How to Earn $1 Million in 30 Days

First: everything you need to learn about productivity: Pick a kick-butt goal. Shorten the deadline. Gather the best people around you. Then chase down that goal, and beat it into submission. That's how Remi Frazier plans to make $1 million in a month.

Here's his grand plan (although, flawed):

To achieve his goal, Frazier, 27, planned to build a volunteer network of business consultants, conceptualize and design a product, conduct market research for that product, and finally manufacture and sell it on a wide scale. He would have 30 days to complete what a startup usually takes years to do. Earlier that morning on the plane ride in, Frazier had decided on his product: a multipurpose utility tool he dubbed the Mantool, which he describes as similar to a Swiss Army knife or a Leatherman, the real difference being that a customer will be able to customize each element through a Web site.

Sidenote: Yes, we too think he's crazy, but...

Regardless if he does make $1 million, he's shining a bright-freakin' light on the business industry. That is, get moving quickly toward a major goal.

Now, here's what he should really do

In three sweet tips:

Forget the loooong scratch-to-sell process. Think short sales cycles.

Going along with his original idea: first, he'll need to contact folks to set-up his website. Then, debugging. Then contacting customers and educating them about the product, about the site, about the benefits. etc. etc. etc. Here's our tip to him: why not cold call -- which is, importantly, free with Skype? Sure, it's unwise to cold-call individual purchases, so we'd recommend calling businesses or non-profit groups to buy the knives in bulk. Cold-calling before product development also serves another useful purpose: market research. But also...

Know that you can't convice a thousand customers overnight.

When you work on a low-price widget, you better have your butt in gear. You'll have to concentrate on educating a number of customers, selling to a number of customers, supporting a number of customers, etc, etc, etc. Volume is certainly not your friend. Which brings us to...

Spend time getting huge clients by selling high-priced items.

You think multi-million-dollar transactions happen everyday? You betcha. And what's the beauty of focusing on high-priced products? You'll only have a convice a couple of customers. (And as our motto at Trizzy goes for unknown small businesses: convincing somebody to buy a $50 product is as hard as getting them to purchase a $1000 product.) So in a sweet summary: Start selling high-priced items by first cold calling businesses or other organizations.

Regardless of our hateration...

The best ideas (tangible or not) -- from the first PC to eBay, and countless others -- were dismissed as whacked-out ideas. It's happened then, it's happened recently with Skype, and it will always happen. Despite Frazier's approach, we do have high hopes for his goal -- and wish him the best of our wishes. If his progress picks up steam by various media outlets -- who knows -- maybe some crazy media business out there will offer him a $1 million movie deal.

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