If you’re in sales, this is definitely worth watching.  If you’re not in sales, you’ll still laugh.  And if you’ve ever gone cold calling door to door, did any of your calls go like this?

Try saying no to this guy!  I have a feeling he’ll end up doing quite well.

“What you are selling?”

“Personality.”  Love it.

-Nick

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These are the must-read books for aspiring young entrepreneurs and the “Retired at 25″ set. Some are classics, some you’ve probably already read, and some I hope are new to you. Each is inspirational in its own way.

1. Rich Dad Poor Dad

I have a special place in my heart for Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. It was one of the first non-fiction books I read that wasn’t for school. I was 18 or 19 years old at the time, but was in the middle of my first true entrepreneurial experience, running a painting company as a branch manager for College Works Painting. This is a book about financial intelligence, and how the school system and conventional wisdom don’t teach what it takes to get ahead. Employees, Kiyosaki argues, are fighting a losing battle because they only trade time for money. The relationship is linear; to earn more you have to work more. Business owners and investors on the other hand, leverage their time and money to reap exponential returns. Rich Dad Poor Dad is easy to understand and rings so true. I found myself saying “Yes!” and nodding along at nearly every page.

Key Takeaway: How to accumulate assets to achieve the holy grail of financial freedom: multiple streams of passive income.

The Next Level: Everything I’ve read in the Rich Dad series has been worthwhile.

2. The Art of The Start

Every great company starts with an idea, and Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start is written to help you turn that idea into a viable business. Kawasaki cut his teeth in the Macintosh division in the early days of Apples, and now runs his own venture capital company in Silicon Valley. Successful entrepreneurs, he argues, require humility and modesty mixed in with their revolutionary “curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending” ideas. It’s a book about how young entrepreneurs can change the world once they learn a little more about the game they’re playing.

Key Takeaway: To be great, you need to make meaning.

The Next Level: You might like Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries.

3. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Author Robert Cialdini packs weeks of sales training into Influence, and it’s all backed up by his research as a professor of psychology. This is probably the most concise and important book on how marketers and salespeople can influence customers. It’s filled with great stories and and is packed with useful and sometimes surprising information. Every entrepreneur can learn something from Dr. Cialdini.

Key Takeaway: How to sell.

The Next Level: Try Why We Buy and Getting to Yes.

4. The 4-Hour Workweek

Something we can all aspire to! Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek has been a runaway bestseller because of the promises it makes on the cover: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. The claims are certainly audacious and probably unrealistic for most, but Ferriss shows that with a little effort, a dramatic change in your lifestyle is possible. The writing style is very direct and some of the suggestions won’t work for everyone. But at the very least, you will learn some effective tips to free up a few extra hours every week, including limiting email access, outsourcing, and intentional ignorance, which should definitely improve your quality of life. If nothing else, it will get your brain turning.

Key Takeaway: Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource. Protect yours dearly.

The Next Level: The Other 8 Hours is a good follow-up read on how to better spend your time.

5. The E-Myth Revisited

Do you run your business or does your business run you? That is the key question in Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. Many entrepreneurs fall victim to the self-employment trap, where they fool themselves into thinking they’ve got it made just because they’re their own boss. The problem is if you spend all your time working on the day-to-day grind of the business, you’re not an entrepreneur, just a glorified employee. Instead of working in the traditional sense, your job as the boss is to build systems that allow employees to do the work for you. Before hiring my virtual assistant, I was guilty of the same sins as many of the business owners featured in the book. It’s not easy to remove yourself from the system, but the rewards make it very worthwhile.

Key Takeaway: Take control by letting go.

The Next Level: For quick ideas on managing your people and your business, you can’t beat Kenneth Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager and The One Minute Entrepreneur.

6. Capitalism at the Crossroads

On the average, earthlings are better off today than at any point in our history. But on the extremes, more than a billion of us still live in dire poverty. Stuart Hart’s Capitalism at the Crossroads is a book about how businesses can improve the lives of those people and make money at the same time. The basic premise is that charities and non-profits on the whole have done a pretty crappy job at creating lasting change for the world’s poor, and that the often maligned “profit motive” can and must be used to serve the “bottom billion.” It’s an interesting read and a reminder that businesses don’t have to exploit the environment and developing nations to make money. Indeed, those that can solve some of our challenging ecological and humanitarian problems over the next 50 years stand to truly cash in.

Key Takeaway: Between 1 and 4 billion potential customers are being ignored by most of today’s companies.

The Next Level: If you want change the world, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and The Go-Giver should probably be on your bookshelf.

Don’t have time to read these and all the other great business books out there? Why not give Executive Book Summaries a try. They give you the Cliffs Notes version of all the classics and latest books on productivity, sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, and more.

-Nick

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I got an interesting mailer the other day from a company called storesonline.com.

It said, “FREE Livermore Dinner Conference… Two Tickets Enclosed…” and, “Dinner Table for Nicholas Loper and guest.”  Now, knowing that nothing’s free, I was even more curious to find out about this company and what the sales pitch was going to be.

Red Flag #1: The “Livermore” Dinner Conference was really in Walnut Creek (26 miles away), Concord (31 miles away), Vallejo (46 miles away), or Napa (62 miles away).  But whatevs, the customization is part of what makes this mailer such an awesome marketing piece.

