The family structure is changing but the same technology and opportunity that attacks old family values can be used to enhance new family bonds through small family businesses.
Our youngest daughter, Eleanor, was the keen entrepreneur. She wanted to work in our direct mail business before she could even read and write. When we told her she had to read before she could affix labels to the envelopes she asked… “don’t the numbers (zip codes) go on the bottom?” She could tell letters from numbers and had proudly figured out how to get the job done. It’s little wonder that she has an amazing business now as you’ll see below.
Ele wrote this note about a recent event in her family business. She has brought her husband and the families of her clients into her business! She wrote: Dad, I had one of my proudest work evenings ever last night at my end of term competition. The kids were outstanding and I was one proud principal. To top it off 10 of my students dads’ surprised the audience to a dance to ‘FAME’ at the end of the night. We had secretly been rehearsing them for 4 weeks and it was amazing! So entertaining and the dads were so ‘in time’… of course one of those dads was our very own Benjamin Marsden! What a long suffering and supportive husband I have-but actually I think he had the time of his life! He said after he felt quite famous and all the mums were asking who he was!! As you can see from the photo the dads looked every bit the part. Thankfully we got it all filmed so you can look forward to watching as soon as I get the footage from the videographer.
Technology creates enormous opportunity for families.
There is no doubt that technology and rapid change creates pressure on families today. First and foremost it attacks parental control. Mass media aimed at capturing and directing children’s attention bombard children every waking hour.
Economic pressures create medical, educational and social norms that channel family decisions towards areas of greater profits for insurance, big pharma and chemical agri businesses rather than better family choices.
The global economy creates family by creating opportunity further and further from home.
The U.S. divorce rate has more than doubled since the 1960s. The number of households headed by single or divorced women has increased by 46 percent since 1980. In 1977 almost 18 million children were living in single-parent homes in the United States. Today that number has experienced a 100 percent increase.
Violent confrontations among family members has grown. Approximately 2.8 million wives a year are beaten or abused by their husbands. Even more children are abused each year, physically, sexually, or through neglect, and at least 2,000 of them die of their injuries.
These pressures take place amidst growing economic stress. There was a record decline in family wealth between 2007 and 2010.
The median family’s net worth dropped 38.8 percent during the three-year period.
The family structure is changing but the same technology and opportunity that attack old family values can be used to enhance new family bonds through small family businesses.
American Express’s Open Forum for Small Businesses recently published this report showing benefits in a family business:
7 Advantages of a Family Business
If you’ve ever watched QVC, you probably know about Honora, the company that pioneered marketing high-quality pearls to the masses. The growth of the 64-year-old family business is legend in the gem industry. How did it get there?
A business analyst might cite Honora’s early alliance with China to bring freshwater pearls to the West, its 20-year branding campaign, or its total focus on freshwater pearls, even to the point of risking a third of its revenues.
Those are all great aspects of Honora’s story, but ask CEO Joel Schechter, whose father started the business, and he’ll tell you the real competitive advantage: family. Schechter’s sons, sisters and other family members work in the business.
In a recent interview, Schechter shared some benefits to running a family business.
1. Speed. ”In a family business, we can think about something in the morning and begin working on it in the afternoon,” says Schechter. After all, the family is a natural team. And in the pearl business, where new designs must get to market fast, speed is everything.
2. Solidarity. Competing agendas make for harsh office politics. Fights happen in the family, too, but when the goal is to help the family business win, turf battles diminish. “We’re much faster than companies that have to go through a more politicized process of getting things done.”
3. Nature plus nurture. Some of us are just born to entrepreneurial risk-taking — so it’s likely our kids are, too. When kids grow up in the business, they absorb the skills it takes to succeed. Schechter began working in the family business as a boy. “I can tell you as a son of the owner, you really get to know the life that your parent leads. You really understand the trials and tribulations, and what it took them to make a living for you.” Icing on the cake: Kids can see firsthand the work it takes to win at business.
4. Authenticity. Family is the place where you can let things fly. “We laugh more here,” says Schechter. “And we yell more here. Sometimes family members can get to be more emotional with you than non-family, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.” The ability to be fearlessly and emotionally honest can help a family business thrive.
5. Trust. Trust is essential in all business, but especially so in a business where trade secrets are make-or-break. “For us, there’s a very high level of trust among family members. And we can talk to each other very freely and openly.”
6. Control. Family businesses control their fate. “We’ve looked at different scenarios for investors. And it always kind of comes back to the same thing: Do we want to lose control of this family business, of the specialness that we have of working with each other on a day-to-day basis? It’s nice for me as a father to work with my sons.”
