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This site have focuses on success
guidelines for business and investing. Few activities are as important to successful
investing and business as spotting good trends. Ethical Cultural Creatives create
ethical alternative investment business ideas and are one of the biggest trends
we may ever see.
This lesson entitled Alternative
Investment Business Ideas highlights why understanding Ethical Cultural Creatives
(who by the way we call Dragonflies) is so vital to our economic success.
This is the fifth of six lessons.
You can use the arrows at the top of this lesson to read part one, two, three
and four of this series, which introduces the Book Cultural Creatives by Paul
Ray PH.D, Sherry Anderson PH.D. and tells who Ethical Cultural Creatives are.
Previous lessons introduced alternative
investment business ideas for the three subcultures (Moderns, Traditionals and
Cultural Creatives), who they are and what each likes. Then the fourth message
reviewed the Ethical Cultural Creatives and ended with:
"Wow. This is important stuff,
especially if you are trying to sell books or reports or courses. Frankly we could
quit this lesson now. You could go get the book, the Cultural Creatives by Paul
H. Ray PH.D. and Sherry Ruth Anderson PH.D, read it and probably be ahead.
But…I am on a roll here
with a story to tell. We have left the house unsold and you don't know my mistakes
yet (or the solutions). So perhaps my editor (she won't want to bore you) and
publisher (every page printed costs additional bucks) will let this lesson drag
on."
We continue with Alternative
Investment Business Ideas Here
You need to know what happens
when a publisher who is marketing to Moderns and Traditionals shifts focus and
aims directly at Ethical Cultural Creatives! The book won't tell you that. (read
it anyway).
Back to the house for sale. There
we were. We had sold our Dominican condo and the North Carolina cabin. we had
our house in Naples for sale and we were changing our entire way of life. Still
we did not know why. Nothing happened in Naples. The house just sat there for
sale and would not move. In an Ethical Cultural Creatives way of thinking this
was probably because we had not yet made the commitment. Or we could believe that
the house protected us until we found the next place to go or whatever. That's
a silly thought, but I believe it. Darn it, we had been nice to that house!
Good thing to, because we did
not have a new place to go.
Our business was changing though.
We wanted a new way of life as well as a new home and we got it. We wanted to
do less office and telephone work so we could focus on more research and writing.
We liked this best and we were following the Golden Rule of Simplicity I so often
promote, "Do what you love".
We decided to accomplish this
change by expanding our market through strategic ventures. We had good contacts
in the publishing field so we would give up part of our profit and let others
publish for us. (This course is an example of this very plan. I used to publish
it myself). The idea was we would make less per publication but achieve higher
sales and enjoy the process more.
Plus I had a compelling urge
to write some fiction. Do not ask me why? I created all types of logical reasons,
to justify myself, but all I can honestly say is I just wanted to.
I started writing the 65th Octave,
as a spiritual economic thriller. The excuse I used for doing this was I wanted
to reach a larger audience that had an interest in my now expanded areas of focus.
I had expanded from international investing to alternative investment, having
fun in business and alternative health. The novel was definitely about spirituality
and changes in mentality. The book was aimed at the CCs and reflected what I was
feeling. I just did not know this.
I still did not know why I had
even made this expansion or that there were Moderns, Traditionals or Ethical Cultural
Creatives.
I just stuck to that Golden Rule,
writing about and doing what I loved and what interested me. This was all based
on the assumption that my readers would be interested as well.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The Golden
Rule of Simplicity says your wants, needs and desires represent a market. You
can use these emotions as a key to unlock that market. The rule does not say when
your wants, needs and desires change that the wants needs and desires of the market
where you have been change as well.
Major Alternative Investment
Business Ideas Lesson
Read this carefully.
If you use the Golden Rule of Simplicity and your wants, needs, and desires change,
so too does your market!
There I was cranking out the
novel thinking that all my readers would love the darn thing. My business plan
counted all those readers as buyers plus sales through bookstores and Amazon.com.
This would shift the desires
of my existing readers and open a whole new market who would also love my international
investing stuff. Right? Nope. Wrong on two counts.
