- Excerpt
How to Make Millions with Your Ideas
by Dan S. Kennedy
The Eight Best Ways To Make A Fortune
There must be tens of thousands of different categories
and
types of businesses, methods, and means of marketing and
distributing products and promoting services. Maybe more.
With new ones, or, at least, new hybrids being found or
figured out every day. We are a very inventive society,
especially when it comes to ways to make money.
However, you do not need to be an innovator or pioneer if you
carefully evaluate your chief objectives for bringing a
product to market or building a business. Money made by
pioneering is no more valuable that money make from reliable,
predictable means. A dollar is a dollar. A million is a
million.
From all of my own entrepreneurial
experience -- failures as well as successes -- and that of my clients,
I've identified the eight highest probability areas of opportunity,
where millions can still be make from scratch. These days, I try to
concentrate my own efforts and business interests in these
areas, and to direct my clients into these areas. Why? The
key words: "highest probability." Launching a new idea,
product, service, or business is risky and problematic enough
without doing it in a low probability of success environment.
Climbing a huge, forbidding, dangerous mountain is tough
enough; why try doing it during the worst snow, rain, ice,
and wind storm of the season? So, this chapter serves two
purposes. First, it's an overview of the entire book. Second,
it sets up these eight categories of high probability
entrepreneurial activity, so that you can do just as I do:
Adapt your ideas to fit these categories, to bring as many of
these categories together as possible.
High Probability Area of Opportunity
#1: Surprise! It's "Ordinary" Businesses!
As you drive down the street tomorrow,
on your way to work, or as you run errands and go shopping on Saturday,
you'll encounter doughnut shops, restaurants, dry cleaners,
bookstores, video rental stores, gift shops, and dozens of
other "ordinary" businesses. We give most of these businesses
very little thought. These shopkeepers seem to have, in most
cases, just created jobs for themselves. In some years they
may make as little as $25,000, in their best years no more
that three times that, working longer hours and harder than
in a comparable job. Nothing very remarkable about any of
that, is there?
Yet, here's what's very interesting. Somewhere in America, in
every one of those business categories, you can find someone
who has found ways to turn an ordinary business into an
extraordinary profit machine. I profile several in Chapter
Two. And, maybe even more interesting, is that more of
America's self-made millionaires own and have accumulated
their wealth through these ordinary businesses than through
any other means.
That local dry cleaner might surprise you. As you drop off
your cleaning, you notice that the owner is always there
working. What you don't know is that he owns the piece of
land or the shopping center where his shop is located, that
he has a corporate pension fund that has sheltered a chunk of
his earnings from taxes each year for the past ten, and that
the dry cleaning business has a collection of extra-profit
centers: It refers customers to a carpet cleaning company and
receives commission; aggressively markets, fur, suede, and
leather cleaning services; sells its own private label brand
of spot removers; and has three independent contractors
operating neighborhood pick-up and delivery dry cleaning
routes. All things considered, he's doing about double the
normal, one-store average in the dry cleaning industry. And
that, over ten years, has quietly made the owner rich.
High Probability area of Opportunity #2:
The Best Equity Is Exclusivity
If you're just starting to consider any and all business
opportunities, you will be confronted, through advertising,
business opportunity and trade shows, and other sources, with
a myriad of chances to distribute or market other people's
products and services -- distributorships, dealerships,
franchises, and so on. You can make money this way. But it's
very, very difficult to get rich this way.
Wealth is most often linked to exclusive ownership or control
of a particular concept, product, or service. In chapter 3,
I'll introduce you to people who have followed this path to
riches. Rather that be a cog in someone else's wheel, they
make certain to own the whole wheel outright.
If someone else has control over your destiny, if someone
else can change the economics of you business, alter your
marketing rights, impede your creativity, sell the parent
company, or otherwise unexpectedly interfere in your
business, you don't really have your own business. One of the
insider secrets to making millions is doing everything
possible to minimize circumstances beyond your control.
