How to Sell Anything to Anyone

Over the past two months, I have been working with an entrepreneur in the restaurant industry who was having trouble shaking off a bad a reputation that his small business had earned in the previous year.

The problem was that as his restaurant became popular, the wait time became longer and longer. Some people were getting served more than 40 minutes after ordering their food! Word started spreading around on restaurant review websites, in newspapers’ eating out sections and so forth. Eventually, people started going elsewhere and the restaurant owner smelling trouble gave me a call for help.

Word of mouth marketing is a double-edged sword. When the buzz is positive, it builds a small business. When it’s negative, it destroys it at a faster rate!

(Artists and orators know the feeling first hand. A good performance earns them a standing ovation. A bad performance earns them prolonged boos. Photo: Joi)

I believe that a negative reputation is not necessarily a bad thing for business. Of course it depends. If the people were saying that the food was bad, that’s just a big problem. But people were saying that although the food was excellent, the wait time was a nightmare.

I asked the restaurant owner why it took forever for the food to be ready and served. It turns out that the reason was that the food had to be prepared in a certain manner and it simply took time. If he took shortcut, it was going to affect the quality and the food would not be as great tasting.

In other words, whether there was one client or 50, the wait was inevitable.

The negative press made it seems that the wait time was due to bad management and poor service.

The issue became telling the world the real reason behind the wait time and actually making this reason, the key benefit or unique selling proposition.

While I would not call this negative word of mouth marketing, I would simply say that sometimes a bad reputation can sometimes be good for business as long as it’s turned into a benefit.

The restaurant owner and I devised a plan to let the world know why exactly it took forever for the food to arrive. I also suggested that he comes up with clever gimmicks to make the wait worthwhile and fun. Think about it, I also told him that if I was having a first date, I would take a lady to his restaurant because it would mean me spending a great deal of time with her!

Keeping all that in mind, we went to work and today, the restaurant got a major review in the press mentioning that it was delightful to see that some restaurants were taking the time to prepare the food with great attention and care!

I recently received a rather desperate email asking how to make easy money fast. The aspiring entrepreneur was in a hurry to make a lot of money in a short time to cover some expenses that are getting out of hand.

“How to make easy money?”, I wondered, “Is it even possible without getting involved in questionable or illegal business activities?”

It’s possible to make easy money, that’s for sure. Fast, I don’t know. For instance, there are entrepreneurial people who will leverage the fact that they’re acquainted with a lot of people to approach businesses and offer them to promote their goods or services to their list in return of a percentage on sales.

That’s easy money making. Fast? I doubt it because it may take days to months to structure the deal, send out the offers, collect payment and so on.

I will throw in the towel and admit that I have no idea how to make easy money quickly. There are many ways to make it without a lot of effort but easy and fast? That’s a combo that never seems to work if legal avenues are pursued.

Of course, “fast” is relative. In this instance, I am talking about a week as per the reader’s email.

“Fast” could mean two months or one year depending on the money making scheme in mind.

I will definitely research more on how to make easy money quickly. I am sure that some enterprising people are pulling it off. The key is to figure out their secret and share it with you.

My ten year plus experience in business has never made me come across people who make easy money fast legally. They may make it fast but not easily or they make it easily but not fast but never easily and fast.

This post will be revisited and updated for sure. Stay tuned!

Opening a small business and earning money as an entrepreneur are two different things. Most people assume that being entrepreneurial is all about starting a business that is incorporated and so on. You can certainly make lots of money without having to set your own company!

I felt the need to address this issue when I spoke to a client who owns a restaurant and he told me how some of his clients were loving the cookie in one of the desserts on his menus and that he could make easy extra money selling the cookies but that it would mean opening a small business to deal with that venture as he did not want to dilute his restaurant name.

“Whomever passed out a law that dictated that in order to make lots of money, entrepreneurs had to absolutely start a business?”, I asked. 

I certainly have been earning money from suggesting some ideas to other entrepreneurs without opening a small business to deal with each idea! Sometimes, I sell ideas to entrepreneurs and it’s unrelated to my consulting and publishing businesses. 

Do you think that the entrepreneurial teenager who shovels snow and makes lots of money than other teens really has to open a small business?

If you’re looking at making lots of money, focus on the idea first and the business stuff second. Entrepreneurs solve problems and make their money. Nowhere it’s written that opening a small business is a must!

There are two ways of making money on the Internet. Going for extra cash or going for an empire or millions. Different entrepreneurs have different objectives in life. Nothing wrong with that. The issue becomes when you start your own small business and down the line you realize that it’s not a business but a job! Discover how to discover that fatal fact before it ever happens!

