Since Spain started exporting oranges and other citrus fruit at the turn of the 20th century, it has developed a robust infrastructure producing fruit stickers, paper wrappers, and custom-printed fruit crates.These little gems of graphic design are now the subject of a new exhibition in Madrid. Featuring more than 300 Spanish brands, the aptly named Frutas de Diseño (Design Fruits) shines a light on the colorful history of fruit branding in Spain from the 1950s onward and the wild variety of graphics that have been used to market fruits there and abroad.

The World's tiniest Canvas for graphic designing

The use of branding on Spanish produce dates back to the country’s golden age of citrus exporting in the 1920s and 1930s. “They realized if they exported oranges with a name, they would sell more,” says Leandro Lattes, the creative director of Spanish design studio El Vivero, which curated the exhibition.Valencia oranges are famous around the world today, but when the export was booming, having a name like “Infinita” or “La Soculente” (The Succulent) helped businesses, often small family-run affairs, stand out from the crowd.

History of Branding

brands would hire artists to draw elaborate illustrations on the protective wrappers and sometimes even sign them. (After oranges were coated in wax to reduce spoiling, he says paper wrappers became all about the marketing.) To this day, some “Soculente” oranges come in a striking paper wrapper that portrays a slender hand complete with red nail polish and a sparkling ring holding half an orange over a juicer.

Noteworthy Designs

After World War II, the intricate illustrations gave way to more abstract graphics that made use of typography and striking colors. In recent years, some companies have continued to update their brand identity.The 1960s brand Filosófo, for example, once sported a paper wrapper with concentric circles, illustrated stars, and a serif typeface. Today, it features a more contemporary typeface and a pristine, watercolor-like rendition of oranges adorned with blossoms; the stickers are shaped like leaves).

Typography and Colors

Over the past few years, some companies have been experimenting with lasers, etching numbers, and brand names on the skin on the actual fruit. While in its early days, the practice might gain steam in countries like France, which banned disposable plastic packaging and produce stickers across 30 fruits and vegetables in January. (According to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, the ban may threaten the United States’ exports thereof stickered sweet potatoes and grapefruits, which together amount to $28 million in annual sales.)

The Future

A new exhibition celebrates the grocery-store gems, which have been around for almost a century.  


marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

product

Product & Design

The delightful history of fruit stickers, the world’s tiniest canvases for graphic design

Incubation: build your minimum viable product (MVP) in close partnership with potential customers to ensure you are solving a real problem with a credible solution.Iteration: have customers using your MVP and are rapidly improving the product. Success at this stage is rooted in customer insights – both qualitative and quantitative – not marketing excellenceScale: have product/market fit and are trying to grow your customer base. The goal of this phase is to build a portfolio of tactics that maximize market penetration with minimal – or at least profitable – cost

What growth stage is your B2B startup?

Success is rooted in growing lifetime value through retention and margin, maximizing funnel conversion to efficiently convert leads to customers, and finding repeatable tactics

Leverage your network. This is particularly valuable for founders who are building a product based on their own past experience.Cold calling (or showing up in person). Knock on doors, make phone calls. You have to get used to hearing “no”, but you’d be surprised how often you can get people to try your product once you have a personal connection. A big advantage of paid digital is that you get results immediately.Paid digital. Facebook and Google make up 90%+ of all new online ad spend these 2 channels are generally the best place to start testing online advertising

How do you find B2B customers?  1/2

Paid physical. It’s more expensive to get in front of each person, but you can choose exactly who gets your mail so you only show up in front of people who qualify for and want your product.Events. For almost any industry, there are events and trade shows where you can find customers.Content Marketing and SEO. Content marketing means writing articles and creating content to get in front of people searching for information about your product category.

B2B customer acquisition tactics 2/2

For Incubation…In this stage, you’ll be doing a lot of manual outreach to get your first paying customers, and improving the product based on feedback. The channels above most often used in this stage are leveraging your network, cold calling, cold email/LinkedIn outreach, and going to events.You don’t need much marketing budget in the innovation period, assuming you’re using your own labor for all this outreach. $500 per month to afford tools like Clearbit (to get lists), Reply.IO (To help with cold email) and LinkedIn Pro (To send messages on LinkedIn) should be fine.

