Five top tips to starting a successful business - by Richard Branson

Here is an amazing post from Richard Branson on starting your own business.  If you already own a business, don't dismiss this article as it applies to opening a new income stream or division.  Enjoy!

1. Listen more than you talk

We have two ears and one mouth, using them in proportion is not a bad idea! To be a good leader you have to be a great listener. Brilliant ideas can spring from the most unlikely places, so you should always keep your ears open for some shrewd advice. This can mean following online comments as closely as board meeting notes, or asking the frontline staff for their opinions as often as the CEOs. Get out there, listen to people, draw people out and learn from them.

2. Keep it simple

You have to do something radically different to stand out in business. But nobody ever said different has to be complex. There are thousands of simple business solutions to problems out there, just waiting to be solved by the next big thing in business. Maintain a focus upon innovation, but don’t try to reinvent the wheel. A simple change for the better is far more effective than five complicated changes for the worse.

3. Take pride in your work

Last week I enjoyed my favorite night of the year, the Virgin Stars of the Year Awards, where we celebrated some of those people who have gone the extra mile for us around the Virgin world. With so many different companies, nationalities and personalities represented under one roof, it was interesting to see what qualities they all have in common. One was pride in their work, and in the company they represent. Remember your staff are your biggest brand advocates, and focusing on helping them take pride will shine through in how they treat your customers.

4. Have fun, success will follow

If you aren’t having fun, you are doing it wrong. If you feel like getting up in the morning to work on your business is a chore, then it's time to try something else. If you are having a good time, there is a far greater chance a positive, innovative atmosphere will be nurtured and your business will flourish. A smile and a joke can go a long way, so be quick to see the lighter side of life.

5. Rip it up and start again

If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture isn’t a success, welcome to the club! Every successful businessperson has experienced a few failures along the way – the important thing is how you learn from them. Don’t allow yourself to get disheartened by a setback or two, instead dust yourself off and work out what went wrong. Then you can find the positives, analyse where you can improve, rip it up and start again.

My Confessions that led to Massive Breakthrough - Pt 1

I vividly remember a scene in the second Matrix movie when the Frenchman was explaining - Choice and Consequence; or Cause and Effect.  This dialog has stuck with me ever since I watched the movie.  In this scene, he discusses choice, but we do not have the power to choose our consequence.  He discusses the true power is in "Why!"  What is your "Why?"

Once you understand your "Why," you can then choose your actions to support this.  The challenge in life is that most people do not understand his/her "Why."  Without this understanding, we are essentially powerless because we base our decisions on emotions, feelings and the influence of others in that moment.

This is also true in business. Why are you in business?  How do you select your clients?  (That is right, how do you select your clients?  Too many people just accept anyone who agrees to give them money even if they are not a good fit for you.)  What kind of client service do you give?  How do you become EXCEPTIONAL!  If you do not base your CHOICE in your WHY, then your choices are random, and far too often they are reactionary.

And, sometimes you give your WHY or purpose away to another person by letting them determine your WHY for you.  This is very dangerous!  I recently found myself in this situation, and I had convinced myself that I was in control.  The reality was that many of my decisions were based on the emotions, whims and decisions of another person.  I found myself unfulfilled, unhappy and stressed to the MAX.  For months, I found myself going through the motions, feeling sorry for myself, and wondering what else life could throw at me.  (This is for another discussion, but the Law of Attraction was strongly at work here.)

Luckily, I had a great friend, Christina, that reminded me that I had choice.  She reminded me that I had the power to choose what I thought about, what I focused on, how long I dwelt on something, how I reacted to something and who was a part of my life.  At first, she simply challenged me with questions like:

• Why do you choose to think that;
• Why did you let yourself feel that way;
• That's interesting, why did you react that way;

For weeks, we had been talking about Attraction, Choice, Respond versus Reaction, and Happiness.  One day, she asked me to discuss and coach her on a specific business idea.  The funny thing is that when we met, we decided to walk and talk, and the focus of our discussion became the Power to Choose.  And, this is when she asked me my most revealing question -

And, the most enlightening question was, so you have been frustrated about this all day, why?  And, what do you have to do to change the way you feel?  Christina asked me this question almost off the cuff, but it penetrated to my very core.

