November, 2009
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Re-set your main goal and keep it there
I am reviewing my business activities in these days so to develop a more orderly and effective way of managing them. I also need to recruit some help that can take over some of the things I am still doing personally and that absorb too much time. I have discovered that in order to do that I had to better clarify all of my current activities in relation to the main goal of my business and I also had to review such a goal compared to what has been working best this year.
I am first an foremost in the business of international real estate but I also provide coaching and training to people that want to improve their business by leveraging international connections as I have done. I have discovered that, while the real estate business is going fine and is taking most of my time, my most strategic asset is really the know how on international relationship building, online and offline. Thanks to this special ability and know how I have developed (which is unique I believe) I am able to obtain the funds or promotional support I need to keep the rest of the business going.
Therefore the know how about networking is way senior to the know how on real estate since not only keeps my real estate business running and gives me an advantage against some other investors, but also will allow me to create and foster any type of business. So now I know that developing a codifying this special know how will have to be part of my goal and can become a business in itself, maybe even the most important one.
By doing this simple but necessary evaluation I have thrown off additional activities that have been proposed me during these latest months and that seemed, each, to be very attractive and potentially very profitable but that are not directly contributing to the main goal. It is kind of refreshing because now, every time I get a new e-mail pitching the latest and greatest real estate investing strategy or Internet Marketing technique I can brush it off confidently and never think back again, unless it does contribute to my plans.
Take the time to review your business periodically, it will be the best time you will have ever spent and it will also save you lots of money in materials or activities you will never benefit from. If you have no direction to go, try to set one by yourself rather than jumping on any bandwagon coming you way and promising immediate huge returns with no risk, no work, no pain.
Roberto Mazzoni
The champion frog
Today I spent some quality time with my wife Maria in reviewing my business and setting the objectives for the year to come. It has been an important moment because, despite all the things to do, I have taken the time to actually stand back and review everything I do or that I could do and lay it down in written format on a white board so that she could also review it and give me her opinion. She has been with me all along this incredible American journey and has enough good sense and business experience to advise me or at least help me better clarify my true objectives.
She is always able to make me focus on the important achievements and my abilities rather than on the setbacks and the difficulties, and this is priceless. But there is a little story that she sent me via e-mail today that I want to share with you.
Once upon a time somebody organized a frog race. The objective was to reach the top of a very high tower. Many people gathered to look and the peculiar competition and bet on the winners. The race began but the audience actually didn’t believe it was possible for the frogs to actually climb that high so they started telling to each other: “What a pity, they will never make it!” Some of the frogs that were attempting to the climb the tower heard these words, and felt discouraged, so they abandoned the race. Just one frog continued in trying to climb to the top.
But the people kept saying: “What a pity, they will never make it” so even more frogs abandoned except for this single stubborn frog that was still trying despite everything. Eventually all the frogs gave up except our lonely frog which stubbornly and with great effort managed to arrive to the top.
At this point everybody wanted to know how he had made it to complete successfully such a difficult task. But the frog didn’t answer… So everybody found out that this single triumphant frog was DEAF!
Moral of the story: don’t listen to the people who have the habit of being negative about things, they will rob you of your best hopes. Remember the power contained in the words you read or hear. So try always to be positive and always be deaf to anybody telling you that you can’t make your dreams come true.
Thank you Maria.
Roberto Mazzoni
Social Network Marketing
Today everybody was shopping all around, yet for me, aside from buying a trampoline for my kids, it was business as usual. I was inside one of the house we have finished rehabbing recently and I was checking the last items and designing the layout of the external lights so to make the house stand out.
I was actually in the garage when I suddenly got a phone call on my mobile phone from my business partner and best friend Daniele Bogiatto who was driving along the Italian highway towards to Rome for a major event where he will launch, together with other partners, a whole new company dedicated to Social Network Marketing. An enterprise that wants to be the first really successful mixture between Web 2.0 and network marketing.
He has been working on this project for some months now and in the coming week end they will organize in Rome the first world wide convention of the company that is an evolution of an already successful European network marketing company that has been using the Web effectively in the last decade but that now wants to master the social networks.
The money battle has begun
Today it is black Friday and the whole North American nation launches into the holiday season with a shopping event that has no comparison elsewhere. Yesterday I went to some shops and noticed that everything had been prepared for this major event. You had whole isles closed out and big cardboard packages full of new goods that nobody could open before today.
It looks like the preparation for a major battle, where all forces have been brought to the field and every general (store manager) has prepared the best tactical layout to meet the sudden assault that begins at 5 am and continues until late in the evening.
And it might as well be a battle because every single store will compete with the next on in attracting as many buyers as possible and in selling them as many good as possible while they are still in the store. The Internet makes no exception and you have America is the country of marketing, and you have all kind of e-mail pouring promoting all kind of stuff.
Confessions of a dinosaur
The holiday season is upon us and the mind goes to this incredible year and the incredible challenges and opportunities that came with it. And I have a confession to make: once upon a time I was a well paid technical journalist, people would depend on my articles to know what was hot and what was not in the computer field. I even became editor in chief of a very successful monthly magazine, with testing labs, full time staff and all that.
And boy did that feel great. Readers would wait for the next issue to come out and they would write e-mail or letters inquiring about some subject and we would pick just the most “significant” and publish them with our answer (usually 1 out of 20 because of the limited space on the magazine). We also gave some e-mail answers but the magazine remained the center point of gravitation for the whole system.
And then the Internet came about and all of us journalists, along with the publishers and the advertising people, started reasoning how this would have changed our way of working. We figured out that people would come to our site in addition to our magazine and everything seemed familiar again. We were in control of the news and the publishing tools. We had control of the advertising so, we were still ruling. It was very expensive at that time (year 2000) to have a software to publish your articles on a site.
D5 Creation