Success isn’t luck…
Jan 16th, 2008 by Vikram Rajan
Last night, I attended an awesome networking event with some of the most influential leaders of Long Island. 
Luckily, it was my book release party (and 30th birthday). It was the biggest event the bookstore (I AM Books in Huntington, NY) ever had; and my book sold out. (This is bitter-sweet since I don’t have books for my speaking engagement on Friday; or for a real estate trade party on Tuesday; back-of-the-room sales is a Thumb-rule; this is a faux-pas.)
My main intention of the event was of course to drive book sales… but not only to sell out the room, but to promote the book as an awesome gift: 100% of my book sale profits from last night is being donated to the Cross Island YMCA Strong Kids campaign, which grants memberships to lower-income families. I’m the campaign chair for 2008, so it seemed natural to me. We raised over $1500 last night for Long Island youth. PLUS, those who purchased more than 2 books got my audio-book(s) for free. Now they have an extra copy - hopefully autographed - to give as a gift to a “stranger.” My colleagues will pollinate future orders.
I have achieved my January “book sales quota,” and I now working on February. But this success isn’t luck… And while it’s based on strategic design, I know there’s a greater power at play.
I wanted to invoke my spiritual beliefs to bless the success of my book. I invited my aunt, Geetha, to perform a short pooja (Hindu blessing ceremony). It was only fitting that I have my immediate family in the room, including my grandmother. As one of my colleagues mentioned as he was leaving, “It was like I attended a family event.” I responded, “It is.” My network was introduced not only to my family, my culture, my beliefs, and my intentional personal brand. Unfortunately, the video of the ceremony has been lost to the Universe!
Words cannot fully express how grateful I am for the wonderful reception I felt last night… while the cupcakes weren’t fully appreciated, folks ate up the snacks and my sense of style (4-button peach suit and deep purple shirt). I nurtured the success and am grateful for the forces that coalesce to continue the book’s phenomenal success.
We must plant the right seeds at the right time in the right soil. We must water appropriate and tend to the weeds. But still, we cannot grow the fruit. I believe God does the Growing in response to our successful Strategic Habits. Together, everyone achieves this TEAM.
Thank you.
What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that’s featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers
Dear Mr. Rajan,
I could not agree more fully with you that in essence, there is a time for everything under the sun and that ‘God’ plays an indisputable role in orchestrating the universe and all that is within it. I also take great stock in the little story about a religious man who was stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean and was waiting for God to rescue him. By and by a sailboat passed and the captain yelled out, “do you need help?”, whereas the stranded man replied “no thanks, I’m waiting on God”. Two additional vehicles passed by the man, including a rescue helicopter, whereas the man declined their offers for help, restated he was “waiting on God” and insisted that his God would not let him down. Subsequently the man died and when he rose to heaven he inquired of God as to why God never showed up. God replied that he had in fact showed up and had attempted to rescue the man three times through various means but that the man had failed to respond because he did not recognize the signs of God that were placed in front of his nose. I think it is true that God works in very mysterious and even obvious ways but that in order to achieve results we must attune ourselves to his wave length. Someone once stated that “running a business” can be the greatest obstacle to true achievement. I believe that a business can be a great blessing if and only if the motivation behind it is impeccable. Service to others is the greatest calling one can acheive. Thank you for your calling. In what I hope does not detract from your article which is subject of this blog I have replied by offering a recent article I wrote. All the best. ~ ComCrown.
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Say Hello To Your Competition April 27, 2008 by comcrown21
Say Hello To Your Competition
Yes, they bite, and that’s when they’re just being friendly. It’s true: the majority of your competitors would derive pleasure at seeing your business’s guts ripped out all over the road in their rear view mirror at the first opportunity and would laugh themselves all the way to the bank or just back to the office as the case may be, just as you would them, right? Well, am I right or are you really that much different than your competition? Put another way, what type of “wounding” does your value system allow, assuming that you have one, and are you violating the slightest of your values by the way you currently “bite” to compete? Taking another perspective, is there a way to compete successfully and obtain the effect of a “bite” while keeping high-road values intact? Absolutely. Just take your focus off low-blow biting and focus your time, talent and energy on getting a grip on the 3 Vs: Value, Visibility and Viability.
