Mar
27Top 10 Cities Losing Population Since 2000 in the United States
Filed in: General by Mike Lautensack on 03-27-11To watch majestic cities decline is never fun. New Orleans took its hit with the natural devastation of Hurricane Katrina and can come back, but what will happen to great cities like Detroit that are crumbling under the mismanagement of auto executives and union representatives?
The rust belt cities have taken a huge hit during the last decade as industry leaves and people flee for better opportunities. The crashing of cities like Cleveland and Cincinnati have slid under the radar of Detroits epic fall. Even mighty Chicago has lost 200,000 residents.
What is even worse for these cities is they all have huge public works infrastructures that are driving taxes even higher as their populace flees. Most of the cities are highly unionized in both the public and private sector so there is very little flexibility to improvise and improve their lot.
Instead, they watch their mobile, productive citizens flee and are left trying to keep the cities moving forward.
What mayor will be the next Ozymandias? (Poem below)
Top 10 Cities Losing Population Since 2000 in the United States
City 2010 +/- Since 2000 % Change
New Orleans 343,829 -140,845 -29.1
Detroit 713,777 -237,493 -25.0
Cleveland 396,815 -81,588 -17.1
Cincinnati 296,943 -34,342 -10.4
Pittsburgh 305,704 -28,859 -08.6
Toledo 287,208 -26,411 -08.4
St. Louis 319,294 -28,895 -08.3
Chicago 2,695,598 -200,418 -06.9
Baltimore 620,961 -30,193 -04.6
Santa Ana` 324,528 -13,449 -04.0
Via US Census bureau via the WJS
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Mar
2310 Million Dollar Secrets of Renegade Millionaires From Dan Kennedy
Filed in: General by Mike Lautensack on 03-23-11Below Ive given you the 10 Secrets of Renegade Millionaires from Dan Kennedys newest program.
Enjoy and please comment and let me know what you think.
10 Million Dollar Secrets of Renegade Millionaires
1. They turn ordinary businesses into extraordinary businesses.
* There wasnt a shortage of coffee before starbucks
* There wasnt a shortage of pizza before dominoes
The formula is they turn a mundane ordinary business turned into an extraordinary businessnot an incrementally better business. This is a shift in thinking. You leave the core business there were in X but now what are all the radical things you can do that nobody in X would ever dream of doing?
2. Defy industry norms
Industry norms is average results. Conforming to be accepted.
Everyone making good money defies them, everyone making average money conforms to them.
Make a master list of everything that is a norm in your industry everyone conforms to ie how things are priced, sold, delivered, advertised, marketed, contracts usedthere should be 100s.
Now defy as many of them as humanly possible. You will transform your income in direct proportion to the number you manage to violate. Seriously. Show me the wall. There is no wall. Its a belief.
3. Positioning
You need to carve out some territory in the marketplace you can own.
A piece of space in the market you can own.
Sometimes you need to completely reinvent your business to do it. Ie. Subway taking a fast food business and making it a weight loss business.
Stake out territory your competitors dont have and thus making it difficult for your competitors to get into it with a radical positioning approach.
Same business, different positioning. Carve out a different place in the market. Ie positioning as extreme specialist but doing the same stuff, positioning in a cluttered field in terms of what youre NOT about, positioning as reverse of norm / reverse position (women approach you)
4. Process change
How can you do it better or perhaps substitute an entirely different process for it etc. Ie having people pay in advance (lay away plans) rather than later in installments, 1 step selling to relationship lead gen, single sale to continuity as in you cant just buy one thing of acne goop as you need to sign up for acne goop proactive for life to get it and you need to stop it if you dont want it (still selling goop and simply changed process from you can join the club if you want to you ARE joining the club), bundling versus cafeteria style, options in the second sale after the sale
5. Price
PRICE CHANGE (ie offer a premium option of what you sell and also getting to $1 million using 1 transaction or 2 at $500K and so forth PRICE starbucks did not get to $8 a cup of coffee by looking at Dennys and averaging out coffee prices), Price elasticity
6. Immunity to criticism
Some people when criticized dont recover.
The antidote is: renegade millionaires dont care what anyone thinks except those who give them money. Thats the only vote you get. Not your mother in law, brothers, sisters, not even YOUR opinion countsthe only thing that can count, is results.
They dont care what anyone thinks about what they do except the people who respond to what they do. What they care about is the people who respond to them. Immunity to criticism. Complete immunity. People that make the most money ARE.
7. Systems
Reinventing 67 wheels in your business and business cant function if they arent there and day to day emergency stuff versus McDonalds. Most successful of all of them with the worst food. FAST food business everyone has a poor shadow of a system while McDonalds has a system for fast.
Everywhere one guy cant find a box for something, a girl cant find the cups, etc McDonalds has a system. Operational systems are easy. But assembly line approach to handling customers when they come is what most people dont havea MARKETING system.
8. Macro / Micro
Micro yes or no versus a or b, changing 1 word in a phone script for 10x resultmicro adjustments yielding big results
Macro whats the big vision? whats the big idea? How do we take the core business and wrap 5 businesses around it?