High Probability Area of Opportunity #3:
Serve, Serve, Serve
In 1994 almost all the new jobs
created in the United States were in the service category. Why? Because
those are the businesses expanding most consistently and rapidly. People
at all levels of society are unbelievably pressed for time, so
they need "servers" to do for them what they do not have time
to do for themselves. In Chapter Five, I'll show you how to
capitalize on this trend by incorporating service elements in
any business or product.
I'll tell you one illustrative story
here, quickly. A client of mine, International Correspondence Schools,
has been in the business of selling in-home career training since 1890.
These days, one of their most popular home study courses is "Learn to Use a Personal Computer." The product they sell is
this home-study course: the books, manuals, videotapes,
audiotapes, and computer software. But the service element
they've added is ICS ON-LINE, their "electronic campus." Right
through the computer, modem, and telephone line, their students can tap
into group discussions and classes, leave and receive messages from helpful
instructors twenty-four hours a day, share software, and much more. Learn
from this example of putting a service element into a product and
you'll possess one of the most topical insider secrets for
making millions.
High Probability Area of Opportunity #4:
Go Ye Forth and Multiply
One of the great benefits of turning an ordinary business
into an extraordinary profit machine and of owning or
controlling exclusive products is the ability to get rich
through duplication and multiplication. This is a great, big,
hungry country of consumers. When you have a business that
works in one place, there are almost always dozens, hundreds,
thousands, even tens of thousands of other places where it
will work, too. Once there was one McDonald's -- the
brothers' original restaurant. One Subway shop. One drive-
through car wash. One athletic-shoe store. One fast-photo-
processing shop. One of something. One of everything.
In Chapter Six, I'll introduce you
to some of the "masters"
of duplication. You'll see that even simple ideas, products,
and services, if properly "packaged," can make you rich
through duplication or multiplication.
High Probability Area of Opportunity #5:
Go Direct!
Direct Marketing is one of the fastest-growing categories of
business. Bypassing all the traditional complexity and costs
of manufacturers' representatives or salesforces;
wholesalers, jobbers, and other middlemen; retail stores; and
brand-identity, image-building advertising, more and more
companies are either going directly to the consumers
themselves or moving their products and services through
established direct marketers.
How do you go direct? With ads or direct-mail campaigns or TV
or radio commercials that bring the end user directly in
contact with the manufacturer or publisher, with you, usually
via an 800 number or the mail. Products that were never sold
this way in past years are finding new success in direct
marketing -- furniture, security systems, computers, food,
even automobiles. Services are now sold this way too, such as
long-distance telephone and flower delivery. Today, if you
want to send someone flowers, you don't schlep down to the
florist shop, you just pick up the phone and call a toll-free
number. If you want fresh Maine lobsters for a big cookout
this weekend at your home in Nebraska, you don't go to a
supermarket or specialty foods store; you call a toll-free
number and have the lobsters delivered right to your door.
What's next? Maybe your fortune.
In Chapters Seven and Eight, I take you on an eye-opening,
opportunity-filled tour of the booming direct-marketing
business.
High Probability Area of Opportunity #6:
Profit from the Information Age
The most traded, most consumed,
most sought-after, and most valued commodity of our time is not precious
stones, oil, or real estate. It is "specialized information." All
around you, in every imaginable form, people are profiting by selling
what they know or know how to do. Do you know how to plan a
failsafe wedding? Brew beer in a basement? Make famous
recipes at home? Lose weight fast? Make money with a
computer? Get air travel discounts? Build birdhouses? The
list of types of information being turned into profits would
itself fill a book bigger that this one.
A quick example: A friend of mine has figured out a way
dentists can give complete dental exams in half the usual
time. That is his only piece of information. With that piece
of information alone, he has developed his own how-to course
for dentists, another for dental assistants and dental
hygienists, and two video products, and has created a
$100,000 per year home-based, part-time business. And, after
going through Chapter Nine, you'll quickly see how he can
turn that simple foundation into a million-dollar empire.
