Article by Helmut G. Flasch, CEO Flasch Business Expansion

Why is that? Is this headline true in the first place? After all one has heard for eons that hard work will eventually pay off! One also has heard that being educated is the only way to get ahead in life.

Sure, and all true, but the hard-working people and the well-educated people who make it, have a few other trademarks which to most seem to be getting unnoticed. Most of the hard-working well-educated individual, really do not make it to their adjusted goals, never mind their original goals when they were young and when they thought they would be rich and happy!

98% of people rely on social security - do you think they were all lazy and dumb? I don't think so!!

Be honest, how many well-educated people acknowledged as 'smart' at least according to their diploma, do you personally know who are really not doing quite as well in life as their education might suggest?

I am at this point and in this issue only talking about the financial success. I am not talking about relationships and the difficulty of raising children.

Yet, those important parts of anybody's life are needed to be happy, of course. Also success of being happy based on own hard work and definitely on a base of knowledge. Oh yeah - one actually can learn (better yet must learn) how to handle relationships and marriage, and raising children and so on.

But for the sake of not making this issue a book or even a volume of books I am only talking about financial success.

Actually, if you really think about it - I have already stated the whole problem of why some hard working and some well-educated people do not reach their sky-high goals and often not even their lowered goals.

They are neglecting to get educated, work hard in enough different areas of their business activities and activities of life fuel as many raising children, staying energetic, not overweight etc.

It is definitely misdemeanor to say that personal life and business life and family life are separate things.

Leave your family life at home when at work and don't bring your work home is the standing order.

Well it does have some workability but only some.

Life is life and any deficiencies in any area will keep you down in the other areas of life no mater how hard you work on that other area.

Let's say you own a business, a practice of some sort because you happen to be a doctor of some kind.

Doctors have a great education and we at Doctor Relations, Inc., and the observant patient who gets treatment at odd hours, all know that the doctor also works hard.

So, why are so many doctors considering themselves (despite the general and out-dated belief of the public) not even close as financially successful as they set out to be when enrolling in medical school?

Because they are greedy and have no shame on how much they want to make and thus only consider themselves poor but they are rich? No not really. The doctors I know have actually quite moderate goals, which always include doing a good job for patients, thus the hard work!! They don't mind the hard work but someone, as educated and hard working should get some financial reward also, so they think.

Doctors by the way are not the only educated people suffering from this unexplained but often well-justified phenomena (well-justified by themselves so they can bear this phenomena better) of "not quite doing as well as we should". I am only using doctors as an example here since I work with many doctors and since they serve as well as any other profession as an example of hard working, well-educated, also as a tremendous value to society and yet on an average being under-compensated for their efforts.

So let's get to the basic of why hard working and successful people to not necessarily reap the benefits of such valuable commodities.

Sure, all the above do influence your success in the negative even though all of them except your immediate competition will be thoroughly offended by such a statement. Government, Merchants, Insurance - they after all are here to help. Yeah Right!! Some of them some times do but…

It is not the governments or other groups of specific interests, such as labor unions, medical associations, crooks, or the competition whether the competition is considered unfair or not.

Sure, all the above do influence your success in the negative even though all of them except your immediate competition will be thoroughly offended by such a statement. Government, Merchants, Insurance - they after all are here to help. Yeah Right!! Some of them sometime do but…

Be it as it might, YOU have a harder time than you like to have in terms of succeeding in the financial world.

This outside sources I mentioned above, are there, but the problem is that you cannot handle them.
Uh, you say of course not - they are big as one of them never mind, or complained!!

The world has changed and there are many things, which one cannot control. Times have changed thus… Victim, victim, victim!

Yes times have changed and you have not!
You did not adjust to the situation. Well actually the correct thing to say is, you did adjust to the situation - you are "perfectly satisfied that this is how it is and that times changed and that you will have less than you set out to have some 20 years ago." You adjusted TO the situation - you didn't adjust the situation.