Value speaks for itself. Value must reside in your product and should equally and consistently reside within your service delivery of the product if you are to be even a candidate for success. It is not unusual for business to deceive themselves as to the true element of value in their product. This deception often occurs by default as a result of faulty improper analysis of their market and product. Needless to say (or is it?) they rarely acquire any customers or their base is limited to a few close and equally gullible or sympathetic “friends”. Constantly work to improve your product and service delivery of your product. Do on point and aggressive analysis of current market trends, strive to broaden your horizons by developing insight into current and projected market trends and apportion your energy smartly, viewing it as the rare and precious commodity it is. And don’t confuse intelligent work with staying or looking “busy”. Most companies stay and look “busy” enough, but busyness doesn’t equate to “building”. Moreover, unfettered and unfocused busyness with non-essentials and ill focus can effect the gentlest yet most fatal blow a company could ever inflict on itself.
Visibility requires a blended balance of marketing strategies including SEO and a balanced array of other techniques so your market (and potential market) can “see” your presence through the least possible effort and on a consistent, reoccurring basis so that familiarity may lend itself to comfort. Maintaining market visibility is proportionately challenging based on budget yet this can be a call for your creativity to fully engage effective juice. Choosing an effective brandable domain name provides a solid baseline from which to succeed and a great domain name is the most controllable and obvious way to protect your business investment because a memorable domain name will empower the balance of your business strategies to achieve optimal market effect, whereas having a “difficult” domain name or improper fit can create significant “drag” on your brand and marketing systems and effectively pull back the reins on profit. Regardless of how you become visible, the fact remains that to reach your market you must become visible. This requires staying on top of the current shifts in marketing trends and by engaging a solid and comprehensive marketing base to obtain that visibility. If you have to go out literally, from door to door, and shake hands with every one of your prospects in order to gain visibility, then like it or not, you should do it. And don’t forget those old fashioned business cards! It’s an irreplaceable marketing medium and tangible lasting “business ambassador” that could well wind up in multiple hands before its useful life is through! The internet offers a plethora of avenues in which to build your visibility but the key is to choose methods which are most efficient and suited to your current business model and market and then to place your capital eggs carefully and with great forethought into those particular mechanisms to get you the most effective results. So do your homework and make sure insight goes into every effort because business success is not a free lunch.
Viability has to do with the “Personal Relationship Factor” you build with your community and market which is composed of the trust and likability factor for which there is absolutely no substitute. Who wants to buy widgets from old man scrooge when sweet little Annie or George just down the road sells the very same ones for just a few pennies more? Like when Jerry Maguire’s old school but highly successful mentor earnestly, simply and profoundly explained to Jerry the secret to building a business, he summed it up clearly as follows: “It’s all about personal relationships.” We couldn’t agree more.
All the 3 Vs demand your uttermost focus and dedication to achieve harmonious effect. Mastering 2 out of 3 just won’t do.
Now back to Competitors. Competitors bite because it’s their nature to bite and wounding you reaps proportionate kudos for them, or so they think. Several noteworthy ironies penetrate this commonplace premise. First, many businesses, including those low-road tactic companies, are so busy wounding themselves, either directly or indirectly, by action or, more often, by lack of it, that they are literally incapable or unmotivated to wound their competition effectively. Ironically, this fact is only potentially beneficial to those target-companies who have ceased wounding themselves and are in a position to reap “potential” good from their ill-spirited competitor’s impotent self-inflictions. As such, just because your competitors slide off base through self-inflicted or outer-inflicted wounds does not necessarily increase the market’s perception of your value or your value, unless you are the only game left in town and rest assured you are not unless you’ve just taken hold of the last golden egg.
To posture yourself to rise in the marketplace, your focus should include “personalized involvement”, networking and communication within not only your immediate and known market but crusading through various multimedia channels and beyond your comfort zone of known market toward the outermost extremities of the world in an effort to shake hands, figuratively or literally, with everyone you can. Ladies and gentlemen, please permit me an analogy of husband and bride as I employ it with all due respect: Consider your market your bride. It is your job to romance and woo her under the balcony of her choice, swoon her with chocolates and flowers, offer her a proposition of perceived long-term value and then, when the moment is right, to look directly into her eyes and to offer her a “diamond ring” (offer) she just can’t refuse. Keep in mind, there are tons of hungry business Romeos like yourself, and yes, even more experienced and savvy, flooding the foyers and stairs. And with the advent of niche splintering, specialized services and yes, increasing competition, prospects are becoming less and less. But don’t despair. Instead, consider the challenge a golden opportunity for you to go to work on your business.
