Interim Career Solutions

I have been using a free program called Shortkeys for a few years now. If you do a lot of computer work you will find this so useful. To explain what it does, here is the description from their website:

ShortKeys is a macro utility allowing you to setup replacement text or paragraphs for any given number of user defined keystrokes. ShortKeys monitors the keyboard activity on a global nature and anytime a user defined keystroke combination is typed in, it will be replaced with the replacement text.

An example: how many times do you type your email address out? All I do now is type rrrr and as if by magic richard [at] walltowall.biz is typed in. [By the way ever wonder why people put on websites [at] in an Email address? It’s to stop automated robots harvesting Email addresses from your website… useful tip!]

That’s just a small example… I use ShortKeys a lot in Emails – many of which are ‘standardised’ – I only need to personalise by ‘topping and tailing’ with the recipient’s name and maybe a few other details. When I want to pull in the standard part I just type a few keystrokes and ShortKeys does the rest. It saves a lot of time and is a lot quicker than copying and pasting from somewhere else. Here’s a screenshot:

Not only does ShortKeys make things quicker but it also guarantees consistency – many times in the past I have mistyped an Email address, url etc. Not now.

Download the free lite version here:  www.shortkeys.com.

How to get ahead in a recession

If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of professional people who are finding the global downturn tough, it can be a very worrying time. Add age to the equation and it feels worse – people like me over 50 are ‘over the hill’ in the job market.

One thing most people do in a recession is cut ‘discretionary expenditure’… the non essentials. One of the first casualties is often the training budget. Maybe you are an Interim Manager or Management Consultant and you are waiting for the phone to ring, your income is down and you need to trim your expenses. There’s one area though you need to spend more on: personal development and business development.

Personal development is often thought of as just happy clappy motivation and positive thinking – well it’s a lot better than negative thinking which is somewhat popular in the UK ( here in Yorkshire if you ask a lot of people how they are they’ll say “not bad”, “could be worse” or “mustn’t grumble.”)

Until now access to personal and business development material meant spending a lot of money on books, DVDs and courses.  I’ve found a wonderful solution for busy professionals and entrepreneurs… I’ve just teamed up with one of my heros, Brian Tracy, and a remarkable company called iLearningGlobal (iLG). It’s very exciting to be working directly with Brian – who is one of the true giants  in the personal and business development world.

iLG’s philosophy is very refreshing: if you could change your life completely by changing less than 1% of your daily routine would you do it? By investing 7 minutes per day (roughly ½% of 24 hours) in yourself and your education you can dramatically improve your skills and get more out of your life.

So if you don’t have an hour a day to spend on your continuing education, iLearningGlobal has divided its Hi-Definition content into 7-9 minute segments; packed with valuable material so that you can take your education in bite sized (or should that be byte sized?) chunks. Directly from the experts in personal development, business, sales, finance, teens, parenting, relationships and much more.

Why continuous learning?

 - The average person will increase their salary by only 2-3% annually.

 - Each year inflation increases by approximately 2-3% annually.

 - That means, without lifelong learning, it’s virtually impossible for the average person to get ahead.

However…

Top Achievers, people who are continually learning and growing, DOUBLE their income every 3-5 years. This is why the top 10-20% earns more than the bottom 80%.

To separate yourself from the pack,  you often need to know just one additional skill… and that could make all the difference in your pay packet or if it is you who gets the next interim assignment or consultancy job.

Free eBook

iLG is attracting some very high profile people like Brian Tracy, BNI founder Ivan Misner and billionaire Bill Bartmann. They have never been anywhere an MLM venture before. Check out the free eBook “The Way Out!” to read more about the people behind iLG and how you really can thrive in the global downturn not just survive:

Free eBook

Finally, don’t take my word for it, here’s Brian Tracy:

Find out more

What is Pyramid Selling?

If you are in between jobs, or maybe an interim manager or consultant looking for your next assignment why not set up an alternative income stream? There’s never been a better time than now to set up a ‘home-based business’. There’s a lot of opportunity out there, however many of them will get a lot of people saying to you “Oh – that’s a pyramid – don’t do that!”

So, what is pyramid selling?

Most countries have rigorous legislation which outlaws pyramid selling (although pyramid selling itself is not legally defined). The usual horror stories are:

- There is no product – like a chain letter where people pay to join a scheme and you are paid a commission for those new ‘recruits’. A few years ago ‘gifting’ programs were very popular – if they ever became big they were closed down and the last people in lost their money. A bit like ‘pass the parcel’ when the music stops.

- There is a product, but it’s overpriced to enable the company to pay out the large commissions.

- New recruits are encouraged to buy a garage-full of products to get started. Water filters and burglar alarms here in the UK in the early/mid 90′s spring to mind.

- Distributors are paid on recruits rather than on sales of products and services.

- There’s a large up-front purchase commitment.

A Ponzi Scheme is the foundation for most of the regulatory pressure on the MLM industry over the past few years. In a nutshell, this is a money-making scheme which entices you to buy something, duplicating yourself by recruiting other people to do the same and those people recruiting people and so on. Hence the pyramid structure – just like a chain letter. Here in the UK, the courts talk about ‘bound to fail’ schemes (Titan was one of the best known ones – I knew a few people who were involved – and it ended in tears.) The main reason why they are bound to fail is somewhere down the line you will run out of people – and because there is no product the last people in the pyramid lose out. Also your success is down to chance… your commissions depend largely on people you haven’t introduced and over whom you have no influence.

The Golden Rules for MLM

Rule Number 1: Ask yourself, with your hand on your heart, “Are the products/services good enough to stand up without the business opportunity?” If yes and there are no ‘garage qualify’ purchase quotas or monthly targets, you should be fine. If not, you are going to find your circle of friends getting smaller. Brian Tracy sums up effective selling very well: “If you don’t believe in your product, if you don’t love your product, if you wouldn’t use it yourself, if you wouldn’t sell it to your best friend or your mother you are probably selling the wrong product.” Don’t worry, Brian doesn’t mean over the top bore-your-friends-to-death evangelicism, just genuine ‘constrained enthusiasm’ about your products/services.

Rule Number 2: Do you feel you are doing your friends a favour by asking them to look at your business opportunity, or do you feel a bit embarrassed asking them? If it’s the latter, you must either quit the business or raise your confidence. In some MLM businesses raising your confidence high enough is impossible. The early days of networking were often mysterious: “come round for dinner” was often the invitation. Unsuspecting punters would go round for dinner to their friends. After the first course, a whiteboard would be wheeled out from behind the curtains and the presentation would begin. There’s a stigma about this approach… for example a friend in our village said a few years ago, soon after my MLM debut, “It’s not bloody AMTRAK is it?” Well he was close. And no it wasn’t Amway.

Rule Number 3: Read Chapter 5 of my Residual Magic eBook. Without this you have no chance