Posts from — June 2008

Discover the 7 secrets to salvation from the C-Problem

We live in a world where everything seems to get more and more accelerated.

Do you feel that you have less time but more things to do than a few years ago?

Does it appear that time is running and you are always attempting to catch up?

Have you craved for an opportunity to stop, take a deep breath and get a good view of what is going on, before getting back into the rush?

For a long time I have been in that same situation, maybe because when flying fast jets it appeared as if everything had to be done faster.

What did I do to overcome this probelm?

Well, the issue is that most of us have more and more things we try to cram into the same amount of time. We feel we need to answer emails, write letters, attend to meetings, get our chores completed, make sure our finances aren’t getting out of whack, and on top of it all, meet the deadlines for the projects assigned to us.

Most people try to cope with this load by prioritizing. Finding out what is most important, what’s less important, and what might be so unimportant that it doesn’t matter if we do it or not. That works well in theory, but when you are rushing around, life happens and priorities get shifted. Suddenly you have to decide, often without all the information desirable for a sound, well thought out decision.

When this is happening, you are bound to forget something or shift certain things in a position that make it appear as if you’re already past that chore or commitment. When the actual deadline or delivery date arrives and passes without you performing as you probably promised, you have “crastinated” on this particular issue.

That’s the C-Problem strutting it’s ugly head.

If this only happens in seldom, rare cases, you can consider yourself an “Amateur-Crastinator”. I sincerely hope you identify/recognize when this happens and begin to take corrective action.

If you don’t and this happens over and over, you will become a “Professional”. At some point you might even become known for this behavior. Don’t let the pressure of fast decision making and an ever increasing number of balls to juggle turn you into a “Pro-Crastinator”.

On this particular topic, you don’t want to be an Amateur or a Professional. You want to be a “No-Crastinator”!

How do you do that?

Well, it starts with the right frame of mind. You can review the free special report we created for this issue at http://www.meierhoefer.net/special

In addition you need to have a daily planner or at least a calendar with enough space for you to put in your assignment. Here are the 7 secrets to avoid becoming an “Amateur-Crestinator” or even worse, a “Professional Crastinator”:

1. Develop a system of priorities (A,B,C; or 1,2,3, or high, medium, low, or color in Red, Blue, Green)

2. Pick a day in the week when you sit down and enter all the known assignments, projects, deadlines, etc. into the planner/calendar for the following week.

3. On that same day, enter every new item you already know about for the weeks and months beyond the week following the one you are currently in.

4. Next, go backwards in your planner/calendar from today through the last 5 days, and identify any item that has not been checked off or completed. Move it into your current week and make sure the priorities are still correctly showing. If they need to be updated, make sure you do this right away. This way any uncompleted items will still get taken care of. (Better late than never)

5. Review every day of this current week (old and new entries you just made) from the last day of the week towards today’s day, and check if all the items are still current and have the correct priority annotation. If something changed, make sure it is showing in your planner/calendar.

6. Check tomorrow and today and make sure everything is set for you to be successful and meet your commitments. Make any changes needed to have a good plan.

7 - (A) For your work tasks, in case you have an assistant or confidant, tell them what the three most important items on your planner are and encourage them to ask you about those entries at least once a day. Let them know that this is helping you rather than bugging you (if you feel you can, give them a copy of your planner/calendar pages).

7 - (B) For your private/family tasks, do the same as for the work tasks and encourage your spouse/partner or a friend to ask you about the important items as a reminder (if you feel you can, give him/her a copy of your planner/calendar pages).

Armed with this kind of system and following the ideas and recommendation in our free report, you will have no problem avoiding to become an Amateur -Crestinator or a Professional Crestinator.

Should you determine you need more coaching or help on this issue, please feel free to contact us or get your hands on a wonderful package at http://tinyurl.com/4hqyzq

Good luck to you and let us know how these 7 secrets worked for you.

Axel Meierhoefer, AMC LLC

Have you read the articles in the papers about the status of our economy? I am not sure that we are really in a recession or even in a depression, as some pessimists seem to indicate. May that be decided by the historians in a few years when all the data is available and analyzed.

