I Have A Vision

There is a great need in our country for vision. There is a great need throughout the world for vision. Advertisement surrounds vision. Everything that we use everyday, whether it be the television, our phones, or the computer, there we find advertisement. And advertisement is someone trying to impress upon you with their vision.

If our visions match, I may have found a new customer, and you a new product. The cycle of vision. They say that "Those who have the vision lack the money, and those that have the money lack the vision." Cycles are meant to be broken. And I enjoy breaking out of the box.

Lets discuss vision. I know you have some type of vision. Children have visions of how their life will be when they grow up. "When I grow up I want to be a ..." What? What did you want to be. I wanted to be a preacher, a firefighter, an engineer/architect... The list goes on. I still want to be all the things I wanted as a child.

If I advertised to your inner child, would I win the sale? Let's not make this about sales, how about friendship? If I impress you to share in my vision, I have gained a friend. If I paint a picture with my words, and you can see that picture, then we have connected. That is the essence of good communication. However if I try to paint a picture of a beautiful garden and what is transposed into your mind is a nightmare, then our communication has obviously failed.

Problem is, in failure we have to find the place where that transposition went wrong, so it can be fixed. Did I speak/type it incorrectly, or did I misrepresent it in my tone of voice, body language, facial expressions? Was it merely a misunderstanding that could not have been prevented? Vision is important, because "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

It is the job of a good leader to properly introduce and explain vision to those they lead. Or it will be heartily rejected. That can lead to a lot of unnecessary problems. But if that leader effectively describes that vision, then the people will back him up wholeheartedly. 

It is my goal to communicate well. I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't believe anybody does. We all desire to be understood, whether we speak much or not.

How to win friends and influence people is a good book to help with the common problem. But it cannot give you vision. If you have no vision, don't step up to lead. If someone gives you their vision, and tells you to lead your people with it, then be clear to get their vision across the way it was given to you.

If you have no vision, pray. All of my visions come from God. You may see that as conceded or delusional, but to me that is giving credit where credit is due. I may be stuck in a rut, but I'm more wealthy than the richest man on earth. Its all in how you look at it. That's the treasure of good vision.

Today it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are running out of vision. Good vision only goes so far, and then another is needed. Thankfully we are only given some of the vision. If we had the whole picture then we would either give up, or there would be no more room for new visionaries.

A good visionary recognizes the quality in others, and builds a team to further the vision. It is in the best interests of all of us, everybody, that vision is not given up on. America will fall for lack of vision. The world system will fail for lack of vision.

Get the picture? Vision is extremely important. And that saying, "Those with the vision rarely have the money, and those with the money rarely have the vision." only bears testament to the fact that there needs to be a system for getting the two together.

If your vision is limited to two or three great ideas, you need help. If your vision has a stopping point, it's not full, then you need help. Every visionary needs help. Everybody needs help, just as much as everybody needs vision.

Don't take people for granted. Everybody you see everyday; none of them are just scenery in your life. Many of them have great vision, and many could be that person you need to help you. And you could be the person they need to help them. How can you know, if they are scenery?

I've put one link in this post. That was for the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" - you can buy it at the link. It is definitely worth the seven bucks you may spend on it. But it is the least of my concerns in writing this.

My concern is the value of vision. It is more valuable than time or money. Vision is what gives us time and money, and vision is what will fix the mess our country is in, and the messes we get into in life. I trust God for the vision I need.

I would not have found the opportunity that inspired this blog and my savings, if not for the great God that I serve. And that's the truth. I've been writing about my search for a startup business, primarily because it has been a long and strange search. But the rewards are far better than money. They say happiness cannot be purchased.


Vision can be bought, but it is more a gamble than an investment. Build a visionary team, make visionary friends, and surround yourself with good council.

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I'll post a few special deals as i find them or am notified of them from time to time. If you need a special (especially on computer equipment or other business related equipment) check out my blog, or request a special. I'll find you a good deal and post it for you and anybody else.

