Sometimes having a team of hundreds of people is not the most ideal solution to a problem. Large teams are difficult to develop, as training all members to the same standard needs a team itself. However small teams are most effective and can be rapidly deployed after a few initial meetings.

An effective team has:

• Clear Performance Values
• Meaningful Purpose
• Well-defined working approach
• Mutual accountability
• Manageable Numbers
• Complementary Skills
• Shared values 

 Use Software

We are living in the technological era, and it’s wise that you make use of the software solutions to team management that are on the market. If you don’t want to spend loads of money on software, you could look into a software as a service solution such as Basecamp or Backpack by 37Signals. These solutions will help you manage your projects and share information across your business.  

Have Regular Informal Meetings 

Take the suit and tie off and head down to your local Starbucks to have a nice Toffee Mocha while discussing ways work related issues. A group of people surrounding a round table isn’t always the best environment to be in, to be the most productive. 

Choose Passionate People 

There is nothing more valuable than people who have a passion for what they do. They will naturally always go the extra mile to get a job done, they might even be happy to work if you offered half the amount of money. Passionate workers are what will drive your company forward, big companies such as Google and Microsoft only hire people who have a passion for what they do. If a person who is not passionate is in your team, expect them to be a bottleneck in the team’s productivity. 

Reward Your Team 

Your teams happiness should be the top of your priorities. If they aren’t happy they aren’t going to be working to as hard as they could be. Therefore you should be respectful to team members and reward them accordingly. You don’t need to reward them financially, you could give them more authority for instance. Gestures like this will earn you more respect for your team.

I personally think the ability to be able to sell anything, is one of the most powerful abilities anyone can possess, as it gives the opportunity to create true unlimited wealth.

Why is it so easy to sell furniture in a furniture shop and rent out movies in a movie rental shop? However it seems nearly impossible to sell anything online, even if you create the perfect environment by obtaining an ideal domain and making it as easily accessible as possible.

Who Are You?

How can you expect anyone to pay you money over the internet, without knowing about you or your business? It would help if you displayed your address and a small description of your business. Doing this builds a trust with your customers, and at the end of the day, if they have your physical address it gives them a small amount of security.

Not Too Much Writing

What is it with landing pages these days? I’m sure I’ve seen many that required me to scroll endlessly to the bottom to find the final price and payment options. This content is not at all helpful and is just a waste of time that is going to annoy potential customers. All this information should be condensed to the key facts that a potential buyer would need to know about their purchase.

Make It Easy

No I don’t want to register to have the ability to make a purchase. I just think its ridiculous that users need to register and give unnecessary details. I’ve seen companies such as Amazon change the way they checkout customers. Now they have a quick purchase option where you don’t need to register. You have to keep in mind not everyone has the time to go through your registration form to make a purchase. It’s easier for them to just visit another site where they can buy the same product.

Please No Fake Testimonials

What do you take your potential customers for? You think that your potential customers truly believe that the testimonials you have placed on your site are legitimate. It’s better to have no testimonials than to have fake ones. Actually I take that back just don’t have any testimonials at all, as people are most likely to think its fake.

If your business does not have a strategy in place to keep customers happy, apart from providing a great product or service. It’s time to start making small changes that will put a smile on your customers face, because at the end of the day if you are unable to satisfy your customer, you can at least keep them happy.

Smile Mirror Trick: Have you ever realised when someone smiles at you, no matter how you’re feeling, you have this urge to smile back. Smiling makes people feel warm and happy, so smiling at people, will make them smile in return causing them to have a slight lift in mood.

Say Your Customer’s Name: Stop being formal, calling your customer “Mr.” or “Mrs.” This is likely to make your customer feel slightly guilty as they feel they are above you. You should call your customers by their first name. This is the first step in creating a relationship with your customer.

Follow Up: Now that you have provided a service or sold something to your client. You should follow up and find out if everything is ok, and if it is possible for you to assist the client. This gives them a feeling that you are watching out for them.

Do What They Don’t Expect: Why not surprise your customer? By this I don’t mean jumping out of a cupboard on them. I mean why not by them a drink at your next meeting or even give them a freebie. They will appreciate your gesture of good will.

• Finishing School.
• Having a million pounds.

However I do have a feeling that I have succeeded in other things that could be considered extremely difficult, these are:

• Starting various small web based companies.
• Earning a decent amount for my age.
• Becoming an influential writer.
• Being able to live off my own skills.
• Being scouted by investment firms.
• Having my work featured on some of the world’s most influential technology journals.
• Having the privilege to be in close contact with some big names in the industry.
• Having over 4 years’ experience in a field.

