It's your call

Malaysian Business,  Jul 1, 2008  by Rajen Devadason

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WHEN PETROL and diesel prices were raised in early June, there was little doubt all of us would be affected. Now there is NO doubt.

All we need do is open our newspapers or go online for our daily dollop of depressing data from conventional sources or from the blogosphere to realise tougher times are here to stay. Still, I am getting cheesed off with the number of individuals who have chosen to play the role of the victim ('poor me syndrome'). Instead, it is much wiser and more profitable to zero-in on those areas of our personal economic equation that we retain control over.

As we move deeper into what's been described by super-investor Jim Rogers (who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in the early 1970s) as `a long-term secular commodities bull market', it is vital that we wake up to the fact that food costs will rise worldwide for years to come.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that our current combination of fuel and food price hikes is a toxic cocktail that has messed up the `budgets' - formal or otherwise - of not just millions of us in Malaysia, but also billions of others around the planet.

If we hope to not just survive but to thrive, we must channel our store of remaining energies and resources intelligently. I suggest this simple two-stage approach. Firstly, determine our current cash flow patterns, and secondly, decide how best to improve our long- term cash flow surpluses.

Since things are going to cost more in the future than they do now, we should grow very, very serious about expanding our means. Our goal has to be to bring in more money into our lives - ethically, honestly, intelligently.

In addition to the specific, concrete steps I am going to outline here to boost your personal brand name recognition, I do have other suggestions in my online article Create Many Income Streams for Yourself at www.freecoolarticles.com/FP5.htm

Why do I believe it's crucial to raise the current job market valuation of your personal brand? Because in this Knowledge Economy we live in, what is important is not how much you know, but what you do with what you know.

Another reason is that your ability, to attract large and growing volumes of cash into your life, is to a large extent dependent upon how you are perceived by the market place.

Regardless of what happens to the price of fuel, food and other basic commodities, the best way to make sure you stay ahead of inflationary pressures is to commit to making short-term sacrifices in managing your active income so you are able to purchase or build long-term sources of passive income.

If you're intent on surviving, then you must increase your capacity to rake in active income through an escalating salary or rising profits from any actively run businesses you might have. To do so, you must be able to attract employers or clients and then lock them in for a long time.

Because I tend to address financial planners and financial planning clients most often, please bear with me as I give you examples that revolve around my profession. You're welcome to extract the key principles and lessons within these examples and modify them to suit your specific circumstances.

For those of us in service professions, our economic survival hinges on what I term our CSQ or Client `Stickability' Quotient. The CSQ is a term I coined to measure how genuinely effective financial planners are guiding, even shepherding, potential clients to opt to work with them and not someone else over the long haul.

Regardless of your profession or industry, it's possible many potential clients are intimidated at the prospect of calling you and requesting a meeting to learn who you are and what you might be able to do for them. Regardless of what arena you operate in, I'm pretty sure competitive pressures are taking their toll on your profit margins as well as revenue growth.

So, the first thing we should work on is making sure anyone who is thinking about working with someone in our field is able to find us. Towards that end, word-of-mouth referrals are the best way of ensuring a client wants just you and not someone else. So be nice to your best clients; then let them know that you're open to helping their best friends, as well.

But apart from word-of-mouth referrals, many of us also require superior online exposure to succeed as 21st century professionals. Figuring out what we need to do becomes a little easier when we consider what we do when we grow curious about someone. Most of us `Google' that person's name and scroll through the first few entries that pop up on our browser.

So, tell me, if a potential client were to do that with your name, what would pop up? Well, if you have a unique name, as I do, and if you have been doing the correct things to elevate your online presence, then an Internet search on your name should generate multiple first-page entries.

To get a better sense for what I mean, go ahead and `Google' me. Don't bother drilling down beyond the first page. Most people looking for information about you won't do so, either. How many of the first 10 items refer to me? Your immediate goal should be to get at least one first browser page mention of yourself. Your ultimate goal should be to dominate that search term so ONLY references to you, and not of anyone else who shares your name, pop up.