Jesse

The Value of Research

They say that time is money. This is very true. We trade our time for money, be it $7.25 for an hour or whatever you may make. There has to be a better trade-off! Personally I value my time much more than this, but have found it difficult to locate a way to improve on the value of my time.

You could spend all of your time looking for a higher paying job. Then is the higher pay a reward for the time spent looking, or a higher reward for your current time? You could start a home based business. Working your job, and then working your business to try to supplement your job's current income. Think about that, you're spending more time, more money (capital) on the business...

There has to be a mathematical equation to define this by. Unfortunately, that equation will usually end in LOSS.

Lost time, lost income, lost investment. There are over 100,000,000 websites out there. How many bring in income that can be equated to adequate gain for capital, and time? Less than 97% I'd say. But then again, I may just value my time more than others. How much is your time worth to you?

More to the point, the 3% that do bring in an adequate income (resulting from traffic), are (a) run by major corporations supplemented by television advertising, or massive multi-million dollar advertising efforts (I can't afford this!), (b) take massive groundwork, and advertising campaigns, and already have some sort of business base somewhere, or (c) were started by individuals, and small businesses using SBI! (Site Build It!). And by the way, 65% of the top 3% were option (c)!

I want to count myself in that number. Research. This is the way that I have learned what I have learned. I have spent countless hours trying to learn and figure out how I would make money on my own. What was the Google search that found it for me? "best way to make money online with no overhead (or investment)"

Best Ways to Make Money Online With No Capital. Search it for yourself. Here's what I found.

The first three things listed there, I've researched and/or tried before and found the website's recommendation to be correct. They are a waste of time! The 4th, I hadn't read much about for some reason, like it was some great internet secret or something. The fifth and best way, I've been planning on since I was 15 or 16!

We took a trip to Canada with our Church youth group. It was an awesome trip, we got to see Niagara Falls, Montreal, (spent most time there) Toronto! What an awesome trip! (Thanks Bro. Barton!) We passed out tracts, got in trouble, (as young men often will,) played pranks, the usual fun stuff for kids to do.

I remember while we were headed up, we were getting close to Niagara Falls, I mean we were just about to cross over the border into Canada. Somebody pointed and shouted "Hey I can see the statue of Liberty!" which was pretty dumb considering how far from it we were. There was a building in the distance that LOOKED like the Statue of Liberty. I was fooled. Luckily a young lady with us happened to be the bigger fool, and shouted out, "Oh yeah I can see it too!" (* Sometimes it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt!!!)

Saved by the Southern Belle.

Anyway, to continue, on that trip I learned that the American Dollar was worth around 17 to 20 cents more than the Canadian Dollar, however the quarters, (the change) was worth the same and could be used on either side. Well, it didn't take long for me to figure out a way to make money off of it. If you took $100 American to Canada, changed it into Canadian Dollars, and then changed that into Quarters, well right there is $17 to $20 profit! Just bring back the quarters, put em in a Coinstar, and woohoo! I'm a little richer for the wear!

Okay, I know that's not the way currency exchanges really work, but any loophole you know. !!! Personally, now with the way that our economy is, and with the way that the entire worlds currency relies on our own to provide and detail its own worth; when ours fails, (which we have allowed it to do, being fiat currency and all) the whole world's will also fail. Best to invest in the new world currency, if you invest in any at all.

But number four on the list, is still quite promising. More and more people are researching online before they make any purchase. Be it a large financial transaction (a home purchase is the largest investment most Americans will ever make, followed by vehicle) or small, (if you know how, you can find enough coupons online, to buy $100 worth of groceries, for around 14 cents) they are looking online for a way to pinch their pennies.

As this trend becomes more and more habitual, the search engines become more and more intelligent at providing for their results, closer and closer matches to what people are actually looking for. It used to be, that you had to be a search engine guru to find anything. You had to know how to word your search terms correctly in order to get what you want out of them. Although you still must do so, it is not anywhere close to the way it used to be!

