January 12, 2008

This year, let’s consider ways for you to increase your net profit by creating tremendous value through the products or services you offer.

We each typically hit a “plateau” of what our income streams generate: this may be $30,000 a year, this may be $300,000 or $3 million a year. Whatever our plateau, this year, I challenge you to measurably increase it.

The best way to increase your net profits is to find more and more ways to create value for more and more other people.

Most self-made millionaires have become wealthy through creating exceptional value through their properties: these might be intellectual properties, real estate, or royalties.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Are you a musician? If you enjoy playing music, or you’ve even recorded some pieces, composed some pieces, or performed live, consider assembling your compositions into a CD format and packaging it to bring along with you. When you give a performance, you now offer a ‘takeaway’ with your music. Instead of performing once, you now have the option to expand your reach, make more sales, and develop a fan base. Slowly but surely, as you feel more and more savvy, you may create more boxed sets of music, put up a website with samples of your music for download, extend your social networking sphere, and sell either your own compositions, your taped performances, one-of-a-kind items, or your own ticket sales to your own performances on a tour.

Are you a gardener? If you are doing laborious projects one at a time, consider taking pictures of the “before” and “after” of your work. Composing these images into a workbook or guidebook, with your own articles based on your specific knowledge (xeriscapes, tropical landscaping, minimalist design, easy-to-care, etc.), you may create a book format of your knowledge. Consider licensing your articles to the Home and Garden section of local or national magazines or newspapers. As you build up more and more expertise, there are even television, radio, and web-based shows available for you to share your knowledge. Instead of working on one garden at a time, you may be able to reach hundreds of thousands of gardeners who crave your knowledge. Alternatively, you may continue to do one garden at a time but command a higer price because of your expertise.

Are you an engineer or inventor? If you have a scientific idea or a breakthrough technological innovation, it’s possible that you have an item or procedure that you may patent and license or develop. Consider working with an intellectual property attorney to protect your thinking process and register it. Then, consider working through your own business or by partnering with a proven group to bring your product to the appropriate market. Too many great ideas are sitting on a shelf because their owner didn’t believe in themself and didn’t think their ideas was workable. Get a second or third opinion from someone you trust and keep your idea machine generating…. persistence is the key to getting your product from your head out into the market.

The more we think about ways we serve more and more people, the more creative we will become in systematizing and productizing our wares. For example, in my website design business, we’ve moved from doing to one-off, highly-customized websites, to doing a more standardized, efficient version that we treat more like a software installation (not a custom-made website). We’re also taking our knowledge and creating more consulting, speaking, training, and writing gigs from that knowledge.

If you have a current task where you’re serving one or ten or a hundred people at a time, is there a way for you to serve ten times that many people? Is there a way for you to serve a hundred times the number of people you’re currently serving? As you find ways to do this, you’ll come up with better and more efficient items which you may sell at a lower price to more and more people.

More value for others = more net profits for you and your company.

This year, let’s aim for serving ten times more customers then we typically do. Let’s aim for making a process ten times more productive. Let’s aim for creating ten more hours of leisure time because we’ve automated or efficiently created a system that frees up that time.

Let’s aim for the stars in 2008!