In advance of my free webinar on Wednesday about “The 3 Key Secrets of Business Success” I thought I’d share some stuff with you on that very topic but I’m not going to tell you the Secret for each day – it might be fun for you to use the “share your thoughts” link or the comments box there and guess it! If you guess it right, I’ll email you a free copy of my Money Gym ebook AND a link to the audio (Total Value $97)
I thought today what I’d do is start by telling you a little bit how I got so obsessed with success, what makes some people successful, what makes some businesses more successful than others.
My personal journey began back in 1998. I’ve always been a serial failed entrepreneur I should tell you, and I had a series of disastrous and/or boring jobs. I always did quite well for about 18 months and then got totally bored. I was usually good at setting up systems but absolutely appalling at following my own systems. So I had some minor successes around the entrepreneurial front, most notably when I was at college and I was selling waistcoats to upmarket, top boutique shops in Brighton.
A couple of interesting successes working for other people and making money for other people which was very frustrating for me because I just never seem to be able to earn enough. In 1998, anyone who’s ever heard me speak will know that I’ve told this story many times. I got to the point where I was just absolutely disgusted with being so poor all the time. I looked around and thought, “I’m bright, I’m energetic, I work hard. What’s wrong with me? Why can I not become successful?” Specifically, why can I not become successful enough to make enough money that I never have to think about it again?
It’s the like the scales fell from my eyes really. So I started my personal journey in 1998, 13 years ago. I started with where I start with everything really which was to read. I started looking for books on how to become successful. My first ever book that I picked up was Swimming with Piranhas Makes You Hungry by Colin Turner. Although a lot of the content of I already knew it because it was all about how to go from being an employee into being an entrepreneur, I knew I was doing a lot of it, I still haven’t cracked it.
So I knew that I had to keep looking. The second book I read after that was 7 Habits of Effective People by Stephen Covey. That really was an eye-opener for me because it really did start with me the idea that you’re responsible for yourself, there’s nobody else that’s going to do it for you. If you take personal responsibility for everything that happens to you and get out of victim mode, then your life can really begin to change. So that was where my personal journey began. If you would like to see my Top 10 Business Books of all time, just click the link there – I’m thinking I might need to expand that list to 20 now!
Quite soon after that I stumbled across the idea of getting a business coach or a career coach as I was looking for then. My first coach was Rachel Turner who’d been in the music industry, and I was in the music industry so that’d seem like a bit of a coincidence. She was phenomenally successful for awhile running her ex-husband’s record label and publishing company. Then personal circumstances changed for her and she changed and she trained as a coach, and I stumbled across here awhile after that. She did really begin to teach me some amazing stuff. But then she also encouraged me to train as a coach myself because it’s something you can do from home. I had small children at that time, I wanted to work from home.
So I started training with Coach U in America, but I knew very quickly I didn’t want to be a life coach as such. I wanted to be someone who coached people towards business success or career success, down to earth sort of practical stuff rather than the emotional stuff. I trained as a coach with Coach U, I took on a lot of the stuff myself and did a lot of work on myself personally because you only have a few steps ahead of your clients.
Because I’m a fairly outgoing person I started getting clients fairly immediately. Then I started to share what I was learning about wealth creation and business success with my fledging mailing list as it was then and on what was called a text-only ezine at that time. I used to upload that text-only ezine every week to my five-page website.
My five-page website although it looked like a five-page website from the front, it actually has an archive of constantly updated relevant content. I didn’t realise how groundbreaking that was in ’98, ’99, 2000, it was in effect the early form of blogging and the search engines absolutely love it. So I then started getting traffic who then started signing up for my mailing, who then started asking me if I would share what I was learning with them in the form of a coaching programme. I also knew that I had to walk my talk, so bought The Acacia hotel (half a million, no money down) and then The Money Gym was born. The Money Gym which I’ve been working on for the last 12 years, it was NicolaCairncross.com first and then it became The Money Gym. It was an incredible journey.
The Money Gym became really, really successful, more successful than I ever imagined it would until of course the property crisis hit. As a lot of our clients came to us in The Money Gym to find out how to invest in property, obviously nobody’s able to get mortgages so people weren’t quite so interested in joining a training company who was going to teach you how to invest in property. Then we started getting some unwelcome visits from a governement department that thought we had “too much influence” and that our blog and ezine could be construed to be giving financial advice and that Judith and I could be held personally responsible if a client invested in something that didn’t work out and blamed us.
That was the end of it really. But during the time at The Money Gym, over the 12 years, I coached hundreds if not thousands of Money Gym business owner clients.
