success principles for building your business
Basic truths like these business axioms are easily overlooked. Valuable axioms should be revisited frequently to see if you are on track. In fact that is one reason for this lens - to keep me reviewing these important success principles.
Perhaps I find investments easier to explain.
These books therefore serve two purposes.
Developing quality at a great price.
find bargains or create them - then stick with them unless they lose their value
The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing
Warren Buffett credits his success to Ben Graham's methods; but value investing is not exciting so most people would rather gamble.
Advisers will try to sell you relative value to get fees and commissions - this book will teach you how to find absolute value.
Value investing is easy; buy well managed companies that are selling for less than actual business value based on historic cash flow, and then hold them.
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1) Be Too Early
The First Axiom
The internet spawned a concept on the value of being "first in the space." Of those dotcoms that survived, most entered a market before it was known to be a market. If you can sense early adapters embracing a change, run past them and prepare for the crowds that usually follow.
You will be able to get in and inexpensively build market share in the quiet period before the storm.
If this sounds like value investing, and how to really make long term profits in investment markets, you are right.
Hot Commodities : How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World's Best Market
Speculation is one way to wealth. start very small, do not over leverage, and become competent before you progress. Jim Rogers is one of the best - and well worth reading even if you never intend to speculate in futures.
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2) Focus
The second axiom
To the point: wealth is created through concentration, it is preserved through diversification.All the talk of multiple streams of income and the value of diversification can put you in constant start-up mode. It is easy to be diverted from your quest by other great opportunities. If you see a need for multiple streams of income, tie them all to your one venture.
For instance if you are testing advertising and one ad greatly outperforms the other, drop the poor one and build a new ad to compare. If the ads bring similar profitable results, keep them both.
Each ad may appeal to a different audience, your diversification protects you if one stream dries up or is regulated out of existence. Notice though that both income streams are flowing from the one venture.
Concentrate on making your one business exceptional as opposed to having several pretty good businesses. If you want to succeed, exceptional is just a good start.
Why have thirteen investments? You will find that your top two or three choices will greatly outperform your next ten investment ideas.
If you apply efforts in many directions your forward progress will suffer. Put all your eggs in one basket; and then watch that basket very carefully.
"Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall." - Stephen Covey
Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders
You might as well buy all three books now, once you start one you will want all three.
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The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders (A Marketplace Book)
Top traders making, outrageous profits, consistently. Yes some are probably just lucky, or their style fits the markets they trade.
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Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America's Top Stock Traders
There is a theme that runs through these well done interviews that will impress itself on you through repetition.
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3) Persist
The Third Axiom Required For Business Success
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Teddy RooseveltYou started too early knowing it will take time before your hard work pays off. If you lose your focus and try other ideas - you are soon off in another direction.
The law of inertia does apply to business. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, an object at rest tend to stay at rest. It takes work to change the state of your business.
It is easy to be like Sisyphus whose hell was continually rolling a boulder up hill just to have it slip away and roll back down again. With business when you take your eyes of the goals and start a new venture the old boulder disappears, you have to walk to the bottom of the hill and start a new one.
It usually takes a couple of years to develop a loyal client base. If you stop every six months and re-start with a new venture you will never develop the momentum to push to the top.
Once successful, your business can stay at the top of the hill with only your careful attention. The hard work of establishment being done - it is time to maintain and improve.
It is going to take between two and five years of your life to discover if this business will become a great success. How much care should you use initially in choosing the venture? Don't just jump in - evaluate carefully first - then commit and persist.
If you are involved in a project right now that has limited potential it may be time to evaluate opportunities and seek a longer term idea. The best time to get off a sinking ship is as soon as possible.
Like the market wizards above, find a niche and style that fits you and then persist. Keep costs and losses small while letting capital and profits grow.
These three axioms contribute to the success of your business.
Be too early
Focus
Persist
Consider where you are regarding these 3 business and investing axioms with your current venture.
Three axioms, three special books - is there a trend here?
The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything
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The Zurich Axioms
The best general speculation book I've ever read. You may also find insights to assist your wealth building journey.
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Speak and Grow Rich
A Jewel -- Dotty was a serial entrepreneur that paved the way for women in the sales force and for all of us in public speaking.
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Some sites that may be of benefit
You have your own style and your own passions.
Work at your passion in a style that is comfortable to you.
- The Netcohort Institute
- Are you ready for the next age?
Learn how to collaborate on the internet to achieve your goals. The future wil be determined by the Netcohort. Unbound by distance, age, or national identity they multiply each other's potential.
Discover how to prosper in the netcohort age at The Netcohort Institute. - BFU School Of Entrepreneurship
- A nice jumping off point for information.
- Small Business Ideas blog
- Don't just read the most recent post, the archives are full of good ideas.
- SiteSell
- The most complete tools and the best documentation and tutorials for starting your own, real, online business. There is a lot of free material on this site. The real value is in inexpensive web business creation tools.
This link will take you to case studies by successful internet business people - notice the enthusiasm they share about their business. - start your own business ideas
- Your best choice is to follow your passions and personal style into a tailor fit business. If that is too much to consider right now, these ideas may help you learn to be comfortable with learning to run your own growing business.
- Association of Coaching & Consulting Professionals
- hundreds of articles and resources for building passive revenue and multiple sources of income for your coaching business.
The BFU Weekly Journal
documenting the creation of a new type of college
Bastiat Free University offers internationally accessible, affordable, and actionable student-directed learning for visionaries and entrepreneurs.
Rediscover for yourself the pleasures to be found in self directed learning.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byDo you enjoy growing your business?
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