The reality? 74% of my existing
international investing readers would not be interested in the book and many of
my new readers would have an interest in health or spirituality but would not
give a toss about international investing. But we did not know!
We set up PR and focused on doing
FREE radio interviews and book signings across the country. We were going to get
even richer. There was only one snag. The plan did not work.
Financial success was modest.
Experiential profits were huge.
Nobody explained before writing
the book that fiction is the hardest medium to sell. I know this now. Nobody told
me that the publisher would probably not do a darn thing. I know this now. Nobody
told me about Moderns, Traditionals and Ethical Cultural Creatives. I did not
focus correctly.
I wrote the book. I found a publisher
who printed it. He gave it to a distributor and we did our book signings and had
lots of radio interviews and only sold about a thousand books. The low sales was
because our focus was wrong. Many of the radio shows for example were on Fundamental
Christian radio.
This market was as Traditional
as you can get. Many others were money shows, which were very Modern. The interviews
were great. We sold books, but the book sales did not move readers along to the
next sale.
Let's do the math. The book sold
for $19.95. My royalty (had I been paid by the publisher) would have been about
$1 a book. You can only do a little to sell a lot with numbers like this if the
book is not creating future sales.
Then I had some good luck. The
publisher went out of business and I never received a penny of the royalties I
was owed. This was good because I got the book back and had to sell it myself.
Then I began to figure out what was happening.
Alternative Investment Business
Ideas Point
I readjusted my focus and unintentionally
began to sell the book to Ethical Cultural Creatives. Then my business plan began
to work. First, the math changed a lot. I sold several thousand books myself through
the internet. I kept the whole $19.95. See the difference?
With a publisher, I had to go
do book signings (at my expense), radio shows etc. and made $1,000 per thousand
books sold. Now I made $19,950 per thousands. I like the new numbers!
And because I was selling in
the right market, these readers started to buy other courses and come to seminars
at the farm.
Speaking of the farm, I have
moved ahead of myself. Back to the house in Naples. While all these events were
taking place we started traveling to Ecuador and found a hacienda we loved and
bought it. We finally found a farm (Merrily Farms-see www.littlehorsecreek.com)
and bought it.
Now the house could sell and
it did almost immediately at a record high for the area we had lived in. When
you're hot, you're hot. We sold everything, books, clothes, dishes, the Rolls,
the sports car, the lot.
There was still a problem. Neither
the farm nor the hacienda had a house in which we could live. We moved into a
tent. Does this seem strange, moving from a 5,000+ square foot, seven bedroom
house into an 80 square foot COLEMAN tent? Merri and I felt strangely proud. We
still did not understand why. Our alternative investment business ideas were still
not clearly formed.
This is when 74% of our friends
and family probably began checking to see they could have us certified. We began
fixing an old Johnny Appleseed farm house and I continued to write what I am sure
many readers said were, "strange things."
On completion of the farmhouse
we proudly moved in and invited friends. Some came, were polite and never returned.
Others had an even bigger reaction. One gal drove a 918 miles, saw the house,
turned around and drove back. She did not even stop to say "hi". She later confessed
being so embarrassed (go figure) she could not come in. "Gary & Merri would
never live in a place like that," she told a friend. She had a real identity problem.
She later explained (when she sold her place in Florida and also moved to North
Carolina) that we had changed so much it frightened her because inside she knew
she had to make these changes as well). She did.
Readers kept fleeing like rabbits
chased by hounds (our pumpkin patch hound Ma was another odd acquisition who came
along at this time). Still we did not understand the alternative investment business
ideas that were running through our heads and hearts.
Fortunately money was not so
important. Our kids had now finished higher education and were productive and
on their own. We never did spend lavishly anyway. I have since learned (from the
book) that voluntary downsizing is a very Ethical Cultural Creatives trait.
In fact we were proud of our
reduced lifestyle. I even sent my readers an article titled, "The Benefits of
Trading a Rolls Royce for a Beat Up 87 Ford" This was a classic Ethical Cultural
Creatives move. More Modern readers fled. But that was okay. We now had growing
numbers of Ethical Cultural Creatives signing on!
