Twitter Updates for 2008-05-31

• It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a NEW LIFE…….and I’m feeling GOOD! #
• @garyvee – love to play Texas Hold’em with you one day (in Vegas obviously!) #

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Wealth Coach Diaries: Nicola’s Week

It’s been half term this week, and along with making strides on my new hobbies, which are

1.  Gardening – well, weeding!  Done half the back garden and all of front so far, bark chip next.
2.  Playing poker live – once but determined
3.  Starting to design/sew again (have a bid for a sewing machine winning on ebay!)

I determined to spend at least one day with each child this half term – not working – and doing something different.

Nelson chose to go to the Natural History Museum and visit Yo! Sushi! (http://www.yosushi.com) which I find to my suprise is his favourite restaurant…..we had a bit of an adventure getting there with two trains breaking down, and he practically having to carry me up and down stairs to see every single dinosaur, due to too much weeding at the weekend (sore knees) but we had a great day.

He got outside a lot of sushi in the Harrods 102 branch – very surprising for a boy who hardly eats! and wow’d the waitress who I’m sure didn’t charge us enough as she got distracted and coo’d all over him.  She asked for a hug but he went bright red and didn’t grant her one – always leave them wanting more Nelson, that’s right!  Where did you learn that so young?

Then on Thursday, Phoebe and I went to London (again Lord help me, I must have taken leave of my senses!) to go to Selfridges, and again visit Yo! Sushi! there after swinging by the MAC and Bobbi Brown counters, and where she racked up a bigger bill on Prawn Tempura than the small boy managed the day before on Prawn Katso!

Their father did warn me, but but boy!  My kids do love prawns!

We then went on to see the rather marvellous Darius (remember Pop Idol?) in “Gone With The Wind” as I fancied seeing a show and it’s a rattling good story.  Everyone said “Oh goodness it’s about four hours long!” but luckily they had managed to compress it into three, but it did charge along at a very fast pace.  We had great seats – the best available (at 50% discount from www.LastMinute.com) and the music was very good.  The gospel number in particular had me standing to clap which mortified P, who was already deeply embarrassed by my taxi hailing techniques.  They don’t call it “drama” for nothing though.

London generally and Selfridges particularly had the desired effect, with P asking about why/how people got jobs as shop assistants, ticket collectors, roadsweepers (“must be very depressing Mummy, when you have just done a bit and poeple walk on it/ throw rubbish on it”) and then being very impressed by one woman, who stole our taxi and who had about 20 Selfridges bags on her arm, and who had obviously been shopping till she dropped!  It got P asking about the kind of careers she could pursue where she could go into a shop like Selfridges and just buy any stuff that she wanted.

Now we need to pursue getting some photos done, as she is long and thin and very pretty, and fancies modelling as you get paid well, travel the world and get lots of free clothes.  I was telling her about the lovely Janine, one of our Money Gym members who is a beautiful girl, models professionally and then ploughs her fees into property investments.  Stunning and bright!

Home again for a morning, and then I’m off to meet David Lee and Rick Otton and the rest of the Money Gym Cashflow Investors for “An Audience With Rick” as we are calling it.  My first ad for motivated sellers went in three weeks ago and they haven’t managed to get the number right once, so I’ve demanded three weeks free, and got the number they used (Wrongly) added to my account so I catch the calls anyway.  Lots of buyers lined up though.

I’ve been to look at about 30 properties this week and my issue is not finding motivated sellers but whittling them down to those I think might consider offers on the terms laid out in the Cashflow Investor plan.  All good fun though and there are some very cute young estate agents out there!  Why did I think guys in suits were straight when I was a teenager?

So off to a hotel in Ealing tonight with Judith, Dave, Rick and the Money Gym gang then back home tomorrow to finish the garden and find out if I’m the proud owner of a nearly new sewing machine.

I used to be a fashion designer back in the mists of time (helped designer Derek Lilliard make the suits for the Pasadena’s in the early ’90’s), so I’m looking forward to making paper patterns out of my favourite (and now falling apart) shirt, and then replicating it in many colours of linen, starting with white, black, navy and perhaps…..pink!  Next step, those John Rocha trousers that got ink on them!

