We’ve all got some big challenges to deal with these days: this wacky economy, maintaining cash flow, laying safety nets, building our companies, attracting more business, all while managing to stay sane and tenacious through these trying times.
That’s why we rolled up our sleeves and put ourselves to work on attacking this hairball of issues that literally can make or break your career…not to mention your spirits.

After months of all nighters and brutally long workdays, we’re finally ready to unveil a big new resource to help you find solutions to your biggest personal and professional challenges.

It’s called Fast Track to Success: 30 Days to Transform Your Life & Career.  Jam packed with perspective, inspiration and tips for leaping into action, this new tool is GUARANTEED to make a serious difference for you.  And you can take that to the bank!

How?  Fast Track is an online learning program that you can power through in as little as 30 days, 30 minutes a day.  Every lesson features online posts to read with full audio (read by me!) that you can download and listen to on the go if you’d prefer.  Then, once you’ve learned, it’s time to help you do.  Almost every lesson has a worksheet (or a few) designed to walk you though putting everything into action immediately.

Since this is all about getting to the next level, you’ll see not only your perspective, but outlook and opportunities evolve more and more every day!  We’ve even included a few videos to keep you fired up and opportunities every step of the way to share your thoughts or ask for help or advice from our team.  And again, we’re so confident this can help change your life for the better, we’re willing to guarantee it.  We’ll even send you a hard copy of our New York Times bestseller Secrets of the Young & Successful: How to Get Everything You Want Without Waiting a Lifetime as our gift.

To celebrate the launch of this new program, we’re going to spend the next 30 days sharing some of our best tips and tricks to take on this crazy economy on by storm, increase your opportunities, amp up your competitive advantage, and yes, make more money!

We want to share your best advice too, so keep your eyes peeled and we’ll offer plenty of opportunities on YoungandSuccessful.com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to share your expertise and experience too!  So stay tuned and help us spread the word about anything you find particularly useful to your friends and colleagues.  We’ll all fare better and find the success we crave and deserve if we bond together and become a force to be reckoned with.

Here’s to all of our success!

Everywhere I go lately, small business owners, company execs and everyone in sales is preoccupied with closing deals.  The economy has certainly made business a lot more difficult to succeed in, and more than ever, we all need to constantly be analyzing how we’re doing things to keep getting smarter, better, more efficient and more effective.  And at the top of everyone’s list: making more money.

That all said, I want to share some hard earned insight that will hopefully save many of you a lot of time, money and aggravation.

When you’re courting a new company or client, the sales process can easily get dragged out over a matter of weeks, months, or worse, never really result in an answer at all – be it yes or no.  So, how do you cut to the chase and find out whether there’s really even a deal to be done in the first place?

A few simple questions can make all the difference.

1.  What exactly are you looking to have done?

2.  What does success look like for this project?

3.  Where does this fall on your overall priority list?

4.  Are you exploring solutions with other prospective consultants/contractors?

5.  What questions do you have about me/us/our work?

6.  What’s the time frame you’re looking to start and execute this in?

7.  What does your budget look like?

8.  Who is the ultimate decision maker? (Who controls the checkbook?)

9.  Do you have a specific process for closing deals like this?

10.  As for next steps, would you like me to send you a recap of our conversation and a proposal on how we might be able to help you/best serve you?

They say yes, and you have yourself a hot lead.

It may take a meeting or so to build rapport and get comfortable enough to ask these questions, but rest assured you’ll start closing deals a heck of a lot faster when you get answers to these questions early on.

Learn to succeed with investors–from a guy who failed.

Shortly after my college graduation, a few friends and I started a new media company. Within a few weeks we fleshed out the concept, wrote a business plan and set out to seek financing. With a little hustle, I managed to get us a meeting with a well-known investment firm to discuss the opportunity. Even though our business had yet to bring in a single dollar, and none of us had ever been the CEO of coffee shop let alone a multi-million dollar enterprise, we were all confident that we had a sure thing on our hands. After all, our financial projections forecasted gross revenues of $200 million. What investor could say no to that?

We’d be rich. All we needed to do was raise a small amount of capital–$15 million.

I remember thinking, “How hard could it be?” We were obviously, naïve, foolish and delusional.

