Deb and Amy talk about Thinking Bigger, how to Start Your Own Business without an MBA, how a Business Coach can speed up success, and much more in this final 3-pound mafia podcast.

If you missed it: Part 1 interview on Business Ownership
Part 2 interview on Business Ownership
Part 3 interview on Business Ownership

Deborah Cole Micek, (the Motivation M.D.) and her partner John Paul Micek (the Commando Capitalist) are founders of the business coaching company RPM Success Group ® Inc.

Deborah is an expert in negotiation, team building, and leadership. With over 17,500 hours of research and study working with thousands of business owners around the world — Deborah and John Paul have created a simple scientific system that maximizes your performance, persuasion, and wealth in just 60-Seconds. They both are in demand speakers, published authors, and certified trainers in persuasion and Self Influence™, and experts in Marketing with New Media. Their latest book ‘Secrets Of Online Persuasion’ is the definitive guide on getting more customers and cash online with New Media. You can reach Deborah by contacting [support@rpmsuccess.com]

	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
Attribution (text and links) must be given to RPM Success Group Inc.and Business Owners Coaching Club. Full copyright is retained by RPM Success Group Inc.

Deborah Cole Micek, (the Motivation M.D.) and her partner John Paul Micek (the Commando Capitalist) are founders of the business coaching company RPM Success Group ® Inc.

Deborah is an expert in negotiation, team building, and leadership. With over 17,500 hours of research and study working with thousands of business owners around the world — Deborah and John Paul have created a simple scientific system that maximizes your performance, persuasion, and wealth in just 60-Seconds. They both are in demand speakers, published authors, and certified trainers in persuasion and Self Influence™, and experts in Marketing with New Media. Their latest book ‘Secrets Of Online Persuasion’ is the definitive guide on getting more customers and cash online with New Media. You can reach Deborah by contacting [support@rpmsuccess.com]

	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
Attribution (text and links) must be given to RPM Success Group Inc.and Business Owners Coaching Club. Full copyright is retained by RPM Success Group Inc.

Deborah Cole Micek, (the Motivation M.D.) and her partner John Paul Micek (the Commando Capitalist) are founders of the business coaching company RPM Success Group ® Inc.

Deborah is an expert in negotiation, team building, and leadership. With over 17,500 hours of research and study working with thousands of business owners around the world — Deborah and John Paul have created a simple scientific system that maximizes your performance, persuasion, and wealth in just 60-Seconds. They both are in demand speakers, published authors, and certified trainers in persuasion and Self Influence™, and experts in Marketing with New Media. Their latest book ‘Secrets Of Online Persuasion’ is the definitive guide on getting more customers and cash online with New Media. You can reach Deborah by contacting [support@rpmsuccess.com]

	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
Attribution (text and links) must be given to RPM Success Group Inc.and Business Owners Coaching Club. Full copyright is retained by RPM Success Group Inc.

Deborah Cole Micek, (the Motivation M.D.) and her partner John Paul Micek (the Commando Capitalist) are founders of the business coaching company RPM Success Group ® Inc.

Deborah is an expert in negotiation, team building, and leadership. With over 17,500 hours of research and study working with thousands of business owners around the world — Deborah and John Paul have created a simple scientific system that maximizes your performance, persuasion, and wealth in just 60-Seconds. They both are in demand speakers, published authors, and certified trainers in persuasion and Self Influence™, and experts in Marketing with New Media. Their latest book ‘Secrets Of Online Persuasion’ is the definitive guide on getting more customers and cash online with New Media. You can reach Deborah by contacting [support@rpmsuccess.com]

	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
Attribution (text and links) must be given to RPM Success Group Inc.and Business Owners Coaching Club. Full copyright is retained by RPM Success Group Inc.

Deborah Cole Micek, (the Motivation M.D.) and her partner John Paul Micek (the Commando Capitalist) are founders of the business coaching company RPM Success Group ® Inc.

