6 Mistakes To Avoid As A Home Based Business Owner

For the last 7 years, I have been researching and developing communication and sales techniques that turn people into millionaires. This list is a compilation of the rookie mistakes that many new home base business owners make when they first enter the business. I confess that I have personally committed a number of these mistakes in my day, and still fall prey to them on the occasion. Through continuing education, you, as did I, will be able to recognize when these mistakes arise, and quickly readjust your thinking as you build your home base business.

Mistake #1: We Hunt and Hound Instead of Attract

You are not in the business to “hunt down” prospects to look at your business opportunity, nor do you want to be continuously “hounding” prospects. This is time consuming, emotionally tiring, and plain ol’ bad manners. As in all things, the Golden Rule should apply:

Do unto others as you wish they do unto you.

Do you like to be convinced, manipulated or sold to? Most likely, you like the power of choice, the power to make decisions… and so do the people you want to attract and work with. What/ who are you really seeking after?

You are looking for people that are looking for you.

Be the kind of person you want to work with—a dynamic leader—and dynamic, charismatic people will hunt you for your business.

Mistake #2: We Talk Too Much/ “Puke Information”

When we start a new home based business we are excited, love everything about our company/ product, and want to share it with the world! While we think we’re sharing, in actually, we are “information overload”ing.

In this industry, more is less and less is more. The more you say the less your prospect wants to hear, and the less you say the more they want to hear.

Questions are the answers… Engage your prospect by asking questions about their business, their family, their interest. Find common ground. They in turn will ask you questions, and if they are sincerely interested, they will ask for more information.

Mistake #3: We Exaggerate the Opportunity

Frequently we say to people “It’s so easy, all you have to do is get people on the call” or “I only work 20 minutes a day and now I’m making $5,000/ week” or “I used to wear glasses to fix my eyesight, but this product cured me and now I can see without glasses”.

And they’re thinking… “I need to run away from this person as FAST as possible!”
Honesty is always the best policy. This goes back to mistake #1…
You are looking for people that are looking for you.

Do you really want to work with a person who is easily convinced and swayed by outrageous exaggerations? They will probably leave your opportunity as soon as they joined for the latest fad next week.

Mistake #4: We Spend More Time Managing Instead of Prospecting

When you prospect people for business partners and customers, you will inevitably enroll people, and thus, your business grows. When you spend more of your time training your enrollees, this is called managing. A prosperous home based business will always have this ratio:

80:20 Prospecting: Managing

The moment your ratio shifts into “management mode”, your business will stop growing. It is important that your prospects and enrollees value the time they meet with you. If they are unable to commit to appointments or neglect their assignments prior to meeting with them, guess what you tell them?

You are too busy to manage their business!

Mistake #5: We Look for Needers and Not Leaders

Inherently, we want to help those who stand to benefit from this business most. However, you cannot help those who do not want to help themselves. Aim to work with people that deserve your home based business opportunity, who deserve your time and help, not those who are not will to put in the time, creativity and passion.

People are attracted to leaders… be the leader they are searching for. This will aid you as you shift out the people who will not grow your business.

Mistake #6: We Treat out Home Based Business as a Hobby

This proclamation says it all. Concentrate on your behavior and activity, not on the results. A farmer plants his seeds in the spring time, and may not seed anything appear for weeks. Then the young shoots appear, and then the shoots turn into saplings, and then into true plants. Harvest Time does not appear for 4- 6 months. The farmer knows that he needs to be consistent in his effort to have the results he needs.

We home base business owners must maintain the same, consistent approach. Remember sow now and reap the benefits later.

Result?

Now that you are aware of the most common mistakes a new home base business owner make, you will be able to recognize when these mistakes arise, and quickly readjust your thinking as you build your home base business.

How to Set Goals & Act on Them

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far-greater value than what you get.

When Andrew Carnegie died, they discovered a sheet of paper upon which he had written one of the major goals of his life:

Spend the first half of his life accumulating money and to spend the last half of his life giving it all away. And he did!

Some people are disturbed by those tough days because all they have is the days. They haven’t designed or described or defined the future.

Goals. There’s no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There’s no telling what you can do when you believe in them. And there’s no telling what will happen when you act upon them.

We all need lots of powerful long-range goals to help us past the short-term obstacles.

The ultimate reason for setting goals is:

To entice you to become the person it takes to achieve them.

Don’t set your goals too low. If you don’t need much, you won’t become much.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.

As the late Mr. Jim Rohn once said, "We all have two choices: We can make a living or we can design a life."



