 How do you come up with million-dollar ideas in 60 seconds? Well, today I'm going to read out my notes from when I went to a conference in Los Angeles in 2013. It was called Guerrilla Business School. It was at the Hilton Hotel in Universal City. And I took notes and I still have those notes and I'm going to read out my notes now. So if you have an idea or you're wanting to come up with an idea, you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to understand business, this is for you. So I'm going to read over some of my notes here. Let's do it. Business is two things. One, buying or creating something. Two, selling it for a profit. There is nothing else going on. This is the essence of business. You buy something for one price and then you sell it for a higher price and make a profit. Despite this, most people put their efforts into administration. Business is simple, not easy, but simple. How to come up with million-dollar ideas in 60 seconds? One, solve pain for others. Two, solve problems for people for profit. Three, look for problems, solve problems. Four, don't look for opportunities, look for problems. Five, after problem comes no problems. It's pretty simple, right? If you want to come up with a business, solve people's problems. You know, my Swanee's blue-eyed blocking glasses, it solves the problem of bad sleep. 30-day no-alcohol challenge solves the problem of people drinking too much and feeling lousy. Makes sense. How to increase your profits? Make a wealth plan instead of an income plan. Create contacts with blog editors who can promote your business and blog posts. Be a good people person. Be a good networker with successful people. Be better at understanding online marketing. Offer high-ticket, high-profit items. Find high-volume buyers. Do joint venture deals. Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all. The fastest way for increasing profit is offering higher-ticket items. Focus on higher-ticket items. Double the price of your product. It's all about the zeros. Say to yourself, I keep revenue, profit and cash flow high and expenses really low. When the cash is high, you buy. First, you get the customers. The rest will take care of itself. Cash flow is king. More businesses go under because of poor timing of cash flow. A business based on receivables is a disaster. Cash flow is king and queen. You have to increase revenue and decrease expenses at the same time. That's good stuff. I'm already thinking about it as I'm going over this. I'm looking at ways to decrease my expenses in particular. This is a good habit to get into. Whenever I go to a conference or seminar, I take notes. I then type them out and stick them in a drawer. Then I'll pull them out on occasion. This one I haven't looked at in about a year actually. This is a good reminder for me. Let's do marketing and sales. You must focus most of your business energy on marketing and sales. You get paid when you sell it. Say to yourself, I am in the business of marketing. You have to be an excellent marketer. Only 20% of your time should be in administration. Anytime you're handling administration in your business, you are losing money. Set yourself a life goal. As an example, I have $1 million cash in the bank. This is true about handling administration. Wow, I get bogged down on that. I've done pretty well at outsourcing it. Even sometimes I'm paying people, that takes up time. Of course you've got to pay people. The act of me going into a bank account and setting up how to send a direct deposit or wire and transferring the money, I shouldn't really be doing that. I should have someone else handle that and deal with invoices and stuff. This is a good reminder for me. Negotiating. The objective is always to get a win-win outcome. Number one, ask for what you want. Ask and you shall receive. If you want things in life, you have to ask. In a negotiation, ask for a better deal. It's okay to want a better deal. Say to yourself, I am willing to ask for a better deal. Number two, create affinity and commonality. Number three, state a win-win intention at the outset of any negotiation. As an example, you might say, I'm looking for a win-win and I see I would like this at the outset. Let's see if we can put our heads together and find a win-win. Say to yourself, I create affinity with my negotiations partner. Number four, create a semi-reason why you were entitled to more favorable terms. Five, ask these questions to drive the price down. Oh yeah, sorry. So when I say ask these questions, there's some examples here of questions you might ask to drive the price down. What's the price if I pick it up? When is the sale? What's the sale price? Can I get the sale price? Why are you penalizing me for paying now? The key is to make you a special situation. In negotiating, don't go first. Always get them to suggest a price first. If the other person wants you to go first, call it out. In other words, say no, and then make a joke of it. Disarm the situation. Seven