This is one of several great quotes and ideas from ‘21 essential lessons for growing your business’ by investor and former Channel 4 chairman Luke Johnson.

I rarely watch Dragon’s Den (or any of the ritual humiliation programmes on TV) because it perpetuates the myth that great businesses come out of unique, innovative ideas. None of the really successful clients I have worked with over the years have built the business on anything particularly original; they just do everything consistently well: good customer service, good money and people management, good marketing.

Other quotes of Luke’s that I like (but which I don’t necessarily agree with completely) are:

• “Football clubs are essentially charities run for the financial benefit of staff, as are most investment banks.”
• “The life of a self-made man is not always pleasant. Driving hard bargains, dealing with litigation, juggling creditors, making staff redundant, fighting for customers – these are all part of the craft of running your own show. Managing a business can have a brutalising influence on your character.”
• “Achievement changes people. Once someone attains status and wealth, their attitude towards sharing the spoils and the glory alters. It slowly dawns on them that actually all the clever moves and breakthroughs were their idea and, in fact, they are the only one who really does any work.”

Here is the full list: http://realbusiness.co.uk/advice_and_guides/21-business-lessons-from-luke-johnson

Please tell me which is your favourite, and why.

The secret to success on the stock market is quite simply:

Learn a good system and apply it with absolute discipline

Don’t let ego and greed get in the way! These are the main reasons why people lose money on the stock market – they refuse to accept small losses (ie to accept their own failure) and instead end up losing a lot more.

It is a statistical fact that women are better at making money on trading shares than men are. The reason is ego!

The systems that make all the difference are in themselves quite simple. The main ones we learned about were “channelling” where you track trends by looking at graphs for various shares to pick up on patterns, and then do some basic due diligence on the company concerned (easy with the internet now of course).

Also you must always, always using “stop losses” (selling stocks after they drop by a certain %age from the purchase price or the subsequent increased value – usually 10% to 20% maximum).

Another small but important tip that we picked up from the seminar was to do with US stock rather than UK or elsewhere. The main reasons are that the US stock market:

• is the most liquid, most freely traded market in the world
• their trading hours end at 9pm our time, so you have time after office hours to check on your stocks
• it is the world’s largest stock market, so there is so much choice
• there is no stamp duty

At the time of writing this, I have not yet traded actively (my US brokerage account is still being opened), so I hope by the time you read this I will have some success stories to pass on!   Please let me know if you would like to hear them.

As accountants, we are in the privileged position of knowing just how much money all of our customers are making. We also work very closely with them, often over several years or even decades. I have noticed that the people who make a lot of money and grow wealthy share certain characteristic or habits that most of the less successful people do not.

Here is my personal account of what I think the main habits shared by the most successful K&H clients that I have worked with:

1. They have clear desks, and they have clear uncluttered minds that are capable of focusing on one thing at a time.
2. They are great listeners and are always hungry for advice, feedback and outside ideas.
3. They know where they are going and what they want.
4. They instinctively prioritise their day to day activities according to their goals.
5. They are passionate about details, but without being perfectionists (a hard balancing act).
6. They return phone calls and emails promptly.
7. They have accurate, timely, relevant management information, including accounts, at their fingertips.

Stephen Covey (author of ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effectively People’) wrote another book called ‘The Eighth Habit’. If I were to add an eighth to my list it would be:

8. They don’t blame other people when things go wrong.

I will leave you to decide on the deeper personality/psychometric traits that are revealed by these clues.

I would also be interested to know how well you do on each of these areas, if you were to give yourself a 1 to 10 score on each one. (Mine comes out at 65 out of a possible 80, or 8.1 average – let me know if you agree!) .

Asian-owned businesses in the UK are one such group. These now crosses from first through to second and third generations and span manufacturing and services, entertainment and fashion, hotels and property, food and pharmaceuticals.

Spinder Dhaliwal, author of Making a Fortune – Learning from the Asian Phenomenon, has identified six key traits of the Asian business success phenomenon in the UK, that we can all learn from.

