The value add that I bring isn’t necessarily the execution of services offered. The value add that I bring is that I bring a reality check to your business by helping you understand these 2 universal limitations

The first constraint is the limitation of resources. Specifically time and manpower. Small businesses often have employees who do a little bit of everything and only have so much time to dedicate.

The second constraint is the limitation of money. Budget. Businesses only have so much money that they can allocate to our services on a monthly, annual  or any other time interval.

Put another way, every small business will ask these 2 questions to me.

1. How much time and resources do I need to allocate to accomplish this. (Constraint #1)
2. How much of what you’re offering can I afford (Constraint #2)

Given these 2 contraints, how can I as a consultant help you get the most bang for your buck. Return on Investment.

But more importantly, given these 2 constraints, how can I help you understand your trade-offs. Because there will be trade-offs that you need to make. You cannot get everything that you want if you have these 2 constant contraints.

There is a small chance that some vendor will come along and tell you that you can get everything that you want with your 2 constraints. And there is a big chance that he is fooling you into believing that. And you won’t know or understand the true limitations until you are knee deep into hiring him.

How to avoid this scenario?

Be upfront with me about your limitations. I value the candor. Because once I know your constraints, I can develop a specifically tailored program to meet that. But more importantly, I can tell you what you need to sacrifice. I can help you face reality.

And the reality is that you run a small business with constraints.

If you put this into a formula then it’s P + O= L .

Preparation is simply the idea of how ready you are. Opportunity is seen as chance or the prospect to advance.

For the sake of this formula, we can say that P reflects the intensity of your preparedness. Preparedness, is, afterall a spectrum or range rather than one finite point. You can be under prepared or over prepared or somewhere in between. O represents the number of opportunities you can have. Opportunities come more than once. Wiseman explains in the book as to how you can increase your opportunities. The combination of both of these element will than represent how “Lucky” you truly are.

So if you want to really increase your luck, then you need to increase your preparedness and/or increase the number of opportunities you have.

For example, the formula can be written as such; 3P+4O=L.

The numbers themselves are just arbitrary. They can be anything. The point is that you can increase your luck by simply increasing how well prepared and studious you are in addition to increasing your opportunities. By doing so, you increase your “luck factor”.

This conceptual formula can be applied to all aspects of your life, be it business, personal, or social. I think this formula in addition to Wiseman’s work really helps to demystify that luck isn’t as fatalistic as some people make it out to be. Ergo you’re either lucky or you’re not.

Let’s take a few scenarios:

Professional- You want a better job. Prepare better and more diligently for your interviews and increase the number of interviews you go on. Do this enough times and you can get really “lucky”.

Social- You want to increase the number of friends you have. Just go out more often rather than make the excuse that you may not meet anyone. This represents the opportunity element. You can increase your P by simply working on how sociable or friendly you are. People with good social skills tend to have a larger social network. Social skills can include how conversant you are, your accessibility, and overall personality. All of these can fit within the subset of P, being more prepared. By being prepared to be more social and increasing the opportunities of going out, you can increase how lucky you get in making new friends.

Romance- You want to get more dates. Again, you can increase your opportunities by simply going out and asking more women out. Someone is bound to say yes….sooner or later. Preparation in this case is simply working on your personality. This can be charm, wit, intelligence, or whatever traits that a woman may desire in you. By being better prepared and increasing the numbers, then you can get pretty “lucky”. I use that word loosely in this scenario.

Personal Example- I have recently gotten “luckier” in landing new clients in the past 2 months. I’m on a roll, actually. *Knock on wood*. I’ve closed every single deal that I’ve written a proposal for in the last several months. How? I changed a few things in my proposal writing. I changed the actual words, deleted a few areas, and made some modifications to how the proposal is presented to the prospect. I have not increased the number of prospects I meet. That would represent the O in this case. So by simply increasing how well prepared I am, I manifested a “lucky streak”.

Wiseman goes into far more detail of how to increase your luck factor in his book. When compared to his research, my formula is considered generic. However, don’t ignore the simplicity of it.

