Job Related

We all know that branding – or having a name brand and bolstering it with ads and other marketing resources – is a huge part of big business in this day and age and it has been for many decades. But the new version of branding that is becoming as hot as a branding iron in this new decade is personal branding. Those who use this innovative new tool basically go about marketing themselves, their skills, their talents, and the benefits that they can bring to companies by branding themselves. They have mottos, mission statements, and even a dress code and way of speaking that supports the brand.

By effectively using a personal brand, say those who give tips and career advice, professionals can greatly enhance their chances of getting a dream job and avoiding unemployment due to downsizing and corporate layoffs. The fact is that whether you call it branding or not, those who do take the time and effort to create and promote a personal brand will typically come out ahead in the competitive employment arena. That’s because the whole process needed to build a personal brand also requires the ability to refine and upgrade your marketable talents, update your interview and presentation skills, and hone in on what exactly it is they you to offer to an employer.

That will always into a more optimistic career outlook, because people who do those things get noticed by their bosses, their managers, and the HR department staffers who interview them to fill open positions. So if you are in the market for a new job or promotion this year, consider personal branding. It can improve your personal image and your chances of getting hired or bumped up the organizational ladder. Plus your competitors are probably considering a personal branding strategy – so to keep the playing feel level you also need to keep up with the times and create a brand to promote yourself.

Sure, it sounds completely crazy – especially in the midst of one of the biggest economic downturns in world history. But one of the smartest moves you can make to survive and thrive during any business cycles, including a deep recession, is to get rid of some customers and clients.
 
Have you ever fired an employee because they were goofing off on the job or wasting valuable company time by doing personal business while they supposed to on the clock earning their salary? If so, you know how important it is to jettison the dead weight that is holding your business back from success. And of course if you have not actually had to lay off an employee, at least you can easily understand the logic and reasoning behind that kind of decision. Nobody can afford to run a company – not matter how big or small it happens to be – if the employees are just showing up at work to chit-chat, play on their computers, and spend precious hours sending text messages to friends.

Okay now here’s the crux of the argument for ditching customers. If they are basically doing the same thing – that is, they are showing up at your place of business in person, calling on the phone, or sending emails to just do nothing but waste the time of your valuable employees, they are not quality clients. You need to get rid of them because the time you waste on them is time that is being taken away from customer service directed to your truly valued customers – the ones who are spending money and keeping your business afloat.

What you do is analyze which customers are contributing to your monthly revenues. Also identify any who spend an unusual amount of time complaining or negotiating or otherwise taking up the time and energy of your staff for issues that are not really legitimate. You know the ones – those who constantly shop and browse but never commit to a purchase or the ones who buy but first complain about the price until they are blue in the face. Meanwhile perfectly good customers have to wait in line, and that is bad for your business and your reputation.

Be nice about it. Take them off your mailing list, and when they call or email put them on the back burner and let them wait while you attend to your better clients. Instruct your staff not to spend an inordinate amount of time with them. Soon they’ll get the message and go waste the time of your competitor while you get back to the core business of great customer service to great customers.

In the 12-page introduction to his 2004 book, “Think Like a Billionaire,” Donald Trump lists and briefly explains 10 ways of “thinking like a billionaire.” (Or like one of them, anyway.) Here, condensed, are quotes from six of his tips...

1. Don’t take vacations. What’s the point? If you’re not enjoying your work, you’re in the wrong job.

2. Don’t sleep any more than you have to. I usually sleep about four hours per night. I’m in bed by 1 a.m. and up to read the newspapers at 5 a.m. That’s all I need, and it gives me a competitive edge. Why do you need a competitive edge? You don’t, if you’re happy to be an also-ran in life.

3. Think of yourself as a one-man army. You must plan and execute your plan alone. Work hard, play hard, and live life to the hilt.

4. Success breeds success. The best way to impress people is through results. You have to create success to impress people in the world of business. If you’re young and haven’t had any successes yet, then you have to create the impression of success.

5. Treat each decision like a lover. Vast fortunes are accumulated through dozens of decisions a day, thousands a month, and hundreds of thousands in a career. Yet each is different and special in its own way. If you treat each decision like a lover—faithfully, respectfully, appropriately—you won’t be locked into a rigid system.

6. Be curious. You have to be alive to your surroundings and hungry to understand your immediate world. Otherwise, you’ll lack the perspective to see beyond yourself.

 

“Many Americans are coping with the worst job market in a generation by doubling up. (Moonlighting.) They’re scrambling to pick up the slack as they, or their partners, lose jobs, endure pay cuts or watch their retirement savings shrivel.” That’s a quote from a feature article in USA Today (6/24/09) entitled “Moonlighting becomes a way of life for many.”

