At a recent Mastermind session, we had a fairly deep conversation about wealth – especially how to attract and get more of it. It’s a topic that has fascinated me for many years, and there is such a lot of depth to understanding how wealth is acquired and retained.
Two excellent books on the topic are “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis and “Wealth Attraction in the New Economy” by Dan Kennedy. I spent several years working closely with Kennedy in his Mastermind Group and I’ve also had lengthy conversations with Felix Dennis on the topic too.
They’re not the only ones that I’ve studied and spoken with though and, the truth is, there are secrets that make a massive difference here.
In the limited space available I can’t summarise all the points I’ve learned on this topic but I have identified five that I think are bigger and more universally applicable than most of the others. These pointers were thought provoking for the members of that Mastermind group and I hope the same will be true for you.
I always do my best to start using and deploying secrets as soon as I discover them and I pass them along through my writing and speaking. The one thing I can promise you is that it is implementation and application that makes the difference – not ‘knowing stuff’.
With that in mind, here goes…
1. Price Elasticity
There really are no restrictions on what people will pay. There are only selfimposed limits, both psychological and practical, that bounce around inside the heads of all of us entrepreneurs and business owners.
We all set our own prices and the truth is that, more often than not, we set them lower than we could/should.
As EC members, we are way better than the country overall at this but the truth is, many members of EC continue to undervalue themselves, their services, their products and, in conjunction with this, they underestimate what the market will pay. It’s vital to grasp that, as you set your own price.
I got a lot of feedback some months ago from a presentation that I gave, in which I talked about how we can all go to the ocean with either a bucket or a teaspoon – the ocean doesn’t care. There is an abundance of water. It’s like that with wealth.
You get to choose how much you want to take away and you are the one who puts limits on what’s available. I know that’s deep – but it’s true, which is why it’s worthy of considerable thought and contemplation by anyone serious about their ambition to acquire wealth.
2. No Excuses
I wrote in “Botty’s Rules” about how you are responsible for what happens in your business and the same thing applies to your life. The recent death of 25-year-old Peaches Geldof, alongside the premature death of a family member of one my team here at Botty Towers, was a stark reminder to all of us of the fragility of life and the fact that none of us know how long we’ve got left.
We’re all capable of heading in the direction of where we want to go every single day and of creating the disciplines to do what we need to do brilliantly. I did discover a long time ago that few people are attracted to whingers, whiners, complainers, and excuse makers. Hanging out with a ‘victim’ is not appealing to most reasonably sane people. The person in the victim shirt tends to wear out his welcome early – as he should.
More relevantly, his thinking, his beliefs and his behaviour are even more repellent to money and wealth than they are to other people… which is why complete acceptance and embracing of the rock-solid fact that YOU are responsible for what happens in your life and – in this context – for the wealth that you accumulate, is an absolute prerequisite to getting to where you say you want to go.
3. The Secret of Transaction Size
I talk a lot about this at the Master Plan Event (this year’s is taking place towards the end of June – it’s a four day extravaganza in which you’ll not only learn tons but, even more importantly, get a shed load of it implemented before you even leave the building. For information call 0121 765 5551 and speak with one of the team).
Simply put, it requires fewer £3,000 sales than £300 sales or £30 sales to get to each million pound benchmark.
BUT, and this is the important thing, it is not proportionately more difficult to create and sell a £3,000 thing than it is to create and sell a £30 thing.
Even in relatively mundane businesses, including B2C, innovative entrepreneurs find ways to dramatically boost transaction size. The impact this has on leverage to your wealth can be dramatic.
Don’t believe me? Then look no further than Starbucks. It was exactly this thinking that replaced coffee shops selling a hot drink for less than a quid with a multi-national brand taking four times as much from every customer each time they visit. It’s a biggie.
4. The Power of Residual Income
It really is a beautiful thing.
I believe it all started back in the ‘60s with the ‘Book of the Month Club’ but we see it is now prevalent in many industries and sectors, most recently with the success that companies like Graze are having shipping snacks automatically every week. Someone told me last week that I was fortunate that my business included revenue streams where people paid me monthly by direct debit. I promise you, it’s not fortunate, it’s very, very deliberate. But I haven’t always got it right.
It turns out I’d be something like £6 million richer if I had included an annual renewal payment on My Mag. We sold over 2,000 packages and the majority are still publishing. If I had implemented a £250 per year renewal fee to keep the rights to your geographic area, then a very high proportion would have paid it, every year, for almost a decade now – and those that didn’t would have released their area for me to resell.
All in all, it genuinely would have been worth over £6 million to me since 2005. It could make me weep, but the truth is, there are other millions that I’ve missed out on as well – and I miss all of them!
Everybody ought to strive and fight and work to find ways to create this residual/continuity income stream in their business and if you really can’t find a way to do it, then getting involved in a business where you can would be a smart move if wealth creation is anywhere near the top of your list of goals.
5. Behavioural Congruency
This is a deceptively simple idea but, in many ways, it is contrary to the overwhelming majority of selfimprovement books and courses. They have people focus more on attitude and thoughts, but what I’ve learned over the last ten years is that in terms of acquiring wealth, it is much less about how you think than about what you do.
It was our own BGA down in Kent, Ian George who, having spent a couple of days around our offices two years ago came to me with what, to him at the time was a revelation. He said, “I understand now how you get so much done and why you’ve achieved so much success – it’s all about your daily disciplines”. I hadn’t used or heard that phrase ‘daily disciplines’ before but Ian was absolutely right.
I work harder than anyone else I know but the difference between me and many others who also work hard is that I make sure that what I’m working on are the right things. In that respect, my behaviour is congruent with the behaviour of people who are already achieving the goals that I want to achieve – they’re already living the kind of life that I want to live.
Some people call it “modelling”. Find them, study them and model them.
It’s why I find it fascinating that so many people will accept the logic of my 90 minute chunks. If you spend 90 minutes every day, in the right environment, undisturbed, working on the things that will make your business more successful, then you will make rapid progress. Yet so many people, even once they know this, still fail to do it. It even happens at Mastermind. People come up with excuses as to why they haven’t done the 90 minutes – and then wonder why they’re not where they wanted to be with regard to their targets this year, let alone their wealth creation goals. Bonkers.
I will state clearly, and unequivocally, here and now:
YES, I DO MY 90 MINUTES EVERY SINGLE DAY.
There are hardly any exceptions (National Events and Mastermind days are the only two). On every other working day of the year (and on plenty of non-working days as well, including holidays) I spend 90 minutes doing the things that will move my business to where I want it to be. And the truth is, that if you analyse all the success I’ve been fortunate enough to achieve over the last decade, then it’s all been built in 90 minute chunks.
That’s behavioural congruency for you and, if you’d like more wealth, you really should take note…
I encourage you to make these five secrets the focus of your thinking and actions this month. Pay attention to them on an ongoing basis. Carefully consider them every time you launch a new product or service and get an opinion, or several opinions, from people who “get it” and who might see a way to price higher, say, that you may have overlooked (your BGA can be great at this – ask them at your next local meeting).
There really is no virtue in settling for less than you’re worth, less than you deserve, less than the market will cheerfully pay. Strive to never accept less than your customers would gladly give you.