Some people may still argue what the definition of luck truly is and therefore making my formula invalid. The point isn’t to focus on the semantics but to understand that luck, which plays a role in our success, can be controlled to some degree. Luck, success…call it whatever you want. The point as Wiseman notes in his book, is that our lives aren’t as fatalistic as some of us would lead to believe.

In the American business marketplace today, we shouldn’t have to worry about being “great”, “remarkable”, or other terms that gurus have coined throughout the years. Instead, we should focus on just being “good enough.”

Just focus on being good enough… for now. Be good enough to land a client. Make sure your systems are good enough. Make sure that your methodologies are good enough. Ensure that how you present yourself is good enough. Not great, not perfect, but just good enough.

Being good enough will help you get moving. In time, you will achieve greatness. We all have the potential to go from “good to great”. However, greatness started with just being good enough.

Being good enough frees you from undue pressure that you put on yourself. Once you reached a threshold of being good enough and avoid chasing perfection for that discpline, then that is time you’ve saved that can be applied elsewhere. You start taking that time you’ve saved and “funding” other discplines that require your time to be good enough.

You now start developing a portfolio of disciplines that are good enough to be used to win over clients and customers. You continue to win customers which in turns creates momentum which in turn allows you to bankroll more discplines and initiatives. This gets the ball rolling. And that’s really what you need– to get the ball rolling.

When I came up with the concept, I wondered as to what I should call it. Do I call it something generic like The Entrepreneur’s Dinner? Or do I just call it a get together and keep it low-key with the hype? But no, I had to get creative, create a logo, and start branding it already. So I picked, The Amazing Dinner.

But then, nervousness and trepidation started to creep in. This always happens to me whenever I organize something new that I hadn’t done before. I’ve been hosting and organizing social and professional events for years now. Nervousness and concern always starts to creep in till this very day.

I start to worry. I start to have thoughts such as; “What if it sucks?” What if no one comes? What if something happens to derail the event? What if one freaking moron decides to ruin it for everyone else?” Funny enough, they rarely ever do and it’s a rarity for me to ever have a bad event.

These thoughts are amplified when I do it for my professional network. I don’t want to lose face to them. I don’t want to waste their time when they can be at home with their family or at some other meeting. It’s my reputation that is on the line. I built it with every word I spoke, every action I made, and every deal that I brokered. It’s what is so precious to me.

These were some of the thoughts that occurred in my head every now and then leading up to the event. You know how I combated those thoughts? With the following below. And this is what I wanted to share with you.

Life is nothing without expectations. We could go through life and never expect anything from anyone and be perfectly content. Try doing that and see how little you will accomplish.

I decided to raise the bar high for this concept. To me, there is nothing more, well, amazing, then putting a group of risk-takers and deal-makers that I personally know and vouch for in one room. We sit down, break some bread, and create conversations around the one commonality that unites all of us. It is something that most of our friends will never understand about us. But as soon as we sit down, we already know how hard some of us had to toil to get to get to where we are today. There’s implied commonality.

Words such as nice and good are used in our daily language. We don’t know what it’s like to experience amazing on a daily basis. We just know that we’re “doing good.” Or we “feel fine.” Or that we think “that’s nice.”

But amazing? Forget about it.

We need to learn to set the bar high.

Some months ago, I recall seeing someone who was pretty amazing in her own right. She had all the qualities that I wanted in someone. I remember one phone conversation where she was on fire. She was dreaming of a better tomorrow for herself. I could hear that excitement in her voice and her vision. I couldn’t remember the last time I dated someone who was that excited and had amazing expectations of herself and her future. That unto itself excited me. She set the bar high for everything that she did in her life. Mediocrity was not in her vocabulary.

We’re so preoccupied with the daily rigors of life that we forget that there is something more spectacular just over the hill. We hang with a crowd that tries to bring us down. We follow a herd that lacks direction. We have to lead ourselves into a direction full of possibilities. We must become possibility thinkers again.

We have to expect amazing even if we get disappointed or heartbroken.

