A Money Market Career

Everyone knows that the riskiest financial strategy is to have all of your money in one stock.
Yet for most working people, they have all of their income dependent on one company.

Think about it. If you lose your income, almost everything else in your life will be affected.
Why then should you entrust your financial security to one company or one career.

In this new employment market, you need a career that includes diversified sources of income along with one that includes a residual income component. Consider these options:

• An eBay business where you can sell an on-line product that adds extra part-time income.
• A part-time job where you teach a night class.
• Work weekends doing a job that offers a secondary cash flow that can teach you new skills.
• Write a book where you can earn residual income – you do the work once but keep earning money over time.
• Set up affiliate marketing links on a Blog to earn referral income automatically.

Now more than ever, the Internet offers most of these options for little, if any investment, other than your time.
Think of your career as an income portfolio instead of tasks that you do.
Track the results you get for your effort and focus on what earns you the best return for your time.

1. Focus on Cash Flow - Careers today are moving away from the traditional 40-hour work week to more self-directed opportunities for generating income. The jobs of the future are becoming project based and tied to multiple employers who need your services periodically.

2. Know Your Rate of Return - There are often different ways to achieve the same career goal. Some ways may take less time but produce the same result. Calculate your rate/hour and try to maximize what you earn for what you do. If your earn 100K but have to work 70 hours per week you’re only earning $27.47 / hour. Use your time more effectively and you could work less and earn more per hour.

3. Manage Risk - Find a mix of income opportunities that align with your talents to minimize risk and the stress of trying to start something outside your area of expertise.  Think of ways your income sources can complement each other.

4. Invest in Yourself – For most people, training stops when they graduate from school. Invest in yourself by setting aside time and money to use for continuing education to stay current in your field and learn new things that may make you more valuable.

5. You Can’t Manage It if You Can’t Measure It – Many people actively manage how they choose their career and a company, but passively manage how they will develop their career. Too often they wait for a layoff or job dissatisfaction to motivate them to start a new career track. Periodically evaluate what results you are getting tied to what you are doing. Set up a simple spreadsheet and “know your numbers”. Then decide how you can improve your results.

A money market investment typically protects investment principal while providing a modest return.
Think of your career development like a money market. It’s careful balancing of investment risk to reward where time is your investment and multiple income streams are your reward.

Jim Carrey – A Lesson in Building Your Career

Jim Carrey was an extrovert as a child. As a child he performed constantly for anyone who would watch.
When he was a teenager, his family was forced to relocate to a Toronto suburb. They all took security and janitorial jobs. Jim worked an 8-hour shift after school. The family lived out of a Volkswagen camper van.

Eventually he dropped out of high school (age 16) and decided to strike out into the comedy club scene. Then he moved to Los Angeles and worked his way into a regular show at The Comedy Store, where he impressed the late Rodney Dangerfield so much that the veteran comic signed him as an opening act for an entire season.

After seeing Jim perform, Damon Wayans made a call to his brother, Keenen Ivory Wayans, who was in the process of putting together the sketch comedy show “In Living Color” (1990). Carrey joined the cast and quickly made a name for himself with outrageous acts.

Carrey’s transformation from TV goofball to marquee headliner happened within 12 months! He starred in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and then in Dumb & Dumber, his first multi-million dollar payday! Eventually he made $20 million for a movie (The Cable Guy), the largest up-front sum that had been offered to any comic actor at that time.  Jim wrote himself a check for $10 million dollars in 1983, post-dated 10 years and hoped he could cash it by then.

What can we learn from Jim’s journey to become a major movie star and comic actor?

1.     You never get anything good for nothing – study the “greats” and you’ll see that they all worked hard. It’s your focused day-to-day efforts that add up to making you remarkable in what you do.

2.     You’ve got to LOVE what you do - Studies indicate that 75% of people are not excited about their work – they have a job but they don’t have a career – without passion you are unlikely to ever make it big!

3.     You’ve Got To Be Bad Before You Become Great – Career development is a PROCESS not an event – keep trying to get better at what you do and soon or later, you will be the expert!

4.     Recognize The Power Of Relationships – Jim made it big because he offered amazing talent that was recognized by industry leaders – who’s in your contact database that can help you achieve greatness?

5.     Focus On Who You Want To Become – Jim’s teenage life started with him working 8 hours after school and living in a Volkswagen van with his family – he beat the odds to become successful because he focused on where he wanted to be not where he was.

6.     You Become What You Think About (most often) – have a focused drive to become somebody great and have a WRITTEN plan to make it happen – having written goals dramatically increases the chance you will reach them.

Now more than ever, take time to think about what you want out of your life and your career.
The Internet and technology has made it easier than ever to become someone great.

Watch this video and Become A Dreamer Again.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

A Coca-Cola Employment Market

Why does the US unemployment rate seem to stay about the same despite news that companies are hiring? Companies are hiring but the real hiring is mostly overseas!

Look at corporate hiring nationwide and you’ll see that the era of a global workforce is rapidly emerging. International employment markets are growing twice as fast as they are domestically.

Take a look at the latest labor statistics and you’ll see that U.S. jobs have been moving overseas for the past 10 years. Years ago, clothes and commodity items were the primary goods made more cheaply overseas than in the U.S. Now the products are software and high technology electronics.  Look at GNP data and you’ll also see that the products being made overseas are primarily being sold to the emerging markets of China Brazil and India – not in the U.S.

Think about it. The # 1 English speaking country in the world is now China!  If you want and easy to understand overview of the globalization of the world markets, watch this video featuring Tom Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcE2ufqtzyk

The reality of the new economy is that U.S. companies are going where there is product demand and big profits. Asia-Pacific sales soared 40% in the first nine months of 2010, compared with 17% in the U.S. 50% of corporate revenue in the S&P 500 in the last 2 years has primarily come from outside the U.S.  China is now the world’s 2nd largest economy!

