Female Entrepreneurs Exposed (Part 2)
October 10th, 2008

No matter how much you know or have experienced, there is always room in business for mistakes. However, you need to be aware of some of the common mistakes business owners confront.

The following four (4) points are Dale Beaumonts perspective of what these entrepreneurial women have learnt from their mistakes and how they have applied these lessons to the success of their business.

1. ‘The Idea Avalanche’

Focus on your goals and do not get distracted. It is common for people to come up with a great idea, get excited, take action towards turning it into a reality, but before achieving anything move onto another idea. You need to stick to your plan otherwise you will never be successful.

This was a mistake for Sandy Forster when operating her business, Wildly Wealthy Women. Reflecting on her past, she found herself jumping from one idea to another so that she spent years starting and stopping many ventures. Sandy now writes all her new ideas down and chooses to focus on one or two ideas at a time instead of moving from one idea to another.

2. Loss of energy

The first five years of any business is often the hardest, and troubling obstacles and exhausting times can erode your passion and question whether it’s all worth it. Owning your business can affect your personal life and demand excessive time which consumes your energy.

For Bay Street Mediaworks founder, Suzy Yates, this point is important. She believes that balance is essential to operating a business and she achieves this through exercise and camping trips. She says that it’s difficult to be at your best when you are exhausted. Do not lose energy and do not stop fueling your passion. Have faith in your business and know that a thorough business plan will help guide you through moments of doubt.

3. Financially ignorant

Many people enter a business thinking that passion and drive will result in business success. It is easy to convince yourself that you donÕt need financial or accounting experience, but a business will not thrive on passion alone.

When Joanne Mercer started her company, Joanne Mercer Footwear, she had no financial experience and thought she would employ someone else to handle her finances. With no real grasp of her business from a financial perspective, her company starting going broke within three years. Faced with the prospect of failure, Joanne understood her mistake and went on to complete a Masters in Business Administration in order to develop her financial knowledge.

4. Invest wisely

Remember that this is your business, your goal, your lively-hood, and that it is you who has spent an amazing amount of time and effort establishing it. Investing trust in people is essential to business success, however, learn to do it wisely.

Sue Ismiel, creator of Nad’s Hair Removal, considers this to be the biggest mistake she’s made in business. That is, she over-trusted someone that did not have the right ethics. To avoid difficult situations, be meticulous with your record keeping of conversations and finances and always use agreements and contracts.

In Summary

Do not be afraid of mistakes because they are an inevitable element of business. But be aware of the mistakes made by others and you will be able to fast track your success.

Till Next Time

Mentoring Dream Team

Filed under: Health And Fitness, Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Aaron Byerlee @ 10:32 am
Discover Two Key Secrets To Putting Weight Loss and Body Shape Change On Turbo Charge
October 10th, 2008

I want to share with you two key secrets to losing weight and changing your body shape.

The one key area we can improve to put weight loss and body shape change is increasing exercise intensity. We follow a simple scale called the Rate of Perceived Exertion or Borgs Intensity scale.

The key importance of this is to make sure we apply this scale when doing both cardiovascular training and strength training.

I am going to give you a classic scenario. 90% of members achieve all the correct success indicators of attending the gym enough times per week and for the correct duration and are achieve great results. However, if you want to put your results on turbo charge you can apply the Rate of Perceived
Exertion for your action packed gym session and watch your results accelerate.

Lets apply it to your work out:
If you are on a machine and working for a certain duration ie 10 minutes, 3km rower etc. We apply
the intensity scale based on feeling and we want you to pace yourself for the duration ranking about
7 or 8 on the scale.

Cardio:
The Intensity Scale is based on a 1-10
5 - Is what you would call your warm up. You are moving but just really ticking the legs over.
6 - Is exercising but you could hold a conversation
7 - Is intensity has increased to a level where you could not hold a conversation. But could still sparing talk
8 - Intensity is at a level where you could not hold a conversation. Maybe answer with Yes or No
9 - As hard as you can maintain. No Conversation at all.
10 - Hitting your lactic acid threshold there. (Not recommended)

Strength:
If you are doing a strength exercise. Whether it is 10 reps, or 20 reps. The principle you should apply is
that you are doing a weight that you are challenged for the last few reps.

For example, if you have 20 reps. By rep 17 the last 3 are a bit of a challenge. If you are doing 10 reps
you want at least 8-10 a bit of a challenge.

