Help Jumpstart

My Kickstarter

For many businesspeople, asking for help may come easy, but rarely is it easy for an entrepreneur.

For an entrepreneur, such a request can translate into “having to swallow my pride,” “getting someone to do what I can do better,” “having to trust someone else with my baby,” “admitting a weakness,” or “owning up to my own inadequacies.”

So what? Who appointed you as “Perfect”?

When you consider that all of the above suggested excuses (which I have heard often over my years of business and professional practice development consulting . . . and have admittedly tried myself on occasion) reduce themselves to unproductive ego-based thinking and behavior.

Remember your grandfather telling you:

“No man is an island”?

Ego-maniacal thinking and behavior of course tends to dominate early-on entrepreneurship pursuits until experience and reality sink in and struggling entrepreneurs begin to realize that it’s the idea that’s important, and that any (legal) way to achieve success –regardless of others that need to be relied on– is the right way to go.

For entrepreneurs,

results tend to outweigh process.

Interestingly, the opposite tends to be true in government and corporate life where more relience is placed on analysis of available options than on getting the job done (e.g. deciding which committee to study an emerging market becomes folly in the face of an entrepreneurial spirit that simply drives itself into the heart of the market and adjusts along the way.

I have learned a great deal in the first half of my Amazon Kickstarter site effort that literally requires nerves of steel for me to implement in completing the second half of the effort. Stuff I forgot: Ask for the sale. Ask again. And again. Drive as many people as possible to visit or experience your message. Adjust and improvise. Switch gears. Ask for the sale. Ask again.

Why “nerves of steel”? I’m a creator, not Superman, not Zig Ziglar, not (Thank Heaven!) Steve Jobs, not an award-winning super-salesperson or winning candidate. I’m just a small business owner.

I’m me. I don’t like asking. I have to conjure up massive amounts of courage to approach my friends and family, and online contacts (even strangers) to buy into something I created. I know in my heart that what I have to offer is worthy. I know it’s a great dollar-value. And, yes, the Kickstarter race against the clock means it’s “make it or break it” time. It still feels awkward.

But –ahhh— I’ve always taught that behavior is a choice, so it’s time to get over all that and step up to the plate, right? Okay, so here it is —

Will YOU please help me jumpstart my Kickstarter by visiting this site NOW and making a pledge of some kind  —EVEN JUST ONE DOLLAR!??

In the interests of your love for the arts and creative development, will you also please urge your friends and contacts to visit my Kickstarter site NOW?

I will be forever grateful for this very important bit of support.

Thank you!

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Hal@Businessworks.US    302.933.0911

I am thankful for my

 Kickstarter Backers!

Happy Thanksgiving!  I hope it is a time of great rest, relaxation, reassessment and re-energizing for entrepreneurial leaders everywhere. Certainly, it is a time for family, friends, and appreciation . . . a time for prayer and caring and tolerance.  

Thanksgiving is for me personally —and most of all— a time for saying thank you to those who have locked arms with me through the two years of harsh realities and trauma that ended with Kathy’s death this past March.  

It is only because of that allegiance and outpouring of love and support for my personal and business survival that I have indeed survived. It is with full and deep appreciation for all that Kathy meant to me and the joy she brought to my life, that these friendships and offerings of time and help, and support (even food!) have prompted me to do what she urged of me consistently (but that I unwittingly resisted) over her last two years: to move on! 

AMAZON Kickstarter, as many of you know, has enabled me to step forward with the wonderful book manuscript –HIGH TIDE— that occupied thousands of hours of my spare time (and much of Kath’s) over the past twelve years. But Kickstarter is just a platform, a format.  

It took a concerted effort by a small army of close friends and family members to give me the faith and incentive and encouragement to bring that format to life… to move on. As it stands this minute:  it works!         

In the middle of my Kickstarter website, you’ll find a lengthy list of individuals who stayed with me through the long haul and who passed me the torch to light up HIGH TIDE. 

Many others, too many to list here, have eagerly jumped on the bandwagon to help. They know who they are. I will thank each publicly as soon as I can get through the Kickstarter project, regardless of outcome.  

I will simply say here and now that I am deeply grateful to each of you who have taken the time from your own busy lives to reach out and pull me a rung or two up the ladder and for bringing God’s blessings to my doorstep. Thank you. I love you all. And God Bless YOU.  

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I ask also that anyone reading this please be sure to remember all the families still suffering from Hurricane Sandy, and to send God’s blessings to them, as well as to all our young men and women serving in America’s armed forces and emergency services throughout the world. Pray to grant them all continued courage, resourcefulness, patience, forgiveness, and understanding.

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Hal@Businessworks.US    302.933.0911

WRITING   YOUR   BOOK 

It’s just not the same as editing, designing

 formatting and publishing, distributing,

branding, promoting, legalizing, and

marketing your book… or selling it!

READ BEFORE YOU LEAP, YOU 81%!

Why am I telling you this? What makes this relevant to small business? HA! 81% of all Americans think they “have a book in them” according to a New York Times survey report . . . uh, that’s like over 200 million people in the U.S. who want to write a book — more than total viewers of the most-watched-in-history 2012 London Olympic games!

WOW! That sounds like a sizable market right? And an awful lot of new books on the horizon, right? Wrong! How could that be? Well, first off– like the old days when TV first came out, and everyone watched it with the same passion we now relegate to smart phones, all humans thought they could write TV commercials because they watched them!

In other words, if you don’t read, you can’t write. According to industry findings reported at www.SelfPublishingResources.com, the average book buyer reportedly never reads more than the first 18 pages of a book she or he has purchased!!! If you don’t read complete books, you can’t write books worth reading. And if your first 18 pages don’t shake the walls loose . . .

Second: WRITING your book is the easy part!

And even if you DO write a book worth reading, you’d better have a lot of money and/or considerable professional expertise with editing, designing, formatting, publishing, distributing, branding, promoting, marketing, contract law, and sales. Even IF you can manage getting a big-time agent, publishing house, and publicist, the buck still stops with you! Even if.

Discouraging? Absolutely. My best guess is that 80 of the 81% will fall by the wayside trying to effectively manage the tasks noted in the paragraph above. That’s a big pile of dead book efforts! Ah, but now there’s CROWD SOURCING to the rescue!

Go to this site now for an example of how to make your book work once it’s written. Oh, yes, and it’s only a couple of hundred dollars to create! IT’S THE NEW WAY TO SELL BOOKS. IT”S THE WAY ALL FUTURE BOOKS WILL BE SOLD!

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Hal@Businessworks.US