The same goes for websites. If you wanted to be in the top ten results on Google, for however many key search words; you had to search those words, find your website in the list of a thousand plus results, and click on your website. Catch this; you had to do all of that millions of times. Again, the search engines (SE's) are getting smarter, and now do most of the work for you! As new websites pop up, and are found in certain searches, even if they are at the bottom of the list, the SE's look through the entire website, and begin to determine their relevance to those search words based on content.

The better the content is written to comply with what the SE's know their users are looking for, the higher in the list of responses those websites will climb. Think about it, that is SO much easier than it used to be!

Here's the big deal. The number four way to make money online, is affiliate marketing. The number one way to affiliate market, is to start a website using a program, (SBI!) that does all the hard research work, design and layout work for you. Do the research for yourself. You will only prove me right! The best part, is the investment in start-up can be as little as $0. It just depends on your own ability to depend on yourself.

Are you willing to do the research? The results speak for themselves! Remember, Time is Money. And that is the Value of Research.

All the Time

You could search for all the time in the world, to find a great opportunity, but so long as you're searching through all the bog of opportunities, you may never find the best one for you. Look, for anybody, anything could work, and work very well. It just depends on who you are, and what the opportunity is. You could already have a great business going, it doesn't matter if it's a big business, or a small more local business. It could even be a small info or blog business on the internet. The potential is always greater.

Without realizing potential, you're stuck in the same place. And growth takes much time, not to mention the growing pains. I used to look at potential as a good thing when I was much younger. I took it as a compliment. Then after some consideration I decided it was not a good thing. Why? Because if somebody says you have potential, that must mean that you have something that is not yet realized to you, or by you... Now, I look at it both ways. Potential is both good and bad, because although it is yet unrealized, it is a good thing you should seek hard to realize.

Your business has potential. It can either succeed or fail. While failure leads to lessons learned, it is the way that people would rather not go. Myself included. I'd rather be seen as sitting idle, than as a failure, but it is always better to fail while trying, than to succeed at not trying. Both ways are failure, but one way has a better chance of success. You've always got to try, if you are to get where you want to be. What if there was a way to have something work for you, like your website? Or a company that makes websites, runs the advertising and marketing side for you, where all you have to do is customize it, or tell them what you want? Sounds expensive to me. Although in reality there is such a company, and the cost is less than running a 2" by 4" yellow pages add, and at the same time delivers way more return.

Hey, I've worked for companies where they provided the vehicle, to take you to neighborhoods, and then you walked and hiked your tail off knocking on doors trying to get someone to invite you inside. I've been kicked off front porches, threatened, known people who were shot at, and had guns pointed in their faces. Hah! What risk for such little in return! I was selling meat out of a freezer hooked up on the back of a pickup truck in Florida when I happened to knock on one door, the last door of the day, and it was getting dark out. The gentleman answered, and by the way everything was happening inside after I knocked, I knew he had a gun with him at the door.

When he opened the door, I started with something along the line of "Don't shoot, I'm a veteran!" Not that its actually what I said, but it was the jist of what I tried to get across! What I said isn't important, what happened after is. He had just got a coupon from a competitor (Omaha Steaks) and happened to mistake me as being them, since they were expecting a caller. I told him how much better quality our steaks were, and told him I'd come in and show him. Now I hadn't seen the gun the man had, I just new he had one behind his back when he answered the door, so when I got the box off the truck and went inside I saw it laying on the table. Great conversation starter when you've been in Iraq!

What was important to that man when I got the sale was the coupon he had, and after our conversation it was obvious that he wanted to buy from me, I had gained credibility with him. Omaha didn't matter to either of us beyond that coupon, which I eagerly took. The sale was mine. The important fact to note? I could have quit working as it was getting dark (and you're not supposed to knock on somebodies door after the sun goes down according to law,) I could have said, well, I didn't sell anything today, I might as well quit now and try again tomorrow. I could have run away when I knew he had a gun at the door! I don't know what motivated me to that last door, maybe it was the sales lectures I'd heard many times, about the last door so often being the only sale of the day, just keep going! If I hadn't kept going, and knocked just that one last door, such amazing timing would have never been realized!