1. Tenacity
   TV programmes like The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den have popularised the idea of the brash go-getting entrepreneur. The truth is that hard (and “smart”) work, perseverance and true grit that has driven the Asian business community in the UK. Most Asian-owned businesses are more famous than their owners – for example not many people associate ebookers.com with its founder Dinesh Dhamija. Jim Collins in his book Good to Great showed how sustained success is more likely in businesses with lower profile leaders.
2. 24/7 work culture
   Up until the first big wave of Asians arriving in the UK in the1960s, Britain had a 9-5 working culture. The Asian entrepreneur gave us with the open-all-hours corner shop and the late night take-away restaurant, fuelling the UK’s development of a 24/7 economy. This resulted in entrepreneurs like Gulam Noon who credits the restaurants for opening the doors to his supermarket ranges of Indian chilled and frozen foods. The same is true for Karan Bilimoria and Cobra lager. In adapting this for our own benefits it is of course crucial that life/work balance is not lost.
3. Family
   Of course, a few high-profile successes disguise the fact that in reality of a multitude of small firms struggling for survival. Many of the corner shops so closely associated with Asians would not be financially viable if you costed in the true family labour costs. Now, these shops are going into the hands of the next generation of immigrants as younger Asians opt out of working the same hours as their parents. That generation is much less accepting of the working habits of their parents (this applies across all cultures of course, not just Asian).
4. Woman
   Women have played a pivotal role in the success of the Asian family business (despite cultural, social and economic barriers). But until the recent emergence of high profile Asian female entrepreneurs like Perween Warsi of S&A Foods, women were rarely given the limelight and remained the secret weapon in the Asian family business.
5. Multicultural and linguistic advantage
   Even if the next generation of Asian entrepreneurs lack the motivation that drove their mothers and fathers, they are gaining competitive advantage by capitalising on their linguistic skills, cultural knowledge and business contacts both here and overseas.
6. Self-reliance and adaptation to change
   The success of the Asian business community is based on self reliance, family involvement and incredibly hard work – all qualities which have built small businesses in the UK for centuries. As an immigrant population however, the Asians have had to adapt to a huge amount of change and their story teaches us the value of flexibility.

The E-Myth
Of course, every business can be made more successful by taking on some of the lessons of books like Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited. All of the above traits can be built upon by clearing defining personal and business goals, empowering the team, creating systems and all the other things that Michael Gerber talks about. The ability to harness this extra potential depends on a willingness to invest time and money to learn new skills and embrace new ideas. (I will discuss in a later blog the characteristics that K&H’s most successful clients share based on years of working a huge range of small business clients. This includes being open to new ideas, including reading books like The E-Myth.)

If you would like to know more about the Asian business success, have a look at a book by Dr Spinder Dhaliwal Making a Fortune – Learning from the Asian Phenomenon (Capstone) £14.99.

Please let me know your thoughts on this, and let me know if you think there are other reasons for the success of Asian-owned businesses.

This also coincides with the decision of Feisal Nahaboo (MD of the Probiz accountants network that K&H are members of), to enter into a partnership with the UK’s exclusive Heartmath provider (Heartmath is stress relief and personal performance enhancement system that uses breathing and visualisation techniques with huge scientifically proven benefits).

So, here are 7 (why is it always 7?) ways to boost your personal performance and money making capabilities, based on my own experience:

1. Eat healthy food
2. Take regular exercise.
3. Don’t eat/drink anything that just gives you a short-term boost because when the effect wares off, you will suffer a proportionate decline eg coffee, alcohol and similar stimulants and drugs.
4. Explore natural supplements- e.g. Ginkgo Biloba, Ginseng and Omega 3/DHA.
5. Meditate or use similar techniques (such as Heartmath – see above)
6. Explore alternative health remedies when you are ill, instead of just taking the pills that your GP prescribes.
7. Associate more with people who practice the above (“You are the average of the 5 people closest to you” from the Slight Edge book).

I will talk more in a later blog about my personal experience of Heartmath and some of the effects on me of making changes in the 7 areas above.

One thing that is becoming obvious as I work with clients and see who is successful and who is not, and that is the fact that “the key to success” is actually several keys. These keys are about much more than just accountancy and business advice in the traditional sense, and I believe it is crucial that we at K&H take a holistic approach to the advice we give to make sure our clients get value from us. This includes thinking about their physical and mental wellbeing and in some cases helping coach and support them in these and other areas.

Do you agree? Please tell me.

In essence this book is about how the money you make is a barometer of the value you are adding to the people round you (assuming you are accumulating your wealth “ethically”). There are lots of great ideas ion the book and what follows is based one of the more interesting sections- Seven Money Skills of extremely prosperous people. These are:

Moneyskill #1 – Value – they value each pound/dollar like a money seed and recognise that even a very small amount can grow into a fortune given time and the right investment choices

Moneyskill #2 – Control – they control their money down to the penny, eg always looking for the best value, balancing their books (eg doing bank reconciliations!), taking advantages of discounts, checking bills for errors etc

Moneyskill #3 – Save – they enjoy saving money- at least 10% of what they earn.

Moneyskill #4 – Invest – they have a systems for investing money, eg using an emergency “bucket” for 3 months’ worth of living expenses. As that bucket overflows it goes into other buckets with different levels of investment risk.

Moneyskill #5 – Earn – they have multiple steams of income, eg rental income, business profits, salary, interest, dividends.

Moneyskill #6 – Shield – they protect themselves with trusts, limited liability companies/partnership, insurances etc

Moneyskill #7 – Share it – If the above creates a rather unpleasant image, this last one will dispel it. They are also very generous, donating at least 10% of their income. Money multiplies fastest when it is divided.

If you scored yourself 1 to 10 on how well you are doing on each of these measures, what would your score be? My score was 45 out of a possible 70 (an average of 6.4 out of 10).

Please us know what your score is and whether you think that score matches your overall level of prosperity.