The Network Business is designed to let you have more time, more freedom, and the advantages of being in your own business, while letting you help others, and without the risk of starting a new career. Let me show you how it worked for me. www.Sherlock.GoYoli.com or 801-953-1888

Build Your Business with Facebook

With the sudden rise in Social Media in the past 18 months, Facebook has become one of the most visited websites online.

It has now been reported that Facebook gets more visitors every day than even Yahoo!

So with all these people to "be-friend" on Facebook, the question is,

“How do you use Facebook to build your Home Based Business?”

The answer is quite simple.

You make friends first.

Then, you attract followers by providing them good value in the form of thought provoking questions, comments, quotes and dialogue.

You’ll know who your followers are because they will read your status updates and comment on them or let you know that they like what you have to say.

Then, those followers will become a fan of yours, meaning that not only are they your friend and follower, but they will reach out to you and thank you for your contributions to your community and perhaps might even ask you what you do or how they might be able to work with you.

This might even result in a new customer, business partner or both.

This is called Permission Based Marketing and it makes for the best transaction between a seller and a buyer online.

Now, the worst thing you can do on Facebook, is pitch your deal.

Not only will people ignore you, but many will remove you as their friend if they feel that the only reason you are on Facebook is to sell your product or service.

Imagine going to a dentist and before they even ask you any questions, or begin work on your teeth, they are writing you a prescription and billing your insurance.

Not only didn’t they ask you anything about yourself, but they didn’t even find out if you even have a need.

To suggest to someone on Facebook that they should look at your company, product or service is considered rude, pushy, even annoying. This is otherwise known as spam.

Nobody likes to be sold, but everybody loves to buy.

So, brand yourself as a leader first – someone that people will come to know, like and trust.

Then, if people ask you about your business, that’s great. Let them engage you and then you can provide them with more information.

Now, if you contribute to your community on Facebook often, with great value, it’s fine to include a link to your personal blog or hub page or any other Social Media that you’ve created or that has been written or spoken about you.

Just don’t keep posting the same status that reads, “Make a Million in a Minute” with a link to your website.

Nobody cares about your business opportunity until they see that you are someone they’d even want to work with.

If all you post is business information, your intentions speak loudly on their own and you will alienate yourself.

If you treat your Facebook friends with respect and courtesy and contribute often, chances are that you will attract great people who ask what you do and how they can get more information.

Personality... do you have what it takes?

Great story that was recently sent to me, about a man who learned from, and aspired to be like, the top leaders not only in his industry, but in life:

"I want to tell you about my friend Alvin who used one of the best wealth secrets ever to double his income in his field. He worked selling vacuum cleaners door to door, but you can apply this to whatever field you're in.

He wasn't doing as well as the good salespeople in his local office. In fact, he was one of the worst vacuum salesperson on his whole crew!

The only thing that separated him from all the ones who came in and stayed for a week or two was his tenacity, that and his ingenuity.

So he went and interviewed his boss about what made the best and the worst sales people. He asked what qualities the best salespeople all had in common. He asked what habits they all shared in common. Best of all, he got it all on video.

Then he went and talked to the three best sales people on his crew. He asked what habits they had, what they did to get themselves psyched up in the morning. He asked how they handled common objections, and asked how they knew when they'd make the sale.

He got their permission to tape them-they were all happy to oblige. Generally speaking, successful people are happy to share the secrets to their success.

It's usually the under-successful that have a scarcity mentality, with their work methods and everything else.

(There is also the matter of pride here-who doesn't want to be acknowledged for how well they do things, get listened to, and seen as an expert or authority?)

Then, he went to the district manager and found out the best salespeople in the district. He interviewed them and got many of the same answers.

But he didn't stop there. He wanted to find out what the worst sales people had in common, too. Neither his local nor his district manager wanted to be rude and name the worst sales people by name. He was disappointed but not daunted.

Alvin knew where to find some of the people who didn't last very long. Several of them hung out at the same bar. So he went there with camera in hand and told them he was making a video covering the vacuum sales experience. He said he was interviewing the people who'd been around the longest and the people who decided it just wasn't for them.

A couple of rounds later, he had four interviews from some of the worst salespeople his local office had seen. (Some traits they all shared, if you're wondering, was a lack of confidence in their abilities, negative thinking, and the unwillingness to keep trying--at least when it came to that specific job.)

He went and talked to the few people he'd made sales to. He asked them what their favorite things about the vacuums were. There were three common answers and he integrated those into his sales pitch.

He also asked when it was they decided to buy. He was a little surprised at the answer. None of the answers involved a feature or even a benefit of the vacuum. Every answer started with something like, "You really had me sold when you..."

Something clicked and Alvin learned what is perhaps one of the most important parts of salesmanship: nobody will ever buy from you if they don't like you. You can rarely if ever sell someone on your product or service, if you don't sell them on you first.