Life is one big project comprised of many smaller projects and milestones. Make a decision to take on a project and make it amazing. Develop an amazing relationship with your significant other. Have amazing friends. Find an amazing job. Make amazing money. Have an amazing night. Engage in an amazing conversation. Have an amazing kiss.

One definition of amazing is; “So remarkable as to elicit disbelief.”

It’s unexpected. It came out of nowhere. We are all capable of eliciting such a reaction from others if we really wanted to.

Make a decision that everything that you take on will have not just have a stamp of approval but leave people with an imprint of amazement. Leave people talking the next morning.

We don’t use the word, amazing, enough in our vocabulary. We don’t live up to amazing expectations or surround ourselves with amazing people or try to accomplish amazing things ourselves. Most of it is just mediocre. We settle.

So this was what went through my mind when I created the concept and title of The Amazing Dinner. I set the bar high with the name itself.

I had to bring in high caliber people. It had to be in a great restaurant. The conversation had to be fun and nonstop. Perhaps I set the bar too high. Afterall, how amazing can a simple dinner be? Well, judging from the feedback, it can be pretty darn amazing.

Wake up today with the decision that you’ll take on a project and make it amazing. Afterall, life itself is one big amazing project.

Live with purpose. Love with passion.

~Dean

The Offer

I run my own design studio and I’m looking for a type of barter exchange. I’m willing give away free hours or web design and maintenance work for a business or at a deep discounted rate (50% off). It ultimately depends on the work that needs to be done. See below for my skillsets.

In exchange for the free services rendered, I want gift cards, comped, or a fair monetary value exchange of their products. For example, I put in a few hours of work on their site. As opposed to billing them for services rendered, I want a giftcard for the same amount or some other fair monetary value to be exchanged at their establishment at a later date.

At the top of my list are;

1. nice restaurants who have horrible websites. There’s a lot of those.
2. ski lift tickets to any local resort. Or if you know someone who operates something out in Colorado or Utah than that’s a double bonus and I’ll take you along I want to get as much skiing in as possible before it’s over!
3. any other entertaining local nightlife establishment
4. bed and breakfast inns or other lodgings
5. destination travel resorts (Hawaii, cruises, carribeans, etc…)

Know someone?

Forward this email on to them along with my contact info below.

Typical services rendered on my part are;

1. blogging platform setups (Wordpress)
2. online and web graphic work ( I don’t do print design)
3. web design and programming
4. recoding of pages or adding new pages up
5. html and css maintenance coding

I don’t do barters for service professionals unless it’s an extremely great service that I need. I’m interested in *tangible* products.

My company site is Sachi Studio and my contact info is found there as well. My email is dean[at] sachistudio [dot] com

I look at all the people I know and some of the most enjoyable relationships I have are the ones that I have with fellow entrepreneurs. It tends to be a sort of hybrid relationship that I have with some of them whereby we mix both business and pleasure. We connect well on a professional level but we also go beyond the boardroom and connect on a very meaningful personal level. We’ve become friends. Our conversations go beyond business and delve into personal topics such as dating, politics, mutual interests, and more.

That type of connection is very rare for me to develop. I know and run into a lot of people on a weekly and monthly basis. But there are only a few who ever stick out in my mind. It’s important that that these types of relationships are maintained and strengthened.

The process of breaking bread is a very intimate process that allows people to get to know each other over good food and developing meaningful conversations.

So it’s my hopes to bring this back on a more consistent basis. I’m thinking monthly. I don’t have any fancy schmancy name for it right now except for Amazing Entrepreneurs Dinner. Because that’s what I hope it would be. Amazing people. Amazing conversations. Amazing opportunities.

The goal;

To add value to the lives of my friends and colleagues. That value comes in two distinct forms- strong connections in either a friendship or professional capacity.

The process;

Invitation-only. Most of them will come through my own network. I’ll allow everyone to invite at least one of their own friends as well to help grow the circle but limited to the capacity of the event itself. It’s dinner for 8-11 entrepreneurs at a local restaurant. It won’t be super high end, but certainly not low end either. The goal is too enjoy great food in a great environment.

Primary age range is between 25-45. There is a high correlation between the age and strength of the relationship; the closer we are in age, the more likely we are to have something in common.

