Sant Qiu’s Speed Profit Blog

In a crisis, most businesses stop their promotional activities. Their focus is to cut down on expenses and possible losses. A lot of the times, they forgot that what helped them arrive to where they are today, more often than not, is their focus on growth, plus a healthy appetite for risk-taking. I’m not talking about gambling, but calculated risk-taking that is the bedrock of entrepreneurship.

This presents a very unique situation… a very rare opportunity for those who can recognise it. Just imagine, while most of your competitors are cutting down their marketing, and everyone is shrinking, you can buck the trend by ramping up your marketing. This will help you increase your market share and even dominate your niche.

In a boom market, everyone is actively marketing. Even though the target market might be bigger, but competition is much more fierce. Your target market has a lot of alternatives and options to choose from. However, in a downturn, while the market probably shrink, there are also much less competition! When you’re the only one actively marketing your products/service, you will definitely gain bigger market share.

Not only that. In a downturn, media owners (TV, radio, newspaper, etc) tend to offer better discounts to keep people advertising. (By the way, I’ve never paid retail price for any advertising before. You should not either.) Not only that, service providers such as ad agencies, designers, printers, flyer distributors, etc, will be much more flexible with prices as their services are normally the first ones that got cut. It is the buyers’ market. With a little negotiation you can get really great deals.

So, with the same amount of money, you probably can get more and achieve more compared to when times are booming. So, expanding in a crisis can be a very smart thing to do.

We are in the process of interviewing the top entrepreneurs who will be featured in our upcoming book. If you like our previous book Secrets To Dominate Your Niche, I think you will really love this one as well.

On top of having more strategies, tactics and great contents, we have full-length case studies from businesses that are doing over $1 million to those which are doing over $10 million to those that are doing over $100 million.

And I personally grill these CEOs. Over the years, they have done interviews with the media. So they are “trained” to give media-friendly, politically-correct, safe answers… But that’s not we want. We want the real hard-core truth. The exact mindset, strategies and tactics they used to get to where they are today… even if it’s all due to luck (highly unlikely!)

So I have to peel through layers of those safe (and boring) answers. In fact, a few of them were caught of guard with my dogged persistency by asking the same question many different ways in response to some media-friendly answer. (I can see their eyes expressed a little shock. They were probably thinking “no journalists have asked that questions before!”)  But after a while, invariably, I got them to reveal the real gems. They shared with me things that they have not shared with any other interviewers before.

Here’s your chance…

So, since a huge reason for writing this book is for you, the readers, I’d like to give you the chance to ask these entrepreneurs your questions.

What are your 2 most burning questions you want to ask these top entrepreneurs about success?

Post your 2 questions in the comment box below and I will do my best to get them to answer your questions. Obviously, we already have a whole bunch of questions for them, but we don’t want to miss anything that you might have wanted to know. We will then include their answers in the book itself.

Cheers.

We have been working on a few interesting and exciting projects. One of the exciting projects we are doing is a follow up of our National Bestselling book “Secrets To Dominate Your Niche” we published last year.

When we published Dominate Your Niche, we (my co-author, Thomas Fernandez, and I) were already considering to do our next book. But since we were both busy with our individual businesses we didn’t really put a timeline to it. However, since the release of Dominate Your Niche, we have been getting a lot of rave reviews and positive feedback about it. So we thought the time is right to release a follow up book.

With the new book we wanted to achieve a few objectives. Among them:

• share strategies on how to overcome the economic crisis and even profit from it,
• include more full-length case studies (a favourite among readers of our previous book),
• share more in-depth strategies on growing your business,
• show how to bounce back from set-backs, even if it is a severe one,
• and many more…

On top of that, we also wanted to do our part to encourage entrepreneurship locally and in the region. It’s our way to contribute back to the society. With that in mind, we set out and search for successful entrepreneurs in their niches. We invited them to be featured in our upcoming book. It is a win-win as we get to openly share their success secrets to the readers, while they get to expose their brand to the masses.

We are happy to have received wonderful responses from well-known entrepreneurs and brands. Some of them are over 10 million dollar companies. One is even over 100 million dollar company! We will share more about the companies in a later post.

But here, we would like to ask for your feedback. We have 3 book cover designs that we are considering. We’d like your opinion on them. I won’t explain too much on the reasoning behind the design as on the bookshelves, the general public will react just based on what they see, without prior knowledge of what it is about. So here’s how to judge them:

Imagine you’re in the bookstore and looking at the shelves. Which one grabs your attention and compels you to find out more/even buy it. The most important thing is attention grabbing.

Cover #1:

Cover #2:

Cover #3:

Let me know your choice (the one that GRABS your ATTENTION and makes you want to find out more/buy) by leaving a comment in the comment box below. It would be great if you can include your reasoning and additional thoughts/comments.

Looking forward to hear from you and thanks in advance.