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Writing this book was really hard work – please don’t steal it.
I felt compelled to share this story with you, it’s such a great little
business and I don’t know of anyone else who does it the same way
that I do. However, the task of writing this book was far more time
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hard to write this book – and you get it all for just a few bucks.
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All rights are reserved. You may not distribute this report in any way. You
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
How to Make a $Million in Business
with No Qualifications and Without
Leaving Home
By
Bradley Moorland
www.makeamillionebook.com
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
"Good timber does not grow
with ease; the stronger the
wind, the stronger the trees."
J. Willard Marriott
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
Table of Contents
Introduction
• How to get rich
• Work hard, work smart
• Anyone can do it
Chapter 1: A Very 21st Century Business
• Information publishing
• Outsourcing / BPO / Offshoring
• Virtual business
• Environmentally friendly
• With no qualifications…that’s right, NO qualifications
• Ultra-low up-front capital investment
Chapter 2: My Growth Story
• Beginnings
• The second year
• The third year, rapid growth
• Years four to seven
• Table: MBR Sales Growth
Chapter 3: The Business Information Market
• Business information
• Reports or studies
• Don’t panic!
• Newsletters, magazines and periodicals
• Books
• Maps, charts and wallcharts
• Slide presentations
Chapter 4: How to Research and Write Management Reports and
Market Studies
• Study your competitors
• Price and size
• Getting started
• Structure
• Still don’t panic!
• How to do the actual research
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•
•
•
•
•
•
How to present your report; making it look right
What makes a good report
Questions and answers
Extra bits
The final edit
Summary
Chapter 5: Managing the Production Process
• Selecting your KPO partner
• Check the details
• Visiting your KPO partners
• Vacation
• Managing production scheduling
• Your input to the writing process
Chapter 6: The Publishing Process
• The finished article
• Format
• Promotional materials or sales collateral
• Sales brochure
• Press release
• Web page
• Sample pages
• Solicit reviews
• Specially-adapted sections for journalists
• Tell your agents
• Timescales
• Shelf life
• License prices and copyright protection
Chapter 7: Selling, the beating heart of any good business
• Sell, sell, sell
• Mouse traps
• Learn from the investment experts
• How to sell market research
• Build a database
• Contact management
• List building
• Finding contacts
• Target job titles
• People who don’t want to pay
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Ways to sell
Telesales
Publishers’ sales agents
Email (oh no, he’s going to talk about spamming…!!)
About spamming
Sales support
Mix it up
Broader distribution networks
Sales tips
Do as they ask
Understand cultural differences
Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)
Dealing with non-payment and cancellation
Money back guarantee
Tips for selling reports by email
When it’s all going to plan
Take pride in your achievements
Chapter 8: How to Set-Up your New Company and Your New Home
Office
• Company name
• Image makes a difference
• Your new home office
• Website
• Be professional
• Working under a false name
• The illusion is complete
Chapter 9: Running and Growing Your Company Beyond the First
Year
• Accounts
• Cash flow
• Continued growth and expansion
• Bespoke research
• Diversification
• Consulting
• Events
• Online networking forum
• Pick another industry, start another company, sell the one you
have already created or build a corporation
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Chapter 10: The Big Picture
• The end
• Different needs
• Getting the carousel moving
• Beware the hot dog vendor…
• If it feels good to run, keep on running
• The beginning
Appendix and Additional Resources
• Business 101: Taking an order and getting paid
• List of publishers
• List of BPO / KPO companies
• List of third party sales resellers and publishers’ sales agents
• List of useful resources
• Brief glossary of acronyms
About the author
Bonus Sections – Additional FREE information!
Disclaimer and Legal Notices
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
Introduction
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
How to get rich
It’s been said by many that the art to wealth, the real secret to making
money, is all in your head. If you get your psychology right, then the
money will come to you. All you have to do is Think, and you can Grow
Rich. Well, I think there is a lot of truth in that, and I think that most
people will probably never make huge amounts of money because they
will never beat those thoughts in their heads that are holding them back.
So many millions of people are raised into adulthood with an ingrained
belief that they will never be rich, that they are only ever destined to be
‘normal’ folk, putting in an ‘honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay’.
While there is nothing wrong with good old-fashioned honest hard work,
the ‘honest day’s pay’ often seems to leave you far behind in today’s
world, wanting for so much more that always seems out of your financial
reach. I feel quite certain that many of us wish for so much more, yet
only so few realize that we can have whatever we like, if we just apply
ourselves to finding a way and have some self-belief.
Well I am one of those few people who took that extra step, I found a way
to take more than two million dollars out of the world of the telecoms industry in less than six years, and I did it without breaking my back
working eighteen hours a day, without leaving home (yes, I said without
leaving my home), without kissing up to a bunch of managers in suits
and without having any previous experience or relevant qualifications. I
have not been to University, I do not have a college degree and I did not
have to go out on the hard sell, no knocking on doors and no long days
driving hundreds of miles between meetings.
In fact, I made this money without even leaving home (did I mention that
bit, without even leaving home), and I didn’t have to manufacture any
physical products or provide any physical service. All I have used is a
computer, a telephone, the Internet, the 21st century trend for outsourcing and my ingenuity, and well over two million dollars have made their
way into my bank account in just a few short years. While I have done
this without leaving home, this business has the added bonus that you
could do it from anywhere in the world that you can get a telephone line
and an Internet connection. The power of the web – live where you like
and earn a small fortune!
I’ve built my business in the telecoms industry, but to be honest you
could replicate this business in other industrial sectors using the same
business model, it would not be difficult – pharmaceuticals, oil and gas,
banking, automotive or any other industry would be equally suitable.
You do not need to be an expert, but obviously it’s fair to say that a little
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interest or a little basic knowledge would help. You can easily pick that
up as you go, ‘on-the-job learning’ so to speak, with the vast and seemingly endless free resources available online these days. Quickly reading
your way up to a basic level of understanding in any industry is simply a
matter of spending a few hours researching and reading on the Internet,
at any time or place that suits your schedule.
Speaking of suiting your schedule, this business does not even need to
be a full time activity; you can easily fit this in around your other commitments. I started seven years ago and still held down my regular day
job for the first two years, working this business in my spare time in the
evenings and weekends, until I decided to commit more time to this new
business and then I saw my income explode through the roof.
Like I said, I decided to run my business in the telecoms sector, but
that’s just because I was a salesman for a few years selling low-level telecoms products, so I knew a little about the industry and it seemed quite
fast paced and exciting. But you could replicate this business model in
any other industry, so if you are a pharmaceutical salesman, then I
would recommend that you work in the pharmaceutical sector, if you are
a worker in the oil and gas business, work in oil and gas, if you sell cars
or work in the automotive parts business, then you can copy this business in the automotive sector.
There is no reason to follow me in telecoms, this business would work
just as well in power generation, print and publishing, IT and computers,
consumer electronics, electronic components, consumer goods (food and
drink), textiles, heavy engineering and so on – almost any industry that
you have some interest in and know a little about.
Of course, the bigger the industry then the bigger your potential market
and potential customer base, so if you pick the luxury boat business
then you are limiting your potential market – I made money in cell
phones, and believe me there are a lot more people with cell phones in
the world than luxury boats. So pick a big market that has a vast international consumer base, such as FMCG [fast moving consumer goods]
products like food, drink, clothing, etc., and you’ll probably find plenty of
healthy competition and plenty of opportunity. Healthy competition is a
good thing, it’s a sign of an active market, so don’t look for a completely
un-served niche, as that probably means there is no interest and no
market for you.
My business was, and still is, in mobile telecoms, a completely swamped
and fiercely competitive market, which is perfect, as there is always room
for more competition. The mobile telecoms industry is also a growth inwww.makeamillionebook.com
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dustry, which is another good thing to look for, as growth ensures increasing revenues flowing into the industry and endless new opportunities to exploit.
Work hard, work smart
Now let’s be clear, the title of this book said you could learn how to make
a million dollars with no qualifications and without leaving home, but it
didn’t say ‘without working hard’ and it didn’t say ‘with no effort’ and it
didn’t say ‘be a millionaire in just five minutes a day’ or anything else like
that. I don’t promise you riches without working for it, that’s just dumb.
I neither promise that this book will tell you how to make a million ‘the
easy way’, or ‘with no effort’. Frankly, in my personal opinion, any book,
system or product that promises to make you a million with no effort, or
without working hard, is almost bound to be a complete scam, and I
would avoid it at all costs.
Let’s face it, if it was possible for hundreds of thousands of us to sit and
do nothing all day and become millionaires, then why would someone sell
us this secret for $20 bucks or $50 bucks or whatever it costs. That person would simply sit and make their millions without you, why would
they need your help, and why would they share their secret with you? If
it was that good, and if it was true and it really worked, they might sell it
to you for $50,000, or $100,000, but no one is going to sell you an
‘amazing secret formula’ to making millions with virtually no effort, for
just twenty bucks. Wake up, these schemes are bullshit, I say that if it
looks and sounds too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be
true, you have to trust your gut feelings on these things.
I personally don’t believe in ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes, I think the ‘rich’
and ‘quick’ bits are largely incompatible, unless you happen to win the
lottery. I am sure there are plenty of decent ‘make-some-nice-additionalincome-quick’ schemes, and plenty of good ‘get-rich-slow’ schemes, but
making big money in very little time is rarely easy. These people are just
trying to sell you their book or scheme or product, and then get you to
sell it on to lots more people, and all those $20 bucks or $50 bucks add
up, making them rich, but not you, and probably not so quickly, but
quicker than you.
Well my highly-realistic scheme, in this book, is proud to be a ‘get-richslow-working-for-yourself’ scheme. I don’t promise it’s all easy, I don’t
promise you won’t have to work, and I don’t promise overnight instant
success. In fact, I don’t promise anything!! That’s right, I don’t PROMISE
you anything…hell, this is just my story, how I did it, and I’m writing it
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
in a book which I hope you’ll buy, making me more money!! However, in
the process I hope you will learn some very useful and valuable lessons
which you can then apply in your own ventures, which just might help
make you a bit richer too. I don’t promise you anything, but if you read
this book and you think it’s just bullshit like those other schemes, if you
really get nothing from this book and you think this is some kind of
scam, just write to me and I’ll give you all your money back, that’s one
promise I will make you.
So I don’t promise you success, this is not a guaranteed system, this is
not a set plan that you follow and this is not a fail-safe scheme for making a quick killing. No, this is just my story of how I built a successful
small business which made me a lot of money in just a few years while
enjoying working conditions which made most of my friends envious.
There is no guarantee that this will be easy or that you will succeed;
you’ll need to set up your own company, work hard, spend some of your
own money to get started (though not too much), make your own decisions, be responsible for your own success or failure and then you just
might make a million along the way.
If you do it the way I did, then you shouldn’t have to work the kind of
long hard hours that most high earners work, and you won’t be stuck
commuting in traffic for hours every day. You can work from home with
your music playing and your kids running around the house, take as
long for lunch as you like, work flexi-time and hang out in jeans or pyjamas or whatever you like all day long - whatever works for you!
The point is this book will outline for you a way to establish a small
business that can make serious money in just a few short years, yet fit
into and around your lifestyle as you like. You will be the boss and you
will take the majority of the money coming in as profit. My business has
run for its first seven years at between 59% and 84% profit margin, with
turnover reaching over half a million US dollars in any one year. By my
fourth year, the business hit half a million turnover, with approximately
70% of that being my profit…just for me and my family - and the tax
man of course!
I have no boss, little overheads and few suppliers, so I have few people to
answer to other than my customers. And I did the whole thing during a
period when my wife and I added four children to our family. I grew this
business at 50%-100% growth per annum while coping with sleep deprivation and tiredness and all the associated strain of raising a young family. And no, I was not a ‘hands-off Dad’ who left all the hard work to my
poor wife…I did my share of child-care and sleep loss and I wouldn’t have
had it any other way!
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In fact, having me around working from home all this time was a massive
bonus to my wife, as the work allowed my flexible working hours to help
out at home when things got tough. This has also been a huge bonus for
me, as I have been here to enjoy my children while they were young,
unlike so many fathers these days who seem to be career men during the
week and ‘weekend Dads’ at best. I have enjoyed being here for the first
words and first steps and first Birthday parties and all those irreplaceable memories that all parents should witness and enjoy. I feel sorry for
the guys in suits working sixteen hour-days in some high-rise office who
miss all that just to move up the career ladder – it’s their loss, and sadly
they can never go back and re-live that time, once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Well this business idea will allow you to stay at home and help raise your
kids and still earn more than the career guy in the suit, so this offers you
the best of both worlds. At times you’ll have to work hard, and at times
you’ll just have to work smart, and at times it’s really easy but a bit boring, and the first year may seem like lots of work for little reward, but
overall if you stick with it and give it your best shot for at least a year or
two, you should make some really serious money and have the kind of
easy, flexible and relaxed working conditions that most people only ever
dream of. That’s working smart. Work hard for a few years, get this right,
then you’ll be working smart for the rest of your life. And your friends
with college degrees, putting on suits and driving an hour into the office
every day, answering to the boss and worrying if they might lose their job
in the next downturn – they’ll wonder how come you have such an enviable lifestyle AND earn twice as much as they do.
Anyone can do it
Remember, ANYONE can do this; any age, gender, skill, experience, race,
religion…all you need is some common sense and access to the Internet
and you can try this business model. If a million people tried this tomorrow the world would soon be swamped with small publishing companies
and the whole market would be a mess, but a million people won’t try
this tomorrow. In fact, I would be prepared to bet that at least 90% of
people who buy this book won’t read every word of it, and 90% of people
who do read it won’t start their own publishing company.
Sadly, most people in life are spectators, few have the balls and determination to actually take the plunge and be a part of something that breaks
from the norm. The business plan outlined in this book can work for
anyone; you can run your own business anywhere you can connect to
the wonderful World Wide Web. You can be your own boss, live anywhere
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in the world earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and work
from home at your own pace, and all you have to do is try.
Perhaps you need to risk a couple of thousand bucks, perhaps you will
have to work pretty hard for a year or two, but really, don’t be afraid,
don’t think this is beyond you, because it’s not. Anyone can make a success of this, anyone. If I can do it, you can do it. I had no qualifications,
no previous experience in the business, no special skills, no financial
backing, no lucky break; I just saw an opportunity and got started. If I
can do it, so can you.
I can’t stress this enough, anyone can do this, no matter your background, skills or experience, your age or your origin, there is no reason
why you can’t do this. You need to be able to use a computer, you need
to know your way around the Internet and you need to have some people
skills, be able to communicate and have some common sense. If you
have those basic skills, there is no reason not to try this.
As you read my story you might say ‘oh it’s OK for him, he worked
around the printing and publishing industry first, and he worked around
telecoms so he knows about that too.’ Trust me, this business is so modern, so 21st Century, that almost everything I learned from previous jobs
is of no practical use to me now. Besides, you have one massive advantage over me, you have this book! Seriously, I have made this all up as I
went along over the last seven years, many of the things you’ll learn
reading this book took me three, four or even five years to figure out –
and you are getting it all right now, right from the start, and for just a
few bucks – lucky you!!
I have tried to include enough background information in this book (possibly to the detriment of the book, adding those extra pages) that you will
hopefully feel like you know something about the publishing industry by
the time you have read this. And there is a wealth of knowledge in these
pages. For just a few dollars you get the benefit of everything I have
learned over the last few years, you get the wisdom of all my trial and error, and all for a few bucks and a few hours of your time. You buy this
book for a few bucks and I show you how to make a million, using a
business model I created all on my own and spent years getting right.
So be confident, read this whole book cover to cover several times, mark
pages, turn corners, stick notes in it, write on it, use it as the basis of
your new business and get out there and give it a try. You’ll never know
if you don’t try.
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Once you have read this book a few times, you will start your new business with far more knowledge than I ever had. You will know way more
than I knew at the start, by a mile, and all for just a few bucks. What has
taken me seven years to build should be achieved in half that time armed
with the knowledge in this book. I see no reason why you can’t start your
business and be hitting the kind of turnover I now enjoy within three
years, not six or seven. So give it a try and you might just change your
life, change your perceptions of ‘work’ and maybe you’ll make a million
bucks while you are at it.
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
Chapter 1:
A very 21st Century Business.
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Information publishing
This business makes the most of a whole range of 21st century business
trends, even down to being a pretty ‘green’ way to make a living, which is
great!
Primarily, the name of the game is business-to-business (B2B) information publishing. Publishing information for business is nothing new, and
many real-world offline publishers have been selling premium grade
business intelligence to companies all over the world for decades. These
publications may be newsletters, market research reports, studies, surveys, books, maps, wall charts or magazines. The subjects may appeal to
wide audiences of hundreds of thousands of readers, or they may be
niche publications which interest just a handful of people in any one
business area, and those people could be spread all over the world.
The emergence of the Internet and email changed the face of publishing
dramatically, and now the online publishing world produces hundreds of
times more electronic information every year than hard copy that is
printed. Internet publishing has blossomed into a massive worldwide industry. Professional business information publishing is a vast and intensely competitive industry with literally thousands of publishing companies producing hundreds of thousands of publications every year.
The Internet has also sparked a worldwide trend for information publishing on a much smaller scale, publishing newsletters and ebooks – just
like this one! Now thousands of individuals and small business’ publish
online magazines, online forums, ebooks and newsletters covering almost
any imaginable subject. Indeed the sheer volume of material available
online today is quite staggering, and you can bet that someone somewhere has published something on almost any conceivable topic.
While at first this may seem like a problem, because so much good information is now available for free if you know where to find it, in fact
this information overload is proving to be a big help. Just look at the
amazing growth of Google, a company which grew from nothing to a
market capitalization of almost $200 Billion USD in just ten years…that’s
an astounding rate of growth and an equally astounding market valuation, and all achieved by helping people sift through the mass of eight billion pages now available online to find the one they want.
That’s right, the value these days is helping people find what they need,
reducing down the vast amount of data and information that is available
into something manageable and presentable. Many business research
companies (like mine) and many small-time online publishers (like me!)
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now make a living finding the information people require online and repackaging and re-presenting it in a size and format that people find
quick and easy to digest.
This activity is not illegal or immoral; it serves a purpose for all those involved. For the end user it saves time and effort, and it provides just
what they need in a format they can use, and for the publisher it makes
a profit, so everyone’s a winner! Of course it’s not all that straightforward, some information requires more in-depth research and analysis,
adding value through interpretation and so on, but essentially we trade
in publicly available information, saving people the time and effort of
finding it themselves.
Outsourcing / BPO / Offshoring
Now, in the case of my business model, I don’t even do most of the research work myself!! That’s right, this is where we exploit another very
21st century trend, the modern trend for outsourcing to cheaper labor
markets. Again, using cheaper labor overseas to manufacture goods is
not a new concept, but this is a trend that has only reached such industries as information publishing since the Internet and email changed the
face of the working world. I now have production teams in India and
China who do the majority of the research work for me, while I communicate with them from my home or from wherever I happen to be.
All I need is a cell phone, a computer and a web connection and I can
run my business from anywhere on Earth – literally, anywhere. I’ve had
‘production meetings’ from halfway up a mountain in Colorado, from a
beach in Florida, from a riverside picnic site in the South of France, from
a mountain bike trail in Arizona, sitting on the beach with my kids and
from a private villa in Mexico, to name but a few locations. The point is,
once you have the basic knowledge you need to run your business securely in your head, you can get on with enjoying your life while your
production team are working hard on the other side of the world. Unlike
so many self-employed small business owners, your business keeps
working while you take a vacation or enjoy a fun day out with your
friends or family.
In a business sector that barely existed twenty years ago, there are now
hundreds, probably thousands, of companies in India, China, Eastern
Europe and Latin America offering ‘business process outsourcing’ (BPO)
services, and growing from that, ‘knowledge process outsourcing’ (KPO)
services. The growing trend in BPO saw hundreds of thousands of socalled ‘back office jobs’ move to India and other large Asian markets ofwww.makeamillionebook.com
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How To Make a $Million in Business With No Qualifications and Without Leaving Home
fering labor far below Western rates, over the late 1990’s and early
2000’s. As firms relocated IT services and call centers out to India, then
next KPO was born, starting a trend for outsourcing such services as
business research, market research, data analysis, database management, IP (intellectual property) research and so on. KPO is the world I am
involved in, and it’s still a very young, evolving space, which even more
recently has been joined by LPO – legal process outsourcing.
So this new world of outsourcing is the trend my business exploits. I use
specialist KPO firms in Asia to write the majority of my published research work, and then I handle sales and service from this end. The
firms in Asia will also look after IT, building and managing websites for
me and maintaining databases and so on. This removes almost all of the
hassle from running my growing business, as I have no permanent staff,
no office rent to pay, no capital equipment costs, no bills to pay, I simply
‘rent’ enough manpower for each new project on an ad-hoc basis, and
any time I want to stop I have absolutely no forward liability at all. So
long as I complete any projects we have started and pay the bill, I am free
to do as I please any time.
As my business has grown and matured I have managed to maintain a
constant flow of projects for my team, so I retain these staff now on a
permanent basis. This is good for my business as they are learning all
the time and building specialist expertise in our business area, namely
telecoms. This is also great for me, as I have all the benefits of permanent
staff, but none of the hassle. I negotiate each deal with the KPO firms
and we arrange how many staff will work on my project, for a number of
days, or weeks, or months. Once these terms are agreed, they are committed to ensuring that I get those resources that I am paying for.
This is great for me – if someone calls in sick, not my problem! If someone quits his or her job – not my problem! Hiring new staff – not my
problem! Someone’s desk/chair/PC/air conditioning/broadband connection is broken – not my problem! By outsourcing the staff I don’t have to
worry about hiring and firing, it’s not my worry to ensure the whole team
are present every day, and it’s certainly not my worry or my expense to
ensure that every employee has all the equipment they need in good
working order.
Instead of these things being my problem, the KPO company has to deal
with all these issues. They have to pay staff to cover holidays, sick leave,
maternity pay, etc. If staff need to be fired, if employment tribunals are
involved, if long term sick leave is draining resources…none of these issues are my problem. Many small business owners suffer tremendous
levels of stress over these issues and tremendous costs too, but by outwww.makeamillionebook.com
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sourcing my production staff I remove the stress from my shoulders and
free up my time to focus on selling, bringing money into my business.
Speaking of selling, I outsource some of that too! Yes, even the sales
process can be outsourced to third parties if required, though as a former salesman myself I do enjoy selling and I do engage in sales work
every day – well, I’ve got to have something to do all day! Generally I still
do almost all of my own sales work, but I do outsource sales support
work to Asia, and I rely on sales from a network of third party resellers to
provide some of the company’s income. You’ll read more on resellers and
sales agents later in this book.
Virtual business
Just how 21st Century do you want it to be? Hey, this business is amazing; this business model freaks people out. I explain this business to
people over fifty years of age and they just look at me like I am an alien
or I have two heads or something - they just don’t get it! They simply
don’t understand how come I never leave home, I never meet anyone, I
don’t manufacture anything, I rarely even speak to anyone, I don’t manufacture a physical product, I don’t provide a physical service, the only
things I put in the post are invoices, I don’t even write the actual books
myself…yet somehow, thousands of bucks are transferred into my bank
account every month!
Seriously, to most people who grew up before the age of the Internet this
business model of mine is a complete freak out. People from an age when
real things got made or built in factories and sold in shops, people like
my parents (in their sixties) and even people in more traditional jobs who
are as young as their forties just don’t get it!
I know I have written this before – and will write it again before this book
is done – but the Internet has changed the world in such radical ways it’s
hard for some people to understand. I come up with an idea for a product, and I email one of my teams on the other side of the world asking
them to take my brief and ‘work it up’ into a full spec (specification). This
comes back to me with some ideas for discussion, which we usually chew
over in a thirty minute call, then they produce a written quote, suggesting time frame, cost, layout of book (I say ‘book’, but it’s ‘management
report’ actually, but we’ll cover that later), details to be covered, etc.
Once I commission the team to start work, they work in their offices
without input from me, until I edit the draft report and add my thoughts,
my analysis, my comments on their work, etc. The job proceeds this way
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during production, generally going back and forth across the globe by
email, perhaps three or four times in total. Once it’s finished, they send
me the final documents, and I then email or call my designer, who adds a
cover and makes a brochure for me. Then I email or call my IT guy, who
adds details of the new product to the company website. Once the details
are up, I promote the report using email and some phone calls, and people order by email, phone, fax or post (generally in that order of popularity), either requesting an invoice or sending me credit card details for
payment.
I process these orders, I take the payment using the credit card terminal
in my home office, I send the report by email, I send the invoice by email
and a hard copy by post if required, I send the receipt in the post (with
the invoice in most cases) and I follow up with an email or even a phone
call some time later to see if everything is OK. Guess what – I never left
home, I never met anyone, I didn’t make anything, I didn’t provide a
physical service, I didn’t provide a physical product…yet by doing this,
somehow between twenty and sixty grand arrives in the company bank
account every month.
It’s amazing when you think about it; in most cases I never even speak to
the customer, and even those payments are made by ‘invisible’ electronic
bank transfer, but it all just keeps working. I could spend all day in my
pyjamas if I wanted to (hey, I don’t really…but I could) and never leave
the house (but I always do, it’s not healthy to stay in all day, so I at least
take my dog for a walk) and in a really good month, I can bank over $85
grand! That’s amazing, the true epitome of the modern business in the
virtual world. Welcome to 21st Century working, I love it!!!
Environmentally friendly
This business is also totally green! Wow, what a great bonus in present
times, to have found a way to be your own boss and start your own company, AND have hardly any negative impact on the environment. Think
about it, no factory, workshop or offices to run/heat/cool/light/equip, no
company cars, vans or trucks, no manufacturing process, no staff canteen, no coffee machines or water coolers, virtually no physical output of
any kind!
This business is great! The only physical things that I use or produce in
running my company are:
-
one copy of each book/report, which I have printed and bound to
keep for my files
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-
invoices posted to clients in envelopes
credit card receipts
a few printed notes during production, maybe ten or twenty pages
maximum for each project
Essential paperwork for my accounts/files/taxes
That’s it, otherwise we don’t produce anything solid, and so the company
produces virtually no waste. In terms of fitting into modern day requirements to reduce our carbon footprint, you couldn’t get a more environmentally friendly business, and I am very proud of the fact that I earn a
living without it costing ‘the Earth’.
Of course the company uses a little electricity, I run three or four PCs
and a couple of routers and printers, and I have a couple of phones and
a credit card terminal and I have my hi-fi system playing most days, but
these are not significant compared to the power consumption of a manufacturing line. I appreciate that as a home worker, our household domestic heating and air conditioning bills are a little higher than usual, as
some days in summer the air con runs all day and in winter I keep the
heating on all day, even if the rest of the family are out, but annualised,
this is nothing compared to the energy that would be used if I rented offices and worked away from home.
Taken as a whole, I believe this business is very environmentally friendly
and I am very proud of this fact. It’s testament once again to the way the
Internet has changed the world. I can see a future where the Internet becomes one technology that has a massive impact in helping to reduce the
effects of human activity on our planets delicate environment. I am not
naïve and I appreciate that the Internet is powered by huge server farms,
which require vast amounts of air conditioning, using huge amounts of
power.
However, I believe that the future of broadband video conferencing could
offer a viable alternative to millions of air miles of international business
travel - if you doubt my prediction just look at the latest innovations in
video conferencing by such market leaders as Cisco, as an example; it’s
impressive technology, really impressive.
There is every chance that such technological solutions and others like it
could radically change the future of business communications. Combined with other new services, the Internet will continue to dramatically
change our lives for many years to come. Anyway, it sounds like I am
writing one of our telecoms reports now, so I had better move on…
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With no qualifications…that’s right, NO qualifications
I’ve got nothing against formal academic qualifications; in fact I am actually studying for a degree myself in my spare time, but let’s get one thing
straight here: a bunch of qualifications does not automatically correlate
to business success as defined in terms of earnings. What did I just say?
Put simply - being old ‘Billy-Big-Brains’ won’t automatically make you
RICH! Got it?
I’ve spent years looking at the link between traditional academic qualifications, higher ‘intelligence’ and income and wealth, and I have to say
that there is little evidence that I have seen that proves a stack of academic qualifications leads to greater earning potential. I am aware that
over the years studies have proved that individuals with a degree earn
something like 15% more in their first job than individuals without, but I
have never seen any research looking at the bigger picture. I know many
really smart people with great college degrees behind them, educated at
top schools, MBAs from well respected establishments, years of academic
sweat on their brows…and I earn like three times as much as they do!!
The point is, lots of clever people have lots of great academic qualifications, but it’s not essential, and if you don’t have a degree from Harvard
and an MBA from Wharton it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll never be
a high earner – there is plenty of potential for ordinary folk to get by
without those important pieces of paper.
I don’t have a degree, nor an MBA, nor a PhD, but I outsource the writing
of my reports to people who do. Yes, the Indian and Chinese workers who
write my research reports have all the best qualifications that young
people can hope to earn in their home countries. These bright young men
and women have degrees in science and math and English and many of
them MBAs and even PhDs, so they are amply qualified to write the kind
of weighty research that my company produces. So when we sell market
research reports, which include market analysis or trend forecasts, we
are not cheating any one, the research wasn’t written by idiots with no
knowledge of the market, not at all, the research is written by skilled and
qualified market analysts and forecasters, who spend their entire working year studying these markets and writing this research.
What’s more, by Indian and Chinese standards, working in the KPO sector is very good work, well respected and well paid within the domestic
market. This is good news for everyone, as it means you get workers who
are highly motivated, in good jobs, well paid and hence hard working and
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ing into the fast growing work force, which means better written research
reports, good for you and good for your customers. Everyone is a winner.
So you don’t need any special qualifications to do this job…I don’t have
any, just a basic school education. What is more important is having
some common sense, gumption, street smarts, or whatever you want to
call it. Listen, this whole book, my whole ‘system’ for making a million
bucks, this didn’t come from a text book, I didn’t copy it from anyone,
no-one else was doing it, still isn’t that I have found (though I am sure
someone else must do the same thing, somewhere). No, I made this up,
dreamed up the whole thing after a few years working in and around the
publishing industry (see my story, later in this book).
I saw companies all over the world paying for premium-priced business
research; I saw companies in Europe and the US writing research reports
with a typical production cost between $60K to $200K per report; I saw
salesmen like me taking just 10% of the cover price for selling this research, and the staff writing them making an even smaller cut than that;
I saw the rise of the BPO market in Asia; I saw myself learning a bit
about the telecoms space just from selling books and then I put all this
together and thought “Yeah, I could do that, be a publishing company,
pay bright Asians to write me some books, then sell them and keep ALL
the money, not just a few percent.”
And so a business was born. But that’s the point, I was smart enough to
see all this and put it all together and create a fantastic opportunity, a
whole new business and a whole new way of life, with massive ramifications for myself and my young family. So I may not have a bunch of academic qualifications, but I am a smart, switched on guy, and that’s what
you need to be - switched-on, smart, agile, quick-thinking, looking for
changes in the market, opportunities, the ‘next big thing’.
It may sound obvious to some of you (hopefully it sounds obvious to all of
you…) but you’re not going to make a million being a dummy. No sir,
these ridiculous Internet sites that promise ‘Make millions while sitting
at home doing virtually nothing all day’ or ‘Millions for Dummies’ or ‘The
Half-Wits way to a Fortune’ just don’t wash, it’s crazy. Sorry to shatter
any illusions, but if you are a complete dope, give up now, go back to the
sofa, stare at your TV and waste the rest of your life away…this book
ain’t for you my friend.
However, and I hope you are ALL still reading, if you are prepared to
switch on, get smart and put in some effort, then you really can easily
out-earn that smart guy with the MBA without even leaving home – and
without kissing the boss’s butt!
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Emotional intelligence, now that’s more interesting than traditional academic intelligence when it comes to earning money in today’s business
world. Emotional Intelligence (try looking on Amazon for the wonderful
Daniel Goleman book by the same title, I thoroughly recommend it) concentrates more on the individual’s ability to communicate effectively with
other people. Being good at communicating with other people – something which tends to be present in most sales people, PR folks, marketing
people, decent managers and others in communication-intensive careers,
such as teachers, customer service workers, etc – is often a far more useful skill to have than any academic qualification.
Good communicators generally have high EI (emotional intelligence),
making them good at understanding what other people want and need,
and good at interacting with other people in ways that elicit the best responses. People with high EI tend to make friends easily and are usually
good at avoiding or settling arguments. If you have higher-than-average
EI, you may never have known what it is, but I’ll bet you know if I am
talking about you…right?
You don’t need to have any academic qualifications to run a business
like mine, nor do you need to have high EI, and in fact you don’t really
need any business experience either, but I guess all of these things do
help. If you have certain skills that you can ‘bring to the table’ then that’s
so much the better. Maybe you have some skills or experience or knowledge that I never had. In all honesty, I had very little industry-specific
knowledge about the telecoms industry when I started, and my knowledge of the publishing industry in general was quite limited and in reality
quite out-of-date.
I had an idea, and determination, and I thought ‘hell, I’m making this
whole thing up as I go along anyway, this new business idea is so nontraditional, if I don’t know it, I’ll just make up a new way and surge
ahead.’ And that is exactly what I did. Over the years, I have found ways
to refine and perfect what I do, and I have learned of ways other people
do things which would make my business better, and I have adopted
those ideas thinking ‘Oh if I had only known this two/three/four/five
years sooner it could have saved me time and effort’ but you live and
learn, that’s how it goes. That’s one of the great advantages of this book –
I’ve spent the last seven years creating and learning and perfecting this
business and now I can pass all that on to you so you can replicate this
business in half the time! I’m so good to you – what a nice guy!!
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Ultra-low up-front capital investment
I wanted to write ‘zero’ up-front investment, but ‘zero’ is a bit of an exaggeration, but ‘very, very low’ up-front capital investment would be perfectly true. I started my company for just $1,242 US dollars, which covered the costs of setting up and registering the company, creating a logo
and a corporate image, designing and setting up a basic website (which
you could do cheaper if you know how to write and publish a simple site
yourself) retaining the services of a CPA (accountant) to help me, getting
tax registered, buying some books and office supplies for keeping my accounts and so on, and purchasing a couple of software packages I
needed.
Of course I already had a couple of PCs, a suite of office software (MS Office suite – I use MS Word, Outlook and Excel all the time) and a broadband connection, all of which are essential, and a telephone and antivirus software. Once I had all this, and with my $1,242 bucks of risk
capital on the line, I was ready to get started.
Many people are too frightened to start their own business because upfront costs at start-up can be very high. As a typical scenario, take the
entrepreneurial inventor who comes up with a new product or an innovative new design for an existing product. Often such entrepreneurs and
inventors find the costs of tooling up a production facility are prohibitively high, and they end up selling their idea to a manufacturer, perhaps
for just a few thousand bucks, or a tiny percentage of future profits. It
must be so heart breaking when the product goes on to become a multimillion dollar selling item, and the inventor or entrepreneur is making
just a tiny fraction of that money (typically just 1 to 1.5 percent) as the
owner of the patent.
This illustrates another wonderful advantage of a business that employs
fully the virtual world of the Internet. While it would be wrong to say that
Moorland Business Research (my company) is a ‘virtual business’ (it’s
not, it’s a real business), it does fully employ many of the facets of the
virtual world, and yet the profits I generate, and the things that those
profits afford me to buy for myself and my family, are very real indeed.
My house, my car, and the vacations we take…these things are very real,
not virtual at all.
Even factoring the cost of buying a PC, the MS Office Suite and a broadband connection, you could start this business for no more than $2000
bucks, certainly $2500 at most. Obviously to some people, $2500 is a lot
of money to lose if this doesn’t work out. Listen, I have been honest with
you from the start, this is not some easy ‘quick-fix’ scheme, you won’t be
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a millionaire over night, but this is a very real story of how I set up a
home business using just $1,242 bucks of my capital and so far that
business has grossed over 2.5 million dollars by its seventh birthday,
with my wife and I as the only employees. I’ve had to work for it, during
the harder years I’ve worked over fifteen hours per day, month after
month, but once the business was firing on all four cylinders I was packing income over $300K per annum working just six hours per day, from
home, in jeans and a t-shirt, with my music playing, kids running
around, easy living.