7. Next-gen ingenuity. Companies can lose their competitive edge when leaders lose touch with the youth market. A smart family business keeps its edge naturally when it brings in the next generation. At age 30, Schechter’s son Michael has become the industry guru on social networking. “My son communicates with hundreds of thousands of people at the same time. I’m very lucky to have somebody who’s really at the forefront.”
See the entire American Express report below.
The British government also has a great page on family businesses at their Businesslink.gov UK site that says:
Family-run businesses
Advantages of family businesses
If you start or join a family business you’re likely to benefit from a range of advantages which you often don’t find in other enterprises. These include:
• Common values – you and your family are likely to share the same ethos and beliefs on how things should be done. This will give you an extra sense of purpose and pride – and a competitive edge for your business.
• Strong commitment – building a lasting family enterprise means you’re more likely to put in the extra hours and effort needed to make it a success. Your family is more likely to understand that you need to take a more flexible approach to your working hours.
• Loyalty – strong personal bonds mean you and family members are likely to stick together in hard times and show the determination needed for business success.
• Stability – knowing you’re building for future generations encourages the long-term thinking needed for growth and success – though it can also produce a potentially damaging inability to react to change.
• Decreased costs – family members may be more willing to make financial sacrifices for the sake of the business. For example, accepting lower pay than they would get elsewhere to help the business in the longer term, or deferring wages during a cashflow crisis. You may also find you don’t need employers’ liability insurance if you only employ close family members.
See a link to the entire page below.
For every problem there is an opportunity! This is very true when it comes to technology and the family. Technology and rapid social economic change create enormous pressures and opportunity for the family.
Gary
Learn how to develop a family business at our upcoming Super Thinking plus Investing and Business Seminar. Families welcome!
Gary
Quantum Thinking for Everlasting Wealth Seminar
Quantum Thinking for Everlasting Wealth Seminar. How to retire from the rat race… at any age. Where the writing, business and reading world meet.
Gary Scott teaching delegates about quantum wealth.
Learn Quantum Thinking & How to Have Everlasting Wealth with Gary and Merri Scott.
These special seminars look far beyond creating or improving your own business for income. They begin with a global economic update that helps integrate thinking of the past with the here and now of global economics.
Learn how to integrate your brain waves so you become smarter and how to gain never ending income by continually spotting contrasts distortions and trends.
The seminar is divided into three sessions.
Each session builds on the next to help you learn how to gain freedom, remove stress and earn more by combining powerful tools of thoughts and business action
Sessions One: Our global World present past and future… seen from outside the box.
Sessions Two: How to have quantum wealth and health with more intelligence with whole brain thinking through “Frequency Modulation.Saturday – How to Write.
Session Three: International Micro Business – “How to Have a Global Income “.
This seminar provides a learning funnel that integrates your personal desires, skills and circumstances to current and historical global economic realities.
Here is what you learn:
* Global economic history - how this combines with each business’s past… future… interest, skills and knowledge.
The historical review sees current markets for writers based around economic cycles as outlined first by Russian economist, Nikolai Kondratiev, who proposed a theory that Western capitalist economies have long term (50 to 60 years) cycles of boom followed by depression. These business cycles are to this day called “Kondratiev Waves”.
Kondratiev’s thoughts were refined by Austrian economist, Joseph Shumpeter, which we have extensively researched and follow the global economy (and US stock market) and how it has moved through a series of bull…. and then a bear (a period of no growth) cycles that each run around 15 year bull as shown in this graph below.
These stock market bull and bear cycles are based on cycles of human interaction, war, technology and productivity.
These cycles are a driving force in the creation of opportunity.
These cycles are intricately connected with the new waves of productivity that grow from the great human platform of combat. The cycle goes like this.
An economic downturn enhances a war or threat of war. Struggles for survival in the war (like the Civil War, WWI, WWII and the Cold War (WWIII), super charge inventiveness that creates new forms of productivity…the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, production line processes, jet engines, TV, farming techniques, plastics, telephone, computer and lastly during the Cold War, the internet.
Each new invention helped win a war. Shifting the technology to domestic use… after the war… created a boom.
Each boom leads to excess.
Each excess led to a correction. The correction creates an economic downturn.
The economic downturn enhances a war or threat of war.