To be honest I am pleased with what I have been able to accomplish for my age, however I really wanted to do all this stuff well before I was 18. However it takes a long time to become respected and recognised In this industry. I want to look back in a few years at this post and be able to say that I have accomplished the things I have yet not accomplished. I want you to use this post as a milestone in your own success story.

Thanks

Nish

If you don’t know by now, Twitter is a social micro-blogging service that allows users to communicate through 140 character status updates. We are being constantly being bombarded by social marketing gurus telling us that, every business should be on Twitter trying to become an influence.  This has caused loads of businesses to sign-up to twitter with nothing but business benefits in their mind. I think most of these businesses are doing it wrong on Twitter and this is why:

Don’t Follow Everyone You See

What is up with people and trying to follow everyone they come across, without even having any kind of interest in what they have to say. I think this is a case of Myspace syndrome, because people are assuming they will get followed back just because they followed first. While in fact it just makes you look like a spammer at first glance. There’s nothing more off putting than seeing someone who is following thousands of people but only has a few people following them back. This is mainly because its quite clear that they don’t really care about anything anyone has got to say, as following thousands of people makes it impossible to read what people have to say. Would you follow strangers you have no interest in, out on the street?

Don’t Tweet Too Often

Twitter’s social model is in between instant messaging and emailing. So you need to find the perfect and often variable period in between tweets. Tweeting too often can be very annoying especially if you’re not engaging with the community, and just promoting your business. I’d say it’s ok to tweet as much as you want if you’re replying to someone, but continually tweeting not directly too anyone is defiantly not good.

Don’t Tweet Too Infrequently

This is actually one of my problems. I sometimes just completely forget  about twitter. I think everyone should try to make atleast one useful tweet per day. When you don’t tweet people will notice, and you will be most likely be un-followed. I know this is contradictory to my previous point but you really do need to find the perfect balance between often and infrequent.

Via RSS

Whatever you do don’t automate your tweets via RSS or any sort of API. This just makes it obvious that you’re not really saying anything , but you have a system in place to make it look like you do. I know a lot of tweeting automation software exists out there, that randomly sends outs tweets based on certain keywords. Just don’t do it. Do you really think that anyone thinks you’re a legit tweeter?

Don’t End All Tweets With A Link To Your Website

There is no reason to put a link to your website after every tweet you make. People would of seen the link the first time and maybe visited. Sending the link out another 1000 times isn’t going to drive you much more traffic. However it is going to seriously affect the way people look at you on Twitter. Why not just put a link to your website in your twitter profile. If people are interested in you, they will naturally check it out. You wouldn’t end every sentence in real life with your website URL would you?

Never Repeat A Tweet

Have you ever tweeted something that you thought was great, but you didn’t get the response you wanted? Well don’t bother tweeting the same thing out again, as it isn’t going to do you any favours. People are just going to think your craving for attention, which you probably are. If you did get any response the first time, a better thing you could do is retweet the response to try reignite the fuel.

Never Start A Tweet with..

A tweet should never start out like this:

• Read this!
• Learn the trick.
• How I made.
• Click here.
• Pls RT
• Get 100 followers

If you’ve ever tweeted something that begins with one of these you are probably already a lost cause. These are probably the most used words by twitter spammers.

Following these 7 rules you have a chance of being a legitimate twitter user that people will respect, as you are actually engaging the community instead of treating it like a stock market exchange floor, where people are shouting out trying to grab each other attention, without out any regard of their looks but only with personal gain in their eyes.

Thank You

Nish Chandradas

Having a closed beta is basically like advertising a shop but only letting a few people inside. The people who don’t get into the closed beta are likely to be slightly annoyed and loose interest. If you’re about to launch a startup, either let everyone use your services or no one at all.

Being open is defiantly a part of the online business culture. Having an open beta will defiantly help your startup company, as people will be able to try it out, spread the world, causing twitter trends and then eventually journalists may pick up on what your startup offers. Having a closed beta only a few people will really get to use your service and its highly likely that it is just going to hurt your startup.

• Launch Your Startup. As soon as you are ready for business, launch your startup. Don’t worry about the small details such as not having enough content or users. Maybe keep a little “In Beta” tag on your Logo.

• Get SEO Juice. Being a closed product you’re not really going to get any love from the search engines. Being open allows you to be indexed by search engines and capture all that lovely search traffic.

• Get Feedback From Real People. There is no point in getting your best friends or work colleagues to give you feedback on your concept. It’s most likely going to be affected by bias. Having real users on your site try to harness feedback from them using a service such as Kampyle.

• Remove Sense of Security. Once you have launched, there is less chance of you going back and changing your mind on the project. Remember that time is money, you don’t have years to launch a product as potential customers may be waiting for you now. Look at it from an investors perspective, if you was an investor would you want to invest in a company that plans to run in closed beta for a long time.