Applying the Intensity Scale
5 - Weights barely feeling anything
6 - You do you set but at the end you could probably have continued for 5+ extra reps
7 - You do the set and you would be able to achieve up to 5 extra reps
8 - You complete the set and could do 1 or 2 extra reps
9 - You just make the set
10 - You can not achieve the set.

Therefore, when you are in the gym doing an exercise think of intensity and use this practical scale
to help you increase your intensity.

If you would like to keep up to date with fantastic health and fitness information.

http://www.ParkvilleFitnessGuaranteed.com/blog

Have a great week and rest of 2008 (83 days to go)

Best wishes

Craig Schulze

Filed under: Health And Fitness, Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Aaron Byerlee @ 10:31 am
Female Entrepreneurs Exposed
October 8th, 2008

Over the last 12 months Mentoring Dream Team have been in constant contact with one of Australia’s leading entrepreneurs Dale Beaumont. Dale is a leading author of the Secrets Exposed Series. Today Dale provides a summary of his book Secrets of Female Entrepreneurs Exposed.

Dale’s book takes people up-close and personal with seventeen of some of the most successful female entrepreneurs including: Sonia Amoroso, Joanne Mercer, Suzi Dafnis, Margaret Lomas, Sue Ismiel and others. In a surprisingly candid way each contributor shares their personal successes, business philosophies and unique insights into how every woman can discover her own entrepreneurial spirit.

All of these women express desires and passion in their area of business, and through their experiences they understand the factors that can determine the success or failure of a business.

The following five (5) points are the author’s perspective of how these entrepreneurial women improved their chances of achieving business success.

1. Have good customer relations

Without customers you have no business. They are the life-line of any business and to achieve success you need to ensure that your customers are satisfied with your service and/or product. Effective customer relations can give you that extra edge over your competitors, especially in an age of technology, where human contact and service are becoming ever important.

Kirsty Dunphey, co-founder of M&M Harcourts, regards excellent customer relations as a core value in her business success. She places a significant emphasis on building customers for life, especially the ones who rave and serve as great advocates for the business. She says, word of mouth is the best kind of marketing and will increase your success rate.

2. Do what you know and love

A path to success will always be impeded with obstacles. When faced with these obstacles you have the choice of: throwing in the towel or battling on. If you are doing something you love, this decision will not be difficult for you. People who are passionate about something will not let obstacles and challenges interfere with their business success.

Sue Ismiel, creator of Nad’s Hair Removal, believes people start different businesses based on their skills, interests and opportunities. While it makes sense to centre your business on you particular skill-set, she says that a genuine interest will always build a solid foundation for business success.

3. Educate yourself
Successful entrepreneurs are inclined to say that one of the most common mistakes made by new business owners is that they think they know everything about business when they don’t.

According to Suzy Yates, Bay Street Mediaworks founder, you need to keep moving. Once you’ve started a business, get educated. Join networks, find mentors, read books and magazines, find out as much as you can about your field.

4. Eliminate your competition

To eliminate the competition is easier said than done, and it often depends on the industry you’re involved in. One of the ways to eliminate competition is to choose something that is difficult for others to copy.

According to Elim Chew, founder of 77th Street, you should choose something that has a natural obstacle to being copy, whether it’s due to the need for highly-specialised skills or because it’s expensive to get into. If you can do this, you will be able to increase your chances of success.

5. Take the risk

Risk-taking is not always received positively by people, however, entrepreneurs do not take unnecessary risks. In fact, through research and well-thought out plans they are able to minimise real risk and know when they are required to take the plunge. To be successful you cannot be scared about taking risks.

Sonia Amoroso, creator of Cat Media, takes risks when she believes in something. One of her top ten tips for becoming a successful entrepreneur is to assess and/or minimise risk first. But understand that you need to invest in order to receive a return and that may require calculated risks.

One of Dale’s philosophies is find out what successful people do and follow their magic formula.

Make sure you continue to log and read or listen to a product at least every week.

Till next time,

Mentoring Dream Team

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Aaron Byerlee @ 10:38 pm
Five Ways To Grow Your Business - Brad Sugars
September 22nd, 2008

Brad Sugars is one of the worlds leading and respected business coaches. Today Brad provides an insight into five key areas to grow a business.

Brad says most people that come to one of his Action coaches generally want three things - more customers, increased turnover and higher profits. However, you can’t change those things on their own because they are simply the result of other factors in the formula.