If you are prepared to try it, to risk a couple of grand and some hard
work, there is NO REASON why you can’t emulate my success. There is
almost unlimited scope for new entrants into this market. There is plenty
of potential for hundreds of new small, specialist market research firms
in every market sector, from telecoms to pharmaceuticals to automotive
engineering, oil and gas, mining, power generation, construction, heavy
industrial engineering and so on. I’ve seen small specialist publishing
firms producing news and research services for the most tightly defined
market niches. Some publishers produce data which has a total maximum worldwide audience of just a few hundred professionals around the
globe. While a small market makes your product harder to sell, it usually
means you can charge more, and for some people that is ideal.
Whatever your field of expertise, or your interest, there is plenty of opportunity out there, if you are prepared to put in some time, a little money
and a certain amount of effort, and be patient while the results of your
labors grow. Don’t expect to make your fortune overnight, if that’s what
you want, try a lottery ticket, but commit yourself to trying this for a
minimum of one year, running your business in your spare time, with no
risk to losing your ‘day job’, commit a minimum of say ten hours per
week for one year, and you will get results. Once you get the momentum
going, the rewards will follow, if just takes a while to build up. Like all
good things in life, you get out what you put in; you reap what you sow,
so get sowing.
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Chapter 2:
My Growth Story
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Beginnings
I started Moorland Business Research at the start of 2002 after spending
the previous five years selling low-value products in the telecoms sector
for a variety of mainly US and European companies. Prior to that I spent
a few years in sales in a variety of average jobs, mostly selling business
to business, but also selling to consumers, and working in shops and a
couple of factories. Before that I had a stint as a teacher, and I spent
about eight years in the printing industry, where I learned a bit about
publishing, but it’s all pretty ‘old-school’ and out-of-date these days,
print and publishing has moved on a long way in the digital age, what I
did back fifteen years ago has changed completely now.
I expect many of you reading this will search for Moorland Business Research [MBR] online and you won’t find it, and you’ll wonder just what
kind of bullshit story this book really is. Well, fear not, I’m not just making this stuff up, but the truth is MBR is still up and running and still
making me a lot of money, only now I have outsourced almost every
function of the business, so while my profit margin has declined slightly,
I now earn a very comfortable income for doing virtually nothing, just a
few hours per week at most.
Because the business is still in operation, I have changed the name of
the company in this book to maintain anonymity. I am sure you will understand. MBR does exist and is very active, which is all the more reason
for keeping its identity a secret! Many large companies simply would not
purchase research reports from me if they knew MBR was a 1-man operation working from my spare room at home. Even though the research
work is written by suitably qualified people in India, China, Poland, Singapore and Chile (the extent of my network includes a few other places
too, but 90% is in India and China), many big companies would fail to
see MBR as a ‘proper, legitimate’ company if they read this book and
knew the company under discussion.
It seems a shame to me, that so many companies are still prejudiced in
this way, but that’s how it is. If I were to gather the same staff into a big
office and move them all to a central location, raise their pay according to
their new home-country, pay office rents, buy new equipment, etc…then
write the same research reports and charge twice as much, they would
still want the research, but they would complain about the prices and
ask for a discount. Yet despite that, they would not be happy if they
knew the true order of things as they are. Big companies – full of crazy
people!
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At this point, I want to be sure that you understand that there is nothing
illegal, immoral, deceitful or underhand about how MBR operates. We do
top-quality research and analysis work and sell it to companies who need
such research at very reasonable rates. The work we sell is first class, we
offer excellent after sales support, answering any questions, supporting
the conclusions people read in our publications. We have been in operation for over seven years now and so we are not ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ suppliers, we are a reliable long term source of market intelligence
and a well established, well know, well respected market research vendor.
As you read in the previous chapter, I personally do not have any academic qualifications, but I do not suggest that such qualifications are of
no value, of course not. The people who actually do the research work for
my company are amply-skilled, appropriately-qualified and fullyexperienced, and as outsourced workers, they also do similar work for
some of the biggest and best-known names (and most expensive) in the
research industry. Oh yes, that’s absolutely true. Almost every research
publishing company out there, even the very biggest, outsource some of
their work to India and China, where there is a huge pool of very welleducated talent.
So the people who do my research work are MSc and MBA qualified, who
also do research and analysis work for many other much better known
research companies. We in no way ‘con’ or ‘rip-off’ our clients, we deliver
first rate work at fair market prices, it’s just our extremely new and unconventional business model that would raise many eyebrows if it was
revealed, and that is why we create the illusion that we are a normal
company…it’s a matter of ‘what they don’t know, won’t hurt them.’
So we remain anonymous. I intend, when I am finished with my publishing company, unless I sell it on to someone else who restricts me from
revealing its name, that I will re-write this book using the real name and
reveal all! You have my word!
After all those jobs in various aspects of print, publishing and telecoms, I
found myself in a job selling market research reports for other publishers. It was a telesales job basically, paid on commission only, no basic
salary, and I would typically sell a report costing about $2000 bucks and
retain about 10% of that cover price as my commission for the sale. After
a while in this game, I figured out that writing these reports probably
wasn’t that hard, it’s pretty formulaic stuff, and I had just discovered
about these clever guys in China and India who could do the research for
me.
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I spoke to the sales rep for one Indian KPO company, and shared my idea
with him. At the time, KPO was pretty new in India, very much in its infancy. So far, the BPO scene had boomed, all manner of IT work, call
centers, back office functions, and some basic research work (like legal
work, patent research, IP dispute research, stuff like that) was being outsourced, but market research was still actually quite new. My contact
suggested that his firm would be able to handle the work without any
problems, and I managed to get him to agree to give me 90 days credit
(he was – and still is – a really great guy, and to this day I don’t think his
boss knew he let me have that long to pay the bill!!) before I had to settle
for the first job. So I commissioned the KPO experts in India to start
working on our first research report and while that was in progress I set
up the company and created a website, a logo, name, tax registration,
etc.
I had MBR up and running and looking pretty tidy by the time that first
report was ready for release, and then I had ninety days to play with, before I was due to pay the bill. That first bill was only about $5000 bucks
but I remember thinking that it was risky, I didn’t want to end up with a
duff product and have to pay out the five grand myself – that would have
been the beginning and end of my business right there and then! However, within the ninety days the report was a big hit and took orders
worth over $10,000, many of which were invoiced and paid by the time I
had to settle with the KPO company. To this day, I have tried to never
again make them wait that long to be paid, now I try to settle all my bills
within sixty days at most, often quicker.
So we were off, success! One report out and one success story. This had
lit my fire, and now I was ready for the big league. While still busy trying
to sell more copies of my first report, I had an idea for the second one, so
I agreed the spec with my colleagues in Asia and commissioned them to
start work on number two. At this point, the point where I gave them the
“go” on the second project, the company had so far generated a total of
$22,000 in profit, so I committed the whole lot to the second project, reinvesting every penny. The second project took three and a half months
to write, including more input, advice, editing and assistance from me
than I had originally envisaged, but the end result was awesome. I had
arrived; this was the real deal now, a proper market research report,
which any senior manager at any telecoms company would be happy to
read.
And boy oh boy, they did. That second product, finally published some
eight months after starting the company, cost a total of $22,000 in production costs, but grossed $140,000 USD over the following nine
months. I was amazed, this was better than my wildest dreams, better
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than I could have ever imagined. I was blown away by the earning potential of this new business. After one year in business, my young company
had turned over $120,000 and I wrote myself a dividend check from the
company for $70,000 USD, as a bonus for working a few evenings and
weekend afternoons, and my wife and I just stared at that check for what
felt like hours, as I was thinking ‘and this is just the start’.
The second year
Writing myself that dividend check at the end of the first year was a turning point. What had started as a hobby to generate some extra cash ‘on
the side’ of my day job was starting to look like it had amazing potential.
I calculated the hours I had worked on my day job, and hence the actual
hourly rate that job earned me, and then calculated the hours I had
worked for MBR, and what it had paid me, and guess what? Yeah, you
got it, after just one year, MBR was paying me a better hourly rate than
my day job.
I notched it up a gear and decided to give MBR a huge push in year two.
Using profits retained in the company (see, still no risk, I like to play
safe!) I commissioned the next product from my production team in India. Actually, I had made a mistake here already. Writing these big research reports takes time, often several months from start to finish, so
you need to be thinking ahead all the time. During the first year, I had
been so blown away by sales on our first big report that I just kept focussing my time and energy on selling that report, and I never gave a
thought to getting the next one started, in production.
Once sales on the first big one had finally run out of steam I remember
thinking it was time to publish the next one. I decided on a title, got the
spec and price agreed with my KPO partners, and commissioned the
study. Then I waited, and waited, and contributed some thoughts and
waited, and then waited some more. Four months in total, that’s how
long it took to finish that second big study – worth it though, it was a
masterpiece in the end. This was such a mistake, as all the steam had
gone out of sales of the first one, so I only had the occasional order still
coming through for that, but I couldn’t start selling the second one until
it was ready. So I ended up with a four month period where sales were
very quiet, indeed two of those months I put no orders through at all,
and that period left a huge hole in the sales ledger.
In hindsight, it seems so obvious that was going to happen, but back
then, like I said before, this was all new. I was pioneering this thing as I
went, breaking new ground along the way, and these kinds of mistakes
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were easily made. After that point, I resolved never to let that happen
again, and I started working a system where almost as soon as I finish
one major project, then I immediately start the next. This way, my production team are working on the next study while I am selling the latest
completed one, and we have a nice constant rolling production system in
place – well, in theory anyway!
That second big study, when it did finally come out, was an instant hit.
The month before it was published was a flat month of zero sales and
nothing on the ledger. Then the month we published that second big
study we recorded a new ‘best-month-ever’ since the start of the company, clocking up $37 grand in sales, and continuing to make $66 grand
that quarter. With sales from the first product supporting the first half of
year two, and sales from the second product lining my pockets in the
second half of the year, I ended up that second year on almost $200K
turnover, far more than I ever dreamed the company would make when I
had set it up.
The third year, rapid growth
Year three went crazy, growing turnover to $345,000, and all the while
keeping my profit margin at around 65%, which I maintained from the
start. I managed to keep profit at over 80% in the first year, and these
days, with the company much bigger and more functions outsourced, I
keep profits at about 60%, but always my goal has been to split the revenue, very approximately, into thirds. One third costs, two thirds profit,
that’s always been my general rule of thumb.
Still making mistakes as I was learning, in year three I tried to produce
too much. Having been ‘burned’ by my experience in year two, I was desperate not to have ‘dead months’ in year three. I became so determined to
have plenty to sell that I commissioned too many new reports from my
suppliers, and this led to the opposite problem – too much time managing the production side of the business and too many products to sell,
rather than not enough. I put out no less than eight products in year
three, some were big studies and some smaller, shorter reports, but still
that’s a new product out every six or seven weeks all year round, which
is a serious pace to maintain! With just little old me to manage everything, I just didn’t have enough time to dedicate to selling all those products.
I tried experimenting with smaller reports, which would sell at a lower
price point to the previous two big reports we had published. I thought
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tion and this would help keep a steady flow of new products coming to
market, and hence a steady year-round flow of revenue. In hindsight,
publishing doesn’t always seem to work this way and in reality it often
takes as long and just as much hard work to write a short book as a long
one, so I ended up spending the whole year mired in production and not
spending enough time on sales.
Mid-year I gave up the day job. MBR seemed to be going from strength to
strength and the day job was only paying me about half the hourly rate
that MBR was paying me, so I quit to concentrate full time on running
my own business. Ultimately, year three was another triumph, but I only
made it through because of hard work and determination, not through
being so smart. The major lesson I learned was to get the balance right
between not publishing enough and publishing too much.
Valuable Lesson: Running a company using outsourced production is
great, but it’s kind of easy – especially when things are going well – to
keep saying “do more” and the KPO firms in Asia just keep saying “yes
sir”. Before long, you can have a small army working for you out in
Asia and you’ll find yourself overwhelmed at this end. When the invoices all come in for payment, you better hope your sales have been
keeping pace with all that report writing or your profits are screwed.
All I am saying is this; don’t rush, pace it out. Aggressive, ambitious
growth plans are great, but don’t sink yourself. Walk before you run.
I did OK in year three in the end, I worked hard and grew the business
75% in one year and still maintained a margin of over 65%, but I had to
work perhaps a little too hard to do it. Learn from my mistakes – don’t
push it too fast, take your time, grow it at max 50% per year, learn to
walk good before you try to run.
Also, in that state of ‘over-production’, I found I never had quite enough
sales time to dedicate to any one product, so come year end, when I
looked back over the year’s performance, I felt several of the products
that I had published had failed to maximize their potential. When publishing business research, there is no going back to a product at a later
date. These research reports have a limited shelf life because the information inside is dated and as with all things in business, trends change,
things move on, and after 12 months your ‘cutting edge research’ is like
yesterday’s news… nobody wants it.
If you don’t give yourself enough time to work the sales on each product,
then the next one comes along and you have to move on. I found, at that
stage (in year three), that eight products in one year were way too much
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and several of those products didn’t give me the kind of ROI I like to see.
ROI is ‘return on investment’. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a
measure of how much you get back in profits compared to how much you
spent in the first place. I like to shoot for an ROI of about four on average, in other words for every dollar I sent on a new project, I want to earn
four back in sales. After the bills are paid and the general costs of running the company (called overheads – see, you are learning so much
about business in this chapter) are taken care of, and taxes are covered,
that leaves me with two thirds of gross annual turnover as profit.
Of course, there is rarely such a thing as an ‘average’ product. Sometimes (but not often) I publish reports that barely turn a profit, and on
other occasions I have published “ten-baggers”. A ten-bagger is a product
that makes back ten times the investment, or more. My best ROI on a
product since I started the company is twenty five! Yes, I published one
little report that made back twenty five times the investment, all in about
nine months or less, but that doesn’t happen every time, so don’t get too
excited! Also, an ROI of twenty five on a small, low-value product, may
actually generate less cash than an ROI of four or five on a bigger highvalue product, so treat ROI figures with some caution.
So far, I have never published a report that has ended up losing me
money, but a couple have been pretty slow sellers, and I have had to
‘tune them up a bit’ in order to get out of the red and make a few bucks
from them. On average, I get to see an ROI between three and six on all
the big studies, the ones that cost me between $20K and $40K to publish. These solid performers form the vast bulk of my annual revenues,
and the odd ten-bagger that comes along makes a nice bonus. To date,
the best performance for one of my big reports has been an ROI of eleven,
on an initial spend of $18K, which made $200K in sales. Sweet! That’s all
I have to say – S-W-E-E-T!!!
Year four I tried to get that all-important balance right. I published four
major research reports and no small products, which can be a distraction from the big earners. From the point of view of timing and resource
management, four big studies, evenly spaced through the working year,
was about right, one per quarter. This should ensure a steady flow of
sales revenue, no ‘dead months’ and not too much production work coming my way. The only problem was that it left no room for error. If any
one of those four was a bit of a flop, you’re right back where you were in
year two, with ‘slow months’ in your annual cash flow.
Note: At this point, I should note something. I keep talking about how this
business is built around the premise that I outsource production to Asia, so
all I have to do is sales work…yet in recent pages I keep referring to the
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production schedule eating into my time. Allow me to explain. While the
bulk of production IS done overseas, there is still a certain amount of project management, editing and general supervision required from this end.
In fact, there is another important lesson to learn here. When I started
this, I really did naively think that 100% of production would be done in
Asia and that all I had to do was dream up the project in the first place,
then the KPO services would write it, and I would receive a finished item.
So wrong! That just goes to show how little I knew at the start. To think
you can write a book that easily. In reality, it requires a fair bit of project
management from this end, supervising the work, ensuring the job is heading in the right direction, editing any language you are not happy with and
so on. I’ll go into much more detail later in this book about how to actually
produce one of these research reports, including details on how these
books are made up, structure, lay out, look and feel, type of content inside,
and so on. But for now, just be aware, that like anything in life, to do a
good job you need to put in some effort.
So as I was saying, even in year four, still the business model wasn’t
quite right, as it allowed no contingency for things not going well. As it
happens, the second of the four reports I published that year was a bit of
a flop, only giving me an ROI of less than two, so not even a doubling of
my money. That means I worked for four months project managing and
editing that job, and ended up with about one month’s salary for it –
pretty poor.
Luckily for me, the first of the four reports we published that year was
my super s-w-e-e-t eleven-bagger that I mentioned above, so that made
up for the poor performer, but it’s risky to rely on these things always
working out that way. So still the model needed tweaking. Going into
year five I had to get it right, so my target was to publish one major study
per quarter, plus two or three small studies throughout the year, maybe
adding a fifth major study if there was time.
Years four to seven
Year four was also a significant year for revenues, I broke half a million
for the first time, just, hitting gross turnover for the year of $503,000
USD, which was a huge motivational boost for me. Year five matched
that for sales, but for the first time the company barely grew, as we only
hit $510,000 in gross turnover. I did publish more reports in year five,
but I think I had finally found what you might call ‘the limit’ in terms of
how big I could grow the company without hiring staff and renting offices. At this point, five years in, it was still just me.
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This is an interesting point actually, because I spent year five kind of telling myself that I had hit this limit, this point where it would not be possible to grow the business further without moving out of my home office,
renting offices, hiring staff and working longer hours. Somewhere around
the middle of year six I realized this was total bull! This was just a story I
had been telling myself, like an excuse for stopping at a certain point. In
the end year six cleared $550,000 in sales and we have grown again way
beyond $600,000 turnover in year seven.
The company is currently (as I write this book) just coming to the end of
year seven and we have now turned over more than $2.7 Million Dollars
since we started, and I still did it all WITHOUT LEAVING HOME!! I now
see my goal for years eight and the future is to pioneer new ways to expand the business model, grow the model by outsourcing more and more
to find new limits.
This is the whole point, I now realize, that what I love about this business isn’t the job itself, it’s the business model, the actual way I run the
company, that’s the fun bit, the exciting bit. Learning more ways to run a
company without leaving home, more ways to grow a business without
renting offices and hiring staff and buying capital equipment, etc, this is
the real juice, the real buzz. Imagine if I can get this to a $1 Million annual turnover, working from home, without ever leaving home, with no
office rent, no other permanent staff, it’s mind boggling, what a great
challenge – can I run a Million Dollar turnover company without stepping
outside the front door?
That’s an awesome concept; imagine that scenario before the Internet existed; that never would have been possible. Imagine a home based business that can take a million a year in revenues without producing a
physical product, delivering a physical service, without ever even leaving
home or meeting any of your customers. So that’s my goal now, to grow
another 40% or more to that point, to outsource some of my production
management, outsource more of the sales process, outsource some of the
accounts work and outsource more of the IT. Hey, then I could write another book – How to Make a $Million PER YEAR in Business with No
Qualifications and Without Leaving Home - but one step at a time, right?
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Growth of MBR in approximate annual sales revenues.
MBR Sales Growth
600000
500000
400000
300000
200000
100000
0
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Total amount of revenue generated in first full six years, $2.253 M USD
Total amount which was profit in first six years, $1.442 M USD
So after paying my taxes (very tax efficient as a small business owner, get
yourself a good CPA) I ended up with approximately $1.25 M USD in my
pocket over those first six years, and remember I was still earning a full
salary from my ‘day job’ during the first two years of that time.
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Chapter 3:
The Business Information Market
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Business information
The business information market is a large and highly competitive space,
and I had some limited experience of working in this space before I
started MBR. Prior to MBR I had worked in publishing for a short time,
mostly working in the offline world, handling print buying and understanding how hard copy books are created, typeset and printed. Then I
worked for a while as a salesman in publishing, selling publishing services to organizations and selling hard copy printed materials to the
market. During this time I spent a few years selling the kind of market
research reports that MBR now publishes, so I did learn the basics of
this industry before I started MBR.
I also spent a few years (way back now) working as a salesman in the IT
sector, and I even spent time as an engineer back in the early days of microcomputers. None of these jobs made me rich, but collectively I must
admit that I gained some valuable experience around print, publishing,
IT, computers and sales, all of which has proven useful in driving the
success of MBR.
Useful, but not essential, so if none of your previous work experience has
been relevant to the publishing industry, don’t let that put you off. Since
the inception of the Internet, everything about print and publishing has
changed anyway, so very little of the knowledge I gained from those early
jobs is of much use to me now. Sometimes it is useful to know how
books are put together and I guess it can be handy when I find that publishing industry jargon doesn’t confuse me, but to be honest, you’ll soon
pick that stuff up, it’s not difficult.
Of course, talking about stuff I learned ten or fifteen or twenty years ago
is pretty pointless anyway, because as I explained in the first chapter,
this is a very 21st Century business, this is a thoroughly modern, thoroughly virtual, online, Internet-age e-business. As I wrote in chapter two,
the real juice in this business is the fact that I invented this business
model, it was all my idea, I didn’t copy it off anyone else, I didn’t emulate
any other business, I spotted an opportunity and a few trends, and put it
all together to create MBR the way it is today. So it doesn’t matter if you
never worked in publishing the way it used to be, or if you know nothing
of the old ways of the printing industry – what the heck, I don’t print
books and we are not a traditional publishers, so none of that matters.
Seriously people, there is absolutely nothing traditional about this business, and like I also said before, I am not so arrogant as to think I have
found the best way to do it. No sir, I wholly expect and hope that a few of
you folks reading this book will copy this business model and evolve it
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onwards, develop it in new, fresh ways, move it on – and then call me or
email me and tell me all about it, PLEASE! I’m totally serious about this.
I’ve said all along that I just make this up as I travel along the path, each
year I strive to make more money and work less hours, and so each year
I try to refine the business to make that happen. It’s taken me seven
years to get this far, but with this book, and the wisdom it contains, the
lessons from my triumphs and mistakes, you can emulate my business
in two years, not seven, then you can evolve it and move it to the next
level.
And I really do want to hear about it when that happens. Email me at
[email protected] and tell me all about it. Hey, I’m giving
you the benefit of all my experience in this book which you purchased for
just a few dollars, giving you my secrets to help you make a million, so if
you find ways to take my good work and improve on it, do me a favor and
let me know the improvements you make. It’s the least you can do to say
thanks to me!
Speaking of all my experience, let’s take a look at the business information industry; it’s time for some practical market knowledge. Now you
understand the business model that we are using, it’s time to start learning some details about the industry.
Business information comes in a wide variety of forms and formats. So
far in this book I have referred to my products mostly as ‘books’, or reports, but now you need to understand these products in more detail.
You get market studies, or strategic management reports, that’s what we
publish at MBR, and then you also get newsletters, surveys, books,
magazines, periodicals, maps, wallcharts, slide presentations, data tables
and bespoke research. Now I’ll explain what all of these products are.
Reports or studies.
This is what MBR publishes. Market Reports, or Market Studies, or you
might call them Strategic Management Reports or some other fancy title.
These are big, expensive research reports that explore a certain topic or
range of topics, aimed at providing answers to the kind of questions
business managers ask. These might be questions like how does a certain market or technology look? What opportunities exist for making
money in that market/technology? How is that market/technology likely
to change in the future? What are the risks? Who is the competition?
Etc.
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Business managers purchase these studies to help them make investment decisions, to help them guide their sales and marketing staff to target the right products at the right markets, to help their companies be ‘in
the right place at the right time’. Market research reports are tools to
help companies operate efficiently and make the most of opportunities,
and avoid dangerous pitfalls. There are lots of reasons why companies
buy research reports, and it would be almost impossible for me to explain it all here, but I could give you a few examples.
Suppose your company makes car parts, which it primarily sells in its
domestic market, the US. It could be that your company has a patent on
a certain component that goes into certain types of vehicle suspension. It
just might be the case that this type of vehicle suspension system is
most commonly used in light to medium weight commercial vehicles.
Management has a meeting and decide that there is some investment
cash available in the company (or from investors) which should be used
to fund some expansion. At this point, a whole bunch of people are
charged with looking into this new expansion drive.
First off, someone at board level is asked to examine the key options, and
present those options. Here is the first need for research. The senior guy
at board level will ask one of his managers to look at the options, and
here’s one place where research studies might come in handy. These
guys know their industry, so they likely already know – roughly – what
their options are, but they will need hard figures to back up their gut
feelings. Maybe they think that China is the obvious first choice, as the
booming economy there is likely to mean a huge new market for commercial vehicles in the coming years.
Second option might be Latin America, where steady growth means constant demand, and then there is always Europe, and Russia to think
about. Another option might be to stick with the US, but develop a heavier duty version of the company’s core product, and sell to existing customers, or maybe look at lighter duty versions for domestic cars...but
perhaps some of the firm’s directors feel that market is already far too
competitive.
These are the options that need to be assessed, so the manager charged
with ‘fact finding’ is likely to buy a research report that offers some core
data, such as worldwide commercial vehicle market sizing, with regional
data and some forecasts, perhaps five or ten years forwards. This is classic research report material – market sizing, I.E. how many commercial
vehicles are bought in each region (Asia, Europe, North America, etc)
each year, and what is the forecast future demand. It might be that these
suspension systems can be retro-fitted to existing vehicles, so now they
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want to know the existing “installed base”, not just the annual sales of
new vehicles. There are many variables that a company might want to
know.
Don’t panic!
STOP!! OK, I can here you panicking now, you are thinking ‘Oh my God I
don’t know any of this stuff, how the heck am I supposed to forecast the
future demand for light commercial vehicles in Eastern Europe in eight
years time...???’ Listen, YOU don’t have to, that’s what you pay your KPO
research partners to do, all you have to do is figure out what research
people want to buy (hint: ask them), then get your colleagues to do the
work. They’ll figure out how to do it – you know, don’t even ask them how
they do it, seriously, don’t, you don’t need to know, it’ll only confuse you,
it’s boring and who cares!!! So calm down, all this stuff about commercial
vehicles is just an example, I am simply trying to help you understand
who buys market research reports, what those reports actually are, what
they tell people, and why people want to buy them.
So, back to our example...the first manager buys a couple of reports,
these tell him the size of his target markets worldwide, and offer market
forecasts, expert opinions on how the Chinese market might grow, or
why Brazil is the next big market, or why Kazakhstan shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s quite likely this manager may buy two or three reports offering pretty much the same data, from different publishers. That’s because
we publishers often disagree with one another and offer quite different
numbers, opinions and forecasts. The manager then may either read all
our reports and decide which one he agrees with, or average them all out
and hence come up with his own set of figures based on this average.
Whichever way, he gives the end results back to his superior, who then
presents his thoughts to the board and between them, they decide on the
next course of action. Depending on the size of the company and the
amount of investment capital at stake, this process may be over in one
round of meetings, or it may be that they short list several options and
then investigate each one further. If a big company is looking at spending
several hundred million dollars of investment capital in a new project,
this process of choosing the right project to invest in, may take months
and cost several million researching all the ideas, in order to pick the
right one. This all involves buying research – good news for us.
Once the process is complete and the investment decision has been
made, then the company needs to prepare its investment strategy. Let’s
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hicle market. The company now needs to decide between making the
suspension parts in its existing production plant in the US, and then
ship them to China, or should it make the parts in a new production facility in China. Making decisions like this requires a lot of research. The
managers in the company charged with making these important decisions need to understand what vehicles the parts will go into, where
those vehicles are assembled/retro-fitted, what’s the distribution model
in China, what’s the Chinese labor market like, and so on.
If the company makes the parts in the US and ships them to China, Chinese vehicle manufacturers might not want to buy them, or the distributors in the market may not want to handle US-made parts, and shipping
may be expensive, what are the import taxes like? However, if the company opens a new production facility in China, then Chinese vehicle
manufacturers may readily buy parts that are proudly ‘Made in China’,
and there may be tax breaks available to foreign companies investing in
China and bringing jobs to Chinese workers. Building a facility in China
maybe closer to cheap supplies of raw materials, there may be tax incentives and favorable labor laws, and there may be future opportunities for
export into other mainland Asian markets.
This is just a crude example, but I hope you are beginning to get an idea
of the many complex decisions that a company has to make, and the
many opportunities there are for selling market research into companies.
It has often been said, within the market intelligence business, that the
main reasons people buy information are fear and greed. Fear, because a
business manager is afraid of not knowing something that his company’s
competitors (or his peers, or his juniors) know, and that will leave
him/her at a disadvantage. Greed, because that manager wants to know
something that his/her competitors (or colleagues, maybe) don’t yet
know, putting him or her at an advantage over the competition.
Success in business - making a profit, winning a contract, getting a sale
or getting a promotion, or avoiding getting laid off – often involves knowing something that the other guy doesn’t know. Information truly can be
power, and often a little information is all that separates the winners and
losers in business. Companies and individuals will often buy information
in order to have this advantage, or avoid the disadvantage of not knowing
what their competitors know. When it comes to selling market research
studies, you can use this to your advantage, and play them all off against
each other, telling one guy that ‘all your major competitors have bought
this research...’ and so on. Obviously I’d never say anything like that; especially if it wasn’t entirely true...I am just saying that you could do that,
if you wanted to...
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OK, so I hope you have some idea now. You should be starting to understand the kind of thing we write about, and why people buy it. Later I’ll
get around to how you think up what to write reports about, but really,
it’s not hard, just get into the business and ask a few people what they
want, you know, it’s that simple.
Newsletters, magazines and periodicals
Now let’s move on from market studies for a while, let’s take a look at
some of the other products you may want to publish. After reports, the
second huge category of business information products is newsletters,
magazines and periodicals. These are serial products, as against reports
which are almost always one-off publications. Sometimes reports are
published in parts, spread over a period of time, but most reports are
published as one-off products with a one-off purchase price, and some
time later (maybe 6 months, maybe 6 years, depends what industry you
are in) they are deemed out of date and therefore ‘dead’.
Serial products are different. Serial products include magazines, newsletters and periodicals, and these products are published on a regular basis, such as a monthly trade magazine, or a weekly industry-specific
newsletter, or a quarterly research journal.
Serial products can be published in any frequency, from hourly to sixmonthly. In this high speed digital age your serial product might be an
electronic ‘ticker’ or RSS feed, which drops relevant news items to your
readers as often as every hour during the working day. Conversely, at the
other end of the spectrum your serial product may be a semi-annual scientific research journal that is printed only twice per year.
In the middle ground there are literally thousands of daily, weekly,
monthly and quarterly magazines, newsletters (print and electronic/email) and trade journals that cover every industry segment,
business vertical and special interest group imaginable. During my years
in this business I have seen some very successful news services, but this
is not an area MBR works in, we do not produce any serial products. To
be clear, in the interests of understanding the industry I am telling you
all about these things, but this is not a part of my business, MBR does
not publish newsletters, magazines, journals or e-zines.
Some of you may prefer to work in the serial products market. Publishing
serial products is less of a research-intensive task, as serial products
tend to be more news-based, more about tracking current industryspecific news, rather than looking at all that data-intensive forecasting
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and so on that we do in research reports. Personally, I prefer to work in
research reports, but I know plenty of people who have made a lot of
money publishing serial products, and some people think it’s a much
easier way to make a living.
There are plenty of opportunities to make money in serial products. You
could establish a bi-weekly newsletter which might run to sixteen or
twenty pages per issue and you could easily charge as much as $2000
USD per annum for an annual subscription, or more once you are established. You wouldn’t need too many subscribers to make a very tidy little
business out of that, but personally it’s not for me. There are quite a few
complications involved once you are publishing serial products.
Once someone pays you for an annual subscription then you have that
forward commitment to meet, so you are legally responsible for keeping
that serial product in publication until that obligation has been met. If
for any reason you want to stop writing your newsletter, then you would
be obliged to give some portion of the annual subscription fee back, and
giving money back is not something any business likes to do.
There are other advantages and disadvantages to publishing serial products. Trade journals and magazines often carry advertising, which is a
whole new revenue stream for your young business. Again, this is not an
area MBR is involved in, but it’s something you might like to consider.
Magazines, in the Internet age, don’t need to mean expensive printing
contracts. In the 21st century an industry ‘magazine’ can be a simple industry-specific website, containing useful industry-specific information, a
subscribers-only secure area full of bonus features, such as the latest
news, interviews, special news features about industry developments, resource directories and so on.
Such a website, combined with an outgoing periodical, such as a
monthly electronic newsletter, could generate revenue from paid-up
memberships and from on-site advertising. Many such industry-specific
e-zines exist and this is one business model you may want to consider.
There are other advantages to serial products. Once you have sold the
product the first time, the annual renewal is usually a quick and easy
sale, delivering a very nice regular stream of revenue into your bank account. Most publishers of serial products consider the first year of the
subscription as a ‘loss leader’, meaning the profit is eaten up in the acquisition cost, that’s the cost of making the sale. But then once you have
that person signed up, they may stay for three years, or five years, or
twenty years, depending on the business you are in. With the full renewal fee being paid every year, this can be very lucrative.
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In some sectors staff turnover is high and fast, so you need to stay on top
of your admin, keeping in touch with staff movements. If you sold the
subscription to Mr. Doe, and he leaves the job halfway through the subscription period, ideally he will notify you of his replacement, which
might be Mrs. Smith, and you can switch the subscription into her
name. Ideally, she likes the product and agrees to the renewal when it
becomes due, and then in a truly perfect world, Mr. Doe has gone to a
new job within the same sector, and he emails you asking if he can subscribe again in his new role.
This is the kind of thing you need to work hard on; this is how sales
come along in the serial products market. The flow of renewals can be
easy money – a quick phone call to say ‘do you still like it, shall I send
the renewal invoice?’ and with any luck, you have a nice order for five
minutes work. In some industries, such as in the energy, oil and gas and
pharmaceutical research fields, some people stay in their jobs for many
years.
This can be great news if you manage to sell a subscription to someone
who then renews for fifteen years, that’s a very nice way to make a living!
Sadly, in my chosen field, in telecoms, few people stay in one job for that
long, most people move every few years, it’s just the nature of the business.
In some ways serial products are easier to sell too, as you just send a few
sample issues from recent months to see if the prospect likes the look of
it, or put them on a free trial for a few weeks and then ask if they like it.
You get them hooked then cut off the supply until they make a decision,
that’s a great way of securing orders! You also have lots of ways to add
value to a sale… Instead of giving discounts which cost you money, you
can add value instead, offer thirteen months for the price of twelve or
something like that; it’s a great way to sell newsletters and magazines.
While serial products can make a lot of money fast, and offer wonderful
revenue streams off the back of renewals, please remember that all subscription products show as something called ‘forward liabilities’ in your
company accounts. In other words, if at some point in the future you decide to sell your company, the buyer has a legal obligation to continue
supplying the products to these people, or refund their money.
In the eyes of an accountant, that means that a lot of the money in your
company bank account is not really yours, but in fact it is the ‘property’
of your customers, who have paid you for the goods in advance of delivery. In accountancy terms, the obligation you owe to your customers in
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lieu of this money is known as forward liabilities, and such forward liabilities will be deducted from any valuation of your business, so it pays
to be aware of these longer term complications.
Books
Writing and publishing books (now I am talking about books in the form
you are more familiar with, little books, not great big expensive management reports) is another possibility, though to be honest it is not one I
recommend to you if you are just starting out. There is a world of difference – in terms of content, writing styles, presentation and more – between a research report and a book. In my opinion writing research reports is much easier and far better suited to the outsourcing model, and
the reports sell for much higher prices, so opting to publish books will
just be making your own life harder.
Where publishing books may work for you is as an additional activity on
the side. If you find that your research reports business is producing
‘spin-off topics’ and there is scope for producing additional documents,
that are worth publishing but do not justify their own entire reports,
then you may find that you could publish a series of short books as supplementary material.
Note: I hope you will have noticed that as this book moves forward I
am slowly trying to introduce you to as much ‘business like speech’
as I can. Obviously if you are from a business background then this
note will seem patronizing or childish to you, but if you don’t have a
business background and the world of ‘office talk’ sounds alien to
you, hopefully this book will slowly and gently familiarize you with
talk of revenues, forecasts, projections, project management, board
level executives, gross profits, industry developments and trade journals, to name just a few.
Now if it all sounds like a big bunch of bull, well to be honest it
mostly is, but it’s a b/s language that you had better learn to talk if
you want to make a million working from home, because it’s the language your customers talk – and the customer is king, never forget it!
There are literally hundreds of thousands of business books, technical
books and industry specific research books available, and once you have
gained a few years experience in this business you may want to look at
book publishing. But for now, if you are just starting out, this is not
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something I would recommend, and most of the advice you will read in
this book will not be applicable to the book publishing industry.
Maps, charts and wallcharts
Some publishing companies produce maps showing all kinds of interesting things. You can get oil and gas maps showing where all the world’s
oil rigs and refineries are; you can get fishing-territory maps showing
where each country has coastal fishing rights; you can get telecoms
maps showing all the major international telecom cable installations and
you can get financial maps, showing the respective wealth of different nations, where the major stock exchanges are located and their relative
economic power measured in annual turnover.