The next cool thing was the very real-looking admission tickets, complete with an official-looking Guest Reservation ID number.  Very classy.

And then, to seal the deal, they throw a couple free gifts at you.  Everyone who attends their conference gets a free MP3 player, and the first 50 people who RSVP and attend the conference get a free netbook computer!

Red Flag #2: If they’ve got to give away items of high perceived value just to get people through the door, that might not be a good sign.  But on the other hand, they must have a pretty profitable business if they can afford all these goodies.

So what is storesonline.com selling?

The letter is about creating and marketing an online business.  Storesonline.com provides “full e-commerce services,” but is professionally (and intentionally?) vague about what that means.  I interpret it as website templates, hosting, tech support, training, and shopping cart software.

But what they’re really selling is hope.  Hope of financial freedom, success, and independence.  Which is very, very smart.  “Full e-commerce services” are cheap, and some open-source solutions are even free.  But hope is priceless.  And in the case of storesonline.com, hope costs $2400-6000 to start, plus recurring monthly fees of $20-30.  (Based on limited info I could find online without attending the conference.)

There are a lot of people bashing storesonline in forums and calling the company scam artists and frauds.  I don’t think storesonline.com is a scam.  I think they’ve come up with a creative way to package and sell cheap commodities at a premium price.  I think the nature of the business inherently sets customers up for disappointment though.  After dropping that kind of cash, customers expect a magic bullet solution, and when they don’t see immediate success, they blame the system and call it a scam.

Storesonline.com is right: building an online business is an excellent path to financial freedom.  But it’s not easy, it’s not for everyone, and there are no guarantees.  If you attend a storesonline.com conference, they will probably pressure you to sign up on the spot, before you can fully research the company and what they’re offering.  The salespeople are very good at what they do, and it is definitely in your best interest to have a self-mandated cooling off period so can do your due diligence and make an informed decision.

You may find that you can piece together the same “full e-commerce services” for far less money.  But if the conference motivates you to make some lifestyle changes and really go into business for yourself, it was well worth the 90 minutes.  Hopefully you can use your new free netbook to get started!

-Nick

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Sure, Girl Scout cookies are delicious.  But are they more delicious because they’re only available for a limited time each year?  Scarcity, whether manufactured or real, helps give an item value.

Take diamonds, for example.  A large, perfectly cut stone is extremely rare, so it commands a high price.  Or the Nintendo Wii, which has sold way above retail on eBay during each of the last 3 holiday seasons since it wasn’t available in stores.

The Girl Scouts have perfected manufactured scarcity.  Because of that, we pay more for their product even though they have lower costs than any other cookie-maker.  Think about it — no excess inventory, everything is pre-ordered, and their entire sales force is unpaid child labor!  And we’re happy to do it because the cookies are great and it’s for a good cause.

Did You Know?

Depending on where you live, your favorite Girl Scout cookies may go by a different name.  Here in California, Samoas are known as Caramel deLites.  I learned from another blog that this is due to the two different commercial bakeries contracted to make Girl Scout cookies.  Little Brownie Bakers makes the familiar Samoas, while ABC Bakers put out the Caramel deLites.

And, according to the (unscientific) study done by the other blogger, the name-brand Samoas won out in a taste test.  So the folks being served by ABC Bakers are getting short-changed!

-Nick

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When it comes to my entrepreneurial history, I was getting a little smarter by the time high school rolled around.  Before heading off for a week at scout camp when I was 15,  mom and I stopped at Costco and picked up a box of skittles bags and a big bag of caramel apple pops.  This represented about all the extra room I had in my pack, and was a minimal amount of financial risk. I think $14 was the total.

Selling candy at summer camp was a great business venture for two reasons:

1. The camp trading post has a monopoly so they feel they can charge whatever they want.  It was easy to undercut them and still maintain a decent profit margin.

2. Parents give their kids spending money for the week at camp. Disposable income, no parental supervision, and cheap sugar made for a winning combination.

The skittles sold for $0.60 apiece or 2 for $1. The caramel apple pops were $0.25 each or $5 for $1.  I was sold out by Tuesday. All told, I think I doubled my initial investment that week, but could have made way more if I’d had room for more inventory.

-Nick

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When we were kids, my friends and I would set up shop on the sidewalk with a card table and sell baseball cards.  It wasn’t the best business model since pretty much our only customers were each other, and the only thing we’d buy with the proceeds were more baseball cards.  Still, there were some marketing lessons to be learned that closely relate to the “4 P’s” they teach in business school.

Product – You have to have the cards of desirable players in good condition.

Price – Just because the Beckett magazine price guide says your card is worth $10 doesn’t mean someone in the neighborhood will give you $10 for it.  This was dad’s favorite point when I got excited about a card that was “worth” a lot — it’s really only worth what someone will pay for it, he’d say.

Placement – Some neighborhood locations just worked better than others.  Not a lot of car / bike / foot traffic at the end of a cul-de-sac, for example.

Promotion – At one point we decided that a lack of advertising was hurting business, so we wrote “Card Sale” and drew arrows on paper plates and stapled them to mail boxes and stop signs.  Apparently this was in violation of the homeowners association’s rules.  A real stroke of genius was our invention of the “grab bag” — a mixed set of mystery cards sold for a fixed price.  Basically it was like opening a new pack from the store; you knew there were going to be some bad cards, but there might be a superstar!

-Nick

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