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!

The world overflows with abundance, and there are many ways for you to be able to share, create, add value, and be prosperous. When listing out goals for the new year, many people decide that they’d like to be millionaires, and they often take steps like investing in an e-book, “proven system,” or home-based business opportunity to achieve that goal.

Sometimes, a lofty goal drops down to a less important level and eventually falls off the table, with any money invested into the dream discarded or written off as a loss. The same pattern may refer to relationships, health and wellness, personal goals, career plans, or anything that requires envisioning, measuring, and achieving.

I’m here to give you some ideas on achieving your million dollar goal.

If you break down the numbers, a million dollars (in receipts) every year is:
$83,333 per month

The average American income per year is between $30k and $60k, so when we reach the level of thinking like a millionaire, we’re definitely thinking above average, out of the box, on the cutting edge, in the top 10 percent.

What is your million dollar idea? Or, putting it a different way, what idea do you have for a product or service that you will sell each month to 83,333 people for $1?

How about an idea for a product or service that you will sell to 8,333 people for $10 apiece, each month? Or 20,000 customers every month for $5 apiece?

How about an idea for a product or service that you will sell to 900 people each month for $100 apiece? What about 1500 people each month for $60 apiece?

Now we’re seeing some creative juices flowing!

An alternative is to do high dollar value projects, such as twelve products a month for $8000 apiece, one customer each month paying $100,000, or two customers each year worth $500k each.

In most people’s current jobs, they’re capable of serving one, two, ten, or twenty clients. However, with a business serving up patented products that sell in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions, or with a commission or sale of a valuable service, you may easily move $80k worth in a month, every month.

Your biggest objective when coming up with your million-dollar goal is setting up your targeted income streams to total $83,333 each month. This might mean product sales (say, three separate products at $16k a month apiece), speaking engagements ($5000 each month), commissions on sales for $10k each month, and memberships, gadgets or geegaws, client services or some other valuable service selling for $20k each month and you’ve hit a million dollars in gross receipts every year.

If you’re smart, you’ll also not take this as taxable income but instead invest it in your company or series of companies, and you start to see some incredible ways for you to increase your net worth, hire people to do good work, and serve the causes and issues about which you care the most.

Now you may start looking in the tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or billion-dollar range.

That would be $830k of sales every month, or $8.3 million in sales each and every month, or $83 million in sales every month. As my second-grade enrichment education teacher would tell us: “Put your thinking caps on, it’s time to come up with an idea.”

Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing
What the Rich Invest In, that the Poor and Middle Class do Not!
by Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter, C.P.A.

Kiyosaki is a favorite of mine, so when I saw this next book in the Rich Dad series, I couldn’t help but pick it up. When we think about investing, we think about our future, and when we learn the tools, language, and facts of investing at the levels that Kioysaki is talking about, we begin to understand how we may use that knowledge for the benefit of our loved ones and our communities.

If you’ve played Monopoly, you know the formula for success, and Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad” (his friend’s father) told him that formula: buy four green houses and then sell them and buy one red hotel…. keep on going until you control the whole board.

Kiyosaki’s tone is light hearted and positive: he is wry when he speaks of his “poor” days as a student and just returning from the military, and he is energetic and adamant that readers who follow a straightforward formula will automatically bring you from the 90% level to the top 10% level.

A great read, and a good way to remind you of your own investment plan.