WORK SMART AND GET PAID       

We all know some of the reasons people decide to start their own home business—flexibility, no boss, financial independence, and more time with family. These are the benefits of network-marketing success, and they attract new people to the industry every day. But just as important as the advantages are the aspects of the field that turn people away: lack of sales experience, no confidence on the phone, the inability to recruit, shaky products, and poor management. Jay Kubassek and several of his top producers decided to create a business that addressed the concerns of the latter group, assuming a clear path to success could be found by putting systems in place that help people automatically clear the hurdles in front of them.

This was the thinking that led Jay to the create CarbonCopyPRO.com, an internet marketing “business in a box” that gives average people the marketing power of an internet powerhouse. The four- year-old company enables anyone to go toe-to-toe with veteran networkers and puts them in a position to earn a six-figure income without any background knowledge or prior marketing experience. “It’s really my way of making my marketing techniques work for the average person who wouldn’t otherwise stand a chance of success,” Jay says. “How do we eliminate the sales and marketing variables for Joe Blow coming in off the street? It began as a way for me to take my personal marketing experience and success—ad copy, auto responders, my website, “carbon copy” it, and make that available for other people. Along the way it started to snowball as we attracted more and more industry leaders and top income earners. “Everything else out there requires the new marketer to go out, learn the techniques of marketing, of sales, and then identify an opportunity and give it their best shot,” he adds. “You look at years of trial and error and long, frustrating learning curves. CarbonCopyPRO is different in the sense Jay knows full well how difficult it is to jump into the network marketing world without a life preserver. After years of working 60- and 70-hour weeks and still only making enough money to pay the bills, he decided to try a home-based business as a way of supplementing his income as a Midas store manager where he was selling brakes and tires to people. “I followed the system, bought leads, called my leads, put people on the conference calls and sent them to websites,” he remembers. “I did three-way calls, talked, preached, ranted, sang, and sold the company and products. I was marketing to anyone who would listen.” The problem was, none of that worked. His sponsors got rich while Jay went to sleep exhausted and broke. Eventually, he came to the realization that his process wasn’t working. Rather than throwing in the towel,

Jay took what he learned through two and a half years of failure and vowed to create a system that actually benefitted the average networker. “I thought to myself, what if I could take everything I had learned and create a marketing system that would eliminate most if not all of the variables, a system that would work for me and everyone who got started with me?” Jay says. “This was the genesis of CarbonCopyPRO. Everything that was proven to work was duplicated and taught to each new member. This dramatically reduced learning curves, eliminated guess work, and increased results for everyone.” Four years later, and it’s obvious Jay and his partners were on to something. CarbonCopyPRO went from holding its own against bigger networking companies to increasing by nearly 500 percent in gross commission. By having a system and call center in place to handle all the marketing, recruiting, phone interactions, and communication aspects of the business, home-based rookies and veterans alike are achieving unprecedented success at unmatched levels. “Typically, you have to have a success story before people will work with you in this industry, and when you’re new, you have no story. It’s a bad catch-22,” Jay explains. “You’re not marketing yourself here, you’re marking a network, a system, a community, and an idea. All the emphasis is put on the success of the group and the system; not on you. A lot of our members make most of their money without ever talking to their new customers. You just pay us a monthly fee and we do the grunt work for you.”

CarbonCopyPRO can be applied to any business or product line. Currently, the company is exclusively partnered with Wealth Masters International, handpicked by Jay because “they offer the highest value product line in the industry, and we want to provide our distributors with a quality business. We believe they’re the best product line out there, and that’s why we chose them.” Jay has come full circle in four years, transitioning from corporate America to a home- based business in network marketing and finally, with CarbonCopyPRO.com thriving, back to corporate America. He and two partners run the business from their Manhattan offices where they employ a full-time staff of four. They also have 13 contract workers acting as professional business coaches who personally work with members to ensure each person’s business is growing to the level they desire. “I’m back to the 10-6, Monday through Friday schedule, and I absolutely love it, because this time it’s about building my own company, not someone else’s,” Jay says. “And that’s why I created this business—I want everyone to be able to experience this same feeling of personal freedom and success, and now they finally have a real, proven way to do it.”

The Survival Of The Fittest

By Jay Kubassek

Whether you’re already an entrepreneur, or just thinking about becoming one, you are invariably motivated by one of two things, or maybe even both—passion and necessity. Very often, entrepreneurs do what they do simply because they like it and want to do it. And because entrepreneurs, particularly very successful ones, rarely do anything half-way, they tend to pursue their lives and their businesses with a unique intensity. In short, they are passionate about how they live and work. Sometimes though, entrepreneurs start a business because they have to. Maybe it was because they were laid off from their jobs, or even worse, fired. Perhaps their company went out of business and left them out of work, or didn’t pay them enough money. In today’s economy, it’s not uncommon to see whole industries collapse when their markets dry up, as we’re seeing with real estate, construction, mortgage lending and automobiles.

