I want to start by sharing this fantastic quote from Ruth Reichl
“The first time you make something, follow the recipe, then figure out how to tailor it to your own tastes.”
This is one of the problems that I have noticed with people who start a new business venture or a method of making money… very few actually follow a proven plan.
The plan is like a recipe that is used in cooking.
When someone has created a dish that tastes great, they write down what ingredients were used and when they were added to the cooking process.
People take those recipes and follow them to make the exact dish to taste.
If the dish doesn’t taste quite how you would like it then, and only then, should you attempt to make the dish a second time making any subtle changes required to suit your individual tastes.
Unless you are a great chef who has been cooking professionally for years, it would be foolish to attempt to make a dish the first time by changing any of the ingredients.
Andi, our techy chap in Portugal, loves a good tarka dhal from the Indian restaurant but with very few Indian restaurants in his area he took it upon himself to make one of his own.
He searched online for an authentic recipe and began cooking. The dhal he me made was, in his words, the best thing he had ever eaten.
It is safe to say that it was a success.
And the reason why it was a success is that he followed the recipe to the letter.
He followed what was written down and didn’t deviate from it in any way.
Now that he has successfully made the dhal, he can make any changes to it if he wishes.
As it stands, he doesn’t need to make any changes, but he could add more salt or more garlic if he wanted to.
The point is this…
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If you want to make more money or start a business venture of any kind, you MUST first follow exactly what someone else did successfully.
If you wanted to open up a coffee shop, it would make sense to go and see what the successful coffee shops in your area are doing and if possible, ask what it was that they did when they first started.
You may realise that the fancy decor you intend to have hanging from the ceiling to make the place more ‘cosy’ could actually be a lot of unnecessary ‘dust collectors’ that will require a lot of cleaning, and that most customers will hardly notice it or appreciate it.
People starting out in business have this idea of what they want, but they often decide that they want to do it ‘their way’ which ultimately doesn’t deliver the results they desire or causes them a lot more extra unnecessary work or expense.
A perfect example of this would be the person who wanted to be a successful author making money selling novels and who shunned the advice from a seriously successful author because they didn’t want to do ‘what they did’ or write the ‘types of books’ suggested.
I’m not saying that you should only write the kind of books you don’t personally want to write, but there could be a huge chasm between what you want to write and what people want to read.
It could be something as simple as deliverability of your product.
Many authors make a lot of money by writing a lot of short stories instead of big novels.
They take a story that would fit a novel, but they break it down into a series of easier to read novellas which can be published quickly and can actually make them more money over time.
A person who is fixed on writing the next great novel and doesn’t want to write what people want to read… could end up wasting all of their time and fail to make any money.
It would make more sense to take the advice and write the stories people want to read and then publish them as a series of shorter novellas, and then… once the money is coming in and you are building an audience… write your bigger dream novels.
It doesn’t matter how good your story is or how well written your book is, if you do not have an audience to sell it to, you will struggle to make sales.
When you do have an audience or a fanbase, it is easier to make sales of your products.
Going back to the idea of the coffee shop, if a coffee shop in the neighbouring town had built a very successful business by focusing completely on giving customers what they want, would it not make sense for you to replicate that in your own town?
You might love the taste of a little-known South American coffee, but would it not make more sense to sell a coffee that is favoured by most people?
Yes, by all means offer your little-known South American coffee as a speciality coffee, some people may love it, but it wouldn’t make sense offering it as your main brand just because you love it.
There’s a reason some coffee shops become giant brands, and that is because they focus on giving customers what they want in both taste of food and drinks, and experience.
Yes, of course, there would be subtle differences and you won’t do an exact copy, but you would model your coffee shop and business on theirs.
You must add your authentic self into your business and you must have your own angle, but that is just what people see on the surface.
Under the hood your business should be the same as any other successful business.
To help you, here’s a six-step checklist for creating your own successful venture.
- Copy Business Models That Work. Look at how prospects are collected and converted into repeat customers.
- Imitate Offers That Do Well. Look at them structurally. Look at the components and make sure your offers include them.
- Replicate Successful Promotions. Where do successful businesses promote their products and services? What do they publish to attract customers?
- Where To Innovate. Innovate only when it comes to your own ‘character’ in your content and offers. You’re a unique persona, after all.
- When To Be Creative. Creativity comes in when you remix the sources you’re imitating. Make the recipe your own by changing specific ingredients such as furniture similar to Starbucks, but decor similar to Costa.
- Don’t Be Afraid To Be Original. Originality comes from collecting and combining what you like, and cutting away what you don’t. But you won’t know what those things are until you TRY THEM. Adjust only AFTER following the recipe once.
The whole purpose of a recipe or a plan is to make everything easy on yourself.
Why spend a day cooking multiple batches of food using a variety of ingredients trying to get the right dhal when you can use a recipe and cook one easily within an hour?
Don’t make things hard on yourself, follow something that is proven to work.
A perfect example of something that is proven to work is the Double Your Way To A Million programme
Starting with just £100, you double that initial investment 14 times until you hit £1.6 million.
Please note… you can stop whenever you hit an amount of money you are happy with.
This plan works, several multi-millionaires have been created from following it.
Two of them, Stuart Goldsmith and Barry Tyler, decided to put everything they did and learned into this programme:
Double Your Way To A Million
As with everything in life, if you do not have a plan that you can follow, it’s highly likely that you will fail, or waste a hell of a lot of your precious time trying to figure it all out for yourself.
Stuart and Barry have included a detailed step-by-step plan that will take you to your goal of becoming a millionaire starting with just £100.
Go take a look.
Kind regards
John Harrison
PS… The price of this works out at just 26p a day for a whole year. That’s more than a third of the price of the weekday edition of the Sun newspaper… and the information is a lot more useful and factual too.
With the Double Your Way To A Million programme you will learn how to get started with £100 and double it to £1.6 million.