Deborah is an expert in negotiation, team building, and leadership. With over 17,500 hours of research and study working with thousands of business owners around the world — Deborah and John Paul have created a simple scientific system that maximizes your performance, persuasion, and wealth in just 60-Seconds. They both are in demand speakers, published authors, and certified trainers in persuasion and Self Influence™, and experts in Marketing with New Media. Their latest book ‘Secrets Of Online Persuasion’ is the definitive guide on getting more customers and cash online with New Media. You can reach Deborah by contacting [support@rpmsuccess.com]

	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
Attribution (text and links) must be given to RPM Success Group Inc.and Business Owners Coaching Club. Full copyright is retained by RPM Success Group Inc.

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

“There can be no great courage where there is no confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the conviction that we can do what we undertake.” –Orison Swett Marden

Confidence, courage, and certainty… succeeding in business and in life requires that they go hand-in-hand. Courage is the inner power to face difficulties. Yet courage is rooted in confidence, and confidence is rooted in the mindset of certainty.

Real life examples of confidence and certainty in action

General George S. Patton was the poster child for confidence and certainty. He was a remarkable leader who trained and motivated his men to achieve astounding results. With an unwavering certainty and emphasis on mission, he transformed an utterly demoralized American force in North Africa into an army capable of defeating the Nazis’ much-feared General Rommel. Later storming across France into Germany at a breakneck pace, his unit conquered more enemy troops and liberated more civilians than any other in World War II.

Helen Keller (a model for certainty, confidence and encouragement) once said, “face your deficiencies and acknowledge them. But do not let them ever master you.” Both General Patton and Helen Keller both realized that in order for a person to succeed he or she must routinely overcome personal failings, or turn them to his or her advantage but never to doubt him/ her self.

Certainty, confidence, and successful business ownership

For myself, I have always made the connection between a relative level of confidence or courage and its direct proportional relationship to success in business. (Success having different definitions for each person.)

But until the other day, I never realized what a powerful role the attitude of certainty has had in helping me achieve all that I have so far in life. My wife said to me, (admittedly in frustration) “You’re always so darned certain, but you’re wrong sometimes you know.” Her comment at first got me a little concerned. But then as I took it to heart it made me realize a couple of things I knew were critical for me to share with you for creating a successful business and living the ideal business ownership lifestyle.

First it called my attention to the fact that I need to parse my words at times and listen more openly to feedback when conveying a vision I have or a possible plan of action.

Secondly is that “certainty” is the gasoline that fuels the engine of massive forward momentum. In every area of business, from entrepreneurship, to marketing, to leadership — certainty is the crucial ingredient required to overcome obstacles and achieve outstanding results.

An example of certainty in business ownership

Let’s look at small business marketing as an example. Once you are certain that you have a product/service that people really want, then you will want to exude confidence and unabashedly market yourself. Marketing is not the place for uncertainty or, do I dare say — humility.

As a matter of fact, most business owners equate humility with silence or lack of self-promotion. What they don’t realize is that this attitude actually drives prospects and clients away because what they are looking for is security in knowing that you will deliver what you say you will.

If you’re not certain or confident about yourself or your product/service, why should anyone else be confident to do business with you?

The same is true in entrepreneurship and leadership.

Certainty, built upon dedicated thought and study, allows you to make decisions quickly, confidently and efficiently. Does that mean you’ll always be right? Of course not. But it does mean that you are in a state of constant growth. Whether your decision takes you two steps forward, or one step back — the wise person is always learning and growing no matter which direction they’re moving at the time.

In part two of this article I’ll act as your virtual business coach and share with you four proven ways to boost your certainty and confidence as a small business owner.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Part 10 — Small business marketing success all comes down to incremental improvement!

I saved this principle for last in this series because it reinforces all the others. When most of our business coaching clients join the Business Owners Coaching Club, or participate in one of our click-and-mortar marketing courses — they come in with the misconception that they need to overhaul their entire marketing operation in order to produce powerful results. The plain truth is, most of the time that’s simply not necessary.

Principle 12. A slight marketing edge is all it takes to exponentially increase your profits.