Many of today’s highly successful companies were started by entrepreneurs and bred from pure necessity, plain and simple. Entrepreneurship carries with it many rewards—and many risks. It is often said that when you are self-employed, you wake up unemployed every morning. But according to Experian, one of the three biggest credit reporting agencies, self-employed entrepreneurs make about 25% more than the general population. Of course when you really consider income differential, you also need to realize that most of the wealthiest men in America made their fortunes as entrepreneurs. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Donald Trump and Sam Walton are all self-made billionaire entrepreneurs. But what about the risks? According to Entrepreneur Magazine somewhere between 85 and 94% % of all new business fail within the first 5 years. According to Dr. Gregory B. Murphy, associate dean and director of the MBA program for the College of Business at the University of Southern Indiana, the number of small businesses that close up shop due to severe financial distress such as bankruptcy is more on the order of 30%–40%. Regardless, this is still a huge rate of attrition. Regardless of the risk, according to a study of entrepreneurs conducted by Master Card International, 65% of small business owners would tell a friend to start a business now, rather than wait a year. And according to MSNBC, small businesses are responsible for over 75% of the net new jobs in the economy. These businesses often start very small—called micro businesses—and then grow rapidly.

The US Census Bureau reports that 49% of the nation’s businesses are run from home, and industry analyst the Dieringer Group places the number of Americans running businesses from home at 45.1 million. Today, more so than ever, it is easy to start such a home-based business. Global search engine giant Yahoo reports that well over 75% percent of adults surveyed online indicated that the Internet directly facilitated the launch of their new business. Based on all of this, regardless of whether you are—or want to be—an entrepreneur based on passion or necessity, you also need to consider the risk versus the reward. The potential benefits are vast and unlimited. The major risk is that you have about a 50% chance of failure. But you can get around that by doing some very basic things. Leaders are not born. They are created. Anyone can become a leader in any area if they want to. (Read OUTLIERS by Malcom Gladwell) You need to set realistic expectations and manage them aggressively and then stick the bleep in there! Success is almost entirely based on determination—having the discipline to hang in there even when you feel like quitting 1000 times. Most entrepreneurs fail because they simply give up too soon. Free enterprise is really about the survival of the fittest, where only the strongest survive. The formula is simple—figure out what you what and then don’t quit until you have achieved your goals. Period.  

GROWING THE TREE

Personal branding is no longer the celebrity culture embellishment it once was associated as. It’s more than “Foreman Grills” and “Body by Jake” (I have both actually). It has become a fundamental necessity of any successful business. If your company does not articulate its brand message clearly and consistently within its given space, it is certain to die the slow death of irrelevance.

However, even the systematic, and clear dissemination of your company brand/message is not enough to distinguish yourself in a given consumer space. Why? Because everybody already does that! Sure, every blue moon a McDonalds will change it’s slogan, Pepsi will change the look of its can (a recent design debauchery if I might add) but overall companies launch with a singular message, and then beat you over the head with it until you buy it or decide you didn’t want it after all. So then what do you need to brand yourself in a distinguishable way?

As an Entrepreneur, consider it this way for a moment:   Joe Entrepreneur is the CEO and President of “Joe Inc.” Joe Inc. has spent many a night in his horrifically loathsome basement for the last 2 years developing a revolutionary new slinky. Let’s just say this slinky can go UP the stairs! Joe is thrilled, both with the slinky and to be out of the basement. He knows the Internet is the most effective and explosive means of getting exposure for his magnum opus, but he’s a little unsure of how to go about publicizing his ingenious feat. This is where the difference between brand Publicity and PR come into play.

Publicity is easy. Anyone can either pay or entice, various media outlets to run a story, throw up a banner, write a review. If any of these are positive (which in the case of a stair-climbing slinky has got to be a given) they will definitely help increase awareness. But does awareness translate into sales? Everyone knows about AOL still, but how many new users does it really have?   Now on the other hand “PR” is about the strategic crafting of the your brand’s STORY. It’s the artistry of how you evaluate, and ultimately compose, the consumer’s interaction with your product. Its interaction with your design, price point, functionality and relevance. Ultimately it is simply storytelling. This is what makes your company, your product, even You, worth discussion.   The acute concentration of these detailed elements is the formation of your branded message. Whether it be the color palette on your blog, the font size, the packaging or the music. Each element is a branch, the roots your product, the growth of the tree, well that’s determined on how well you can water the details with the sweat of innovation.  