These are just a few examples of the many types of maps available for
business people to hang on their office walls. Of course, maps are a
physical product, not an electronic product, so MBR does not produce
maps, but you should be aware of them, as they are a very popular
product. Some publishers also produce wallcharts, which are kind of like
maps but tend to include lots more data tables.
You get wallcharts showing complex corporate ownership structures,
wallcharts showing the make-up of an industry, wallcharts showing work
flow best practice, wallcharts sowing ‘exploded’ technical drawings and
so on. All these maps and wallcharts are a popular segment of the professional publishing industry. They tend to be priced typically between as
little as $50 bucks and as much as several hundred, but as mentioned
above, these are physical printed products and MBR only produces electronic products, so we do not produce maps or wallcharts.
Slide presentations
Presenting research findings as a series of slides is a very popular format
for our kind of work. Many of the executives who buy research do not
have time to sit and read one hundred, two hundred or three hundred
pages of background research and supporting data, so a set of slides
summarizing the findings of the research is the perfect ‘easily-digestible’
format for these busy people.
We often produce our research reports in two separate formats. When a
customer orders the report, we deliver the full report as a PDF document,
all two hundred pages or more, and then we deliver a brief slide presentation as an additional document, maybe twenty slides or so, showing
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the key findings from the report. A lot of busy executives will only have
time to study the slides (which they can re-use in their own presentations for management meetings, etc), but they are comfortable knowing
that the two hundred pages of background research is there, should they
need to dig into it to prove how we arrived at those results.
The busy executive may task a junior with reading the whole thing, while
the boss only has time for the key findings. It is not uncommon practice
to publish this kind of research, and it costs you very little extra to deliver this more end-user-friendly dual format. You will ask your KPO
partner to produce the slide presentation as an additional enddeliverable. Once the main report is written and edited and almost finished, they’ll produce a set of slides (for your approval) from that finished
report, and this stand-alone document will usually be referred to as an
‘Executive Summary’. In terms of costs, it will probably only add a day or
two to production and only a couple of percent to your costs.
For this small additional investment many of your customers will be extremely grateful, and it may help your products (and hence your company name) penetrate deeper into the customer’s company, as your
slides will likely be re-used internally. Ensure your company name and
logo appears on the template for all the slides, and you will be enjoying
free advertising inside the company, at a level you may otherwise never
penetrate.
Many other products are published as slide presentations. Many publishers publish their whole report as a set of slides, as this is the format
of choice for many customers. Slide presentations also tend to work well
for presenting certain types of results and information. For example, if
you have conducted a market survey then often survey results are perfect material for presenting the statistical-based results in slide format.
Also, if your research includes lots of large graphics, such as bar charts,
graphs, pie charts and bubble charts, then these often suit slide presentations perfectly.
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Chapter 4:
How to Research and Write Management Reports and Market Studies.
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Study your competitors
In the previous chapter, we looked at who buys these research reports,
why they buy them and what they use them for. We looked at some
imaginary scenarios to try to understand the people who need this information and I hope you now have some idea of the kind of information
your reports should contain.
If you want to get a look at some reports already published by other
companies, to get a feel for the content, then just try asking. In the appendix I list a number of real-world publishers out in the market that
you might like to check out online. I suggest you visit their sites and
spend a few minutes looking at what they offer, including checking out
some of their back-catalog of published research reports, Use a Hotmail
or Yahoo! or Gmail account and email these people asking nicely if they
could send you a report or two on XX topic. Tell them you are a student
doing your thesis on XX market, and you would greatly appreciate the
background material, strictly for your own personal academic use.
State that you do not work in the industry and will not be using the material for any commercial purposes, and you would be delighted if they
could send you a report or two, even if it’s dated, a year or two old, that
would be OK. If you try a few you’ll get some results, and this will give
you a few of these actual reports that you can read and study and look at
how they are presented and what they contain. You should be able to get
a feel for the size and scope of reports available at different price points.
Price and size
Pricing is an interesting point. You will find a huge range of material
available at prices between fifty bucks and more than fifty thousand
bucks in some cases. In my years in this business, I have seen some
really good reports being sold for as little as $60 bucks for two hundred
pages of research, and I wonder how these people can run a business
with their prices so low. At the other end of the scale, I have seen reports
at ridiculous prices…one stands out in my mind, seventeen pages long
and priced at $14,000 USD! I never read it, so I don’t know what it said,
but I struggle to see how any data can be so valuable that a publisher
can sell an off-the-shelf report for almost $1000 dollars-per-page!
MBR tends to sell reports between one hundred and three hundred pages
in length, and prices vary between $2000 and $5000 per report. Then
there is price variation depending on what copyright-controls you have in
place. This can get complicated, selling the same material at different
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prices depending on how many people are licensed to read it within the
company which has purchased it – and then how do you police that license? Don’t worry about that right now, we’ll come back to that later.
I have targeted the mid range report size and price point on purpose, and
I believe it’s the perfect place to be. Below one hundred pages a report
looks a little ‘light’ to be priced at several thousand dollars, but above
three hundred pages it gets too ‘heavy’, too big, and this leads to lots of
problems. If a report becomes too big, it’s a nightmare for you to publish,
editing is long and tiresome, errors slip by unnoticed. It also becomes
unwieldy both for you as chief-editor and for your readers, your customers. I once published a 522 page report and it was a nightmare, mindnumbing hard work to edit and finish, but also hard work for the enduser to find anything in it. Remember, we send these research reports
out as PDF files, and finding one specific page out of 522 in a PDF file is
a real pain-in-the-rear.
Remember, many of your customers are busy executives, highly paid and
short on time. A few of these end users will probably keep the reports as
electronic files and read them on-screen, but not many. Most will likely
give the report to their assistant and ask for a printed copy back on his
or her desk, somehow bound together. Very few of these will be printed
and bound properly at a high-street copy-shop, as this can be expensive,
so it is likely that most will be one-side-only printed on the office laser
printer. Can you imagine working with a 522 page report printed this
way?
It would be almost impossible to bind in one section, and then you end
up with something that looks like three or four reports and one section
will get lost and so on. It’s a nightmare, and sure to put customers off
buying from you again. Also, no one has time to read all that. Seriously, I
bet most of my customers rarely read the whole report, as these are busy
executives with deadlines to meet. Often, they are only using the report
for a few key figures, so they don’t want a massive book with hundreds of
pages of featureless text, which is hard work, boring, and it makes it
hard to find the most important points.
So after years of trial and error and experimenting with different prices
and formats, I think I have settled on the ‘sweet-spot’ in terms of size and
price. An average of about one hundred and fifty to two hundred pages in
each report delivers value, gives you plenty of room to develop and discuss a topic in depth, and keeps the report to a size that both you and
your production team, and the readers, your customers, all find comfortable and manageable.
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At this size, you can charge prices ranging between $1000 and $5000
dollars for a report and you are in the right range compared to your competitors, and what your customers will expect to pay. If you are selling
your report and customers balk at the price, suggesting that $2000 dollars or so is way out of their price range, then you are marketing to the
wrong customers. The sort of business executives who purchase these
premium priced reports don’t usually have a problem with buying a few
reports each year priced at a few thousand bucks a piece.
I also believe this is the ‘sweet-spot’ in terms of maximizing your efficiency and profits. It takes roughly the same amount of time and effort
on your part to make a product, if that product ends up as fifty pages
selling at $800 dollars, or two hundred pages selling at $4000 dollars. It
also takes roughly the same amount of time and effort to sell those products, so why spend your time making and selling $800 dollar products,
when you could spend your time making and selling $4000 dollar products?
As you will read in the following pages, each time you develop a new
product (report) you need time to initialize the production process, and
then manage the production process through to final edit and completion. Then you need to prepare the document for publication (see next
chapter) and then the sale process begins. Every sale requires time to introduce the product to the prospects, then deal with questions, handle
negotiations and close the deal. Then each completed sale needs fulfillment, invoicing and entering into your company accounts.
If you are going to go through all this for every deal, don’t do it for lowvalue transactions, when you could do it for high-value transactions instead. That’s simple economy of effort. Use your time most effectively.
Leave selling millions of cheap books to experts like Amazon and the big
publishing companies, who have all these systems fully automated. Focus your time and efforts on the “premium-priced” market.
Getting started
Getting down to the details of how you actually write a report is not as
daunting as you may think. Firstly, if you have followed my advice and
acquired a few free sample reports you’ll already have some idea of how
these research reports should look. Additionally, you don’t actually need
to worry too much about the content… that’s what your KPO partners
are there for. If you have picked a decent reputable supplier, preferably a
good size company in a well established market (India, it’s way the best),
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then they will have lots of experience in this field and they will easily be
able to help guide you in producing your first report.
Your KPO partner should know how to lay out the content and how to
arrange the sections, but as a guideline let me give you some ideas here.
Undertaking basic research online into your chosen field, especially a
good look at what your competitors are writing about, should give you
plenty of ideas for what to write about. If you are still feeling quite inexperienced and out-of-your-depth, and you can’t think of what your first
report should be about, here are a few tips for getting started.
1. Try looking at the upcoming industry events in your chosen field.
Look online for conferences, seminars, exhibitions and special industry events. Find the websites and look for the ‘agenda’ or
‘speaker agenda’, and look at what topics the speakers are planning to cover. Such events are usually advertised many months in
advance, up to a year sometimes, so this will tell you the hot topics
likely to be discussed over the coming months. I often write about
topics which will be under discussion at leading industry events in
six months time, it’s a perfect way of writing about a topic which
people are obviously talking about.
2. Try looking at a number of your competitors. Look for trends; look
for what they were all writing about six or twelve months ago. If
you can see that several of them covered XX topic last year, but no
one has yet covered it this year, then maybe there is an opportunity for an up-to-date report in that area.
3. If you have set up a site and you have some traffic, set up a simple
reader-survey and ask people what topics they are interested in.
4. Track the online news sites in your chosen sector; look for news
that seems to be building towards new and emerging industry
trends, as these are likely to be topics people will want to know
more about. Subscribe to a bunch of free news feeds in your sector, start reading the industry news and learning about the business, you’ll soon get ideas.
5. Compile a short list of four or five ideas and ask your KPO partner
for their thoughts. They might come back suggesting one clear
winner, or they may advise against one or two of your ideas if they
believe it would be too hard to deliver good research on those certain areas.
6. Ask an expert. You can join industry forums, chat rooms, blogs
and other online resources to chat with other industry experts and
find out what the hot topics are that way. There are many blogs
and you can spend too much time getting lost in the ‘noise’, but
they can be a great way of tracking the very latest industry buzz.
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Once you have chosen a topic for your first research report, you need to
write a brief specification of your needs for your KPO partner to get
started. Try to write at least a page, just a few paragraphs describing the
area you are looking at, why you think it is hot and some of the key
points you want to cover. Share any thoughts you have, and invite your
KPO partner to share theirs too. If you ask honestly for their input, they
will often do a few hours exploratory research for you for free, to scope
out a subject for its potential. This can be very beneficial, as they will often come back with helpful ideas for points your new research study can
cover.
Send this specification (often called a brief or an RFP, which means Request For Proposal) to your KPO partner and ask for a quote. They will
return to you with a price quote, time estimate, and some outline of how
they plan to write the report, what they plan to cover, etc. If you use a
firm with lots of experience in this area, they will give you a thoroughly
detailed proposal, quoting estimated time lines and schedule, price, how
they plan to write the research, an outline structure and a brief table of
contents, and details on what methodology they plan to use to complete
the work.
If there is anything you want to change, then negotiate – remember, you
are the customer, so you are king – then once you are happy, give them
the go ahead and they can get started on the research work. I recommend trying multiple KPO partners and getting competitive quotes, but
more about this later – see chapter five.
Structure
I’m quite sure that even at this point, halfway through reading this book,
many of you are still thinking “this make-a-million thing sounds fine but
I still don’t really understand exactly what I am supposed to write in
these big expensive books (reports) I’m going to sell!” Let me explain in
more detail how we actually go about writing one of these reports and
what goes in it.
In each report, we attempt to tackle an industry topic from start to finish.
We want to have a clear set of goals at the outset, and then tackle them
in a logical sequence. Business people like things to be logical, it makes
the [often-complex] material easier to follow and easier to find the bits
they are looking for.
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A typical layout might follow this format:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Table of contents
Executive summary
Introduction
Frame the questions
Present the evidence
Argue the points
Show supporting data
Summarize arguments
Draw final conclusions
Present recommendations (maybe)
Appendices
I’ll explain what each of these means. Once you break it all down it’s actually pretty straightforward.
Table of Contents: That’s pretty obvious really. Your KPO partner will
probably create your research report in Microsoft Word or some similar
popular word processing package, and these software packages automatically produce the table of contents for you at the beginning of the
document.
Executive summary: The executive summary is just that, a short summary of the whole report. This aims to condense a two hundred page research study down to ten pages for those short of time. The executive
summary should present a very brief introduction of the subject and
then a quick summary of the key findings and conclusions. That’s it,
keep it brief. As noted previously, sometimes the executive summary
might be presented as a separate document, a short slide presentation to
accompany your main report.
As mentioned previously, many busy executives do not have time to read
an entire report. You may be thinking it sounds rather insane to spend
$4000 dollars on a report you don’t read! Well, yes, but you have to remember these people buy lots of these reports every year, so to them this
is just another long boring document they must read. There is every possibility they just want to pick out a number of key data points and they
have little interest in reading the supporting arguments and evidence.
Note: Please don’t think that half of what we produce is wasted, it isn’t.
Just because a lot of the end-users may not read every word we write, it is
still important that we write it. That may sound crazy, but we are providing all the essential proof behind the conclusions and forecasts that we
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produce. Someday, someone somewhere will have to use all that supporting data to back up the conclusions and forecasts we provide, and so then
it becomes essential. For those busy executives who only read the summary of the key findings, while they do not want to read every word of the
report, it is still important for them to know that it is there, just in case they
need it. They may not read the arguments behind the conclusions, but like
any good research, it matters that we have done our homework.
Introduction: Again this is pretty straightforward; we introduce the
broad topic and give some basic background data. This should only be a
short section of your finished report.
Frame the questions: For every report we publish, there are always a
number of core questions which we are setting out to answer. These are
usually the factors which have attracted us to this particular subject in
the first place. They may be basic questions like ‘how big will this market/product grow?’ or ‘how is this market developing in different regions/countries?’ or ‘how much money will this industry generate over
the next ten years?’ and so on. Or they may be very specific questions,
such as ‘how will innovative new product X from company ABC disrupt
existing markets?’ or ‘can products A, B and C survive in the face of new
solutions X, Y and Z?’ and so on. Whatever these core questions are,
whatever the key things you are attempting to research in the report, this
is the place to state those aims. The questions you lay out here, as the
‘aims of the study’, should correlate with the conclusions you draw at the
end of the research – makes sense really, doesn’t it?
Present the evidence: Once again this is really very straightforward;
this is where we lay out all the supporting evidence. We present charts
and tables full of data, we show calculations and forecasts of market
growth and data illustrating historic performance as a guide to the future
and all that kind of stuff. Again, your KPO partners will know how to do
all this, so you don’t need to worry about it too much at this stage.
Between them, this section and the next section present the bulk of your
report, this is the ‘body’ of the report, expect this body to make up 60%
to 70% of your whole finished report.
Argue the points: Carrying on from the previous section, now we have
presented the evidence, we argue it out, agreeing with some things, presenting supporting evidence and calculations for things we agree with, or
presenting ‘disruptive data’ for things we wish to disprove. Again, do not
worry at this stage if your opinions are right or wrong, do not get
stressed out about the fact that you think you don’t know all this stuff –
your KPO partner will have bright young graduates working on all this,
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scientifically studying the data and presenting much of the arguments in
ways that leave the subject wide open, for the reader to draw their own
conclusions.
Summarize arguments: So here we begin to pull it all together, condensing those previous big two sections down to the core findings of the
research. This prepares us for the final conclusions.
Draw final conclusions: Here we present our conclusions, our final forecasts of future growth or whatever it is we set out to achieve in the first
place. This is where we must tie up with those core questions we set out
at the start; here we attempt to provide well thought out answers to
those questions.
Present recommendations: Some publishers build up the conclusions
section of their reports with recommendations. This is great, but as a beginner you might like to avoid this until you are more experienced. Including recommendations immediately targets your research work to a
specific group of companies, and this changes the whole nature of your
report, and changes the demographics of the people you will then be able
to sell it to. I’m not going to go into this in great detail here, so suffice to
say that by the time you understand what I am on about, you’ll be ready
to start including recommendation in your conclusions.
Appendices: In the course of writing a good report you are likely to come
up with a bunch of additional material that doesn’t seem to have a home
– maybe some supporting data, perhaps a brief glossary of technical
terms and you might need to explain your research methodology (ask
your KPO partners to add this, readers like to see it and people will likely
ask you for it from time to time).
Still don’t panic!
So this technical stuff doesn’t make sense to you….well don’t worry, most
of it never made much sense to me either, not in the early days, so really,
don’t worry about it. As long as the people writing it know what they are
doing, and most of the people reading it understand most of what’s written, then everything else is cool. You know, half the people who buy this
stuff won’t read it anyway, and half of the ones that do read most of it,
won’t understand half of it – but that’s OK too! It doesn’t really matter,
because most of the time they just want to get their hands on the data,
the charts and graphs that they want to copy and use in their own presentations. Remember, often that’s what they have bought the report for,
just a few charts and graphs with the key numbers in.
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Obviously some people read it all, and some people carefully read every
word in detail, maybe several times, but they are just the minority. If the
people who did the research and wrote the report – your staff at the KPO
firm – did their homework properly and wrote it well, and if those minority of buyers who do read every word actually understand it, then everyone will be happy. Remember the title of this book – you don’t need the
qualifications, you don’t have to be an expert, no previous qualifications
or experience necessary, you just employ other people who have all that.
You are just the middle man, the salesman, the mover and shaker who
makes it all happen. Clever people write it; clever people read it; you get
rich in the middle. Love it!
How to do the actual research
Do I even need to write this section? Do I even need to answer this question? Do you really want to know how to actually do this research?
Guess what – it’s not your problem! Who cares! Don’t worry about it!
That’s why you employ the services of your KPO partners – they are experts in doing research, as long as they know how to do it, you don’t
need to! They’ll tell you, it’s not your job to know!
Seriously, I could tell you it’s a mix of primary research, secondary research, data analysis and mathematical modeling, but now I have told
you that, I bet you still don’t know what the heck I’m talking about –
right? I wrote on the last page, you should get your KPO partners to include a ‘research methodology’ page in your appendix, that’ll tell you and
anyone else who wants to know, how the research was conducted. Provided you have employed the services of a good KPO firm, as I recommend you do, and provided they have done a good job, then you need not
worry any more at this stage.
Now you might be thinking, that as a beginner, how will you know if your
KPO partner has done a good job or not? Well all the good big reputable
firms should do a good job, and reading the end product should give you
a feel for quality, even if the technical material is over your head. But,
you’ll soon know if the work is sub-standard when you start to sell it, as
customers rarely give feedback on work that is good, but they are very
quick to complain if the standard of work is poor! Let’s hope that never
happens, so trust your partners to do good work, sanity-check what they
produce, cross reference things online, do some homework, and everything should be OK.
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If you really seriously have nothing better to do with your life than to
clutter up your brain with all this stuff that you just don’t need to worry
about at this stage, then I will give you a brief explanation here. However,
if you are sensible, please skip the next few paragraphs and get on with
reading the rest of this valuable little book.
Primary research: This is just what it says, primary, or new, or virgin
material. [Note to most people…I hope you are not reading this right
now…] In other words it is brand new research material that you have
gone out and created all for yourself. This usually comes in the form of
interviews with executives in the industry, results of surveys conducted
by telephone, in the street, by email or on the web, results from face-toface interviews, results from field studies, physical product testing, results of scientific tests or studies and so on.
Primary research is your own work, it’s new and original research work
that you and your KPO team own, you do not have to give anyone else
any credit for this work, as you are the originators of the data or material. If you commission your KPO partners to do any kind of original interview work, scientific testing or product/market research – such as
surveys, secret shopping, pounding the streets, knocking on doors, etc –
then this is primary research.
This will be the most expensive research for you to commission, but it is
the best material you will have in your report, adding value to your report and allowing you to charge higher prices. If your report is written
using 100% primary research, you can charge the highest prices within
your price range. Also, primary research may be of value to you in other
ways too, as you may be able to re-use some of it in future projects (depends how quickly it ‘ages’) and you may even be able to sell selected results to other research firms who wish to use your data. But this is getting quite advanced now…remember you are just a beginner, don’t try to
run before you can walk!
Secondary research: Again, the name kind of gives it away really; this is
secondary work, or second hand work. This is where other firms have
done the primary research work, and you are quoting their findings or
their figures. You don’t really want a report that is made using 100%
secondary research, although many research companies still do this, because it smacks of ‘low-value production’ to many end-users. But it is OK
to have some secondary research in your report; in fact almost all reports
usually have at least a little secondary research in them. It is rare that a
research report doesn’t quote some figure, fact or statistic courtesy of
another source – you just have to ensure you credit the original publisher/source of that which you quote.
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Data analysis and mathematical modeling: This is the scary stuff, and
after seven years running my own publishing company, a lot of this still
goes way over my head, so don’t expect me to explain it! When producing
forecasts, the analysts who write these reports will use complex mathematical instruments to model the behavior of a market, a product, a
revenue stream or a body of consumers. They often use complex modeling techniques such as growth curve analysis, yield curve analysis, regression analysis, demand curve analysis and Gompertz curve analysis,
to name just a few. Then once they start looking at analysing data from
survey results or consumer spending habits, they use techniques such
as purchasing power parity, MaxDiff scaling, probability theory, pricing
analysis and a whole bunch of other stuff. You know what, seven years
and more than two million bucks down the line, I still don’t know what
any of that stuff is, or how it works – I don’t need to, I’m just a salesman!
And hey, if I don’t know it, then you don’t need to know it. [See, I told you
not to read this bit.]
These mathematical instruments help understand how markets or products or consumers have acted in the past, and predict how they are likely
to act in the future, based on many variables and possible market conditions. Put together in spreadsheets and studied alongside a good dose of
common sense and some knowledge of the market, these instruments
produce forecasts of likely market growth or likely future revenue flows.
Including such data in our reports, along with arguments supporting our
figures, helps the readers to understand the likely future demand for
their company’s products or services.
How to present your report; making it look right
Hopefully by now you have followed my advice and visited a few research
publishers’ websites and made your very best efforts to acquire a few free
sample reports. If you have achieved this, then I hope these have given
you some ideas about how reports should actually look. Above we have
talked about how many pages you should aim for and we have outlined
the broad structure most reports should follow, and as I have explained
you don’t need to worry about how to actually do the research itself,
that’s down to your KPO partners.
In chapter six, I’ll explain why the most likely format for delivering your
report is as a PDF file, and it’s most likely that your KPO partners will
prepare the document using MS Word or another popular word processing or desktop publishing package. Depending on which KPO firm you
are using, they may have access to the most sophisticated professional
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publishing software, but in all honesty if they have such software and the
staff skilled in using it, then it’s probably going to cost you way above the
regular rates.
But for now, we need to get back to making the report look nice! Seriously, this sounds silly but you have got to make your document look
nice, and we do this by including lots of charts, lots of graphs, lots of tables and some nice pictures. You may think this sounds amateurish, but
in fact it’s very important. No one on the planet wants to sit and read 200
pages of solid text. Most of the people who buy these reports want data;
they want numbers they can re-use in their own internal reports and
presentations, and they want figures they can run through their company sales and cash flow forecast models.
If people want numbers, and endless pages of text are too boring to read,
then the obvious thing to do is to present lots of data tables and pretty
graphics like charts and flow diagrams, etc. Some publishers will refer to
these as figures, some will call them exhibits and some will call them
graphics, but it’s all the same thing really. You should include as many
bar charts, pie charts, photographs, tables, lists, diagrams and drawings
as you can, and try to spread them throughout the report in order to
break up all the heavy sections of solid text.
When selling our reports, we will often include a detailed table of contents as part of the sales collateral, and this will often include a list of all
the figures or exhibits within the report. If you look at any reports you
have managed to get hold of, I am sure you will see plenty of examples of
how graphic elements are used to break up long sections of text. Sometimes we include photographs, but you need to be careful here, as too
many photographs, especially if they are high-resolution, will quickly
ramp up your file size to something huge and unmanageable.
You must remember we distribute the finished product by email, so file
size does matter. Broadly speaking, you need to try to keep the file size
under ten MB (mega-bytes) for the finished report, otherwise emailing it
to people can be fraught with problems. You may well find that the MS
Word (or other file format) document you are working on can get pretty
big, up to one hundred MB in some cases, but once the report is finished
and tidied up, and the document is compressed and converted into PDF
format, it should ideally be smaller than ten MB. Later on, once you have
gained some experience in this field, you can work with much bigger files
and host them on a secure website for your customers to download them.
Once you get to that point, the size limit does not matter, but when you
are starting out, keep things simple, and keep your files under ten MB
for easy emailing.
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What makes a good report?
There are a lot of different types of research reports. The type we want to
produce are often termed ‘management reports’, as they are strategic in
nature and they appeal to company management, who have to plan the
future development and direction of their companies.
Such reports, depending on the exact topic you decide to cover, often
tend to include forecasts of the future development of products, markets,
revenue streams and customer bases. Management loves this stuff, and
indeed forecasts often make up a substantial and important chunk of a
management report.
Another popular element might include some kind of SWOT analysis.
SWOT means Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. A
SWOT analysis looks at a product or range of products and then analyses that product against the rest of the market, against its peers and
competitors and against possible new technologies coming to market, etc.
The end objective is to understand the potential for the product, its
strengths and weaknesses, and the future opportunities ahead and likely
pitfalls. It’s kind of obvious really.
Note: You can always look up things like this on Wikipedia. If you are
planning on running a super-modern 21st Century Internet based publishing company, you had better start getting used to living your life
on the web, and Wikipedia is a great place to start, a wonderful resource. Start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swot_analysis
Many reports also use some kind of survey results. This is often a major
element of a report, and in fact there are some publishing companies
who specialize in only publishing reports based around surveying consumer habits and opinions. There are many ways you can conduct surveys and many ways to use and present the results. MBR has used surveys on many occasions as a supplementary part of our market research.
There are many ways to conduct surveys, and most of them tend to be
quite expensive.
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Consumer surveys:
The most common type of survey is a survey of consumers. Let’s say you
are writing a report about the toothpaste industry, you might survey
consumers to find out their oral hygiene habits, how many people brush
one/two/three/four times per day, how many use dental floss, how
many people use mouthwash, which brands people use, etc.
Such a survey could be done any number of ways:
Face-to-face: Using those annoying ‘people with clipboards’ you see in
shopping malls and other public places.
Telephone: You rent or buy a list of names and phone numbers (your
KPO partners will find this) of people who agree to take part in consumer
surveys and then your KPO partners conduct the survey by phone.
Online: There are now hundreds of companies appearing on the Internet
who can help you conduct simple online surveys – companies like surveymonkey.com, snapsurveys.com and zapsurvey.com to name just a
few.
Conducting face-to-face research can be expensive, so I would advise
against that at first as you are a beginner in this business. If your questions are simple and lend themselves well to yes/no answers, or simple
multiple-choice answers, then an online survey is probably the best and
cheapest way to go. Web-based surveys are perfect for those kind of
questions that ask for an answer like “completely agree/agree somewhat/neutral/ somewhat disagree/completely disagree”.
For more complex questions, where you need to capture more detailed
responses, a telephone based survey is better, but again, this can be expensive. If your report is looking at oral hygiene (just an example) across
a large territory, like “Europe” then you might have to conduct telephone
interviews with perhaps a minimum of one hundred or two hundred people in each of ten or twelve countries. This means your KPO partner will
probably employ the services of a language translation bureau (unless
they have extensive internal capabilities to cover many languages) and all
these things push up your costs.
For a complex telephone survey of a couple of thousand people, in several different countries, you could easily find the cost prohibitive, like
$20 grand or something, just to complete the survey. As you are a beginner, you really don’t want to be committing that kind of expense at this
stage, so it’s best to leave that kind of work until you are more established.
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For now, if you want to include a consumer survey, best to stick to a web
based survey. Getting members of the public to visit your survey site and
complete your survey is a challenge, and you may need to offer a prize
draw (free iPod or something like that) as an incentive to get completed
surveys. Email everyone you know and ask them to spread the word; it’s
not usually too difficult to get a few hundred responses.
Business-to-business:
While surveying consumers may be a little ambitious for your first or
second project, surveying and interviewing other people within your chosen industry is likely to be a feature in almost every report you publish.
Interviewing industry executives is the cornerstone of primary research,
and as such it’s an almost essential element of your reports.
Some of your reports may include a short business-to-business survey,
perhaps interviewing fifty or one hundred executives in the industry, and
then writing up a summary of the results. Such a survey is most likely to
be conducted by telephone, though in some instances you may get away
with conducting an email-based survey, if you do it nicely and keep it
very slick and professional – as you should always be when dealing with
executives within your field.
Sometimes it can be hard getting hold of these people and you have to
offer an incentive, as a trade off for a few minutes of their time. You
could offer a free copy of one of your company’s previous reports, or if
that doesn’t work try telling those who help out that they can have an
abridged version of the results. Then you deliver the abridged results
making sure it is a nice free gift, but it doesn’t give away too much of
your actual report, as many of these executives may also be the kind of
people you want to sell the finished report to.
Short of a full survey, the process of researching and writing most reports involves a few executive interviews at some stage, a process your
KPO partner will be quite familiar with, so they will include this whenever required. Buyers of your reports like to see evidence that you have
spoken to some other executives in the industry too, so a few well placed
quotes from Mr X, senior product manager at XX company said “XX”, always look good in any report.
Another element many management reports include is some kind of
technical analysis, technical explanations and technical diagrams. Now
personally speaking, this kind of thing bores me to death, so I try to keep
it to a minimum in MBR reports, but you may pick an industry where
you need to use a lot of technical material, so it can be very important.
The trick is to keep it interesting if you can, ensure the technical text is
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littered with graphical elements and make sure the diagrams are as easy
to see as possible – keep them big, light, colorful, spaced out and easy to
understand.
This may all sound rather elementary, but trust me this is important. If
your readers are lost and do not understand the material you have presented, the questions come back to YOU. That means you get stuck trying to answer technical questions about a subject you don’t entirely understand. This is time wasting…you have to email the team at your KPO
partners (who may no longer be working for you, if it was a one-off job
some months earlier, so you better hope they give after-contract support)
and ask them to write you an explanation, then you forward this on to
your client.
This whole process can go back and forth a number of times, and you
have to do all this working around different time zones too. If the client is
in Singapore, and you are in New York, and your KPO partners are in India, then these question and answer sessions can take days to complete,
emailing back and forth trying to catch people during the right working
time. In short, you have to do all this when you should be selling more
reports, so for that reason, avoid it happening in the first place. Make
sure your technical material is as self-explanatory as possible, even if it
takes longer in production, as it will be worth it in the long run.
Questions and answers
Actually this whole topic brings me nicely to the next point; your report
really must attempt to answer more questions than it asks. Your readers
need to actually learn something reading this document they have paid
several thousand bucks for, so you must keep an eye on quality and ensure the report actually delivers serious value-for-money. At MBR I try to
ensure each report takes a holistic view of the topic it is meant to be covering. That is to say, we pick a complete subject and try to cover the
whole thing in one report. Occasionally, you start work on a project and
it ‘grows’, in ways you hadn’t expected.
In the research world, this growth might be termed ‘scope creep’ or ‘spec
creep’ meaning the specification keeps ‘creeping out’ in this way and
that, adding on extra bits here and there. Your KPO company will keep
an eye on this and they tell you each time it is going to cost you more
money. If things get out of hand, then you might have to consider breaking the subject down and publishing it in two or three parts, but I would
try to avoid this for at least your first year if I were you. You’ll learn all
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this stuff as you go, but for now, just try to keep each report as a single,
self-contained and complete discussion on one single topic.
It’s great to produce thought-provoking material which raises lots of new
issues that your readers may not have previously thought of, but – overall - try to answer more questions that you raise. If your customers buy
your report for answers, they don’t want to get to the end feeling as
though they now have to buy three more reports to complete their understanding of the topic.
Extra bits
We’ve pretty much covered it now, I hope this chapter and the previous
one have given you a fairly good idea of what a research report looks like,
what information it has in it and how you go about getting your first report into production.
There are certain pages you need to include in your report that we haven’t covered yet. You’ll obviously need a cover, and this can be a simple
text heading alone on a page, or I could write another whole book about
cover artwork, designs, styles, etc. Personally, for MBR, I outsource all
cover artwork to a professional graphic designer who makes beautiful
covers for my reports, costing a few hundred bucks every time. In my
opinion it’s money well spent, as it makes the whole thing look and feel
slick and professional, and all the reports are branded in the company
colors, so after a few years, when you have published a number of reports and you have all these products displayed together on your website, the continuous branding looks real nice.
If you want to keep it super-cheap, have your KPO team stick a simple
text based heading page on the front, but if you can afford an extra few
bucks, have a graphic designer do the job for you. If you do use a designer, when finding who to use, ask if they have experience in the business-to-business (often called B2B) market. A graphic designer who designs lovely looking covers for children’s story books is no use to us in
this business; we need someone who understands the market. There are
thousands out there, and a smart, professionally designed cover should
not cost you more than $200 to $300 bucks absolute maximum.
The first page inside the cover should hold your legal information. Traditional book publishers would probably call this the verso page, or the
imprint page, but as we are an electronic-only publisher, we don’t need
to worry too much about following traditional typesetting rules. This page
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will contain your Copyright notice, publication date, a legal disclaimer
and any other important notes or legal notices.
If you search online for ‘copyright notice’ you will find many resources
which can help you pick the right text, but essentially you need to state
the word Copyright, and the date the work was published, and the name
of the owner of the material, I.E. your new publishing company. You can
then include wording along the lines of “no part of this work can be copied, broadcast, reprinted or reproduced without the written permission of
the publisher” as this stops people stealing your work. Needless to say, I
must state at this point that I am not a qualified lawyer and this is not
adequate legal advice. If you wish to ensure the legal integrity of your
copyright notice, I must advise you to seek professional legal assistance.
Then you may want to add a legal disclaimer, again look online for examples and guidance, but essentially it needs to say something like “we
take no responsibility for the material contained within this document,
you use it at your own risk, the publisher is not responsible for any decisions or actions that you take as a result of using this material…” etc.
This is basically saying, that if we publish a forecast for XX product to
sell 100 million units, and it only sells 5 million, you can’t sue us for getting it wrong.
After your cover, your copyright page, your legal notices and maybe an
internal header page, then you have your Table of Contents and then the
report as we have discussed. At the back, you will likely have some appendices, as also discussed earlier, that might include background data
or additional material from the report. Just as an example of what such
material might include, in preparing growth forecasts your KPO partners
may have used country-level population data to forecast product consumption in certain countries. A table of supporting data giving the base
population forecasts might be a suitable additional piece of information
to include in the appendices of your report. Adding such extra material is
really your judgment call, it’s not essential, but it can help ‘bulk up’ a report if it needs a few more pages.
You could also include a glossary of technical terms, or some useful reference material – a list of the companies mentioned in the report, a list of
useful industry resources and websites, any lists of technical specifications relating to the technical sections of the report, etc. The appendices
is the place to print any extra material which might have been used in
making the report, but didn’t seem to find a place within the main body
of the research, this is where we dump that supporting material. No
doubt someone will find it useful.
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Your appendices can also include research methodology (see earlier discussion) and an index if you feel your report needs one, though personally it is not standard practice to include an index in an electronic report,
simply because it is not necessary, as most computers will search the
text for you.
Also at the back you may want to include some other extra pages, such
as ads for some of your other products, perhaps an advert for someone
else’s products (such as a relevant conference, event, a companion report
that has synergies with yours, etc). You could include a referral form to
help you gain new names for your sales prospects database, and you
could add a feedback form to see if your customers loved or hated your
report.
I’d be cautious about including too much advertising in your report. Including one or two pages advertising your own other products is fine, but
generally when people spend a few thousand dollars on a report, they do
not expect to see it rammed with ads. If people see ads, especially paidfor ads from third parties, they will start to question the integrity of the
findings of the report. Your customers will start to wonder if the conclusions of the report have been skewed to fit the interests of the advertisers, and your trusted ‘independent view’ starts to look untrustworthy.
