklets

The Go-Giver

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Alfred Poor, author of 7 Success Secrets That Startups Can Learn from Breaking Bad.

The Internet has changed everything.  You don´t really have subscribers, you just want to have as many articles as possible so that when somebody is searching for something the chances are better that you show up.

With the Internet, you pay as little as you possibly can so you can get as much money for your content as possible.

How to become successful at writing, speaking or any other position!

Baby boomers should have a presence online.  Social media is the way to do that.  Have a LinkedIn profile that describes you and what you are looking for.   When filling out your Job Title, aim for what it is you want to do.  The same with the bio.

Join groups of the topic you are interested in and participate.

Beyond that, you also want to be on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

Baby boomers should establish themselves as someone knowledgeable in their field.

There are two very distinct aspects to making a living this way, they are equally important. You need to have both in order to succeed.  They are:

You need to have the skills and the ability to command the content. So if it´s writing, you need to be a good writer, if it´s speaking, you need to be persuasive, bring energy into your presentations, etc...

Being able to run a business. 

Alfred recommends Speak and Grow Rich written by Dottie Walters and Lillet "Lilly" Walters. It discusses the basic principles of having a speaking business.

If you are just starting out speaking, you want to set your fees at $2,000 to $2,500. Once you start getting 50 or more bookings a year, you can start raising your rates.

For baby boomer speakers that are just starting out, an important thing is for them to recognize when there is other value available to you; practice your speaking.  Remember people buy from people they know, like and trust. People don't want to take a risk when they are buying. Have video posts of you speaking. 

Techniques:  "I am willing to waive my speaking fee in exchange for .....  This can be testimonial letters, video testimonials, audio recordings, sell products at the back of the room, referral, opportunities to audition for your market etc....

Write a book. It gives you credentials.

Writing a book is not going to generate a lot of money in itself. However, combining to sell a book and giving a speech is tremendous. 

Write a book that has value. Get your message out. 

This is all part of how to run a business.

When doing speaking engagements, consider cost and value. So for example, if some says, "we want you to come speak for free and no you can't sell anything” that is when the business part kicks in.  That is when you say, “I don't see value here for me to make it worth my while to come and speak. Thank you for thinking of me. "

To go after the event planners; direct mail, postcard or large padded envelope and make a lumpy mailing, start locally, local targets of opportunities as there is less travel and it more affordable.

Telephone combined with email.  Do it in a couple of steps; First call, all you are doing is getting information. Next step is calling and finding out the contact person in charge of hiring the speakers.  You can hire a virtual assistant to do this work for you.

Do your homework, research, identify your target population.

Alfred Poor Contact Information:

Websites

www.alfredpoor.com

Career Success Programs: www.alfredpoorspeaker.com

Small Business Marketing: www.tcfsb.com

Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Alfred Poor

Email Address

apoor@verizon.net

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

August Turak is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and author of Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO's Quest for Meaning and Authenticity.  He also writes for Forbes.

He is a spiritual person who used business as a way of self-development.

The first thing he did was not figure out was he was going to do, but figure out who he wanted to be.

The first thing he did was to sit down and write the values, who was the kind of person he was going to be, how he was going to live, how he was going to conduct himself as a business entrepreneur and he believes that was the critical reason as to why he was eventually successful.

He started with the shoe string approach; back against the wall mentality that he wanted to foster and maintain in his first business, that was one of his values.

Anybody can do anything that they want to do if they do it right.

Business is making things and selling things.

You have to be in business for something higher than money. Money is not the purpose of the business; money is the way you measure if you are achieving the mission or not.

Focus on delighting your customer, serving your customer and the commissions and quotas take care of themselves.

The purpose of leadership is a way for you to make other people successful. The more time spent on making people successful, the more successful you will become.

There are two kinds of people; there are sufferers and learners.  To find out who you really are, you find out under pressure.

Excellence is not a choice, but a habit.

Fear is the number one problem with people.

One of the things that make an entrepreneur an entrepreneur is he or she is the kind of person that finds the money he or she needs; they don’t sit around and wait for the money and then become the entrepreneur; they becomes the entrepreneur by finding the money in the first place.

Great leaders believe in themselves.

Baby boomers can sell. Ask yourself if you have the self-discipline for it. You have to be willing to hustle. Many people are looking for sales people. There is a lot of money in sales.

After retirement, the first thing you should do is get out and meet people.  Start networking.

Use your expertise in any way you can.

Entrepreneurship is salesmanship.

When you retire. Aim past the target. Look around.  Ask yourself what you want your life to be about now?  See this as an opportunity.   Put a group together.  This group can read books together, discuss things, get more active.

August Turak Contact information

Website

www.augustturak.com

To view his writings visit www.forbes.com

Twitter

@augustturak

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/August.Turak

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Edward Massey is a consultant and the author of Every Soul Is Free.  He also has a company that focuses on the concept of using family stories and history to pass the values across generations.

70% of inherited wealth is dissipated by the second generation. 90% of inherited wealth is dissipated by the third generation. It is a difficult task and he approaches it by talking about something that is not money. How do you build a value system that is really representative of what your family stands for?

Consulting is a business of viewing people. Get in the path of the kind of people that you want to work with.

You will have to take a lot of rejection.

The answer is always yes until it is no.

A person has to be a bit willing to run at blind alleys, what that means is not to chide yourself that you run at blind alleys.

Baby boomers that are retired accountants and have a passion for baseball can find the name of every baseball agent online and write to them and say that you are looking to develop a practice as account and financial analyst to baseball players.

Do tangible things that are consistent with what it is you want to achieve.

If you live in a town that has a minor league baseball team, talk to the people that operate the team and see if there is anything that you can do with them.

Visit banks and see if they have any leads, talk to any people you know.

All of these opportunities are created by human interaction. You have to be available to let lightning strike.

Send letters to everyone in your rolodex and explain what services you offer now after retirement.

Look deeply into what your specialty is. Go for firms that are investing in that area.

Baby boomers that want to write a book:

What they should do is sit down and write.

Baby boomers should get involved with the writing community, either doing workshops, going to classes or conferences.

Finish your manuscript.

You can self-publish using a publishing company.  Everybody has to examine their own circumstances.

There are a lot of things people can do in retirement years. 

Take on anything new that you want to do, but it requires a little bit of entrepreneurship that you need to go out and let the world know you are available.  Talk to people and tell them what you are doing, find your passion.

Edward Massey Contact Information

Website

http://www.edwardmasseybooks.com/

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS