The DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum now has its own website: www.DollarMakersJVForum.com and is growing internationally - a group of winners using JV’s to grow and prosper.

Zig Ziglar said, You can get anything you want out of life, if you’re prepared to help enough other people to get what they want.”

I talked recently with a fellow who has a staff of eighty-five people. They’re not his sales team. He wants to increase his sales, and I suggested he consider turning these employees into salespeople. “But that’s not their job!” he protested. Exactly. And that’s why most business owners overlook their greatest underutilized asset – their non sales employees. I got very excited when I realized that there were 85 people who could help increase his sales with no cost or risk!

Every person on earth wants to feel important, recognized and appreciated. We want to feel that our contribution is important and that our ideas and suggestions are valued. Plus, we want to feel that we get rewarded for any value that we create. I have found that our employees at the coalface often know more about our businesses than we do. Their suggestions are based on real life, real experience and real opinions. They have insights and recommendations which could radically improve our bottom line profits, if we only gave them a reason to share those ideas, listened, and rewarded them accordingly.

Your employees want to feel a part of the business. They want to feel that they have secure jobs and that they can increase their income without moonlighting and arriving at your business half asleep. By listening to their ideas and providing them non-threatening and easy to use, understandable sales tools with a system to measure and reward results, you can unleash massive sales! When we understand that our businesses provide products and services that relieve pain and create value, we can train our employees to perceive “sales” differently. Use this massive, neglected resource – the cost is miniscule and the results are extraordinary – improved productivity and loyalty, decreased employee and customer attrition and increased sales and profits, innovation and motivation.

Zig Ziglar said, “You can get anything out of life, if you’re prepared to give enough other people what they want.” Most employees dread going to work and we can change that. Give your employees what they want: a voice, an ear, an opportunity, security, self esteem, reward, motivation, purpose and recognition, get your ego out of the way, and the sky’s the limit.

How workers ranked what they considered important, starting with the most important:

#1: Appreciation for good work,

#2: Feeling “in” on things,

#3: Help with personal problems,

#4: Job security,

#5: Good wages

#6: Interesting work,

#7: Possibility for promotion,

#8: Loyalty of Management to workers,

#9: Good working conditions,

#10 Tactful discipline.

After lying awake many nights, worrying about a business deal, thirty minutes with my lawyer removed all my concerns. And something he said has always stayed with me: “You were right to do nothing at the time, Robin.”
Kenny Rogers sang,
“You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em

When the dealin’s done”

We all know how important timing is. Or do we? As we mature as entrepreneurs, we get a gut feel for timing. At the same time, we learn that we don’t need to do every deal, or deal with everybody. We learn to walk away and we learn to stick it out. And we know that sometimes the results we work so hard for aren’t immediately evident. And sometimes, what keeps us disciplined and objective is the company we keep. If desperate people do desperate things, we need to associate with people who are not desperate, strapped for cash or emotionally unstable. Wise counsel comes from people who are relaxed, confident and impartial. Sometimes, we’re tempted to try and force things to happen, to twist the arm of the business process, to apply undue pressure. This usually leads to disaster or at least embarrassment. Or we hold back and allow a wonderful opportunity to pas us by. It takes self control and faith to hold ‘em, to fold ‘em, to walk away and to resist counting ‘em too soon. And sometimes it’s easy to run when we should be holding on.

So aligning ourselves with a group of strong, patient and experienced entrepreneurs who can keep us on track when the wind howls and the seas are rough, is a smart thing to do. Courage is not the absence of fear and every entrepreneur has known the odd sleepless night. That’s when it’s good to have a seasoned mentor or wise business associate on call. Preferably someone who has a vested interest in your success. Together, we can do amazing things.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries” – William Shakespeare.

You’ve heard about the fellow who decided, after some heavy drinking, to go ice fishing. So he packed up all his equipment, his auger, catchcovers, catchcover sleeves, scoop, rods, reels, lines, bait, bobbers, split shot, ice pick and propane heater, and of he staggered, down to the ice. He picked up his auger and was about to start cutting the hole, when a voice boomed down from above: “There are no fish under the ice.” He shook his head. Was he hearing things? Must have imagined it. So he started again, and again the voice rumbled, “I said, ‘There are no fish under the ice!’” The drunk looked up and asked nervously, “Is that you, Lord?” “NO!” the voice replied, “This is the Ice Rink Manager!”

Rika and I decided to take the scenic route back from Kelowna, BC, where I delivered a talk last week. On the way, we saw some people ice fishing in the middle of a lake. So we pottered across the lake and went to talk with them. This was the first time we’d ever seen anybody ice fishing. The friendly fisher folk told us very interesting stories. The ice was twelve inches deep. Fascinating! Anyway, it reminded me of the joke, above.

In life and in business, I have found that we often waste time getting information from the wrong people or dealing with the wrong people. We tend, sometimes, to fish where there are no fish. It’s like asking a bank manager about a business opportunity or a virgin about childbirth. With time so valuable, we should be very clear about how we spend it, and whom we spend it with. I talked with a chap recently who told me he attended ten business networking meetings and only met one good prospect. When he factored in the wasted time, gas, parking, membership fees, and so on, he felt he had wasted a lot of time an money, fishing where there were no fish.

There’s a simple rule of thumb to prevent disappointment: Do your due diligence and qualify people before you spend time on them. Check them out – Google them – do a Better Business Bureau check – ask for references and testimonials – call your friends and ask if they know them. Ask more questions. Be direct. Spend more time on the phone and e mail qualifying them before you give away information or go to a meeting with them. Ask them if they can make a buying decision and if they have the money and authority and when they intend buying or deciding. You will save time and money and catch good fish. Joint Venture with the right people: Click here

Some of you insisted on seeing samples of what JV agreements look like, including joint venture declaration forms, sample joint venture agreements, mining joint venture agreement form, etc., so here they are.

