Diary on Wealth creation in a Depression

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I work in a commission-only sales job. Which means if I don’t work I don’t eat. There is no receptionist or brace of secretaries to do my paperwork or to hide behind if one has an irate customer, or the usual company administrative machine to protect you from litigious and predatory individuals. I do get my photocopying paid for, but I still have to do the photocopying. I don’t have money deducted at source going to a “guaranteed” pension on retirement. I do not have a team of call-centre operatives feeding me leads: I have to find these myself-every week.

On a certain day I phone the leads that I have personally made the previous day. If I’m sick , I don’t get sick-leave, I just have to leave work sick (i.e leave my income-producing efforts, not leave a workplace because I work from home) until I recover. I am in the classic self-employed/Small businessman’s quadrant that Robert Kiyosaki talks about in his book “Cashflow Quadrant“(which I recommend you read if you haven’t).

Having mentioned some of the niggling things, what are the pros of direct selling? I have been in direct sales and direct marketing-type jobs for six years and nobody has fired me-even in this Recession/Depression. (I did leave one sales job because of greedy, incompetent individuals) but that was my choice. Nobody tells me when to go to work, and nobody tells me when to go home. In my industry, I sell to the old and infirm, so I’m still in work because I provide a service that people need. Yes, people still get old, all the more so as the “Baby Boomers” start to retire! Also I have good bosses who pay me on time and don’t breathe down my neck-how many salesmen can say that?

No, I do not like going out in the wind and rain every Tuesday-O.K, some days we do book a mall for our direct sales marketing-,and I don’t like making those phone-calls on Wednesday, but I’ve learned that when I need to get out of a financial rut there’s one thing I can do: SELL ! Sales answer most of your personal and company problems. Sell what, you ask? Whatever people need! Find a niche where there’s a need , and build on it. In Internet marketing there are tools to help you do this, which we shall discuss further under the topic of SEO positioning and SEO techniques.

Being a salesman has taught me self-reliance, or to put it another way, amplified my reliance on God, who has helped me to do many times things which I would previously considered impossible. Selling for a living, for example: and not sales with a retainer, health benefits and accrued pension benefits either: Direct sales, commission only, paid holiday trips if I meet my targets:that’s it. I am not your typical aggressive, “hunter-mentality” salesman (beloved of writers of online ads for sales personnel) but I can get customers without being supplied by leads from Head Office, and have been successful in sales for over six years; and having no prior sales experience notwithstanding, bar a short spell selling Amway in England (now there’s a challenge!) and knick-knacks for a friend who can be best described as “along the Del-boy lines” (British readers will understand).

Perhaps faith will be something executives will need to rediscover as, increasingly, businesses face bankruptcy,layoffs and the rest. As Kiyosaki says, when you go into business for yourself (and this is on any level) you realize just what it costs to pay for those paperclips, that coffee you get for free from the firm you work at, and just how much that bevy of smiling secretaries costs .

One thing I always remember when I’m quivering and agitating about my next sales call: it is the LAW OF SEED-TIME and HARVEST. Find a Bible and have a look at it now. It’s in Genesis 8:22 “While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” There are FOUR very important words there : SEED, TIME, HARVEST and SHALL NOT. What’s God saying? And why is this so exciting for a salesman? The answer is: if you take the trouble to SOW (SELL) you will REAP (commissions, customers etc)…and whether the ECONOMY is UP or DOWN is irrelevant. Why ? It’s a LAW- GOD put it in place and I found it works for me every time I put it to work. No farmer reaps by talking about farming. He reaps by sowing. And sowing at the right time and place. Preachers need to preach their message and salesmen need to sell their product message before any products change hands. Furthermore, a time period is required between the act of sowing and the act of reaping. Advertising should not be chopped out of your budget in a recession, and especially not in a depression!

Check out this book by the man who first put Seed Faith on the map:

get Miracle of Seed Faith by Oral Roberts

Have a great day!
John Reason,
Briton currently living in New Zealand.
Salesman, teacher, article writer, Internet Marketer.
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© 2010/11

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The fear of losing one’s job

People today are terrified of losing their job. At least this has been my observation in the various small outfits, firms, middle-ranking businesses and major national utilities I have worked in in the U.K, South Africa and New Zealand.  Losing a job for most is tantamount to losing one’s identity. Particularly for men- what is the first question men ask each other at a party after initial pleasantries?- “What do you do(i.e for a living)?”

The inference is that who we are is all tied up with our job. Question: what happens if you are unable to get a “job” (i.e become an Employee). Who are you then?

I remember being laid off from a printing company in England back in the Nineties. It was probably the most “secure” job I had got in years, having worked as a “temp” for years, and I was now in what many called a “proper” or “permanent” job. My “permanent” job lasted a year, almost to the day. My manager Colin, an assiduous school-masterly-looking Englishman, had a few months previous taken on another “temp” alongside me. She was sharp, ambitious, had a background in printing (which I did not) and was, above all, younger and better looking!

At the same time the company started losing print-jobs. mainly to German companies, who were able to undercut our prices with more family-based, high-tech manufacturing models. Colin called me in to his little office a few months later and in the polite, detached way that the English have perfected, informed me that they (meaning he, the head of the Estimating dept) would have to let me go because of the shortage of work.

I was a little upset with the news but did not show it.   I told him that I was disappointed but had the conviction that if God had provided me with this job, He would find me another. Colin was impressed, remarking that a lot of people faced with the news I had just received, would have begged to keep their position, uttered howls of protest, or otherwise gone to pieces. What he was saying was FOR MOST PEOPLE THEIR JOB IS THEIR IDENTITY. He said he didn’t know too many people with my “composure” at the news.  (I would substitute “faith” for “composure”, because inside I was not all “composed”.)

After I left that job I did a few other “temp” jobs, which suited me as my main interest at the time was to do with voluntary and church projects, and then later was promoted to another “permanent” position-this one lasting two years before “restructuring” took place !  Apart from the time it took me to find work in New Zealand after moving here a few years ago, I have been in continuous work ever since that printing job, and survived the ensuing recessions and stock market crashes.  I managed to go from a situation where my family and I were living in a church hostel for the homeless in Windsor, three miles from the Windsor castle (this period roughly coincided with the printing position), to buying our first house with only GBP500 in the bank, another house in New Zealand a few years later from the proceeds of the sale of the first house in London; cars when I needed to have a car, and being able to afford holidays to all parts of the world. How did I survive, and even , “prosper” (even though I am by no means a millionaire-yet!) without having a regularly salaried J-O-B? By something called  faith.

Faith in business

By “faith” I do not mean mind over matter.  Not faith in one’s own power or intellect-because those are limited; not faith in the U.K or U.S or Aussie economies- we’ve seen how they can perform!; not positive thinking, although that’s good:but faith in that which does not change:the invisible realities of God ,the word of God and his covenant  (binding promise) and that God, according to His own word, intended good to me. I was simple enough to believe that in a world where “contracts are made to be broken, ha ha” there was Someone whose word was always good: that He was “able to make all grace abound towards (me) that I always having all sufficiency in all things would abound to every good work“. ( 2 Corinthians 9:8)

Faith, I am convinced, is something increasingly people will need to draw on, as the days of a “job for life” are gone. In the old days one could almost count on a job for life in many areas of employment. Not so today. As Robert Kiyosaki observes, we are now in the Information Age-, no longer the Industrial Age, in which our parents grew up and lived.

Have a great day!
John Reason
British Internet Marketer/salesman
Currently living in New Zealand

©John Reason 2009/10

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