• Tweak. Use the feedback from your users, to make changes to your business and website to make it better for you and the customer. Use a poll or a voting system to pirotise things that need to be done before you launch your final product.

Closed beta startups often end up looking like email list catch pages, asking for email addresses and telling people they will be emailed. This is a turnoff as no one wants to wait and be informed about something a product/service when they can just easily find a competitor by doing a Google search.

That’s all for now.

Nish

This is their yearly profits for just one their companies.

Firstly we need to identity what a hustler is, so here is a definition of a hustler from Urban Dictionary.

“People who are forced to use their Brains to make it in this world. They outsmart the smart, cunning, and have street smarts. They know how to get money and are skilled at doing it to. Also they can be so sly that they can sell you stuff you don’t need.”

So I’m guessing you’re not a drug dealer from Peckham, London or Brooklyn, New York who was forced to become business minded from a young age. Well not to worry as anyone can learn and understand the traits and mentalities needed to have the hustlers mindset.

There Is No Other Way

If your living in a really poor neighbour with very little employment rates, business is the only way to go. However failure isn’t an option as there aren’t any other options to fall back on. This is what gives hustlers that determination and drive they need to succeed. No matter how many times they come to life threating situations or lose everything they have earned. They just have to pick themselves up and carry on hustling.

Imagining yourself in that situation isn’t very hard, doing so will allow you to be motivated to work harder.

Don’t Leave The Ghetto

Most high earning hustlers don’t leave the original ghetto that they were brought up in. It isn’t a case of not being able to move to a better neighbourhood, but hustlers know that staying in a poorer neighbourhood means cheaper living, which in turn maximises profits. Not only do they want to earn as much cash as possible, but they know the further away they move from their customers the higher the chance of competitors succeeding is. The only time they leave their neighbourhood is when they know they have made enough money to live really nicely outside of their neighbourhood.

What we can learn from this is, that having a nice house is irrelevant you should live rough and get as much money as possible and always be as close to your clients as possible.

Expensive Yachts Don’t Earn Money

Your average hustler doesn’t have his eyes set on buying expensive tuxedos and ridiculously priced Yachts. They know that these luxuries don’t bring any financial advantages and are just for rich people to waste money on and show off their wealth. Instead hustlers are going to be looking at ways they can expand their using more equipment and personnel.

What can learn here is that, money shouldn’t be wasted on pointless luxuries that don’t benefit your business.

Attention Is Bad

The last thing a hustler wants is attention, too much attention could get you killed or even arrested. However these days it seems entrepreneurs focus all their energy on getting as much attention as they can from the media, instead of actually making money. Most people believe that once they have enough attention the money will just roll in, but this is only half true. The real people making money are the people who stay silent and are in the background.

“No” Is Not An Answer

In the hood, there’s hustlers you can’t say no to, because you will be left to bleed on the roadside. This obviously creates enormous opportunities for them. I’m not saying you should go out and be aggressive to get your way. But there are ways of getting what you want without being violent. In Neil Patels blog post “Why immigrants are more successful than you!”, he explains how his mum got a job by refusing the answer no.

“When my family first immigrated over here my mom could not find a job as a preschool teacher. So when they told her no, she told them that she would work for free. Months later they decided to hire her and more importantly pay her.”

Conclusion

If you try to adopt this mentality of business you will become a much more defined businessmen, working harder while making more money.

Thanks

Nish

I’m not sure if this is a saying or not, but the more sparks you have the easier it is to light a fire. The same is true for a brainstorming session, the more bright sparks you have the more intense the brainstorming session is going to be. This puts us at an advantage, and therefore it is crucial that we optimise the process of brainstorming as much as we can, to reap the best results. Here are in my opinion the 5 musts for a successful brainstorming session.

1. Strap Yourself in

It’s hard enough to get into the optimum mental “zone” to brainstorm, the last thing you want to do is have to start and stop irregular. You will end up rethinking what you have already thought of and losing interest very fast. Therefore it’s a good idea to have one long brain storming session without any distractions.

2. Silence is Gold

Carrying on from the point that any distractions could potentially ruin your brainstorming session. It is crucial that you are in a quiet environment, where you will not be disturbed by anyone. This also means that you need to turn off your phone, TV, radio and computer. Sometimes you may feel that you feel more inspired while on the computer because the internet has so much information on your subject. However I believe that being on the computer will be more distracting than beneficial.

3.  Map Your Mind

Instead of simply jotting your ideas down in a list form, the best thing to do is to create a mind map. If you’re unsure what a mind map is or how to create one. I’ve put an example below.

Here is a list of advantages of using a mind map taken from this post.