When do you use which channels? 

In this stage, you want to get more strangers outside of your network and social circles to try your product.This means an expanded focus on cold calling, email, and outreach. It also means you can start paid digital ads on Facebook and Google. This will help you learn more about what messaging brings in potential customers. For instance, you can find out things like which of your product’s features customers like more by putting different features in different ads and seeing which ad gets higher click-through rates.

For Iteration…

Paid digital, paid physical and content/SEO are the three channels that offer the greatest scale for B2B companies. If you build a strong sales team, cold email and cold calling can both scale, but this involves building out a serious sales organization.The easiest channel to start testing is paid digital because it has the fastest time to get results and the smallest investment needed. You still need a minimum of $5k test to spend in paid digital, and in reality closer to $20k, to get a good idea of long-term cost per conversion.

For Scaling…

Generally, if you’re targeting companies with 10 or fewer employees, use ad messaging that directly promotes your product. For any kind of ad you build, use the SUCCESS framework.If you’re targeting companies with 10-10,000+ employees, use marketing messaging that promotes resources closely related to your project. Resources are eBooks, guides, tools, and things that are useful to customers that are related to the product you’re selling but are not actually your product.<ul><li>Simple</li><li>Unexpected</li><li>Credible</li><li>Concrete</li><li>Emotional</li><li>Stories</li></ul>

What kind of marketing messaging should you use?

<ul><li>Create an automated sales <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/16/how-should-b2b-startups-think-about-growth-not-like-b2c/#:~:text=What%20is%20a,days%20later%2C%20etc.">nurture flow</a> that comes from a sales account.</li><li>Create a marketing nurture funnel – usually with email – for people who fall out of the sales funnel after a month. A marketing nurture funnel is like the sales funnel, but is usually less “salesy”. A good example would be subscribing someone to a useful monthly newsletter.</li><li>Create a task-based system to organize sales calls. The faster you call people after they submit their lead information, the more likely they will convert. </li></ul>

How do you build your sales funnel?

<ul><li>Lifetime value – Most people do this by calculating out monthly churn (how many customers leave every month) and using that to determine how long customers will keep paying for your product.</li><li>Cost of your sales team – Some B2B products require extensive human engagement. In such cases, marketing will need lower CAC thresholds.</li><li>Vintage periods – For many B2B products, the answer is anywhere from 7 days to 7 months. To calculate the return on your ad spending, you have to track what results came from a given month’s spend, no matter when those sales close down the line. </li></ul>

How should you calculate and use the ROI of your marketing budget?

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of B2B companies apply ineffective demand generation strategies to their startup. If you’re a B2B founder trying to grow your business, this guide is for you...

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

startup

Startups

How should B2B startups think about growth? Not like B2C – TechCrunch

Because B2B transactions tend to be larger and vendor relationships longer-lasting, B2B companies must rely more on relationships and partnerships to expand into new markets.Entire business models may be built on partnerships that allow companies to serve customers they otherwise couldn’t.

Expanding into Business-to-Business (B2B) takes more than just opening a new page on your website

Consumer decisions can be based on emotions, personal preferences, and peer influence. Decision-making in businesses is much more complex.More people have to weigh in, and there’s a strong emphasis on desired business results, such as reduced expenses and overall benefit to the client’s company.Emotion really has little to do with solar when it’s a business decision.

How Will You Appeal to Customers?

Both consumer- and business-facing companies have to pay attention to the fundamentals and realities of today’s environment. Meaning, technology is a critical factor. More specifically, a company’s digital marketing, web presence, social media, and SEO efforts must work together seamlessly to translate search <a href="https://www.boostability.com/seo-from-rankings-to-revenue-infographic">rankings into increased revenue</a>.It’s all about presence, traffic, lead generation, and converting a prospect into a customer—whether that customer is an individual consumer or a business.

What is Similar Between B2C and B2B?