(Ouch...And, I was frustrated for most of one day because a client wanted her website to be EXCEPTIONAL, and she kept making adjustments to  the photos on her site!)  Now, go figure that, a client has listened to me about being exceptional, and I choose to get frustrated!  Oops!

I doubt she even realized the impact of the conversation.

I rushed home, and started to pull out old books and notes from seminars that I had attended over the past two decades.  I was like WOW!!  I really have given away my power to choose.  As soon as I decided to eliminate the toxic thoughts, influences and people in my life - a peace overcame me.  I was able to focus on my WHY, something I had forgotten as I was rushing to put out fires and please others.

This sent me on a massive EVALUATION of my business and my life.  If you can relate to this, you will definitely want to bookmark this blog and read next week's post as I share with you the specific steps I took to make a major breakthrough in my life, how I did it, and within a few short months changed the entire outlook of my business and life.

To your success,
Jesus Balderas
The Coach

P.S. I recently had a client who was working with a high profile business person who was causing chaos in my client's life.  He treated my client as if she owed him something, and he kept dangling carats of big business.  This was causing her great stress, and I shared my story and some strategies with her that I am going to share with you next week.  Once she dealt with this person and situation, she was instantly relieved and her business grew almost instantly.

The Zappos Way

Zappos is an incredible success story that has created an amazing culture within its company.  Here are the 10 Core Values of Zappos that we can all learn from:

1. Deliver WOW through service.
2. Embrace and drive change.
3. Create fun and a little weirdness.
4. Be adventurous, creative and open-minded.
5. Pursue growth and learning.
6. Build open and honest relationships with communication.
7. Build a positive team and family spirit.
8. Do more with less.
9. Be passionate and determined.
10. Be humble.

There is so many great lessons in these values.  Study them, learn from them, and most importantly apply them within your business and service model.

What I learned from Richard Branson...

ARTICLE REPRINTED FROM ROBIN SHARMA'S ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER.


I hope you're great! Just finished an event with Richard Branson in Bucharest (a city known as the "Paris of The East") and wanted to share my takeaways with you to help you take your career and life to its next level of wow.

Richard was polite and larger than life. A pleasure to share time with. And a man who clearly adores all he does. I encourage you to read his autobiography "Losing My Virginity" as well as his book "Business Stripped Bare" if you haven't gone through them yet. Uber-inspiring. For people who want to become Remarkable Entrepreneurs - and express their absolute best.

Anyway, I'll get right into some of my observations as well as the ideas we discussed. Please don't underestimate the power of these simple ideas - superbly executed, they yield brilliant results.

1. Politeness Matters. As mentioned, Richard Branson was unfailingly polite. He mentioned to me that when he was a kid, if he criticized someone, his mother would make him stand in front of the mirror at home and say, "what you're seeing in others is really what you're seeing in yourself. So look in the mirror." This educated him on the key leadership habit of looking for - and then encouraging - the gifts and talents within other people.

2. Be Massively Independent. When Richard was just four years old, his mother stopped her car and instructed him to find his own way home, over many miles. When he was about 12, she told him to cycle 100 miles to Bournemouth alone, to visit a relative. He expressed to me that these childhood experiences were his mother's way of growing his self-reliance. And building the invincible inner core that has served him so well as an entrepreneur.

3. Screw It - Just Do It. What makes a great company (and great life) isn't so much the inspiring idea as the flawless execution around the big idea. As Edison once said: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Richard shared that much of his success came from his philosophy to disregard the naysayers and those telling him his dream was impossible and just get the dream done. (Please remember: the impossible is generally just the untried). This is a man with a giant bias towards action.

4. Lavish Praise on People. I know you know this: the bigger the dream, the more important the team. Having worked with many of the best entrepreneurs in the world, I've learned that every single one of them gets that you can't do it alone. Beautiful to have a brave vision. But the real key is finding the genius-level talent to get that vision delivered into reality. And if all you know how to surround yourself with is mediocre people, you're destined to experience mediocre results. Richard is brilliant at finding the right people that bring his targets of opportunity to life. And he confirmed that once they are on his team, "I lavish them with praise." Our takeaway: relentlessly celebrate+develop+inspire your people.