A case I can think of from recent memory is a web designer who wanted to make money online selling his services. She was a one-woman shop and did the design work, marketing and business management. She was making decent money from freelance websites such as Guru or Elance. But very soon, she realized that since her hours were limited, she still earned the same amount of money as her previous job while working harder and longer!

(A web design business can be a great way to make money on the Internet from home. Photo: .Fabio)

In other words, this was no Internet business, it was merely Internet independent contracting! Don’t get me wrong, if you are just interested in the freedom to set your own hours, choose your clients and projects then it’s all good. If your objective is to make millions, you are in a serious jam. Your solution would be to land more high paying projects or hire additional designers as a way of leveraging time.

I sat down with the web designer and told her to put on her entrepreneurial hat in lieu of the creative one. I asked her: what web design related problem nags at least a hundred thousand people who would be grateful for a fast, easy, cheap solution. That was her assignment. She had to come to me with the ideas so that we could evaluate the strong opportunities over the weak ones.

She could not think of any. That mental block happens a lot if one’s brain is not trained to recognize problems or opportunities. I quizzed, quizzed and quizzed her for two hours or so until we landed on an Internet money making idea. It turns out that she was a respected authority in tableless web design (yes, I had to look it up on Wikipedia too to understand what it meant!)

“Why not change your own small business and start making money on the Internet selling CSS templates?”, I asked. She liked the idea but told me that there were many websites available that provided them for free and that no one would pay for hers if they could just get them for free.

“Well if you make your CSS templates valuable enough, smart prospective clients will buy them. Couldn’t you for instance create some for professional sites and limit them to a number of downloads?”

We polished the idea and she went on from working as web designer to making money online with a striving Internet business. She could make money while she slept as someone in London could buy her template while it was 3AM Pacific time and she could go on as many holidays she wanted without worrying about the no work/no pay conundrum that most working people face.

There are different ways of making money online. Start you own small business only if it has potential to grow into a million dollar operation. That does not mean that you need thousands of employees like Google. Craigslist makes millions with only 20 employees! The one thing you should seriously watch for is if the online business is actually another unpleasant job in disguise.

Almost everyone has heard of it, some people are doing it and a select few are successful. Welcome to the fascinating world of making money on the Internet! If you’re feeling an entrepreneurial urge to start your own small business, you should seriously consider the many ways to make money online that are forever popping up.

If you’re new to this, you are probably bombarded with a lot of information on making money on the Internet. From the business opportunities to affiliate programs to even tips on launching the next Google!

The Internet has created thousands of millionaires and there’s still room for everyone. Yes, you can start your own small business online and turn it into an empire. It depends on how big you want to be or how small you want to stay.

How do you come up with the right money making Internet business idea?

Solving problems

My personal rule of thumb is that any entrepreneur should act on an opportunity to solve a problem. Like I have said it before, entrepreneurs are problem solvers. If you can recognize an idea that would help people (your future customers) solve a pressing problem then you should start your own small business on the Internet.

The more people face the problem, the more potential of making money on the Internet you have.

Where would entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook venture be if a 100 million people worldwide did not want to stay in contact with their current friends and meet new ones? He certainly wouldn’t be making money on the Internet!

How about the YouTube founders? If millions of Internet users were not struggling with posting, sharing and viewing videos online, they would have not made money online. They sold their company to Google for 1.65 billion and you can rest assured that they’re millionaires now!

Photo: originalhamster

Don’t think for a second that you should only start your own small business only of your solution solves the problem of millions. You most certainly can make money online with a potential audience of a 100!

How many eBay millionaires made their money online by selling items that less than a 100 people bid on? Many!

Recognize a problem then provide the solution is the basic premise of an entrepreneur including Internet entrepreneurs.

It’s the easiest way not to get confused by the many salesmen trying to pitch you their business opportunities, left, right and center. The problem with such business opportunities is that you end up doing something that thousands of other entrepreneurs are doing.

In such instances, only the pitcher makes money and you’re essentially working for him!

You most certainly can make money online with jobs. Selling your freelance services online is a way of making money on the Internet. But with the fact that you have limited hours in a day and that you need to constantly work to be paid, you will soon realize that you have a job and that you have to pay for your own benefits!

Start your own small business only if it solves a problem and if it can work for you and not the opposite. I will explore this issue in a future post

A marketing professional whose theories I greatly respect value once said that the reason that small business stay small is because the entrepreneurs behind them keep a small mentality.

It was one of those things that seemed obvious but had never really crossed my mind.

It’s true that if you tell family, friends and acquaintances that you will be starting your own business shortly they will react differently if you mention the word small. They may not take you seriously and may offer some encouraging words in the lines of “Oh, good for you! You can make some extra cash!”

If family, friends and acquaintances react like that, how do you think investors, prospective clients and other stakeholders are going to react when you announce that you will be starting your own business in the same manner?