Now is a great time for B2C companies to expand into the growing B2B marketplace, but success will depend on how well you understand the differences between these two market segments.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

Here's How B2C Companies Can Break Into B2B Markets

A startup is a company designed to grow fast…The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

The key to good “Cold Email Outreach” is not to come across as SPAM. Instead of trying to push a product or send a marketing message, keep the emails short and ask for help. Also, make sure you’re emailing the right person.<ol><li>Scrape lists of companies off the web </li><li>Create a list of all possible “title targets” </li><li>Provide the list of companies and title targets to a Virtual Assistant</li><li>Give the VA an email finder tool like <a href="http://sellhack.com/">SellHack</a> or <a href="https://www.toofr.com/">Toofr</a> so they can get you further details.Email Name etc</li><li>Clean the data with a tool like <a href="https://kickbox.io/">Kickbox</a> to eliminate any bad emails</li><li>Create sequenced email marketing campaigns</li></ol>

Cold Email Outreach

Keep it personal, short, and non-promotional. The subject line “{first name} — quick question” generally yields a 70%+ Open Rate after 3 touches (3 emails).Email content should be extremely brief: 2–3 sentences. Avoid formal language and business buzzwords.Personally, I find that taking the “product research” or “feedback” angle works pretty well. Gets people on the phone or clicking the link, and honestly, you should be just as happy getting feedback as getting the sale.Regardless of your strategy, AB test your messaging to see what happens to your Response Rate and CTR

Content of the email

The goal of the email is not to sell your product or your idea; generally people don’t care what you’re pitching. The goal is to get them to click, or to get them on the phone. Emails should be composed with this goal in mind

<ul><li>Brainstorm topics that would be useful or interesting to your users</li><li>Think of how that content intersects with your product</li><li>Write down the search terms that your users would search to find this info</li><li>Use Google's Keyword Planner</li><li>Cross-reference with Google Trends to find new terms that are gaining popularity</li><li>Create a content plan of articles on helpful topics using the best keywords</li><li>When you write, don't be too promotional about your product.</li></ul>

Content Creation

Start by asking yourself a few questions:<ul><li>What products/companies exist in your space that have similar client bases, but are non-competitive?</li><li>Is there a group of professionals (i.e. marketers, developers, designers, data analysts) that would find your product particularly useful and advocate for your product?</li><li>Are their agencies or other resellers of products and services that have clients who would benefit from your product?</li><li>What can you offer as a partner? Would your product drive more engagement for them? Is your client base valuable? Can you offer commissions on sales? </li></ul>

Partnerships, Affiliate Marketing, and Marketplaces

<ul><li>Set up an incentive program for selling each other's product</li><li>Find a deal that makes sense for both parties</li><li>One time payout: A lump sum of money is paid to the affiliate per conversion</li><li>Recurring: If you have a subscription plan with your client, you pass a percentage of the monthly or annual subscription along to affiliate for a period of time</li><li>Initial payout and recurring: A combination of the two aforementioned.</li></ul>

Affiliate Marketing

The process for gaining your first few clients isn’t so intuitive when you have a product that is less than a week old, and a bank account that’s at least several zeros lower than that of…

strategy

Strategy

How to Acquire Initial Clients for your B2B Startup

Determine your "change champions" - That same IT manager may see the advantages of certification programs for things like <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/training/">cloud management, Azure, or AWS</a>, and you can incentivize them by offering these to their staff for free.your "best practice": spend time doing your research and building the persona of your change champions to ensure that your teams hit all of the pain points, incentives, keywords they use, and how they determine success

Know Your Change Champions

<ul><li>Target customers are likely to adopt XaaS quickly and start with a small-to-medium-sized customer.</li><li>Be Flexible and Stay Ahead of Customer Expectations</li><li>Respond to customer feedback swiftly and be open to adopting requests</li><li>Package Your Offering Based on Customer Need</li><li>Tailor your product/services so that your offering is not bloated with features the customer does not need or won’t use</li></ul>