This is not a desirable place to be, so only ever accept paid advertising
from anyone else if you are happy it does not compromise the integrity of
your research work.
The final edit
Now you understand everything that goes into a research report and
roughly what the end result should look like. While your KPO partners
have pretty much done all the work since agreeing the specification,
there is one final task that falls on your shoulders, and that is the final
edit. Your report has most likely been written by Indians, Chinese or
Eastern Europeans, and, as such, the standard, quality and fluency of
the written English language may not be to the standard you want.
To be clear, these KPO firms will all produce good work in well written
English that makes sense and reads well, but you may notice that it is
not as fluent and well written grammatically as if you had written it
yourself. This is not a big problem, as you should also remember that
half your target audience will not be native English speakers, so they will
probably never notice anyway. However, you will almost certainly want to
run a final edit yourself, just to ‘tidy up the edges’, especially if you are
fussy like me!
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During the time your report is in production, you should see at least one,
if not two, interim deliverables. These work-in-progress (WIP) documents
will give you a chance to see how the report is progressing, and to ensure
you are happy that it is developing as agreed in the specification document. The final deliverable, after your KPO partner has run it through
their in-house quality control (QC), will then need you to read it through
carefully, amending any grammar or other fine points you don’t like, and
asking for any final tweaks or changes if there is anything you are not
happy about.
Of course, in the early days, you may feel you don’t really know what it is
you are looking for, but in time you’ll get more out of this process, so just
go with it for now, it’s all part of your learning curve.
Summary
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Aim for between one hundred and three hundred pages, and price
between $1K and $5K accordingly
Follow a well established, simple, formal structure
Try to include a couple of principle ‘key features’ in your report,
such as a set of industry forecasts or the results of a market survey
Publish in PDF format, either as a PDF ebook or PDF slide presentation and finish the job off with a nice professional looking cover
Include lots of nice looking graphs, pictures, tables, charts, drawings and diagrams
Aim to keep the final product below ten MB in file size
Include self-promoting ads for your other products
Include some kind of customer feedback mechanism
Think holistic, cover an entire subject as best you can in one single
report
Allow plenty of time for final QC (quality control) and edit
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Chapter 5:
Managing the Production Process
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Selecting your KPO partner
Selecting your KPO partner is one of the first major hurdles you will face.
I can’t simply tell you right here and now just who to use. Firstly, because the outsourcing industry is changing so fast that I could never
keep this book up-to-date. New players are coming on to the market all
the time and existing firms are growing, adding increased capabilities to
their offerings in this fast evolving new market place. Secondly, and
probably far more importantly, you have to pick the right partner for you,
for your needs, for the kind of work you want to do.
Not all KPO firms are equal. In fact, there are hundreds of companies out
there who offer KPO services, and hundreds more who offer ‘research
support services’, but many of these companies are not capable of the
kind of work that we at MBR are trying to do. Obviously much depends
on how you amend the business model laid out in this book for your own
company, but if you follow my business model closely, you’ll only find a
handful of KPO companies that are truly capable of supporting your new
business the way you need.
If you plan to produce a simple news-feed service, tracking and regurgitating news items within a certain sector, then you will be able to employ
the services of any of a large number of firms offering KPO and research
support services. However, the kind of research work required for publishing these detailed, high-priced business reports as described in this
book, is specialist work that involves complex analysis and mathematical
modeling. For this kind of work, many firms will not have the right staff
with the right skills, and you will need to take your time finding a partner
who can support all your needs.
Don’t be nervous; don’t be afraid to ask questions. The majority of firms
you are likely to look at will be based in India, with some in China, and
probably some in Latin America or Eastern Europe, but the majority will
be in India. Indians are absolutely wonderful people, and great business
people and great workers. Indians have a fantastic work-ethic, they work
very hard and they are very conscientious. They care about the impression they make on you, and they are super-professional.
If you start talking to a firm whose staff are not polite, professional and
helpful...then move on, because you have picked a ‘bad apple’, as the
great majority of companies in India will be a pleasure to work with.
There is a short list in the appendix at the back of this book that will
suggest for you a few firms you can start to look at, but like I say, this
industry is evolving all the time, and new players are coming to market
all the time, so get online, search “KPO companies” or “outsource knowlwww.makeamillionebook.com
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edge research services” or something like that, and see what you can
find. I suggest you approach several firms, at least for your first couple of
projects, to get a look at how they work differently, to see their competing
quotes and to learn about the proposal process.
You’ll need a brief written specification of your needs, as described previously, and from that the KPO firm will work up a specification for you. If
you try to ask several firms for your first quote, you’ll probably eliminate
one or two during the quote process, as they will either not be able to
provide a completed proposal or you will decide there is something you
just don’t like about them. You will hopefully end up with between two
and four complete proposals, and you can then compare them to pick
who you want to award that first job to.
Don’t pick just on price. Of course price is important, but there are many
factors at work here. You may have firm A quoting $5000 bucks, while
firm B is quoting $7500, firm C says $9000 and firm D quotes $12,500. I
would look at those proposals carefully. If ALL four firms are proposing to
deliver exactly the same thing, and you cannot find any other differences
except price, then I personally would pick between B and C.
I would eliminate A as too cheap, which rings alarm bells in my head. It
either means they have lower grade capabilities, and hence will deliver a
lower grade result, or it means they have missed something in the quote
process, and your end results will suffer accordingly. Alternatively, cheap
could mean they have failed to grasp the full depth of the brief you gave
them.
I would eliminate D as too expensive. They are either ‘top shelf’ which is
probably far too over-specified for your first project, as I would advise you
to start with something quite basic, while you are learning the ropes. Or,
expensive means they rate themselves highly as a firm and feel they can
charge above-market rates, which is no use to me, as I have a profit margin to think of, and I won’t see my margin eroded to massage another
CEO’s ego!
So I would pick between B and C and I would scrutinize the details. If
there is NO discernible difference between the proposed offerings, ask C
if he will consider any movement on his price. Be honest, tell him he is
second most expensive out of four identical quotes, ask ‘if we use you,
what extra do we get for our money that your competitors can’t give us?’
If he comes back saying you get ‘this’ and ‘that’ and so on, go back to B
and ask B if his firm also does ‘this’ and ‘that’ for the price they quoted.
You’ll soon nail down your chosen partner, even if it just comes down to
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the one you ‘like’ the most. In fact that is important, you have to like the
people you are going to be working with, it will help a lot.
I should not use this book to specifically endorse any one KPO firm, and
so I will not mention any names, but I would encourage you to put quality ahead of price. Select a KPO partner which has an established track
record, go for experience, scale and professionalism, which may cost you
more but I promise you it will pay dividends in the long term.
Experience and capability, and expertise in your chosen field will all
prove very valuable to you as your business grows, so try to build relationships with KPO firms which you like and trust and which can show
you they have that experience. Try several partners over your first year or
two, and get to find which firm is best for you.
You may decide to select your KPO partner for many specific reasons, not
just ‘who gave you the lowest price’. For example –
• Which firm seems to be educating you the most?...pick the firm
that is being helpful, holding your hand, teaching you. That can be
very useful/valuable.
• Which firm offers the best written English, do they hire good editors, any native English speakers from the UK or USA?... that can
save you lots of editing time.
• Which firm has the most experience in your sector?
• Which firm has most experience writing full length reports?
• Do they offer any references, anyone you can call and talk to?
When I started MBR, my #1 criteria for my first job was protecting my investment capital. I selected my first KPO partner for my first published
report because I managed to sweet-talk the salesman into letting me
have ninety days to pay the bill! That first product only cost about $5000
dollars, and I paid the bill approximately one hundred days after they
finished the work. This enabled me to publish the study, win some sales,
bill for those sales and collect the revenue by the time I paid my first
supplier’s invoice.
This is how I started a company with such low initial risk capital, I simply did what I had to do to ensure my customers paid me before I paid
my suppliers. I don’t recommend all people to run all companies this
way, but as I was trying hard to start a company with limited financial
risk and low investment capital, it was a huge help. I have always been
grateful for that favor, it helped me get started.
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Check the details
Before awarding your first job, be sure you are happy with the details –
how you pay, when you pay, how long the job will take, what format you
will receive the results in, what after-sales support you will get, etc. You
should not be expected to pay until after the job is complete, but some
firms will want 50% up front and the remaining 50% on completion, at
least until they know you – remember YOU are an unknown quantity to
them too. You should be given support and after sales help even once the
job is done and the bill paid, and there should be guidelines to how long
the job will take and what deliverables you will get and when.
If your KPO partner will not deliver in PDF as you have requested, move
on to someone else. If they don’t have any previous experience or expertise in your chosen field, think carefully about trying a different firm. Ask
to see some examples of their work, ask for references, case studies or a
copy of their published client list, if they have one.
Once you are happy you have chosen a good partner, and you have
awarded the job, spend some time on the phone getting to know them.
Suggest (if they haven’t done this already) a call at the start of the project
to chat the job through, to ensure they understand your primary objectives. Remember that your new staff on the other side of the world will
know nothing about you prior to this point, as so far you have probably
only spoken to and emailed the salesman for the KPO company, so don’t
be afraid to spend thirty to sixty minutes on the phone getting to know
your production team.
Be nice, these people will work harder and do a better job if they like you,
and respect you, so be honest, be pleasant and try to make friends. Ask
what you can do from your side to help, how you can adapt your working
hours or working practices to help make their life easier. Figure out
which time zone you are in and which time zone they are in and try to
schedule a call every two or three weeks that is suitable to you both. Remember, if you are in the US, especially on the West coast, and if your
team are in India or China, the time zones are horribly unsociable...your
evening is their small hours of the morning. Try to be flexible; don’t expect them to work night shifts just to please you. Maybe you can get up
at six am and take a call with your team...is that something you could do
to help?
Make sure you understand who is in charge, who is the team leader and
who is the senior boss above that. It is important to know who to go to if
you have a problem, and equally it is important to know who to contact if
you wish to send your compliments and thanks for a job well done. You
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should remember you may well be employing the services of a group of
workers in a poor economy thousands of miles away from your home,
and asking them to work hard for you even though you have never met
each other! They will work hard, and they will do a good job, so please
have the courtesy to thank them afterwards, and tell them if you are
pleased with the end result.
On some occasions when I have had a production team work exceptionally hard on a job for me, or deliver an exceptionally good result, I have
emailed the senior management over their heads and expressed my gratitude and pleasure at a job well done. Such emails can result in compliments to the team from a very senior level, and such compliments are of
great value to the staff themselves. I also like to tell my KPO partners
when the end product, the report, is selling well, or selling to important
people.
At MBR, I have sold reports before to CEOs in massive Fortune 500 bluechip companies, some of the biggest names in the telecoms industry, and
it is a huge morale boost to my regular KPO partners when I go back to
them and tell them who some of these VIP buyers are. This kind of feedback is immensely valuable, it makes me feel proud and it makes my
KPO partners feel proud that our output is reaching such senior offices.
Such kudos helps to build bonds too, between me and my KPO partners,
and this is good for all of us.
Visiting your KPO partners
I have been asked and invited many times to visit my KPO partners in
India, China and other locations. As yet, to my shame, I have not, but I
do intend to and I often feel very bad that I haven’t made the trip already.
Using the business model set out in this book, which is great, you will
find one problem. As with all small businesses, you are in danger of becoming a prisoner of your own company. In chapter 7, which is all about
sales, you’ll read how your new business relies on a regular, steady flow
of sales effort. The problem with this is, once you are established and you
have a steady flow of revenue, you don’t really want that to stop, and that
means never leaving your office.
Now that MBR is as big and successful as it is, at seven years old, I truly
find it difficult to even take a full day away from the office, let alone flying
across the world for a week and hoping everything is OK in my absence. I
doubt my KPO partners fully understand this. I am sure most of their
clients visit from time to time, and they probably think I am being rather
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distant by not making the trip. But the whole uniqueness of MBR is that
it’s just me, there is no office full of guys in suits, it’s just me, so if I take
a week out to visit another country, then sales take a dip, there is no one
else back home running the company in my absence.
Everything about this business model revolves around a slow, constant
trickle of sales activity. The activity you put in one month creates the
sales revenue of the next month, and the one after that. When I take a
vacation in July, August takes a hit. If I were to take a week off to visit
my KPO partners, the following month my sales would be off by $20K. I
know it’s not a great situation, and I admit it’s a flaw in the business
model, or maybe I am just greedy, but I hate to see that dip in sales.
Vacation
Just know this – when you run your own business, and it all relies on
you, there is never a good time to take a vacation; never a good time to be
out of the office; never a good time to go on a business trip. That’s just
how it is, it will always feel as though it has come at just the wrong time,
it will always seem inconvenient. Get used to it.
In the 6 years I have been running MBR I have taken one family vacation
per year. Where possible, I take my laptop with me and keep things ‘ticking over’, but for some vacations I have had no remote Internet/email access, so I have had to let business go quiet for a week or two. I hate this,
I hate not knowing what’s going on and not being able to check my email,
and it makes a huge hole in sales over the following two months.
I can usually work remotely on vacation without stopping us having fun
as a family, I do a little work over breakfast, a little work in the evening
once the kids are asleep, and I keep the laptop hidden away during the
day so my wife won’t see it. It’s usually fine. On one vacation, we stayed
in a quiet cabin in the mountains in Colorado. Each morning I took my
dog for a walk up the mountain nearest where we were staying, and my
wireless laptop had a perfect high-speed signal at the top! I sat looking
out over the beautiful mountains and worked for an hour early every
morning before my family got out of bed – that’s the best office view I
have ever had!
Soon I hope to grow the business to the next level, perhaps hiring a remote working salesman, and this will allow me to relax a little and take
more time out. I’ll treat my family to more vacations, I’ll visit my KPO
partners in Asia and I’ll train myself to be less of an email-addict.
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My advice to you is to visit your KPO partners, take vacations often and
don’t become a prisoner in your own business. Read that great little book
by Michael Gerber, ‘The E-myth Revisited’, and learn how to be in control
of your own business, not the other way around. You know, I promised
you a book that would tell you how to work from home as your own boss
and make a lot of money with no qualifications and no daily commute – I
never said it was easy or perfect, sorry!
Managing production schedules
Managing the actual day-to-day production process is not too big a deal,
your KPO partners should know just what to do and they should get on
with it quite happily without you. You’ll need to keep an eye on time
lines, so it’s good to check in with your production team once a week or
once every two weeks, just to stay ‘in the loop’ as they say. Maybe it is
easiest to arrange for regular updates. Just ask your team leader or key
contact to drop you a weekly email with an update on progress. It need
not be detailed, just a summary, perhaps every Friday afternoon or every
Monday morning, telling you the latest status of your project.
Certain types of research work are often subject to unplanned delays.
Survey work can be quite time consuming, so expect delays there, and
build some contingency into your time allowance for such delays. All
kinds of primary research work, such as conducting interviews with industry executives, will likely take much longer than you expect. Interviewing executives in your chosen field tends to be subject to particular
delays at certain times of the year, and it all takes longer the more senior
the people you are after.
Summer in Europe, end of November in the US (Thanksgiving) and
Christmas are notorious times to be trying to conduct telephone interviews with industry executives. The usual problem of finding time in their
hectic schedules is compounded by vacation time and it can sometimes
take weeks and even months to complete a round of interviews. Your
team will have to make friends with senior executive’s personal assistants and then wait patiently to get their allocated ten or twenty minutes
when the person is actually in the country, at their desk and not in a
meeting. It may sound simple, but it can take weeks and weeks to arrange such interviews.
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Your input to the writing process
During your first few projects, unless you are already an expert in your
chosen field and you have a lot of relevant knowledge to contribute, it is
unlikely that you will actually add to the report yourself. However, over
time you will start to build relevant industry knowledge, especially if you
monitor your competitors, industry news sources and so on, and you
may feel you wish to add your two cents worth.
I now have many years experience in the telecoms business, and I have
spoken to many clients on the phone, read competitors’ reports, read our
own reports of course, and tracked telecoms industry news every day for
a decade. Over the last seven years I have gained a good deal of knowledge and I contribute regularly to our own reports, in terms of providing
arguments to the subject matter, and in terms of editing what my KPO
team have written.
As your confidence grows, you should endeavor to learn as much as you
can about your chosen sector and help to ensure the reports you publish
are first rate, factually correct and packed with valuable data your clients
can use. Like all things in life, ‘you get out what you put in’, and this
holds true with this business.
Sure, you could get away with just commissioning a job and letting your
KPO partners do everything, and you just selling it at the end, with no
input, no work for you. That’s possible, but I think you will find that if
you take an interest and get involved and try your best to help make the
products as valuable as possible to your end users, then you will reap
the rewards in the long term. It is said that ‘You reap what you sow’, and
if you put time and effort into working with your KPO team to produce
insightful, data-packed, well written and well presented reports, they will
keep coming back for more.
I have worked hard to build MBR a reputation of good quality at fair
prices, and in some areas of the telecoms space we are now considered
market leading experts. This pays dividends in the long run. We enjoy a
lot of repeat business from some loyal customers, and our high-quality
off-the-shelf reports help win us much higher value bespoke research
and consulting work (See chapter nine). If you are planning on starting a
business based on what you have read in this book, promise yourself
now to build a quality business that you and your KPO partners can be
proud of, and when you’ve done it, write me and say ‘hello’, I’d love to
hear from you.
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Chapter 6:
The Publishing Process
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The finished article
Once you actually have a finished report on your desk, then you have to
go about publishing it. If you don’t know anything about the publishing
industry then this bit might seem rather daunting, but it’s actually quite
straightforward. Publishing niche, premium-priced reports for sale to a
select business audience is quite different to publishing books or magazines for sale to the general public. Also, we are only publishing in electronic format, and we are not offering a hard copy to our customers, so
this makes life much easier.
At this point I would advise you NOT to buy any books about ‘how to self
publish’ or ‘how to publish your own book’ or anything like that. If you
read those books at this stage, they will only put you off, as the publishing world can be complex and hard to get into. But not for us, not using
my business model. We are not doing any of the things they talk about in
those other books; our publishing model is much quicker and simpler.
Unlike book publishing in hard copy, we don’t need an ISBN number or a
Library Catalog reference in our reports, and obviously there is no print
run to organize, so the publishing process is much quicker and easier.
As your business grows you may decide to use more channels to market,
such as Amazon, etc, and if you do this you will need an ISBN, but for
now you won’t need any of that while you are just starting out.
Format
As mentioned previously, it is most likely that your KPO partners will
have produced your report either in MS Word or MS PowerPoint. Indeed,
you should request them to use MS Office Suite software, as this is the
cheapest and easiest way for you to have the same software as them at
home, so that you can read, edit and contribute to the document where
appropriate. Once your first report is finished, complete with a nice
cover, ads at the back and all the other things mentioned in chapter four,
then you will have it converted into a PDF file, at which point your KPO
firm deliver the PDF to you and they are finished, their work is over.
Almost everyone in the publishing industry uses PDF (Adobe Acrobat) as
the best file format, simply because it is so universally acceptable, and
the Acrobat reader is free, so no one can complain that they cannot read
it. Anyone can go to Adobe’s website and download the Acrobat Reader
for free, and most people already have this on their PC, certainly most
business people, so it is the most widely acceptable format to use. As a
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eral other possible formats. Some publishers use strange file formats,
some use online ‘viewing’ software, hosting the report online and sending
buyers a password to access the study and read it online. Some even use
executable files (.exe files) that contain the report and its reader embedded in one file.
Granted, once the document is opened these things may look quite good,
but I would strongly advise you to stay away from any such ‘exotic’ file
formats as they are only going to cause you problems. PDF is what I call
the ‘lowest common denominator’. That means everyone can use it, no
matter what hardware or software they are using. You have to remember
that in your new business you will be selling your market reports to people in all countries and all cultures around the world.
Please try to remember that in some countries people may be using the
latest and greatest new PC loaded with all the latest software and a perfect high-speed broadband connection. However, in other countries,
some of your customers may be using old computers with far more limited software, and only a slow, unreliable Internet connection. We must
deliver our products in a format that suits all these users, and PDF is
that universal application that everyone, including Mac users, can access. You definitely don’t want to be sending out .exe files, as almost all
corporate firewalls will block these files, as they are usually associated
with spam, viruses and other malicious content.
Using PDF offers further benefits too. PDF compresses files quite neatly.
There often seems to be some slight loss of image quality when graphs,
charts, pictures and diagrams are converted to PDF, but it is not enough
to worry about, and the advantage of the compressed file size far outweighs the slight loss of quality. Large MS Word files of fifty MB or more
can compress down to just three or four MB using Adobe Acrobat (PDF),
and this is a great help when sending the finished report out to buyers.
As explained earlier, some of your buyers may not be sitting in their office with a super fast broadband line, some may be working in countries
with slower Internet connections, or some may be businessmen traveling
and using a hotel room connection, an airport hotspot or some other
connection that restricts bandwidth and download speeds. These people
will greatly appreciate your report being only three or four MB, not fifty
MB! Often, in Europe, many European businessmen take a long summer
vacation, perhaps four to six weeks at a time, but they take their laptop
and work while on vacation. Many such businessmen access the Internet
using just a slow dial-up connection while on vacation, so downloading
twenty MB files or thirty MB files is almost impossible for these people.
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For all these reasons, sticking with the lowest common denominator
makes sense. An old friend of mine, and an excellent and very experienced salesman, always said “don’t give people a hammer to hit you
with”, meaning if you are trying to close a deal, don’t put any obstacles in
your own way, don’t give the customer reasons to say ‘no’. If the file format is unfamiliar, or the file too big, or the buyer needs to get on to his
corporate IT department to arrange delivery of this special file...these are
all reasons for the customer to say ‘no’. Remember, stick to the lowest
common denominator.
Finally, PDF files also offer good document security. You can publish
your reports so that people can read them, print them, and even copy
and paste data from them (your choice), but you can set password controls to stop buyers from amending or deleting or extracting pages, which
helps to prevent your reports being copied or ripped off. You can’t stop
people from forwarding the documents, and that does happen, but don’t
let it get to you, it’s just part of the business; you have to live with it.
Promotional materials or sales collateral
In order to start selling your new report you will need certain promotional
materials. I would suggest that you need a sales brochure, a dedicated
web page, a press release, a detailed table of contents (TOC) document, a
selection of sample pages, a copy of any reviews or testimonials you have
gathered (obviously these come in once you have published, but maybe
include testimonials from previous jobs, once you have them) and some
kind of order form document.
Some of you may decide to cut this short and keep it cheap and simple to
start out, and that’s fine. If you want to keep your initial investment to
an absolute minimum, then you could get away with a simple page on
your website which describes the report in detail, and maybe includes
some graphical elements (such as images from the cover, maybe a couple
of screen-grabs of sample pages), and details on pricing and how to order, and that might be enough. But it might not.
In my experience, ‘the more you tell, the more you sell’, and I produce my
promotional materials by the maxim ‘tell them everything they need to
know to make a purchasing decision’. If I don’t tell the customers everything they need to know, they will only come asking, and then I’ll find
myself repeatedly giving the same answers over and over, which is a
waste of my time.
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Sales brochure
These promotional materials, often referred to as sales collateral, are
quite simple really. Your brochure is your primary sales tool. It might be
two pages, made using MS Word and turned into a PDF, or it might be
something eight or ten pages long that you have professionally made by
your graphic designer, the choice is yours. All you really need is two or
three pages giving a detailed description of what the report is about, what
it covers, what questions it addresses, what data it includes, which forecasts, which market sizing figures, etc. This is where you can use lots of
bullet point lists, explaining “Report includes…” and then pop in a little
list of key sections, chapter headings, subjects tackled, etc.
Your brochure may include a detailed TOC (table of contents, remember)
or it may not, you may decide to make that a separate document. If you
include your TOC in your brochure, then you can present it any way that
you like, brief (just main chapter headings, etc) or in all its detail. If you
present your TOC in a standalone document, then you may either copy
the entire table of contents straight out of your PDF report, or have the
TOC professionally typeset and presented by your graphic designer.
Again, this is your choice, based on how much you want to invest and as
you build your business you will likely experiment with these different
options until you settle on what you think works best.
Press release
The next thing you need is a press release, and again you have the option
of employing a public relations agency to do the job for you professionally, or you may decide to do it yourself to save money. Obviously, the
saying ‘you get what you pay for’ is very true, and you’ll certainly get the
best results using a PR agency, but this can be expensive, so while you
are just starting out, shop around for a small, local firm, and plead poverty, asking them to keep costs to a minimum.
A PR agency will study your report, ask you questions about it, then
write a press release that highlights some of the most exciting findings
from your study. Remember, a press release is not the same as a sales
letter or sales brochure, a press release is not designed to sell your report. Instead, a press release is designed to catch the attention of editors
in the media, so that they will want to write about your report in their
trade magazines, newsletters, journals, newspapers, blogs and newswires. Whoever writes your press release will try to pick out the most interesting angle to attract the eye of editors. If there is anything controversial in the conclusions of your study, this is bound to catch their eye.
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I don’t write my own press releases, I use a professional, but I use a
small one-man company local to me, which keeps my PR costs to a
minimum. If you shop around, you will likely find a one-man PR company close to you, there are plenty of PR executives who leave their employers and set up their own companies, offering similar services at
greatly reduced prices. Using such a professional will help get your press
release distributed, as they know the business and which press-releasedistribution services (known as newswire services) to use.
There are many newswires out there which distribute press releases to
editors and news desks all over the world, for which they will charge you.
While you can compile a list and do this yourself, this will be time consuming and it is not a direct revenue-generating activity. Also, some editors will not accept unsolicited press releases direct from companies,
they only accept releases sent through newswire services, so you will often find that a press release generates much better news coverage for you
if you use a professional PR firm.
Web page
Clearly one of the most important pieces of sales collateral you need is a
dedicated web page on your own website. [See notes about setting up
your new company website later, in chapter eight.] The bulk of your sales
will be generated using this web page, so this is your most important
sales tool. Any time you manage to get external links on the web (such as
in an article written from your press release, or a review of your report),
those links will point to this page. Any emails you send out about the report will link back to this page. Your sales brochure will display the link
to this page. Your website home page should link to this page. You
should link to this page as often as possible!
The web page must list all the details people will need to know about
your new report. As I said earlier, ‘tell them everything they need to know
to make a purchasing decision’ is my motto, so I would recommend that
this page has a complete description of the report, what is in it, what
questions it addresses, what forecasts it contains, and so on. You may
also list a basic TOC here, you should have a link to your order form, order page, or at least give an email address and/or phone number to call
to place an order. See more about taking orders in chapter seven.
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Your web page should attempt to answer all those questions buyers
might ask, such as the following:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
What format is the report delivered in? Paper, PDF, etc?
How much does it cost?
How do I place an order?
How quickly will the report be delivered?
How many pages in the report?
How many exhibits/features/figures?
What geographical regions does it cover?
When was it written/published?
How many users can access the report? (Details in this chapter)
What does it cost for an enterprise license? (Details in this chapter)
These are the kind of questions people ask before making a purchase, so
it is worth taking time to design a nice looking web page that answers all
these questions in advance.
Sample pages
Some people like to see sample pages taken from your research report, so
they can get an idea of what the contents are like. This may sound silly
to you if you are unfamiliar with this business, but in fact there is often
good reason for this. Perhaps they wish to read a sample of the commentary and analysis, to see how insightful it is, or perhaps they want to see
the quality of the writing to ensure it is grammatically correct, and not
full or spelling errors. This may sound petty to you, but I have seen some
terrible reports being sold by some unscrupulous vendors, riddled with
bad spelling and poor grammar. You wouldn’t liek it if this book was ful
of spelilng erors would yoou? Imagnie if this bok cost $4000 bucks and
was flul of missteaks!
Maybe they want to see sample pages to evaluate how the graphical elements look, to judge the quality of the presentation – is the data legible,
is it easy to read the data on the graphs and charts? Alternatively, your
prospects might be looking for sample pages that cover a topic they are
personally familiar with, so that they can judge the depth and extent of
your research work. In some rare cases, someone with no intention of
buying your report will request specific sample pages, from the TOC listing. In such cases, I almost always say no, and send some randomly selected sample pages instead, as you may find they only want to get certain data for free, so they ask for those specific pages as samples.
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You can easily put together a brief selection of sample pages from your
PDF file, or just ask your KPO partner to prepare samples for you, in PDF
format. Some publishers may give a whole chapter as a free sample, often
the introduction chapter, as this tends not to contain too much of the
important conclusions or forecasts. Some publishers give sample pages
with the data points (like forecast numbers, etc) replaced with ‘XX’s, or
data tables purposely left blank, but I just select a few random, nicelooking pages from the report and bundle them together in a little PDF
file, and that seems to work just fine.
That just about covers your sales collateral. If you are still not sure what
to do, go back again to those sites of some of your peers and competitors,
where you went fishing for free sample reports earlier, and look at what
they have all done. Look at their web pages, their brochures, TOC documents and sample pages. Look at the words they use, the colors, the
style of presentation, the way the pages are laid out. This is all especially
important if you are trying to do all this on a budget, writing your own
materials instead of paying a graphic designer to do it. I use a graphic
design company to prepare all my sales collateral, but I cut corners and
did some of it myself when I first started out, to keep costs to a minimum.
There is no shame in copying what other successful publishers have already done. I don’t mean outright plagiarism, that would be wrong, but
there is no reason why you shouldn’t copy other companies’ successful
styles, layouts, presentations, etc. Sam Walton, the famous founder of
Wal-Mart, was always proud of the way he frequently visited other stores
and copied all their best ideas...and he went on to build the biggest company in the world, so there is really no shame in copying a good idea.
Solicit reviews
Now you have your report finished and your sales collateral prepared it is
time to start promoting your new report. In some cases you may just get
straight to selling, and as a salesman myself, I am all for that. I usually
start selling a report in the last few days of production, even before it is
actually finished. The final stages of production are usually a rush to get
the sales collateral prepared so that I can start promoting the report immediately that it is ready, or almost ready. But while leaping enthusiastically into your sales role, you should also try to find time to solicit some
reviews if you can.
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port, or the very next morning. You may include a note to editors in your
press release offering a ‘review copy’ for editors who wish to write an article about the findings in your report. Beware of insincere requests for
such a review copy – you don’t want to give copies away for free unless
you are going to get a nice review out of it. If the editor of a gardening
magazine wants your report which is about food preservatives, then he’s
probably just a time waster who asks for every freebie going. I avoid such
people, I don’t like handing out free reports to just anybody, I like to keep
strict control over where copies of my report go.
If a genuine editor wants a review copy, ensure that you offer some support. Send the copy with an email offering an interview or follow-up, suggest that if he has further questions, he can email you and you’ll provide
further insight. If he does ask further questions, you can get your KPO
team to help answer them, and in time, once you learn more about the
business, maybe you’ll be able to handle such requests by yourself. I’ve
been interviewed in magazines, national newspapers at home and
abroad, on local and national radio and on national TV, and I am regularly quoted in the press worldwide as an “expert”, but seven years ago, I
knew nothing. You’ll soon learn.
If you get these reviews, and they say positive things about your report,
you can keep copies of these ‘press clippings’ and add them to your sales
collateral. Don’t be afraid to ask for a review you can quote. The relationship is mutual – you are helping the editor with his story, so he can help
you with a nice comment, it seems a fair trade. Just ask, he can only say
no, that’s the worst that can happen. Alongside any reviews, if you
achieve good press coverage from your press release, you can even copy
the links to stories about your report and add them to your sales collateral on your site too.
It may help give some prospective buyers the confidence to buy from you
(remember no one has ever heard of your company, so you are trying to
establish your yet-to-be-trusted brand) if they see a list of links, which
click through to reputable industry-relevant sites which feature news
stories about your company and your report. Such activity quickly builds
your online presence; the links help your site to optimize well with search
engines and the repetition of your company name online helps establish
you within your chosen sector. Over the last seven years, MBR has become recognized as a world expert in certain areas of the telecoms business, and this helps win us more business, as we build credibility.
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Specially-adapted sections for journalists
Some editors don’t have time to review your report or write lengthy articles about the findings in your research. In many cases, busy editors
running online news feed services just reprint your press release almost
verbatim. However, in contrast to that, many journalists will do anything
to avoid copying your press release word-for-word. Where many news
feed editors have a duty to simply report the news of the day, most journalists work to slightly more generous time frames. A busy editor is often
happy to stick your press release straight on to his news feed, and so
that press release will often appear all over the Internet word-for-word
the same on many news sites. However, journalists working on articles
for newspapers, magazines and trade journals are often looking for a
unique angle, something to differentiate their news story from all the
press release repeats.
Some of these journalists may contact you asking for further details on
one certain aspect of your report, or they may want information from
your report that is relevant to one certain country or region. It is often
worth your time helping journalists with such requests, as they will often
produce far more interesting articles that are read by many more executives, just the kind of people whose interest you want to attract. Sometimes I have even extracted and modified a whole mini-section of a report
to help a journalist put a nice story together, and the result is nice coverage for your report, and usually a nice online link to add to your sales
collateral.
Take some time to work this kind of PR activity, it can produce results. If
you have employed the services of a PR firm to help you, they will help
you make the most of all these opportunities, but of course, it all costs
you money. PR itself does not make revenue for your business, but it
helps you penetrate the market, and it helps you build your brand,
which can have many long term benefits.
Tell your agents
Finally, once your report is written and finished, your sales collateral is
prepared, your press release out and you have started pushing for reviews, you must get down to some serious sales work. One group of people who can help you enormously with this is third party resellers, otherwise known as publishers’ agents. We’ll get down to much more detail
about this in the next chapter, but suffice to say for now that publishers’
agents come in many shapes and sizes these days, and some are utterly
useless, while some are absolutely fabulous.
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A publishers’ agent is a company rather like an insurance broker. When
you visit your insurance broker, or your mortgage broker as another example, that broker will find out your requirements and then sell you the
best policy to suit your needs (and earn his commission) from his large
available range of policies. The agent charges you the same as it would
cost you to purchase directly, taking his fee from the insurance company, under a pre-agreed contract.
Publishers’ agents work the same way. The salesmen at a publishers’
agent try to find people who need market research, and sell them the reports or newsletters or books that meet their needs, from an available
portfolio of hundreds or even thousands of products. As the publisher of
some of this material, you pay the agent a big fat commission for promoting your material. These commissions run from anything between about
15% of the list price up to as high as 75% or even 80% of the list price,
though the ‘industry standard’ for selling reports is 40 to 50%.
I strongly suggest you seek out a few good publishers’ agents to work
with you, and in the next chapter I’ll tell you more about picking a few
good agents. Once you have such relationships in place, be nice to these
people, they are your friends, and if they do well for you, they can help
you to make a lot of money. I have seen some relationships where 70% of
an entire publishing company’s revenue came from one single agent, and
I have seen many other examples, several of them sadly with agents appointed by MBR, where an agent has failed to produce a single penny.
Timescales
The publishing process is rarely quick.
The complete process, from first putting your job out to tender (asking a
bunch of KPO firms for a quote based on your brief) to the day you actually start selling the finished report, can be as short as one month, or as
long as six. Generally, if you start with a small job, it’ll probably take you
a couple of weeks to gather quotes and get the job started, then the production process might take four or five weeks, then it’ll probably take you
another two or three weeks to organize all the details described in this
chapter, the process of actually publishing your first report.
This will all get faster in time. Once your company is running efficiently,
you’ll have some experience under your belt and you’ll find things working more smoothly. You’ll be able to get all the sales collateral and press
material sorted out while the report is in the final stages of production,
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and you will learn to get the specification of your next job sorted out
while the current job is still in production.
I have learned through my mistakes. For full size two hundred to three
hundred page reports, involving primary research (interviews, surveys,
etc) and mathematical modeling, the production time runs to an average
of four months for each project, from when I first mention my latest idea
to my KPO partners, to the day I publish the finished report. In my first
two years, I would often wait until one report was coming to the end of its
sales shelf-life before starting to think about the next. This is a mistake,
because then you have nothing much to sell during the three or four
months of production time. Profit from my experience and overlap your
projects. When the report that is currently in production is about four
weeks away from the finish, you should get the next one down on paper
as a rough brief.
At some point late in the production process the almost-finished report
will come to you for your approval and your final QC and edit. During the
time you are doing this (it will typically take you a few days, assuming
you are working evenings and weekends on this new business) then your
KPO partners can be working up a proposal for the next project. Then
you swap back, and they send the proposal to you for approval, while
you send the report back to them to be finalized.