Have fun, I SO have been largely this week, knees notwithstanding!

Nicola

Business: Failure -V- Mistakes

It’s been a great reading week this week – mainly due to being on trains a lot.  Steve bought me Theo Paphitis’ “Enter The Dragon” after seeing him on Loose Women (don’t ask!) and that was a rattling good read.  He seems like a nice bloke, but he did make it sound easy, even the difficult bits!  Just one of those people to whom business came naturally I guess.

This book spurred me to buy a few more to keep the reading momentum going and I really enjoyed “Millionaire Upgrade” by Richard Parkes-Cordock.

The premise of the book is that an aspiring entrepreneur gets upgraded to first class, ending up sitting next to, and spending the flight talking to, a successful entrepreneur.  Based on a true story, where the author’s cousin ended up sitting next to Richard Branson, it’s a great way to get a lot of infomation about success across in a short but very powerful book.  I particularly enjoyed the sections on goals and the need for lots of failure.

On the goals front, I’ve been feeling a bit like I’ve been wading through treacle with the Money Gym traffic generation, and search engine optimisation and statistics reporting, and it’s a long slow business sorting it out.  I’ve also felt a bit frustrated that I can’t just concentrate on this using the (less strong) analytical side of my brain, but have to keep swapping to the other – creative – side of my brain to write daily marketing emails for our workshops.  I enjoy both activities but hadn’t realise till this moment while writing this, that I must seperate out the two activities.

The chapter on goals was great and helped me clarify that I must set clear goals and action steps on how to achieve them, around this challenge of traffic.  For example, he says “a goal is a dream with a deadline” and that your goals must be big – they must cause a stretch.

But one of the later chapters really struck home and caused an a-ha moment.  This was the chapter about failure.  Now we have all heard the usual stuff about having to fail many times to reach success but this book goes much further and talks about it very differently.

The “successful entrepreneur” Michael, actually tells the aspiring entreneur, Tom, to “expect failure” and to treat it as a blessing in disguise because it’s a faster, more effective way of learning.  Morevoer, failure creates wisdom and that it’s not the person that fails when something fails, but that the person who never gets started is the real failure.

In fact, if you are not failing, you are not trying hard enough!

One of the qualities needed is persistence (talked about earlier in the book) and you need to use that persistence to keep trying and keep failing till you succeed – this made me remember the story about Edison looking at each failed lightbulb being one more way the lightbulb didn’t work but one closer to finding out how it would work?

Michael then says a couple of sentences that struck home for me so profoundly, I underlined them.  “Success is going from one failure to the next, without a loss of enthusiasm” and he goes on to talk about risk, judgement, wisdom and the connection between all of those things.  Michael then talks about the emotional baggage that is attached to the word failure and says that he prefers, instead to use the word “mistake”.

Failure is huge, scary and overwhelming, whereas a mistake is more ordinary and every day.

We all make mistakes all the time, we accept them, pay for them if necessary, and move on.  You write off mistakes to experience, cut the ties and move on.

As I read this I realised to my amazement that I have been carrrying my perceived “failure” at my boutique hotel The Acacia around in my heart for the last few years.  It’s been quite literally weighing me down.  When I read that I started to think about The Acacia as not so much a failure, but a mistake I started to feel much, much lighter….but then I thought, but how can it have been a mistake?

If I hadn’t bought The Acacia, I wouldn’t have started to hold workshops there, which led to the launch of The Money Gym, which I believe is my reason for being on this planet.  I wouldn’t have met Steve & Judith, Greg & Andy and many of the people in my life now.

So what mistakes did I make with The Acacia that I can learn from? That I can gain wisdom from….

1.  That traditional business models will rarely make you enough money to make up for the sheer hard work you put in (compared with property and the internet)

2.  That I overpaid dramatically for a business that the owner was desperate to get rid of – always make a much lower offer in future than you feel comfortable with intially

3.  That I should have kept it going while I tried to sell it (and that I didn’t try hard enough to do that)

4.  Never believe planning officers!

5.  Work with what is, right now, rather than what you believe will be.

My third book of the week also has some interesting takes on failure….I’m now reading “How I Made It” in which 40 successful entrepreneurs “reveal all” which is also very good.  Chris Gorman, founder of DX Communications and now worth many millions, having made his first million before he is 30, talks about blowing half a million on an ill fated record label (easy done!).

