Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose By Tony Hsieh.

The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success.

Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too.

Sound crazy? It’s all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that’s doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year.

In 1999, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO.

In 2009, Zappos was listed as one of Fortune magazine’s top 25 companies to work for, and was acquired by Amazon later that year in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing.

In his first book, Tony shares the different business lessons he learned in life, from a lemonade stand and pizza business through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Ultimately, he shows how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion, and purpose both in business and in life.

Delivering Happiness Book Review is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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Just like plumber with the bad pipes, the gardener with the worst front lawn… it took us a while, but…

We finally got the new PeteWilliams.com.au site up…

It’s now live over at http://www.PeteWilliams.com.au (ironic right ?)

We’ll be making a bunch of changes to the blog here over the coming weeks as well … so stay tunned.

The All New PeteWilliams.com.au is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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I recently re-sold Australia’s version of Yankee Stadium, the MCG – a project I first did back in 2003 when I was just 21 — and how I got the tagline ‘Australia’s Richard Branson’ from the Aussie media.

It was a great success when I first undertook the project, but this time around, it was much more organised, and on may levels a more successful project – (the reason why is below)

… and that’s even after I received a cease and desist letter right in the middle of the campaign that threatened to shut the whole thing down.

When opened the doors to the online sales page, we received a very nice 5 FIGURE PROFIT in the first 12 hours – with out any affiliates !!!

Not bad for a project, I launched on-the-side for a bit of fun.. and to help get some of the remaining MCG carpet out of my mums garage.

The reason for the success – http://www.preneurmarketing.com/MCGsecret

It was a downright, good old fashioned Product Launch…

A Jeff Walker product launch…

If you don’t know Jeff Walker, he’s the guy with all the strategery (yes, I’m sure that’s a word) behind all the crazy online product launches.

… and Jeff has just released his Product Launch Blueprint for free.

You get the PDF Blueprint PLUS a video that walks you through the entire blueprint …

… the exact same strategy, plan and process I used just a month ago to resell the Melbourne Cricket Ground…

.. and it cost me a few thousand dollars to have one of his trained coaches help me out during the launch.

Obviously, you have to enter your email to get this… but there is no cost, and there’s no hidden upsells or continuity or anything.

Get it now before Jeff pulls it down on Tuesday: http://www.preneurmarketing.com/MCGsecret

IMPORTANT: be sure to print out the PDF so you can take notes as you go through the video.

Seriously, this is a pretty powerful document to have in your swipe files… whether you market online or offline.

It’s worked for me, and I know it will work for you.

Pete

P.S. There’s even a hidden “resources” section that Jeff must have snuck in at the last second – it doesn’t show up in the training video, but it’s in the actual Blueprint.

P.P.S. There are also a few other videos one the site you can watch as well – including a breakdown of Apple’s recent iPhone 4 launch.

How I RE-sold the MCG. is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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In an effort to get a few projects that have been sitting on my to-do and would-like-to lists completed, I am trying something I’ve never done before…

.. disconnecting from the grid.

Well, the best I can anyway.

I decided to leave a week prior to any locked in commitments to lock myself away, remove as many distractions as possible and just work on ’shipping’ some ideas & projects.

My rules are pretty simple:

Keep my mobile phone turned off for the entire week, and limit send/receive of email to twice a day only.

It’s only been 36 hours and what I have to report is

Anxiousness.

For someone who has lived his daily life by checking email at least 48 times a day (and that’s under- exaggeration) this is tough – real though.

I have broken the email rule a couple of time already …

Firstly, I disabled the automatic send/receive in my mac mail to stop the inbox filling up and pulling my attention … but like any good addict I found myself getting my hit due that nasty enabler – the ‘Get Mail’ button in the toolbar.

So what does one junkie have to do to get clean – remove the enabler, and thus that has button is deleted…

I understand the email is not crack or acid, but if the withdrawals that are physically manifesting themselves in my body and mind in the form of stress, anxiousness and worry that I will be late to an online party, are anything like real drug addiction, I’d be in real trouble is I was a user.

Even with the small rule breaks, it has been a successful experiment in it’s first 36 hours.

I’v gotten my inbox down from over 160 emails to around 40 right now, and made some solid progress on a few projects.

There are still 5 more days left, and I hope as I progress the anxiousness will die down, projects will get complete, and I can come out the other side a little less depended on ‘being connected”

I can only begin to imagine what true alcohol + drug addiction does to a person and their family … and hope our society can continue to offer better support programs to these people.

Experiments in Disconnect is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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The lateral thinking process built into AdPack offers you a process to develop 120,000+ business marketing ideas.

The cards contain proven techniques including pros, cons and suggestions that are current and relevant in today’s business – techniques that many small, local and national businesses use successfully every day.

Simply click START and you’ll be presented with three AdPack strategy cards that makes brainstorming ideas for advertising easy, quick and fun. Double click on the card to get more details on that technique.

Just shake your iPhone to be presented with new combinations; Ideas you may never have contemplated. Ideas that will set you apart from your competitors. Ideas that will increase your sales and generate more profit.

The 150 “trigger cards” are divided into three sections – Media, Offer and Power Words

The Media Cards show you what vehicles you can use to promote your business. Just tap on the card and you’ll find valuable pros, cons, hints and tips to get the most out of each media.

