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Nicola Shares Stories Of Starting Over At Sixty

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3 Crucial Business Books To Ensure YOUR Business Survives This Recession

Business owners are more beleaguered than ever.  From lockdowns to double-digit inflation on things you need to buy, to astronomic energy bills, the obstacles to business success are growing larger by the day.

However, by investing in YOURSELF – and we are talking time not money – you can make sure that you make the right decisions while under pressure and give your business the best possible chances of surviving & thriving through the next few years.

Not convinced?  Here are 3 reasons I urge you to think of books as your secret weapon in your fight for business excellence.

  • You can listen as well as read, if that’s your thing.  Not only do most books go to Audible quickly now (including my own ‘The Money Gym‘ but there are browser plugins that will read articles, blog posts and the rapidly becoming essential alternative media ‘real news’ channel Substack out loud to you.  My mate Andy sets his for double time so he gets through longer articles and news even quicker!
  • ‘Leaders Are Readers’ says Tim Sanders, author of ‘Love Is The Killer App’ and when I’m listening to podcasts, what shines through is that the top people are either reading (or listening) to biographies and ‘how to’ books.
  • Suddenly, all that boring dead time while working out, folding the washing, being a taxi for teens or walking the dog is now a portable classroom.

Being very creative and highly visual, I get easily overwhelmed by lots of information.  So I like to divide my activities into three main areas; mindset, marketing & money.  There is a place for business skills too, but they usually fit under one of those three and if you don’t get those three right, you can have as many business skills as you like, but you still won’t succeed.  Unless you are running a company FOR an entrepreneur.

3 Crucial Business Books To Ensure YOUR Business Survives This Recession

So here are my ‘3 Crucial Business Books’, carefully culled from a much longer list so don’t miss these, read / listen as soon as possible.  One book in each of my three main areas.  First up, Mindset!

Mindset

‘Creating A Bug Free Mind‘ by Andy Shaw.

I could have gone with another top favourite here, ‘The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People’ which was an absolute game-changer for me in my late 30’s but I’m going to assume you have read it already.  No?  Run, don’t walk to get that one.

Can I be blunt? You are never going to succeed in business unless you sort yourself out.  If you have low self-esteem, you don’t believe that you are worthy of success, if you cringe when you talk about money, if you think sales is a dirty word, if you are carrying baggage and resentments, you are on a hiding to nothing.  Might as well shut up shop now.

My really tippy top-notch favourite book on mindset is actually written by a close friend of mine, Andy Shaw.

I’ve watched him go from strength to strength personally, while people from all walks of life in over 150 countries in the world have had their lives changed by this, and its companion book ‘Using A Bug Free Mind’.

Not to mention that I’ve read both books twice now and it’s certainly changed my life – and my business –  immeasurably.

While keeping your head straight is lifelong work, you’ll be wanting to test your big idea now (also known as your Irresistible Offer).

The ONLY way to really test an idea – and get an honest response – is by trying to sell it to someone.  In less than 30 seconds ideally. This can be as simple as explaining it to your Nan, your best mate or someone in your business community.

If they don’t get it immediately you’ve got more work to do on your offer.  But once you’ve cracked it, it’s time to set up a marketing funnel and a sales system, so you never miss a potential sale.

Marketing & Sales

‘Predictable Revenue‘: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com’ by Aaron Hall

In order to make it in business, you need to know how both sales & marketing work. While great marketing is popularly thought to make sales redundant, you do need to know how to encourage people to make that buying decision (and how to make it easy for them).

This is the first book I came across that covers the two together, creating a simple, easy-to-follow system to set up both successfully in your business.

What to do, what not to do, what to do if you sell products versus services, how to sell high ticket versus low ticket, how to DIY and how to run a sales team and marketing department – it’s all there.

It’s also surprisingly fun to read, with Aaron sharing lots of anecdotes to illustrate his point.

Business Planning

‘Traction‘ by Gino Wickman

If you’ve ever wondered how to write a short, brilliant, easy-to-follow business plan THEN actually follow it and track your progress regularly, look no further.

I absolutely love this book and use their Meeting Agenda with my Mastermind clients every quarter.

This is written in the format of a self-help book but if you prefer a story, then click through to ‘Traction’ and then look for ‘Get A Grip’ by Gino Wickman – an excellent follow-up to ‘Traction’ driving home the principles in ‘case study’ kind of format.

Again, combining solid practical ‘how to’ with templates and anecdotes from Gino’s own experience of working with many different types of business.

Money

Bonus Book: “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz

As I can’t leave any list without covering all three of the areas essential for business success, I’ve decided to give you a bonus book – all about how to handle the money in your business!  I’d already been tracking my cashflows weekly – personal and business – and so it was just a matter of absorbing the principles and re-arranging the rows a bit.