Hmm - great adjustment, just not the one I am talking about.

I am talking about adjusting the skills needed to handle the "changing times"

Once you have the skills to handle the environment and the changing times then you will not have to adjust yourself to the new times but you will adjust the times, situations, and the environment to yourself instead!

Oh Gee you say, after having studied for years and with great expenses and after a 10-hour day I should learn other skills? Are you crazy? Yes, you say, that is the problem; I have not enough time to do every thing, which needs to be done to make enough money.

Helmut, you say, you are giving me a solution, which cannot be executed, and thus it is no solution at all.

Cool down, education and hard work had some value to you at one time; after all you did embark on it. Right? Right!

So, education and hard work still do have the same value, you just did not get a balanced enough education and thus are digging ditches very hard but you are not getting the frills of it.

Working smart simply means to work on ALL the important areas simultaneously or in the order of their importance.

For example if the best cook in the world would cook for Thanksgiving dinner and would do the following:

Start all the vegetables, the sweet potato, the corn, the marshmallow yam, and cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes, and so on.

But only after he did all of those side dishes, around 4pm or 5 pm, will he put the perfectly seasoned turkey in the oven?
What would happen?
Knowing that a Turkey takes about five to seven hours to cook you will realize that you would not only eat quite late but the original wonderful tasting just rightly crunchy vegetables and other dishes would be - well: stale, overcooked, etc.

So, the turkey has to start - first, while turkey cooks all by itself, you have all the time to work on all the other tasks to have an enjoyable meal and have it on time.

Can you see that?

Believe me, many a housewife or many not so good restaurants do have this problem. Don't they? I am sure you all experienced a party of four in a restaurant and three of you being served while the fourth one is still waiting for the food. Disturbing at least an establishment, which has non-professionals working in it, in the sense that their employees altogether do not have knowledge in enough areas even though they might be extremely knowledgeable in some specialized areas.

It takes more than just knowing how to season and cook food right. It takes timing. It takes knowing what effort it takes to do any given task!
Hell, it even takes knowing what food - what kind of people might prefer on what time of the day or season. The knowledge goes way beyond just cooking. And I only described cooking - one event - I did not describe the running of a practice with the entire gargantuan task needed to make it all come out perfectly at the end.

Many well-educated and hard working professionals think that what they know about the specific profession should be enough.
If doctors find out in which areas of running a practice they have missing or false data, then I guarantee you that hard work will bring even better financial rewards originally envisioned.

Working smarter not harder only means rounding out your knowledge base into the remaining areas of your life.

It is a natural trap, epically with doctors who, after all, are some of the world's best educated people, to believe that their huge knowledge in one of the most important area of everybody's live should be enough to do well. It IS NOT - NOT BY A LONG SHOT!!! Maybe it once was - but not anymore.

If you really look at it, it is like that in all areas of life.
One can hardly expect to have a healthy body by only taking care of the heart and completely or almost completely ignore once stomach.
Can one? Can one methodology such as medicine really keep a person healthy and active, happy and living long? I do not think so and you will agree that one must have some knowledge about exercise, which foods to eat, how to eliminate stresses in live, how to have fun in life how to handle finances etc., and how to keep a family together

Whether you are a doctor or not, I am sure you agree quite heavily with me on that. Right? Right!

Thus a businessperson or doctor in private practice or any other hard working and the well-educated person better learn a whole shit load of other stuff, especially if he or she finds him/herself not getting to their original goals as fast as they want to.

There is no substitute for knowing once way around the whole labyrinth of business. Business or management skills include marketing, advertising, and public relations, human resources knowledge, how and when to delegate work are easily as important as being a good doctor.

In fact something widely underestimated (missing knowledge) is the time and effort it takes to create customers or patients or clients.