But please remember, the most important part of a JV is WHOM you’re partnering with.

For more on JV’s, Click here.

For those sample agreements, Click here.

Smart entrepreneurs and business owners know that Joint Ventures are the fastest and most effective way to radically increase sales and profits with virtually no money and no risk, as long as its done correctly.
The Advantages of Joint Ventures are speed, access, sharing of resources and the leveraging of underutilized resources, high profits, back end income, low or no risk opportunities and massive leverage.
The Disadvantages of Joint Ventures are the possibility of being ripped off or disappointed by unscrupulous and unprofessional JV partners, and hurting your reputation and/or customers and associates by associating with the wrong people, even unknowingly.
There is a way to locate and contact really solid JV partners, however. The DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum might be the solution for you. We carefully screen Members and the support and education provided are very effective. For more information on the advantages and disadvantages of joint venture, and on the DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum, Click here.

In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, there’s an explanation for a parrot’s lack of responsiveness: “It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.”

There are three kinds of people in the world: Eagles, ducks and dead parrots. Dead Parrots – the world is full of them. They are the people who talk the talk but who never walk the walk, people who copy the words of great men, but have no life of their own. They masquerade as leaders and saviors. They know all the words and all the answers and they have studied much, but their lives are meaningless meanderings of mediocrity and compromise. They hold office, hold forth, but don’t hold any water. They are professors in universities, bureaucrats, mayors of cities and leaders of unions. Figureheads, mouthpieces, slaves. They fear and avoid innovation and creativity at all costs. They are simply parrots and they have no life, no spark, no courage and no integrity. There is a Nykusa proverb that goes, “The dead if not separated from the living, bring madness upon them.”

We have to be careful of pretenders and posers. Avoid the fakes and the shadows. The puppets look real, but they’re not; they’re vitriolic ventriloquist’s dolls and they have no conscience. The maps they share are of cities that don’t exist. Their plans are bogus and their promises are lies. Dead Parrots parade proudly through the herd (the ducks), impressing the plebs, amazing the village idiot and, most of all, consuming the creations of the visionaries and producers (the Eagles). We all pity the ducks – they’re the hoi polloi, the stagnant masses, seething humanity. Pretty harmless unless they gang up and group dynamics goes to work, but generally anemic. It’s the Dead Parrots that we have to be careful of.

The sycophantic ducks mindlessly go about their business, looking for a leader to follow, joining the cults, serving the collectivist Dead Parrots and gratefully accepting survival. The Eagles create, produce, lead, innovate and soar. And while the Dead Parrots tolerate, use and abuse the ducks, they hate and fear the Eagles. They gladhand and backslap the Eagles while at the same time backhanding, backstabbing and undermining them. They copy them and then try to kill them. The ducks will frustrate us Eagles and steal from us, but Dead Parrots are out to destroy us and our work.

Eagles are realizing that we need to protect and assist each other. We need to stand together and form a tight formation of interdependent winners. As the “Atlas Shrugged” story goes, “Dagny discovers that all the great minds who retired and vanished from society now live and work in this remote Colorado valley. Ellis Wyatt is here, as are the other Colorado industrialists. Ken Danagger has joined them. The great banker Midas Mulligan owns the valley, and the philosopher Hugh Akston and composer Richard Halley reside here also. Dagny learns, not surprisingly, that Francisco d’Anconia is another thinker who has come here to be free from the looters’ oppressive code.” Click here now for a solution.

Kobus and I were drafted into the army at the age of seventeen. We became good friends during our basic training (boot camp) and then attended the Operations Intelligence training program together before being placed at an air force base. We had a lot of fun which included getting drunk, jabbing a hole into the door of an airplane with the blades of a forklift, overturning a battery-operated luggage cart and smashing the back of a staff sergeant’s car with the same forklift. I loved the army.

After the army we went our separate ways, but remained friends. We boated, camped and stayed in touch. I worked in a government department and then got a bursary for Hotel School and Kobus trained and then worked as psychiatric nurse. He got married and caught his new wife in bed with another woman three nights later. He remarried and became a medical rep. While working as a salesman, the man who tended his garden told Kobus that he could make personalized resin pen holders that Kobus could sell to the doctors he was calling on. This became a lucrative sideline until the gardener told him that he could also teach him how to make resin baths, basins and commodes. Kobus put him to work in his garage and soon had his own factory. Two years later, he was a millionaire.

I tell you this story because it’s not about education. There are many educated people around who have no money, no success, no vision. The universities and colleges make their money by promising people they’ll succeed because of education. And it’s not about ideas – many of us have great ideas that we keep in a box on a shelf somewhere. It’s all about TAKING ACTION. THAT is what defines the winner and the conqueror. Action is what separates the men from the boys. Talk is cheap. Kobus had the guts to take action. And to bounce back when things went wrong. Goethe said, “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

Taking action means moving, getting off the coach and out of bed, doing the difficult things and taking risks. In business, even the things that don’t work, work. That’s because we learn from success as well as from failure. If you’re not failing often, you’re not taking enough action! The more failures, the closer you get to success. Stop talking and start walking. DO something. Pick up that phone, write that letter, go to that meeting. Woody Allen said that 90% pf success is showing up. You never know whom you’ll meet! You don’t stumble across opportunities watching television. You don’t meet many winners in a bar or a casino. Alfred Adler said, “Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” Finally, we build trust by what we DO, not by what we SAY. Take action. Benjamin Disraeli said, “Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”

Click Here: http://www.dollarmakers.com/JVForum.htm