Choose Your First Customers to Migrate Carefully

<ul><li>Create a comprehensive roadmap with clear goals, milestones, use cases, and plans for your internal team to become transformation champions</li><li>Focus on Long-Term Solutions Instead of Short-Term Tradeoffs</li><li>Utilize your change agents to train your teams on demonstrating the benefits of the transformation to your partners and customers</li><li>Redesign Your Teams for Success</li></ul>

Provide an Infrastructure That Ensures Your Team's Long-term Success

How to Grow Customers While Transitioning to XaaS

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">When implementing a UBP model, prioritize allowing for maximum usage flexibility and pricing transparency for your customer. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Create the option for customers to commit to your product for an extended time period for a pricing discount.  </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Emphasize the benefits of UBP to your investors and get them excited about usage-based metrics. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Don’t hesitate to automate financial processes when you are ready to scale.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Don’t let your financial team exist in a vacuum. Collaborating with outside teams will help your team do their job more accurately and be prepared for change.</li></ul>

Usage-Based Pricing(UBP)

Usage-based pricing removed a lot of friction for adoption.For customers, getting started is easy and with an emphasis on flexible usage, staying with the company becomes a no-brainer.Pricing transparency is also a huge selling point.

Removing Friction By Being Transparent

Answering questions about what the top line is going to grow to as new logos are added or as existing logos expand can be more challenging with UBP.

Manage Expectations for Predictability

<ul><li>Your product and platform's intrinsic virality gives your investors confidence in continual top-line growth.</li><li>ARR is the metric that communicates how Datadog is performing today.</li><li>Usage-based annual recurring revenue (UARR) measures usage growth over time with any vertical customer.</li></ul>

Sell Your Investors on UBP With Redefined Metrics

Financial processes need to clearly present different commitment and drawdown plans and track customer-specific contract terms.Whereas seat-based models can implement a third-party customer billing platform with relative ease, these billing platforms cannot readily account for all the features.

Automate Financial Processes to Scale

<ul><li>Pricing will change with a UBP model.</li><li>The finance team has to be able to adapt and move as these new insights arrive.</li><li>Take proactive measures to understand potential changes and prepare your teams for them.</li></ul>

What The Finance Team Needs To Do

I joined Datadog as VP Finance back in 2015 when the company was still very small. Back then, the company had about 100 employees, was making around $20

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Implementing Usage-Based Pricing: What Your Financial Teams Need to Know - OpenView

You have an idea for a new product, and now you want to bring it to market. You may not think it would be easy because of your limited budget and experience. The internet is an excellent tool for research, but there is also value in visiting brick and mortar retailers and befriending store managers. In addition, trade shows are great for doing market research and relationship building. Before you start spending your time and money trying to commercialize your idea, you need to ask yourself some pointed questions.

Bringing an idea to market

Market size: How large is the potential market for your new idea? Put otherwise, how many consumers may be interested?  Competition: How saturated is the market for similar products? Too much competition can make it extremely difficult to succeed. However, identifying products that have been selling for a while without innovation or improvement could be worthwhile. Value proposition: Does your new idea offer a benefit that consumers will want to pay for? Amazon reviews can help to identify the benefits that consumers are actively looking for.

Market size, Competition, and Value proposition

Manufacturing: Can your new idea be manufactured using existing machinery? YouTube can help in researching alternative manufacturing methods. Cost: Will the retail price of your new idea be low enough to stand up to the competition? Protection: How will you protect your ownership of your idea with intellectual property? Patenting can be very costly.

Manufacturing, Cost, and Protection

Education: Do people understand when you explain your concept to them? Educating the consumer can be expensive and time-consuming.Line extensions: One new idea doesn't make a business. Consider how you can expand your idea into a line of products.Profit margin: After all the expenses required to bring your product to market, can you live on the money left over? Experience: Do you have the necessary skills to launch a new idea, and can you build a team to help you?Money: Are you prepared financially?

Education, line extensions, profit margins

Crowdfunding to raise money.Test your idea while raising the funds you need to get started.Joining a startup. It can be enlightening to work with others who have skills that you don't.Focus on licensing your idea instead of venturing. Licensing is like renting. Instead of you doing all the work, your licensee takes on the responsibility of manufacturing, marketing, and fulfillment. The company should have great distribution.

