Build Your Own Success

Business is ALWAYS and FOREVER about the Cash Flow

2016-08-24T21:30:00.000+08:00

CASHFLOW IS KING. CASHFLOW IS THE FOUNDATION OF ANY VIABLE BUSINESS.
Image Source:blog.willis.com

I was just reading a LinkedIn article by HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, "How NOT To Run A Billion-Dollar Company in 2016".

I wonder why he mentioned on "2016".

The GOLDEN RULE in business has always been CASH FLOW. It is the fundamental of any businesses. It will ALWAYS be.

You should and must make POSITIVE CASH FLOW the moment your start your business.

The mentality should FOREVER be with you, not just in 2016.

Dispel Your Confusion About Whether To Say 'Yes' or Say 'No'

2016-08-08T20:30:00.000+08:00

Source: www.sunsigns.org

Since 7 or 8 years ago, I started on this thing called personal development.

I came from a poor family. Even though I worked my ass up to finally obtain a university, and I was gainfully employed, but waking everyday at the same time, taking the same train, and then doing the same thing in office every day, and then getting off at work at the same time every day was not my cup of tea. A monotonous life is not one that made me feel worth living. What's more, the salary that I was getting would not be enough to take care of my parent's retirement, my own retirement, and start my own family.

I attended many seminars. I still attend many today.

I read many books on personal development.

I read many blogs on how to be successful, on how to improve our personal qualities.

I read many articles on the same topics as well.

I read many quotes by successful people.

Some advise that we have to always say "Yes" so that we will not miss any opportunities because opportunities are the staff that can make us rich.

Some advise that we have to say "No" because we want to be fully focused and shut down all other distractions.

So I've been asking myself: which is the truth? what is the kind of attitude I should have in order for me to have a higher chance of success? I was very confused. Why are there so many schools of beliefs about what will make one successful?

I find that it's about balancing both.

We need to say "Yes" to new ideas, new people, and new opportunities.

At the same time, if we nod our head to so many new things, we won't have time to focus on what we have to do in order for us to reach our goal.

So, over a period of time, I start to get into this pattern: when I run out of ideas, I become fully open. I went to see all kinds of people, listen to all kinds of seminars and review all kinds of new ideas. Then I would narrow down those that will actually help me in what I wanted to do. Then I would start to be more focused and I would turn down more invitations for seminars and discussions, even to the point of completely not attending these events so that I could execute what I had learnt and measure my results. Then I would repeat the cycle again.

I hope this helps to clear up your confusion about being a Yes-Man or a No-Man (including women as well). All the best!

Eagerness To Learn & Humility Are Keys to Success

2016-07-29T18:00:00.000+08:00

I have a friend, also my partner in a few business projects until recently, who has been a website designer for the past three years. Late last year 2015, he contacted me and told me he wanted to start getting serious in his business. He needed to settle down and would like to develop a reliable source of income. He wanted to start a Travel App project with me and told me that he was confident in marketing it to obtain a total of 1 million download in 12 months' time. With 1 million downloads, he will then approach large travel-related companies like Singapore Airlines and many restaurants and hawkers in Singapore for advertising fees. He wanted to go with the model of Facebook Ads and Google Adsense. He wanted to charge them $1 per day of advertising fees, which is about $30 per month. If we have 100 restaurants and hawkers come on board. we would have a Passive Income of $3000 per month. It sounded really great. That was all it was! Something that sounded nice but with no concrete results.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you will see the bright red logo of the Travel i SIN (renamed to Travel i SG) mobile app which brings you to the Google PlayStore to download. My friend has also created a Facebook Page to promote this application, which he recently removed me from being an Administrator for the page.

After 6 months in April 2016, we didn't achieve that. We only obtained about 50-100 installations. By then, we each had already put in about $100 to subscribe to a mobile app development for the creation of the Travel I SIN app and creating a Facebook Ad campaign for about two and a half weeks during the movie season of Batman v Superman. He also signed up to some services that could put a few hundred likes on the Facebook page every day.

Late in April 2016, after a consultation with a business coach, I realised that ALL THAT WE DID WAS WRONG! Immediately, I told my friend everything that I could remember from that consultation.

At first, he was resistant to some things I conveyed to him from the coach. He told me that we hadn't failed. We just needed more time to prove we were right. I was frustrated.

He also told me he was new to marketing but he was willing to learn. I passed him many ebooks on Marketing. But after two weeks, he told me he had read just a little. I wondered whether he was willing to learn.