The Offer Cards help you develop powerful offers to draw people into your business.

And the Power Word Cards are 50 of the most powerful words in marketing when used in a headline or body text.

There is no other product on the market (let alone as an iPhone app you can have with you at all times) that helps you develop fast, cost effective advertising and marketing solutions like AdPack.

AdPack iPhone App is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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“[Yellow Pages is]…for small businesses who may be time-poor and don’t always have the necessary expertise in marketing and advertising, web and content development, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, etc.”

So to combat this, and teach you the skills even Yellow Pages agrees you need to know to grow your business, Dave Jenyns and I are teaming up to put on a one-day workshop.

A workshop focused heavily on Internet Marketing for local business. Run By Real World Business Owners – Not Some Self-Proclaimed “Marketing Expert.”

Today, once you harness the power of online marketing, the outcome for your business and bottom line is completely different.

Click Here To Find Out More About The Small Business Internet Market Workshop.



Side-Note:
The whole ‘hidden pizza restaurant’ thing is an interesting read, so check out http://www.preneurmarketing.com/Hidden-Pizza-Overview and http://www.preneurmarketing.com/Yellow-Pages_Flaws

Yellow Pages Is… is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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In a post today on his blog, Seth Godin, talks about the principle that makes a trade exchange so effective.

I like to think of margin as the money left over after you’ve paid the direct costs for making an item, the last one of the day.

If you’re not operating at capacity, the key word here is margin. The marginal profit of one more pizza is high. You’ve already paid for the rent, the oven, the sign, the ad in the Yellow Pages, the hourly wage, the uniforms, all of it. Whether you sell that last pizza of the day or not, all those costs are fixed. So, if your ingredients cost $2, your gross margin is $8.

This is the exact same thought process and calculations, you need to “GET”, to make a trade exchange like Bartercard work for you… The sales you make in a trade exchange, need to be treated as additional (other wise lost) sales- “the last one of the day” as Seth puts it.

The ‘cost’ of those sales are simply your raw/direct costs, as the overheads are taken care of …

Seth continues – “If someone offers to run a coupon in the Welcome Wagon envelope that goes to new residents, and the rules are, “one per customer, new customers only”, and the coupon offers a large pizza for $2, is it worth it for you to run it? That’s 80% off! Surely, this is too expensive. You can’t afford 80% off.

On the margin, of course you can. You got a new customer for free. Unless your store is at capacity, with people waiting in line, one more pizza sold at cost is a great way to build your business (unless there are too many coupons and unless it changes your positioning as a high-end place, but that’s a story for a different day).”

The great thing about trade exchanges is that you can apply this principle, get a customer for less than cost, and still make a profit as you still get paid the full $10 for the pizza.

Yes the $10 is in ‘trade dollars’, but you can then go and spend that trade on off-setting business costs or other ways to grow your business

… and for those you have experienced ‘over-pricing’ in a trade exchange; technically you could pay 5x the price off-setting a business cost, and you’ve still got that new customer for free, as this best selling business author suggests.

Seth Godin On The Principles of Bartercard is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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For those playing along at home, you may have noticed that I’m in the process of launching the final series of MCC Crested Carpet over at www.OwnTheG.com.au

This whole project has been a lot crazier than expected with, not only the media supporting the cause with a bunch of media interviews (click here to listen), pre-registrations going through the roof… but the MCG sent me a “nasty letter” late Friday afternoon.

Apparently, the Melbourne Cricket Ground means so much to Australia, that the 1999 government decided that the G needed it’s own Parliamentary ACT, just like the Goods & Services ACT of 2000 or the Road Safety ACT — a real set of parliamentary passed documents, called the Melbourne Cricket Ground Act 2009, that spells out a bunch of stuff specific to the ‘peoples ground’

The MCG people where real nice about the whole thing, which was good …

but how crazy is that, the MCG is such an important piece of Australian Sporting History, that it has it own laws …

Speak soon,

Pete

The MCG Sends Cease & Desist Letter is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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Our latest iPhone Application is now live in the Apple iTunes App Store – it’s a project we did with the author of the New York Times Bestseller, ‘The Game’ – Neil Strauss (alias Style) who was named the World’s Greatest Pick Up Artist.

StyleLife is the first iPhone app from Neils academy for dating, pick-up and attraction – StyleLife Academy.

We’ve assembled some of the most successful openers, pebbles and attraction lines in this ’swipe-file’ style iPhone Application.

Simply open the app in a bar, club or mall and you are presented a selection of great PUA style openers that you can use in your approach… You no longer have to do what Neil once did when he was learning the game- pulling out bits of folded up notepaper in the club.

In version 1.0 of the StyleLife App, along with all the swipe file content, you can have the opener appear on your phone as a ‘Fake SMS’, so if you’re out sarging by yourself, you can approach someone and start a conversation by asking for ‘help responding to the sms’… Plus, there is a series of video tips direct from Neil Strauss himself, to help you refine your game.

We’ve also got some really cool functionality planned for future updates including; global voting on the best lines, ability to add your own openers to the database, along with the ability to update/purchase additional openers direct from Neil and the team.

The StyleLife iPhone App is available here – http://www.StyleLifeApp.com

StyleLife iPhone App with Neil Strauss is a post from: Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams
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