So here are the five ways to grow a business:

1. LEADS
(prospects or potential customers)
X
2. CONVERSION RATES
(the difference between those that could have bought and those that did)
=
CUSTOMERS
(the number of different customers you deal with)
X
3. NUMBER OF TRANSACTIONS
(the average number of times each customer bought from you that year)
X
4. AVERAGE DOLLAR SALE PRICE
(the average price of the item you sell)
=
TOTAL REVENUE
(the total sales of the business)
X
5. MARGINS
(the percentage of each sale that is profit)
=
PROFIT
(something every business owner wants more of)

It’s important that you work at improving each of these five areas simultaneously. If you don’t, it’s a bit like going to the gym and only working the muscles in your right arm for one month, then the muscles in your left leg for the next month. It doesn’t make any sense.

To find out more information from Brad Sugars you can do a $1 test drive.
http://www.mentoringdreamteam.com/testdrive

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Aaron Byerlee @ 3:14 pm
Success Tip - Business Coaching
September 22nd, 2008

Brad Sugars is Chairman of Action International, which currently is the 16th fastest growing franchise in the World and World #1 Business Coaching Company.

Why would someone consider using a business coach?

The top three reasons why someone would use a business coach are:

1. Team problems - If you have staffing problems a business coach can assist you in finding solutions to recruit, train and keep good people.

2. Time problems - If you work too many hours or if the business would collapse without you in it, a business coach can help you to find ways to leverage yourself out of your business and to implement systems so that it can run like clockwork without you.

3. Financial problems - If you need to find ways to boost your revenues, raise capital for projects and/or increase your bottom line, then a business coach can help to find cost-saving or profit-increasing solutions to integrate into your business’s financial plan.

Most business owners realise pretty quickly that because they don’t have anyone pushing them, they tend to slack off a bit, so with an Action International coach, two things happen - they finally have someone to hold them accountable and they have someone with the knowledge base to help them grow in the areas they need to grow.

To find out more information from Brad Sugars do a $1 trial

http://www.mentoringdreamteam.com/testdrive

Filed under: Success Tips — Tags: , — Aaron Byerlee @ 3:14 pm
Success Tip - Avril Henry
September 22nd, 2008

In 2006, Avril won the prestigious Lifetime Achievement in Human Resources Award at the Australian HR Awards. She has been a finalist in the Best HR Director and Sydney Business Review Businesswoman of the Year awards, and nominated for Telstra Business Woman of the Year on four occasions. She now works in Sydney and owns AH Revelations. Avril continues to help and inspire 100’s of business owners every year.

What challenges did you face when you went out on your own and started a business?

Self-belief and fear of failure! These were my two biggest challenges. I knew I had the experience, reputation, contacts and networks, but for the first few weeks I kept asking myself, Have I done the right thing? Can I do this? Will it work? Can I earn a living by building a business that makes a difference and is respected?’

I received my first paid speaking engagement two weeks after I started the company and I am delighted that the business has grown by 50 to 60 per cent each year!

While I say that I was afraid of failure, I have always believed that the worst thing that can happen when you try something new is that you fail. In the beginning, I think I was more concerned about whether failing would have an adverse impact on my professional reputation, which I am proud of.

Another challenge was building a business through referrals only - this was a conscious decision that I made. I started by working with people who knew my work, doing pro bono presentations and mentoring assignments. This was a good strategy as it gave people who did not know me the opportunity to see me in action as a presenter and facilitator. This ultimately led not only to new business and clients but, more importantly, repeat business.

For more information and success tips Mentoring Dream Team offer you a $1 test drive trial.
http://www.mentoringdreamteam.com/testdrive

Filed under: Success Tips — Tags: , — Aaron Byerlee @ 3:14 pm
Business Success – Starting Your Own Business
September 8th, 2008

Today’s success tip comes from Amy Lyden. Amy is the Managing Director of Bow Wow Meow, which today is a leading producer of fun and functional pet tags. Its products are distributed through more than 1,500 pet shops sold throughout the world via the Internet.

What advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to get started in a business of their own?

First things first, put together a great support team of other people in business that you meet with regularly and help each other out. Surround yourself with people whom you admire or can learn from. Create your own personal cheerleading squad - people who only want the best for you and who are prepared to help you shine and be the best you can be.

Next, consider what you are going to do. Try to think of things that make people’s lives easier. Life is getting more and more complicated, how can you make it easier? Also, as a consumer, what are some of the products and services that you want that others might too? This is how I got the idea for my business.

Then, start researching. One of the key areas that I find people need to do extra research in is understanding the financials. This is absolutely essential. Often, new business owners underestimate or don’t understand cash flow. I highly recommend a course called ‘Beyond Survival’. It’s a two-day course put on by the Westpac bank. It is a highly practical, hands-on course designed to help business owners understand a profit and loss statement, balance sheet and the key ratios that determine the health of a business. Numbers do not lie, and if one doesn’t understand what they mean it can be a serious disadvantage.