So I demanded for a change in direction. I suggested we came up with digital travel guidebooks for people in other countries to purchase and download. I told him about this in May 2016. It took him one month to come up with a list of places to visit in Singapore. The first place that he wanted to visit was Gardens by the Bay because it was rated the best tourist attraction in Singapore by TripAdvisor. It took him another month to come up with a half-done draft of a detailed guide to Gardens by the Bay. It was of poor design quality. I was very disappointed because he kept telling me he's a professional designer. He

It was only then that I know he was just boasting. The more serious issue is it seems he has no idea he's doing that! Or perhaps, because he has been living that way for years, he has got into the bad habit of telling people in a confident way that he can do this and that without actually having the knowledge and skills to do it!

So I started my own Travel Blessings Page at Facebook in June 2016 to promote a flight & hotel booking service and also to promote tourism in Singapore. This is a down-to-earth honest Facebook Page that seeks to earn genuine followers. I can't delay the progress of developing a travel business because of my friend's laziness, slowness, bad habits, huge ego, arrogance, lack of business sense and marketing skills.

He is in a partnership with two other friends of his, and the partnership is called Nogaku Sketch. They have a Facebook Page for their partnership. It was initially started as a web design firm but because there are many free and excellent platforms to design basic websites and blogs he found he needed to revamp the business. He wanted to go into Marketing. He wanted to use the Travel i SIN project as a showcase for the marketing expertise of Nogaku Sketch and start getting marketing projects from small and medium businesses.

We have a common friend in his partnership who was good in marketing. So I assume he has learned something from this friend of mine and wanted to test all the things he has learned about marketing on a separate project (this is my fault, I assume that he's trustworthy and capable and knowledge just because he was with my marketing friend for three years).

Now, when I call him, he rejects my call.
He unfriended my from Facebook.
He unliked all my Facebook pages.
He refused to respond to my SMSes.
He kicked me out from my Admin Role at Trave I SIN (or Travel I SG) Facebook Page.
Yet he was the one who promised to bring in $3000 per month from this project.
He was the one who said he would leave no stones unturned and would do whatever it took to achieve the aim.

Lack of Eagerness to Learn
My friend kept telling me he wanted to do marketing, kept telling me he's learning. But he also told me (because of some difficulties) he can only read 2-3 pages of the marketing ebooks that I passed him. Some books are thick, consisting of 200-300 pages. It would take him one year to finish all the books. Yet he kept telling me that he wanted to do marketing and was willing to learn.

A person who is eager to learn will devour all the books in 1-2 days.

Lack of Humility
He did not have marketing knowledge and skills, and yet when he told me he could obtain 1 million downloads, he spoke as if he knew how to do it. He presented himself so confidently and so convincingly.

He boasted that he was a professional designer yet he couldn't come up with a properly designed travel guidebook for just one tourist attraction in Singapore in 4 weeks.

He boasted that he can do video editing. But 6 weeks after visiting Gardens by the Bay and videoshot the whole Light Show event while he was there, he still couldn't produce that video and put it up on the page.

He sounded so genuine that he would learn about marketing but his actions did not show he was eager to learn.

Meanwhile, I wish him all the best and I will honour the promise to myself, to establish a travel business in Singapore. I will present you a series of travel guides on Singapore and you get all my insights of the best places to go, best food to eat and where to find them, how to use the Singapore public transport effectively to travel free-and-easy around the island, unique places to shop, where to find pockets of nature and tranquillity in Singapore and how to explore the historical facet of Singapore.

Like the Travel Blessings Page to get updates. Find it on Instagram and Tumblr as well.

What about you? Do you want to find success in your life? Then start with the basics. To construct a tall building, you have to building a strong and deep foundation. Likewise, to succeed in your life, you must build a strong foundation. This foundation includes your attitudes and beliefs in life. From this incident that you have just read, it will do you good if you are humble and honest with your own capabilities and acknowledge that you need to learn a lot and learn quickly. You must be eager to learn too! All successful people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet learn everyday! Bill Gates carries with him a luggage of books wherever he travels.

If You Are Confused, You Are On The Right Track

2016-07-20T18:13:00.001+08:00

Image Source: http://cdn.quotationof.com/images/confuse-quotes-7.jpg

Are you reading books after books, trying to figure which principles or strategies listed in each book will be best suited for you to be successful?

Or maybe you are a seminar junkie, just like I used to be?

You will be confused.

But that's good.

That means you are thinking.

Keep thinking.

That's how Jack Ma started. After he talked to many tourists who came to his country, he found that what they told me about the world was different from what his parents told him, the news told him or what his school teachers told him.

So, from then on, he started to think on his own. If he sensed that's opportunity, regardless of what people say, he would go ahead and start to grab the opportunity.

So Keep trying. Keep experimenting.

Keep monitoring your results. Keep refining your approach.

And you'll reach your goal soon.

Good Luck!

If You Want To Start A Business Today, Start It Online

2016-07-18T11:51:00.000+08:00

If you are looking to build a business and it is your first time building up a business for yourself, forget about the traditional bricks-and-mortar business model.

This is not to say that bricks-and-mortar businesses don't work anymore.