What I do know, is that timing is everything. And I never knew when was the right place at the right time. Time is so important to our existence, everything that surrounds us, all of the business, or personal life in the world revolves around time. It is the dimension that we have not mastered, and it is what binds us on a continuous race to our end. We cannot give up on it, because it will not give up on us! You have the opportunity to do something with your time, or to watch it fly by.

Don't give up your time, it is limited, don't waste it, it is more valuable than money itself. Thank God for such amazing events of timing, as it becomes more and more obvious to me everyday that he is the orchestrator of such wonderful timing.


Don't give up your search! No matter who you are, or what your position, if you are a military person, looking ahead at that 20 or so year retirement, that pension will seem much smaller when you actually get it than it does today. Stay at home mom? You have the time, just as you have the need. Become a Work at Home Mom, everybody knows that every little bit helps, and even moreso would we all agree that a lot more helps a lot more!

If the time I've spent saying no to different opportunities was wise, then it is just as wise for you to heed my advice. By the way, all I'm saying is; Do Something Valuable with your Time!

The Journey

Ahh, the journey, searching for a way to start a business, with no overhead. And lets face it, why no overhead? Because I don't have any to invest. Especially now with the economy being the way it is, I've got to start something up with no overhead, but that will market to the entire nation, no, not just the entire nation, the whole world. My, what an order for an opportunity to fill!

Look, if you're looking for a good opportunity, maybe you're looking for similar reasons as I am, or maybe you could invest in something, great. I've found it. And having money to invest will just get you a leg up. Not that it will matter, much to me, I can still make that extra income I want, at the same time you're getting yours. You could even have a blog or business site that is already generating a substantial income or following, or even limited amount of sales leads, or customers; the opportunity is for you to increase your business potential. Rather than starting a second income.

I told you I was going to talk about my walk and experiences along the way, and what a story, I should be able to deliver. Ever since before I left home and joined the military I've had different offers made to me, even from my own parents to start the schemes they were starting. But even then I may have gotten excited about it at first, that excitement was quickly drained by the realization that those businesses couldn't really deliver on the promises they made. Even though I wanted to get-rich-quick, somehow I knew it wasn't possible.

The only way to make a bunch of money real quick, is to have a bunch of money already. It takes money to make money. Oh, but whats cool about this one statement of fact, is that time is money. And the time I have invested into searching, my oh my. I've had a picture of what I wanted to do, the business I desired to be involved in, the way that it should work, for a long time. Basically, I've had the vision, I just needed the reality.

I remember while selling cars at Sandy Sansing in Pensacola Florida, a network marketer set his eyes on recruiting me, and the time spent just thinking about this offer, (it was the "new" Amway,) just took from the time I spent doing my actual job. I was constantly trying to sell him on getting a new Chrysler to replace his old convertible, and he was constantly trying to get me to join his "team." If I'm to have two things happening, (ie. a job, and a business, ) then neither can interfere with the other, or else both will fail. That's the way I see it. Here's something I learned about sales, of any kind, you have to create a bond with the people you are trying to turn into clients.

For instance, while I was selling Chryslers, a pretty young lady and her two young children had come to look at our selection of vans. In case you didn't know, Chrysler is more well known for their vans than for the 300's, having such great features, and being the first company to make a minivan. I had before walked a potential customer around a van showing off all of its great features, and they walked out the door complimenting me to my manager for my great knowledge of our products, but they left without me getting the sale!

