You Should Be Getting Far More Referrals- Here's How

Most businesses and service professionals do not gain nearly the number of referrals they could and should.  The main reason is this: they don't know how to.  Most people believe that referrals mostly come to them when they are deserved and that getting referrals in not really something you can proactively engage in.  They're wrong.  Here is a step by step process to gain FAR more referrals for your business and to develop better relationships in the meantime.
First, establish a list of people who already know, like, and trust you.  Think of those who would do most anything for you if you asked.  Most people can come up with between 10-30 of these people.  They may be family, friends, neighbors, business associates or clients, childhood friends, etc.
Next, call them or email them with a message that includes the following line: "So, ____, I am currently working to build my client base, and I was wondering if you'd be willing to help me?  Would you be willing to meet (or connect by phone if they're distant) on either Tues or Thursday for coffee/lunch/dinner?"  It's critical for you to use the words "help" and to avoid the word "referral".  People love to help but they hate to refer.  Most of these people will be very happy to "help" you, and so they'll respond "sure".
Next, create a profile of the types of people you're looking to be put in contact with.  It should include 4 or 5 descriptions of your top target markets (if you don't know who your top target markets are, stop reading this and figure that out before all else).  Include in this list who they are and what types of people they are.  The most specific you are the better.  For example, "business people who work in the Twin Cities are" is not nearly specific enough.  "Business owners in the Twin Cities who feel like they are working too many hours and making too little money" is much better.
Send a one page or less description of these people over to your soon-to-be referral partner the day before you meet.  Not more because if you send it out a week before they won't consider it pertinent yet and will just overlook it.
Meet with them and start off by ensuring them that you only want to brainstorm with them and that you will NOT contact anyone that you discuss unless they specifically say that you should at the end of your conversation.  Proceed for 30-60 minutes accessing their different mental "file folders" of people.  Ask them "who do you know who....is a member of your Rotary group that fits this? Who do you know who goes to XYZ club and fits this description...." and so on.  The more specific you on this, the more people they'll magically think of.
After you go through this you should have a list of 10-30 names.  Now comes the fun part.  Tell them to rank their names on a scale of 1-10 on how well they'd fit you as a referral, 10 being the best fit.  Then start with the ones and ask, "why is Jack not a 10?"  Regardless of the answer, make a dramatic line through Jack's name and say something like "No matter, we'll take him off the list.  Next." and proceed until you're either about half way through the list or until your partner says "OK OK, stop! The rest are really good!" (most of them will say this).  The reason is because they really do want to help you and don't want to waste their time.  The brilliant thing about this is that they now become an ADVOCATE for the fact that you should be talking with these people, and their tensions about you calling those they weren't sure about are gone!  Brilliant.
Next, ask them how they'd like to let these people know about you the following way: "OK____, would you like to contact these people in person, by mail, or by phone?" The reason for doing this is that most people would chose email if you offered it.  Don't offer it.  Emails are too easy to ignore.  Get them to call their referrals and JUST GET PERMISSION FOR YOU TO HAVE A VERY BRIEF PHONE CHAT WITH THEM.  That's all they have to do.  Coach them on how to talk to people about you.  But make it clear that all they need to do is get permission for you to call them.  Don't let them try to sell them on your services. (when you do call them, make sure you are faithful to this- try to convince them to schedule a time to talk with you within a short conversation).
Lastly, set a follow up day/time.  Agree on a day that's 3-7 days out for you to have a follow up conversation.  This is important to ensure your referral partner doesn't go back to their office and get busy and forget about it.  Be sure to follow up at the agreed upon time.
At this point you're at a very good place.  You've got a bunch of names to be referred to you and someone doing the referring who believes in you.  The rest is in your hands.
This is one way to create a PROACTIVE referral strategy.  This should be worked into the marketing process for most companies and professionals in my opinion.  I've personally used this and taught it to many people who have used it successfully.
If you'd like a copy of my step by step document that includes all the scripts for each step of this process, please email me and I will send you a copy, free of charge.  jonomalley@jccompanies.net or call 651-705-6625

Time Management Secrets of Millionaires

In my opinion there's nothing more important regarding being successful than how we decide to spend our time each and every day. So it's no surprise that there are millions of books in print and enormous numbers of bloggers, speakers, and other experts on the subject. That being said, it's also my belief that humans are GREAT at over-complicating most things in life, time management being no exception. So here's the simple process that I teach my business coaching clients (I am a business coach located near Minneapolis St Paul, MN), with great success.