The reason why I'm saying this is because unless you are already seasoned business man or business woman, or you have deep pockets that you are willing to risk it all, you should not start a traditional bricks-and-mortar business.

These are the risks that you have to bear when starting a traditional bricks-and-mortar business:

1. You have to bear a HIGH FIXED RENTAL EXPENSE, even if your revenue for a particular month drops.
With increasing rental cost year after year, your financial risk increases proportionally as well. Moreover, the rental expense wastes a lot of your revenue which can be put to much better use. Many businesses, including the established ones, have been driven out of markets just because the rental costs have become too unaffordable for them.

2. You have workers whose salaries you have to pay first BEFORE you pay yourself.
Worker's salaries are another fixed monthly expense you have to deal with when you have a traditional bricks-and-mortar business.

3. You have to STORE and MANAGE INVENTORY.
First, you have to hire people or use your own time to manage those physical goods. So, money is wasted on paying salaries. Even if you are using your time, you are wasting money too because time is money. When you waste your time on low value work, you waste your money as well. Next, you have to waste valuable rental space to store those goods. Third, you need to spend money to buy an inventory system to manage the stock level and automatically order for re-stork if the inventory runs low.

4. You have to SPEND MONEY IN THE LOOK AND FEEL of your physical store.
This isn't just a one-time expense. It's a RECURRING EXPENSE because you have to keep renewing your image to keep up with the trends

As you can see, there are lots of expenses to take care BEFORE you are even sure you can make a high profit from the goods you are selling.

Now let's look at the advantages of building a digital business that is focused on selling INFORMATION PRODUCTS.

1. NO HIGH RENTAL TO PAY
As there is no need to display and store your physical products in a store, there is no fixed rental expense to pay for. At most, you only need to invest in a domain name (which you need to renew every year) which only cost about $10 per year and a web hosting service to store all the files in your website (this may only cost you $120 to $150 per month). Many web hosting services offer discounts on a regular basis when you first sign up. You may even spend less than $100 per year for hosting your website. If you buy a longer-term plan such as a 3-year hosting plan, your discount will even be deeper. Compare to thousands of dollars of rental costs, which one will post must lesser risk for you?

2. NO SALARY TO PAY
There are experts selling information products that earn them 6- or 7-figure revenue per year all by themselves. You can have a highly profitable business without the headache of paying salaries to any workers and managing them.

3. NO INVENTORY TO MANAGE!
Information products refer to eBooks, MP3 audio files, video recordings, teleseminars, webinars, and eCourse. These can be easily in your computer's disk space, on an external portable hard disk, or on a cloud storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and Amazon.

4. NO NEED TO SPEND MONEY ON STORE DECORATIONS!
You only need to invest some money (this could be as little as a few hundreds only) to build up an effective website, a few effective sale pages with good copywriting

5. NO NEED TO MANAGE PHYSICAL PAYMENT
All payments can be done online with secured fast payment transaction services provided by trusted online payment provider such as Paypal. All your transaction records will be stored, so you can easily keep track of how your business is moving. No need to manage physical receipts.

Don't LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY! DO YOUR OWN THINKING AND DECIDE WHAT IT IS BEST FOR YOU!

My Suggestion to you...
If you already in an industry which is information-rich, such as in training, education, cooking, arts and crafts, health and nutrition, design, or gardening, turn that into a set of products and use FREE internet resources such as blogs, Facebook Pages, Google+ Pages, Twitter, Instagram, and paid marketing resources such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and Email Autoresponder such as GetResponse.

Click Here To Set Up Your GetReponse Account Easily!

If you are not in such an information-rich industry and still want to open a physical store, try to think of ways to convert some parts of your operation into information marketing segment and exploit that to draw more people into your store!

GOOD LUCK TO YOU!

If You Want To Be Successful, Surround Yourself With Successful People

2016-06-13T11:51:00.002+08:00

I know this is a cliché.

I know you have heard this thousands and thousands of times.

But only today then I realise how true and profound this simple statement is.

I thought I "really" have understood what it meant in the past. But I haven't. You might be in the same state as I was, thinking that you have already understood, but you might not have.

The reason why I just found out I had not understood the cliché is because first, I found myself mixing around with people who are only pretending that they are successful but not true success themselves and yet they claim they can build big and successful businesses shamelessly, and second, even when I found out those people I'm hanging out to complete my business projects are not successful people or not even have the successful people mindset, I continue to stick with them for a while now. Both time and money have been carelessly wasted.

People who are successful already will most likely continue to be successful because they have done that and been there. They know what they are doing. They know how business works. They know the success principles very well. People who have not been successful are the opposite. They don't understand the secrets of building successful businesses. However, they are still not the most dangerous people.

