The fastest way to succeed in business – Leverage
A guide by Jim Connolly
The fastest way to succeed in business is also one of the easiest!
Since 1996, I have trained, coached or mentored thousands of businesspeople from hundreds of businesses in almost every industry. As such, I have had top level access to some extremely successful businesspeople and businesses. Something that struck me very quickly, was that the most successful businesspeople shared a number of common activities, strategies and tactics. These could almost be thought of as ‘the keys to business success’ – and I am going to share one of them with you right now. The fastest way to succeed in business!
Successful businesspeople (and salespeople) all understand and engage in something called ‘leverage’.
What is leverage?
Leverage is a strategy for getting the best or highest return possible from your investments in time, money and effort. Leverage is what successful businesspeople and salespeople use to achieve massively more success – and far, far quicker than their competitors! It is also why they move ahead further and faster than anyone else.
Think of it like this
Obviously, it costs you the same amount of time and money to send a mail shot; whether or not it generates new business for you. So, if you send a mail shot and it generates £100,000 in new profits, the cost to you of that mailing is no higher than it would have been, had the mail shot failed. If you leverage a mail shot by sending a great letter, with a compelling offer, to a targeted audience, with an endorsement from one of their trusted contacts – you will make a fortune and achieve stunning results. Follow that letter up with a phone call and you will maximise the results even further; often increasing the return by a factor of 4x, 5x or 6x! You will have leveraged the investment you made in that mailing, by getting the highest possible return for the cost of each letter. You will have achieved more success from one mailing than most people do from a years’ worth of mailings – and at a tiny fraction of the cost, time and effort too.
Leverage works across the board
It costs the same for you to advertise; whether your advertisement is massively successful or not. Your website will still cost you the same, whether the wording is professionally written so that it inspires people to spend money with you, or if the site just sits there doing bugger all for you or your business!
So, the first step in getting leverage to work for you is to get the highest possible return from your commercial activities.
Upside leverage
The second step is to make sure you are only investing your time, money and effort in activities that are high-return or ‘upside leverage’ activities. After all; there’s no point rowing your boat as hard as you possibly can – in the WRONG direction. You have to make sure you are doing the right things, before you make sure you are doing things right!
A great example of upside leverage
Buy your staff an audio program that will increase their productivity by 5% or 10% or 50%. It will cost you peanuts and potentially increase your annual productivity by tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds!
Downside leverage
The most successful people in business eliminate all activities that are low value. These are known as ‘downside leverage activities’; because even if you get the maximum they have to offer, it’s still not worth the amount of time, money, effort or risk attached.
A great example of downside leverage
Successful salespeople are seldom seen at traditional networking events; because they know the room is filled with SELLERS and not BUYERS! People send their sales staff to networking events and thus, the people you meet have no interest in your message and (worse still) they have NO AUTHORITY TO BUY from you either! Sales ‘experts’ sell seminars and books on ‘how to get the most from networking,’ without ever mentioning that traditional networking is massively ineffective for most small or medium-sized businesses. This is why so many growing businesses seldom stay with any networking group for long and why these groups have to ‘tie you in’ with annual membership instead of monthly membership.
Here are some questions to ask yourself if you want to leverage your business
What downside leverage activities are you currently wasting; time, money and effort on?
Take a long, honest look at your business and see if you can identify downside leverage activities that can be stopped. Then, invest the resources you were using on downside leverage - in upside leverage activities.
What current upside leverage activities could you get a massively higher return on?
There are too many to mention here, but let’s quickly look at your website, as mentioned earlier. Your website can provide you with a targeted global audience. It can inspire people to; call you, visit your store, email you, write to you and recommend you. It can give you the opportunity to showcase your expertise to your target clients and position yourself as an expert in your field. It can even take payments from people and make money for you while you sleep.
Does your website do all these things? If not, get your site professionally worded and designed and make sure it starts paying its way! There is the potential to skyrocket your profits extremely quickly or at least generate stacks of daily, high calibre leads; providing you leverage the site and make it work hard for you 24 hours of every day!
Success leaves clues
If you are serious about achieving true success in your business or career, you have to start using the amazing power of upside leverage. Leverage everything you can to its highest potential and focus your time, money and effort exclusively in areas that have the most value. There is an old saying in business, which tells us that; “Success leaves clues.” The most successful people in business all use leverage to its fullest, and so should you. Your time is precious. You work bloody hard and deserve to see the rewards for your time and effort – so start NOW by investing in the areas that really matter and eliminate for ever the activities that are holding you back.
You are just too valuable to settle for anything less!
To your success,
Jim Connolly
PS: Forward this guide to a friend or contact now, using the box below!
