No B.S. Business Success By Dan S. Kennedy
These are my personal book notes of No B.S. Business Success by the author and marketing legend Dan S. Kennedy.
My book notes on No B.S. Sales Success from the same author can be found here.
Let’s dive in.
Facts
- Title: No B.S. Business Success
- Subtitle: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Tough & Spirited Guide
- Author: Dan S. Kennedy
- Author’s website: nobsinnercircle.com
- First published: 2004
- Type: non fiction
- Genre: marketing / sales
- Rating: 5/5
- Recommended: Yes (Hell, Yeah!)
The purpose of being an entrepreneur is to get really, really rich, and reward yourself for taking on all the risk and responsibility with exactly the kind of life and lifestyle you want.
- Dan S. Kennedy
Table Of Contents Of The Book
- Foreword by Brian Tracy
- Preface
- Chapter 1 - The Decision and Determination to Succeed
- Chapter 2 - The Real Entrepreneurial Experience: A No B.S. Report from the Front Lines
- Chapter 3 - How Do You Know If You Have A Really Good Idea?
- Chapter 4 - Positioning Yourself and Your Business for Maximum Success
- Chapter 5 - How Entrepreneurs _Really _Make Money - Big Money!
- Chapter 6 - How to Create Exciting Sales and Marketing Breakthroughs
- Chapter 7 - Why and How to Sell Your Way Through Life
- Chapter 8 - Key People for Your Company
- Chapter 9 - Working with Lawyers and Accountants
- Chapter 10 - Why Entrepreneurs Aren’t Managers - And What You Can Do About It
- Chapter 11 - How to Manage Your Cash Flow
- Chapter 12 - How to Achieve Peak Productivity
- Chapter 13 - How Entrepreneurs Attract Good Luck
- Chapter 14 - Staying Sane in an Insane World
- Chapter 15 - Why and How to Build Your Own Mini Conglomerate
- Chapter 16 - Using Your Business as a Path to Financial Independence
- Chapter 17 - How to Get a Business Out of Trouble
- Chapter 18 - A No B.S. Report on the Internet and Other Technology
- Afterword
- A Look at the Author’s Business Activities
- Resource Directory
- Eternal Truths
Key Concepts & Ideas
How well you can take medicine - deal with reality - has a great deal to do with how successful you are as an entrepreneur.
Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.
- James Allen
I have seen people succeed under the most improbable conditions.
I’ve also seen people who have everything going for them still manage to screw it up.
In all of these cases, it’s the person making the difference.
That’s why there really are no business successes or failures; there are people successes and people failures.
Only by making a decision and acting on it can you get into action and move forward.
Motion beats meditation.
- Gary Halbert
Successful entrepreneurs learn to be much more assertive, proactive, and creative in making decisions to change things as they prefer, to make things happen.
If you are to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to break free of your old reacting and responding mode and switch to the assertive, proactive mode.
You have to reject the entire idea of limited choices.
It’s amazing how people spend their lives in prisons entirely of their own making, the key dangling right there in the lock, no jailer in sight.
- Dan S. Kennedy
The reason why so many new businesses fail is that the owners are unable to leave their old attitudes behind.
Earl Nightingale brilliantly summarized all this:
“We become what we think about most.”
If you are going to become an exceptionally successful entrepreneur, that is what you must think about most.
If you observe any successful entrepreneur, you’ll find, for them, work is play.
I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living.
- Richard Branson
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must set aside your neediness for acceptance from others.
Immunity to criticism is a “secret” shared by all the highly successful entrepreneurs that I know.
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to set aside your “Book of Excuses” once and for all.
Making money as an entrepreneur and making excuses are mutually exclusive, wholly incompatible.
The sooner you arrive at accepting 100% responsibility for everything, the more successful you’ll be.
Go take a look in the mirror.
There’s the man or woman - the only man or woman - who can make you happy, thin, rich, famous, or whatever it is that you aspire to.
Dr. Phil can’t make you thin, McDonald’s doesn’t make you fat.
I think one of the secrets to success is that, no matter what, you have to crawl out from under, set aside, and ignore all the bureaucratic B.S., the million little irritations and problems, even the crises, in order to keep the process of getting, serving, and satisfying customers as your number-one priority.
After all, if it was too easy, everybody would do it, and it would be devalued.
Every “overnight success” knows there’s no such thing.
The need to shake it off, regroup, bounce back, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again is universal and reoccurring in the entrepreneurial experience.
There’s a sign on my office door that reads, ‘Whatever it takes.’
- Dan S. Kennedy
Entrepreneurial life is the solving of the never-ending stream of problems.
The characteristic that tends to distinguish the winners from the losers is the relentless conversion of problems to opportunities, negatives to positives.
The big money in the world is made in sales and marketing.
Nobody gets rich dusting shelves, changing light bulbs, keeping books, or managing employees.
Yet I’m amazed at how many entrepreneurs let such things suck up all their time, focused on everything and anything but sales and marketing.
So let’s get this straight from the start:
The place for you to direct your time, energy, creativity, common sense, hard work, and resources is marketing.
In fact, the first quantum leap from ordinary good-job-type income to big entrepreneur-type income occurs very rapidly after the business owner makes the intellectual, emotional, and actual switch from ‘doer’ of his ‘thing’ to ‘marketer’ of his ‘thing.’
- Dan S. Kennedy
The worst marketing sin you can commit is to be boring.
Boring is boring.
Leap-out-at-you, outrageous, fun, and interesting is what it is.
People are people, in the boardroom on the 50th floor or on the floor in the living room.
The Author On Breakthrough Strategies
- Breakthrough Strategy 1: Find a Niche Market and Exploit It - In niches are riches.
- Breakthrough Strategy 2: Find a New Sales Medium and Let It Make You Rich
- Breakthrough Strategy 3: Create a New Type of Guarantee and Confound Your Competition
- Breakthrough Strategy 4: Deliver Exceptional Service and Earn Word-of-Mouth Advertising
- Breakthrough Strategy 5: Seek Strategic Marketing Alliances
- Breakthrough Strategy 6: Get Professional Prowess on a Percentage
Dan S. Kennedy On The Two Most Important Sale You’ll Ever Make
I believe the most important sale you’ll ever make in your life is selling yourself on selling.
The day you commit to a life of selling can be the day that turns your life around.
When you start viewing your activities in the context of making sales, you’ll get much more done, much faster, and much more effectively.
The second most important sale is selling you on you.
Do you really believe you have what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur?
How you feel about yourself and how you see yourself (self-image) combine to regulate what you permit yourself to do and be, much like the thermostat on the wall regulates temperature.
No one can outperform his or her own self-esteem or self-image.
The willingness to do whatever it takes is infinitely more important than knowing everything there is to know about how to do it.
- Dan S. Kennedy
It’s impossible to overemphasize the deliberate achievement of peak productivity.
It is the secret of secrets to getting rich.
Closing Thoughts
My book notes only cover small parts of the book.
So if you like what you read, please consider buying the book from the author.
Thank you for reading and stay awesome,
Tim for Online Business Dude
PS: Start And Grow Your Own, Profitable Online Business From Scratch, Step-by-Step, Today!