magic words to say in negotiating. What's the least you can live with? I like that. What's the least you can live with? Let the other party go first and then say, ah, I was thinking more around this. What do you think? Say to yourself, I negotiate with an objective in mind. Say to your negotiating partner, help me or can you help me out here? Create competition and you will get a better price. For example, if you're in a store buying something, you say, do you match your competitors prices? What's the least you can live with to save me from going to one of your competitors? Say to yourself, I create competition. Use third party authority as your reason for special circumstances. If you're selling, blame it on your lawyer or manager. If you're buying, blame it on your wife or partner. Never negotiate with anyone who doesn't have authority to give you what you want. So don't try to basically saying, don't try to argue with like the common store clerk. Try to, you know, go into negotiating negotiations with the store manager. Ask who is in authority to change the prices or turns. Say to yourself, I only negotiate with people who have power to make changes. I utilize third party authority. Use the good cop, bad cop routine. Always go into a negotiation knowing you'll have to haves. They are your blue chips, your must haves, your bargaining chips are things you'd like. So ask for everything and end up with the important things. You have to use all these elements in your negotiations. It's not just about the price. It's also about delivery, credit terms, shelf life, returns, quantity, shipping, juggling several factors at once. Agree on the easiest points first. Skip the impasse points and come back to them later. Do not have the table between you as an obstacle. Have your negotiating partner to your left or right. It's friendlier, so people are more open to finding a solution. Create a cooperative environment. Try to operate on home turf. Try to create a cooperative environment. Use the power of the written word. If you're struggling to find a solution instead of splitting the pie so it's equal, what else can we do? Business is about building long term relationships. Negotiate the way that leaves everyone feeling great and getting what they need. When someone asks you what is your budget, reply, I have no budget. That's pretty cool. I'm reviewing my notes from a conference I went to in 2013 called Guerrilla Business School, which is at the Hilton Hotel in Universal City. In fact, it even says on my notes here the dates that had happened. It was Wednesday, May the 15th until Sunday, May the 19th, 2013. Pretty cool. These are my notes here. Keith Cunningham, who's a business guy, was obviously one of the speakers here. I remember him now because my notes say Keith Cunningham. He says the most important things are to find out what they want, go and get it and then give it to them. So in terms of creating a customer, find out what they want, go and get it and then give it to them. That's a great way to grow a business. He says, what's keeping you from growing is that you are more interested in giving them what you want to give them rather than what they want. Find the gap between what customers want and what the competition is doing. Find a group of frustrated customers and you will get rich. Find the pain in the marketplace. Who is your ideal customer? Narrow the boundaries and refine a niche. Figure out your niche and you will get rich. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Be clear on your target market. Know who your competition is. You should understand what your competition is doing inside and out. Make them addicted to you. Focus on the customer and what they want and on how to get them addicted. Most business owners don't understand this. What you have to do is get your customer saying, yes, I want more of that. All right, that was from Keith Cunningham. Here's some stuff from Bill Walsh. Bill Walsh is another business coach. I met him a few times and I've got notes here from when he spoke. He says, be 100% focused. Make zero time for energy suckers. The night before you go to sleep, write down the top 10 things you will do the next morning before 10am. Build membership sites with a great product or service. If you have customers, do everything you can to stay in touch and give them free stuff. Build active communities. If you have subscribers paying $10 a month and you get 1,000 of those people, that's 120 grand a year net. That's pretty good. Change is okay. Absorb the change. Don't be resistant. Work with the change and you will continue to be successful. All right, Bo Eason spoke here. This is the first time I saw Bo Eason speak, actually. You may remember him. I had him on the James Swannick Show podcast some time ago. He teaches about how to be engaging on the stage and tell stories. His notes here, he was talking about how to create, communicate and cash in on the power of your life story. He says, if you want to be