Ways to mitigate risk

Ready to go all in on your new idea? Make sure you know the answers to these questions first. 

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

Can Your New Idea Compete? 11 Criteria to Help You Assess

Useful = allows a user to accomplish an objective in a certain contextUsable = useful + enablement of the user to perform an actionUsed = useful + enablement + adoption. The ultimate goal of a product.

Useful,  Usable and Used have different meanings

Some questions to guide<ul><li>Life goals – what does the user aspire to in their life? How might your product get them to that goal? What would motivate a user to choose your product over a competing product that achieves this objective?</li><li>Completion goals – what do users expect to happen at the end of using your product? What can you measure when this takes place?</li><li>Behavioral goals – when users undertake achieving the goal without using your product, how do they do it? How can your product mimic that process so that the product is familiar to them? </li></ul>

Ease of Use

Oftentimes, usability is mistaken with user experience, but in reality, it is just a part of it. Usability, on its own, is also not only ease of use, but rather a sum of multiple aspects: <ul><li>effectiveness - the ability to complete a task</li><li>efficiency - effectiveness + speed</li><li>engagement - looking right (typography, navigation)</li><li>error tolerance - preventing users to do errors</li><li>ease of learning - appropriate onboarding on a product or learning about new releases</li></ul>

Usability

Imagine a product has 7 different buttons, that whenever pressed with low or high intensity, they produce different results for users: <ul><li>Useful - has a purpose in the user's life</li><li>Usable - enables the purpose of a product to be brought to reality</li><li>Findable - the product and its content are easy to find</li><li>Credible - has built trust that it can accomplish the promised purpose</li><li>Desirable - good brand, image, identity, aesthetics and emotional design</li><li>Accessible -  a product's ability to be used by as many people as possible (e.g. impaired people)</li><li>Valuable (its production costs don't outweigh its usefulness)</li></ul>

The 7 Factors of User Experience

<ul><li>Top Management Support: Getting resources from top management to test innovative ideas</li><li>Market Orientation: Ability to conduct user and market research to bring them closer to the need of users</li><li>Technology: Suitable for the market selected</li><li>Knowledge management: Information sharing between teams helps bring down the knowledge silos</li><li> Development Strategies: Teams can negotiate and bring input to the roadmap</li><li> Development Speed: Being fast enough to provide value ahead of competitors</li><li> Development Process: Clear processes for design and development</li><li>Product Teams: Bringing different input for the product </li></ul>

Factors of success for new product development

Adoption is the ultimate goal of a product. For it to happen, the Product works with the marketing teams:<ul><li>Pre-Design Phase: Market research determines if the user base is large enough to make a product profitable; user research looks into its value & usability. </li><li>Design Phase: Designers ensure the product is desirable & usable, and marketers work to release news and build anticipation for the release.</li><li>Launch Phase & Beyond: Involve channel partners, distributors, influencers to spread the word; press releases, social media, free trials where possible. Get meaningful metrics to measure adoption.</li></ul>

Turning prospects into users

Appropriation can have two meanings: <ul><li>the usage of existing objects to create different contexts than originally thought (e.g. dressing in clothes from another culture)</li><li>the usage of a product in an unintended way  (e.g. using a block of cement instead of a hammer with a nail). </li></ul>It is desired that companies look to integrate their products in other contexts to attract more users, but should pay attention to copyrights issues.

Appropriation

There are different stages of a product and different strategies apply to each of them: <ol><li>Market Introduction: High costs, low sales, little competition, customer education, marketing investment, low profitability</li><li>Growth: Declining costs, higher sales volumes, profitability appears, brand awareness, competitors appear</li><li>Maturity: Declining costs, sales at peak, more competitors, brand differentiation needed, profitability declines</li><li>Decline: costs not optimal, sales decline, prices fall, profitability depends on efficiency of production and distribution</li></ol>