Have you heard about the relatively low confidence readings by the public? You yourself might have asked yourself how to continue to pay for $4/gallon gas at the pump, ever increasing prices for food, and many other daily necessities.

Officially we have an inflation rate of about 1.5 – 2 % but when I look at most of what we consume, it has increased easily by 20% or 30%, and in some cases even 40%, not to speak of the 100% increase when filling up the tank of my car.

Do you feel the same pain? If so, you might ask yourself what you can do. You might also ask yourself what your organization can do, as your place of work is probably the one resource you can’t afford to loose in these challenging times.

With unemployment racing towards 6% nationwide, there is an increasing fear among the workforce about job security. The overall mood of the population is suppressed by the jump in prices, the war that doesn’t seem to end, the negative economic news, the unending stream of reports about foreclosures. It almost looks like everything is on a negative downslide right now.

Individually we can’t change the fundamentals of the economy and the associated political decisions. What we can do is get back to the very basics of doing business. One of these very basic things is customer service.

I strongly believe that the trend we currently see in many organization is going to be regretted when the dust of all the turmoil settles. When companies want to reduce cost, they typically look at those parts of the organization that don’t deliver obvious returns on investment. These include, almost on equal levels, expenses for training, and expenses and salaries for customer service.

One of the additional fallacies is the believe that a reduced number of customers coming into stores or visiting your website means you don’t need as many people providing services. The opposite is actually true.

When you want to maintain reasonable sales figures and thereby secure the jobs in your organization, you need to be better in customer service than most everybody else.

Many people who would have been customers a year ago are prospects right now. That means they might be interested in what you have to offer in products and services, but they have a generally negative state of mind. You know the reasons from reading all the bad things above.

To convert a prospect with a negative frame of mind into a buying customer, you will have to find out what they need, and show them all the benefits of what you have to offer. In these times, customer service becomes a needs satisfaction task, not a pure sale.

If you can satisfy the needs of a prospect by clearly showing how he or she will benefit from spending the little money they currently have with you, you have a much better chance to actually make a sale.

The second and almost more important task for your customer service providers is the transformation of a customer into a client. When the economy is restarting and the general mood will turn more optimistic, those organizations able to convert lots of prospects into customers and ultimately into clients, will be in a prime position to accelerate even more.

Never forget that a customer buys once (maybe because you just happened to have what they were desperately looking for). A client buys over and over again and builds a relationship with you that is often stronger than the lure of a lower price your competitor might offer.

To have a lot of clients, you want to determine what the needs of your prospects are, what the benefits of your solutions are, and then bring the two together in a smooth, caring, supportive way. If you can trigger the urge of a prospect to fill a need by buying what you offer, you will have a seamless sale.

If you keep serving your customer well after the sale, he or she will turn into a long term client and no recession in the world can change that.

Make sure that everybody in your organization understands that customer service is even more important in these challenging times than it is during a boom. You might even want to change the term from customer service to client service.

If that becomes the frame of mind of everyone working with and for you, your chances of flying through this demanding economy are way better than any of your competitors.

Make sure you don’t save at the wrong end of your business and invest in the skills of those among you who deliver the all important client services. That will secure the longevity and prosperity of your organization automatically.

Axel Meierhoefer, AMC LLC

This new system will give charter members and partners who join us from the beginning the opportunity to add a fabulous and very successful system to analyze the situation in a company. So far we have often talked about looking at the individual and help solve problems.

Now with Alchimedus, we will be able to cerate a very quick analysis of the whole organization, typically in less than a day, adn create a storng foundation for all the projects the organization needs to tackle to improve.

In combination with our already existing systematic and structure for individual help using the PerformanceIQ® system developed by Gary Morais at GPT3 Inc., we will now be able to offer help on any level, organizationally and individually.

To give you an idea how the graphical depiction of an ideal organization looks like, please refer to the picture below.

In the near future, as we are working to create the structure that will allow those organziations and individuals interested to join us for the launch and roll out of this system, I will keep posting pieces of what the system can do and how things look like to start familiarizing you with the amazing abilities we will have at the disposal of every consultant, coach, trainer and partner we will integrate into the community we are currently forming.