To continue with my story, I took the young lady and her children to the lineup of vans, on our company golf cart, to show off our companies product, and understand what features were most important to her, so that we could pick out the perfect van for her family. When we had found the perfect van, and decided to return to the sales floor to figure out the "numbers" as car salesmen and managers so affectionately refer to the sales price; I hopped up front of the cart, and she and her two children sat on the back. I turned it around, and hit a dip in the ground, that was a small shallow ditch, and in the middle of the turn the bump caused me to punch the petal, which in turn sent the young lady and her two children flying off the back of the golf cart.

We were both so embarrassed by the incident, that upon returning inside, the sale could not have gone more smoothly, and she wound up driving off in a brand new Chrysler minivan, leaving me behind completely confused and wondering how that, of all things wound up in a sale!

Why? Why would one couple walk out after such a great presentation, and another buy after such an experience? The difference is in the words themselves - with one potential customer I gave a successful presentation, and with the other, we had a mutual experience. Experiences create memories, that last a lifetime. A presentation, is easily and very soon forgotten.

I'll tell you more in my next blog post. Maybe I can hit my goal of one blog post per day.. So far this is the second, and there is so much more to tell! I don't usually tell stories in person, primarily because that invites the other party or persons to tell a similar story just to one-up my own. This does not create the lasting impression of an experience that I want to leave a conversation with. But here, I want it. I want to read your stories of similar interest! Tell me about some experience you've had that wound up giving the results you desired, but did not at all happen the way you intended!

We all need a good laugh, especially at our own selves! After all, Laughter is the best medicine!

Search for a Startup Business

I can remember, as a child and teen, my parents trying all kinds of ideas, to make an extra income, from Amway (yes even Amway) to health food, and supplements (like colloidal silver) even now today, still the same thing. My Dad owns his own businesses, and for as long as I can remember its always been on the brink of starvation, monetary-wise, as what would seem to me to be a product of their goals being far to spread out over different mediums.

I've always been concerned with having my eggs in more than one basket, but the right way to do that? Personally, I've always been shy of pyramid structures, network marketing, and get-rich-quick schemes, always promising more than they can deliver. Always requiring some type of prior investment to beginning. I wanted something that would deliver results, yes at the cost of time, but without the start-up overhead, or capital, before I could see the actual results for myself.

I've had salesmen from all walks of life, in all types of schemes try to pitch me on this or that extra income, selling this or that type of product, and to be honest, its not the products that I've had the problem with; It is the entire manner of business with which they choose to go about selling those products, and paying minimal return to their associates, for all the hard work it takes to add maybe $500 a month extra to their income stream.

This is not my preferred manner of conducting business. I wouldn't conduct my personal business that way, so why would I choose to become involved with theirs in the first place. Men and women have wasted countless hours trying to convince me that whatever they were doing was the way I was meant to go, and the way I was supposed to become successful for myself. I stand by my decision not to get involved with such schemes, I have been to their homes and heard their lectures, heard the testimonials, and seen the "big dog" of the local or state-wide structure influencing these people to continue.

From mongo juice or whatever its actually called, being God's promised manna from heaven, or whatever craziness, to Amway's new changed business name, with the same old structure, where they can brag about having generated the highest sales, or whatever it is they claim (reasonably, to me these claims went right in one ear and out the other)...

I chose, and still choose to stay as far away from involvement as possible. Maybe my childhood and teenage experiences watching my parents try time and again to make a decent extra income by such means, that I have become such a personal watchdog against them, maybe it was the fact that I was raise on the brink of poverty, while my parents were promised one big payout after another. For whatever reason, I have been content to go my own way, to work whatever job was available, to do anything in my power to prove that my decisions have been correct.


I've been searching for that opportunity (some say take all the opportunities you can get, as they come, don't pass anything up, or it will pass you by) I still retain my right to be picky and choosy about who I let rob me blind! Why? Cause I don't want to get robbed blind!

Oh my word, I could tell you so much more about the different things I have done. And I promise I will, in the next blog entry, I'll tell you about some more personal and face-to-face experiences and jobs I've had, from being a car salesman, to knocking on doors. What a wild ride. Sometimes in life it takes some very hard roads, before you find the right one.