5. Be a Radical Innovator. When he was a young entrepreneur with nothing more than the little college newspaper THE STUDENT, he still showed a lust for disregarding all the rules. He challenged the status quo. And disrupted what was considered normal. An example: he somehow was able to get John Lennon to do an original piece of music for him. He then put the song on a special disc and packaged it into the newspaper, right next to the interview he'd done on the rock 'n roll legend. At Virgin Records, he recruited the Sex Pistols and reinvented a whole category of music. At Virgin Atlantic, he gave passengers massages on airplanes and dropped them home in limos. And with Virgin Galactic, he's taking people into space. Very cool. Fantastically bold.

At the Bucharest meeting, he told the 2500+ people in the concert hall that "sometime in your lifetime, every one of you will have visited other parts of the universe." And I believe it.

6. Build Your Brand. Richard Branson gets branding. He knows what he - and the Virgin name - stands for. Fun. Good Value. Strong customer service. And so at every possible opportunity, he evangelizes all it stands for. Oh, and he's also clearly a master of getting attention. From hot air balloon adventures that made global news to showing up at a press conference nearly naked to promote Virgin mobile, this Remarkable Entrepreneur gets the value of owning a share of our brain cells.

7. Find Your Necker Island. Get this: Branson paid roughly $300,000 for his beloved Necker Island. He and his then girlfriend Joan were visiting the Caribbean on a getaway. They fell in love with Necker - but it was about $4,000,000. But he wouldn't give up (let's never discount the power of a ridiculous amount of persistence around your most closely loved goals). A few months later, the owner needed cash. Branson made his deeply discounted offer. It has served as his retreat away from the world for many years. Here's the real point: in the world of so much noise and complexity, find your personal retreat (even if it's an aged wooded bench in a public garden) where you can withdraw to think+create+renew+rest.

8. Lucky Wins. We make luck. Enough said.

9. Don't Do It If It's Not Fun. Branson wears a smile pretty much all the time. He laughs naturally. And radiates happiness. Zero doubt: he loves his life - and all that's in it (George Clooney said he'd swap his life for Richard Branson's - much to the delight of Richard's wife). The lesson for us: life's just too short to be doing work that destroys your soul. This is the best time in the history of the world to become an entrepreneur. Find work you adore. And get busy changing with world with it.

10. With Gifts Come Responsibilities. OK, so Richard Branson's one of the richest people on the planet. But he gets that being good trumps shiny toys. He mentioned to me that, "with great wealth comes great responsibility." And so he's spending a lot of his days evangelizing Virgin Unite, his foundation that helps kids in need. Reminds me of what my amazing father taught me - using the words of the great poet Tagore - growing up: "Robin, when you were born, you cried while the world rejoiced. Son, live your life in such a way that when you die, the world cries while you rejoice."

So there you go. What the iconic Richard Branson shared with me on a sunny Wednesday in Bucharest. I hope the lessons also serve you well.

Robin

Create multiple streams of revenue

The weather in Grapevine is incredible after an entire summer of 100+, isn't it? I am loving it. I want share with you an important component to building a successful business, but I want to start with two questions. 

• How many income buckets do you have? Do you have 1, 2, 3 or 10? This is an incredibly important question to ask yourself.
• And, do your income buckets require active selling to generate any revenue?

It is an important component of business for you to have multiple streams of income or multiple buckets, and some of those buckets need to generate income residually. As an exercise for you to work on, I want to ask you to spend an hour over the next week brainstorming other ways you can generate income through your clients and relationships by bringing more value to them.

Next week, I will share with you several strategies to creating multiple income buckets. And, the reason this is so important is that all markets fluctuate to a certain degree. You do not want to be held hostage by one product or service. Develop multiple streams of income starting today!

The words we choose can determine our success...

Today, I want to share a powerful concept that I was studying last week. Often times the thing that holds us back the most is ourselves. We are often our greatest obstacle to success. It is so important to constantly be developing oneself as a person. Read and listen to the personal growth coaches, and that will directly impact your business. In the book, Cash in a Flash, by Robert Allen and Mark Victor Hansen they discuss the power of the words we speak to ourselves and out load. Do you use positive or negative words and language? The words you choose can enable or disable you. They can energize or weaken you. They can take you to great heights or keep you in dark valleys.