an iconic leader, you have to lay it out there. People buy your story and that pays the most. Be a great storyteller. You want people to feel this guy has it. Your story must be personal. He lays out three tips on being a good storyteller. Number one, the more personal your story, the more universal it becomes. People are thinking to themselves, if I'm going to do business with you, I need to know about you. You need to develop trust and intimacy. He says, the highest paid person of this century will be the best storyteller. Number two, physicality. He says, you've got to use your body to connect. Move like a predator. Have great presence. Command your audience so they can't take their eyes off you. Generosity equals dollars. Give all of yourself all of the time. Think of how much time and effort Jerry Rice put into training every day. Jerry Rice, of course, was considered probably one of the greatest NFL players of all time, wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. While others complain, I train. Tell your audience your story and they will follow. Chief Cunningham comes back again and he's talking about understanding and getting knowledge. He says, as adults we're all playing pin the tail on the donkey. We're all paying dumb tax. Do something dumb and it costs you money. The key to getting riches to stop doing stupid things. Business is a game that has a language. If you can't speak the language, you can't speak the game. If you can't read the scoreboard, you don't know the score. If you don't know the score, you can't tell the winners from the losers. So you have to speak the language of business. The only constant in business is change. What gets measured gets done. Measure results. Change activities. Your balance sheet is a what you owe plus B what you own. Profits are a theory. Cash is a fact. Spend your cash. Do not spend your earnings. Hmm. It's not what you do. It's how you do it. Stop learning how to make money. Learn how to keep your money. Do a financial blood test. Some good stuff here. There's actually enough stuff in my notes here to do a part two probably. Cool. I might do a part two. Because there's enough stuff here. That's exactly what I'll do. I'll do a part two. So there you go. Keep in the air out for the next part. I'll do a part two of these notes. So I'm going to make a note here to do that and release it next week maybe. Or another week. We'll see how we go. So yeah. I hope that helped you in terms of getting some good business ideas and talking about negotiating and persuasion and coming up with million dollar ideas. I'm sorry. And go ahead and send me a tweet right now at at James Swannock. Make sure you follow me on my Snapchat at James Swannock. You can find me on Instagram at James Swannock and James Swannock.com. There you go. So a lot of people keep asking me about how I built my Swannys blue light blocking glasses. I now sell them on Amazon. If you want to see how I brand and market those, you can go to Swannysglasses.com. If you're in the US, you can send a text message to the number 44222 and just type in the word Swannys and I'll text you back with a link. You can see how I've incorporated a lot of what I learned at that conference a few years ago into building that business, that physical products business. Or if you go to 30 day no alcohol challenge at 30 day no alcohol challenge.com. You can see how I built a membership site. You know, like it's amazing. Like three years ago, I went to this, this conference and Bill Walsh was saying, build active communities, you know, build membership sites with a great product or service. Wow. Look at that. That's what I did. I didn't even realize that I don't, I mean, I realized that I'd done it, but I didn't realize that Bill Walsh taught that very thing three years ago. I realized that this is before I even dreamt up 30 day no alcohol challenge. It's amazing. Isn't it? Like you go and you learn stuff, you go and implement it and then you forget kind of where you learned it from. And you just, and then it takes something like this, reading over your notes again three years later to go, oh, look at that. Isn't that amazing? Get the knowledge in your brain. Speak the language of business. Come up with million dollar ideas. So there you go. I hope that helps. Go ahead and send me a tweet now at that James Swann, I can tell me what you got out of this. What was the one thing you got out of this? Please do leave a review on the James Swann show and iTunes. It helps. Every review helps and share this episode with someone who you think might benefit from this. You can share it on your Facebook page by clicking the share button and just posting on your Facebook wall and encourage people to listen. That would really help me out or send it to someone. Thanks for listening. Catch you on the next one. So this is my first roommate when I moved and lived in London in 1999. This is Chris. How are you doing? Hello America. Wherever you are. And that right there was