Alvin then rolled up his sleeves and went to the people that DIDN'T buy from him. Some were pretty vague and non-committal (he figured maybe he just hadn't made a good connection with those prospects.)

A handful of people, however, told him something they didn't like about the vacuum or his sales pitch. He came up with answers to objects about the vacuums and also modified his sales pitch. He even sold a vacuum to one of the people he'd missed selling the first time!

Alvin more than doubled his sales income. And then he doubled THAT income by selling the videos and teaching seminars on how to double your income! Most importantly, this is a strategy that can work in any field--not just vacuum sales.

In fact, you don't have to be in sales to use this strategy. Just learn your field from every angle possible and apply the knowledge and you can double your income just like my friend Alvin."

Raymond Aaron

Nine Things More Important than Capital

When starting any enterprise or business, whether it is full-time or part-time, we all know the value of having plenty of capital (money). But I bet we both know or at least have heard of people who started with no capital who went on to make fortunes. How? You may ask.

Well, I believe there are actually some things that are more valuable than capital that can lead to your entrepreneurial success. Let me give you the list.

1. Time
Time is more valuable than capital. The time you set aside not to be wasted, not to be given away. Time you set aside to be invested in an enterprise that brings value to the marketplace with the hope of making a profit. Now we have capital time.

How valuable is time? Time properly invested is worth a fortune. Time wasted can be devastation. Time invested can perform miracles, so you invest your time.

2. Desperation
I have a friend, Linda, whose first major investment in her new enterprise was desperation. She said, "My kids are hungry, I’ve gotta make this work. If this doesn't work, what will I do?" So she invested $1 in her enterprise selling a product she believed in. The $1 was to buy a few flyers so she could make a sale at retail, collect the money and then buy the product wholesale to deliver back to the customer.

A friend of a friend went to Chicago as a teenager after he got out of high school. And the first job he got was as a night janitor. Someone said, "Why would you settle for night janitor?" He said, "Malnutrition." You work at whatever you can possibly get when you get hungry. You go to work somewhere—night janitor, it doesn't matter where it is. Years later now, Bill is a recipient of the Horatio Alger award, rich and powerful and one of the great examples of lifestyle that I know. But, his first job—night janitor. Desperation can be a powerful incentive. When you say, “I must.”

3. Determination
Determination says I will. First Linda said, "I must find a customer." Desperation. Second, she said, "I will find someone before this first day is over." Sure enough, she found someone. She said, "If it works once, it will work again." But then the next person said, "No." Now what must you invest?

4. Courage
Courage is more valuable than capital. If you've only got $1 and a lot of courage, I'm telling you, you've got a good future ahead of you. Courage in spite of the circumstances. Humans can do the most incredible things no matter what happens. Haven't we heard the stories? There are some recent ones from the Middle East that are some of the most classic, unbelievable stories of being in the depths of hell and finally making it out. It's about humans, real life people, and you can't sell humans short. Courage in spite of, not because of, but in spite of. Now once Linda has made 3 or 4 sales and gotten going, here's what now takes over.

5. Ambition
"Wow! If I can sell 3, I can sell 33. If I can sell 33, I can sell 103." Wow. Linda is now dazzled by her own dreams of the future.

6. Faith
Now she begins to believe she's got a good product. This is probably a good company. And she then starts to believe in herself. Linda, single mother, 2 kids, no job. "My gosh, I'm going to pull it off!" Her self-esteem starts to soar. These are investments that are unmatched. Money can't touch it. What if you had a million dollars and no faith? You'd be poor. You wouldn't be rich. Now here is the next one, the reason why she's a millionaire today.

7. Ingenuity
Putting your brains to work. Probably up until now, you've put about 1/10 of your brainpower to work. What if you employed the other 9/10? You can't believe what can happen. Humans can come up with the most intriguing things to do. Ingenuity. What's ingenuity worth? A fortune. It is more valuable than money. All you need is a $1 and plenty of ingenuity. Figuring out a way to make it work, make it work, make it work.

8. Heart and Soul
What is a substitute for heart and soul? It's not money. Money can't buy heart and soul. Heart and soul is more valuable than a million dollars. A million dollars without heart and soul, you have no life. You are ineffective. But, heart and soul is like the unseen magic that moves people, moves people to buy, moves people to make decisions, moves people to act, moves people to respond.