If you get this timing right, the moment they finish one job, they can
start the next, meaning you will have another report to sell in three or
four month’s time. Working this way, you should be able to publish three
or four products each year, which is probably optimum for your first
couple of years, until you quit the day job and go full time, when you will
then have the time to increase production.
Ideally, you should try to get your sales collateral and other materials all
prepared during the final weeks of production, at least as best you can
without the finished product in your hands. Once you have the finished
report on your desk you will be keen to start selling it ASAP, so try to get
your support materials ready in advance. Don’t worry about all this at
first, it’ll take your first two or three products to get up-to-speed. There is
a learning curve in starting any new business, but worrying and getting
stressed out about it won’t help, so just accept that you are learning and
try to stay positive and upbeat.
Make the most of this book, of my experience. I didn’t have this book, so
I just had to guess or make it up as I went along, and I did OK. You have
this book, so for you it should go smoother and easier than it did for me.
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Shelf life
Once your report is finished, you should have plenty of time to focus on
selling it. In my business, telecoms, a good report probably has an average shelf life of about twelve months. It’s not an exact science and every
report is different, as is every business, every sector, every subject and
even every buyer. It could be hard luck that you write a study about one
particular exciting technology just as another emerges to replace it. I
have seen some research reports in less fast-moving sectors that are still
highly relevant and still selling (at full price) even five years after they
were published. At other times, I have had customers reject reports I
have published because they believed the report was ‘old and out of date’
just four or five months after it was published.
So it’s often a matter of perception. Reports with market data in will obviously age faster than reports about technical meanings and specifications. Equally reports with ‘news’ in them will age very quickly, which is
obviously why we tend to leave ‘news’ to the newsletters and magazines. I
generally get about six to nine months good selling out of a report at full
price, then I might knock it down with a twenty or thirty percent discount and get a few more months out of it reduced, then once it hits
twelve months old, if I have a nice profit in the bank, I consider that report finished with. Some last longer, but not many.
License prices and copyright protection
This is one issue I have been dreading writing about, but I can’t avoid it
forever, it has to go some place in this book, so before starting the chapter on sales, I had better get this ghastly subject out of the way!
It’s not really so bad, and I’ll try to keep it as brief and easy for you as I
can, but anyone who has ever worked in the electronic publishing business before will know why this subject can be a headache. When you
publish a document electronically, it can be used and handled by the
buyer in very different ways to a hard copy report. If Mr Doe works for
The Big Company in New York, and he purchases a hard copy report, it
will generally spend its entire lifetime on his desk, right there in New
York. He may loan it to colleagues around the New York office, so that in
time it is read by several people, but it is unlikely to leave that office
unless he takes it on a business trip with him.
However, when that report is published as a PDF document, then within
minutes of receiving the report he has paid for, Mr Doe in New York
could be reading his copy, but also forwarding it to Mr Smith in Paris, Mr
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Jones in London, Mr Weng in Beijing and possibly many more colleagues
besides. Since publishing became an electronic industry, there have been
many attempts to control this illegal file sharing, and I am sure I could
easily fill an entire book for you just writing about this...but don’t worry,
I’m not going to.
Because of the problems of unauthorized access, and because electronic
reports can be sent to one or one hundred people in a matter of seconds,
unlike hard copy documents, we tend to see electronic reports in different license categories. Typically, most publishing companies start with a
‘single user’ license, then offer some kind of ‘site license’ then offer some
kind of ‘corporate license’ or ‘global license’. Most publishers offer two, or
three, or four levels of price, but there is wide variation across the industry. Let’s just look at these license categories in detail.
Single user: The obvious starting point is just one person. Almost
all publishing companies offer a single user license as their starting price, the lowest price. I think they are all wrong. I honestly believe that 90% of single user license reports ever sold are shared
with at least one or two other people. I’m not a pessimist or a
cynic; I just know this business well enough to know that’s how it
works.
Small group: Many publishers offer a small group license price. It
might cover three to five users, or maybe as many as ten, or it
might be a ‘Workgroup License’ or ‘Team License’, or it might be for
one unit, office, building or department. There is plenty of variation. Personally I think ‘office’ is dangerous, that could mean six
hundred people, so I would advise your ‘small group’ license
should be limited to max ten people, but you can experiment and
figure out what suits you best.
Group or City license: A lot of publishers offer a license for an ‘office’ (meaning building) or city (meaning all premises of that company in that city) or even a country. These are very hard to monitor
and police, as most executives load the documents on their laptops
and move around all the time. This category seems strange to me.
Small company: This is far more logical, this level of license allows
a small company (pick your definition of small) to purchase a license for unlimited internal use. Small companies will generally
distribute the report internally by email.
Medium company: As above, larger organizations. Medium and
large sized companies will typically redistribute purchased reports
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internally using a corporate Intranet (a limited access private
Internet network, only used by employees of the company, not externally accessible to the general public).
Large company: Often called MNC (Multi-national Corporation) or
Corporate or Enterprise license, this is a big license for large global
companies with hundreds or even thousands of potential readers
for your report. Again, as above, the license grants unlimited internal distribution using email and Intranet.
Multi-site license: Another license level that gets offered, multisite, for the large corporation who doesn’t want global access, but
they do want multiple cities...oh please, how fussy?
Global license: This one is great. I have seen some very savvy
salesmen at publishing companies sell more than one corporate
MNC license to the same company, combined and called a global
license. I think to the salesman this is the “charge what the hell
you like, here comes my Christmas bonus” license, and to the
buyer, this seems to be the “our company is so big and powerful
we actually want to pay more than all the other big companies just
to prove how huge we are” license. World full of fools, one born
every minute...
You might be wondering just what the difference between all these licenses is. Well, essentially, not really very much at all. Some publishers
like MBR, offer two or three different prices and rely on people to honestly buy the right one. Other publishers actually sell the report with a
printed license (piece of paper, stating terms and conditions) which people are supposed to take seriously.
Then there is the huge question of ‘how do you actually police this?’
Some publishers set up individual documents for every individual person
who purchases the report. That person has an assigned user name and
password to open the report and read it and the report is sent to a specific PC which is signed with a digital signature so that the report will
only open for that person on that PC – what a load of effort!
Some publishers encrypt the reports in special proprietary formats and
send the reader software first on a CDROM and then the report can be
read, and the buyer has to install the encryption/reader software...oh
how dull is that?!?
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Some publishers ask the buyers to sign lengthy contracts for each report,
saying that if they are caught forwarding the report illegally they will be
fined up to $100,000 dollars and the contract is enforceable under law
across loads of countries, and my Dad is bigger than your Dad so I’m
gonna get you....oh please, gimme a break.
I promised you I would keep this section short, and I’m like three pages
in already, so I don’t want to go into this too much, but really, distance
yourself from all that rubbish, here’s my sensible approach.
•
People will rip you off, I’m afraid it’s a fact, just get over it. You’ll
sell single user, four will read it; you’ll sell a ten user license, and
fifteen will read it. Don’t worry about it, that’s life.
•
Don’t offer single user, no one is ever a single user, so start with
about four users as your lowest price. At that point, some buyers
have a chance to be honest.
•
As the small publisher, leave this multi-site license stuff to the big
boys, it’s not your worry.
•
Try to sell reports to software companies; they are like the only
people in the world who honestly respect license terms. They know
about this stuff, they learned the hard way, they wrote the rule
book on this stuff.
•
Don’t worry about pieces of paper, contracts, terms and conditions,
legal documents, digital signatures, reader software, digital IDs
and all that. Remember my old friend, ‘don’t give people a hammer
to hit you with’. You put barriers in the way, people won’t buy.
•
Offer one price for the small group, one for the small company, one
for the big group and one for the big company – that’s plenty, try to
keep it simple.
At MBR we offer a few simple options, nothing too technical, we just want
to make sure everyone gets a fair deal. I know that if some guy buys a
four user license, seven will probably read it, or maybe fifteen, I don’t
really care. I know that if a small company (less than three hundred people, less than a billion in turnover) wants it, they should get it cheaper
than a huge blue chip Fortune 500 company. You see, it’s pretty simple,
the huge Fortune 500 companies can pay a bit more, on their Intranet it
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might be read by three hundred or even three thousand people, but a
smaller company, they only have seven hundred employees, maybe
twenty or thirty might read it, so they should pay less.
And if people ask for “specials” then dream up a price. If some guy says
they want eighty users, quote them something in the middle. Remember,
to you it makes no difference; all you have to do is send one email, so
this whole thing is just paper-shuffling bullshit anyway. I know some
publishing companies who have one price, that’s it, no license bracket
pricing at all. It’s a wonderful clean, easy idea, but it doesn’t work. If you
said your report was $3000 bucks for someone at a company ‘to purchase it’, they’d ask how many users that was for. You’d say ‘whatever
you like, one or one hundred’ and they’d say ‘well if this is for one hundred, we only want three, can we get it half price’. You see, it just doesn’t
work.
Set your official list prices, it makes you look like a proper publishing
company. Chapter eight later deals with lots about making your company
look bigger than just ‘you at home’, and this is all part of it. Set your
prices and stick to them. I would recommend you start at your price
point of something between $1000 and $5000 bucks, as discussed previously in earlier chapters, then spread your price points out until you
have doubled or tripled by the end. So something like this:
•
•
•
•
Small Group (4 users): $2500 USD
Small Company: $3500 USD
Large Group (30 users): $4500 USD
Large Company: $6000 USD
You get the idea? You want to offer price points that tempt the buyer up
to the next level. Most sales will be at your lowest price, and remember
they will almost all rip you off a bit by forwarding it, so load enough margin into your cheapest price that you feel comfortable with that.
After all my years in the business I have a very good feel for the honest
ones and those who are quietly thinking ‘ha ha Mr Publisher, I bought
four users and it’s going to be shared with twenty’. Let him think that if
he likes, because I’m thinking ‘ha ha Mr Rip-off, if I really thought there
were only four of you, I’d have let you have it at half this price.’
At the end of the day, this whole thing is a game. I look at those example
prices above, and I think that if $2500 is a fair price for half a dozen guys
at a small company, then $6000 seems a fair price for a hundred people
to share it in a Fortune 500 corporation. If you come up with a pricing
structure that seems fair to everyone, and makes a profit for you, then
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that should do the trick. Don’t get hung up on the details of this, it can
be such a big issue but it’s not worth it. I seriously could write a whole
book on it, but it is not worth worrying about.
This issue is more serious for big publishing companies, but for the small
guy like you and me, this is not a big problem. So a few people are ripping us off, no big deal, you still get a few thousand dollars every time
you send an email out, so who cares. Keep your eyes on the bigger picture, there are thousands of potential buyers out there, just don’t worry
about the few who get the better of you. If you can sell reports to one
hundred companies, so what if one hundred and twenty companies end
up with a copy? At $3000 bucks a copy, you will have three hundred
grand in your bank account – so who cares about the few that got the
better of you.
Enough said. I’m glad that’s done.
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Chapter 7:
Selling, the beating heart of any good
business
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Sell, sell, sell
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, maybe I am biased, maybe I’m just an ignorant
salesman, but I firmly believe that selling is at the heart of every good
business. The customer is king, I hear you cry. Absolutely, I would follow
up my first statement by saying that good customer service and honest
value for money are the two essential cornerstones of all sales, so please
don’t think I am setting customer care aside in favor of pure financial
greed. But what I am saying is that I believe many small businesses fail,
and many start-up companies fail to ever achieve critical mass because
often the people in charge fail to understand that sales is the throbbing
pulsating heart of any good business.
Of course, there are not-for-profit organizations, sure, and clearly they
are different. Government bodies, they are not about selling and making
a profit, I understand that. But listen, I have never worked for the government, so I don’t know what that’s like. I support quite a few charities,
but I have never worked for one or run one, so I don’t know what that’s
like either. I run a company solely designed to make money, and that’s
what this book is all about, and I know that selling is the key.
Too many small business owners think that a good idea is all you need,
and then the money will come. Wrong, you need to be commercially
aware, and understand the very simple notion of selling your product or
service for more money than it costs you to make or provide it, and then
you make a profit.
There are lots of good, honest, hard working people out there who come
up with great ideas for a business, great product or service ideas, but
their businesses fail. What does that often-quoted statistic say? I think
it’s that 70% or 80% of all small business ventures fail within the first
five years, most of them in the first year. Something like that…pretty
dismal really. Often, in my opinion, one of the main reasons for these
doomed business ventures is that the people running these small companies fail to understand the vital importance of sales. Many small business owners have an invention or idea, and that’s ‘their baby’ and that’s
all they focus on.
Mouse traps
Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said “Build a better mouse trap and the
world will beat a path to your door.” While Emerson was absolutely brilliant and that quote may be true in many circumstances, times have
changed and in the ferociously competitive 21st Century, for the most
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part, in a small business you need to market and sell your product proactively and aggressively. No one will buy your mouse trap unless they
know you’ve made it, so somehow you have to get out there and tell them
about it!
Of course there will always be exceptions…if you have an amazing invention, the next must-have craze like Rubik’s Cube or if you can write
books like the Harry Potter series then sure, the world probably will beat
a path to your door, but for most of us, our products, services, inventions or business ideas just aren’t quite that good. And besides, you
check up on the story of J.K. Rowling’s early days, she and her agent had
to work hard to make Harry Potter a success; it took a year to find a publisher who was prepared to publish the first book. Even then, they only
printed a few thousand copies as they didn’t think it would be a big hit.
Now, a decade later, the Harry Potter series has sold over three hundred
and twenty five million copies, the final book in the series was published
with a world record breaking first print run of twelve million copies and
Rowling is among the richest people in the world, and certainly one of the
most successful authors of all time.
Not bad for someone who had a hard time getting started!!! So believe
me, even if you think your product, or service, or business idea is fantastic, you can’t just ‘build it and they will come’, you have to get out there
and sell it. Also, once your business gets going, sales is the lifeblood of
any business and a lack of cash flow will cripple your business if you
don’t keep your finger on the pulse of your sales and your accounts. Over
the last twenty years I have seen too many small business owners who
are solely focused on their product or service, and their businesses have
ultimately failed because they ran out of money, or the market just never
took off.
I’ve seen inventors who spent all their time perfecting their product, only
to find that by the time they have finally developed this perfect product,
they have run out of cash and can no longer operate, or the market has
moved on and the so-called perfect product seems out of date. I have
seen writers who spend so long perfecting their books that they run out
of money long before the book is ever published (so my apologies if this
book is ‘a bit rough’, seriously, I know this isn’t perfect, but at least I got
it finished!).
I’ve seen people delivering services who spend all their time and money
getting the service delivery just perfect for the first handful of clients
(who usually come from friends, family, neighbours and extended social
networks) then they find they have no cash left to support growing the
business beyond their immediate ‘doorstep’. Over the years I have been
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telling my staff that publishing market research for the B2B market is
“about selling, not spelling”. I mean that while it is important to deliver
good quality, 99% will do, then get the thing out there.
Don’t waste forever chasing 100%...perfection is a myth. I am pretty sure
there are a lot of people who don’t agree with me, but personally I’d
rather make a couple of million bucks selling something that is 99%
right, than spend my life working towards 100% and never make a dime.
Remember we are publishing market intelligence here, which is timesensitive material by default. Therefore, it is more use to the end users,
your customers, if you get it out in good time while they can buy it and
make use of it, even if it has the odd spelling mistake or the odd graph in
the wrong color, than if it’s 100% perfect but running six months late,
after the market has moved on.
Learn from the investment experts
Thousands of small businesses fail every week because good people with
good ideas simply run out of money and can’t afford to keep making their
product or delivering their service. If these people put sales and cash flow
at the core of their business plan from day one, many more of these
companies would survive and go on to thrive.
If you have ever looked at how venture capitalists (VCs) invest in start-up
companies, you’ll see how they set milestones, targets for the company to
reach, before each tranche of capital is released. So if the VCs tell startup company ABC Inc that they must achieve sales of $XX before the next
$5 million is injected into the company, if that sales target isn’t reached,
the next infection of capital is held back and the company management
better have some damned good reasons why they missed the target, otherwise the funding stops.
This way, VC firms minimize their risk, they hold back investing more
until the start-up company has proven itself capable of generating revenues. Now, this is all some way beyond the kind of home-based enterprise you are learning to run from reading this book, but the process is
not dissimilar. You have to have this kind of structure and discipline
with yourself. In my case, as explained back at the start of this book, I
wasn’t prepared to risk any substantial amount of money starting my
business, so I set the whole thing up for just $1242 dollars. I then made
sure I was ‘in the black’, I.E. bills paid and in profit, before I invested another penny.
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To this day, over two and half million bucks later, I have never invested
another dime in the company, which has remained profitable and with
cash reserves in the bank ever since those first few months.
This wasn’t luck; this is how I planned this business from the outset. I
had a good job already and a good income, and my wife was expecting a
baby. There was no way I was going to risk our home or our security for
some crazy idea of a new business! My wife wouldn’t have let me!! No,
from day one I put that $1242 bucks in and I said never a penny more,
that’s it, don’t be seduced into thinking ‘just a little more should see me
through.’ That’s the downfall of so many small business owners, they
keep pumping in their personal cash in the false belief that ‘any day now’
they will see it all take off, only to find they run out of cash and still the
business isn’t making the money it should.
I set out my business plan from the start, it seemed a good idea, I knew
how to sell the products, and there was no reason why it wouldn’t work.
The crucial point here is, if the first product failed completely, I.E. failed
to generate even a couple of grand in sales, then clearly the business
model was flawed, and it would not be wise to invest further in the business until I had figured out where it all went wrong.
Too many small business owners don’t look at their new company this
way. Why? Because they are often ‘in love’ with their product, their invention, their ‘baby’, and after years of thinking up this great idea and
perfecting it and nursing it into being, they are blinded by their love of
the product, unable to see the cold, hard facts.
Note on political correctness: You may have noticed that I refer to
you being a business ‘man’, or I talk about ‘he’ or ‘him’ whenever I refer to you, the reader, or to a non-specific business person. Guess
what, I’m not a sexist, I’m not biased, I’m not belittling women or suggesting men are better at business than women (in fact, women are
often better at managing a business than men, they tend to be better
at detaching their emotions from important business decisions, apparently.) No, none of that, I just decided to use ‘him’, not ‘her’, probably
because I am a man, so it maybe feels natural to me.
Anyway, it’s not a slight on anyone, so don’t worry about it, and if you
really find it offensive, then sorry, but… you know, get over it; it’s just
words, that’s all.
Hope that’s OK with everyone, Brad.
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Listen, if you have an invention or some product or service you have developed and you absolutely love it – great, good for you, you’re a great inventor, or artist, or craftsman, or creator, or service provider, or caregiver
or writer or whatever it is that you do/give/make…but that doesn’t mean
you are a great businessman. So many bright, honest, hard working
people make this mistake, they have an idea or creation and they want to
develop it, so they think they must be entrepreneurs, set up their own
businesses and make a fortune. But that’s not logical!
Being good at business is a separate skill (or set of skills) all by itself. If
you can invent gadgets or electronic devices, that’s one skill; if you can
write a great book or create an amazing sculpture, that’s a great skill; if
you can cook, write, sing, paint, build things...all great skills, but none of
these skills mean you know how to be a good business woman (see,
caught you by surprise there...). To be good at running a small company,
you need to be part strategist, part accountant, part visionary (it really
helps if you can see things coming, forewarned is forearmed and all that),
part laborer, part salesman, part customer service provider and part production manager – to name but a few of the skills you might need!
Think about your skills...if you don’t have what it takes to be a business
man, get a partner who does. It’s far better in life to own half of a really
successful small business, than to own the whole of one that fails. If you
don’t see yourself as a part salesman, part accountant, part buyer, etc,
then be honest and seek out someone who has these skills, and maybe
some experience, and see if they want to work with you. J.K. Rowling had
confidence in her own writing abilities, but she didn’t try to publish her
own book, or print the copies on her own printing press, or run her own
PR campaign or design her own sleeve illustrations, instead she sought
out the right partners to help her achieve her goals.
I don’t want to be down on anyone’s entrepreneurial dreams, but be realistic about your skills, apply yourself to what you do best, and where
necessary, partner with others who can help you with your weak areas.
The business described in this book could be run by anyone, now I have
ironed out the bugs and perfected the process, and laid it all out here for
you in great detail.
But still this business will work best in the hands of people who have the
street smarts to take it from where I am and move it on, evolve it to the
next level. Anyone with a dose of common sense could run this business,
but someone who understands selling, money and cash flow will make it
thrive, and drive it forward.
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So if you have a great idea for a business, remember that very few people
will make a success of any business if they do not understand the process of selling, and if they fail to keep a firm grip on the accounts. Businesses run on positive cash flow, and cash flow requires a steady stream
of sales. If the cash stops coming in, no business will survive unless you
have some very friendly investors behind you. I’ve been running MBR for
seven years and no matter what I have to do, every day I spend the first
half of the day on sales work. Every day – no matter what. And in case
you were wondering, I wrote this book in my spare time, in the evenings
after my kids go to bed – I never stopped important sales work, not for
this book nor for anything else.
When I am busy, and I have work stacked up on my desk, everything else
has to wait...the accounts, production work, editing, planning future
product launches, IT and website maintenance and development, paying
my taxes (oh OK not really, but that’s the ONLY exception, paying the tax
man) otherwise everything else comes second to selling. As a small business, you get a pretty good deal on the tax front, so never upset the tax
man, just pay, on time, and stay ‘under the radar’. It’s just not worth
causing any trouble.
But with that one exception, you have to make time for sales work every
day. Any time you spend a whole day working on production, at the expense of marketing your small business and selling your products, you
are entering a very dangerous place. In the last six years, I have made
time for sales work every single working day, without exception. At MBR
we publish great research reports at great value prices and I truly believe
we deliver excellent value to our customers. However, in reality our
‘mouse traps’ aren’t that much different to anyone else’s, and sadly the
world isn’t beating a path to my door – I have to beat that path outwards,
constantly, every single day. That’s the reality so accept it and get ready
for it, or stop reading here and go do something else.
How to sell market research
Once you actually start selling, it’s really not too bad. If you are a born
salesman like me, then you’ll enjoy it, but even if you are not a natural
seller, there are plenty of ways to sell research reports without too much
‘hard sell’. I once attended a great one-day sales seminar given by a fantastic speaker from Texas named Larry Winget. Larry had a great phrase
for summing up the entire process of selling, he said: ‘Find out what
people want, give ‘em lots of it; then find out what they don’t want, and
don’t give ‘em any of it.’
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Brilliant, and completely true and that just about tells you almost everything you need to know about selling. Beyond that, there are details, but
in terms of the essence of the whole process, that’s got 95% of it covered.
There are a few other wise words you may like to remember (see later),
but selling really is that simple. Personally, I reckon all these books with
hundreds of pages describing selling systems and techniques, detailed
plans and schemes, are all simply perfecting the ‘last five percent’. If you
want loyal, happy customers who come back and buy from you time and
again, and who tell their friends and colleagues to come visit your site,
the only way you will ever achieve this is to sell them what they want and
need, and never sell them what they don’t really want or need.
Almost any tricksy salesman can talk someone into an order if they persist, but some time sooner or later that customer will end up realising
you sold them something against their will and this will leave him or her
feeling ripped off and cheated. Loyalty and repeat business will only come
your way if you sell genuine, good-quality, good-value products to the
people who need and want those products. At MBR we get lots of repeat
business, we rely on repeat orders, and in fact I would go so far as to say
that if we didn’t get repeat business, we’d probably be out of business by
now. There is no way you can afford to publish rubbish and rip people
off, thinking you’ll just go find another idiot to buy your next report. No
way, forget it.
If you think this is some kind of quick-buck, hard-sell, scam then you
are very wrong. You’ll need to get to know your customers, understand
their needs, build a relationship and add value to their lives by helping
them to get what they want, when they need it, at a price that fits their
budget. If you do this, they will reward you with plenty of repeat business. If you don’t, they’ll be buying from your competitors instead.
Over the last seven years I have built good profitable relationships with
many of my customers, but as the title of this book points out, that has
not meant lots of business meetings, lunches, overseas travel, etc. No, I
have done it all without leaving home. Many of the best relationships can
be built over the phone, and even I have been surprised over the years
how well I can get to know people by email. I am a prolific writer, often
sending up to three hundred or four hundred personally written emails
in a single day, and we’re not talking those three-word one liners here, I
mean proper emails, hundreds of words in length. It’s amazing what relationships you can build using the phone and email.
This book is not the place for me to start teaching any kind of complex
sales training courses, and frankly you don’t need it, but I’ll do what I
can to help you get started. Naturally, if you have some sales skills or
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experience, this will help you, but I honestly believe you do not need to
be a salesman to make this business work. Anyone who can provide a
little bit of clear, honest customer service can do this. Selling isn’t rocket
science, it’s actually very simple. Selling to business is much nicer than
trying to sell to the public, as people tend to have less emotion attached
to spending their company’s money than spending their own.
My wife taught me that. She used to work as a teller in a bank before we
met, and she told me that banks can be really miserable places to work,
because everyone who goes into a bank and approaches the teller is so
serious all the time. Once that’s pointed out to you it all makes sense,
you look next time you are in your bank, you’ll see that my wife is right,
everyone is dead serious. People tend to be serious about their money –
they have worked hard for it, they feel protective of that money and their
privacy, so when they step into a bank, they tend to check their sense of
humor at the door.
Selling business-to-business (B2B as against business-to-consumer,
B2C) is different, people are happy to laugh and joke when it’s OPM
(other people’s money) they are spending. ‘Sure, no discount, OK, just
send me an invoice for $5000 bucks, can you email the report over right
now?’ – that’s how people are with company money, but most folks just
aren’t so relaxed about their own, personal, hard earned cash. You’ll find
selling B2B is really much nicer than selling B2C, and if you are honest
and you do your best to help people, to serve people, you’ll do just fine.
Now, let’s take a look through some of the actual mechanics of selling
these research reports.
Build a database
I suggest you get organized right from the start. Start building yourself a
sales database from day one, now, and keep it clean and up-to-date the
whole time, as best you can. There are as many types of database software out there as there are pages in this book, and I am not trying to sell
you anything or get you to pick one make over any other, so you go pick
one that suits your needs. I built mine in Microsoft Excel, but that’s because I already owned Excel, so it saved me buying any new software.
Excel is great for keeping big lists, but Excel is not a database package,
it’s a spreadsheet, and so it is not perfectly suited to building a database.
There are many better software packages out there that have many better
functions, proper database and contact management functions, so you
should probably go an invest in one of these once you can afford to.
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You should build a database of names, job titles, companies, phone
numbers, email addresses and all that kind of data. If you buy proper
database software then you’ll have room to keep notes about what people
say and all sorts. During my years in sales jobs I have used all kinds of
sales contact management software, some of it quite simple and some of
it very detailed and complex. Some of these packages prompt you to record so much information about your contacts that if you are not careful
you’ll end up spending all day building and updating your sales database
and no time actually selling!
Some software links your phone to your PC so you can press a button on
the keyboard and it auto-dials the contacts number. Some software records notes about your contact while you are on the call. Some software
keeps dozens of bits of data about each contact, from birthday to
spouse’s name and inside leg measurement...well, almost.
But really, do you need all that? I keep name, company, job title, email
address and phone number, and postal address once they actually purchase from us. That’s all I need, I rely on my memory to supply the rest,
which seems to work just fine, even for my tens of thousands of contacts.
I suggest you start for your first year or so just keeping a simple database of essential contact information then grow it from there if you feel
you need more data.
Contact management
While I keep my contact database [mainly] in MS Excel, I use MS Outlook
as my primary contact management software. A couple of thousand of
my best buyers and key contacts are also kept in Outlook, for ease of
use, and I do actually think Outlook is a great piece of software, with a
lot of functionality, but I don’t want to push Outlook, (hey, I’m not on a
sales commission from Microsoft!!) so you may pick any of hundreds of
other contact management and email handling packages.
I do not specifically promote or endorse Microsoft, but I have the full Office suite and it does everything I need. I love Excel and Outlook, PowerPoint is OK, but I hate Word even though I use it all the time, and I never
use the rest of the suite – Access and Publisher and so on. As an overall
package, it’s all you need at an affordable price, but equally there are
plenty of other options you might use. A friend of mine builds his own
customized databases in FileMaker Pro (see www.filemaker.com), which
he says is real easy to use, and I have seen his results and they look
great, so that’s another option you might like to look at.
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There is one other option you may want to explore for all your database
maintenance and contact management – outsourcing. Yes, once again
turn to your KPO (or BPO) suppliers in Asia and ask if they offer sales
support services. Sales support is a key component of most BPO offerings, so you will probably find almost all firms offer this, and there will
be ten times as many service companies throughout Asia offering you
sales support compared to those offering full KPO research services.
Basic sales support tasks, like database maintenance or pre-sales lead
generation, is quite simple work compared to writing complex research
reports, so you’ll find a huge number of companies that can offer this
help, probably at much cheaper pay rates than you’ll pay for advanced
research work.
You may run your own database at first, just to keep costs down, but in
time you could easily hand this function over to your BPO partner who
will manage your database online for you, where you can access it whenever you need to. Eventually you can even hand over some of the sales
activity too, and have your BPO partner search for leads for you, send
out emails, make pre-sales enquiry calls for you, etc. As a salesman by
trade, I tend to manage most of my sales work myself, but I do use outsource partners for lead sourcing, database cleaning, preparing some
mailers, that kind of thing.
List building
Once you have a database set up with some content in it, then you need
to build lists for mailings. You could be really lazy and just promote everything to everybody, but that is bound to be a partial waste of your time
and it’s bound to annoy some of your prospects. It’s better to be a bit
more scientific than that and actually target appropriate products at appropriate people. Keep this in mind from the start and add ‘fields’ or
notes to your database to segment your contacts by their area of interest,
to help you build separate lists for separate promotions as time goes on.
If you are starting a publishing company in the automotive sector, as an
example we have used before, you may build a list of production managers and production facility directors, and then promote a report about
technological advances in automotive production line equipment to these
lists. Then you may have a report about automotive plant operations in
emerging markets, or the rise of Asian car manufacturers, and you may
build a list of senior overseas portfolio managers, global manufacturing
executives, and so on.
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Maybe you plan to publish in the pharmaceutical industry, so your list
may want to separate out managers in drug company R&D facilities,
from product marketing executives working with finished products. It
can take several years for a drug to go from R&D through testing and
certification into the hands of product managers who have to them promote and sell that drug…so clearly these people will have very different
interests at different times, so it makes good sense to segment your database accordingly. Essentially, you are trying to identify the right people, because there is no point in promoting your report to the wrong people, a waste of their time and yours, and if you can find the right people,
then you only need a small list, as just a handful of sales will make you a
very nice profit.
Finding contacts
The web is a wonderful thing. I’ve been in sales on and off for many years
and I can honestly say that finding prospects has never been easier,
thanks to the marvel that is the Internet. You can use the net to search
for the people you want, and find their contact information, and then you
can contact them by phone, by email or by post. If you have some previous knowledge or expertise in the area you have picked to write research
reports in, then you may know the names of some of the companies most
active in this business.
Maybe you already have some contacts and know people you can try to
sell to. Perhaps you have friends and colleagues and contacts in the
business who you can ‘work’ for more contacts, more leads to try to sell
to. Use your social and professional networks, if you have any in the
relevant business, to try to gather names and contact information. There
are the social networks like Facebook and Twitter which are finding increasing popularity among business users, which may be of some use to
you, but there are also many professional networking sites, like LinkedIn,
Xing and Plaxo to name just a few.
Searching the web for contacts is easy, much easier than you might
think. There are far more web pages online than people on the planet, so
you’ll be amazed how tens of thousands of business people have allowed
their basic contacts details to appear on the web, for you to try pitching
to them. Search company names, search job titles (see more about target
job titles below) and search for events where your target audience meet
and network.
The kind of people we sell research reports to are often the same kind of
people who tend to appear as speakers at relevant industry events such
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as seminars and conferences. Search online for conferences and exhibitions in your chosen field and you’ll probably find a list of speakers,
many of whom will be ideal target prospects – product managers, VPs
(vice presidents), marketing managers, strategy directors and C-level executives. (C-level or C-suite means senior top management…CEO, CFO,
CMO, CTO, COO, CIO, etc. As suggested back in an earlier chapter, if in
doubt, look these things up on Wikipedia and you’ll soon learn.)
Another great source of potential sales leads are trade associations and
industry-specific forums and groups. Most industries have trade associations and other special interest groups, and they all have websites.
Check out these sites, you should find listings of members which will
usually give you company names, address details, links to websites, and
possibly named individuals, sometimes with phone numbers and email
addresses. Of course, if you take these email addresses and email these
people, you would be sending unsolicited commercial email, better
known as spam, but we’ll talk about that later.
Once you find the names of people you think will make ideal targets,
then go to the websites of the companies these people work for and locate
office addresses, try calling the switchboard and asking where the target
is located, ask for his/her email address or direct dial/extension number. You might not get it, but it’s worth a try. Search online for these details, type the targets name in and search it, if it is a poplar name like
‘Mike Smith’ then search for the name of the company too, to narrow
down your search.
Corporate press releases often give details of people you can contact. At
the end of a press release they usually include a paragraph “About XXX
Corporation” which usually includes a name and phone number or email
address. You can search press release archives on almost every company
website, and those same press releases will often name managers within
the company. It is common for a press release to quote someone at the
company, maybe the CEO, maybe a senior VP, maybe a mid-level manager, quoting some words of wisdom from that individual. You can collect
such names to build your contacts at a company.
As your database grows, completing the other contact details for these
people can be easy. Once you have a list of office addresses (find these on
the ‘Contact Us’ or ‘How To Find Us’ or ‘Locations’ pages of company
websites) then you gather the list of named executives. A quick call to the
HQ switchboard to ask “Please could you just help me, is Dave Smith in
the Seattle office or Chicago” and the receptionist says “Oh no sir, he’s in
New York” and you have that sorted out. Then you know which time zone
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he’s in, so you won’t go calling him too early or too late in his working
day, or call his cell phone at an unsociable hour.
Email addresses can be just as easy. Something like 50% of all companies on the planet follow a pretty straightforward email address construction. Loads of companies use [email protected] or just
[email protected] or [email protected] or something
similar. Many companies use the same domain construction for email
addresses and their website. So for example take Procter & Gamble, the
pharmaceutical and household goods giant responsible for such well
known brands as Pampers, Ariel, Duracell, Gillette and many more. The
company’s primary website is at www.pg.com and many of the employees have email addresses ending @pg.com
Take another vast global brand like Ford Motor Company, and the company’s main site is at www.ford.com and again many employees have
email addresses which follow the domain construction @ford.com. Other
companies use abbreviations of long names, maybe using letters just like
P&G, and other companies insert ‘corp’ or ‘email’ into the construction of
their email addresses. As an example, you might find ABC Company uses
email addresses written [email protected] or they might use
[email protected]
Some global corporations use a common domain name but then add the
relevant country extension depending on where the employees work. So
for instance, our imaginary friend Dave Smith might work in the US and
his email address might be [email protected] but if he moves to Beijing then he becomes [email protected] and if he moves to England he becomes [email protected] or in France he would be
[email protected] and so on.
In my experience, a few minutes searching online for any company and
you can easily find out how they construct email addresses, and you can
easily guess how someone’s email address will be written. You won’t always be right, but I bet you’ll be amazed how easy it is to get it right first
try at least 50% of the time. Then you can easily find office locations and
addresses and phone numbers, at least for the switchboard in each office, then if you are nice and friendly to the receptionist, you can usually
get to the person you want quite quickly.
Obviously you will not get to C-suite executives in Fortune 500 companies in one phone call…I’ve been selling for twenty years and I rarely get
to C-suite executives in really big companies, but to be honest we don’t
want these big hitters anyway, they don’t buy little $3000 dollar market
reports, they have bigger things to worry about, they make multi-million
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dollar decisions every day. This is actually one of the great things about
this business model; at the price point I am suggesting you use, we’re not
really demanding much from the targets at these big companies.
Most corporations think $2000 to $5000 dollars is only a small amount
of money, so we don’t need to go all the way to the top to get authority to
make the purchase. Most junior managers can sign off a couple of grand,
so that makes our sales job much simpler, as we don’t have to work our
way up the ranks to find some CFO who can sign off on a $750,000 order, we just need a product manager with a company credit card and we
can make a sale.
