Business and Money Tips

Many people today are very wise, wise in pounds and foolish in penny.  Check to see if you do any of the following 7 things.  If the answer is none, call us at 6225-1784 for a chat.  If the answer is yes to the 7 questions, congratulations and please forward this article to your friends.  1.    Build Relationships with Suppliers by Not Squeezing Them .  Penny wise pound foolish Purchasers like to squeeze suppliers.  They often end up with very few choices as few suppliers would like to work with them.  As a result, they buy cheaply but didn't get the best choices in the market. In fact their purchasing cost went up! 2.    Train the Managers and Directors First Before Training the Staff. When things go wrong, the first thing managers do is to send their staff for training. For they feel that if the staff are better trained, there will be fewer problems.  Truth is the managers...

By now Xiaomi Tech (www.mi.com) has become the world's number 3 mobile phone maker, right after Apple and Samsung. Last year 2014 Xiaomi sold over 100 million smartphones in the world. In end of December 2014, Xiaomi became the world’s most valuable technology start-up after it received $1.1 billion funding from investors, making Xiaomi's valuation more than $46 billion. How did this China's company climbed to the world's top 3 position in just 3 short years? In our latest course Business is Booming (details are at here ), we teach you the 3 lessons from Xiaomi that we too can learn and apply in our business: 1. Focus on Quantity but with Quality Xiaomi sells its phones at cost (i.e. no margin at all) but such products are of similar quality to that of Apple and Samsung, but at half or less than half of their price. 2. Lose Money on Selling Phones but Make Money on Software If you include tooling, research and selling costs, Xiaomi is actually losing money on e...

Be a student of life, don't just follow what people say.  You have to use your wisdom to not only make sense of what they say, but to apply what they say. For knowing without applying is just useless knowledge, not smart knowledge. You have to take advise from people, but don't take orders.  Even if the order is from your boss or customer, you don't just take the order.  You have to make sense of the order and make it work for yourself too.  Otherwise you are just a slave and not an independent human being.  If you want to take orders, take orders from yourself. Success is not doing extraordinary things, it is to do ordinary things well.  It is to learn a skill with a high degree of precision. Like we all can speak, but only those who can speak well will earn a fortune as a speaker.  (For list of our topics, click here ) According to the late Jim Rohn (America's foremost guru), the most important thing that separates successful people from thos...

As we know, a company's culture defined how it performs. Often in our courses like How to Be a Better Manager (details at here ), people often asked if an organization's culture can be changed.  Some companies like Google have a culture of innovation, whereas others have a culture of following the leader.  Is one better than the other? If you think that your existing culture is no good, it's time to change.  There are 5 steps to change an organization's culture as detailed in the best-selling book "How Google Works" by Eric Schmidt: First, recognize the problem.  What is the culture that defines the company today, not the one that is described in the mission and value statements. In other words, the real culture that people live in day by day. Second, what problem has this culture caused the business?  Draw a connection between the culture and the problem, but do not criticise the culture. For any criticism will only alienate people.  Third, let...

We know it is your benefits, not your product features or advantages, that sell.  But how to sell benefits without being seen as pushy? Follow this simple but highly effective 'Back-Tracking Benefits' method. Step 1: Your state your best feature among all your features. Step 2: You state how this best feature will benefit the customer THE MOST Step 3: You re-state how this best feature and its benefits will solve the need or problem of the customer Step 4: You ask questions to get your customer to agree to this need and the solution that your feature provides Step 5: To close the deal, you leverage to make this need bigger. This means you let the customer know what he can do when this need is solved, like he can reach his aspirations. Imagine I am selling Apple iPhone 6 + to a Samsung user.  I select the best feature of Apple: fully integrated software with hardware and how this will prevent the phone from getting hanged and prolong battery life.  I re-s...

Last year 2014, we gave away one iPad Mini to a client that purchased from us more than $6,800 training services from April to June 2014.  This year 2015 we like to repeat this good offer.  The following are the updated top 5 things to give to our clients: Apple i-Phone 6 64GB (4.7 in) worth $1,288 - for $6,000 of training services purchased Apple i-Phone 6 Plus 64GB (5.5 in) worth $1,488 - for $7,800 of training purchased  Samsung Galaxy Note 4+ Edge 32GB (5.7 in) worth $1,288 - for $6,000 of training purchased Samsung Galaxy Alpha 32 GB (4.8 in) worth $998 - for $5,000 of training purchased Samsung Galaxy K Zoom (4.8 in) worth $788 - for $4,500 of training purchased Conditions: Offer is until 31 March 2015 and will NOT be extended.   The above gifts are given as long as you incurred and  paid  for our training services Our list of courses are at www.asiatrainers.com/SeminarsList.php Enquiries: 6225-1784 or text to Andy at 8201-4347 or ema...