Actually,
all you need to outperform your previous efforts, and your competition, is a slight edge. I’ve seen explosive results from simply changing a headline or restructuring a guarantee. The copy, design, and medium of delivery remained exactly the same – but the advertising pulled three, six or even eight times the previous way. On occasion a major revamp is called for, but most often, this is simply not the case.

The principle in practice

Look, it’s quite simple. If you can increase the number of clients you serve by 8%, increase your average sales amount by 10 or 20 dollars, and make just two additional repeat sales to each of your clients every year, you can realize very real net profit increases of 35% or more.

And better yet, you can do it safely, with very little effort, and almost no additional expense. To do that, just remember the RPM Principle Of Compounded Business Growth: small, prioritized gains carried out with consistency over a period of years will grow your business to astounding levels.

So leave the flashy, wildly creative, costly and “cutting edge” advertising campaigns that produce little or no action to the “Big Boys” with “Big Budgets” whose focus is more on winning awards than on winning clients. You can be content knowing you’re on your way to making BIG profits with hi-impact marketing in your small business — not a big impression.

Follow the twelve principles that have been laid out in this eight part series, apply what you’ve learned, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing you soon in the winners circle too!

And if you’d like to put all these 12 laws into practice and start profiting in less thatn a third the time it would take on your own — you definately want to join the Business Owners Coaching Club.

Aloha, enjoy — and I’ll be speaking with you soon in an upcoming article, podcast, or teleclinic.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Part 9 – Marketing Without Action Is Dead

I hate to see money wasted. And I hate it even more when it’s the money of hard driving small business owners or professionals. And no where is this waste more prevalent than in marketing, where these business owners try to emulate institutional marketing. Here’s a quick example to illustrate my point.

The other day I was watching a tape of CSI. As I was fast-forwarding through some commercials, a beautiful scene in one of the ads caught my eye. I even skipped back on my DVR to watch the entire commercial on the hard drive. That’s unusual since the whole reason for recording the show to begin with is to save time not watching commercials.

Pretty powerful commercial you might think. But, that would depend on your perspective.

You see, as a viewer, the ad was a visual delight. There were gorgeous mountains in the background with rolling fields of grass waving in the wind in the valley below. Then a thunderous sound became louder and louder as the camera panned across to focus in on a herd of wild mustangs galloping across a field.

All of a sudden the herd comes to a screeching stop and the horses stare to the side. The camera pans again and there is what caused them to stop dead in their tracks. A glistening black 4×4 truck with a man working nearby. The man smiles at the mustangs, turns toward his truck, back towards the mustangs — and they rear up and gallop on.

Wow, impressive. This truck can get a herd of wild mustangs to stop and stare.

Was it entertaining? Yes. Visually stimulating? Sure, if you find the awesome Rocky Mountains awe inspiring.

But does any of that motivate you as the viewer to take action right then and there while you’re emotionally charged, if you even are? With most conventional advertising — it doesn’t.

Maybe a big Fortune 500 company with tens of millions of dollars in their advertising budget can afford that sort of creative license and not get any direct response. But I would guess that you can’t afford that luxury. Good guess, right?

All this brings us to the eleventh principle of this series, and marketing without action is dead in the water.

Principle 11. Direct response marketing is the only type of marketing you want to invest in.

Every ad, every sales letter, commercial, promotion and news release you produce should be geared to getting your prospects or clients to respond in some way. They must take some kind of action. The type of action is dependent on you’re looking to achieve. Here are four examples:

- If your goal is to generate leads, you’ll want a prospect to call to make an appointment for a consultation.

- Maybe you want an interested party to email you to request specific information.

-If your product or service lends itself to single-step selling, you’ll want them to place an order.

- If it’s publicity you’re after, you’ll want to time your press releases with the coverage of a challenging situation by the media. A challenging situation your product or service can solve.

No matter what response you’re looking for with your marketing, you must always remember that you are looking for a prospect to take some sort of action right then and there.

There are two important reasons why you would demand this of your advertising.