• Improved capacity to see detailed information.
• Improved capacity to remember complex information.
• Improved capacity to remember related chunks of information.
• Improved capacity to cope with mental clutter.
• Improved imagination.
• Improved levels of concentration.
• Improved note-taking ability.
• Improved level of interest in the content or subject one is studying.
• Improved problem solving ability.

4. Write Until Your Hands Cramp

You know that burning cramp sensation you get when you have been writing for hours nonstop. Well that’s the only signal there is for you to stop writing while brainstorming, apart from running out of ideas. You should write down everything that comes to head. You should constantly remind yourself that if you stop now, you will never have time again to sit down and brainstorm.

5. Conclude

Now that you’ve wrote everything you can think of on paper in a nice mind map. It’s time you truly get something from all that hard work. I’m guessing you feel very drained, so the best thing to do is to have a rest. Once you’re all freshened up and in the “zone” again, go over the notes you have created and pull out information that is actually useful and put it into a form that will help you progress. For example if you were thinking of business ideas and now you have some notes. Choose ideas that you could really do, and maybe write a short paragraph summary of how the business would operate.

Thanks

Nish

I think the reason so many young people aspire to become business owners is because the impression is always given that creating a business and making it successful is an easy job. This is actually far from the truth, as most people lack the abilities needed. I initially complied a list of 10 things that someone should be able to do, to have a chance in succeeding but then I changed my mind because most people can do these things. I therefore called it a list of super powers because I think you should be able to do these things very well persistently.

Be Able To Sell Anything

Some people think they might be able to sell well, they may be able to sell a can of deodorant to someone who has bad odour problems. I don’t consider this a great feat as pretty much anyone is able to do this. What I would find amazing is if someone could sell flowers to a florist or similar. Believe it or not being able to sell well is the key to any businesses success. A good guide that tells you how to to sell almost anything can be found here.

Discipline Yourself With No Tolerance

Have you ever found yourself working crazy hard just before an exam deadline or project deadline? My guess is yes if you are like any other ordinary person. Just imagine if you could work that hard all the time and be resistant to the pain. This is exactly what you need to be successful, you need to be able to endure through long hours of doing boring repetitive work and come out with a smile at the end.  CNN did a great article on this that can be found here.

Cope In Any Situation

Do you fail to function when you are asked to do something you haven’t planned? Well you need to be able to handle anything that comes at you, because believe me anything could happen. For instance if your company did something amazing, and the local press came to your office. Would you be able to give a speech or just talk about your company without stuttering and making mistakes. You should remember that anything could happen at any time, and if you are unable to cope with it, your company could make a great loss.

Work With No Gratification

Working hard may not be a problem if your getting paid £40 an hour. Are you able to work hard for long hours only hoping that one day you may be chilling on  a beach, somewhere in the Caribbean.  This is the main reason why most of the 40% of people who would like to enter business fail, they would rather  earn instant hourly money for working. You should always remind yourself of the possibility of your future compared to theirs.

Assess and Take Risks

Did you know that most the biggest business owners risked having nothing for what they have today? I’m not saying that you should take all risks that come your way but you defiantly should assess the risks very carefully as one risk gone bad could cost you everything or on the other hand could be everything. What I suggest you do is to actually create a list of risks you have taken and the outcomes, slowly you can build a portfolio of what kind of risk taking is worthy and what is not.

Lead People

If you are working in a team or have hired people, you need to start leading people.  I have created a short list of benefits of being a good leader:

1. Increased profit.
2. Increased passion.
3. Increased workaholicism.
4. Increased quality output.

If your team or staff are being lead correctly they will begin to act as if they own the business, this is great as they will almost do anything for the business much like yourself.

Inspire People

Being the boss of a company people are only going to look up to one person. That’s you. Therefore your vision should be inspiring, if you do not currently have your own vision statement it is time you created one. Once you have done that you should share it with people in your organization, this will create a culture that would suit your business. Steve Jobs has done this very well, with his vision of simplicity.

Super Focus On Tasks

Be so focused that you are obsessive. There are 5 levels of focus which are:

1. Lifetime
2. Yearly
3. Weekly
4. Daily
5. Currently

To succeed your current tasks should be in as many  levels of focus as possible. For example a lifetime focus for everyone is survival. Just imagine how powerful you would become if you could make one of your business tasks a lifetime focus. This will allow you to do almost anything. Most new years resolutions are only in the weekly level of focus that is why they never last very long. You should be able to shift items of priority to different levels.

Be Persistent

There is no point have all 9 other super powers if you cannot persistently use them to your advantage. If you are only able to use utilize your powers sometimes, then this may have a negative affect on your business as you would have major pitfalls. Try to be constant with your work rate.

Know Your Own Powers

Lastly you should constantly remind yourself of what you are capable of.

That’s it for now.

Thanks

Nish