Small is such a limiting word. In a way it’s an opposite word of empire and millions. The general perception is that a small business earns small revenues while big businesses earn big revenues.

There are companies that are small like Craigslist (20 employees) that make millions yearly. Some management consulting firms may be perceived as small businesses until you hear of the millions in billings they earn yearly!

Don’t tell people that you’re opening a small business. Tell them that you are starting your own business and describe the ultimate mission and objective in the same breath. This way, people will understand that you are starting small but with the big vision are headed to greatness!

Someone once said that the only certainty in life was death and taxes. If I may, I can say that among the sure certainties of a business life, competition is the one I am dead sure on. In a previous post I spoke on the many ways to recognize a great retail business idea. In this post, I will discuss how to protect your new business in retailing from competitive attacks.

Gurus always talk about making a business competition-proof. I really believe that it’s a marketing gimmick because nothing in this life is immune to competition. In business, you can surely resist moves done by the competition to take customers away from you but they will take some and you may actually find yourself having to let some customers go.

If your retail business idea turns out to be a good venture, competition is going to come out of the blue like mushrooms on a rainy day. You won’t know where the new stores came from but you will notice some customers drifting away.

(Every retail business will face competition from the day it opens its doors. Entrepreneurs who keep that important fact in mind fare better than those who blindly assume that the competition has nothing on them. Photo: tazz)

From my experience in managing my own businesses and advising entrepreneurs on strategy, I have found that the best defense against competition is to gain recognition for the concept and become synonymous with it. Automatically, the competition is perceived as total rip-offs and this could actually make your brand stronger.

I also find that most competition in retail wages price wars, a strategy that may work if the business under attack does not defend its turf. No matter how much your customers love you, if they see another store selling the same merchandise for less, you can rest assured that they will ditch you in a second, especially in these tough economic times!

How should you protect your wonderful retail business idea from price attacks? You can give more value to customers by offering bonuses, you can provide proof how your goods while slightly more expensive actually have better quality and not to fall prey to cheap imitations.

But ultimately, the best way to protect your store from price attacks is to have reasonable prices in the first place making it difficult from the competition to undermine you from that angle.

Gain recognition fast and keep your prices reasonable. That should protect your retail business idea from competitive moves. 

Good luck and if you have stories or questions to ask, please feel free to email them to me.

Some entrepreneurs make OK money with their cleaning business while others make millions. If you’re considering getting started in the cleaning industry, do things right in the first place and you will find yourself in the latter category of entrepreneurs.

How does a cleaning business make money? By charging clients to clean whatever it is that they need cleaned. The more work, the entrepreneur attracts, the more revenue he or she earns. But there are some entrepreneurs who do less work and yet earn more revenue! Why?

Because their cleaning business charges more.

If you want to make a lot of money with your cleaning business, figure out how you can structure it to command high fees.

For instance, if you go commercial, you will make more money than if you went residential.

If you decide to focus on a particular niche, even better. I once spoke with an entrepreneur who owned a cleaning business and he told me how bad times were because everyone and their dog was entering the market.

After talking to him, he mentioned that he cleaned every type of office, restaurant and anything depending on the deals he landed. I remembered that another entrepreneur who owned a gym was lamenting at the fact that his staff did not know how to clean his gym. It made sense. After all they were personal trainers and not cleaners!

(A cleaning business that only services computers would do well. With the many businesses, schools, universities, call centers for example that own many computers, business would boom! Photo: Extra Ketchup)

I suggested to the cleaning business owner to maybe focus on small gyms if there were no competitors already serving that market and having a lock on it. He was interested in the idea but observed that he would have fewer assignments. I convinced him otherwise by telling him that the fact that he would become a specialist would cause all other small gyms to hear of him, since he was specializing he could charge more and since he had a specific target clientele, it was easier to advertise to it.

The cleaning business is very competitive because anyone can just pick a broom and be in business and if he charges lower fees but provide a good service, he or she can make money.

If you can’t think of a way to stand out from the millions of cleaning businesses out there, don’t even bother getting into it because it will not be worth your while. Don’t think for a second that because you clean better, you will get more assignments. There always will be someone out there who can do a better job that you and charge much less and still be content with his income.

What unique concept can you bring to the cleaning business? That will be your key to success.

Many potential entrepreneurs dream of opening up their own little store where they would be able to sell goods to a regular stream of customers. There’s only one problem, they’re short on a good retail business idea!

Retailing can be a profitable and fulfilling entrepreneurial venture assuming that the retail business idea is strategically sound. In other words, if the idea is good, riches will flow to you and unfortunately if the idea is “bad”, you will set yourself for a miserable time.

What’s the best retail business idea anyway?