Chris talks about “….what I love about America is that people accept failure as a natural part of entrepreneurialism…..Failure can be one of the best lessons.  Fear of failure stops people doing great things but learning from failure helps you acheive greater things”.

So, now I’m ready to make many more mistakes to get The Money Gym even more right and make it even more of a success – Europewide – than it already is in the UK.

So which next mistake shall I make first?

Bring it on!

Inspiration V Perspiration

On the train on the way home, Phoebe was asking me how much work being a model would be. Well, I said, it’s not as easy as it looks……….there IS all the travelling, and the waiting about. “That’s hard work?!!” she asked incredulously. And then we had a very interesting discussion about what we would both class as hard work and I realised that, for me, hard work is more about being bored, it’s more about a mental thing than a physical thing.

In a couple of the business books I have read this week they talk about learning to enjoy hard work – because if success comes too easy, you won’t have learned the lessons.

We are not keen on any kind of hard work in the Money Gym, mental or physical, believing that there is no reason success can’t come easy and effortlessly, in fact that it should! But then, we love what we do so much, largely, that we don’t think of it as work at all!

And the business books echo that thought – they say that while entrepreneurs work long hours, and live, sleep, eat and breathe their business, they don’t regard it as hard work.
My business partner Judith has a take on this too and she asks “Business: Inspiration or Perspiration?

I know I bang on a lot about inspiration. As I write, the sun is going down over the London skyline outside my living room/office window.
The sky is pink, the office buildings are just lighting up, its dusk on The Thames.
I’ve even posted a couple of my photos of this view from here looking west, and from Gabriel’s Wharf looking east on my blog.
The same skyline is on my website. I can’t get enough of it. It’s why I live here. It’s inspirational to me, it constantly feeds me. I love it.

It’s by no means the only thing that inspires me. I love books and cinema, theatre, music, other people including my clients and business partners. Oh, and hot countries, and the sea, and the stars and the moon. I could go on, but I will spare you today.

Right now I’m reading “Pour Your Heart Into It, the Starbucks story” by its CEO, Howard Schultz – and that’s doing it for me.

People are coming here to my home to play Rich Dad’s Cashflow 101 tomorrow. I find the fact that they are going out of their way during their leisure time to learn more about their relationship with money also very inspiring.

One of the things that I find most inspiring is an entrepreneur, setting out on their journey to create a business, to create wealth. Wow.

And they will need inspiration. Obviously it is my hope that they will choose, at some appropriate point in their evolution, the inspiration that we can provide at The Money Gym.

And sorry to bring it up, yucky as it is, but there’s perspiration involved in success too. Yes, you have probably become aware of the concept of effortless success, when you are in the flow, and that’s gorgeous. But for most of us ordinary mortals, being successful at anything pretty much requires some focus, some dedication and plenty of hard work.

I’m not interested in anything which is going to take me longer than three years. I think that’s enough these days. Of course, it depends on how old you are when you start and how much time and energy you have, but experience tells me that your business should be at a rolling boil by three years.

All the impact of your marketing efforts starts to come home to roost. Right?

Of course, many underestimate what’s involved, and some decide they dont like working for themselves and return to the 9-5. I heard that Dolly Parton track the other day, always makes me smile, that one! Got lots of rebellion and irony in it, which I love. Damned good tune, too.

But if you have a business plan, a marketing plan, a vision and a strategic objective and you put yer back into it, connect with some others who inspire you, and put the work in – you should be starting to reap the rewards by the three year point.

If not, move on. Thinking about that decision? Should I go or should I stay? Sell it, stop it, cash in my chips, cut my losses? Let me help. We can wrap that one up in one session. You probably even know the answer already.

But what if you are diddling about – sometimes being inspired, sometimes perspiring, sometimes attracting, sometimes working really hard for it? What would help?

Growing your business requires you to grow personally – have you noticed that? Aren’t you just loving it?