Using the Product Lifecycle

There are different types of adopters at each product stage:<ol><li>innovators: like taking high risks and have a good discretionary income. Naturally knowledgeable in the product space. Marketing and UX teams should identify them before launch to design for mass scale</li><li>early adopters: influential, thought leaders in the product space, educated in social media, with high level of education and reasonable income</li><li>early majority: risk averse, like to compare products before buying, lower income than the first 2 </li><li>late majority: skeptical, like to use trial and tested products</li><li>laggards: don't like change</li></ol>

Types of product adopters

Having a used product is more important than product market fit and usability

What You’ll Learn: Why adoption and appropriation matter to a product’s success. How to place adoption and appropriation in context with UX and usability work.....

problemsolving

Problem Solving

Get Your Product Used: Adoption and Appropriation

<ol><li>The Sidewalk is living for today rather than the future.</li><li>The Slowlane is sacrificing today for tomorrow, The Slowlane takes decades.( Old age )</li><li>The Fastlane is about starting a business, The Fastlane is about retiring while you can fully enjoy it. (Young age)</li></ol>

Sidewalk Vs Slowlane Vs Fast lane

Stop throwing money at another pair of shoes or skincare product, and instead, switch into producer mode. Look at the packaging.How does it feel? What does it do to make you want to buy it? Which words are they using in the ad?Take off your consumer glasses and be open and curious about the world of producing and you’ll be well prepared to start your own business.

Produce, Don’t Consume:

<ol><li>Meaningful relationships with friends and family.</li><li>Being healthy and physically fit.</li><li>Freedom (where the money comes in).</li></ol>

Wealth Trinity

<ul><li>Your roadmap makes up your financial belief system.</li><li>Your vehicle is you. No one can drive the journey but you.</li><li>Your roads are the financial pathways you travel.</li><li>Your Speed is execution and your ability to go from idea to implementation.</li></ul>Note: Sidewalk to poorness, Slowline to mediocrity, and the Fastline to wealth.

Wealth Is Not A Road, But A Road Trip

<ul><li>When you consistently act and bombard the world with your efforts, stuff happens. And that stuff? Sidewalkers interpret it as luck, when it is nothing more than action engaged with better probabilities.</li><li>When you’re accountable to your choices, your alter behavior in the future and take the driver’s seat of your life.</li></ul>

Process Creates Events That Others See As Luck

<ul><li>Money is your army. The more you have, the more they will fight for freedom.</li><li>Thinking never made anyone rich, unless that thinking manifests itself into consistent action toward application of laws that work.</li><li>Live below your means with intent to expand your means.</li><li>Slowlaners seek to minimize expenses while the Fastlaner seeks to maximize income and asset values.</li><li>You have to build a great product or service that starts to produce passive income, even when you’re sleeping.</li></ul>

Freedom = Money

….states that “the more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and magnitude, the richer you will become.”Or“Affect millions and make millions.”<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Scale (quantity) creates millions</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Magnitude (quality) creates millions.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Scale (quantity) and magnitude (quality) creates billions.</li></ul>

The Law Of Effection

<ul><li>People don’t choose to be poor. They make poor decisions that slowly assemble into a poorness puzzle.</li><li>The smallest choices made in your daily life create habits and lifestyle that forms process — they are the ones that can make the biggest impact. You can’t decide to “go Fastlane” because that itself is just an event. A Fastlane process is hundreds of choices.</li><li>Value your time poorly and you will be poor.</li></ul>

Choices

<ul><li>The purpose of education within the Fastlane is to amplify the power of the money tree and business system.</li><li>Skills and expertise are waiting just for you. No one drops a book on your lap and gifts knowledge. You have to seek it, process it, and then use it. The acquisition and application of knowledge will make you rich.</li></ul>

Purpose Of Education 

Businesses that provide value win. Businesses that solve problems win profits.You and your business attract money when you stop being selfish and turn your business’s focus from the needs of yourself to the needs of other people.

Hard Work And Commitment Separates The Winners From Losers

Your vehicle needs an ignition, a starter, something that compels you to jump out of bed in the morning challenged to tackle the day. That ignition is passion. You need a passion for something greater. It is different for everybody, but when you find it, you will do anything for it.

Passion

Solve other people’s problems and you will solve your own money problems!Define the Lifestyle: What do you want?Assess the Cost: How much do your dreams cost?Set the Targets: Set the money system and business income targets.Make It Real: Fund it and open it!