Stay tuned…

1. An online magazine targeted towards young Asian adults (20-40 years old)
2. Uses a blogging platform to power the site.
3. Focuses on topics such as local events, issues, resources, editorial pieces, pop culture, etc…

I tossed the idea to Christian who is heavily involved in the local APA community, but I saw his answer coming a mile away….no time!

We both think it’s a good idea if done right. I know I have the technical skillsets to develop the site as well as the marketing skills to evangelize the benefits to its intended targeted audience. But like Christian, I don’t have the time to find and recruit good writers and bloggers and oversee them.

It’s not a big deal to me at this point as I’ve got way too much to do as it is. But I wanted to toss the idea out there to see if there is anyone who would gravitate towards the concept. Though not exactly what I am aiming for, I like the concept of Kineda, which is an online magazine in blog format dedicated towards pop culture.

There is a growing perception amongst my circle of friends and acquaintances that I am a “player” of sorts. I’ve also gotten “ladies man” as well. Boy- nothing could be further from the truth.

I started to really notice this disparity on my most recent birthday celebration. I looked at the list of people that I invited and those who came and it was a lot of women. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when one of my business friends, Rick Dassler, came to my birthday dinner with his wife. Apparently, she told Rick that she thought I was some sort of player because I had nothing but hot girls on my end of the table. And then there is Jennifer who once asked her boyfriend, Chris, as to why I have throngs of female friends around me all the time. And of course, Tammy had commented on my Life Last Year Video that a lot of the pics in the video were of me “hugged up” with other girls. And the comments and perceptions just go on and on.

I suppose there are far worse things that one can be called so I’m not really complaining.

But I really do wish I had more guy friends.

All the guys that were at my birthday celebration were all taken as well. Chris has a girlfriend. So does Ed, though we’re not that close. But he’s a fun guy to have around. Rick and Tak are both married so I can’t really spend that much time with them.

I started to look at the traits that they all had in common and I realized that perhaps that is also the one quality that I like in my guy friends. All four of them are sociable, intelligent, and sophisticated guys. They all have different personalities in their own right, but otherwise, they are all a good catch. I could vouch for any one of them.

But I look at my female friends and I realize they all have the same traits as well. Christa, Neusa, Marinel, Estella, Sharon, and the list go on and on. Most of my female friends are pretty sociable, sophisticated and intelligent. And so I realized why there was a disparity in my guy to girl friends ratio.

Relatively speaking, girls in general, tend to be more sociable creatures. This has to do with their upbringing and environment. I’m not going to go into that but just trust me on that one.

I never considered myself a sociable person. Hence the tagline in my blog, “extroverted introvert.” I’m naturally an introvert but try to be more extroverted and outgoing. People say that I’m very sociable so I guess I’ll just accept that.

I used to wonder with as many people that I meet why I couldn’t make more guy friends. And I just realized that it isn’t always me but it’s usually some of these guys. Some of these guys aren’t that sociable. They have no personality. And some aren’t that interesting to begin with.

A female friend and I were talking the other day and she was saying that there are just certain people that she wouldn’t necessarily invite into some of her social circles. When you first hear her say it, you may think that she might be snobby. But the more thought that I give it, the more I realize she is right. I do the same thing. Others tend to do the same thing as well. We tend to associate ourselves with people with whom we know, like, and trust.
Birds of the same feather flock together.

So when it comes down to it, I just have more female friends because the qualities that I look for in another friend tends to be something that some girls have more than guys. At least I think that is the case. But hey, I’ve been known to be wrong before. I’m certainly hoping that I can be wrong here as well. Of course, honesty, fun, and loyal are also qualities that I look for in friends.

I do admit that I love the company of a pretty girl. I don’t just mean in terms of looks though. There are a lot of attractive girls who bore the heck out of me. Looks alone don’t go far with me. But pretty girls who have substance is always icing on the cake with me.

But I also realize that friendship with the opposite sex can be fragile at times. So it’s always good to go back to the guys. But then again, friendships with guys can be fragile at times as well. So who knows what to make of all of this.