Stay tuned

Axel Meierhoefer, AMC LLC

For the very vast majority of the articles
I am creating, I try to look for material
and content that will be helpful for my
clients and students

To provide the services available today,
we all have to learn, analyze the market
place, find our niche, and explore it to
the best of our abilities.

Don’t you sometimes wish you were in
the right spot at the right time to take
full advantage of an opportunity before
everybody knows about it and is
exploring it’s potential?

This is the first time I am releasing
word that there will be such an
opportunity at the end of the summer 2008.

My fellow coaches and I are often many
things in one person or as part of
a small group.

Have you had these days when you
wonder how you will find the next
new coachee who will replace the
ones who left because they received
what they had been looking for?

Have you created reports,
e-books, real books, manuals, and
seminars to provide more and more
valuable content for your customers
and clients?

Are you transferring more and more
of your activities online to take
advantage of e-commerce and online
sales while you expand and build
your empire?

The internet marketing community
keeps telling us, emailing us, and
writing us about all these brand
new systems they seem to create
on a daily basis. Not only that…

They also keep telling us how many
millions they have made in a months,
in a week, some even claim in
days or hours.

I am an optimistic person and I believe
in my abilities and those on my team.
We have had successes in the past
and we will have even more in the future.

Instead of trying every new system
available and offered to us by the internet
marketing community, we need to keep
an eye on our core services.

That begs the question what the next
big trend in training, consulting in
coaching will be?

I believe it will be a combination of
individual attention to members of
organizations as they develop more
and more complex skills and knowledge.
But that is only one side of the coin.

The other side looks at the organization
as a whole. The largest consulting
companies have always offered the
organizational view and now you can
too, even if you are a one wo/man
show or have a small team in your firm.

The great part about it that you don’t
need a huge investment, and those
you service will not need a huge
investment either.

The days of tens of thousands of
Dollars for an analysis of an organization
leading to a think binder with a final
report are over.

Not only that - the analysis of numbers
and productivity aspects have been
relegated to accountants and comptrollers.

What we need to do is put human
beings in the center of the picture.

For that a new, extremely successful
system has been developed in Europe.
It’s called Alchimedus.

This system is a perfect fit in combination
with the focused and individual services
many trainers, speakers, consultants and
coaches offer right now.

Alchimedus looks at three main
aspects of the organization:

The tools – meaning the analytic and
methods an organization uses to conduct
its operations

The human being in its values and culture –
meaning what we find as the “unique way
of how each particular  company operates
based on what its’ members have found to
be the best way to achieve the goals and vision

The power of inspiration – meaning the
ability to innovate, be creative and have
the persistence to pursue ideas to the point
where they turn into reality

This new tool is coming to the US market
and a very small group of companies will
certify partners to explore the US market.

Currently more than 5000 organizations in
Europe and Asia are using this amazing system,
but the US market is untouched like a virgin.

During the summer the charter memberships
will be developed and then offered to those
consultants and coaches who want to be the
first to combine Alchimedus with their
current practice.

Anybody interested to be on that list of
charter members should contact us at AMC LLC.

My friend Peter and our team will train and
support the charter members in their
explosive growth across and throughout
the US market place.

First it happened in Germany. Then it began
to cross borders into all the other European
countries from Austria to Switzerland, and
as you read this, it is exploding across the Asian
continent like a wild fire.

If you ever wanted to be onboard when the
first computer was offered, or the first version
of Windows came on the market,
or Aspirin was offered for the first time in
a drugstore, your chance has come.

Alchimedus will revolutionize the landscape
of valuable service in a way we haven’t seen before.

The list is growing as of this writing and
we hope many of the readers of this article
will take the opportunity to contact us and
let us know that you are interested to get
certified and receive your license for success
with Alchimedus.

We are taking names for the limited amount
of tickets available for this train. If you wait
too long, you might miss it. I hope you realize
that this is the moment when opportunity knocks.

We look forward to see you on board

Axel Meierhoefer, AMC LLC