Secondly, many companies built on the rock of the scarcity mentality are, with rare exception, built also on the side-rock of low-road tactics. These companies frequently employ hyper-aggression, judgment, guilt and stick-and-carrot methodologies within their ranks which effectively handicaps inner-rank vision and subsidizes requisite inspiration with forced and impotent tongue-in-cheek cooperation. More often than not, these companies ultimately fail through this self-inflicted damage. These companies are easily spotted due to the various grab tactics they employ, ironically enough, without much effect. They are to be likened to a frenzied shopper at a white sale, pushing and shoving their way to the goods or a gain with patent disregard for their “neighbors” which ultimately reveals the same disregard for their clients. Many of these companies, initially founded on a marketing “vision” of offering some optimal value product by founders whose psyches are rooted in the scarcity mentality, employ by nature compatible sub-systems to achieve their true aim, which aim is not to bolster the envisioned product, but rather to create and implement scarcity-based sub-systems that serve to compliment and reinforce the negative belief system on which the company was truly founded. As such, these companies of duplicity tend to carrot-and-stick internal mechanisms and feel deprived when the carrot-and-stick effect seeps outward to adversely affect their market. “Value”, to these companies, is coined as a mere catchphrase, while inwardly value is correlated solely and improperly, to profit margin. Value to this type of company becomes that which profits them and not their customer. This modus operandi is a fatal mistake. Quite often these same types of companies endeavor to wound their competition via low-road tactics composed of negative energy and believe that such tactics are always an acceptable inevitability in today’s marketplace in order to sustain survival. They believe their company will necessarily posture upwards and reap a proportionately higher margin, proportionate to the “battle blow”. This assumption is skewed and often backfires.
Companies whose focus is wounding competition through low road tactics seldom have or exert the positive energy values and disciplines required for optimizing product value and optimizing customer satisfaction, since it is logical that a company cannot radiate both substantial negative and positive energies from the hub (soul) of its business. This is not to imply that merely “positive” companies have any edge whatsoever over their competition or possess the requisite other requirements for optimizing product value and becoming a business success, however, positive companies who create trust, vision and respect within the ranks create a breeding environment for true solutions and this can optimize the chance for success. On an ironic yet positive note, wounding, be it self-inflicted or from without, can help build strong muscles and healthy teeth when learned from and built upon. However, in order to bounce back and achieve growth potential from a state of having been wounded, companies should examine the wound, distill the most comprehensive and relevant to the wound and thus become increasingly attentive, agile and attuned to the market. The greatest challenge a company faces today, online or otherwise, is how to maintain and keep their 3 Vs edge. There are no schools one can graduate from that offer a built in business-success guarantee and most critically, the playing field changes from day to day. Increasingly, and particularly within the arena of online business although applicable to all business, all but the adept and agile early adapters are being filtered by default out of the pack. This means, quite obviously, possessing traits inherent of adept and agile early adapters and having the ability, although it eerily akin to a talent, of being able to separate the requisite wheat from the quicksand of costly and defeatist chaff. Simplistically restated, it means knowing what the required tools are, acquiring those tools and using those tools with surgical deftness to carve your niche in the block of success. The business road is littered with legitimate billion-dollar mega-machines that have gone belly-up overnight. Entrepreneur, small business owner and Fortune 500 CEO, dwell on this fact for a moment. If a billion-dollar corporation with mind-boggling market share can lose their footing and go belly-up overnight, due to the emergence of a “unforeseen” paradigm shift - who’s to say it can’t happen to you? Think smart, think fast, or forfeit the game. I will also add it’s to your advantage to play fair.
Finally, begs the question: Does the consumer of the end-product really care what goes on behind the battle lines of business? Does the consumer lay awake at night, losing sleep over visions about who is wounding who, who is being wounded or how they are being wounded and do they care in the slightest about listening to those great recover-from-wound stories told by emotionally-charged CEOs over candle-lit dinners? The answer to this is no. Customers are solely focused on value of product, with the exception that, with product being substantially equal, customers choose to buy from those they like the most. In light of this fact, it’s wise for all businesses to sit up and take note.