High Probability Area of Opportunity #7:
Fame and Fortune Do Go Together
A friend of mine, Paul Hartunian,
has make as much as $400,000 in one day. He has been written about
in Forbes magazine and countless newspapers, been on The Phil Donahue
Show, many other talk shows, and built two different
businesses, all through publicity. By making himself famous -
- once as an expert in collecting, investing in, trading, and
selling celebrity autographs, and once as an expert in
meeting and creating relationships with beautiful women --
Paul has made a fortune without spending much money at all on
advertising. Paul says, "For $1,000 you can buy one ad in
just one newspaper that will be here today, gone tomorrow, or
one ad in one magazine that will be gone in a month. For the
same $1,000, I can fax 7,000 news releases to 7,000 different
media contacts and make the equivalent of hundreds of those
ads happen."
There does seem to be an inexhaustible demand for famous
people. There are more TV talk shows on the air that ever
before. Talk radio is booming. Magazines like People are huge
hits. It seems that people are interested in interesting
people. In Chapter Ten, you'll meet people using this
interest to their advantage in fascinating, imitable ways.
High Probability Area of Opportunity #8:
Creative, Clever Combinations
It's hard to find an example of just one of these ways of
turning ideas into millions. And that fact, in and of itself,
points you to one of the greatest millionaire-maker secrets
of all.
Three Additional Ways to Look at
Businesses and Business Opportunities
As you look at all the examples in this book, you'll see that
they fit one of these three categories: product-driven
businesses, market-driven businesses, or media-driven
businesses.
In a product-driven business, the
product itself is so appealing, unique, and promotable that it gets
sold through a variety of media and methods, to or through a variety
of markets. The Nancy Kwan Pearl Cream product mentioned in this
book is such a unique cosmetic product that it has the power
to drive an entire business. It is sold through direct-
response TV commercials and infomercials, print ads in
magazines and tabloids, direct-mail, catalogs, health food
stores, and drugstores. It has attracted loyal, responsive customers
of all ages -- teens to senior citizens -- who buy it repeatedly and
are also receptive to an entire assortment of "Oriental beauty secret" products,
Nancy Kwan fitness videos, and other items. The product built the business.
It is relatively rare to find or invent such a powerful
product, buy when you do, the world is your oyster.
In a market-driven business, a particular niche market
dictates the development of a product or products or a
service or services. The need in the chiropractic and dental
professions for advertising and marketing assistance fueled
the development of my own SuccessTrak seminar and publishing
business, leading to the development of dozens of products
and millions of dollars of revenue. A manufacturer I
consulted with developed, produced, and sold truck tarping
systems exclusively for municipalities' gravel, sand, and
refuse trucks, and that market's need was driven by
governmental mandates. These are businesses created to serve
very specific markets. This is a relatively common although
little-noticed, little-understood type of business. And
businesses in this category have very high probabilities of
success.
In a media-driven business, a variety of products and
services, even apparently unrelated products, or multiple
businesses, are all sold through one primary medium. The
Guthy-Renker Corporation mentioned in this book sells
Victoria Principal cosmetics and has built a cosmetics
business with a product line of over 100 products exclusively
through infomercials and home shopping channels. But they
also sell a motor oil additive, exercise and fitness videos,
self-improvement courses, and golf products, and have a
number of businesses within their business. The only
commonality is the media that drives all the sales. Media-
driven businesses are modern, high-tech distribution
businesses. The entrepreneur is not a specialist in any
particular product or service; instead, he is a specialist in
a particular method of distribution. To me, these are the
most interesting and exciting businesses. And businesses in
this category are often the ones that go from zero to
millions at the fastest pace. By understanding these categories, and
the high probability types, you will look at all businesses differently
and mold your own new or existent, reinvented enterprise to fit a
desirable category and a high probability type.
Copyright 1996 by Dan S. Kennedy. Please feel free to reproduce or distribute
this file so long as proper credit is given. Thank You!