First, know where you're going. Know your final destination. If you're a business owner, know where you're working to bring the company. Are you planning to eventually sell it? Or just build it for additional cash flow? Will you have more locations, offices, employees, etc.? And how about personally: what, specifically, will you do with the money you make (there's an old saying that you'll never make a dollar unless you have a plan for where that dollar will go). Why do you need to know these things for the purposes of time management? Good question. Your vision for the future is rarely discussed in the context of time management. But I've found time and again that it's the most important contributing factor to a person being disciplined around the time management process they create. In other words, if you're not clear on WHY you need to get more done in a day, you probably won't get more done in a day. And if you're self-employed, this spells doom because you can always get away with not being disciplined- the only one who suffers is you/your family. But nobody will fire you (other than perhaps your customers/clients!).

Secondly, get in the habit of creating a daily priorities list. Most people who do this already do it poorly. Psychologist have shown time and again that almost no one can accomplish more than about 6 priorities in a day. But most who make priority lists every day tend to create long lists. But ask yourself this question: on any given day, what are the most profitable/productive tasks on your list? Are they the ones that are "easier" or "harder"? More often than not they are the harder tasks. Now what if I ask: Which ones do you usually do first? Most people will admit that they tend to do the "quicker" tasks first and leave the ones that take more time (the most profitable/productive priorities) to do later in the day. The problem is, "later in the day" usually becomes tomorrow. And as we all know, "tomorrow never comes". This process repeats over and over again and in the mean time there are incredible opportunities and profits missed.

Third, once your "List of 6" priorities for the day is created, order them and work the order. As you work through the day, work on your list in the order you've set, and don't let yourself sneak to the easiest ones. Remember, you PRIORitize them so that you'll do the most profitable/productive ones PRIOR to the others. Stick to your plan.

Fourth: Review! Most people fail to improve themselves because they fail to examine on a regular basis the successes and failures. Take time daily to asses your discipline that day. Just a minute or two. This practice will do more for your productivity than almost any other. I recommend purchasing a modestly expensive journal to write your thoughts in as most people will then be more likely to actually utilize it. The key here is to keep it short so it doesn't become a nuisance.

If you make the commitment to follow these simple steps, I assure you that you will find yourself accomplishing more and therefore experiencing more success in your endeavors.

Find Better Employees in Less Time

Finding great employees can be one of most annoying and daunting aspects of owning a business. Ever get that terrible pain in your stomach when a key employee informs you that he/she is quitting? IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE THAT WAY. There are a few, simple steps you can take to make sure that finding great employees is fast and easy (the key word here is 'great' because it's always easy to find anemployee. Here is how to free yourself from this fear (I've trained many of my clients to use this process to successfully hire new, great employees in less than 4 hours!):

1. Create a voice mail account with either a local number or an 800 number. You can use Google Voice (free) or go to www.onebox.com for a monthly subscription (around $15/month). In the greeting on the voice mail box, introduce your business and the position, then ask three questions such as these: "Tell us about your past experience", "Why do you think you're right for this job?" and "Give us a few of your strengths and weaknesses". Remember, especially if this person will be in contact with your customers, they need to be a decent speaker. If they can't speak well on the phone, they won't be able to speak well in person either.

2. Direct your advertising to this voice mail box. Craigslist.org is one of the best places employers are finding employees right now. It's also free in most market places. To get best results, post your ad or ads every 2 days at least. Do not include an email address or phone number to your business. Direct them to your voice mail number. Also, don't list your business name. You'd be amazed at how many people will not follow your instructions and will just call you or email you their resume.

3. Check the voice mails when convenient for you. Those who sound like good candidates, take their contact info down. Those who don't sound interesting... delete (compare this to having to get an email and read through a resume. Takes a minimum of several minutes. You'll see that many times you can figure out that you're not interested in some candidates within the first minute. Time saved).

4. Instead of inviting those who are interesting to individual interviews, set a date, time, and location for a group interview. That's right. Get all the interesting sounding candidates to gather together in one room. Put together a list of 5-10 questions (the bigger the group the less questions you'll get through) and go around the group listening to their answers and taking notes. If you can bring along a trusted employee, colleague, or Business Coach, it helps to collaborate and evaluate them. This will take around 90 minutes. If you have 15 candidates, you just spent 90 minutes interviewing them! Usually that would take 10-15 hours!

5. Invite those who stood out in the group interview to do a 30 minute individual interview. Be sure to ask tough questions! You don't want to be overly polite when you only have a couple hours with a person who you may have to live with for 8 or so hours a day for the next several years. Ask the tough questions now so you don't wish you'd asked them later.