Many people block themselves in this area by saying, ‘Numbers aren’t my thing’ or ‘I was never good at maths’. This is very damaging talk. It is critical to understand the financial aspects of your business - this is one area that should not be abdicated to the bookkeeper or accountant.

The bottom line is that no one knows your business better than you, even a CPA. I’m not suggesting that you micro-manage the financials, but you should at least understand the financial statements and cash flow of your business.

What are your top tips for becoming a successful entrepreneur?

1. Create a support network - Get to know other people in business and form relationships with them. Form a goals-group or leadership circle where you all support and help one another.

2. Create alliances - Network within your industry. Form alliances with other companies that have the same customers as you and be open to ways of working together that could benefit everyone.

3. Sell yourself and your business - Make yourself known. Don’t be afraid to tell everyone about your business. Get out there and promote.

4. Create a board of advisers - If you don’t have a board of directors, set up a board of advisers. I have four people on my board, including myself. We meet quarterly to discuss my company’s performance, to go over the financials, and to look at potential opportunities. Make sure that the people involved have complementary skill-sets with expertise in different areas such as marketing, operations/systems, general management and finance.

Another thing to consider is the direction of your business, make sure you have someone on your board that can help you go where you want to go. For example, if you plan to start exporting you may want someone on your board that has experience with this. And make sure they have a balance of personalities. It’s also important to have each of the following on your board:

* A Clarifier - someone who asks how things will get done and thoroughly assesses the risks involved.

* A Challenger - someone who helps you act boldly and really go for it!

* A Wise Elder - someone who has been there, done that, and provides invaluable wisdom.

Recruit these people from outside of your organisation, family and friends if possible. This will create an objective board.

5. Contribute - Donate ten per cent of your sales to a charity and volunteer time with an industry association. Spend time mentoring others who need it if you are in a position to do so, and give talks and presentations to share information.

6. Develop great systems - Build long-term sustainable systems in your business. If you do something twice, create a system for it!

Mentoring Dream Team continue to bring you success tips from some of the worlds most successful business people. To read more from Amy please log on to www.MentoringDreamTeam.com and search for Amy Lyden.

Til next time

Mentoring Dream Team

Filed under: Business — Aaron Byerlee @ 6:55 pm
Business Success - Business Health
August 11th, 2008

Mentoring Dream Team is extremely passionate about health and fitness. After years of training a wide variety of people to improve their personal health we have now turned our attention to helping people succeed in business. We refer to this as your business health.

So here are 4 ways to improve the health of your business:

1. Dietary Intake

Monitor what you bring into the business. Hire people who share your vision and will support you in your endeavours. Absorb as much information as you can. Books, CDs, tapes and seminars are an endless source of material and will provide advice and opinions from people who have already succeeded.

2. Physical Exercise

Keep moving. One of the worst things a business can do is stay stationary. The world of business is constantly changing and successful people are able to accept this and adapt accordingly.

Brad Sugars, Chairman of Action International, says today’s business world is about handling change. He believes that many people live reactive lives and should be more proactive in making things happen.

To read some fantastic content from Brad Sugars click on the link below

Brad Sugars

3. Don’t smoke

Don’t let your goals go up in smoke. Obstacles and setbacks will always impede your path to success. Successful people are resilient and have the ability to bounce back. So should you!

When Tim Pethick, creator of nudie, stood outside his factory as it burnt down, he turned to his marketing director and said: “Well, tomorrow we’d better start looking for another factory.”

4. Drink less

Focus on your goals and do not allow your vision to be impaired. There will always be people out there willing to shut down your ideas, even if they have good intentions. Remain focus!

Property investors, Gary and Jenny Leather, believe that focus is important for success. They say that once you know your desired outcome, focus on one thing. It will ensure that you mind does not stray towards negative thoughts.

Make sure you keep the health of your business as strong as your personal health.

Till next time,

Mentoring Dream Team

Filed under: Business, Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — Craig Schulze @ 6:12 pm
Affiliate Commissions - Blogging
August 8th, 2008

Blogging is a massive Internet Marketing strategy and are probably one of the most diverse tools in the industry today. People are making a full time income from blogging and the blog platform is now nearly as functional as a website. One huge advantage a blog has over a standard website is that they are very search engine friendly.