Other reasons not mentioned: To pay down credit card balances, cope with the new, higher interest rates on many cards, and compensate for having their credit limits decreased.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national newspaper reported, there were about 7.6 million holders of multiple jobs so far this year: 5.3% of all employees. Workers in the 45 to 54 age group accounted for most of them—2.0 million—followed by those age 35 to 44 and then by those 25 to 34. Teenagers and seniors (65 and older) accounted for the fewest: 230,000 and 220,000 respectively.

As the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.4% in May, up from 8.9%, the average workweek for those with jobs shrank to 33.1 hours, the lowest in 45 years, due to more unpaid furloughs, reduced hours and pay cuts.

If you decide to moonlight, said a spokeswoman for Manpower, you should do so in a field you “have a passion about. For example, if you’re a sports nut, get a job in a sporting goods store.”

Or, perhaps, start a spare-time business selling products or providing a service in a field that interests you.

Perhaps. If you know how. If you try different things until one of them works. And if you read how others did it and emulate them. Take Ewen Chia, for example.

As a young man in Singapore, with a good job, Ewen spent four hours every night, from 11 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., on the Internet, trying to learn how to become rich. He did this for five straight years, trying various business ventures and purchasing all the e-books and e-courses on Internet wealth he could find (even though most were in English, which wasn’t his first language). He spent close to $50,000 doing so, charging most of it to credit cards.

Finally, in 2002, he settled on affiliate marketing as the business model to focus on, and began putting his hard-earned know-how into practice. Last year, a publisher in New York published his 354-page book, “How I Made My First Million on the Internet—and how you can too!” It’s filled with details, examples and proven advice.

No matter what kind of business you might choose, Ewen offers (at the end of his book), “two basic lifetime principles of money-making, online or offline, which you must fix firmly in your head before you start—because they will serve you for life, make you incredibly rich, and set you free financially.” They are:

1. Provide a product or service that people truly want and are willing to pay for. You don’t really have to “find a need and fill it.” Often, the need has already been found by others. It’s what people want and attach their emotions to. You just have to provide the wanted product or service faster and better than your competitors.

2. Learn the two most profitable and necessary skills of all time in business: copywriting and marketing.

 

Many people started their own business because they couldn’t get a job. Others, who had a job, started a business only after they were fired or laid off. And still others started a business in their spare time, then went full time when it became very profitable.

Whichever category you may find yourself in, you’ll appreciate the ideas and inspiration in the new paperback edition of “Start Small, Finish Big—Fifteen Key Lessons to Start and Run Your Own Successful Business,” by Fred DeLuca, co-founder of the Subway chain of fast-food restaurants.

The book tells how DeLuca got started at age 17 and how 15 other entrepreneurs went from nothing to great personal and business success. Each chapter illustrates one of these 15 key lessons:

1. Start small. It’s better than never starting at all.
2. Earn a few pennies. It’s good practice before you earn those dollars.
3. Begin with an Idea. There’s probably a good one right under your nose.
4. Think like a visionary. Always look for the big picture.
5. Keep the faith. Believe in yourself and your business, even when others don’t.
6. Ready. Fire. Aim! If you think too much about it, you may never start.
7. Profit or perish. Increase sales, decrease cost. Anything less and your business will perish.
8. Be positive. The School of Hard Knocks will beat you down, but not if you keep a positive attitude.
9. Continuously improve your business. It’s the best way to attract customers, and generate sales and profit.
10. Believe in your people. Or they may get even with you!
11. Never run out of money. It’s the most important lesson in business.
12. Attract new customers every day.
13. Be persistent. Don’t give up. You only fail if you quit.
14. Build a brand name! Earn your reputation.
15. Opportunity waits for no one. Good or bad, breaks are what you make them.

Even if you have a Master’s Degree in “whatever,” it’s not going to help you get a job if there’s no demand for “whatever” experts. So perhaps you should think about some other field. A blue-collar job, for instance.

According to a feature article in USA Today (6/23/09) about Joe Lamacchia, author of “Blue Collar & Proud of It,” there’s a shortage of blue-collar workers in many areas, and the pay is good for carpenters, electricians, plumbers and certain other specialists. “My brother-in-law,” Lamacchia said, “is making $60,000 to $70,000 a year installing heating and air-conditioning units. Guys throwing trash are making $50,000 a year—they’re not living out of an airport and suitcase. It’s a nice life.”

A 2007 book, “The Blue-Collar Resume and Job Hunting Guide,” notes that “major growth will take place in many blue-collar occupations in the decade ahead as the economy continues to expand.” (Still true?) “Many of these jobs only require short-term on-the-job training. In addition, many are available on both a full-time and part-time basis, thus offering many people opportunities to acquire second jobs to supplement their incomes.”