In very small companies you will probably still have to pitch the CFO or
CEO (see below), but in any medium-sized company there are a lot more
product managers with a company credit card than CFOs. As a salesman, I can get in touch with a product manager much quicker and easier
than finding time to pitch to the CFO. You see, sometimes ‘selling small’
has its advantages; we have what would properly be called a much larger
‘addressable market’.
Target job titles
After a while you will start to learn which job titles you are looking for,
and these fall into two broad categories. The first category is what I call
the industry/job specific folks. The second category are information professionals...they can be a bit scary, but very useful!
In the first category there will be a lot of variety depending on what industry you are working in and what size and type of companies you are
selling to. In very small companies, the CEO (or Managing Director, or
Chairman, or Founder) or CFO (Finance Director or Company Secretary)
will usually be the only people who can sign off on spending several
thousand dollars on research information. In companies of only a handful of employees, the CEO and CFO are generally the only people who
have any spending power at all!
In slightly larger companies, you’ll probably find you can get sign off for a
few thousand bucks from anyone at C-Suite level (CEO, CFO, CMO, etc)
and also there will likely be another layer of management just below the
C-Suite and they too will have some spending power. In these cases, you
will be targeting VP of Marketing, VP of Business Development, Product
Development Manager, Market Development Manager or possibly head of
R&D, depending on the size of the company.
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In medium size companies, several hundred staff or more, then you will
have multiple levels of management within your sights. Here you will
tend to target senior managers within the marketing department, product managers, product and market development managers, R&D staff,
business development managers and some senior managers in sales.
Again you might go as senior as C-Suite, but at this level you will rarely
get a response directly from anyone in the executive management, more
likely you will deal with their juniors and their personal assistants.
In the final layer, the serious big companies, those multi-national global
companies turning over billions in revenues, there are usually literally
hundreds of target people in each company. Again it will mainly be marketing and sales staff, R&D and product management or market development. However, in these big companies you start to find they employ
information professionals, and even have entire departments set up to
study market and competitor intelligence, and that leads us to our second category, the slightly scary information professionals.
Now, once you get yourself established in this business, you’ll get to
know that this business model, this whole book, is all about that phrase
I just used – market and competitor intelligence. Actually, I can’t quite
believe we got this far through the book before I have used that
phrase...I’ve clearly been too soft on you. Market and Competitor Intelligence, often abbreviated to M&CI in big companies, is actually the posh
name for what we do, the entire business described in this book – we
publish Market and Competitor Intelligence.
Big companies have whole departments set up to cover just this. In some
companies that might be just one or two people, but in others that then
breaks down into several different departments, each of several people.
The biggest companies can have dozens of staff just to track markets,
competitors, market research and so on. Naturally, these are the holy
grail for us, the small publisher, as these people often have millions to
spend, but they are also, of course, the hardest and most demanding
sales to win. These people are information professionals, and they often
know more about the market research business than you do, and that’s
when it gets a bit scary.
Some of these big blue chip companies [blue chip, for those of you not
from a business background, means ‘the biggest companies in the world’.
In gambling, the blue chips in a casino are the serious high value chips,
hence ‘blue chip’ meaning ‘the biggest players’] have market research
functions broken down to the MI department (Market Intelligence), CI
department (Competitor Intelligence) and both report into BI (Business
Intelligence) as the controlling function. You’ll have to get used to people
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talking about intel, meaning short for intelligence, not Intel the chip
manufacturer (well, unless you work in the semiconductor business),
and if you find yourself on the phone to anyone in BI, MI or CI...well, you
better hope you know what you are talking about, or you will likely make
a right fool of yourself.
These information professionals buy reports like the ones I publish every
day, and they have seen the best and worst in published research over
the years. If you publish good reports and you know your subject well,
then you’ll enjoy selling to these people and if you build a good relationship it will pay off for years to come. If your reports are under-par and
you are out of your depth, it’s best you don’t get too closely involved!
If you do manage to make some friends then these information professionals may become customers of yours for many years to come. Like
everybody else, these people change jobs from time to time, and if they
like you and they think highly of your publications, they will likely give
you business from their new positions when they change job. It can take
years to achieve, but it is wonderful if you make a friend who can only
afford to buy one or two reports from you each year due to a limited
budget, then that information professional changes job to a much bigger
firm and suddenly buys all your reports from their huge new budget.
Such events are what makes sales a satisfying long term career.
I’m not going to go into too much more detail on this, you’ll soon learn,
your ideal targets are anyone who has words like tactical, development,
strategic, intelligence, research in their job titles. Anyone involved in
strategy and planning is ideal. Some big companies will have a ‘Strategy
and Planning’ department, and ‘Market Intelligence’ may be a subdivision of that. In some companies I have seen such a department called
‘Policy and Planning’, or ‘Corporate Development’ and I expect that by the
time this book is finished there will be a whole bunch of new names and
buzz words. You’ll figure it out once you get started.
People who don’t want to pay
You know, no matter how hard you try to find people who satisfy your
two main criteria –
a) Want the information in your reports
b) Have money to spend
- there will always be plenty of people who want your research but don’t
want to pay for it. Even though you are not looking for them and you
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don’t advertise much and you only started your new business about a
week ago, somehow they’ll find you – the not-for-profit organizations, the
academic institutions and worst of all, the dreaded students!
Every day some nice student will call or email you explaining how he may
just be a student now and he has no money to pay you for your research
and he really needs your research to finish his thesis. But hey, he’ll tell
you that someday he’s going to be a big shot executive at one of your target companies and he’ll remember your kindness and buy all your reports for his company... It’s a great story, and I have heard it a lot of
times, but I have never known it to come true.
Sometimes I am kind and give students free reports, but then a few
weeks later I see the same person crop up with a corporate email address
at a company in my industry, and I feel cheated. Often it’s because the
guy is an employee of that company, but he’s doing a part-time, company-sponsored MBA and he emailed you from his hotmail account or
something. You just know that your report will have found its way into
that company free of charge, and that stings a bit. How you handle the
students is up to you. I mostly only give away stuff that’s old; I never give
students up-to-date research for free.
On rare occasions I’ll find an NGO or charity that wants our research,
and I usually let them have it for free, and I usually offer not for profit
industry bodies (forums, societies, alliances, industry-specific trade associations, etc) or academic institutions a hefty discount, between 25%
and 50%. Use your own judgment; no two cases are the same.
Ways to sell
At this point we should remember the title of this book – without leaving
home – that’s what it says, so clearly I have not built my business by
knocking on doors or attending lots of meetings. But listen, you don’t
have to do it the way I did.
Seriously, if you are gregarious and outgoing and from a sales or marketing or customer service background and you like meeting people, then
get out there and promote your new business. Just because I did it without leaving home, that was my choice, and you should make your own
choices and build your business how you want it.
As I stated earlier in this chapter, selling is easy, it’s just being nice to
people, helping to give them what they want and need at a price point
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member the old adage ‘people buy from people’ and this is very true, so if
you want to get out there and be nice, and meet people and make new
friends, then go out and sell face-to-face, it’s the best way to sell, without
exception.
I don’t sell face-to-face because I don’t have time, I like being at home
and as a career salesman I have done all that before. Spend a decade in a
suit pitching your goods in other people’s offices and the novelty wears
off. Also, I sell reports all over the world, to every country, and so only a
small proportion of my sales are close to home in my domestic market.
For this reason, selling face-to-face is largely impractical for about 70%
of my customers.
Again, you should make your own choices and you may concentrate
much more of your sales effort on your domestic market, especially if you
are based near a major commercial center that is home to many companies in your chosen field. If you are located miles from any major city and
there are no major industries nearby, you might operate more like I do,
relying on the phone and email as your principle sales tools.
Telesales
After meeting face-to-face, the next best way to sell is over the phone. As
a former telephone salesman, I spent years on the phone, often racking
up hundreds of calls per day. It can be hard work but it can also be very
rewarding, and some relationships I built in telesales – both professional
and personal - have endured to this day. However, you may not want to
sell over the phone, maybe you are not a confident sales person, or maybe you are not one of those people who can talk comfortably on the
phone for any length of time. Perhaps you just don’t like the idea of
spending hundreds of dollars every month on calling international-directdial at peak rates!
Again, the backbone of this whole business model is outsourcing – so
outsource your sales too. Seriously, there are thousands of companies
around the world who specialize in sales and marketing support, so you
might as well try some of them. I’m not going to get into great detail
about this here, simply because this is such a vast subject that I could
easily write entire books just about this. Get online a have a look around
for yourself and see what you can learn. There are full service marketing
agencies which can construct entire sales and marketing campaigns for
you, at vast cost, or there are simple fee-based telemarketing agencies
who will promote your products for a set price per phone call.
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You can supply these telesales agencies with a list of prospects, and a
phone script (or they will help you write both) and they will set to work
calling everyone on the list. Obviously, the more you ask them to do, the
more it will cost you. Now of course, you might not want to spend any
money, so wouldn’t it be great if someone would spend all day promoting
your reports and you didn’t have to pay them - and that’s where the publishers’ agent comes along.
Publishers’ sales agents
Publishers’ agents are companies set up just to sell the kind of publications you are planning to produce, for you and lots of other publishers.
How perfect does this sound…you start a publishing company, outsource
production of your reports to India or China, then outsource the selling
to a bunch of publishers agents, and you just sit back and wait for the
money to come in. Well, in theory, that’s how it works, but as I have said
from the start of this book, you won’t get rich doing nothing, and all
these partners and relationships need managing and supporting and the
more you work at it, the better it will all be.
Publishers’ agents come in all manner of shapes and sizes, although sadly these days too many of them are turning into indistinguishable ‘webbook-stores’ which offer much less value to you as a small publisher. Essentially, the publishers’ agent is like your insurance broker, but for
market intelligence not insurance policies. An agent will represent many
publishers, offering reports, books, newsletters, maps, data tables, wallcharts, magazines and more, probably tens of thousands of products under one roof.
The agents offer a convenient ‘one-stop-shop’ service to the end users,
allowing busy executives to purchase lots of reports and newsletters from
one place, so they don’t have to deal with multiple sales people, multiple
invoices, and biased sales advice. The publishers’ agent also offers a
great valuable service to you, the small publisher. You can work with
these agents and see your reports promoted independently right alongside your competitors, of all sizes. Such exposure next to well established
brands is extremely valuable and can be a huge boost to a new small
publishing company.
As if all this doesn’t sound good enough already, what’s more you don’t
pay these agents per call, or per face-to-face visit, or per email campaign,
in fact you don’t pay them anything to promote your report all day long.
You only pay them when they make a sale. That sounds great doesn’t it?
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It is, except that when you do pay them, you pay them half the cost of
your report – well what did you expect, nothing in life is actually perfect!
Publishers’ agents come in many ‘shapes and sizes’ and I offer more advice about working with publishers’ agents in the free bonus material you
get with this book (see the back of the book, or please email me if you
don’t have that, I’ll send it to you). Before the Internet, sales agents were
generally telephone based sales agencies, but now most tend to be web
based and they use the phone much less. I think this is a shame, and I
believe you’ll get the best results from agents who still maintain a telesales staff who build value-add relationships with their best buyers.
You’ll find a list of agents you can try in the appendix of this book, but if
you search online you’ll find many more. There are now hundreds of
publishers’ agents and online ‘market research portals’ out there, and
they all work on similar lines, charging approximately 40% or 50% of the
sale price as their fee for making a sale. Don’t be afraid of calling these
companies and telling them you are a new, small publisher looking for
exposure to a broader market, and ask how they can help you.
Email (oh no, he’s going to talk about spamming…!!)
Email is a fabulous way to sell market research. Of course, it’s not as
personal and engaging as face-to-face selling or telephone selling, but it
does enable you to reach a vast number of people in a short amount of
time. There are pros and cons to selling by email, and some people love
it, and some people hate it.
Sending out your sales pitch by email won’t give you the chance to use
your personality. People won’t get to like you and form any kind of relationship with you if you only use email…unless you are a good writer and
then, maybe, over time, people will get to ‘chat’ with you and get to know
you.
I am a good writer, and after seven years plus I have formed some good
email-based relationships. But to be sure, building relationships this way
is vastly inferior to face-to-face meetings or a good telephone dialog and it
takes years to do this using just email.
So email isn’t perfect, but it does offer a lot of benefits for our kind of
small, home-based business.
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Advantages:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
You can contact a lot of people very quickly and cheaply
People can process what you have sent them in their own time, at
their own pace
Email hides your voice, your location (home, noisy kids, dogs, etc)
Email gives you a chance to polish your pitch, and answer questions at your own pace
Email can be sent out anytime, as you fit in your new business
around other commitments, like your job and family
Email can be responded to at your prospects convenience, in his
time zone, around his working day
Email can help create the illusion that you are a bigger company,
not just you at home in your spare room
The trouble with email is, for all the advantages, there are just as many
disadvantages.
Disadvantages:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Some people seem to find unsolicited commercial email rather annoying (really…)
Email is not as personal as face-to-face or telephone selling, you
don’t get the chance to use most of your communication skills
Email is addictive, yeah, really, I am an email-addict (how sad)
Email is not instant, you sometimes have to wait hours, days or
even weeks for an answer
It takes longer to write all the questions and answers than it would
take to talk them through on the phone (but if you keep them, you
can re-use them, just copy and paste)
Some people find email too impersonal, which makes them much
less likely to part with their money
With email, you don’t get a chance to ‘hear’ hesitation. A prospect
may answer ‘no thanks’ when in fact they were ‘this close’ to a
deal, and had you been on the phone, you might have been able to
sway them, maybe with a free bonus or a small discount, or just
the right words of encouragement
According to experts, the words we use only account for approximately
7% of our communication. Apparently another 30% or 40% of our communication comes from how we use our voices, tone, speed, volume,
emotion, etc. Then the remainder of our communication, over 50%,
comes from our bodies – facial expressions, how we hold our heads,
arms, how we move, stand, shake hands, use our eyes, etc.
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This book is not the place to get into the science of body language; again
there are whole books just about that. But it is clear that if you use email
as your primary sales method, then you are only making use of 7% of
your total communications skills, and this may limit your results, so you
need to think carefully about that. Email will give you a chance to think
while you are new to all this. You’ll have time to confer with your KPO
partners if you are answering technical questions, and you’ll have time to
compose answers about your company without getting flustered and having to think ‘on your feet’. By comparison, on the phone or face-to-face
you need to think fast and come up with the answers quickly and this
can be daunting when you are just starting out.
Of course, one of the biggest benefits of email is that it enables you to
mail lots of people all at once. If you use the methods we have discussed
earlier in this chapter to ‘harvest’ the Internet for email addresses, then
you can quickly build a database with hundreds and even thousands of
contacts, and you will easily find email addresses for many of these. You
can then compose promotional emails and mail them blanket-style to
whole lists of appropriate target prospects – but this, of course, is illegal
in most countries and many would say immoral too.
About spamming
You know, for decades people have received physical direct mail through
their letter box every morning and they don’t get angry about it, they
don’t do anything about it, they just throw it away. Sure, a handful of
people [who clearly have nothing better to do with their time] use the reply paid envelopes in junk mail to post advertisers various pieces of unwanted mail back to them, switching them all around, just to waste their
money on postage and to annoy them. But in general, most people just
throw out unwanted paper mail without a thought.
So why do people get so uptight about junk email? It’s actually less
wasteful than junk-physical-mail, and instead of walking to the trash or
the recycling bin, all you have to do is hit delete, so why does unsolicited
commercial email cause such anger? Even when you get hundreds of
unwanted emails in one day, it only takes a few seconds to hold down the
delete button and delete them all in one go.
Getting uptight and angry about unwanted email is silly; it really is not
worth pushing your blood pressure up over this stuff. Now sure, there is
that real ghastly stuff, you know the malicious stuff, the phishing links
and viruses and other really bad stuff, and then there is the annoying
stuff that keeps on coming…like when you get offered ‘Generic Viagra’
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forty seven times in one hour, yeah that is annoying, or you get offered
penis enlargement tablets nineteen times each day for a month, sure,
that is very annoying (I need neither, thanks…) but not all spam is like
that.
If you get a lot of that bad stuff then I can understand why people get
angry about it, it fills up your inbox quickly, which is very annoying. I
understand that business people are often traveling and I can see how
annoying it is for them when they connect to the net, possibly with limited bandwidth, and have no choice but to download loads of unsolicited
junk before they get to the important emails. I understand all that.
I once had an old private (non-business) email account which had no
spam filtering on it at all. I stopped using the account for a while and
then I’d log in about once per week to check my mail, which very few of
my friends used, as most people would email me at my work account.
When I logged on to this account I would find about two hundred or
three hundred emails each week in there and maybe two of them would
actually be for me, the rest were endless offers for bank loans, Viagra et
al and other rubbish. Now if you have an email account like that, I understand the frustration, and there is no way I would ever send out mail
like that, no way.
But what I do is different, I have a database of people who work in the
telecoms business and I send telecoms-related emails to that list, and I
try to ensure no person receives more than one email every two weeks.
Yet still I get angry replies from people, sometimes I get a demand saying
‘Stop spamming me immediately you are contravening US and European
laws’ or some such thing...when it would have been quicker and easier
for the person to write ‘Please remove’, and less angry, less negative. You
know, there are so many angry, negative, stressed people out there, I feel
a bit sorry for these people.
The emails I send are technically spam – they are unsolicited (I.E. only
about one third of the people I mail have ever actually asked for my
mail), they are commercial (I.E. I am trying to sell something) and they
are bulk (I.E. I send a few thousand out each week). So technically, I am
spamming, but personally I see a world of difference between me sending
one telecoms-related email to a telecoms-sector businessman once every
two weeks, and the Viagra ads twenty times per day to private email accounts and indiscriminate lists of seventeen million email addresses.
I imagine that most people who object to my emails are being spammed
by many senders and they fail to see any distinction between my mail
and the others. I try not to upset or offend anyone, and overall I don’t get
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many angry responses, just a few. Most people just politely ask to be removed or unsubscribed from our company database, which I do immediately and acknowledge that it’s done. It’s no problem.
So yes, in truth, I am endorsing the sending of unsolicited commercial
email (spam, but I hate that word), but I believe that you should set
yourself, and self-enforce, a strict code of practice. The following are
rules I set for my own business, to minimize any potential negative effects.
•
•
•
•
•
•
Never mail anyone too often, one email per week absolute maximum, preferably once per month is better.
Always remove people from your database immediately if they ask.
Keep a ‘master global remove’ list and ensure you check it against
your database on a regular database, so names do not ‘creep back
on’ by accident.
Never be rude to anyone, even if they email you a string of ghastly
abuse and foul language…remember you started it, you spammed
them, so take it on the chin and remove the email address from
your database and reply politely apologizing and confirming you
have unsubscribed them.
Never buy cheap mailing lists of email addresses. These promote
the worst kind of spam.
Once your business has grown and you can afford it, have a website built with a proper contact system behind it, where people can
freely opt in and out at will – in other words, once you get the
chance, do it properly and be 100% legal!
You’ll learn lessons as you go. I once bought a list of fifteen thousand
contacts from a company in China, and the list was supposed to be targeted to my industry. When I got the list and opened it, it was total garbage, it was full of private email addresses and spelling errors. I asked for
my money back and the company suddenly had problems understanding
English, and I complained about the list but they refused to reply to me.
I tried to do some cleaning on the list myself, and it came down from fifteen thousand to ten thousand, then I started mailing it. Within the first
two thousand I had so many complaints and objections that I stopped
and threw the whole thing away. It only cost about $800 bucks, which
turned out to be a total waste of $800 bucks. Never again. I would
strongly advise you against buying lists, or buying software that harvests
the web for email addresses or anything like that – all bad news.
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In summary, spamming is not a nice business, I hate the word
‘spamming’, it even sounds nasty and underhand, and I try not to think
of my outgoing commercial email as spam, but in truth I guess that’s
what it is. I don’t think people should get so angry about it, but I understand why they sometimes do. The plain truth is this: I wouldn’t do it if it
didn’t work, and I guess that is true even for the worst spamming offenders. I try to use legal opt-in/opt-out databases as much as possible now,
but the fact remains that I still send a few thousand unsolicited emails
every week, and it still makes up for a large percentage of my sales.
Sales support
In addition to the various sales activities we have already discussed, you
can also outsource a whole host of sales support services. Talk to your
KPO partners or look for other BPO firms who can help with MSO support. MSO stands for Marketing and Sales Office or Marketing and Sales
Operations, and many BPO companies offer MSO services. There are a
whole host of activities you could outsource to a partner offering MSO
support, including lead researching, list building, database maintenance,
lead sourcing, pre-sales, warm lead generation, after sales follow up,
mailing list maintenance, regular customer mailings and so on.
Your BPO partners will handle as much work as you want to give them,
but obviously it will all cost you money, so don’t rush into it all too fast.
If you want to start this business the way I did, without putting up too
much risk capital, then you will need to do most things yourself until you
have some cash in the company bank account. However, if you are convinced you can really make a success of this business and you are determined to do it faster than I did, then invest a little more of your own
money into the business up front and accelerate the process.
In reality, I grew MBR quite slowly for the first two years, but you could
zip through those first two or three years much faster, and MSO support
could be a huge help. A few thousand bucks of your money could have
an entire sales database built for you, emailing campaigns designed,
leads generated and warmed up for you. You need to decide how confident you are and how much you can afford to invest in your new business from the start.
As you may now be starting to understand, outsourcing is the backbone
of this whole business and I spend a lot of time trying to find new things
I can outsource. Accounting, book keeping, legal work, contract writing,
IP (intellectual property) research – the list goes on and on. So for me this
business is all about outsourcing.
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Outsourcing gives your business scale which it is unlikely you will
achieve on your own. Once you have established that you can actually
make money, then you can quickly scale up your business by outsourcing as many functions as possible. You can quickly take on large teams
of staff working for you and develop big projects. Just finish reading this
book first – read about cash flow, accounting and how to grow your
business – otherwise you might push too much, too fast, and you might
just sink your business, and your money, before you ever make that million.
Mix it up
My advice to you as a start-up would be to use a mixture of all the sales
techniques discussed in this chapter. I suggest you start building a database yourself for free, just using the web and making the odd phone
call. As your work builds, and you have more demands on your time,
then you can outsource this list building work to your BPO partners. Get
on the phone when you can and try pitching your reports yourself. You’ll
soon find out that it is quite an experience if you are not used to it, and
you’ll see that there is a fast learning curve.
I would definitely encourage you to appoint some good pro-active publishers’ sales agents, but not too many to start with, just take your time
and pick and chose the best ones. Work with them, make friends, build a
relationship and ask how you can get them to do more for you. I cover
sales agents in more depth in the bonus material. I would recommend
you outsource basic database maintenance to a low-cost BPO firm as
soon as you have a couple of thousand contacts or more, otherwise
building and maintaining your database will just eat up your time.
Try sending out some email promotions, either bulk mailed or one-to-one
for a slightly more personal touch. As a salesman, it is incredibly fulfilling to develop a new lead through to closing a sale, all on your own. Subscribe to a few free industry-specific news services (probably published
by your competitors) or set up a news feed from Google or another search
provider, so you can keep up with relevant news in your industry. It feels
great to read a news item in the press, see a company name you don’t
know, find them online, find a name, pitch them with a nicely written
email, answer any questions they have and then actually close a sale.
This process usually takes a few days or weeks from start to finish, but
on a few rare occasions I have done it in a day and it is the most satisfying sales experience you can get.
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If you live near any of the offices where your prospects work, try to get an
appointment and go pitch in person, if you want to, and see how that
works for you. Mix it all up; ‘trial and error’ is the name of the game.
Broader distribution networks
Some of you might have already thought about broader distribution networks such as Amazon.com, book stores, international book resellers,
etc. You can tap into any of these resources if you want to, but I’ll be
honest, it’s probably not worth the effort. If you publish books or trade
magazines or some other product that goes into physical print, then
these sales channels will be worth looking into, but if you publish specialist management reports as I do, then these channels will probably not
be of much help to you.
The kind of specialist research reports we publish are very niche, they
only appeal to a very select business audience (the only people who can
afford them) and so listing them on Amazon.com or getting shelf space in
your local bookstore is unlikely to win many, or any, sales. Getting listed
on Amazon is not easy. You’ll need to produce a POD (print-on-demand)
edition of your report with an ISBN number and a bar code, and get approved and listed through a POD service company, of which there are
many.
Getting onto the shelves in book stores is even harder, as you’ll need a
full print edition, distribution contract and so on. In short, this will be
very expensive and you’ll probably never get your money back. Of course,
if you believe that your reports have mass-market appeal and you want
to access the broader market, then maybe you should look for a publishing deal with a major national or international publishing company. Alternatively, you could sell advertising in your report, allowing you to reduce the cover price and make the publication available to a lot more
people that way. These business models are fine, but that’s not what I do
and so it’s all really beyond the scope of this book.
For the type of management reports I publish through MBR, direct selling, or selling through third party resellers, such as publishers’ sales
agents, are the only realistic, viable channels to market. I know other
small publishers who have produced POD editions and listed on Amazon,
but as far as I know they never made much money from doing so.
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Sales tips
One of the core objectives of writing this book is for me to give you as
much value as possible. I really am trying to deliver thousands of bucks
worth of knowledge to you for just a few dollars. Obviously I am doing
this for entirely selfish purposes…so that you think what a great book
this is by a great author and then you’ll tell all your friends about it, and
you’ll come back to me and buy everything else I publish in the future
too. But hey, if my selfish reasons are beneficial to you too, then we’re all
winners, right? So I am trying to pack this book with as much useful
knowledge as possible. You really should learn from my experience with
all this, I have spent years learning all this, it’s real and it’s very valuable
stuff.
So following that logic, I’m going to finish this chapter with a few pages of
miscellaneous sales tips, tricks, stories and thoughts from my years as a
small business salesman. In seven years running MBR I have sold over
two and a half million dollars worth of reports to people in seventy four
countries. I have sold to people of every color, culture, religion, shape
and size, and I have dealt with everyone from the office intern to the
CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and even one or two world famous media personalities.
Do as they ask
Remember a few pages back, when I said selling is simple, as Larry Winget says, ‘Find out what they want and give ‘em lots of it’? Well this is
more of that same logic really, but taken to a very simple level.
Do what people want, do what they ask. Listen; I say bring back the good
old adage “the customer is always right”, you know…if a customer emails
you asking for the price, just tell him the price, nothing else. If he emails
asking ‘does it cover Japan’ just answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’, just that, nothing
else.
You see one of the wonderful things about human beings is that we are
all different. Because we are all different, we all think differently, and we
all want something slightly different at different times. So never assume
that you know what someone else is thinking, never assume you know
what he wants, ‘cos you probably don’t.
If you get an email and the guy is asking ‘how much is it?’, just reply
with the price, don’t give the guy three pages on why he should buy it,
don’t give him your life story, don’t ask him eighty seven questions about
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his business, just tell him the price, and mention any free bonus that he
gets with it, if there is one (maybe there should be?). If you get an email
asking ‘do the forecasts cover X, Y and Z?’ then just answer that question, and only that question, don’t start telling her fourteen other good
reasons why she should buy it and how much cheaper it is than your
competitors offering – she didn’t ask about that, so don’t tell her.
You see, some people can only process or retain one bit of information at
a time. They might email you again half an hour later asking the next
question, and again, just answer that question. If that is how that person
wants to do business, then you must work their way, don’t try to force
him or her to work your way. You might think that selling this report today is the most important thing you have to do, but to this busy executive, buying your research report is only 1% of what he or she has to do
to today, so it has to fit in around all the other more important things.
Understand cultural differences
You will find that different people in different countries tend to follow
broad cultural trends. This isn’t science, there is nothing conclusive
here, no proven data, just a bunch of anecdotal observations I have noticed over the years. The obvious examples that spring to my mind are:
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North Americans like short emails
The French like to cover just one thing at a time, just one short
question per email
Israeli’s like to do a deal, and Israeli women can sound fierce, but
they are usually absolutely lovely once you get to know them
Indians and Russians and most people in Central Asia all seem to
like lots of annoying and complex paperwork and it takes ages, be
patient and allow time for this
Germans like precision and facts, they like everything to be organized and efficient
The Japanese like to build a relationship, which can take a long
time – respect and trust are important
Finns like a discount! Who knew that? (Swedes will say ‘we knew
that!’)
Germans are the most ‘genuine’ people in the world to do business
with – if they don’t want it, they just politely say ‘no thank you’
North Americans hardly ever just say ‘no thank you’; you have to
chase Americans forever to get a final answer!
Saudi Arabians like formality and respect, and they like emails and
documents laid out clearly and plainly
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I’m sure there are many other stereotypical cultural traits that I could
mention, but these are observations I have made over the years from my
own personal experience. Some of this is really useful. You might be trying to close a sale with someone in France, and you keep sending emails
asking a few questions about their requirements, and just not getting an
answer. Try asking just one question, keep the email to ‘hello’ plus one
sentence. You’ll probably get an answer right away. Then you move on to
the next question, and so on. Within a day, you’ll likely get that sale; you
just needed to understand how that person likes to operate.
You might be sending your fifteenth email chasing a deal with someone
in New York. Guess what, give up, take a hint, if New Yorkers want
something, you’ll know within a few hours….four weeks and fifteen
emails later, take the hint, they don’t want it, they just don’t have the
time to email you back saying ‘no thanks’, or they don’t want to hurt
your feelings. Been chasing that Israeli guy for weeks trying to get your
order? Try offering a deal, throw in a free extra, or apply some discount if
he answers by the end of the week and you’ll soon wrap up the order.
As well as being sensitive to cultural differences you also need to understand different working times around the world. Obviously we try to sell
to all time zones, so plan your day around making contact with people at
the most effective times, and be aware of national holidays, religious festivals, etc. Understand that not everyone takes Saturday and Sunday as
their weekend, and if trying to do business in the Middle East be prepared to work on a Sunday sometimes, and remember that Thursday is
often the end of their week. Get online and learn this stuff, it’ll help you
in the long run.
Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)
You don’t need to read many business, sales, personal development or
‘how-to’ books to come across the same advice – keep it simple. Many
things in life are best kept simple. The modern world is complicated
enough already, the research we have written to sell is often very complex, and the work facing the people we sell to is often complicated too,
so the last thing anyone needs is a complex and difficult sales process.
My philosophy is to keep things as simple as possible.
I am a great believer in the old adage of ‘the more you tell, the more you
sell’, so I like to give my sales prospects as much information as I can
right from the start. There are many reasons for this – not least it saves
me time. If I tell the prospect everything at the start, then they won’t
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swers time and again. As I have run this business over the last few years,
I have become almost fanatical about making good use of my time – I just
hate wasting time doing things that don’t seem absolutely necessary.
Why answer the same questions repeatedly, when all you need to do is
produce a data-sheet with all the answers in the first place, and give that
to everyone, so they won’t need to ask too many questions.
As noted over the previous pages, if you write emails to people who don’t
speak English as their first language, keep the emails simple, don’t cover
multiple topics and ask multiple questions all in one email. Send the first
email asking the first question, then after that reply; ask the next question, then after that reply; ask the next and so on. It may take all day,
but you’ll get the result in the end. If you insist on pushing to get all your
answers in one email, you will likely not get anything at all, as the recipient will feel overwhelmed and pull away from you. Don’t give them a
hammer to hit you with, remember?
Still, a well prepared datasheet will help everyone and save you time.
Such a datasheet should tell people all the basic information they need to
know, such as title, format, price in various currencies, number of pages,
geographical scope, publication date, how to order, how long will it take
to deliver, accepted payment methods, etc. You may produce this datasheet as a standalone 1 page document, or you may include all this information on your sales brochure, or in your sales mailers, but make
sure you have it all available in one place; this will save you a lot of time.
Dealing with non-payment and cancellations
Every now and then someone won’t pay. When you have been in this
business a long time, you might get to know what these people ‘look’ like,
sometimes you can see them coming, and demand payment first, before
you deliver the report, but other times they get one over on you. Sometimes non-payment is genuine, like maybe a company has gone into administration with your invoice unpaid. Other times a cancellation is genuine, like maybe someone ordered the wrong thing or budgets were
slashed, and if you didn’t have an approved Purchase Order (PO) then
you have to just let it go.
Other non-payment cases are more annoying, such as when some guy on
the other side of the planet orders your report, asks for it to be delivered
and then you never hear from him again. He ignores your email and
won’t return your calls. A while back someone came up with a phrase to
cover this – shit happens.
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Deal with it, get over it, don’t feel ripped off, move on, go sell some more.
It is annoying, it hurts your feelings to feel that someone has ripped you
off, but remember he thinks he’s ripping off a faceless corporation, he
doesn’t know it’s just you, working from home. If the guy lives in the next
town or just down the street, then great, if that was me I’d go down the
street and knock on his door and demand the payment, but otherwise
just forget it. You can’t fly seven thousand miles to demand your money,
you can’t start legal action against some guy on the other side of the
world with no money who gave you a false address, and probably a false
name too. And, you would be crazy to spend three thousand bucks on
traveling expenses or legal expenses to chase some guy who owes you
two grand. It’s just not worth getting upset about. Just move on.
Protect yourself by watching out for the danger signs. Don’t email out
$4000 dollar reports to someone using a Hotmail account; insist that it is
company policy to only ship to official company email addresses. If someone from a company you have never heard of wants to order four reports
worth over $10,000 dollars in total, and the company website appears to
be a one-page holding page, saying ‘Under development’, then insist on
payment first before shipping, or say you will send one report now, and
the other three after payment. A little bit of common sense is all it really
takes.
Money back guarantee
This is something else that you have probably heard before, and this is
another subject that is well covered in many other business and sales
books. Offer your customers a rock solid money back guarantee, no
questions. In seven years I have never had an email saying ‘your report
was garbage I want my money back’, in fact, in seven years I have never
had a single complaint, but if I ever get one, they can have a refund, no
questions.
I won’t go into this in detail, if you want to understand why a good guarantee is so important, then go search online, or look on Amazon for some
books about it, and you’ll find huge amounts have been written about
this. Really it’s quite obvious, think about it – would you buy a brand
new car that didn’t have any warranty? Would you go into an electrical
store and purchase a dishwasher or TV or anything else if it had no warranty at all? Of course not, so you have to offer a guarantee – if the report doesn’t deliver what it says it has in it, we’ll give you your money
back, and no questions asked.
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Tips for selling reports by email
- Strike while the iron is hot, get back to people fast, especially if they
are showing buying signals. I’ve had deals slip through my fingers when I
first started in this game because I didn’t react fast enough. I remember
one time an email hit my desk from a guy in Florida, saying ‘I want to
buy your report, how do I order? Do you take AMEX?’ I saw the email
pop in, but I was just about to make a cup of coffee, so I went to make
that coffee and thought I’d deal with the email when I get back.
While making the cup of coffee I got talking to someone for ten minutes
or so, and when I got back to my desk, I called the guy thinking I’d answer his questions on the phone and take his AMEX details while on the
call. When he answered and I said who I was, he said ‘thanks but I don’t
need it anymore.’ I was lost for words, as a slightly arrogant young
salesman I thought that order was ‘in the bag’, I couldn’t believe he had
changed his mind in just twenty minutes or less. I politely asked why
and he said that since sending me that email someone had walked into
his office and the conversation had changed his needs, so he no longer
required that report.
If I had called him as on as that email arrived I’d have got the order, but
the fifteen or twenty minutes I wasted making coffee cost me a deal that
day. Don’t delay, when you see buying signs, act, and fast. If someone
sends you an email asking ‘How much is this?’ then answer quickly. As
prospects go, it doesn’t get much better than someone asking for the
price, or asking a question like ‘If we order this, how quickly can you deliver?’ – That’s a great buying signal.
- Don’t sell single user licenses for electronic (PDF) reports. Always ask
for more users, that way you get more great names for your database….single user is missing a trick!!! People move on, so if you only
have one contact at a company, then when that person leaves the company you have lost all contact. If you have five names at the company,
you stand a chance that at least one or two of them might stick around
for a while, increasing your chances of a repeat sale, and another five
names.
Build your database this way. Sometimes I have made a sale to someone
at a company and asked for four or five names to send the report to – the
names come back and I send the report, then I go on that company’s
website and check through the profiles of the management team to see if
any of the names are important people. It’s amazing how many times you
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find that you have just been given the direct email addresses of C-suite
executives, board members, senior VPs and so on. Great news for you,
just use them cautiously for future promotions, don’t annoy senior people by spamming them every week, be sensible.