You need both to pay attention to big ideas and pay attention to tiny nitty gritty detail stuff.
9. Economics
Adjusting economics. Competitors ask: how can we spend and do less? But Snyder selling to recently bankrupt people sends FEDEXS while everyone else uses direct mail.
You know: the ultimate competitive advantage is being able and willing to spend MORE to acquire a customer than anybody else who is talking to them.
Change the economics to allow you to spend. You can now do things nobody else talking to your prospects are doing. Strive to spend MORE not less. The question is: how can I spend more than anyone else whos talking to my prospects is spending? Theyre sending mini trash cans on direct mail pieces? How can you send a full sized walmart trashcan handcuffed to the messenger so somebody needs to sign for it with the sales letter inside the full sized trashcan? The gatekeeper cannot throw it out and even if she wanted to what would she throw it out into? 100% get the sales letter, half call in, a third book appointments. Its expensive and people think the guys an idiot but hes doing VERY well.
10. Personal behavior
Business is driven by YOU. Its not so much about positive thought and attitude etc Thats all nice. Positive and dead broke. Truthfully, its behavior.
Behavioral congruency. Ask any leader how they think and you find big philosophical differences and simply differences in thinking. Big thought differences. But theres a few key behavioral commonalities. They DO certain things the same. Not so much what they thinkits about what they DO. Not so much about attitudesits about BEHAVIOR.
Look at the behavior of people who are getting what you want. People envy other peoples businesses, then go back to doing nothing resembling the behavior these people have.
Identify the behaviors of the people getting the results you want. Behavioral commonalities of enough of them that you can call it a principle or strategy.
Mimic the behavior (you dont even have to believe it), but if you mimic it almost magically the results happen. If you have behavioral congruency you get results congruency.
Find out 10 people who are doing what you want to do and find out what they do all the same. Get in sync, perhaps mentally and emotionally, but most importantly behaviorally with the people getting the kind of results you want so you can get those results. This is called MODELING. I saw a rich guy walking with a limp so I walked with a limp for 4 years > this is more right than wrong. Thats what modeling is. You got to look at how do they handle opportunities, problems and crisis, how to do they do advertising and marketing, how do they approach their business differentlyall the different things they do to build a model you can follow
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Mar
20Renters Beware: Double-digit Rent Hikes May be Coming Soon.
Filed in: Property Management by Mike Lautensack on 03-20-11(CNNMoney) — Renters beware: Double-digit rent hikes may be coming soon.
Already, rental vacancy rates have dipped below the 10% mark, where they had been lodged for most of the past three years.
“The demand for rental housing has already started to increase,” said Peggy Alford, president of Rent.com. “Young people are starting to get rid of their roommates and move out of their parent’s basements.”
By 2012, she predicts the vacancy rate will hover at a mere 5%. And with fewer units on the market, prices will explode.
Rent hikes have averaged less than 1% a year over the past decade, according to Commerce Department statistics, adjusted for inflation. Now, Alford expects rents to spike 7% or so in each of the next two years — to a national average that will top $800 per month.
In the hottest rental markets, the increases will likely top the 10% mark annually for the next couple of years, according to Lesley Deutch of John Burns Real Estate Consulting. In San Diego, she anticipates rents will rise more than 31% by 2015. In Seattle rents will climb 29% over that period; and in Boston, they may jump between 25% and 30%.
This is a sharp change from the recession, when many Americans couldn’t afford to live on their own. More than 1.2 million young adults moved back in with their parents from 2005 to 2010, said Deutch. Many others doubled up together.
As a result, landlords had to reduce prices and offer big incentives to snag renters.
We paid cash for our million-dollar home
Now that the recession is easing, many of these young people are ready to find new digs, mostly as renters, not owners. Plus, the foreclosure crisis continues unabated, and the millions losing their homes are looking for new places to live.
Apartment developers many not be able to keep up with this heightened demand, which will force prices upwards, according to Chris Macke, a real estate analyst with CoStar, which tracks multi-family housing trends.
“There will be an envelope of two or three years,” said Macke, “when the rise in demand for rentals will exceed the industry’s ability to meet it.”
Plus, Alford added, “there’s been a shift in the American Dream. We’re learning from our surveys that a huge proportion of people are choosing to rent.”
They’ve experienced the downsides of homeownership — or seen friends and family suffer — and don’t want to take the risks or pay the higher costs of homeownership.
Where homeownership costs are particularly high, there are many more renters than owners. In Manhattan, for example, only about 20% own their homes; in San Francisco, about of third of the population does; in Los Angeles, less than 40%; and in Chicago, about 44%.
There’s one factor that could rein in rent increases: the huge number of foreclosed homes that could hit the market over the next few years.
In many markets, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, there are neighborhoods filled with recently built, single-family homes going for fire-sale prices. When the cost of owning homes falls well below the costs of renting them, more people will buy.
“That’s always been the biggest competition for rentals,” said Deutc
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