They shared an exercise that I have found to be very powerful. I remember we did this exercise with my soccer team when they were 11 years old. Every time one of the kids made a mistake and started to get upset at themselves another player or one of the coaches would say CANCEL. It was amazing the impact it made over the season. This exercise is very similar. I want you to really listen to what you are saying to yourself and how you are speaking. Every time you hear yourself thinking or speaking a negative thought say SWITCH. 

And, then replace it with a positive thought. I am not saying that bad things don't happen, but I am saying that there is positive and good things in almost everything.

Let me give you some examples of positive and negative words:

Happy	Sad
Strong	Weak
Optimistic	Pessimistic
Easy	Difficult
Beautiful	Ugly

As you say the words, how do they make you feel?
Finally, let me give you an example of the SWITCH exercise in practice.

a problem	a challenge
a job that I hate	a job that I don't love
he is a real jerk	he is not a nice person
I have so much credit card debt	I had too much fun using my credit cards
Now, it's time to pay the piper	Now I have to learn to be more financially savvy.
I'm stuck in a dead end job	I'm in a place where I don't have the freedom I'd like to have.

These are just a few examples of changing your language. This can have a real impact on your outlook, your business and your relationships. Do the exercise for one week, and I'd love to hear your experiences.

Committed to increasing your profits,

Jesus

Two Keys To Having The Life You Deserve

There are many keys to success in life, but I have found two which embody all keys. The first is that each of us must learn to love oneself. We have all heard the following - "Don't blow your own trumpet...Don't pat yourself on the back...and so on."

Humility is very important, but what is humility? to me humility is to confidently acknowledge one's being. We also must recognize that we are very special and blessed with unique talents. We have the power to think and create. This is an amazing gift. We are God's greatest creation so if we cannot love oneself then what can we love. Also, if one doesn't love oneself, then why should someone else. And, when you love yourself, you will then know how to love someone else completely and without conditions. So. pat yourself on the back. Remind yourself that you are very special.

The second key is to know your purpose. Without this, then one would live their entire life on accident. Because if you do not know which path you want to follow, then how is one ever going to get on it.

One's life purpose needs four things:

1. Passion - Our purpose in life should be one which drives us from bed in the morning with joy and happiness. One which will give us joy to face each and every day. You will know you are in your Passion when you are juiced going to be and you hop out of bed.

2. What you want to give - In life we must always give before we can receive. It is said if you want great wealth, then you must help enough others gain wealth (this applies to everything).

3. What you want to receive - You need to know what you want. If you are only giving then you are a martyr. So, what do you want: happiness, wealth, freedom, good health, love, strong family, etc.

4. Massive action - It won't happen by itself, we need to do it. It all starts with a thought, but it doesn't happen by a thought alone. We need to act and do whatever is necessary to achieve and live our purpose.

This area of achievement and success is something I have studied for twenty years, and it is amazing how the little things can make such a difference. Also the one thing I have learned is that the science of success is something that one will study for a life time. It is essential to always read or listen to books on this subject because you will learn something every time you do.

BBI has a great course on Goal Achievement and Time Management called Life Management Systems, and I encourage you to get it. For more details go here.

Until next time,

Jesus Balderas

12 Secrets To Success

I am often asked what is the difference between successful people and those that do not experience success. There are many quotes and books on this subject. Some of my favorite thoughts are:

• Successful people are prepared to do the things that others aren't willing to do.
• Successful people set goals.
• Successful people focus on daily improvement (CANI - constant and never-ending improvement.)
• Successful people have faith, and so on.

This is a huge subject, but I thought I would share with you my thoughts in the form of a list of 12 keys. Enjoy, and may you find greater success in your life.

12 Secrets To Success

1. MWPs (Millionaires with Purpose) take risks and understand that high risk and massive education = low risk!
2. MWPs focus on ONE thing and do it well.
3. MWPs do not over estimate the short term or under-estimate the long term.
4. MWPs NEVER give up, they just change tact.
5. MWPs do the numbers then back themselves to the hilt.
6. MWPs surround themselves with like-minded people.
7. MWPs make decisions quickly and confidently once they have all the facts.
8. MWPs make everything urgent.
9. MWPs take time out to formulate their own thinking about critical issues relating to their life.
10. MWPs say "How can I?" instead of "I can't."
11. MWPs do whatever it takes to change their lives.
12. MWPs always take personal responsibility and never place blame. If one person can do it then they can do it.

Live with Passion,
Jesus Balderas "The Coach"