- Keep your promotional emails simple. There are many wonderful software packages available these days to help you craft fantastic looking
promotional emails, using HTML editors to include colors, graphics, images, lots of fancy type styles, font sizes, etc. I advise you to avoid all of
this, as all these features will only increase the likelihood of your email
ending up in someone’s spam folder. Invest some time in trying to understand how junk mail filters work, and this will help you to avoid using
certain words, colors and type styles which get your mail marked as
junk. Don’t write using red type; don’t write the words ‘free copy’; don’t
write ‘adult’ or ‘over 18’ and so on.
When it’s all going to plan
Wow, we’re getting to the end of this chapter now, and it’s been a huge
job writing this, there are well over fifteen thousand words in this chapter alone. But you know, it’s no coincidence that this chapter is by far
the biggest chapter in this book – that’s because selling is the most important thing you need to do. Make selling the heart of your new business, as selling should be at the heart of any profit making enterprise.
When it’s all going well, this business can be so great. When you really
have it firing on all four cylinders, it’s awesome. You get a busy inbox,
orders coming in, fax machine ringing, orders coming in straight off your
website, out of nowhere, that feels great. You can get a credit card machine in your office, so you can handle card payments, or get an ecommerce enabled website, and it’s an amazing feeling seeing the money
come in.
I regularly take over $10,000 dollars in a day, without leaving home…
think about this, you crank up your hi-fi system, music blaring, you’re
tapping your feet and fingers, firing off emails, orders keep coming in, it’s
such a buzz…who makes TEN THOUSAND dollars a day sitting at home
tapping their feet to their favorite music…who do you know that does
that?
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And while I am sitting at my desk making this money, the wider world,
the business community who buy the reports that I publish through
MBR, thinks it’s doing business with a medium sized company. This is
all achieved because I have created this amazing illusion of size (see next
chapter), conjured from a smart site, some good graphic design, a few
false names and email accounts, a lot of junk mail and some well spun
‘white lies’ that I have told so many times that even I begin to believe
them myself.
It can be amazing, it can really be the most amazing job, I once made
over $34,000 in a day, and I never stepped out of my own home!!!!!!
Sometimes I have DVDs playing in my office while I work; often I have my
music playing, my kids running around. I stick my hands free phone on
and chat to my friends while I work – I do all this and can still make over
$10 grand a day, how awesome is that?!?!
Take pride in your achievements
Not only can this job be just the best job ever some days, but I also take
a great deal of pride in the broader achievements of growing my business. This pride is not just for me, but I share our best achievements
with my KPO teams overseas, and it gives them a huge boost too, knowing how well the company is doing. Many of the staff on my KPO teams
have worked regularly for MBR for several years and they are really excited and encouraged by our successes.
As you know MBR publishes reports in the telecoms industry, and our
customer list reads like a who’s who of the telecoms world. We’ve sold to
many of the biggest brand names in the telecoms world, networks,
equipment manufacturers and cell phone handset manufacturers. We
have sold to CEOs of huge telecoms companies and we have sold to Csuite executives in Fortune 500 companies, and even to the world famous CEO of one of the world’s largest music labels.
A couple of years ago I was reading the ‘Times Rich List 2006’ published
by the well known Times newspaper in the UK. There was a small subsection listing the UK’s top ten telecoms millionaires…four of them had
purchased our research reports in the previous two years, and we had
sold reports to other employees of the companies run by three more. We
recently found out that the President and CEO of one of America’s largest
telecoms companies was reading one of our reports, and so was the CEO
of one of Russia’s largest telecoms companies too.
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We take great pride in knowing that our work is of a high quality and
that our brand name is trusted and respected within our industry. I
feedback these achievements to my KPO teams in Asia and they feel
equally as proud as I do. They also get praise internally for doing such
good work, and we all feel motivated to move on and do even better. Cultivate an attitude of pride in yourself and your partners and aim to build
a brand with a reputation for quality and reliability, and sell that brand
at the highest levels in your chosen field.
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Chapter 8:
How to Set Up Your New Company
and Your New Home Office
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Company name
Picking a good name for your company can be one of the hardest things
to do. Here’s a tip to save you some time; don’t ‘over-think’ it. You know
my philosophy on selling from the previous chapter, keep things simple
and just be honest, cut to the chase, get that name up front ASAP and
don’t force people to have to think about it. In the UK, the wood stain
manufacturer Ronseal ran an advertising campaign for years which used
the now-well-known strap line ‘Does exactly what it says on the tin’. I am
a great believer in this sales strategy.
Pick a company name that says what you do, and use the same philosophy for the titles of your reports and promotional mailers. Call your company ‘ABC Research’ or something obvious like that, and if you write a
report about batteries in Latin America, call it ‘The Latin American Battery Market’ – you see, does what it says on the tin. Just go with something obvious, use words like ‘research’, ‘knowledge’, ‘resource’ or ‘information’, as that immediately tells people what you are all about. Suppose
you are planning to start your new company publishing research in the
oil and gas business, call it something like ‘Energy Research International’ or ‘Oil Market Resources’ or something along those lines.
If you are starting a company to publish research in the auto parts industry, you might call it ‘Automotive Information Group’ or ‘Auto-Trade
Research’. A new company in the pharmaceutical trade could be ‘Pharma
Research International’ or ‘Medical Market Knowledge International’ or
something like that.**
These kinds of company names are all nice and obvious, they immediately tell the market who you are and what you do, and no-one has to
guess or work it out. Now of course you are all thinking “Hey Brad, you
didn’t choose a name like that” and of course you are right. Using your
name or a generic word or term, or even using a made up word or name
is the other way to go and this keeps your options open a little wider. As
discussed in the next chapter, many small publishing companies grow
and expand into multiple areas and so if you call your company ‘Medical
Research Services’ then you are going to look rather out of your depth if
you suddenly decide to start writing research reports about the telecoms
industry.
** I just made these names up…at time of writing none of these names exist as real
companies, but they could in the future, even tomorrow, before this book is published,
so for the record, I must state that any similarity is pure coincidence, I do not work for
or promote any other specific company named in this book, not even MBR, ‘cos I made
that name up to, remember.
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Choosing a title such as ‘Broadlands Research Group’ keeps your options
wide open. It still says ‘research’ so most people will pretty soon figure
out what you do, but it keeps your future open, allowing you to establish
yourself successfully in one area, then branch out a couple of years down
the line. In my years in this business, many of my competitors have done
just that, spreading out from the telecoms industry, to cover pharmaceuticals, automotive, energy, military technology, IT and other sectors.
So picking a company name like ‘Moorland Business Research’ just
keeps my options open – anyway, as you all know, that’s not the real
name of my actual company anyway, but it’s quite similar. You may pick
a name based on your name, such as ‘Anderson Research Services’ for
example, or you may use the town or street you live in – if you like in
Montreal you could call it ‘Montreal Resources’ or if you live on Baytree
Avenue you could start ‘Baytree Knowledge Group’. Like I said before,
just don’t think too hard about it, and keep it simple and obvious.
The only other thing I would say is try to avoid starting a publishing
company using your name, unless you have set up a selection of false
names to use (see later in this chapter) and then you can trade under
one of those false names. If your name is Mike Baker and you set up
‘Mike Baker Research’ then that’s OK, but if you send out your sales
emails as Mike Baker, and if the guy who handles invoicing enquiries is
Mike Baker, and the person who deals with questions about the contents
of a report after sales have gone through is also Mike Baker…well, pretty
soon you are going to start looking like a small company.
Take my advice and avoid naming your company using your real name,
call it ‘Something International’, or ‘Something Research Group’ and keep
your options open.
Image makes a difference
When it comes to all issues surrounding design, my advice would be to
use a professional. We discussed designing your covers for your reports
back in chapter four, and so you know I like to use a professional
graphic designer to produce my covers. There is no substitute for good
design. Many of us think we can design something that looks good, but
in truth most of us non-professionals are pretty hopeless, and the designs you’ll get from a professional graphic designer will blow you away.
If there is one area where I really think you should invest a few bucks,
it’s in good design. Smart, professional, contemporary design will pay for
itself ten-fold in projecting the right image and message for your new
business.
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I would extend this design philosophy to all the major visual elements of
branding your new company. Find a designer you like and ask them to
do a full corporate image for you. This will give you a company name and
logo design, elements for your website, company letter head (headed paper for invoices and letters) and business cards, compliments slips and
any other paperwork you feel you need. Don’t waste money on lots of
printing, just a few hundred letter heads and business cards should be
all you need to get your business started.
Later in this chapter, below, we will look at building a new website and
other ways to create the right image for your new business, for now let’s
look at how you set up your company.
Setting up a new company that is legally registered and recognized is an
entirely different process depending on which country you live in. Generally, in countries such as the US and the UK, you need to register your
company with the right authorities, you may need a State or local government license to run a business, you may need an export license to legally sell overseas, and you need to register with the tax authorities to
ensure you are legally registered to pay your taxes when they become
due.
That probably all sounds rather daunting, but actually it’s pretty
straightforward, just filling in a few forms, and a good CPA (Certified
Public Accountant, or Chartered Accountant in the UK) will help you do
all that for a small fee, not more than a few hundred bucks. My advice to
you if you are ready to start your new business as soon as you get
through reading this book, would be to start by deciding on a name, then
get busy finding a trustworthy local accountant. Don’t go for the cheapest, try to get someone on personal recommendation from a friend or acquaintance, or approach several and see who seems most informed and
helpful, and see which one is most interested in the sound of your great
new business venture.
Once you have an accountant appointed to help you, he or she will start
getting the paperwork prepared to set up and register your new company, and your accountant will advise you on what costs you face and
what forms need signing. While your newly appointed accountant is getting your company documents prepared, you need to find a decent local
graphic designer who can help create your company name, logo and stationery. At this stage, you should ideally already have searched for and
found a KPO partner and they should be working on your first product.
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You also need to make sure you have a broadband connection in your
home office, so if you don’t have this yet, get it ordered now.
Here is an action plan to help you get things going. If you have been
reading this book thinking ‘yeah I am going to try this, this sounds great’
then this page will be very useful to you…there are only a couple of chapters left to read, I suggest you print out this page and get started on this
list right now, like today. I said TODAY!!
Action Plan:
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Start thinking about a company name
Decide for sure which industry you want to work in
Start searching publishers websites, preferably in your chosen field
of expertise, and try to get hold of some sample reports as discussed way back earlier in this book
Sign up for some free e-newsletters and news feed services, you
need to start reading and learning about what is going on in your
chosen industry
Start talking to possible KPO partners
Start thinking about your first product
Start looking for a local accountant
Decide for sure on that company name, register your web domain
Start looking for a local graphic designer
Start firming up ideas for your first product
Finish reading this book, start back at the beginning, read it all
again, every word. Finished? Good, now read it a third time. I’ve
written well over 69,500 words in this book and I don’t believe you
can remember all that from only reading it once, or even twice. It
took me six years to learn all this, it’s gonna take you at least a few
months
Appoint a KPO firm to work for you, or decide on a short list of
2/3/4 if you want to get competitive quotes
Write a basic brief for your first product and get quote(s)
Decide for sure on your KPO partner and commission work to begin on your first job
Start work in your spare time on building a sales database, start
looking for sales leads. Start this NOW. If you don’t want to start
this NOW, throw this book away, give up, cancel the report order
from your KPO partners, sit on your couch, open a beer, order
pizza, get fat and accept the fact that you’ll never be a millionaire
and you’re always gonna be in a dead-end job because you refuse
to try hard at anything in life. Email me for your money back on
this book, explaining to me that you were looking for an easy ‘getrich-quick’ scheme, and I’ll email back telling you to get lost.
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Appoint and brief an accountant
Appoint and brief a graphic designer
Think about where you home office is going to be, how will you
work from home?
Keep looking for sales leads
Did I mention sales leads yet?
Think about selling
You get the picture about selling right?
Make sure you have ordered (or already got) a broadband line
Talk to you KPO partners, be involved, be interested
Talk to your accountant, get enthusiastic
Do I need to mention sales leads at this point?
Love your new company logo
Are we clear about the selling thing?
Pay your accountant, he (or she – that’s a nod of respect to my accountant, she is a lovely lady) will be worth at least 10 times what
you pay her (or him) over the coming years
You found many sales leads yet?
Check in with your designer, start talking about getting a basic
website design, keep it simple at first, but smart looking
How’s that sales database coming on?
Find a good web hosting company, get your domain name set up
and your corresponding email account working
Ask your accountant to explain the basics of double entry book
keeping, or look online to learn, or buy a book about it
Keep thinking about the sales database, if you don’t have several
hundred leads yet, you haven’t been trying hard enough…if you already have several thousand, I’m proud of you, congrats!
Start setting up your home office, you need a desk, some space
away from the kids and other distractions. If you have a spare
room, that would be perfect
OK, the list could go on for the next 3 pages, but that’s enough to get you
started. You are trying to simultaneously set up your home office environment, get your company registered, get your corporate image designed
and get your first product written. This is a busy time; you are learning
lots and doing lots all at the same time, and it should all be developing
quite quickly. This should be a steep learning curve, a time of rapid development.
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Your new home office
Setting up your home office is pretty simple compared to everything else
we have covered in this book. You need a desk and a chair and a PC and
some space away from everything else that’s going on in your home. Obviously we are all different and we all live our lives in different ways. If
you have a quiet home, no kids, maybe it’s just you, then I guess you can
just work from a laptop wherever you please.
But if, like me, you have a busy home and noisy young children, then
you would be wise to try to allocate a spare room as a home office, or a
quiet corner of a room if space is limited. If you are lucky enough to have
outbuildings, such as a shed, or barn or other outbuilding, or if you have
a basement, loft or attic conversion or other spare room in your house,
then these can be converted into great home offices, if you have the
money, which obviously will be expensive if converting an outbuilding.
Once you have established some space, you’ll need a broadband connection, a phone, ideally a fax machine (but not essential) and a few trays for
organizing papers, invoices, receipts, order forms, etc. You’ll need to get
some headed paper printed, and you might want to have a business card
printed, though in truth you don’t really need one, so it comes down to
vanity really. If you always wanted to see ‘Your Name – CEO’ on a business card, now’s your chance. What would you like to call yourself –
CEO, Chairman, President, Executive VP, Founder, Chair, Managing Director, Senior Partner, Managing Partner...take your pick.
Your graphic designer will produce the files for these things, and probably handle the print for you too if you ask, and you should just get one
ream (five hundred sheets) of letterhead printed to start with, there is no
sense wasting money on more. Don’t use a big printing company, they
will be expensive for such a small job, just get the letterhead as a highresolution PDF file from your graphic designer and ask a local ‘copyshop’ or high-street print shop to run out five hundred sheets for you.
Rather obviously, the better your PC (or Mac) then the easier your life will
be. Don’t try to run a serious business using some clapped-out old pile of
junk that has been running for years. I have a ‘replace-often’ policy for
my business PCs. I figure that my PC is the only tool I need to run this
business, so treat it well, and invest in the best. I replace my primary
business PC every year with the best new model I can buy, no expense
spared.
At a minimum, you need a PC (or Mac) that can cope with running the
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tioned previously, but you may wish to use an alternative. I also use
Adobe Acrobat every day, to create PDF documents, so you’ll almost certainly need to buy a copy of that.
One thing you are going to do in your new home office is keeping accounts. This is another thing you might decide to outsource. You can ask
your BPO partners if they offer such support; the bigger firms tend to offer LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing) which covers accounting and financial services. Alternatively, just ask your CPA (accountant) for help and
he or she will almost certainly be happy to handle your book keeping for
you. Of course, I recommend (in the next chapter) that you do your own
book keeping, but that’s your choice.
Website
Without question, you’ll need a website, and this is likely to be one of
your biggest expenses when setting up your new business. I recommend
working with your graphic designer right from the start to have your
website developed alongside your new company name, logo and letterhead. Getting everything done together, to create a slick, cohesive, well
branded image, will pay dividends in the future. One of the keys to success in this business is making your company look bigger than it really
is. Image is key.
As explained way back at the start of this book, none of the companies I
sell to have any idea that I run a small one-man company, and if they did
know that fact, sadly and misguidedly, they probably would not purchase
the research reports that I publish. Success for your new business will
depend on creating the right image, and giving the right impression.
You need to work closely with your graphic designer to come up with an
image that looks and feels like something much bigger than just you.
Make sure your logo, letterhead, business card, website and email signature all follow a branded theme, make sure your image looks smart and
professional. This is important, re-read this paragraph a few times, this
is very important.
Here’s another way to ensure you give the right impression; make sure
you use a quality ISP to host and run your website. Your website is likely
to be your main sales tool and your main customer interface. Nothing
looks worse than a site that goes down every five minutes, it has ‘cheap
hosting’ written all over it. You are best off using a mid-size ISP. The tiny
cheap companies are too prone to problems, they can lack back up capacity and robust core servers, while the huge firms tend to offer the
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worst customer service. The mid size firms are more likely to offer robust
services at fair prices, backed up with good customer service and reliable
infrastructure.
I won’t go into great details here about how to design and build a website. For one, there is not enough space in this book, which is big enough
already. Secondly, I don’t know much about building websites, I am not a
‘techie’ myself so I can’t teach you much, and thirdly, there are endless
books available on that subject already, so I suggest you go buy a few of
them and learn it all that way. Naturally, you will have different requirements depending on what type of research business you are building,
you may be building an online magazine, you may be publishing reports,
maybe newsletters, you may be offering online databases or other research services, so each of these will have an impact on how you build
your new site.
Of course, you could outsource it…just tell your BPO partners that you
want a nice new site built and they will almost certainly be able to help
you. All the decent BPO firms will be able to offer you IT support, including designing and building websites. Again, so far as design is concerned,
ensure you work with your regular graphic designer to make sure your
website is branded to suit the image your designer has created for your
company; make sure it all fits nicely together.
Your new site should be quite simple to get you started, and then you
can review it and move it onwards if you want to after your first twelve
months. At the start you’ll need a home page, some kind of ‘About Us’
page, detailed pages for your product(s) and a page giving details how
someone can place an order with you.
I worked with my graphic designer when I started out and we got MBR
online for just a few hundred bucks, using a local self-employed guy to
build the site. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked and because of the good design, it looked much bigger than it was. We got through our first two
years with that site and then I spent about eleven grand building a
newer, much smarter one, which endures to this day. Don’t be fooled
into spending thousands, you don’t need to, just think ‘simple features
and functions, excellent look and feel’ – spend more on the designer than
the site build, and you’ll be in the right sweet spot.
When you are starting out, you probably don’t need full ecommerce functionality; you probably don’t need a database driven site; you probably
don’t need frames, forms, newsletter generators and all that other clever
stuff. Just get some nice looking pages online and encourage people to
email you with any questions they have. Once you have made some
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money, then you can rebuild your site a year or two down the line and
add all the fancy new features that you want, but it really will all be
overkill in the early days.
Be professional
One final thing about setting up your new home office: When you are
planning to work from home, it will serve you well to remember from day
one that it is still work, so just because you are at home, you must still
think and act like a professional. People think working from home means
wearing your pyjamas all day (seriously, people really think that, it’s like
the first thing they ask, crazy) and sitting on the couch with a mug of hot
cocoa and hugging the cat. That’s crazy, that’s just an image people have
seen in a commercial, it’s not real, and I wouldn’t want it to be, no home
worker would ever get any work done!
You need some discipline; home working needs a good attitude and some
will power to resist the temptation of distractions. I know I have said I
play music all day and take time out whenever I like…yeah, that’s true,
but I’m seven years further down the line that you are, and so I can afford to push the boundaries. But I also know when it’s time to sharpen
up my act and knuckle down to business, and there are times when I
have to be very disciplined with myself and my young family.
When you are starting out, I think you should try to at least set off on the
right foot, try following these tips:
-
-
-
Create your work space away from distractions like the TV, a bookcase full of interesting books, the kitchen/refrigerator/larder/snack
cupboard, your bed or anything else likely to stop you from working.
Dress for work. Really, I mean it, not a full suit and tie, but wear
something clean and smart, not your worst ripped jeans and a tshirt with last night’s spaghetti & meatballs remains dribbling down
the front of it. If you feel snappy, smart, clean and tidy, your work
and your attitude is likely to reflect that feeling, so don’t dress in the
clothes you use to do your gardening or your decorating.
Set times for starting and finishing. You can do this even if you are
starting out part time while keeping your day job. Set a time once
you have eaten and put the kids to bed, and schedule 2 unbroken
hours for work. If you just try to ‘fit it in around your favorite TV
shows’ then it’ll probably never happen.
Structure your work time with periods allocated to finding sales
leads, time allocated for selling, time allocated for chasing production, etc.
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-
-
Ensure your family, or whoever you live with, is aware of what you
are doing and that they take you and your new work seriously. Let
them know you are serious about this and you are trying to run a
business, and you would appreciate it if they respect your time and
space and leave you in peace when you are working.
Create a positive, professional environment. Make sure that your
work area is clean and tidy; make sure you feel healthy and vibrant
when you are working. Be happy, smile, try to enjoy yourself and be
enthusiastic. File papers where they should go, keep things in order,
otherwise you’ll lose them, so make time to clean up. Don’t allow
your work area to be a mess of empty burger wrappers, beer cans
and pizza boxes. Don’t work when you feel tired and fed up, or ill.
Don’t work in the evenings eating junk food and drinking beer, don’t
work drunk! I’m serious! If you wouldn’t do it in your employer’s office, so don’t do it in your own home office. You have to take this seriously, otherwise don’t bother at all.
Working under a false name
I’ve said already that one of the key success factors in this job is creating
the illusion that your company is something bigger and more established
that just you, in your home office. Now I do not suggest that you lie. I’m
quite explicit about this; I do not suggest you lie to your prospects and
suppliers in order to hide the truth. I suggest you are economic with the
truth, and I suggest you do all that you legally can to create the illusion
that your company is a bigger, more established enterprise than it actually is.
I’m sorry to say this to all male readers, but the truth is – size matters!
You may have noticed throughout this book that I often refer to MBR as
‘we’ or ‘us’ when talking about how MBR works. You’ll be thinking that
the whole premise of this book is that I built this business alone, and
made two million bucks alone, without hiring staff and building an empire – so who the hell is ‘we’? Well, I am several people, which gets kinda
confusing, but this is all part of the illusion of making MBR look like a
bigger company that it really is.
You may recall back at the start of this book I explained that most big
companies are happy purchasing research reports from MBR because
they think MBR is a ‘normal’ company, with some nice offices somewhere
and a bunch of nice people who walk into those offices every morning
wearing skirts and shirts and suits and ties, then go home every evening
to their homes after a hard day’s work. These people went to school, went
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to college, got their degrees and stop for lunch in the middle of every day.
So long as XYZ big company believes that, they keep buying our research
reports.
If they knew that MBR was actually just me - in a pair of jeans and a tshirt, with some rock music blasting out on the stereo in my office, and
me running off down the gym for 2 hours in the middle of the day, and
stopping to play with my kids, who run into my office sometimes and
press buttons on my computers just to see if they can get away with it then there is no way they would ever buy research studies from MBR.
Even though you and I both know that MBR does employ a bunch of nice
people in skirts and shirts and suits and ties who work in a nice big
shiny office and take a normal lunch break...these people just happen to
work for my KPO partners on the other side of the world, while MBR remains just me.
Because of this ‘stigma’, this ‘limited thinking’, this ‘20th Century thinking’ that blinds so many big companies from doing business with the little guy, I decided I had to run MBR to look like a bigger company than it
really is, to build image and trust in my new company. So I set up several computers in my home office, each one equipped with a different
email account and each one designated a different name. So one machine
really is Brad Moorland, but another PC is set up as Mike Lawton, and
another as Carly Morelli, and still another as Lars Pedersen, and finally a
fifth as Ramesh Gurmukhani.
By using these multiple identities, I can create the illusion that MBR has
lots of employees. Often Brad or Carly would close a sale, and Lars would
answer analyst enquiries, while Mike would deal with invoicing and
Ramesh was in charge of handling research questions. At one point
things got pretty confusing and a few times I almost lost control of it all. I
had five phones, five PCs, five sets of printed business cards and I have
attended occasional face-to-face meetings as two of those people, which
is quite horrible!
I can’t pretend to be Carly by any other means than email, as I am not
female, and I cannot pretend to be Lars as I can’t reliably fake a Scandinavian accent, and I can’t pretend to be Ramesh as I am very obviously
not Indian, but I routinely play at being Brad or Mike on the phone and
in face-to-face meetings, depending on who I am seeing, and it’s a dangerous and confusing game to play!! I recommend you have just one or
two identities, and get some practice in before you have as many as five,
it can be a real headache!
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The illusion is complete
Once you have taken on board all that we have discussed so far, you
should be able to run a small business that looks a lot bigger than just
you. By leveraging the skills, staff and facilities your KPO partners offer,
you can punch well above your weight in terms of delivering the actual
goods. Your new company name and the wide range of professional services you offer suggest you are way more than just one person. Your professionally designed, consistently branded corporate stationery, website
and covers create a smart, contemporary, big-company image.
Your multiple identities help your customers to think they are dealing
with more than one person. If you work sporadic hours to fit in this new
job around your current ‘day job’, to you it seems you are fitting the new
work to your own convenience. However, to you customers it will seem as
though you are working a range of flexible hours to cover all the time
zones, and this will help to create the illusion of several people working
from more than one office. Always look for ways to see the ‘up-side’ of a
situation; everything has its advantages if you look closely enough.
I promise you that if you manage to do all this effectively, you will create
the illusion of a much bigger company than you really are, right from the
start, and none of it should cost you much money. None of this is illegal
and in fact it all makes sense. In seven years no one has ever figured out
that Brad, Mike, Carly, Lars and Ramesh are all the same person, but if
someone one day tells me they think Carly and Lars are ‘one’, I’ll quietly
say yes, sure, but it helps keep sales and analyst relations separated,
which keeps things simple. That’s no crime; authors, musicians and actors use pen names and false names all the time, and it’s no big deal.
By contrast to all this, many people go into business without paying any
attention to creating the illusion. You’ll get Danny Jones and he’ll set up
‘Danny Jones Enterprises’ and he’ll self-publish a one page website using
some $29.99 web authoring tool and he’ll design the so-called logo himself using a rearrangement of the letters D, J and E using MS Word and
some cheap clip-art. Then when his customers communicate with this
new company, Davey Jones, whose email signature proudly boasts ‘CEO,
MD, President, Chairman and Founder’, is the man who answers every
question – he is the salesman, the accounts payable, accounts receivable, technical support, front desk, after sales care, etc.
This creates no illusion at all…when the Chairman/President, CEO is
handling simple invoicing queries; you know he’s a one-man band. I may
have been in a few tight spots in meetings when I am pretending to be
someone else, but it’s worth it. I was in a restaurant once, as Mike, havwww.makeamillionebook.com
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ing a business lunch with a client (the truth is out, I do leave home occasionally…but I don’t HAVE to, I just LIKE to sometimes, it’s fun) when
another customer who I have known for years walks by and taps me on
the shoulder “Fancy seeing you here”. I quickly and politely turned away
from my companions and exchanged a few words and luckily I got away
with it, but she easily could have said “Brad, hi, fancy meeting you here,
I haven’t seen you for months.” and that would have been seriously embarrassing!
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Chapter 9:
Running and Growing Your Company
Beyond the First Year.
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So far most of this book has been devoted to explaining just what the
premium business information industry is all about, and showing you
how to start your own small publishing company. There was also a
rather large chapter about selling – did I ever mention the importance of
selling…you got that now? But once you have started your company, and
you may have survived the first year and actually published your first
two or three products, then what next? How do you sustain it and keep it
growing? Let’s look briefly at the longer term effort involved in running
and growing your business, and what might lie in the future.
Accounts
This is one area that you could outsource but maybe you shouldn’t. Keep
your finger on the pulse all the time. Know how much money the company has, how much you are committed to in the future, how much you
are owed and what things are costing you…always. You should always
know roughly how much free capital you have, how much profit you
have, what taxes you owe in the coming months and roughly what your
credits and debits are – I.E. how much you are owed by customers and
how much you owe to suppliers. You don’t need to know this stuff to the
exact penny, but you must have a good idea at any point in time.
If you don’t know these things then you’ll never be able to make any good
business decisions. You can’t make decisions about developing your
business, strategy, investing in new products, etc if you don’t know
whether you are in profit or loss, if you don’t know the profitability of
previous products, if you don’t know how much you are owed and how
much you owe. You may know other people who run their own business
and they make those decisions anyway, without knowing the figures –
that’s worse, they are reckless and clueless and will probably go bust before long.
Cash flow
I have already written in this book how vitally important cash flow is.
Cash flow is the lifeblood of your business, it’s life or death for your business, simple as that. If someone asked me to write my top ten ‘most important one-liners for building a successful company’ I’d probably put
‘manage your cash flow’ in at number two, right under ‘Deliver value’ at
number one. Losing track of your company finances can be fatal to your
business, you must ensure you are running at a profit, otherwise there is
little point in being in business.
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As I have already told you, I was into profit within a few weeks of starting
my business and I have stayed in profit ever since. MBR sits on $150K or
$200K cash at any one time, I have reserves, I have back up, and that’s a
comfortable pillow to rest your head on at night. I suggest you aim for
the same thing. I let my control of cash flow slip once and reserves got
down to the last $20K, and I was a worried man for a while. I’ll bet there
are thousands of small business owners out there who would love to
have $20K reserves in their company!
It’s amazing and worrying how many small companies run in the red the
whole time, waiting for payments to come in from customers in order to
pay suppliers who are threatening to stop supplies unless some payment
is made. I could not live that way, it would drive me crazy.
You simply have to determine your ground rules from the start and stick
to them. I have rules and I stick to them, and keeping cash reserves in
the bank is one of those rules. It’s like an insurance policy, I have a
year’s salary tucked away so that if for any reason I cannot run the company, or the company falls into trouble, my family has a twelve month
safety net for me to get back on my feet again.
Establish your rules right at the start. Decide what terms you need to
work under in order to ensure you do not live in stress or fear, build
comfort in to your plan. Seriously, I think a lot of people think that you
need to be miserable and stressed out in order to get rich, but that’s bull,
just plan your comfort zone and run your new business accordingly. I am
naturally entrepreneurial, and for years people told me I should run my
own business, yet I didn’t, because I was afraid of stress, becoming a
work-a-holic and losing everything if it all went wrong.
That was just naivety on my part, I now understand how to run my company within safety margins so that I do not have to work fifteen or sixteen hours every day to scrape by; I do not spend my life worrying about
suppliers chasing bills and with the bank on my back; and I certainly
would not lose my home or personal savings and investments if this
business failed. My family and our home will never be at risk.
I started my business with ground rules. Never risk my own money; after
that small start up investment, I have never put another single dollar of
my own money in. The company pays me, I don’t pay the company. Never
confuse company finances and personal finances. Never become a slave
to the business – if it starts ruling my life, stressing me out and I hate it,
then I will walk away, fold it and go do something else.
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In reality, the business has demanded some very real hard work, but
there have also been easy years, and I rarely feel any kind of stress, and I
certainly don’t feel miserable. I am in control, the business is my wealthcreation tool, I own it, I’m the boss – it doesn’t own me.
So decide your ground rules from the start and build your business accordingly, and don’t give up the day job until the business can support
you the way you want it to. The business model described in this book is
a rare gem, because using this model you can build a business that allows you to start making money with very little forward investment.
Other business models require some kind of manufacturing or storage
facility, or cash tied up in stock, or retail premises, or all the proprietor’s
time and effort invested, but this business is different. With this business
you only have to make a small up-front investment and you have other
people doing the bulk of the work (at least while you are still small), so
you really can start this business with little risk. It’s all upside.
Once you have decided your ground rules, you really need to understand
double-entry book keeping (or double-entry accounting). Ask your CPA
for a few tips and a little tutorial, or buy a book, or study online. It’s not
that hard, once you understand the basic principles, and you can keep
paper or electronic records. If you keep these up-to-date as you go, every
month, then you will always know what shape your business is in. At
any time you can look at your books and know what you owe, what you
are owed, how much cash you have and what expenses you have coming
up.
I said it earlier, and I am going to say it again now: get a good accountant, as he or she will almost certainly save you ten times what they
charge, so picking the cheapest CPA you can find is a false economy, it’ll
probably cost you in the long term. A helpful accountant will guide you
gently through the process of learning and keeping your accounts, and if
you tell your accountant your ground rules from the start, then he or she
will surely help make sure you stick to those rules.
After selling, keeping your finger on the financial pulse of your business
is the second most important factor in business success. If you don’t understand and control the money, your business is doomed from the start.
You cannot afford to leave cash flow to chance, and you cannot afford not
to understand the basics of accounting.
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Continued growth and expansion
The most obvious way to keep growing your business is to keep publishing more reports and making more money. Increase the frequency and
size and price, until you are putting out new products every month and
making heaps of money. Earlier in chapter three we talked at length
about the different types of information products available in the wider
market place. These are the obvious next step, your first major expansion
opportunity for your business once things are going well and you feel it is
time to move on.
If you have followed my example and built a business selling premium
priced market research reports, then the next step may be to look at a
serial product, such as a newsletter or online information service, or to
look at setting up some kind of online community, an industry forum,
chat-group, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing network or a simple adsponsored online magazine.
Once you get this business established, you’ll quickly come to realize
that your two greatest assets are the knowledge you have built in your
own head, and that database you have built, that list of several thousand
names who come along from time to time and buy your reports. The
knowledge you have built can be used time and again in different areas,
within your industry and also beyond. Meanwhile that database is a
goldmine, a list of people who buy research in your field, and if they buy
research in one format, there is every possibility they also buy research
in several other formats too.
That customer who has been spending $6000 bucks a year buying three
of your research reports, might have $100,000 to spend on bespoke research, maybe another $500,000 to spend on consulting services. Someone who just gave you $2000 bucks for a report might be happy to give
you another $2000 bucks to have a weekly news service in the same
market to support the one-off research report. Every buyer of a $3000
dollar market study is a potential buyer of a monthly update, building on
the earlier research, offering updates and additional research notes.
Once you develop a range of services then you have opportunities to
cross-sell among these various products.
Bespoke research
I’ve had customers before who made hard work of buying one report for
just $2000 dollars, pushing for a discount, asking lots of questions then
taking weeks to make a decision. Then I have been amazed when the
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same person has gone on to order $40,000 dollars worth of bespoke follow-on research without any further hassle. It’s all about perceptions of
value. Perhaps that customer was unsure of MBR with the first purchase, but once they had read the report, then they wanted more, and
the confidence was ‘in place’, so the deal was much quicker and easier.
The key point is that you have endless possibilities to expand once you
get your market research business established. There is a great deal of
‘cross-over’ in the market research business. The knowledge, the data
and news and analysis that we write and sell is your ‘content’, and that
content can be packaged and presented in many ways. Serial products,
such as newsletters, can spawn reports, and one-off products, such as
reports, can spawn serial updates.
All these products can lead to bespoke research and custom projects,
such as building and maintaining databases for customers, tracking
market data and so on. It can take years to establish your credentials delivering bespoke research, but once you have a good name, this can be
very lucrative, and your KPO partners will love you bringing in lots of
work for them. This is where your sales database shows its true value,
because the same people who buy reports also buy all these other products too.
I’m not going into great detail about custom research work in this book,
as again that’s a subject that could fill whole books on its own. Your customers will probably regularly approach you asking questions about areas you have not covered in your current report(s), and these are all potential opportunities for selling custom, or bespoke, research. Through
the unique business model presented in this book you will be able to offer almost unlimited resources for dealing with this work, and probably
at much lower prices than many of your competitors.
Leverage your relationship with your KPO partners to the full and talk to
them about the possibilities of offering their full suite of services and capabilities through your branded front-end. You’ll suddenly find yourself
selling solutions costing anything from $5000 bucks to $500,000 bucks,
with your KPO partners engaged to do all the work, you just take a percentage (ten, maybe fifteen percent) for handling the work and being the
customer facing front end of the operation. This may all sound a bit
scary right now, and rightly so, you don’t want to be doing this as a total
novice, but once you have a year or two under your belt then that experience will give you the confidence to take on these more challenging jobs.
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Diversification
Beyond writing reports and newsletters and completing custom research
projects for your customers, there is a whole range of other complementary areas you can look at moving in to. To be clear, MBR pretty much
sticks to research, but I know a lot of small publishers in this business
and many of them have successfully branched out into these other areas
and enjoyed great successes. Some have done well and others have not,
so don’t go rushing into anything until you feel certain you know what
you are doing. Proceed with caution and don’t try to run before you can
walk. Providing you stick to some of my guiding principles, below, you
should be fine. Remember:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Keep selling at the heart of it. If it ain’t making you money, real
revenues flowing into your business from the start, then forget it.