Plus publishing is such a profitable
business that even in a greatly diminished state we still made tons more than
we spent. I would have felt better about this reduction however if I had understood
what was happening.
Yet I believed and stuck with
the Golden Rule of Simplicity through all this.
Today as this course is updated,
we are about to finish our new, dream house at the farm. Moderns won't understand
why it is so small (just 3,000 square feet).
Some Traditionals won't like
some of the architectural principles used. For example the 30 by 50 foot measurements
(according to the Bruce Rawles website on sacred geometry) represents a 1 to 1.6
ratio sacred geometry ratio called the golden ratio or golden mean. This is a
fundamental measure that seems to crop up almost everywhere, including in crops.
The actual golden ratio is about
1.618033988749894848204586834365638117720309180, but I did not think I could explain
this to our carpenters so 1 to 1.6 was close enough.
Some believe the golden ratio
is the unique ratio that symbolically links each new generation to its ancestors,
preserving the continuity of relationship as the means for retracing its lineage.
This was discovered by Fibonacci
and the ratios appear in the ratio of the number of spiral arms in daisies, in
the chronology of rabbit populations, in the sequence of leaf patterns as they
twist around a branch, and a myriad of places in nature where self-generating
patterns are in effect.
Leonardo da Vinci used the Golden
Ratio in his painting of The Last Supper in both the overall composition (three
vertical Golden Rectangles, and a decagon (which contains the golden ratio) for
alignment of the central figure of Jesus. Perhaps he was the first of the original
Ethical Cultural Creatives.
The outline of the Parthenon
at the Acropolis near Athens, Greece is enclosed by a Golden Rectangle by design.)
So how can our house miss? 26%
of you understand. This is how alternative investment business ideas grow.
Plus we would have a hard time
explaining to Traditionals why we have an east facing entrance and the huge silent
room in the middle of the house that represents the silence within our soul. These
ideas are based on the science of Sthapatya from India. The idea is that buildings
are coherence generators, tuning the occupants to the laws of the universe and
increasing health, wealth and spiritual well being. Buildings are viewed as living
organisms, like the human nervous system, and are designed in "harmonic resonance"
with the underlying energy structure of the universe.
I will not even go into why the
house is colored golden orange.
This will all be a tough sell
to Traditionals, but some of these principles can be found within the architecture
of Angkhor Watt in Cambodia, the Pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt, the temples of
ancient Greece, St. Peter's Church in the Vatican, as well as some towns and castles
in Slavic countries.
Alternative Investment Business
Ideas Key
So it goes in our home. 74% or
so of the population will think we are nuts. This is okay, if from a business
point of view, we understand who we are and why we feel this way and why we love
the place. This is the key to forming alternative investment business ideas.
I hope you also understand why
CCs love the place, especially when they see that we have our own hydro power.
If you understand, (especially
if you are a Modern or Traditional) the lesson was a success. You will be looking
through your eyes and heart to know yourself and you will be understanding (your
and other) markets.
That's a key to success in business.
Know who you are in business for. Know why you are in business. If you then get
the finances right, you cannot miss.
Alternative Investment Business
Ideas Success Guideline
The important point to notice
in this story is that Merri and I followed our hearts, our wants, needs and desires.
Our minds did not know where we were going. We got there anyhow!
Following our hearts finally
brought us to the ezine business that is our main focus now.
Business has just been getting
better and better as we have learned where our focus belongs at this time.
The next and final lesson reviews
all this and looks at the big picture for having successful alternative investment
business ideas. Until then, good everything!
Gary
P.S. For details on our courses
about how to succeed in business that we conduct at our farm go to GaryScott.com
Gary & Merri Scott have
green investments in their North Carolina Farm (Merrily Farms) and Ecuador Plantation
(Rosaspamba) shown below:
"Merrily
Farms in the Fall"
"Rosaspamba's
Virgin Rain Forest" |