Among the jobs listed: truck drivers, security guards, landscaping and groundskeeping workers, maintenance and repair workers, hazardous materials removal workers, environmental science and protection technicians, janitors and cleaners, carpenters, automotive service technicians and mechanics, and electricians.

Among the best-paying blue-collar jobs listed: public transit attendants, longshore equipment operators, brickmasters, stonemasons, power plant operators, locomotive operators, aircraft engine mechanics, and telephone line installers and repairers.

Bottom line: Don’t let a college degree keep you from considering a blue-collar job, if you can’t find work in your own field of expertise.

Would you like to be more successful, so you can pay down your credit card balances and improve your lifestyle? If so, Jack Canfield offers 10 tips on success in “Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul,” one of the more than 100 “Chicken Soup” books published since he and co-founder Mark Victor Hansen started the series 16 years ago. The 10 tips are from his (and Janet Switzer’s) 2005 book, “The Success Principles,”™ which includes 54 other tips, plus details and explanations not shown below...

1. Decide what you want. To get what you want out of life, choose something specific. Don’t just say, “Whatever.”

2. Unleash the power of goal setting. Set big goals. To achieve them, you’ll need to grow—learn new skills, expand your vision of what’s possible, build new relationships, and learn to overcome your fears.

3. See what you want, get what you see. Use visualization. Picture what you want as if it were already achieved.

4. Take action. The world doesn’t pay you for what you know; it pays you for what you do. Don’t over-plan. Do it, even if it’s not perfect.

5. Use feedback to your advantage. Ask customers to rate your product/service. Correct what’s wrong. Do more of what’s right.

6. Commit to constant and never-ending improvement. Start with small, achievable goals that can be easily mastered. Keep at it.

7. Exceed expectations. Go the extra mile. Over-deliver on your promises. Stand out above the crowd.

8. Stay motivated with the masters. Read inspiring books and listen to motivational and educational tapes or CDs an hour every day.

9. Hire a personal coach. A coach can help clarify your vision and goals, support you through your fears, and keep your focused.

10. Mastermind your way to success. Join or start a mastermind group of five or six people for brainstorming, networking, etc.

You can become rich, famous or both if you come up with a “big idea” and then take action on it. So says Donny Deutsch in his newest book entitled, appropriately, The Big Idea.

Since ideas—no matter how big—are useless if nothing is done with them, the former ad exec and current TV host (on CNBC) cites numerous examples of people who (sometimes when they were broke and desperate) came up with big ideas and developed them into various kinds of unusual, money-making enterprises.

For example: Wayne Perry found out, by accident, that the active ingredient in pepper spray (used for self-defense) caused his cluster headaches to go away. So he took his last $350, mixed a batch of spray in his kitchen, bottled it in nasal spray containers, and started selling it on eBay, Today it’s FDA registered and sold in health food stores and vitamin stores, and Wayne is making $2 million a year.

Then there’s Debbee Barker, who used cardboard and duct tape to invent a simple device that makes the folding of T-shirts fast and easy. There’s Kim Lavine, who created Wuvits by sewing colorful fabrics into “healing pillows” and filling them with corn feed. When frozen, or heated in a microwave, they’re used to ease aching joints. And there’s Jeff Foxworhy, who’s made a fortune with his “redneck” brand of comedy—a niche not previously filled by any other comedian. His previous occupation: customer service rep at IBM.

Many work-at-home opportunities are legit. Many aren’t. How do you tell the difference? Often, you can’t, unless you spend money for the details and/or contact the Better Business Bureau to see if there are complaints on file. The new June issue of Consumer Reports reports on three biz opps they tried.

Scam #1 advertised: “Stuff envelopes! Get paid $5 per envelope, up to $1,276.57 weekly...stuffing envelopes and mailing company circulars.” (Note the oddball dollar amount; it’s to make you think it’s real.) After paying $67 to the firm, CR was directed to a Web site with a guide on how to run classified ads selling a get-rich-quick report for $5 each. The report tells customers to do the same thing.

Scam #2 advertised: “Assemble products at home.” CR sent in $26 for a directory that listed companies seeking home assemblers. Selecting one at random, CR paid another $50 for a starter kit enabling them to assemble 24 fishing flies, for which they would be paid $12 “if they passed inspection.” Then, if they bought supplies in bulk for $840 more, they could assemble 3,048 flies and be paid $1,524. Bottom line: If all went well, they’d earn less than $3.35 an hour.

Scam #3 advertised: “Learn how to make $107,389 in six months, just filling out forms and doing searches on Google and Yahoo.” (Note the oddball amount here, too.) Bottom line: It would cost $3.88 “for shipping and handling” plus $72.21 a month to receive a CD and access to a Web site which, CR noted, “give disorganized information on selling on the Internet. The BBB has 478 complaints on file against the company related to unauthorized credit-card charges.”