Major global companies are focusing on the geography where they sell their products and tailoring products to meet local customer needs. A key factor behind this runaway international growth is the rise of the middle class in emerging countries.

By 2015, it’s estimated the number of consumers in Asia’s middle class will equal those in Europe and North America combined. Most of the growth over the next 10 years is happening in Asia.

The CEO of Coca-Cola estimates that a billion consumers will enter the middle class in the next 10 years, primarily in Africa, China and India. Coke is aggressively targeting those markets. Only 13% of Coke’s 93,000 global employees are in the U.S.

So where does this mean to you as part of the U.S. employment market?

1.     Begin to reinvent yourself to compete in a global market – get to know the “facts” of globalization and how they relate to you.
2.     Consider developing an in-demand product or service that can be digitally distributed in the U.S.
3.     Make what you offer REMARKABLE – become a specialist in something – general skills do not pay well.
4.     Understand that your income will almost always be in direct proportion to the number of people you serve.
5.     Use the Internet to help more people get what they want
6.     Understand Web 4.0 technologies for e-commerce – Musion developed a 3-D holographic projection system that Cisco Systems used to “beam” a couple of its executives onstage to deliver a speech. That was 3 years ago.

Where are you in understanding how to use technology or your skills to help people and businesses make money, save money or solve a problem?  It’s the key to your employment security.

Don’t focus on finding a job. Market how you can be a remarkable solution.

The Connection between Coffee and Success

Think about the brand of coffee that you were drinking 5 years ago.
More than likely, it was a well known brand advertised on TV priced at $4.29 a pound.

Then along came Starbucks where you went with your friends to socialize.
The coffee was more expensive but you decided that the experience was worth the price.

Eventually Starbucks started selling their coffee in grocery stores and one day you saw it on sale for $6.29/lb. You bought a bag and enjoyed 2 weeks of premium coffee at your home. Then a bag went back up to the regular $8.95 / lb. and you had to decide – continue with a cup of Starbucks or go back to your value brand?  A premium brand coffee was your new standard – time for an upgrade.

Notice how your buying decisions were small enough that you were able to update your standard of coffee one small step at a time without really thinking about it. Issues related to cost or your need to save money probably never came into your mind. And once you started drinking the premium coffee, you essentially decided that you would never go back to a value brand. Somehow you found a way to adjust your buying options to enjoy the taste of a cup of Starbucks.

The gap between what you wanted and what you settled for was small enough to allow you to upgrade without having to make any radical changes. Little upgrades became your new standard and a better standard.

Amazing success for most people never happens because they try to make changes that are too big. Once you decide what you want, do something each DAY that gets you closer to your goal. One day you start a blog, then you start getting ideas to write a book and then before you know it, you are planning a speaking tour reaching out to people directly to help them reach their goals.

Realize that SMALL steps to reach your goals are the secret.

Drinking premium coffee offers another insight. Once you tasted a great cup of coffee, it’s unlikely you will go back to a value brand.  As you improve your standard of living as a result of reaching your goals, you are essentially preparing yourself to resist regressing back to where you were when you started.

A Starbucks competitor used a great marketing slogan in the 1990’s – “Life’s too short to drink lousy coffee!” The implied message is still valid. Decide TODAY what you want out of your life and more specifically your career. Then write down the steps to get there starting with simple DAILY goals that will become something AMAZING in the next 6 – 12 months.

The next time you’re sipping a cup of coffee, realize that Starbucks has 17,009 stores in 50 countries, including 11,000 in the US, 1000 in Canada and 700 in the UK. Starbucks was founded in 1971 by an English teacher, a history teacher and a writer. Last year the company generated $10 billion in revenue. Not bad for a goal of selling a cup of coffee to one customer at a time.

Why UPS Trucks Rarely Turn Left

The UPS package delivery system uses packages marked with special codes to load the trucks by address as well as a delivery sequence to make as many right turns as possible. Turning left usually requires waiting for oncoming traffic and traffic lights, so by eliminating that idle time, UPS saves millions of dollars. Since the trucks are driven an average of 2.5 BILLION miles a year, their package flow software combined with right-turn only planning, eliminates 29 million miles of driving and saves 3 million gallons of fuel annually. Efficiency is so much of a focus at UPS, that at the end of the day, their brown trucks are parked 5 inches apart with their rear view mirrors overlapping to maximize parking space.

Using advanced analytics, UPS discovered relationships in their truck usage data that highlighted how minor changes could produce amazing results!  But look closely and you’ll see that there is more than just a lesson in cost savings here.

The real insight is that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Studies have shown that more often than not, 80% of your success comes from 20% of your efforts. It is the same for job hunting.

Just think of how much more productive you could be if you focused 80% of your effort on 20% of the things that get you the best results! The secret is to know what those “20% activities” are.

Start your new job search today to measure your activities and track the results.

If sending out resumes for jobs listed on job boards gets you a 4% response rate but 60% of your interviews come from networking events, where should you focus your efforts?

For many job searchers, they rarely get calls for jobs posted on job boards, yet they spend 90% of their time sending out more resumes.  Try a mix of search strategies and see what works for you. Over the course of a month, a minor change in your job search focus can produce amazingly different results. Track your results tied to what you are doing and the data may surprise you.

In the movie Jerry McGuire starring Tom Cruise, actor Cuba Gooding, Jr. made famous the phrase “Show Me the Money”. Years later, a variation of that saying, “Show Me Results” is what’s on the mind of most hiring managers.

Looking for a job is a job. Measure what you do and manage your activities tied to what gets results.  If you are turning left instead of right in your job hunt, you may be too late to pick up a package that’s being returned to the sender because nobody’s home.