Four Steps To Starting:

<ul><li>The owner of an idea is not he who imagines it, but he who executes it.</li><li>The speed of the Fastlane is growing a business exponentially and taking advantage of exploding net income and asset value.</li><li>The key to failure is trying to please everybody.</li><li>Your product/service should standout in the crowd.</li><li>Focus on your business, which is to innovate and win over the hearts and minds of your customers. And when you fill needs and your army of customers grows, something suddenly happens: Everyone follows you.</li></ul>

Innovate And Win Over The Hearts

<ul><li>People are loyal to brands and relationships, not corporations or businesses.</li><li>The first step at building a brand is to have a Unique Selling Proposition or a USP (unique benefit exhibited by a company, service, product or brand that enables it to stand out from competitors).</li><li>If you can arouse emotions in your audience, you will be more likely to convince them to buy.</li></ul>

Businesses Survive, Brands Thrive!

The Fastlane is about building a better system, a better contraption, a better product, or a better “something” that will leverage your work. In the Slowlane, you are the source of heavy lifting, while in the Fastlane, you construct a system that does it for you.

Choose Fastlane !!

“Instead of digging for gold, sell shovels. Instead of taking a class, offer a class. Instead of borrowing money, lend it. Instead of taking a job, hire for jobs. Instead of taking a mortgage, hold a mortgage. Break free from consumption, switch sides, and reorient to the world as producer.”

Go to school, get good grades, graduate, get a good job, save 10%, invest in the stock market…then, someday, when you are, oh, 65 years old, you will be rich but you can’t enjoy at that age…

Is the financial plan of mediocrity -- a dream-stealing, soul-sucking dogma known as "The Slowlane" your plan for creating wealth? You know how it goes; it sounds a lil something like this: "Go to school, get a good job, save 10% of your paycheck, buy a used car, cancel the movie channels, quit drinking expensive Starbucks mocha lattes, save and penny-pinch your life away, trust your life-savings to the stock market, and one day, when you are oh, say, 65 years old, you can retire rich." The mainstream financial gurus have sold you blindly down the river to a great financial gamble: You've been hoodwinked to believe that wealth can be created by recklessly trusting in the uncontrollable and unpredictable markets: the housing market, the stock market, and the job market. This impotent financial gamble dubiously promises wealth in a wheelchair -- sacrifice your adult life for a financial plan that reaps dividends in the twilight of life. Accept the Slowlane as your blueprint for wealth and your financial future will blow carelessly asunder on a sailboat of HOPE: HOPE you can find a job and keep it, HOPE the stock market doesn't tank, HOPE the economy rebounds, HOPE, HOPE, and HOPE. Do you really want HOPE to be the centerpiece for your family's financial plan? Drive the Slowlane road and you will find your life deteriorate into a miserable exhibition about what you cannot do, versus what you can. For those who don't want a lifetime subscription to "settle-for-less" and a slight chance of elderly riches, there is an alternative; an expressway to extraordinary wealth that can burn a trail to financial independence faster than any road out there. Why jobs, 401(k)s, mutual funds, and 40-years of mindless frugality will never make you rich young. Why most entrepreneurs fail and how to immediately put the odds in your favor. The real law of wealth: Leverage this and wealth has no choice but to be magnetized to you. The leading cause of poorness: Change this and you change everything. How the rich really get rich - and no, it has nothing to do with a paycheck or a 401K match. Why the guru's grand deity - compound interest - is an impotent wealth accelerator. Why the guru myth of "do what you love" will most likely keep you poor, not rich. And 250+ more poverty busting distinctions... Demand the Fastlane, an alternative road-to-wealth; one that actually ignites dreams and creates millionaires young, not old. Change lanes and find your explosive wealth accelerator. Hit the Fastlane, crack the code to wealth, and find out how to live rich for a lifetime.