6. Take the best 2 candidates for a "Test Drive". Invite them into your office for a half day or a day and tell them to work just how they would work if you hired them. This works differently for all types of positions and is totally impossible for some that require immense amounts of training, but for those that it works for it is very telling of who that person really is and what they know/don't know.

7. Make your offer to the best candidate ONLY if there is a candidate that really stood out to you. Hiring someone is far too important to chose someone just because there was nobody better available. If you need to, start the process all over. It was cost far less time, money, effort, and mental energy than if you hire the wrong person the first time.

And if you'd like more help on the details of each of these steps, just call or email me. I'd be happy to help you find a GREAT employee. 651-705-6625 jonomalley@jccompanies.net

Save America By Becoming Rich

The first line of the great book The Richest Man of Babylon says

"Our prosperity as a nation depends upon the personal financial prosperity of each of us as individuals."

We, as individuals, are failing our country. American families are swimming in personal debt. Our savings levels have decreased year after year (until the Great Recession where they trended up for a short while, and are apparently already trending back down again as we leave the Recession). If our well being as a nation is dependent upon us individually, then I'd like to make a plea to all individuals: Help save our nation by becoming wealthy! My idea of "wealthy" is relative here. For some people, just getting their personal financial state to being debt free with nothing yet invested would be great improvement. For others, to go from consistently spending 100% of their monthly earnings to saving/investing 10% each month would be an enormous gain. For others, perhaps learning more about how to invest, safely, to build what they do have. Here are some practical and achievable steps to improve your personal financial situation:

1. Get out of debt

As of late people in America have been fooled into thinking that debt is ok, and some even think it's good. This is a bad thing for us individually as well as for our country. Right now our economy is far too dependent upon "consumer spending". What this means is that unless people keep spending within our country, our economy could slow. The reason this is bad is because we as a country need to sell more to people outside our country so that we're not just dependent upon using each other's money to keep things going. The reason for this is because every year we have a trade deficit, more money goes out than comes in. It's only a matter of time before far too much money is gone out of our country. Right now this is being subsidized by our borrowing habits. We just keep borrowing more and more money so it FEELS like it's not bad, because there's still plenty of money to go around. This cannot continue forever. And the answer to this problem is innovation. We need to create more products and services that can be sold outside the US. This will only happen when Americans feel the pain of stopping the House of Cards economy by starting to save aggressively- and then out of necessity will come innovation. Americans will never just go without. We've always been hard working and innovative. But with this idiotic mentality that borrowing money is a good thing has come some laziness (why go through the pain and hard work of innovating when you can just borrow more money?). We need to get back to innovation and hard work.

2. Save 10% of all your earnings

Once you're out of debt. Decide that never again will you ever spend 100% of your earnings. This sounds simple, but it requires serious determination by those who have not developed the habit. Because our desires will always out pace our earnings, it will be hard to learn the habit of not spending all of what you make. This leads me to

3. Create and Use a Monthly Budget

This is critical for all families. No matter how much or how little you make, it is necessary to budget how much money will be allocated to different areas of life each month. I believe almost nobody will save 10% of their earnings unless they utilize a budget that is frequently revisited (monthly at least). If you don't like the word "budget", use "monthly cash flow plan".

4. Once out of Debt, Invest

Once you're no longer in debt and you've saved enough for an emergency fund (should be 3-6 months of your monthly earnings), then start investing your money. In The Richest Man of Babylon, George Clason refers to invested money (gold pieces in Babylon) as "golden slaves, each laboring and earning more gold". Have your money produce more money by taking advantage of investing opportunities.

5. Build Enough for Retirement

Everyone is different in what they're looking for in retirement. Some want to retire with more money than they had in their working years, others are willing to live more modestly. Either way, it's far more prudent to ensure your social security in old age than to be dependent upon a government that is apparently in a state of drunken love with deficits and borrowing, with little care for the future other than individual re-elections. Be sure you'll have enough. I personally know too many elderly people right now who are desperate because they have no money and social security is nowhere enough to support them. It is one of the saddest things I've witnessed in my life. Secure your own future. Invest aggressively and say no to the daily temptations we're all faced with. Those things that you purchase today will quickly fade. Your savings and investments will reward you far longer and they will also multiply.

6. Give Aggressively

I believe that those who give more liberally now will also receive more now. I've worked hard to give as much as I can while still preparing, saving, and investing for the future. God has blessed me greatly along the way. I strongly advocate giving 10-15% of what is earned back to those around us who are in need. I also believe that by doing better financially that I will have far more to give in my older years. So give aggressively both now and when you do achieve greater financial freedom. God will reward you in ways unexpected.