Billed as “How to Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine” this book is a must for all small business owners.  It is not right for bigger ambition fast-growth companies that don’t care about profit because they are aiming to attract Venture Capital. Unless they want a Plan B, which is not a bad thing in this day and age.

Author of cult classics The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability.

Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: Sales – Expenses = Profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren’t always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales – Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows. Using Michalowicz’s Profit First system, readers will learn that:

· Following 4 simple principles can simplify accounting and make it easier to manage a profitable business by looking at bank account balances.
· A small, profitable business can be worth much more than a large business surviving on its top line.
· Businesses that attain early and sustained profitability have a better shot at achieving long-term growth.

With dozens of case studies, practical, step-by-step advice, and his signature sense of humour, Michalowicz has the game-changing roadmap for any entrepreneur to make the money they always dreamed of.

Why Did I Put The Books In This Order?

Because there is no point in writing a business plan unless you have your head on straight personally and you have an ‘irresistible offer’.  Find out more about that here.  Similarly, there is no point in learning how to manage the money until you have made some sales.  I have over 52 years experience of business as an entrepreneur (yes, I started at just 8 years old!) and I’ve put this list together in the order I would have liked to get this info.  Now, tell me…

Would You Like My Full List Of The ‘Top 10 Crucial Business Books To Ensure YOUR Business Survives This Recession’?

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How To Iron A Shirt (And Other Useful Skills)

A little while ago I got an email from an old client, updating me on her progress.  She added “I don’t know if I told you, but I also made over £1400 from a YouTube video I made on ‘How To Iron A Shirt’!”

Even if you don’t think you know something that would make a great training course for business people, I bet you know how to do something that other people would like to know how to do.  Not everyone has a great set of parents who teach them stuff, sadly.

My mum loved me, but had a lot of mental illness issues over the years and didn’t really have a good grasp of the practicalities.  Just the other day, I found out the sliding knob on a toaster does not change the time your toast stayed down, but the heat that was applied to your toast.  How did I get to this age without knowing that?!!

There’s a guy in the USA with a channel called something like ‘Ask Your Dad’ and he started out by making little videos showing his daughter how to do all sorts of basic things around the house.  Now he answers questions from young people all over the world, about all kinds of topics.  He must be making hundreds of thousands per month by now.

There is a little trick or two to making sure your videos get shown high on YouTube (and get picked up by the Google search engine too) and I may share those in my next post if you are interested. Do let me know?

While I love getting messages like the one above, I’d also love to hear your stories of ‘things you never knew you didn’t know’ in the comments below!

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How To Think Well (& Come To The Right Conclusions)

You may know that I’ve been great friends for a long time with a guy called Andy Shaw. Yes, he’s the one in the Hawaiian shirt most often to be found in the pictures when I’m having the very best time in locations around the world. He’s possibly the most clever person I know (and I know a lot of clever people). His spreadsheets are legendary.

A multiple best-selling author, successful property investor and mindset expert, he’s just started to share his thoughts about what’s really going on in the world on Substack. The articles are going down very well and provoking lots of people to ask questions and comment.

I was never taught ‘how to think’ and I had to resort to buying books to help me figure out what I was never taught at school or home! Books like “How To Make Good Decisions”, “How To Become A Woman Of Substance” or “How To Love A Difficult Man”. I kid you not!

So I wanted to share the first in this excellent five-part series, so that my followers can get the benefit of Andy’s great practical tools about how to weigh up any incoming information, discern what impact that information could have on you, your family and your life and be able to take the appropriate action.

Over to Andy…

“Are you good at seeing the most likely ramifications of actions?

We all think we are. However, given what a lot of us (but nowhere near most of us) have witnessed in the last 21 months, the vast majority of people have shown they are really, really bad at it.

The ability to see where something is going means you can position yourself with confidence to profit/benefit in some way when the world catches up to where you saw it going.

So this is one of my favourite skills, but pain is involved with possessing it. One such pain I have to take for it is to be told I am wrong again and again by people who do not discern well… And that I find funny, so not really an issue to me, but it occasionally gets a little frustrating.

In a future article/email I’ll be digging deeper into why not caring what others think is a skill worth mastering…

But in this and the next article, I’m going to talk about the ability to discern well, and how to enhance it.

In March 2020 back at the start of the world’s current mass psychosis event, one of the reasons I decided to do the Rational Thinking Webcast was I saw the world was going the wrong way, and I wanted to ‘get on record’ all the forecasts I was making.

Previously, when a forecast I had made became self-evidently correct, I had gotten fed up of saying, ‘See I told you so’ and receiving the response, ‘No you didn’t say that’, or ‘I said that too’ when they hadn’t said it at all.

To me being right is a matter of skill, of professional pride if you like… And if I am wrong it provides the opportunity to learn and get better at being right.

But to these people who said they were right when they weren’t, they were failing in their ability to think well on multiple levels.