books

Books

10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONIs the financial plan of mediocrity -- a dream-stealing, soul-sucking dogma known as &quot;The Slowlane&quot; your plan for creating wealth? You know how it goes; it sounds a lil something like this:&quot;Go to school, get a good job, save 10% of your paycheck, buy a used car, cancel the movie channels, quit drinking expensive Starbucks mocha lattes, save and penny-pinch your life away, trust your life-savings to the stock market, and one day, when you are oh, say, 65 years old, you can retire rich.&quot;The mainstream financial gurus have sold you blindly down the river to a great financial gamble: You've been hoodwinked to believe that wealth can be created by recklessly trusting in the uncontrollable and unpredictable markets: the housing market, the stock market, and the job market. This impotent financial gamble dubiously promises wealth in a wheelchair -- sacrifice your adult life for a financial plan that reaps dividends in the twilight of life. Accept the Slowlane as your blueprint for wealth and your financial future will blow carelessly asunder on a sailboat of HOPE: HOPE you can find a job and keep it, HOPE the stock market doesn't tank, HOPE the economy rebounds, HOPE, HOPE, and HOPE. Do you really want HOPE to be the centerpiece for your family's financial plan?Drive the Slowlane road and you will find your life deteriorate into a miserable exhibition about what you cannot do, versus what you can. For those who don't want a lifetime subscription to &quot;settle-for-less&quot; and a slight chance of elderly riches, there is an alternative; an expressway to extraordinary wealth that can burn a trail to financial independence faster than any road out there.Why jobs, 401(k)s, mutual funds, and 40-years of mindless frugality will never make you rich young. Why most entrepreneurs fail and how to immediately put the odds in your favor. The real law of wealth: Leverage this and wealth has no choice but to be magnetized to you.The leading cause of poorness: Change this and you change everything.How the rich really get rich - and no, it has nothing to do with a paycheck or a 401K match.Why the guru's grand deity - compound interest - is an impotent wealth accelerator.Why the guru myth of &quot;do what you love&quot; will most likely keep you poor, not rich. And 250+ more poverty busting distinctions...Demand the Fastlane, an alternative road-to-wealth; one that actually ignites dreams and creates millionaires young, not old. Change lanes and find your explosive wealth accelerator. Hit the Fastlane, crack the code to wealth, and find out how to live rich for a lifetime.

MJ DeMarco is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. MJ DeMarco has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. MJ DeMarco's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

MJ DeMarco

The Millionaire Fastlane

<ul><li>The management upskill begins with building new professional networks. All the studies mention a solid managerial approach will be the cornerstone of the Future of Work.</li><li>For this reason, managers must learn how to be great communicators and coaches to develop their team members through supportive and consultative behaviors before challenging them.</li><li>This is the only way to build upon the Maslow Pyramid to reach the ultimate levels: the collective sense of belonging, and the esteem and self-actualization needs. </li></ul>

Managament upskill and professional networks

When leaders believe in innovation to make the change happen, it’s called transformational leadership. They work on inspirational motivation while challenging their people with trust and respect. Many organizations went through this process successfully during the pandemic.Changing a culture to adapt to the virtual world is about giving a new meaning to the effort that transcends everyday problems.It can be addressing a new market segment with new customers, launching a new product, or simply serving customers better as an underlying purpose.

The hard work of changing company culture in the hybrid world

The majority of people redefined their professional success through work-life balance, mental health, and flexibility – the top three new priorities for most of us.

Redefining professional success

An example of best practice within the team is formalizing the values and expected behaviors in a team contract.<ul><li>For example, showing respect or giving the benefit of the doubt are compelling values in the virtual world to create a shared feeling of safety within the team.</li><li>It helps shut down and reprogram the “catastrophizing” cognitive bias that causes our brains to imagine the worst-case scenario, especially when limited communication or data is missing.</li></ul>It might be counterintuitive, but thinking about the worst doesn’t prepare you at all. Instead, it makes us continually feel bad.

Promote healthy mental behaviors and individual accountability

How upskilling helps businesses adapt to a rapidly changing labour market

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Leadership & Management

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Career

Upskilling: Preparing For The Future

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Corporate Culture

How to Upskill Management while Increasing Individual Accountability for an Inspiring Hybrid Culture

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