1. Reason number one is because action that can be attributed to one of your advertising pieces is the only way you will be able to measure how effective each area of your marketing campaign is. And to be as successful as possible, it’s essential to be able to tell precisely how well or how poorly each of your marketing efforts performed.

It’s not enough to know that your sales are up over the same period from the previous year. You must know specifically why they’re up.

· Which specific marketing methods are superstars?

· Which are so-so when it comes to being profitable?

· Which are slugs draining cash away from your business?

Without this critical information, you’ll continue to dump your hard earned cash into worthless efforts. That’s money that would be better invested in adding to your most result-producing performers.

2. Reason number two is more obvious, but equally as important. It’s because you want to build relationships with your clients or would be clients. You want to learn more about their needs, develop trust, build rapport and prove to them you have their best interest at heart. How can you do that if you never communicate with them? Quite simply, you can’t. When a prospect responds though, you have that chance.

From my introductory story you may get the impression that I think emotions and “intangibles” have nothing to do with outstanding advertising and result-generating marketing.

Perish the thought! Nothing could be further from the truth.

Drawing emotion out of your prospects through your advertising and marketing is a crucial component of successful marketing. The vast majority of people buy based on emotional needs. (Yes — even you. You might not like to think so, but watch yourself in the next major buying decision and see if emotions don’t play a major role in your decision making process.)

There’s not time to go into detail on the critical role emotions play in quickly generating action on the part of prospects. In the course curriculum in the Business Owners Coaching Club you’ll learn the critical importance of emotional buying triggers, behavioral preferences, motivational values, and a host of other influence-based factors that you must take into consideration for successful small business marketing. But for now, I do want to be sure you walk away today with some guidelines you can put into use to supercharge your marketing efforts.

There are two simple guidelines that will serve you well if you dedicate them to your long-term memory.

These “rules,” when put into practice, will assure you that every marketing effort you choose to invest in from here on out will give you solid results and business boosting action on the part of prospects and clients.

1. Each and every one of your marketing efforts must be completely measurable. Measurable means your marketing efforts that your prospects or clients take some kind of action based on your marketing. Measuring and improving the results of your advertising methods will allow you to cut your costs significantly while getting much better results for every marketing dollar you invest.

2. If you want the greatest ROI on every dollar you invest in growing your client base through marketing and advertising you must strive to constantly eliminate dead weight. If a marketing format doesn’t produce profit, either modify it and test again or drop it. Period! If you’re not measuring results, you’re wasting your own marketing dollars.

Enjoy — and stay tuned for part 10 of the 12 Laws of Small Business Marketing Success series.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owner’s Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Part 8 - How to Eliminate High Risk and Big Mistakes in All Your Marketing

It simply amazes me how so many small business owners and professionals fritter and waste away thousands upon thousands of dollars on marketing that plain doesn’t work. Often these are the very same people who are so careful with every dollar they invest in other areas of their business that you’d think they had a magnifying glass on their key chain. How can people intelligent in so many other areas of business become so complacent and willing to take whatever comes their way when it comes to marketing?

From what we’ve seen time and again in our business coaching is these hard working business owners are the victims of disinformation. This disinformation comes both directly and in a less obvious indirect way from the “old school” mass marketing and “institutional” advertising companies.

Directly : they happily advise you on what to do with your hard earned money. They have a plethora of suggestions when it comes to ad creation, mailing frequency, delivery medium, etc.

Indirectly: most marketing companies are looking to win awards and or at least recognition in their industry. Therefore what you see of their ads may be flashy and visually impressive, making them more likely to be considered award-winning material. But let me assure you, awards do not often translate into sales for you. When’s the last time you heard of a marketing firm win an award for a campaign that doubled a clients gross sales?

And when it comes to the ad departments of major media outlets, the mantra of “increase your frequency” is all you’ll here when you ask why your ads aren’t working the way you were promised.