1) Demand 

To easiest, fastest and cheapest way to sell anything to anyone is to sell a good that is in demand. That’s the part that everyone gets. What they forget is that if there’s a high demand especially, there certainly are a lot of entrepreneurs servicing that market. Which brings us to the next point

2) Supply

The less a good is available in a high demand market, the more likely the retail business idea is sound. But you have to be smart and wonder why a good that’s high in demand has limited supply. It may be an opportunity or other entrepreneurs know something that you do not know.

3) No Demand, No Supply

No, I am not going crazy. Sometimes consumers don’t know that they need something because it does not exist yet. My classic example is the iPod. Before October 2001, no one wanted one because it did not exist. By the third quarter of 2008, 163 million iPods have been sold.

Just because there’s no demand and supply does not mean that you’re not sitting on a good retail business idea. Your entrepreneurial mission will be to stimulate the demand. I believe that there’s always a demand for anything and the entrepreneur who presents the idea properly will win.

I once advised a successful lady entrepreneur in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil who wanted to expand her business empire (she owned a few restaurants and cafes) to open a retail business that would sell clothes to be worn in temperatures lower than 0 degrees Celsius. Her aides laughed off the idea saying that this was not Canada and that in Rio, it never below ten degrees.

“How many Brazilians travel to cold countries to snowboard. ski or visit attractions, friends and relatives in their winter months?”, I asked.

4) Buzzworthy 

Word of mouth is critical for a new store that does not have a big budget to be spent on promotion. The more interesting the store is the better the retail business idea is. Buzz is a powerful force in marketing new businesses. Not only will customers tell their friends but also so will non-customers and the media!

A few months back, an entrepreneur called me in a panic because he’d heard that Apple was opening a store in the city. He knew that his business would be lost to Apple almost overnight. He was asking for ideas on marketing aggressively and retain his customers.

I suggested to him to maybe consider getting out of the new Apple computer market and focus on selling used or refurbished Apple laptops only. I told him that most people were using desktops anyway and that the used Mac computer market was more lucrative than the PC’s. He was not sure so I advised him to email his clients and run the idea by them. He got back emails from people saying that it was a good idea, when they could come and sell their laptops, how many new used laptops he had in stock and so forth. Buzz right off the bat!

5) Competition proof

Sooner or later, competition will show up no matter the business. The best retail business idea has to be hard to compete against. Usually, having a good advance is good enough as the entrepreneur gets to create a name and a reputation before the competition arrives thus winning all the business.

I will reveal in details ways to make your retail business idea as competition resistant as possible [Update. See: Protecting Your Retail Business Idea from Competition]. I will never be competition proof as in retailing the only certain thing is that a good concept will be copied!

If there were two types of people that should earn society’s respect I would nominate a working mother and a student entrepreneurs. Both do two jobs that are equally challenging where perfection is the name of the game. Both have to manage time the right way because it’s a limited precious resource.

I have some strategic advice for the student entrepreneur. I am fortunate enough to regularly meet with university students who manage their own businesses or are thinking of starting one and I have noticed a few things that I could share.

The strangest thing I have noticed is that there’s seldom a link between the studies and the business venture of the student entrepreneur. In other words, she could be studying medicine and yet run a gourmet cooking teaching academy or he could be a law student and manage his own little café.

Students start businesses for various reasons. To cover tuition and related bills, to profit from something they’re passionate about or to simply build a company that will be their bread and butter after graduation.

A student entrepreneur just like all entrepreneurs should also start a business to capitalize on opportunities instead of just entering in a market for the sake of being entrepreneurial.

If you’re going to spend a lot of money, time and effort studying to get a degree and if you are going to have to invest money, time and energy in a business venture, please make sure that somehow they’ll complement each other in the long-run!

We often hear of people who studied medicine for ten years and after graduation opened a little restaurant because that’s what they were passionate about. While that may seem a feel good story, it’s really not the smartest way to go through life.

Time, money and effort are precious resources that should be cherished. What if the student entrepreneur in the mentioned example had not even bothered with medicine and went into restaurant management? 

I understand that student’s goals do change but it’s very rare that one makes up his or her mind about such a move overnight. The idea usually germinates a few years before and as time goes by it becomes more real.

If you’re a medical student thinking of being entrepreneurial and yet you’re 100% that your business concept that will ultimately be your life has nothing to do with medicine, think hard and change courses.

If you’re a medical student thinking of being entrepreneurial but also want to practice your training, then look for business opportunities in fields related to medicine. Not every medicine student has to become a physician. You can be a student entrepreneur whose market is physicians or whose concept is somehow related to medicine.

To all the student entrepreneurs out there, act on opportunities. But do make sure that they’re somehow related to what you’re investing your money and time to study for. Don’t think for a second that your field has no opportunities. Every sector has opportunities waiting to be exploited by an observant student entrepreneur. Be the one doing the observing.