Are you waiting for a stimulus package that will really have an effect on your small business? Maybe it will come and maybe it will touch you. Maybe you’ll be out of business by then. You can’t control a lot of what happens in the macro-economic world, but you can control what happens in your own environment. You can stimulate your own economy. You are the master of your own future. What you believe to be true, you will make happen by what you do and don’t do. Here are two ways to make money in this economy:

Capitalizing on new opportunities.
Being so positive that you attract what you need.

Capitalizing On New Opportunities

In this economy, what do businesses want more than anything else, need more now than this time last year when things were better? More sales, more cash, right? So how can you be a player in getting them what they want while you take a small piece of every transaction? According to companies like QuickBooks Desktop Canada, you should find businesses with extra inventory, extra staff capacity, extra space, extra trucking capacity, a mailing list, or any under utilized asset; then match each of them up with another business that needs those exact things. Both benefit and you take a piece of the new sales or savings that result.

Put yourself in the middle of a profit making/saving exchange. What is your area of expertise? Do you know the players in your field, the vendors, the trade association, the customers? What can you do to get the players together that benefits them all? A bigger joint buying contract from a supplier who is happy to have the business and offer the discount? A hurting advertising media source who appreciates that you’re negotiated a buying contract with several advertisers all at once, when he wasn’t sure he’d be getting any? A reciprocal endorsement campaign that wouldn’t have happened without your engineering it? Businesses that have complementary but different products who can market together to the same audience?

People are still buying, they’re just buying more carefully. Do a good match that provides benefits to both parties and creates value for the buyer and you’ve got a winner.

If you know of businesses with extra capacity, space, staff time, client lists please email me. I’ll match them up to businesses with whom they can make a deal and both generate more cash flow.

Being So Positive That You Attract What You Need

I was at a meeting today where the fill-in facilitator was describing the regular facilitator. “She is just so warm and welcoming that she seems to have an aura. You can’t help but want to be around her.” Has anybody ever described you that way? If you were that positive and magnetic, wouldn’t more people be attracted to doing business with you? Watch this video about ‘Validation’. It’s fun and also has a message. By validating others, people want to be around you. How can you build your positive attitude?

I recently went to hear Dr. Barbara Frederickson be interviewed about her research and new book called Positivity. She found that a 3 to 1 ratio of positive to negative feelings each day creates a flourishing life. When people are positive, they are open and they gather and attract more resources. Therefore, they are presented with more opportunities for growth and success. You can go to her website each day and take an emotional assessment that will calculate and track your positivity ratio so you can grow it over time.

Appreciative inquiry is a solution creation strategy used often in organizations to ask the right questions that will help grow appreciation of the individuals as well as glass-half-full thinking. Because it helps participants focus on and discuss times of appreciation, it heals wounds, builds consensus and gets buy-in for win-win solutions. Imagine this in contrast: Studying and analyzing poor morale in order to ‘fix’ it. The more we focus on it and get mired in it, the less likely we are to grow positive morale. We’ll get further by just focusing on the image we’re trying to bring into being. Learn more here.

In the ’70’s I was using the creative force of dance/movement therapy to build positive parts of the personality to replace negative parts. Now combined with my business experience, I’m developing the “Dance of Business” concepts. I will be getting a group together shortly to try out some of my experiential exercises. Please respond to this newsletter if you’d like to be included.

You’ve received some tools to create your own stimulus package. Take back your power and control your own destiny. Be creative and take advantage of the economic situation to help people who need help. Keep yourself positive and validate others with plenty of appreciation.