Read the rest of the first Article free here on Andy’s Substack

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Washing Up, Pets & Other Loves

While washing up today, I heard that Rickie Gervais and his partner Jane had lost their beloved cat Ollie. No, they hadn’t actually lost him, he’d died. 

There were outpourings of sympathy from those who insist on calling pets ‘fur babies’ and videos of Jonathan Ross giving Ollie to Ricky live on his television show sixteen years ago. Ollie had enjoyed good innings and was now trending No 4 on Twitter UK, something I’m sure Rickie and Jane will find highly amusing, in months to come when the pain subsides a bit.

Washing up is an opportunity to practise mindfulness, while bringing order to the daily chaos that is a kitchen used by three hungry adults, with three very different diets. I wash up, Nelson puts away and Phoebe does the bins and the floor.  It’s a great time to slow down, be present, not so much to think but to muse. Like showering, driving or ironing (which admittedly I don’t do so much of anymore) washing up occupies your body in a well-known task, muscle memory kicks in and your mind can wander free.

I need to wash up more often during the day at the moment, with the Corona Virus rampaging through the world.  As an avid reader of dystopian fiction, I saw the writing on the wall weeks before anyone else and I now regularly need to get away from the screens screaming silent red numbers at me.  Watching them jump by a thousand confirmed cases every time I refresh the screen, makes me feel as if I’m in the path of a huge juggernaut twisting and sliding slowly and inexorably towards me and those I love.  

It’s not so much getting ill or dying myself I fear, grim as that would be by the sounds of it, it’s the possibility of having to grieve again so soon that terrifies me.

The news of Ollie’s demise made me wish again that I’d had pets.  Some animals had come and quickly gone, usually after my mother realised the reality of coping with pets and two small girls was too much for her.  Our pets, boxer dogs Magda and Velvet, Percy Fluff the kitten, Julie the long-legged Jack Russel, usually went to ‘live up the lane with the farmer’, whatever that really meant.  

You can’t miss a pet you didn’t have time to attach to and standing at the sink, I regretted that my sister and I had never been given the chance to lose and mourn a pet.  I think it would have better equipped me to handle grief. If you grieve a pet or two, but recover, perhaps it makes you more resilient, more able to cope with the grief of losing a person.  Most of all, I really wish now that our lifestyle had allowed me to let my kids have pets too. We moved too often and now I realise, I haven’t equipped them for grief either.

Thinking about the nature of grief made me suddenly remember that Steve died four years ago this Thursday 12th March 2016.  Steve was not a pet, far from it, a more fiercely independent and scratchy man I had never met. But he was my best friend, business partner, companion in shenanigans, lover and step-father to Phoebe and Nelson.  

I braced myself, hands in suds and the pang of loss duly arrived but I noted with interest that it was not so vicious this year.  Not so much the twisting of a knife in my heart, but a more gentle, wistful echo of pain remembered, not actually felt. Still vivid but misted slightly, like the blue of an early dawn sky on a hot summer day.

The first year after he died suddenly, in his sleep, the emotional storm was excruciating.  It was physical, all-consuming, utter agony. I wrote in my journal at the time that it prowled my waking hours like a wolf, ready to howl and growl and tear my equilibrium apart.  I could only cry for a minute or so, each time, hot tears seeping but giving no respite at all.

Nobody can take away the pain, there’s nothing anyone can say to make it better, no activity mitigated it, it was just always there making everything feel surreal, meaningless, every minute endless.  Time became elastic in entirely the wrong direction, it stretched out into the future with no snapback in sight.

In the first months, early evenings were the worst, especially as the spring progressed and summer taunted me.  As the long sunny days dragged on, I wandered around the village in a daze between six and eight o’clock, just to get out of the house, often ending up in the graveyard of St Mary De Haura.  

Steve wasn’t there, my ‘share’ of his ashes still resided in their brown plastic coffee jar urn, neatly labelled, under his mother’s television.  I didn’t want them, they were not him, just like he wasn’t buried in that 900-year-old graveyard. She could keep them, she loved golf and racing just like he had, so it was a more fitting resting place than any I could provide.

But somehow sitting among all the ancient gravestones I felt more at peace, more part of the human continuum.  Each gravestone represented someone who had died, but more than that, someone who had mourned their loss, as I mourned.  Someone who had grieved and yet lived on somehow. Each stone was like a spec of light, a beacon of hope in the darkness, that I might make it through too. Even the seats I sat on around the ancient walls had been donated by someone who had felt what I felt and presumably recovered from it.  

Gradually though, the elastic minutes, hours, days and months passed and the pain gradually lessened its vicious grip on my heart.  The wolf roared less frequently and I remember the day vividly when I sat on a sunbed, on a beach in Greece with children playing in the background and waves lapping at the shore, my toes scrunched up in the warm sand and I thought …

‘Blimey, I’m actually happy again’.