Either way — whether direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional — the average advertising or marketing professional is nowhere to be found when it comes to giving you any viable way to safeguard your investment, limit your downside and maximize your profits. Ask for proven results from previous client campaigns and you’re very likely to get a blank stare, or a plethora of excuses.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are truly professional marketing specialists out there who will hold themselves accountable and give you quantifiable measurements to gauge the success of your marketing. The real pros will make sure you start slow and find out exactly what works for your target audience before asking you to invest substantial dollars in a campaign. Count yourself lucky if you have one of these companies or professionals on your side.

If you’re not lucky enough to have one of these true marketing pros in your corner, don’t worry. What you’re about to learn will put you ahead of 98% of the so-called experts in the industry. More importantly - and this is critical no matter who is in charge of your marketing – you will be armed with the only proven way to limit your risk and maximize your returns with all your marketing from this point forward. No one will ever do a better job at safeguarding your hard earned cash and ensuring optimal results than you!

Now let’s take a look at Principle #10 of this series. This is the proven scientific way to guarantee that you will never again suffer substantial losses and can consistently experience maximum gains when it comes to marketing investments with your small business or professional practice.

Principle 10. Test, test and test once again before you “go big” with your marketing

This is one of the single most profound marketing truths you’ll ever encounter. And it’s also one of the single most ignored. I’m going to let you in on a secret — companies that take the time to test their marketing efforts outperform their competitors by as much as ten fold!

There are so many different elements you could potentially test; I can’t possibly begin to cover them all here. But what I’d like to be sure I do is give you a powerful introduction.

So what do I mean by testing? Let’s look at a few examples. Take ads for instance. The same ad, identical in all respects, may pull differently when run during different times of the year. You won’t know until you test. Or how about changing something as simple as your offer. This can result in a performance difference of 250% or more, in either direction! Once again you just don’t know what works best until you test.

If there is one simple truth you can take away from today’s installment that will save you thousands and likely tens of thousands of dollars — it’s this — TEST!

- Always test small before committing major funds to any product or any aspect of your marketing.
- Don’t ever agree to a discounted rate for running a new ad multiple times.
- Always “waste” a few dollars up front to run it one time to see how it works.

If it works once, it will work again and you’ll quickly recover the few extra dollars you spent on the single run of a test ad. But if it you commit to multiple runs and it fails, there’s nothing you can do but take a huge loss for getting seduced by the multiple run discount.

Companies that fail to test usually do so out of a fatal character flaw. They assume that they already know what their clients want. In fact, they assume that they know better than their clients. Then they’re shocked when their fancy ad campaign fails to win more than a handful of sales.

And if any marketing or advertising company you are looking to hire tells you they know exactly what will work for your company right off the bat – don’t walk - run away as quickly as possible. There’s no surer way to hand your hard earned money over with little hope of ever seeing any appreciable return. Even if a marketing company is an expert in your industry, that may give them a lead on others with more general experience but they still don’t have all the answers without testing.

The bottom line is that you cannot tell the market what to do. As a matter of fact it’s quite the opposite. The market will always tell you exactly what it’s going to do… whether you like it or not!

My advice to you is this: Treat every ad, every sales letter, every promotion, and every product as a test. Take only prudent, completely controllable action at first. Once something has been proven in the market, there’s plenty of time to reap the bounty.

I’m going to take this one step further to drive my point home. If you’re really serious about propelling your profits, testing must become the cornerstone of any marketing program. Only by careful and continual testing can you tell which ads, which headlines, which letters, which lists and media, which regions of the country or world, what niches produce the strongest, most profitable results for you. I can’t stress this strongly enough. If you really want to be successful, make continual testing a way of life in all your marketing efforts.

Yes this will take extra work on your part, but then again if you want to win BIG and lose small, this is the only way to do it. Successful marketing is a science, not art, as some professionals would have you believe. If you want powerful results, you must follow the formula precisely. I promise you the rewards will be well worth it when you look back in hindsight six months from now.

In the next installment of this series you’ll learn two more fundamentals for maximum profit marketing that you can immediately put to use for increased profits and a surging cash flow.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owner’s Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.