9. Personality
You've just got to spruce up and sharpen up your own personality. You've got plenty of personality. Just get it developed to where it is effective every day, effective no matter who you talk to, whether it is a child or whether it is a business person, whether it is a rich person or a poor person. A unique personality that is at home anywhere. One of Jim Rohn's mentors, Bill Bailey, taught, "You've got to learn to be just as comfortable, Mr. Rohn, whether it is in a little shack in Kentucky having a beer and watching the fights with Winfred, my old friend or in a Georgian mansion in Washington, DC as the Senator's guest." Move with ease whether it is with the rich or whether it is with the poor. And it makes no difference to you who is rich or who is poor. A chance to have a unique relationship with whomever. The kind of personality that's comfortable. The kind of personality that's not bent out of shape.

And lastly, let's not forget charisma and sophistication. Charisma with a touch of humility. This entire list is more valuable than money. With one dollar and the list I just gave you, the world is yours. It belongs to you, whatever piece of it you desire whatever development you wish for your life. I've given you the secret. Capital. The kind of capital that is more valuable than money and that can secure your future and fortune. Remember that you lack not the resources.

Concentration: Be There!

I had the great opportunity, and pleasure, to work in a trade show booth with a team member this past week. The banners unrolled fantastically and were hung with excitement, the velor burnt-yellow table cloth didn't have a wrinkle, and our samples were chilled to perfection. We were ready!!

But as the day wore on, I noticed that my team member, and business partner, had other things on his mind. With complications regarding the health of his two littlest family members. He was worried about his children, and his dear wife who hadn't left the house in days as she cares for the babies. This team member, my business partner and friend, is certainly having his faith tested.

Not far into the day, my friend turned to me, and with concern on his face, said, "I feel so guilty for being here. I feel like I should be home with my wife and family."

How many times during the day do these same thoughts cross our own mind? While at work, at the gym, even at home with our significant other and our children, we can only think about the things we need to do elsewhere. We are never truly living 'in the moment', never truly focusing on the most important thing in front of us.

I believe Jim Rohn shared the most important counsel given to him when he said, "The best advice I ever came across on the subject of concentration is: Wherever you are, be there."

"May I ask a personal question?," I inquired of my friend. "When you are home with your family... What do you think about? What's on your mind?".

"All I can think about is wanting to work on my business... I feel guilty for not working hard enough, or putting in enough hours."

My friends, do you see the cycle? This happens to even the best of us... We willfully allow our concentration to be focused on things not in front of us, and we allow negative feelings of guilt, discouragement, and despair to creep in.

May I suggest we follow the counsel given to Jim Rohn, "Wherever you are, be there." When you are with you family, focus all of your energy, your thoughts, your love, on them. When you are working out in the gym, focus on the weights, the cardio, the pain of the muscles as they rip and open to new life. When you are working on your business, focus on the client, the project, the goals that sit in front of you. People will notice when your mind is elsewhere.

Although the health complications of my friend's family didn't change that afternoon, his thought process did. I saw him become more confident, and more focused, on the people and opportunity in front of him at the trade show.

And YES, there is a happy ending...

He developed a great report, and created a wonderful connection, with another vendor there... who insisted on placing a large initial order before the conclusion of the show, with the possibility of subsequent large orders in the near future. Had he not changed his thoughts to what was at hand in front of him, he may have missed this great blessing to his business.

Concentration: BE THERE!!

How Much to Start up the Business?

A very nice lady, whom I went to high school with, emailed me via Facebook two weeks ago to ask me a question about my business.

Instead of explaining in detail about the low start up cost, why Stephen & I left our old Company and Product, I didn't even mention the Break Even Bonus, I offered her and her family FREE SAMPLES requesting their feedback and that they watch the videos posted on my website.

In any case, she said "Yes" and was sent the samples. Today, when she emailed me back, after providing me with a list of excuses as to why she can't possibly work this business, she asked, “How Much to Start up the Business?”

My response:

"That’s a good question Marie, but what I have found is that people who ask what it costs before they even know what “it” is, are more concerned about spending money than earning it. The truth is, there is far more of an investment of your time, energy and creativity than there is of money."

Her second question was, "How Long until the Residual Income is Coming In?". Again, My response:

"And the residual income? Well, that depends on how much you want in return. I don’t know how much you will put in or how committed you will be, so truly, that is impossible for me to answer. Again, you must put in more of your time, talent and discipline, than money, to be successful.

I can tell you want my results have been, but that would not be accurate for you to make a decision as I may have put more, or less, time and energy than you are willing to commit to be successful."

So, the moral of the story?

By providing value and then perhaps very gently suggesting that if a person is interested in your business, to let you know, you might create enough curiosity resulting in a new prospect or lead.

Certainly, you want to be more interested in them, than interesting to them.

Learn more about them than they learn about you.

With this formula, you can’t go wrong.

Marie certainly appreciated it.

After all, the Investment is never just about capital, but about how much of yourself you are willing to put into your business - which is far more valuable than money.