This is a recent photo of when I was working with Jordan Belfort, aka The Wolf Of Wall Street, doing some promotional planning for his upcoming Australian tour.

Find out more about Jordan Belfort here.

This is a quick intro video to Evernote in case you haven’t already heard of it. I store almost everything in Evernote now as part of going paperless. I’ll write more about how I use Evernote in some upcoming posts.

Jordan Belfort is known as one of the greatest sales and motivational guys out there. He was once making $50 million a year and owned one of the largest firms in its field. Martin Scorsese has just directed a movie based on his life and best selling books and to top if off, Leonardo DiCaprio is starring as Jordan.

Recently, I’ve been working with Jordan to promote his upcoming Australian tour which is hitting most major cities in Australia. His training is aimed at business owners, directors, executives and sales teams. I’ve learnt more from this guy in one day than what I’ve learnt from reading and seeing dozens of other sales people.

Contact me if you are interested in finding out more information. I have some special pricing and upgrades I can offer for a limited time.

This is Jordan personally explaining his Straight Line Sales Training. His upcoming Australian tour will see him running these full day training sessions in each capital city. Contact me for more information if you are interseted in attending and would like to know about special pricing and ticket upgrades I can offer.

This website is the primary official Australian Government resource for business. Here you can find a whole range of resources for businesses of all sizes. It’s quite useful and links off to other sites and tools you can use.

If for some reason you haven’t heard of Jordan Belfort, by the end of 2013 you will have when a feature film directed by Martin Scorsese comes out.  Leonardo DiCaprio is starring in the movie which is based on Jordan’s real-life story.

When I first read his first book, The Wolf Of Wall Street, I read the entire book within a matter of days, all 515 pages.

A couple of weeks ago as I was settling into my office for the day when I got a phone call from a close personal friend asking if I wanted to be involved in an opportunity. An hour later I was sitting in a room with Jordan Belfort himself.

By the end of the day I was a senior facilitator for Jordan Belfort and had personally been trained by him. Quite bizarre considering I had no intentions of signing up for this at the start and was instead just using the opportunity to meet him.

Within the first 60 seconds of meeting him I felt he had already changed me. He knew exactly how to engage with the people in the room, how to read our body language and how to adjust his tone to get certain reactions from us.

He is the type of person and speaker that has you instantly thinking in your head how you can do things better and achieve greater success. By the time I got to bed that night I had already re-worked my sales techniques and brainstormed new business ideas I had thought of that day.

Some people are put off by Jordan’s colorful history and he is the first to say that he isn’t proud of everything. However these days he has focused his energy on becoming the world’s leading sales and motivational trainer. He travels the world teaching his unique Straight Line System and works directly with some of the world’s largest companies and sporting franchises.

There’s very little financial reward in it for me to promote Jordan’s upcoming tour. I’m doing it for the experience and because I honestly believe my clients and network could really benefit from his training. If I can learn from Jordan along the way I know I’ll get a return when I put those skills into practice within my own consulting firm.

If you would like more information, you can visit the Jordan Belfort website or contact me to see what special prices I can offer you.

To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.

~ Bruce Lee

From the moment we wake up, we are processing information. It can come from our smart phones, email, texts, social media, our TV’s, computers, tablets, newspapers, radio, signs, advertising, the Internet, our spouse, friends, family, colleagues and just about anybody else we come across throughout the day.

Too often I see leaders trying to be involved in all aspects of their business. These people spend half their days gathering and processing information. I used to be this type of person but then realised I was missing opportunities because I was too worried about things that I couldn’t really do anything about.

As leaders, we must be more selective in choosing the information that we know. We need to empower the people around us to make decisions based on the information they have and then not micromanage them.

Just for one day, track all the information you receive and think about whether it helps you to achieve your goals. Make a conscious decision about whether you’ll continue to receive that type of information. You will find that you can easily win back at least a few hours each week just by being selective in what you know.

6 Ways To Choose What You Know

1. Stop being CC’d or BCC’d into so many emails.
2. Cut down the amount of meetings you have.
3. Empower your staff and direct reports to make decisions.
4. Don’t constantly check emails, sales numbers or updates from other systems.
5. Trust and support decisions made by other people.
6. Use an assistant to process information and only be updated on important matters that require a decision or action from you.

Choosing the information you receive isn’t about being less informed or losing control of your business. It’s about being a more effective leader and having the time to focus on what really matters.

Question: What information could you stop receiving without it impacting the operations of your business?

Every business and its manager’s and leader’s should have a professional voice message recording on their phone systems and mobile phones. They don’t have to be professionally recorded but they should be more than just the generic recordings that come with your phone or system, and I will assume, for the sake of my sanity, that you aren’t using any kind of novelty greeting.

We can’t always answer every call so there is a good chance that your customers are going to hear your voice message recording at some stage. If we are following best practices of time management , we ensure that there are times during the day where we block out time to focus on tasks and let all calls go through to voicemail.

The purpose of a voice message recording is to confirm to the caller who they have contacted and give them an opportunity to leave relevant details so a follow-up can be made easily. It shouldn’t be trying to sell the caller anything and it doesn’t need to go into detail about what you do. I even recommend leaving out the common line of “your call is important to us….” because this just adds more length and means the caller has to wait longer before they can leave a message.

Sample Business Voice Message Recording

“Thanks for calling Entourage Consulting. We will get back to you promptly so please leave your name, number and a short message after the tone.”

Sample Personal Voice Message Recording

“You have reached Shane Mackintosh, please leave your name, number and short message when you hear the tone and I’ll get back to you shortly.”

Your personal recording does not need to be saying why you are away, where you are holidaying or that you are too busy to answer calls. Keep it simple and straight to the point while still fitting in with your corporate brand. Record it in an environment with no other sound or echo and rehearse saying it before you record it.

You may want to get your receptionist or assistant to record the message which is fine so long as they understand the tone you want projected and they rehearse it beforehand. There are companies that record professional voice mail recordings and these can be good for your primary business line, although you may want to record your mobile phone recording yourself so it sounds a little more personal.