What is a blog?
Effectively a blog is an online diary. However, there are a variety of uses for a blog which includes a platform for all your affiliate programs. Blogs are great for building rapport with customers, creating new customers and driving traffic to your other websites. Blog’s are crucial in your Internet Marketing strategy.

Here are six ways to you can use your blog.
1. You can comment on other peoples blog’s and add your link at the end. People do this for traffic. For example, if you have a site in personal development you may search for other personal development blogs. You may have a really important comment to add to a specific topic therefore you comment on the blog. That person may look at your blog, and form a relationship with you, joint venture or a few of their customers may look at your site. It is really important that you are not stealing customers, it is a form of networking and increasing your awareness.

2. Submitting your blog to directories. This is another traffic generating strategy. Directories have heaps of traffic, if you are providing excellent content you will increase the potential for customers at your site.

3. There are a few tools in the blog platform, which can help you make sales and move traffic to other sites to make sales. For example, you have a blog roll which you can list websites, affiliate sites and other products. If you are getting traffic to your blog and are providing excellent content your customers may be interested in your products, and recommendations including your affiliate products.

Mentoring Dream Team are members of Armand Morin’s Internet Marketing Explained program we highly recommend the program and are raving fans about the content of the program. Therefore, we promote this program in our blogroll’s, banners, blog posts and we receive affiliate commissions.

If you would like to find out about Armand Morin’s Internet Marketing Explained online course click on the link below.

Internet Marketing Explained

4. Like Affiliate marketing, Google Adsense is another great way to make some extra money off your blog site. I have mentioned this before, please make sure affiliates and Adsense only supplement your income. Your ultimate aim is to have your own product.

5. Product reviews are an excellent way to make some extra money from your blog. Without doing a complete review on Armand’s course, I sort of did a product review and pasted my affiliate link into the blog. There is a rule of thumb that you are not selling 100% of the time on your blog post. However, every 10th post you may do a product review and then promote an affiliate program. I personally believe you need to believe in the product before selling promoting the product. If you believe in the product, promote it because your customers need to find out why you are successful.

6. Provide your content for other people to use with a link back to your blog. There are people out there looking for content all the time. If you are an industry expert with first class content. Approach people and offer this content as a service.

There are so many ways you can use a blog in your favour to increase customers, increase sales, retain customers. Respect your customers, and create a name for yourself as an industry expert and then your database will build, and your sales will increase significantly.

Till next time

Mentoring Dream Team

Filed under: Internet Marketing — Tags: , , , — Craig Schulze @ 1:22 pm
Affiliate Commissions - Market Research
August 1st, 2008

Online success will be determined by your market research. If you are determined to create your own website or sell a product online this part of your success is absolutely non negotiable. There are so many people who just go on gut decisions when creating an online business and have failed because the Internet is a global tool and there are so many different people in the world and different cultures. Therefore, just because something may be popular in your town does not mean that it is popular globally.

Success on eBay is truly put down to this part of the process. You spend hours on eBay research tools finding hot markets and profitable products and you are always surprised what is a hot product. I take this principle from property investing, I never fall in love with the property I fall in love with the numbers. The same applies when you are creating a business. If there looks to be high profit, it is a highly researched product and all the key performance indicators are there you have a business.

Your aim is to find a niche market with a hungry crowd. Then you need to become an expert in that niche and dominate your field. When I research markets and products online I always make sure there is a back end to the business.

What do I mean when I say backend?

Make sure your business has the ability to sell more products to the one customer. Because it is easier to sell to an existing customer than find a new one. For example, I am in the fitness industry. Therefore, I sell them a gym membership, then sell personal training, weight loss and diet, massage, merchandise and other products that a client may need. It is the same online, you have a customer that has purchased a product off you, if they liked that product and you have another product in the same product pool you could sell them.

Aaron and myself are in the Self-Help, Personal Development, Wealth Creation, Internet Marketing field. Therefore, our affiliate programs and products all fall into that field. You only want to be building one database because building a list is very expensive and time consuming so you do not want to be starting from scratch all the time.

To take your market research to the next level once you have a list and products you can run a survey to ask your customers to find out important information. Go to www.SurveyMonkey.com and create a survey in a matter of minutes. Ask questions that will help determine pricing, product types and anything that will help grow your business.

Therefore, if you nail your market research you can start building your list and will be heading in the right direction from day one. So just remember do not fall in love with a product, fall in love with the numbers.

Till next time

Mentoring Dream Team

Filed under: Internet Marketing — Tags: , , , — Craig Schulze @ 1:49 pm
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