The global economy is currently in a major correction cycle… at the correct time and we should expect that a war (or some major struggle of the epoch or threat of war such as the Cold War) should begin to build! This latest downturn started almost exactly (1998), 16 years after the last boom began (1982)…which began after the last great human struggle called the Cold War that lasted about a decade when the Soviet Union collapsed.
If the cycle repeats, the struggle should build now due to the poor economy. If the cycles repeat then the bottom is around 2012-2013. Everything will seem bleakest… darkest… blackest.
This will be the best time of all in decades to invest!
The epoch of the Cold War fought Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan fought the evil empire (1981 to 1989). The war was won when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Empire dissolved in 1991. That war created an arms race that created new technology including internet.
The economic war that follows the boom comes from the domestication of technology developed during the struggle.
The technological burst off WWIII accelerated when access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) which developed the Computer Science Network (CSNET) providing access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations.
In 1982 the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The dot-com bubble (also referred to as the Internet bubble and the Information Technology Bubble) was the post war boom, a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000.
The next step is to decide where this cycle is and how this creates business opportunity through distortions, contrasts and trends.
Contrasts and distortions in currencies, markets and social and demographic shifts to spots trends.
For example we look at how each new wave of technology creates new problems. Shifts from WWII included increased fertilization in farming and more women at work. This caused dietary differences in the American family that led to an explosion of health food stores.
* Problems & Trends Create Income Possibilities
Surprisingly the inventors of Graham Crackers and Kellogg Corn Flakes were among some of the first to spur an interest in health food so in the 1920s and 1930s health food stores did start to open in the USA selling products such as blackstrap molasses and brewer’s yeast. However health food stores as we know them did not start to boom until the 1960s in connection to the newly emerging ecology movement and counterculture to modern living, intense fertilization, pesticides, women at work, etc.
Image the wealth you would have gained writing about that trend coming!
We explore potential counter cultures created by the internet… a WWIII technology… that could erupt and ways to write and do business based on this.
We pay special attention to economic distortions. Distortions create writing opportunities because your micro business is the best investment you can make backed by your own time, effort and energy.
Quantum Thinking For Everlasting Wealth Seminar – October 5-6-7, 2012 West Jefferson, North Carolina.
Join Merri and me. Enroll here $799. Couple $999
Another session in the seminar shows “How to have an international micro business.” These sessions are highly practical and usable. They focus on how to use modern technology to start global micro businesses with minimal investments of time and capital.
By starting small and building with stepping stones and a harmonious focus, Merri and I have learned how to almost own several profit generating phrases at Google. We, along with our webmaster David Cross share the secrets of how you can use words to create your own global income as well.
The seminar shares how we use the first four of “Seven Ps” (Person, Problem and Promise, Product) to zero in on key word phrases. Then you learn how to use the Fifth P Promise to develop new customers. The Sixth P is the Prospecting Path and Seventh P is the Presentation to create income.
We use this system successfully on the internet and share what we do with you as we look at ways you too can have a high income generating business… even if you never leave your home.
This knowledge has really helped previous course delegates. Here is what one previous delegate just shared:
“Gary , I have been working on my website, healthy-holistic-living.com site and I figure it is time for another update. It is really hard to believe it, but my site just keeps growing and growing and I am now averaging 2000 visitors per day!
“What I find to be most amazing is that in just a few short months my site is #1 out of over a million sites and sometimes even millions of sites! As you always say the internet is the ‘Great Equalizer’ anybody given the right tools can compete on the internet.“Below are some of my search results. I only listed GOOGLE and YAHOO but you can find similar results on both MSN and ASK.com.
GOOGLE:
#1 out of 1,190,000 …………………………“definition healthy spirit “
#1 and #2 out of 1,210,000.………………….“benefits to living a holistic life “
#1 out of 1,260,000 …………………………“gaining a healthy mind “
#1 and #2 out of 1,260,000 …………………“benefits to living a holistic life “
#2 out of 935,000 …………………………..“holistic lifestyle tips “
You will learn how to use the same system to expand (or start) your business globally!
This is a perfect era to increase your wealth and improve your lifestyle as you reduce stress with your own a micro writing self publishing business.
Merri and I enjoy having an international internet business and it is doing well. Almost every month our internet business sales are higher than they were in the same month a year before.
We are very thankful to be one of the most read sites in Ecuador and do very well in the US and Canada too.
May we share our experiences to help you learn how to enjoy this satisfaction and success through your micro business?
Here is a recent ranking of just one of our five websites.
This ranking from Alexa.com shows how our site is in the top 16,000 web sites in America, top 8,000 in Canada and top 500 in Ecuador. There is more. While many suffered in 2007, 2008 and 2009, the recession caused our internet business to grow.