Be different, be yourself.

Best, Don’t be stingy, share with your friends!

JAY Kubassik

A Recipe for Riches
by Duncan Greenberg
Friday, October 9, 2009
provided by

Want to become a tech titan or hedge fund tycoon? Up your chances by dropping out of college or going to Harvard and working at Goldman Sachs.
Are billionaires born or made? What are the common attributes among the uber-wealthy? Are there any true secrets of the self-made?

We get these questions a lot, and decided it was time to go beyond the broad answers of smarts, ambition and luck by sorting through our database of wealthy individuals in search of bona fide trends. We analyzed everything from entrepreneurs’ parents’ professions to where they went to school, their track records in the early stages of their careers and other experiences that may have set them on the path to extreme wealth.

Our admittedly unscientific study of the self-made members of the Forbes 400 yielded some interesting results.

First, a significant percentage of them had parents with a high aptitude for math. The ability to crunch numbers is crucial to becoming a billionaire, and mathematical prowess is hereditary. Some of the most common professions among the parents of Forbes 400 members (for whom we could find the information) were engineer, accountant and small-business owner.

Consistent with the rest of the population, more American billionaires and near-billionaires were born in the fall than in any other season. However, relatively few of them were born in December, historically the month with the eighth-highest birth rate.

Of the 274 self-made tycoons on the Forbes 400, 14% either never started or never completed college. The number of precocious college dropouts is highest among those who forged careers as technology entrepreneurs: Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT), Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL), Michael Dell of Dell (DELL), Larry Ellison of Oracle (ORCL) and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

Forbes 400 members who derive their fortunes from finance make up one of the most highly educated sub-groups: half of them have graduate degrees. Roughly 70% of those with M.B.A.s obtained their master’s degrees from one of three Ivy League schools: Harvard, Columbia or the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Goldman Sachs (GS) has attracted a large share of hungry minds that went on to garner 10-figure fortunes. At least 11 current and recent billionaire financiers worked at Goldman or one of it subsidiaries early in their careers, including Edward Lampert, David Tepper, Daniel Och and Leon Cooperman.

Several Forbes 400 members suffered bitter professional setbacks early in their careers that heightened their fear of failure. Pharmaceutical tycoon R.J. Kirk’s first venture was a flop–an experience he regrets but appreciates. “Failure early on is a necessary condition for success, though not a sufficient one,” he told Forbes in 2007.

According to a statement read by Phil Falcone during a congressional hearing in November 2008, his botched buyout of a company in Newark, N.J., in the early 1990s taught him “several valuable lessons that have had a profound impact upon my success as a hedge fund manager.”

Several current and former billionaires rounded out their Yale careers as members of Skull and Bones, the secret society portrayed with enigmatic relish by Hollywood in movies like The Skulls and W. Among those who were inducted: investor Edward Lampert, Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, and FedEx (FDX) founder Frederick Smith.

PARENTS HAD MATH-RELATED CAREERS

The ability to crunch numbers is typically a key to becoming a billionaire. Often, mathematical prowess is hereditary. Some of the most common professions among the parents of American billionaires for whom we could find that information were engineer, accountant and small-business owner.

SEPTEMBER BIRTHDAYS

Of the 380 self-made American tycoons who have appeared on the Forbes list of the World’s Billionaires in the past three years, 42 were born in September–more than in any other month.

TECH TITANS WHO DROPPED OUT OF COLLEGE

Forget everything your guidance counselor told you: You don’t have to go to college to be successful. Close to 15% of the self-made American moguls on the Forbes 400 never finished college. Many of the list’s drop-outs made their fortunes in tech, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Michael Dell (Dell), Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook).

SKULL AND BONES

Several current and former billionaires rounded out their Yale careers as members of Skull and Bones, the secret society portrayed with enigmatic relish by Hollywood in movies like The Skulls and W. Among those who were inducted: investor Edward Lampert, Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman and FedEx founder Frederick Smith.

GOLDMAN SACHS

A stint at investment bank Goldman Sachs is a prime credential for achieving greatness on Wall Street. Of the 61 tycoons on our list who derive their fortunes from finance, at least six cut their teeth in Goldman’s investment banking, trading, or asset management divisions. The company’s crown jewel: its “risk arbitrage” unit, which launched the careers of billionaires Edward Lampert and Daniel Och, as well as former billionaires Tom Steyer and Richard Perry.

Getting an M.B.A. From a Top-Tier Business School

A graduate degree from a top-tier school is no guarantee of success. But it can’t hurt, especially if you get an M.B.A. from Harvard, as did 19 of the self-made entrepreneurs on the Forbes 400. Another 19 took home M.B.A.s from Stanford, Columbia or the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.