Assumption and hearsay and what one thinks it should take to create patients, or what it did take, are used instead of new fresh up-to-date knowledge or simply a good look at what it actually does take. If patients are not coming to you in the quantity you want whatever you do is:
You doing it wrong or;
You underestimate the effort it takes and don't do enough in your practice. And all the wishing and saying what it should be will not get those new patients in!
You are not supporting those actions with other marketing activity.

Thus you HAVE to increase your expertise in the marketing and management area and then do what needs to be done! After all the most money you will ever lose is by not making money.

Bills piling up, stress, not enough vacations, hard work and the general feeling of things not being right and life not being what it is cut out to be are the ensuing phenomena of not having gone and not constantly going that extra step of getting all the knowledge needed to become financially successful with time and strength to spare to enjoy such a financial success.

There are other corners of knowledge one has to stick his nose in such as how to hire and train employees, why they leave and how to make such an unpleasant task as looking for new employees a rather routine one.

When, and how, and where are something will have no choice but hiring more employees when one has a hard time making payroll already.

Not having enough knowledge to master such things usually paralyzes any organization and makes them overworked while at the same time underpaid. But as with our chef who put the turkey in the oven after he had all the other side dishes ready, if a business owner does not start learning how to use any and all ways of marketing one will have a try, somewhat stale, unpalatable financial life. It does not matter how experienced you are in perhaps the otherwise most important areas of life!! It does not mater. Just look at all those overworked underpaid doctors. It will matter less and less and less every year from now on. The writing is on the wall.

Even somewhat knowing about the above example might still put a bunch of business owners and doctors in private practice in unbearable trouble and they might say that this knowledge of marketing does not do the trick.

In fact I know that quite a few of those business owners and doctors in private practice will say that they already do know about marketing and its importance, but it did not work.
They probably are right, they do know about!!

But you see there is a huge difference of knowing about and knowing enough to actually use the knowledge to one's advantage. Implementation or the luck of implementation has everything to do with enough knowledge on the subject or not enough knowledge on the subject.

It is very easy to say that one knows all about marketing but that it is too expensive! Well, a real responsible and alert person would observe that some business owners or doctors seem to manage a satisfactory market and thus would at once suspect a deficiency in their own basic and fundamental marketing knowledge.

The world is full with people who "know about" but life stinks. Some of those will probably never wake up. They will never be responsible enough to really involve in learning enough about.

One must know there simply is no other way.

Now that is it for this issue which turned out to be longer than I expected, but I hope it will do some good to your financial existence.

And by the way do not assume that the areas of knowledge I described, marketing in specific or the knowledge of hiring and training employees are the only knowledge one must acquire. Far from it but for the sake of these issues this is what I mentioned. I also mentioned it for the fact that in business and medical practices with hard working and well-educated people, knowing all about those areas would bring one of the fastest improvements in their financial life.

It would!! It always does.
So, go and get it. Start looking for this knowledge in all places, take classes, associate yourself with gurus and, yes do not mind paying money to those people. We, the marketing people who are also teachers and couches, need to be rewarded for our efforts just as you do.
You too want to be paid for your services. Right? Right, this is after all why you read this letter in the first place - getting rewarded for your hard work and for the effort you took in getting educated so you can help people sty healthy.

Do not be too worried whether the person you will hire to get you the knowledge or the classes you will attend will be the best in the world.

No such thing anyhow. Just go and study, get people and companies and books to help you. If you have an open mind and realize that it is YOUR responsibility to get something out of the teachings, then you will find plenty of useful and workable stuff from any and all of your gurus, teachers, books and consultants. And just as in your field you will soon become so knowledgeable that you will be able to judge for yourself, what in any given situation will be the best. You will more and more be able to evaluate a consultant, marketing guru, etc.

Yes, three cheers to knowledge, but you must first step out there and get it - not just piece and pieces of it but the whole damn body of it!!

Hey, you baked the damn cake you might as well learn how to put it on the plate so you can eat it too!!

Business knowledge and marketing knowledge puts the money in the pocket.

Helmut G. Flasch
CEO Flasch Business Expansion