There was one small problem with our plan. None of us had any idea how to pitch an investor. So I did what any clueless entrepreneurial upstart would do: Google searched “how to pitch an investor”.

Nothing that I read online could have prepared me for what was to come. We would quickly find out that our presentation was doomed before we ever set foot into the meeting. In reality, it was doomed before we started writing the business plan.

At the beginning of the meeting one of the investors asked me to hand him a one-page executive summary review. I hadn’t prepared a summary, so I handed him the first 11 pages out of the binder encasing my 95-page business plan. Strike one.

Less than four slides into my 32-slide presentation, the second investor interrupted me and said, “OK. Stop. I get it. You definitely don’t need $15 million.”

Defending our business plan, I overconfidently replied: “It can’t be done for less.”

“Really? It can’t be done, huh?” he responded with a smirk masking a hint of laughter. Strike two.

Both of the investors then proceeded to hit us with a barrage of questions:

“How much money have you personally put into your business? Anywhere near $15 million?”

“How can you possibly substantiate gross revenues of $200 million in year three?”

“Why are you trying to produce, market and distribute 10 products at the same time before you see if a single one sells at all?”

The questions went on and on. None of our answers were favorable. Strike three.

As you might have guessed, I didn’t walk out of that meeting with a $15 million check. I later realized, however, that this was one of the greatest educational experiences of my young career. I learned more about real-world fundraising in 30 minutes than many entrepreneurs learn in a lifetime. To this day, whenever I pitch investors for capital, I always remember these six hard-learned lessons:

1. Less is always more.

An elevator pitch is vital. Verbose presentations and lengthy explanations will not impress investors, and most likely will turn them off. Present your business in a manner that’s short, sweet and to the point. Investors need to be confident that your business will attract and retain customers. If they don’t grasp your concept in a short time span, they may presume that customers won’t understand it either.

2. Never hypothesize. Execute, execute, execute.

Inspire confidence with facts, not fiction. Most investors seek out low-risk businesses with proven managers that are as close to guarantees as possible. A company with cash flow, a track record and real-world experience has a better chance of getting investors than a business plan forecasting large returns. Find ways to test your business’s viability on a shoestring budget, and turn your idea into a functional business before you seek investment.

3. Leave the hockey sticks on the ice.

Excite investors about your big picture, but be reasonable and responsible. Avoid hockey stick projections. Respectable investors will not take you seriously if you present them with nonsensical financial graphs that claim your company’s revenues will grow from $100,000 to $50 million in three years. Show investors that you have a grasp on reality with three versions of financial projections: best case, moderate case and worst case. Base each of these models on facts, past and present performance data, industry and competitor analyses and a series of well-thought-out, defendable assumptions.

4. Learn to love discount stores.

Being cheap is chic. In an age where spending is out of control, you’ll need to prove that you are a fiscally responsible manager who knows how to get the most out of a buck. Give yourself wiggle room in your operations and marketing budgets, but avoid being excessive. Never ask for a large salary or big-budget perks. Investors want you to be in a position where everything is on the line.

5. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your business won’t be either.

Investors are wary of funding over-eager businesses that seem destined to bite off more than they can chew. Before asking for millions of dollars to fund 50 divisions and hundreds of product lines, prove how well you can create, manage and fulfill demand for a single product. Demonstrate that your business can crawl before you say it can walk. Perfect your marketing tactics, sales strategies and operational procedures. Investors appreciate companies with sustainable step-and-repeat business models that are poised for exponential growth. Remember, even Google’s success is based on a single product.

6. Choose not to be the smartest person in the room.

Know what you know, know what you don’t know and find the people who know what you don’t know. Build a team of credible experts. The smartest leaders in the world are those who surround themselves with smarter people. Investors are funding a management team as much as they are investing in a great business concept.

Are you a young entrepreneur with a unique venture? Email Scott about it at pitchme@askgerber.com.

Scott Gerber is Entrepreneur Magazine’s Young Entrepreneur columnist, CEO of Gerber Enterprises and founder of AskGerber.com. Visit AskGerber.com to find out how your business can get featured in Scott’s new book, Never Get A Real Job. For information on speaking engagements, media appearances or Gerber Enterprises’ portfolio of businesses visit www.GerberEnterprises.com. Follow Scott on Twitter @askgerber.