Our seminar helps you learn how to use the same tactics we use… in your micro business.
Our sales doubled during the recession. Our list of readers increased over 100%. Since the economy picked up our business growth has slowed but business is still growing. This is how good, value oriented business grow by the way.
Value oriented micro businesses should increase steadily in good times. They do not get caught overextending in euphoria. Then during bad times they are in a position to do really well!
Knowing the micro business philosophies we follow can help you use the internet in business if you desire.
The Western economy has changed… probably forever. The old ways are gone and those who held jobs… or still have work in the private sector have lost the most.
The economy will recover… but the way people earn and work… and how the money is distributed and to whom especially… has been profoundly altered. This is especially true in value added countries like Canada… the USA and most of Europe.
We are in an era of global structural change… in economics… in society and in the way we work because technology brings us low cost administration, low cost access to data, low cost communication, and low cost travel, plus the opening of markets beyond logic that rely more on passion and experience than on efficiency and cost.
We look at these economic and structural changes, and what to do about them in the business portion of our seminar.
We’ll see how markets are shifting from materialistic needs to emotional needs.
We’ll see great opportunity for writers in the following markets:
Love-friendship-control-freedom-tradition-change-big answers-recognition and care. These are emotional needs that create expanding demand and business opportunity. The next generation is having more involvement in every step of the buying process. Uniting the body and mind is an emerging market. Natural physical health, fitness will expand but botox and insulin sales will also grow.
Mental health, retreats and spas prosper. The health of the planet is becoming a more important business.There is a shift of emphasis from GDP to GWB (General Wellness Barometer Happiness Factor). Business will operate with more passion.
Learn about other business possibilities…
In the global micro business sessions we’ll see ideas on how to:
* Create export businesses
* Self Publishing/Writing
* Internet Sales
* Ecuador Business Ideas
* Organic Business Ideas
* Health Business Ideas
* Ideas for Cuban Business
Quantum Thinking For Everlasting Wealth Seminar – October 5-6-7, 2012 West Jefferson, North Carolina.
Join Merri and me. Enroll here $799. Couple $999
The educational program Merri and I have developed uses a different form of frequency modulation that opens enormous opportunity for expansion, understanding, peacefulness as well as greater wealth.
FM teaching uses frequency (in music and with each sense… sight…. smell, tactile and even smell) to integrate brain waves so the process of absorbing, processing and recalling information is vastly accelerated. This brings forth the three C’s: Calm, Clarity and Coherence.
FM creates relaxed concentration… a key to happiness, health and success.
You learn whole brain thinking that can help improve your freedom, satisfaction and income through business.
This part of the seminar helps us integrate their brain waves so they are more intelligent, intuitive and relaxed.
This workshop shows how to get into and stay in a state of relaxed concentration… a mental state shown to enhance almost every human capability… especially writing.
Merri and I are explorers so we have used this techniques for decades. We are always looking for what’s next… trying to stay on or ahead of the leading edge and need ways to think outside he box..
This journey has helped us alter the main mission in our lives again and again… every seven to 14 years.
The Quantum Wealth Frequency Modulation sessions share ideas on how to live better…. using frequency modulation to be smarter… stronger…. more energetic… and healthier.
Most of us have never so many problems that create opportunity as those that face us now. A growing global population… depletion of natural resources and technology are bring social and financial shifts at a pace never seen before.
These shifts will rob many of their financial well being, but fortunately the same technology that is creating the change can also help you gain prosperity like you have never imagined. We look forward to sharing these riches with you.
We are in our 44th year of business and we share what we have learned and where this is leading our activities in our upcoming seminar. Join us.
Each seminar updates how we doing business globally, and even how we are investing… and why… right now. Join Merri, me
Spotting new trends and applying them to our micro business has brought us a strong and continual flow of income. More importantly the process has been fulfilling…. beneficial to society and healthy. Now you can benefit from the latest… and perhaps strongest… of all the trends we have stumbled upon.
Applying the concepts of quantum thinking to spotting trends over the past 44 years has helped thousands of our readers make and save millions. The success of our readers has been a driving force in our lives yet we have always wanted to do more so continued looking deeper at ways we can share how to have income, stability, good health and contentment.
Join us to learn our most recent experiences and most advanced concepts and ideas.
Quantum Thinking For Everlasting Wealth Seminar – October 5-6-7, 2012 West Jefferson, North Carolina.
Join Merri and me. Enroll here $799. Couple $999