Will 2008/2009 be your breakthrough year?

Action, attraction, inspiration and perspiration – a little bit of each, shake it up and stand well back to avoid the fireworks!

Welcome To The Money Gym

The Money Gym enables bright, energetic people to become independently wealthy.  We do that via down to earth, practical, proven methods, which teach you – and support you to use – those things you don’t learn in school or college about making more money, keeping more of your money and growing your money.  We have been making UK millionaires since 1999 – why not join us?  Buy the ebook or choose between our free wealth tips and weekly ezine, our Silver group coaching programme (30 day free trial with the ebook) and our Gold one-to-one coaching programme.  We look forward to meeting you!

Passive Income – Google Trends Rank Us!

When The Money Gym launched it’s first “Passive Income – 90 Day Internet Challenge” and sent out our press release, little did we think that we would trigger a spike in Google Trends tracking of the key phrase “passive income”.

Here’s how we explained it:

“Whilst the coaches at The Money Gym (www.themoneygym.com) are huge believers in the importance of educating ourselves about the various ways of creating wealth, they are equally aware that nothing beats learning by doing. So, they’ve decided to encourage people to just get down and do it with The Money Gym Passive Income Challenge.

Nowadays, we are always hearing about the big bucks that can be made on the internet, millions of dollars/pounds in one day sometimes, and the concept of making money while you sleep is an exciting one — if true. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to sit at home in our pajamas eating left-over Easter eggs, watching Jeremy Kyle on the telly and stopping only briefly to see how many more sales have pinged into our Paypal account?

Just one ebook sale per day @ £20, from one one-page website, would make an extra £7300 a year — enough for a new car or a couple of nice holidays. Two or three ebooks doing the same would make £21,900 — nearly a full time wage. The beauty of the Internet is that you do the work once, and the money keeps coming.

But the reality is that many people end up making a tenner here, twenty quid there, but never get much further.

In contrast, Nicola Cairncross, founder of the Money Gym, has built a six-figure business marketed entirely online and once made £14,000 in one weekend from one mailout. She knows exactly why people run out of steam in the quest for passive income — in her experience would-be internet entrepreneurs often aren’t prepared to focus attention in one place, on one thing, for long enough to make it work.

Nicola suggests focusing on just one thing – one information product, one niche or one passionate interest – and take consistent regular actions that include:

• Creating a web presence — a sales page, a brochure site, a blog. All of them preferably.
• Capturing visitors’ details, encouraging them to subscribe to ezines (online newsletters).
• Turning visitors into raving fans by providing regular, maybe even daily, valuable content.
• Having a system to automate the selling of our product.
• Replicating the process.

As Nicola says, “like creating wealth, making money online is simple but it’s not easy, you have to get off your “assets”, learn new skills and take some action”.

To encourage — or even bully their Money Gym members to success, Nicola and business partner Judith Morgan have decided to set up an Internet Challenge. It’s a three-month personal challenge for anyone who has day-dreamed about creating passive income, or perhaps started but fizzled out along the way.

Anyone can join them for what will be a three-month personal challenge by visiting http://www.TheMoneyGymClub.com and joining the club at Silver Level.

Already people are getting excited about their goals, swapping resources and information…with Nicola on hand to keep everyone focused. And The Money Gym are further incentivising their new Silver members and supporting them in the Challenge by giving them free lifetime access to Nicola’s 12-Step Internet Marketing Home Study Course – which retails for £1450 – and membership of a private email support group. This will provide encouragement, resources and a kick up the backside!

The Money Gym has helped hundreds of people along the road to financial independence (and created millionaires along the way) via their 1:2:1 Money Gym Gold wealth coaching programme. It is a powerful, practical down to earth programme that teaches participants a solid and proven way of creating wealth, with a choice of ways to suit your personality. These could be a choice of, or a combination of high risk, high return investment, solid bricks and mortar, or building a business that you can sell or use to set you up for life”.

So 60 days in, how are the participants getting on?  I thought I would ask them to update you here on the blog – which apart from inspiring you all, will give their projects a useful link from a blog now ranking 3/10 on Google Page Rank. 

So guys, who is going to be first to step up to the comments box?