"I don't know what I'm doing."  Is there something worse than saying this to your boss? All of us want to feel that we know how to do our job well. As such, no one wants to be a don't-know-it-all fool.   If people really know what they are doing, why are we still seeing mistakes in airplanes, stock market crashes and accidents in the workplace?  It's obvious that we don't know it all.  The fact is that we cannot avoid 'not knowing': we simply don't know a lot of the time.  Because life is full of surprises and messiness, even the best plans will get wrong.  Furthermore, life is impermanent; even if you know it all now, the next moment you everything changes.  Thus not knowing is not a bad thing, in fact it is a first step towards mastery and excellence. By adopting a 'don't-know' mentality, we can achieve the following 7 benefits: We are open to new ideas We are ready to admit our flaws and mistakes, thus preventing f...

Just 7 days into 2015 and this book has already emerged as the fastest selling book of 2015.  This happens after Facebook's founder Mark Zackurberg recommended this book in his own facebook's page.   Minutes into reading the first chapter of this book I find myself cannot put it down.  What The End of Power's author Moises Naim said could shock you, if you have been sleeping all these while.  But for people who are in the know, such revelations are hardly new.  Power is actually decaying. Big Banks, Governments, Media Moguls and Multi-National Conglomerates all decry the power of the much neglected 1%.  Leaders of corporate, military, religions and unions all face bigger and far more complex problems than in the past.  We must now see the world in different lens, as what Bill Clinton said after reading this book.    This is a book about power. Power is spreading, and long-established players are increasingly being challenged by newer a...

Some managers are plain 'lazy', they work less than others and yet get more done with less.  Interviews with successful managers (when they come for our management courses ) reveal the following 5 secrets: 1. They focus on Results, not just on Processes and Working Hard. One of my coaching manager client who was very focused on complying with the procedures that she didn't even realize that the customers are going away. When I coached here using the '5-Ways Effective Manager' template, she immediately put them into practice and now there's improvement. 2. They know that people management is about connecting people, not impressing people . So it is not the flowery speeches made but how connecting the messages are. 3. They know when to be tough, when to be soft , and when to 'act blur'.  A smart manager cannot be smart all the times or his people will look stupid in front of him.  Give credit to people, but take the blame for all mist...

(Read also 'Move over PIC, now it's Training Credit' at here ) Following my over 9 articles on PIC (read one of them here ), these are the 2 changes to PIC from 2015 onwards.  Note: there is this course on PIC at here .  1.  PIC Bonus of up to $15,000 will cease to exist    This means that the last financial year to get your PIC bonus is 2014 .  What this means is that in this year of 2015, you can still get PIC Bonus for your PIC claims made in 2012 to 2014.  Note: the PIC Bonus is an automatic scheme, i.e., you don't need to apply .  The IRAS will automatically give you the PIC bonus as long as your PIC claims is $5,000 or more.  The PIC Bonus is another 100% of the PIC Claims that you made, on top of the 60% cash that you get. The cap is $15K for the years 2012 to 2014. 2.  Three Employees Requirement every month.   Companies need to have 3 CPF employees every month in the quarter that they're submitting.  Bef...

Life is a series of death and rebirth: every moment millions of your cells in your body die and millions are reborn too.  We breath in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, that's another form of rebirth.   In the stock and property markets, prices rise and fall in cycles.  In your career, marriage and personal life, you too will go through ups and downs.   From the book 'Peaks and Valleys', when you are down, don't be out.  When you are high, don't be almighty.  This powerful lesson was emphasized in our courses (details at here ). Some people wonder if the new year 2015 represents another kind of rebirth?  Truth be told, there is no such thing as new year or new month or new day. That's just our human convention to count things.  In reality the animals don't eat when it is noon, they just eat when they're hungry. Time is a human invention, that's why there is no such thing as time management but self management. In short, life has no start...