Truth: Most people never become what they could be. Without a definite purpose or ambition, they cruise along in life, tackling what’s easy with great aplomb, saving what’s difficult for another day that never comes. When obstacles become too tough, too inconvenient or seemingly insurmountable, they give up, then resign themselves to the fact that success wasn’t meant for them.

Obstacles – nasty as they may be – are really nothing more than giants on the road to your goal. Giants pop up to test you, to strengthen you and – more often than not – to make you prove you’re ready for what you want in the first place. (Some people say that giants are a sign that you’re on the right path.)

No matter what you do in life, how you handle giants will ultimately determine how successful you become.

Be warned, however: Giants are clever. They come disguised as a lack of time, funds, education, contacts, resources…you name it. There’s a garden variety to choose from, all giants nonetheless. Perhaps the greatest giant of all is insecurity, i.e., who am I to do that? Don’t allow yourself to get intimated by big projects and paralyzed into inaction. Whenever feelings of doubt of insecurity creep in, recognize it for what it is – fear – and then get out of your own way. (Note: The more giants you tackle, the easier they become to defeat.)

The key to conquering fear is not to try and banish it completely (which is impossible), but to deal with it. Use it. Turn your fear into focus. No matter what the situation, if you take the spotlight off of yourself (how is this going to make me look?) and put it on the task at hand (what would really make this project outstanding?), you’ll have an easier time moving forward.

“Focus is bringing everything you have to what you want and cutting off everything else.”

~Advertising Legend Mary Wells Lawrence

Emily Bennington is the author of Effective Immediately: How to Fit In, Stand Out, and Move Up at Your First Real Job. She hosts a popular blog for career newbies at www.professionalstudio365.com and can be found on Twitter @EmilyBennington or via email at ebennington@msn.com.

I always wanted to be both an entrepreneur and writer. Which is what led me to start Literary Magic, an online literary magazine. I was only 15 at the time and was heading into an industry known for thick competition and thinner business plans, but I used my verve and love for writing and words to distinguish my creation from the rest. So was born Literary Magic, the first online source for literati of all parts: short stories and literature combined with linguistics and etymology.

Literary Magic is like a story to me. Like my life, it’s had its up and downs. Successes and failures. But now our traffic has grown and our name has begun to establish itself within the minds of literati and bibliophages (people who “consume” books at a ludicrous rate). We receive hundreds of submissions a year and dozens of book review requests. What started as an idea for a website has been transformed into a thriving venture. Now I’m working on turning it into a profitable business, utilizing a three-pronged business model of advertising, consulting and e-commerce.

I first got started with Literary Magic by following my passions. At 12 I wrote my first book. That took three years. My second book took three days. Sound crazy? Well, if there’s a will there is a way. This led to me to explore other aspects of the English language, which birthed Literary Magic. Since then, I have written over 200 articles and reviews on language and business, received the Attorney General’s Triple C Award and won my high school’s English literature award.

But my passions took me further. Only six months after working on Literary Magic, the former New York Times columnist William Safire dubbed me a “word maven.” A few weeks later, I was invited to intern with The McGraw-Hill Companies to work with their Online Media team.

The most important things I have learned from my experiences is to never give up and that while there is no formula for success, one method that works for me is the equation “Idea + Implementation = Success. Ideas are nothing if you do not persist and put in the effort to make it happen.

I have also gotten a taste of the incredible amount of effort that goes into running a website and managing people. However, from this experience I have improved my communication and marketing skills.

Today, as I start college,  I still run Literary Magic as CEO and Editor-in-Chief, with a staff of six editors, two dozen staff writers and a couple of web technicians. It has transformed into Reichman Media, which will serve as my platform for all future web ventures. I’m trying to both build a business model and expand the readership of Literary Magic. I also do marketing as CMO for robotics and electronics startup Narobo. I have interned with McGraw-Hill for 4 years and I am working on my third novel. When I’m not working on business, I write and tap dance.

But to me, entrepreneurship isn’t just a career choice. It’s way of life.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions about writing or entrepreneurship or if you just want to connect. I love meeting fellow entrepreneurs and writers!