Many of the people who came to The Money Gym were business owners already, and the reason they came to The Money Gym was because they wanted to learn how to make money from other methods because they were working too hard in their business. They were earning money but they were working too hard. That’s how I got to work with so money hundreds if not thousands of Money Gym business owner clients.
I also have spoken many times at various kind of speaking gigs. The thing that’s interesting about that is you end up talking to a lot of people in the audience on quite a deep level. If you stand on stage and touch people’s emotions, they really do come and talk to you afterwards so you really get to know their circumstances quite deeply. The thing I noticed was that many of them would be back year after year, and that became quite a fascination for me. So I became obsessed with success, I became obsessed with business success in particular, especially having bee n such a failure for so many years and then having a taste of success from The Money Gym and having to start all over again. So, that’s when I became obsessed.
Now in The Money Gym, we used to teach people about what we call the Four Lanes of the Wealth Highway, only four ways to get rich apparently. One of those is obviously property and one of those is the stock market, and those two are actually the oldest two really. If you think back in the olden times, the biggest, wealthiest people in England have always been landowners. A lot of those landowners also invest in the stock market. The invested long term, they invested in what was called blue chips shares, the really sort of stable companies. A lot of the income when you read about – in Pride and Prejudice for example, Darcy I think was talked about as having the fortune of £12,000 a year. Some of that income would have come from rental income and some of it would have come from dividends on thing he was invested in the stock market. So, the property and the stock market is very much the traditional way to create wealth.
A lot of those big, wealthy landowners, apart from the ones who had inherited their wealth, a lot of times people have made it in business. They were often looked down on but eventually with time they were made lords and baronets and things like that, so they entered the aristocracy. But a lot of people really did start making their fortunes in business, and a lot of people who make their fortunes in business then go on and invest in property and the stock market. The fourth lane I added to what was originally three lanes of the wealth highways is the internet because while all the internet is a business – and you must remember that and treat it as such – you are able to make money online without having a business. It’s so different to the other three as well. It could fit in business but I don’t think it does it justice. So, I’ve created the fourth lane in the Wealth Highway which is the Internet.
But realistically for most clients property was often a challenge due to a lack of capital and often poor credit. So we found that that was the one thing that stops a lot of our Money Gym clients in their tracks when it came to property investing. We also found that a lot of our clients were stopped in their tracks with regards to the stock market because it was such a steep learning curve and again a lack of capital. You would think for example that you wouldn’t need a capital to learn to trade the stock market or trade in options and things. But actually when you do find out about, you find that you actually need a pot of cash sitting in an account somewhere before they’ll even let you trade. So again, the lack of capital was a bit of a barrier there.
The thing about the stock market of course is the emotional side of it. If ever there was a market designed to bring out the fear and greed in people is that one, and that’s what they call the bull market and the bear market. The bear market is largely made up of people who are feel that the prices are going to go down, and the bull market is made up of people who are carried away and feeling the greed. So the emotion…. of keeping our emotions in check is really quite a big challenge in investing in the stock market and particularly when you’re doing things like short term trading.
So we found really that success for most of our Money Gym clients most often came from either building a business online, and the benefits of that was there was low start-up cost and low overhead. Also, having more time than money means that you got time to learn how to do stuff, so we found quite a few of our clients were very enthusiastic about learning how to make money online. But the biggest, fastest success is, looking back on it, most often came from a real world business because they had an exiting customer base, they had an existing track record, and they had existing products and services.
So, just to go back a moment, we found that the real exciting biggest, fastest successes in The Money Gym most often came from a real world business where we taught them how to market themselves online. We taught them how to add digital products, for example, to their product line that was adding to the profit margin at the bottom line without actually adding to the overheads.
So that said, let me tell you now what the first key to business success is not. It is not a great business idea. We’re going to go into this in a bit more detail in a little while. But you don’t need a great business idea and you don’t need a new business idea. You can often take an existing business idea and just do it better than anyone else. How many coffee shops do you see on the High Street, do we really need another coffee shop? No, we don’t.
But the American coffee people came in and they started to create a coffee experience, they started to give great coffee where we’ve been drinking rubbish coffee up until that point. They gave us lots of choice of types of milk and lots of toppings and all that business. So they took an okay business idea, which was a café that served coffee, and they turned it into something really much more exciting. So you don’t need a great business idea and you don’t need a new business idea to success in business.
You do need however a great business model. What’s a business model you might ask me? It’s how you’re going to make money from your business…..
And I’m going to cover that tomorrow.
In the meantime, we have a free Webinar on Wednesday covering this very topic so register here for that >>>