Manage your finances, watch cash flow like crazy.
Don’t break your ground rules, the ones we talked about at the
start of this chapter. Don’t over invest and damage your existing
business. Don’t be a victim of greed.
Whatever you plan to do, make sure it’s going to deliver real value
to your customers.
Think about customer service; think about the quality image you
have built up in your brand.
Take your time, make intelligent (not emotional) decisions, do your
research, get second opinions, be certain, then if it still looks good,
get on with it and keep the momentum up, don’t get scared.
Consulting
After bespoke research, consulting is probably the next step up the ‘intellectual value proposition’ ladder. Consulting is one of those words that
covers a multitude of sins, and you need to know what you are doing. I
do not recommend reading a few books and suddenly calling yourself a
consultant and turning up places in a nice new suit charging people
$2000 bucks a day to talk to you. In short, they’ll tear you apart, you
can’t possibly know enough.
However, after delivering research, pre-packaged as reports (often referred to as syndicated research) or in the form of customized research
for individual clients, the next logical step is to deliver that research in
person (no, not you!) along with a presentation, a Q&A session (questions
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ness, their market. I suggest that you hire a qualified and experienced
consultant for this as you are probably not qualified or experienced
enough to do this work yourself.
Good consultants have many years of experience working at solving
problems and finding solutions, and they can ‘talk the talk and walk the
walk’ in the right way, the way your customers will expect. Your successful company has the brand and market presence, and the report sales
generate leads for custom research and consulting opportunities. Your
KPO partners offer the support services, researching markets, forecasting
data, etc, and your consultant can provide the front-end, the customer
facing part of the company, to actually deliver the goods. It’s a logical
step up from research and it’s quite affordable, as your own major cost is
taking on the consultant, who should be clearing his own cost and making you a profit within a few months at most.
Events
Many research companies branch out into physical events. At this point I
just want to reiterate, MBR does not run events, and if you decide to
move into this area then you will have to leave home, and meet people,
and spend considerable upfront cash to put events together, etc., so
clearly this all goes beyond the scope of this book. Running conferences,
seminars, industry networking lunches and so on is a whole new business which I shall not get into now. There are plenty of books out there
on how to organize a conference or run a seminar, so if that’s the way
you decide to develop your business, I would recommend you look into it
first and be sure you know what you are doing before you branch out.
Putting on a conference involves many months of planning, hiring a
venue (usually a function room in a nice hotel), and then arranging catering, seating, a small stage, a sound system, etc. You have to book
speakers, determine the topics they’ll be speaking about, pay their travel
fees, market the event, produce printed materials to support the event,
arrange a networking lunch during each day of the conference, try to sell
enough tickets to make your money back, advertise the event, get media
sponsors, etc. Have I put you off yet?
It’s a big task, and it can break you and sink all your cash reserves if you
are not careful, but if you get it right, it can make you hundreds of thousands of dollars profit in just a few days. If you seriously want to host a
conference I suggest you hire an event manager with some experience
and do a lot of research first, before you sink tens of thousands into your
first event.
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Many companies have started with something a bit smaller than a full
blown conference, such as a simple networking lunch or evening meetand-drink. Arranging a networking event is much simpler than a big conference or seminar. Take a bunch of your customers who are all physically located within one country or one city, invite them all to attend X
place for X lunch at X time, tell them you have booked a room and there
will be a menu available for X bucks a head, and ask for an RSVP. Booking such an event is not expensive for you, but equally does not make
you any money immediately.
A small event like this must be seen as an opportunity for networking,
building relationships and probing for further opportunities. If the event
is a success, then run it again, maybe make it quarterly, or even
monthly. The event may be an evening gathering, little more than drinks
after work at a set time and place each month, a chance for a likeminded
group to meet and network. These events can be themed, and you may
encourage one or two of your customers to make a little five or ten minute presentation if the space is appropriate. Clearly a noisy bar is not
appropriate, but if you have a private function room in a bar or restaurant, then you can control the noise level yourself.
Such networking events give you (or your sales staff) great opportunities
to sell reports, custom research, consulting or further events. You may
build up to sports events (take a corporate box) or to one day seminars or
workshops. A workshop can be a cheaper alternative to a conference,
costing you less to set up and run, but obviously it has a correspondingly
lower ticket price and hence lower profit opportunity.
Online networking forum
One final alternative, if you are rather intimidated by the idea of events
and all the work that goes into arranging them, you could establish an
online networking forum or community. Obviously there are already
about a million places online where people can meet and exchange views
and ideas – blogs, social networking sites, business networking sites, forums, chat rooms and so on. But there is always room for one more.
If your information publishing company has successfully published information online – perhaps you have added an editorial blog to your site
(your KPO team could contribute, some of your customers, not just you),
or perhaps you have established an online magazine or news feed service. Any such online presence would make an ideal starting point for establishing some kind of online community, industry forum or industryspecific networking site.
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Of course, you need serious web-space and some clever software for all
this, and I have to admit that I don’t know the first thing about it, but I
know other small publishers who have successfully built such online
communities, charging a small fee for membership, and offering some
value add to community members. Such a business can generate a nice
steady revenue stream and after the initial set-up cost, can be quite
cheap to maintain.
You can outsource all the IT to a BPO partner, and they will manage the
customer database online and run the site for you. You can offer members deals and discounts on reports, take carefully selected advertisers
and allow them to run promotions to your members, either paying you a
slice of their takings or a set advertising fee. You can survey your members to find out what they want from such a site, and set up additional
services accordingly. They may want public message boards, job finding
services etc. This is a huge field, well beyond the scope of this book, but
it is a definite possibility.
Pick another industry, start another company, sell the one
you have already created or build a corporation
In the longer term future, there is no knowing what heights you may
reach. Once you have successfully established your business in your
chosen field, after a few years you may feel confident to start exactly the
same thing all over again in another field. Remember why we chose a
name that wasn’t tied to any specific subject?
This is possibly the most obvious expansion opportunity open to you, as
you have already proved to yourself that you know how to do it, so now
go do it all over again. You might need to hire someone to run your existing business while you focus on the new venture, or you might hire
someone with relevant industry-specific knowledge to run the new venture under your guidance, while you keep managing the business you already have.
Maybe you feel that your existing business has a good name in X field,
and you don’t want to dilute that by publishing reports in Y field, so start
another company. Sure, why not, just go back to page 1 of this book and
start all over again; pick a new name, in a new sector, with a new focus,
and repeat the whole thing.
And who knows where that may lead to – you might build the second one
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petitor might want to absorb your company, or you may know a friend
who wants to buy your business. Using the business model laid out in
this book, your business may be hard to value using traditional accounting practices. The staff is outsourced; there is no physical stock, and you
are not selling yourself as a part of the deal, so these things will bring
your valuation down. However, you have a brand, and loyalty and a customer database, plus you can sell your false identities along with the
business (they are just email accounts after all).
Your little business is an excellent cash-generating machine, with no
debts, and with an established market presence it ought to be worth a
few hundred thousand bucks at least. Factor in the value of the brand,
the back catalog of publications and customer goodwill, plus any regular
buyers you have who take all your output, these have a definite and
measureable ‘forward value’.
Or maybe you have really big dreams, and you want to build your publishing company into a corporation. Such an undertaking would be vast,
and you may need to leverage every idea we have covered in this book
and then some. You may need to publish reports, newsletters, books,
and online news services; you might cover multiple sectors, probably
with multiple brands established, and you may be selling custom research, consulting, events, running networking groups and so on.
It may be necessary to include all these business ideas in order to build
your company up into a multi-million dollar corporation, but if you can
master the essentials of publishing and selling research in a small company, there is absolutely no reason why those skills and experiences
cannot be scaled up. Just keep a grip on those core principles. Manage
your money, watch your cash flow, don’t try to run before you can walk,
always deliver value in your products and quality in your service, and
remember your focus - sell, sell, sell.
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Chapter 10:
The Big Picture
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The end
So this is it, almost the end of the book. Hopefully you have read the previous nine chapters and learnt all about how I made a couple of million,
and with some luck I hope it’s given you some ideas about how you can
do the same thing. But you know, it’s not all about the money. Seriously,
a million bucks is nice, but really the money isn’t the real reward, it’s
just the icing on the cake. They used to say – and I used to love this saying - ‘Anyone who says money can’t buy happiness doesn’t know where
to go shopping.’ I used to think that was hilarious, and true, but over
time I have come to realize that in fact, it’s quite the opposite. The truth
is, anyone who isn’t truly happy, and thinks that having money will solve
all that, really doesn’t know where to go “shopping” for truth and happiness and real meaning in their life.
I mean, money can buy a lot of fun, money can buy distractions, money
can buy time fillers, money can help you have fantastic vacations and see
the world, but money can’t buy you true happiness, true fulfillment deep
down inside your heart. Money can’t buy love, true friendship, personal
fulfillment or a sense of belonging to the wider world. Money won’t help
your children grow up into wonderful human beings who make you
proud every time they speak, only you can do that, and money won’t give
you the feelings of warmth inside that true love and respect can give
you...you can’t buy that, you have to find it, earn it and deserve it.
Different needs
It’s important to remember in life that everyone has different ideas, different thoughts, needs, priorities and dreams. To me, work is mostly all
about making money. I tend not to use work as my primary means to
achieve personal fulfillment or personal satisfaction, work is not the primary use of my waking hours; it’s simply my way of funding the other
things I want to do in life. But I appreciate that for many other people,
work is far more important, and it means different things to different
people.
For lots of people, they get all their personal fulfillment needs satisfied by
how they earn a living. For a huge number of people, their work literally
is their lifetime’s major achievement. Millions of people are far more interested in exactly what they do for a living and what that does for them,
than in how much they get paid for doing it. Listen, if you are one of
those people, respect to you, but I’m not one of those people, and that’s
not how I see work at all. For me personally, I believe being a great father
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portant, and for me sharing some amazing experiences with my friends is
more important, and seeing the world and experiencing other lives and
cultures is more important. So I use work as a tool to earn plenty of
money, without working every possible waking hour, to fund doing these
other things in my life.
There is no right view or wrong view, we are all different, thankfully, and
we all have different priorities, but I mention all this because I think it is
important for you to think about. I created this business as a means to
achieving my goals. I used to – and still do – look at my life every few
months and try to figure out ways to make more money while working
fewer hours. One of my long term goals in life is to constantly improve
that balance year after year, every year making more money than I made
in the previous year, yet working less hours. I have been consistently
achieving this goal for about five or six years now, thanks largely to this
great business model which I have shared with you in this book.
Taking this process through to its conclusion, I guess the ultimate goal is
to get my working hours down to just a couple of hours per day, and my
pay up to something in the region of $1 million per year. A few years at
that level, investing a lot of that income sensibly, and my family and I
will never have to worry about work or money ever again. This will then
set me free to spend my time – the next fifty years - and money doing the
things I want to do, with my kids, my wife, my friends, and pursuing my
other dreams (like writing a book, so I am starting with this book) without concern for whether or not those dreams generate an income.
However, this describes my goals, my ideas and ideals, which may be
very different to yours. If you are one of those people who find deep satisfaction in your work, then this business may not be for you, this business may not stimulate you enough, as it can be pretty boring from dayto-day. I think of work purely as a way to make money, so this business
suits me perfectly. But if you need a more engaging job, then the loneliness of home-office working, and the complications of working under a
false name or two and pretending to be a larger company than you
are...well, these things might not sit easily on your conscience.
Ha-ha, yes, I can hear some of you laughing now - you are the ones who
think just like me - you are laughing, thinking ‘who cares about what sits
comfortably on my conscience, I want to earn half a million a year’. Hey,
you are just like me, but in this instance you simply don’t understand
the other reader’s opinion. For many millions of people, work is an essential part of how they ‘belong’ to society, how they contribute to the world,
how they feel valued, how they communicate and how they form most of
their social relationships. This business model, despite the attractive
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pay, won’t suit those people, as those people need to feel more like they
are a part of something bigger, contributing to a bigger system. For some
of those people, this job may feel too ‘self-serving’, like you are just making money for yourself. [It’s not like that, really, but it can feel that way. I
honestly think my company delivers great value to its customers, and I
believe we deliver genuine quality and usefulness, but sometimes it just
feels like I am sitting at home ‘tricking’ people out of their money. It takes
a bit of getting used to!]
Home-working can be lonely, isolated, boring and oppressive. Some people feel they can ‘never get away from the office’, and some suffer the opposite problem – too many home distractions to ever get any work done!
So be aware of the dangers; home working effectively requires an immense amount of self-discipline. You have to know when to work, and
when to stop. I have built my business to suit me; to me it’s just a job,
and it pays well giving me time to do other things. But be aware, I am the
guy who checks his email at seven in the morning on Christmas Day; at
midnight when I am tired; on New Year’s Eve when everyone else is out
drunk; I’ll still be tapping out emails...perhaps with a cold beer in one
hand, just on New Year’s Eve I might allow myself to have a drink while I
am working!
I would advise anyone reading this book, who is thinking of trying to
copy this business, to try it in your spare time first, before you quit your
day job and risk your future income on this new idea. Try working on
days off, weekends, evenings, try publishing a report or two and see how
the sales come in. Remember, the sales are the core, if you don’t have the
discipline to put in an hour or two pretty much every evening, at least
four or five evenings per week, then maybe you won’t have the discipline
to run your own business from home.
Getting the carousel moving
There is a great analogy to describe the process, maybe some of you will
have heard this before. Your business is like a huge carousel (or merrygo-round) at a funfair. Imagine the strength you would need to start that
carousel spinning. At first you huff and puff and heave for all you are
worth and it seems it won’t move. You push and pull and dig your heels
in and eventually, as the sweat drips down your face, it starts to move
just a few inches. With renewed vigor you push and push and put your
back into it and heave with all your might and the thing actually starts
moving.
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Pretty soon you are taking small steps, your body leaning right into the
pole you are pushing on, but sure enough this huge, heavy carousel is
slowly starting to turn. Your steps lengthen now and before long you are
walking the carousel along, slowly, but it’s a constant movement, requiring immense constant effort, which is increasing as you continue to push
for all you are worth. Excited by your progress, you find new strength
and you push harder than ever, and soon you have the ride traveling at
quite a pace, such that you are slowly running along around the outside
of the ride, pushing on the pole with both hands.
Eventually the carousel picks up enough speed that you can’t keep up
with the outside edge anymore, so you stand still and grab each pole as it
comes by and give it a hefty pull as it passes you. After some time doing
this, the effort gradually becomes easier, and now the carousel is actually
spinning properly, and the children are bobbing up and down on the
horses enjoying the ride. You wave at the children as they pass, and
suddenly you realize that now it is spinning quite freely without much
effort from you, just a gentle push on each pole as it passes...no great
heave-ho, no sweating and grunting, it just keeps spinning round.
This is what it takes to start a business, and the sales are your hands on
the poles. It requires an enormous amount of effort to get a business off
the ground, and that effort may not ease up for six months, or twelve
months, or even two years, but it will ease up eventually, and then if you
keep at it, keep pushing, keep trying, eventually you’ll reach the point
where all you have to do is stand still and gently ‘waft it by’ like the carousel. Once the forward motion is there, the business becomes a machine, something with momentum that will propel itself forward (some
people refer to ‘the super-tanker effect’ which is a similar analogy you
may have heard), just so long as you are always there, waving your
hands over it, pushing the poles as they go by, just enough to keep
things moving nicely.
Beware the hot dog vendor...
The danger comes when you get bored of just standing there. The children seem happy, the ride is spinning nicely, and you get complacent.
You look across the fairground and see the hot dog stall. You think to
yourself ‘I’ll just pop over there and grab me a chili dog, I’ll be back in
two minutes’ and off you go. You glance back over your shoulder from
the hot dog stall and the carousel still seems to be spinning, so you think
everything must be OK. It has actually slowed a little, but it’s barely perceptible, you don’t even notice it. In fact, it all looks fine, and now you
can see the roller coaster, and you really did want to have a ride on that.
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Again you check the carousel and still it looks fine, so you dash over for
a quick ride on the roller coaster. The trouble is the line was longer and
slower than it looked from the hot dog stand, but now you’ve been standing in that line for fifteen minutes there is no way you are going to give
up your space. You finally get on the ride, then there’s a technical fault,
and another ten minute delay, but finally you get the ride and it’s great.
When you come off you really need to use the restrooms, but that only
takes a couple of minutes, then you meet someone you know and you
stop and say hi for a couple more minutes.
You head back to the carousel, and as you come around the corner you
are horrified by what you see...it’s come almost to a complete stop, it’s
only just barely moving! Now all the momentum is gone, you have to go
through all that effort all over again. All that heaving and sweating, you
have to do it all again...
Now here’s the most important lesson: If you had just stood there a while
longer, eventually you would have made enough profit from kids riding
your carousel that you could have paid someone else to stand there
pushing the poles gently along while you went for that chili dog and rode
the roller coaster for as long as you like.
Running a business really is like that, I am sure a few of you reading this
book have run your own businesses before and you’ll read this and you’ll
wholly agree that the analogy is perfectly accurate. Sadly, this business
model of mine does not allow you much down time for the first few years.
I only took one week’s vacation each year for the first five years running
my business and that’s a downside, but it’s helped me get to where I am
now, so I take that as a worthwhile sacrifice. Coupled with the long
hours I worked on this for the first two or three years, that was really
hard, but once my ‘carousel’ was up to speed, I have had a much easier
time over the last three or four years, and those long twelve hour days
now seem far behind me.
Now that my carousel is spinning nicely, the momentum allows me much
more time off. I may not take many weeks vacation each year, but I get
time off every day. I rarely start work before nine in the morning these
days, and I am usually finished by six in the evening, and most days I
take two or three hours off for lunch in the middle of the day. Those
hours give me time to go to the gym, take a shower, then have a sociable
and relaxed lunch with my family, before getting back to work. I sometimes slip back to my desk for an hour in the evening, but not too often.
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So you see again how for me this is a lifestyle choice. I earn good money,
I work a relaxed, flexible schedule, and I am my own boss, so I don’t have
to suffer anyone telling me what to do. Sure, some people might sell you
a book about how to make a million faster than my way, but my way is
pretty relaxed once you get into it, and that makes it long term sustainable. Sustainable means that if you keep it up for ten years, or fifteen
years, that first million could become three million, or five million, or who
knows what the limit might be.
If it feels good to run, keep on running
Let me give you one more analogy that might resonate with some of you.
If you are a runner, or have ever regularly run then you’ll understand
this. If you’ve started a program of running or jogging, and kept at it and
built up your fitness until you reach a point where you can run every
day, or most days, then you kept that up for several months, over time
you will have seen and felt your fitness levels improve dramatically. Remember back to that start. That first time you went out running it was
damned hard, your legs ached, your back was stiff, your heart pounding
like it was gonna burst out of your chest, your muscles hurt, you felt like
you needed to throw up. Yeah, makes you wonder why you didn’t just
quit there right.
But you didn’t quit, you kept going, and gradually, each time you went
out running it got a little easier, until you even started enjoying it. Yeah,
how crazy, six weeks earlier you thought your heart was going to burst
and you wanted to vomit, then suddenly you start enjoying it. You kept it
up for months, and you knew you were hooked once you reached that
point where you wanted to run every day, and you got all agitated and
restless on any day your schedule wouldn’t allow time for a run. You
would run no matter how hard it was raining. You would run even if the
only time you had was like eleven at night…you’d run ‘til midnight then
slip in a quick shower and go to bed feeling great.
After nine months of this, you had burned off those twenty pounds you
didn’t need and you were in your best shape you had been in for years.
Daily exercise builds fitness, strength, muscle…you know that, the winning body builders are the guys who train every day, not the guys who
hit the gym a couple times one month then stay home and watch TV for
six weeks – persistence pays. So all this running and you are in great
shape, ready to run a marathon or two, you feel fit, strong, lean, fast and
efficient.
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Now imagine you stop, completely, after nine months of hard work, running daily, you just stop dead. You hit the sofa, break out a few six
packs, order pizza, load up on DVDs and you just sit there, feeding your
face. How fast will those twenty pounds go back on? After two weeks of
beer, pizza and TV, could you run that marathon now? After four weeks
of pepperoni meat feast and a six-pack every evening, do you feel energized, lean, vital, alive? After six weeks is the twenty pounds back, is the
floppy ring of fat hanging over your belt again, do you feel fighting fit
now?
Getting in shape took nine months of daily blisters, sweat and aching
muscles, it took so much effort that every day it made you feel like you
needed to puke as you ran uphill, it took sacrifice, no chocolate, no pizza,
no beer. Now in just six weeks, you’ve undone all that effort, all that
good, all that building, and it took no effort at all, you just sat there and
did nothing. Nine months of hard work, nine months of blood, sweat and
tears, undone by just six weeks of doing nothing – no blood, no sweat,
and maybe just a few tears when you realize what you have done.
Business can be like that. It often requires a vast amount of time, dedication, effort and sheer hard work to get things going, then if you slack off
for just a few weeks, things can go wrong, quickly and easily. Understand
the key point here – it takes immense effort to build your business up,
but it takes no concentrated effort at all to destroy it – all you have to do
is…do nothing.
Doing nothing will kill your business. Dead. Fast.
Don’t fall into that trap, understand that running your own business can
be like having a child, or like taking on a high-maintenance pet, like a
horse or something. This is a serious commitment, not just a new hobby
for a few weeks; this isn’t something you can drop in a few weeks time
when the novelty has worn off.
I wouldn’t recommend anything below a minimum of one year, that’s the
absolute minimum, really two years is better. If after two years your
business isn’t going where you want it to go, then maybe it’s not for you
or you have gotten something wrong, but you can’t say you have given it
a good shot until you have tried for at least a year. I honestly believe that
this book has left nothing to chance. I have been completely honest with
you throughout this book, I have told you what to do, how to do it, the
prizes, the pitfalls, the good, the bad and the ugly.
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The beginning
If you have read this book and you believe that you are the kind of person who could succeed in this business, and if you are genuinely a fairly
bright, lively individual, with some common sense and some grasp of the
process of selling, and if you are prepared to put some hard work and effort in, then this book tells you everything you need to know. You can do
this; reading this book was just the beginning, now you can go out there
and make your own millions.
In fact, if you are that person and you have got what it takes, then this
book tells you everything you need to know to follow my business model
and build your business quicker and more efficiently than I did. Re-read
the whole thing several times and draw up a business plan, and take
your business from a standing start to half a million annual turnover
much faster than I did…it’s all there for the taking. You could be making
$20,000 dollars per month take-home-pay in just two or three years from
now, it’s perfectly achievable.
I hope you will decide to try. Believe in yourself, as this book explains
again and again, it’s not rocket science, it’s simple stuff, you don’t need
lots of capital up front, you don’t need loads of technical knowledge, you
don’t need any fancy qualifications…all you need is some ‘get-up-and-go’,
a positive outlook on life, the willingness to try to shape your own destiny
- and the contents of this book!!
I wish you good luck…and please, write to me when you make your first
million, and thank me for all the good advice!!!
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Appendix and Additional Resources
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Business 101: Taking an order and getting paid
Whatever country you live in there will be different rules about how you
keep your accounts, so ask your accountant for guidance. One thing you
must know how to do is to take an actual order; once you actually get
someone say ‘yes please’ to your report, then you need to know how to
fulfil the order and get their money!
It’s a good idea to have some kind of order form which you can use to record every transaction. It also helps to act as a kind of ‘proof of order’ in
cases where you have payment problems, or if one person orders but
then leaves the company before the bill is paid. You may include an order
form as one of the pages in your sales brochure, or you may have a
standalone order form document, as a PDF document, or an MS Word
document. Just make sure you have something to record the name and
address of the person placing the order, the product and price, a space to
put the Purchase Order number (if they have one) and a way to indicate
how they would like to pay.
People might pay using a credit card, or they may ask you to issue an invoice, and they can then arrange payment by bank transfer, or some
companies may send a check. You probably won’t be able to take credit
cards right from the start, but as your business grows, you can talk to
your bank about ways to accept credit card payment. Taking credit cards
is good, but be prepared to pay set-up fees, monthly standing charges
and a few percent of the value of every transaction.
You could offer other payment options: you could have a company PayPal
account, or you might use a third party payment processing solution off
the back of your website. These payment solutions are all fine, but be
sure that whatever you use all looks smart and professional, remember
you are trying to make your company look bigger than it really is. There
is no shame in running a successful small business, I am proud of my
small business – but a lot of big companies will be hesitant to buy from
you if they perceive your company is very small, that’s a sad but true
fact.
Ensure your customers can return your order forms to you however they
like – they can email the form to you, perhaps there might be an option
to fill the form in on your site, some people may want to fax the form to
you, some may mail it in and some people may just want to call you and
place the order over the phone. Let your customers do it the way they
want, leave all these options open, as everyone is different and each will
have his or her own preference.
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Maybe you should keep a stack of blank order forms beside the phone in
your office, just so that if people phone in an order, you can fill the form
in as they talk to you. This will keep your effort consistent and ensure
you don’t miss anything, and the form will make a useful record of the
order for you to keep and file in your accounts.
Once you have an order, you must issue an invoice for every transaction.
No one told me anything about accounting when I started out, so I only
ever issued an invoice if someone specifically asked for it. I was many
months down the line, almost a full year, when my accountant realized
what I was doing and then I had a hell of a job going back and raising all
that missing paperwork. I had no clear written records; I had accidentally
double-issued order numbers (invoices must be numbered sequentially,
each with a unique reference number) and I spent a whole week in a real
mess trying to sort it all out.
You see, I told you, now you have read this book, you will start your publishing company knowing a whole lot more than I knew when I started. I
really did make it all up as I went along, and learned from all my horrible
mistakes, so reading this valuable, information-packed book, you have a
real head start on this game. So ask your accountant to help you set up
an order taking and invoicing system, and explain the basics of book
keeping as we have talked about. You may have to pay your accountant
for his or her time to help you, but it will be money very well spent in the
long run. You’ll never run a successful business making big bucks if you
don’t understand your basic accounts work, it’s as simple as that.
Once you have invoiced every job, then when payments become overdue,
you can print off copies of the same invoices with ‘STATEMENT’ written
across the top, and send these to late payers as reminders of their payment obligation. Should an order get paid and canceled, or double paid,
then you can use the same format as your invoices and statements to
produce a credit note too.
I’m not going to write page loads here about the accounts, it really is beyond the scope of this book, but I want to be absolutely clear, you must
know what you are doing. Assume you know nothing (unless you are an
accountant or professional book keeper!) and tell your accountant that
you know nothing, and ask for full guidance.
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List of publishers
There are thousands of research and publishing companies out there, of
every size, so I can’t possibly list them all. However, I’ve listed a few here
to get you started, you can try to contact some of these and pretend to be
a student, see if you can get back-catalog reports as examples for you to
see how other companies produce their work. Many of these companies
publish market research in the telecoms and technology business, which
is my area, but there really are thousands out there, this is just a small
selection of your possible competitors. You should check out these companies and others to see what this business is all about.
Gartner - http://www.gartner.com
John Wiley and Sons – http://www.wiley.com (own many publishing
companies)
IDC - http://www.idc.com
Library House - http://www.libraryhouse.net/
Datamonitor - http://www.datamonitor.com/
Keynote - http://www.keynote.co.uk/
Just Auto - http://www.just-auto.com/
Taylor Nelson Sofres - http://www.tnsglobal.com/
AMA Research - http://www.amaresearch.co.uk/
Kline Group - http://www.klinegroup.com/marketresearch/kline_research.asp
Frost & Sullivan - http://www.frost.com/
Global Industry Analysts, Inc - http://www.strategyr.com/
Kalorama Information - http://www.kaloramainformation.com/
Infiniti Research - http://www.infiniti-research.com/
Mintel International - http://www.mintel.com/ (includes Snapdata International)
First Research - http://www.firstresearch.com/
Plimsoll Publishing - http://www.plimsoll.co.uk/
Global Markets Direct - http://www.globalmarketsdirect.com/
Business Monitor - http://www.businessmonitor.com/
Informa Group - http://www.informa.com/ (own several publishing
companies)
Forrester Research - http://www.forrester.com (includes Jupiter Research)
Nielsen - http://www.nielsen.com/
Javelin Strategy and Research - http://www.javelinstrategy.com/
TowerGroup Research http://www.towergroup.com/research/home/index.htm
Compass Intelligence - http://www.compass-intelligence.com/
Reed Elsevier - http://www.reed-elsevier.com/Pages/Home.aspx
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List of BPO / KPO companies
There are hundreds of companies in India, China and all over the world
that offer KPO and BPO services. You can search for them online; just
search ‘KPO and BPO companies’ on Google. Once you identify a few
firms, call them or email them, talk to a few possible partners and ask for
quotes and you will soon decide which ones you like the look and sound
of.
I have listed just a few of the biggest and best here to get you started.
Evalueserve - http://www.evalueserve.com/ (probably the biggest and
best known KPO firm in the world and extremely professional)
Irevna - http://www.irevna.com/ (probably one of the best known in the
world, specialising in financial services)
Innodata Isogen - http://www.innodata-isogen.com/
Karvy Global Services - http://www.karvyglobal.com/
Outsource Partners International - http://www.opiglobal.com/
Vision KPO Solutions - http://www.visionkpo.com/ (LPO and financial
BPO)
Contech BPO - http://www.contechbpo.com/ (healthcare services)
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List of third part resellers and publishers’ sales agents
Again, there are literally hundreds of reseller channels you may wish to
use to get your products to market. Some are simply just web-based listings; others are proper full service agencies using dedicated account
managers who build valuable relationships with report buyers. Again, I
suggest you get on the phone or send out a bunch of emails and ask
these people how they can help you.
I don’t suggest signing resale contracts with hundreds of these immediately, start slowly and build it up. A few good relationships are worth a
lot more to you than hundreds of unrewarding ones. Some of these companies are huge and they carry hundreds of thousands of products, some
of these companies are smaller and more niche. A huge reseller may be
beneficial, listing your products alongside all the big players, all your
new competitors, giving you good market presence.
But on the flipside of that argument, a big reseller may also be a disadvantage, as you might become a needle lost in a haystack, and you will
have almost no significant voice with the reseller, who might be keener to
please the bigger publishers they represent. You have to get into this
market and experiment, and find out which channels to market produce
the best results for you. Never stop trying new ideas; you’ll never ‘know it
all’.
Tip: check out these resellers to find thousands more publishers, they
are all listed on these big sites.
MarketResearch.com - http://www.marketresearch.com/
Business Library - http://www.biz-lib.com/
Research and Markets - http://www.researchandmarkets.com/
Global Information Inc - http://www.the-infoshop.com/
CMS Info - http://www.cmsinfo.com/
Aarkstore - http://www.aarkstore.com/
IPI Information Service - http://www.ipi.com.au/
Bharat Book Bureau - http://www.bharatbook.com/
Blackwells - http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/index.jsp?route=home
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List of useful resources
As time goes by, depending on which industry you decide to publish reports in, you will build your own list of useful resources. Here are a few
general, non-industry specific sites which you might find useful.
Google – http://www.google.com (endlessly useful, enough said)
Wikipedia - http://www.wikipedia.org/
XE.com - http://www.xe.com/ucc/ (for real time currency conversions)
Oanda - http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic (currency conversions)
Time zones - http://www.worldtimeserver.com/
CIA World Fact Book - https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/ (really useful, for all kinds of things)
Market Research portal - http://www.marketresearchworld.net/
The Market Research Society - http://www.mrs.org.uk/
Market Research News - http://www.mrnews.com/
Publishers style guide - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide (you
should purchase, or develop your own, style guide)
Technical publishers association - http://www.stm-assoc.org/
Yahoo! Babelfish - http://uk.babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt (very
useful free language translation service)
Survey Monkey - http://www.surveymonkey.com/Default.aspx (great for
easy, cheap online surveys)
Population data - http://www.populationworld.com/
Country data http://www.state.gov/www/regions/independent_states.html
Zoomerang - http://www.zoomerang.com/ (another great online survey
site)
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Brief glossary of acronyms
As I’ve written already, I have tried to introduce plenty of ‘business language’ in this book, so that if you are not previously familiar with that
kind of talk, you should have picked up quite a lot of new words reading
this book. Still, if you don’t understand a word or acronym, look it up
online, try the fabulous Wikipedia for almost anything.
Here is a quickie-listing of a few acronyms I have used in this book.
BPO – Business Process Outsourcing
KPO – Knowledge Process Outsourcing
LPO – Legal Process Outsourcing
MSO – Marketing and Sales Operations/Office
CEO – Chief Executive Officer
CFO – Chief Financial Officer
COO – Chief Operating Officer
CIO – Chief Information Officer
CMO – Chief Marketing Officer
CTO – Chief Technical Officer
SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
ROI – Return on investment
RFP – Request for Proposal
SoW – Statement of Work
SOI – Statement of Intent
POD – Print-on-Demand
PO – Purchase Order
CPA – Certified Public Accountant
ISP – Internet Service Provider
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
B2B – Business-to-Business
B2C – Business-to-Consumer
M&CI – Market and Competitor Intelligence
WIP – Work-in-progress
QC – Quality Control
TOC – Table of Contents
PDF – Portable Document Format (Adobe Acrobat standard)
OPM – Other People’s Money 
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About the author
Bradley Moorland
As the title of this book suggests, Bradley Moorland has no exceptional
educational achievements to his name, and he has no illustrious career
in high level positions at big name blue-chip companies, but he does
have a million bucks, and he’s pretty pleased with himself for that.
When not at his desk running Moorland Business Research, Brad likes
to spend his spare time having fun with his four children, traveling, reading, writing, playing racquetball and enjoying lots of fun outdoor sports,
such as climbing, hiking, biking and more.
Published by Peek State.
© Copyright 2009
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Bonus Sections – Additional FREE information!
Just how lucky are you? First up, I have been good enough to share my
great business model with you, which clearly explains how you can earn
a whole ton of money. Secondly, I have packed this book with extra tips
and bits of data way beyond the basics, and third I have let you have the
whole thing for just a few bucks. But wait, it gets even better!
Now I have even written four FREE bonus sections for you, and all you
have to do is go to this web page http://www.makeamillionebook.com/index.php?p=1_5_YourFreeBonus
and you can have these four short but valuable bonus sections completely free. So what are you waiting for, go and get them right now!
Heck, if you are too lazy to go and download them, just email me at
[email protected] and I’ll email them back to you just as
soon as I can. I’m so good to you!
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Disclaimer and Legal Notices
Copyright © by Bradley Moorland 2000-2009
A Peek State publication.
Disclaimer
Every care has been taken in the preparation of this book to ensure that the information contained herein is accurate, factual and correct to the best of our
knowledge, at time of publishing. All opinions, suppositions, estimates and recommendations included in this document are solely the opinions of the author
unless otherwise stated. Peek State accepts no liability for any loss or damage
or unforeseen consequential loss or damage arising from the use of the information contained within this publication.
Risk Statement
This publication has been written to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. This publication is sold with
the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice.
Peek State, and Bradley Moorland, individually or corporately, neither accepts
any responsibility for any liabilities resulting from the actions of any parties involved. You use the information and advice in this publication at your own risk.
All Rights Reserved
No part of this document can be copied, shared, redistributed, transmitted, displayed in the public domain, stored or displayed on any internal or external
public, corporate or private network or electronic retrieval system, nor reprinted, republished or reconstituted in any way without the express written
permission of the publisher.
Forwarding of this electronic document without the correct legal permission is
theft. It’s unethical, immoral and against the law. For reprint permission please
contact the publisher or author, at [email protected]
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Authenticity
This book and the information contained in this book are based on an entirely
true series of events, facts and figures. However, in order to protect the identity
of the companies and individuals involved, all names and locations and dates
have been changed. In a few instances, some minor details have been changed
slightly to avoid any connection with the real world, but this does not dramatically change the substance of the information, which remains based in solid
fact.
Brad notes: This book uses the US dollar as the currency of reference whenever
talking about money. This is simple “internationalization”, as the US dollar is
the most widely recognized and universally accepted currency in the world and
in most countries readers will understand the value of the dollar compared to
their own currency. Additionally, the book is written from a slightly US-focused
viewpoint. That’s simply because I believe the US is my biggest market for selling this book, and the US is probably the most valuable individual country
market for selling premium market research reports, my primary business.
Contact Brad Moorland
Brad wants to hear from you, if you follow the advice in this book, please email
your stories to us at [email protected] but please remember Brad
is a busy guy and may not have time to answer all emails personally.
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