Property: Top 3 Ways?

When I first started the Money Gym, and wrote the “Financial Intelligence 101″ tips, that grew into The Money Gym ebook, one of the most popular sections was the Property Investing Section.  Everyone wanted to know about investing in, and making money from property.

In the early days, when we used to host the Money Gym workshops at The Acacia, my much loved boutique hotel and my latest venture into property investing, we used to cover “The Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” and we used to simply tell people about them, they used to go off and investigate the one they liked the sound of, then we would coach them from there.

However, one day, a couple of guys came along who blew most of our “Top 10″ out of the water. 

Out of “Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” only three of them remain.  Which ones?  Aha, you will have to wait for the next few days to find out that!

After we heard about how these guys invested in property, we simply couldn’t, in all good conscience, just tell folks how they COULD invest in property, but we felt we then had to share how we felt people SHOULD invest in property.

Now this went right against all accepted coaching law and wisdom, I can tell you!

But hey ho!  Wealth coaching has always been different – a mix of training, mentoring and coaching, rather than pure coaching itself.

At The Money Gym, we aim to save you time, money, and stop you making expensive mistakes.

Mistakes like I made with buying that hotel in the first place.  If these two guys, my mates Greg and Andy, had been around in 2003, there is NO WAY they would have let me buy it.  They would have stopped me making THAT half million pound mistake.

Side note:  You will see in this week’s ezine, I talk about the difference between “failure” and a “mistake” and it’s an important distinction to make if you are an entrepreneur.  Essentially, a failure is something that can bury you but you can learn from your mistakes.

That hotel was a mistake – some would definately see it as a failure – but I choose now to see it as a mistake.  A very large one true….. 

One that taught me a VERY LARGE LESSON!  In fact, SEVERAL very large lessons.

I will never forget the moment in the garden of The Acacia, when Greg or Andy uttered the immortal words that made me realise that buying it had been a mistake and told me why.

1.  This hotel will never make you the amount of profit that would make all the work you put into it, worth it.
2.  You have a lot of your own money in this business and you will struggle to ever get it out.
3.  When you have had enough and you do want to sell it, nobody will buy it, unless you find someone as daft as you were, to buy it in the first place.

Hmmmmm…..

They like straight talking, those two.  And that is one of the things I most value about Greg & Andy. So many people won’t tell you what you need to hear.  Nobody around me in those days did, that’s for sure.  Hence the mistakes.

So, five years on, here we are, still making mistakes but not so many, and certainly not failing, and together with Steve and Judith, two more straight talkers, they are still two of my closest friends and mentors.  Whenever I want some advice about business and life, I go straight to Greg, and to Andy for property market / business marketing / creative / internet input.

So you can imagine how thrilled I am that Greg still comes to London, to present for The Money Gym on property investing.

I can’t imagine how much longer he will do that, as we are pretty much the only presenting he does outside their own Open Days.

He’s coming to the Southwark Rose on 14th June and really, you should be there. 

* If you have questions about the current property market, you should be there.

* If you have questions about your business proposition, you should be there.

* If you just want to see a down to earth, authentic, funny, FANTASTIC speaker, you should be there.

* If you want to recharge your wealth creation batteries, and hang out with some like minded people, you should be there.

That’s five “shoulds” in five lines, I’m about to get struck off the Eurocoach List!

Book your place here – still some Early Birds left as I’m late promoting this due to half term.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/MGPresents/property2.htm

See you there!

Nicola

p.s.  Greg always sells out fast so get your space booked now.

Twitter Updates for 2008-05-27

• Why am I still getting Joe Vitale’s twitters looking like they are mine when I have stopped following him now? anyone help? #
• wondering what on earth possessed me to agree to go to the Natural History Museum – might have to dig my trainers out (dig, geddit?!) LOL #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-05-26

• The Truth about Intentions /Dr. Joe Vitale at Zero/ – People keep asking me about intentions. Do I use them … http://tinyurl.com/6ayww7 #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-05-25

• Hear Me Now /Dr. Joe Vitale at Zero/ –  In case you didn’t know it, most of my books are now available as … http://tinyurl.com/4hqdws #

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