The most dangerous people are those who have not been successful in anything but they pretend that they are successful or pretend and think that they know how to achieve that success and they are eloquent people who can convince you that if you stick with them, they will eventually be successful.

Don't believe a word they say. Don't give them or yourself that chance to make the fatal mistake. They won't be successful. You will only be wasting your precious time and maybe even money.

Here's are 2 thing I will do for myself and what you should do for yourself too:

1. Cut off contact with them straight away. If you want to remain friends with them by all means, but not as business associates or partners.

2. Start a personal development plan for yourself. Don't think that you need them to become successful. You don't need to. With the technological advancement today and most importantly, the Internet, anyone can be a success. Start learning internet marketing, social media marketing, start learning how to take photography, make videos and speak eloquently in front of a camera.

Take my words seriously.

Why You Need To Get Rid Of Or Avoid Negative People In Your Life

2016-04-11T15:25:00.000+08:00

Do you constantly feel that you are not progressing in life?

Positive energy attracts success. Success makes you feel more confident and increases your positive energy which in turn attracts more success to you. This is the kind of positive spiral you want to create in your life if you want to have permanent success in your life.

If you are constantly being held back by negative people surrounding you, you will have a difficult time achieving what you want, Every step that you move forward will be set back by ten steps. Instead of progressing, you will be regressing.

And that is why you need to get rid of negative people in your life or avoid them completely. That is why you need to surround yourself with positive people who will be able to take you towards the rising spiral you need to turn your life around.

What are some ways to identify those negative people in your life?

Negative people are critical:
They always think they are right and you are wrong. Maybe they are right. But what if they are wrong? How do you know if they are wrong? You need to do your own research and make a judgement. Like what Alibaba's founder Jack Ma says, different people tell him different opinions about the same thing and he has to make his own judgement and go ahead with it when his research shows that others may be wrong. After the research, if you find that these people may not be entirely right, you will then know they are just being critical and close-minded and you should ignore what they say about you.

Negative people don't teach you good values:
They are many of them. If you observe them for long enough, you can surely tell. They promise you many things but never keep them and you feel that your trust in them has been exploited. They tell you one thing but do another thing. It seems like there is no relationship between what they say and what they do. They measure everything in terms of money and forget about appreciating a person just because he or she is also a fellow human being. They tell you there's no need to educate yourself so much. They tell you under some circumstances a person can "own" another person and dictates him or her anything to be done, including an order to commit suicide. They do not feel there's a need to observe privacy and frequently enter your room without knocking and tell you it's wrong to lock up one's room.

Negative people creates trouble:
Instead of spending time to solve the many problems that already exist, negative people around you can create trouble for you and you end up spending all your limited energy, mental and emotional, on solving issues that are not there in the first place, leaving little to spare to embark and continue on the ventures you are working on. Even when you have understood their problems and have told them how to solve their problems, they continue their old ways and are reluctant to adjust to new ways of doing things even though it solve their problems!

The effect of all these is that you will constantly feel lack of confidence, angry, frustrated, disappointed, hopeless, fatigued and zapped of energy. In the long term, your physical, mental and emotional health may slide back. Without positive energy, it's hard for you to sustain yourself, let alone pursue your dreams and goals.

One of the most important reason why you need to get rid of negative people or avoid or ignore them completely in your life.

Do it because you love yourself. Everything positive has to start within you. If you keep getting yourself poisoned by these negative people and the negative experiences, memories and emotions they pass on to you, you will be dead (you can take it literally or figuratively) from the poison before you can fulfil your dreams and goals.

Do you really want to make a real progress in your life and is the presence of negative people one of the major reasons for that?

Then get rid of them. Remove them from your life. If they cannot leave, try as much as you can to stay away from them and avoid them at all cost.

Remove negative people from your life. Love yourself first. Everything else will then fall into place properly.

Success is Personal. What's Your Definition Of Success?

2016-03-09T17:04:00.001+08:00

Many people want success but when you start to ask them what do they mean, they have difficulty articulating. It means they are not clear about what success is to to them, despite them saying otherwise.

The first step to success is to define what success is to you. If you know the destination, you have a higher chance of getting there eventually with an appropriate plan.

So how do you define success?

One way is by thinking about the different aspects of our lives, such as financial, career, education, personal development, spirituality, health, fitness, social life, family and so on.

How should each aspect be in your life so that it means successful to you? Take out a pen and paper to write down your description of what each aspect means to you.

For me, I write down a list of 100 goals that I want to achieve in my lifetime and then I categorise them into the different aspects of life. Yes, it's 100. You didn't read wrongly. Actually, like you, I thought having 100 goals was too much. But as I wrote, I found myself exceeding 100 goals! Amazing!!

A few months later, review it again and refine your definition. Continue to do this until it is very close to your ideal life. It make take months or even years to clarify your definition. Have patience!

Cheers!