Karma is the universal law of cause and effect.  You reap what you sow, you get what you earn.  You are what you eat. What goes around comes around. Many people at work think that there's nothing they can do to change their company, the business, their team and their career.  Some even think that everything is preordained, so why bother to change the situation?  Just do your work and everything will be fine.   Since we know that karma is operating all the time, we can, in the blink of an eye, make decisions that will shape our futures and transform the parts of our lives that are causing us unhappiness.   Think about karma as a bank. The karma bank is an impartial, honorable, incorruptible, infallible solid establishment. Every time you perform a positive action, you add good karma to your karma bank account.  Every negative action you perform similarly produces a bad karma.  The ultimate goal is to have your karma account in perfect balan...

Questions are the answers, and smart people don't ask smart questions but empowering questions, questions that give you more power.  Does 2015 need to be better than 2014.  If so, do you have the plans to make it happen?   Do you commit to doing those things, some of which you find uncomfortable, which will bring you results for 2015? Are you working on strategic opportunities, or are you still looking out for transactional opportunities? Is your boss going to help you get what you want?  Can you ask your boss for more?  If you are the boss, is your team helping you to achieve your goals?  Can you get better team and ask for more results from them? Are you resolved to only spend your valuable time and resources with truly good opportunities for improvement ? Will you listen more to your customers, your boss, your colleagues, your vendors and people that will help you in your work?  Will you engage them with questions , rather than try to ...

As I learnt from Duane Sparks, author of the best-selling book 'Action Selling'.    Research shows that it's more important to customers that the salesperson understand their needs than that they understand the salesperson's products and services.  Customers have a strong need to feel understood.  The mistake made by many salespeople is to assume that they know what the customer wants. Often the customer misleads the salesperson by stating what he is looking for.  The salesperson would jump the gun and go straight to propose his products and services.   This is a mistake. Even if the customer tells you what he wants, those may not be his needs.  A want is a preference whereas a need is a necessity.  We know that people don't just buy what they want, they must also buy what they need .  A good salesperson will convert all wants into needs , for needs are stronger reasons to buy.   Like you now want to upgrade your phone to iP...

Too much heaven or hell is no good, so is management.  All managers must avoid 2 deadly pitfalls or risk being redundant: 1. Control - Too little control or too much control is a problem.   Too little control would mean not having rules, but most often we see rules not followed and management never do much about it. For example, many companies have rules on working hours, but ask yourself how many management actually work to ensure that people come to work punctually? Many people have got used to being late, and the common excuse is they work late, so they can come late for work.  Many don't know that this is causing some issues in teamwork, e.g. if some people are not here by 8.30 am, how am I going to get certain things done without them? So as a manager, make sure that you set the rules of the game.  A good rules of the game is Values. Values like honesty and 'Go Extra Mile' must be laid down and followed by all staff.  2. Losing Their Voice: It'...

"You can make a great product, but you have to convince people that what you are selling is greater".   CEO John Sculley, in his famous speech to Apple Computer staff in 1983.  Sculley went on, "We are not selling computers, we are selling what people can do with computers.  A tool for the mind, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is limitless".  Indeed, in sales, if you just sell a product or service, you are very much limited in how much you can sell.  But  the moment you turn your selling into what your product or service can do for the customer, you can sell anything .  There is simply no limit in your selling.  Just look at the phenomenal sales of i-Pad, Xiaomi and Samsung smartphones and you will know what I'm talking about.  The following are the 5 most common ways to be limitless in your selling: The Money that Can be Made  with What You Are Selling.  As long as this money that people get is more than what they are paying,...

Dale Carnegie, the author of 1935's best-selling book "How to Win Friends and Influence People", taught us how to fish. Here's how he is able to fish for minutes and catch big catches.  "When I go fishing, I don't think about what I want. I think about what t hey  want.  I don't bait the hook with chocolates and peanuts, I dangle a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and say, "Wouldn't you want to have that?"  So taught Dale Carnegie.   That's the approach you can take when fishing for customers.  Get the prospect to say "Yes" immediately by using the Socratic method of keep on asking questions .   Wouldn't you want to achieve more sales than ever with less work?  How about getting your customers to come back to you over and over again?  Can you win the price war without getting into a price war?  Is it possible to do limitless selling, where the only limits to your sales is your ability to serve your customer...