Leveraging Your Financial Potential

Leveraging Your Financial Potential
By: Brian Tracy

Know the Right People
One of the greatest forms of financial leverage is contacts. Knowing the right people and being known by them can open doors for you that can save you years of hard work. The quality and quantity of your contacts and your relationships will have more to do with your success than perhaps any other factor.

Here are three things you can do to expand your list of contacts. First, make a list of the 25 people you feel it would be most useful for you to get to know. Develop a strategy to get to meet everyone of them over the next 12 months. Then make a list of 25 more.

List the people in charge of the major corporations that would be useful for you to know. List the mayor, list the congressmen, list the senator. List the important people that it would be helpful for you to know and then make a plan to meet them.

Network at Every Opportunity
Second is for you to network at every opportunity. Join business and trade associations. Attend meetings. Get involved. Volunteer for service on a key committee. This action alone can cut years off your career.

Once, when I was working with the Chamber of Commerce, I came to the attention of a senior executive who hired me away from the company I was working for a year later at triple the salary. Meeting people is very important. Network at every opportunity.

Get Involved in the Community
The third way is to get involved in community service organizations. The best people in every community, the people you should know and who should know you, are usually involved in public service in some way. Start with the United Way in your own city, or get involved in any charity that you care about or that you're interested in. You'll be amazed at the quality of people that you'll meet doing voluntary service.

Unlock Your Creativity
Another form of leverage is creativity. Remember, one new idea is all you need to start a fortune. Everyone has the ability to come up with creative ideas and solutions if they look for them. All great fortunes begin with an idea.

Create Good Work Habits
A powerful form of leverage that can help you is good work habits. Good work habits make an extraordinary difference. In a recent study, 104 chief executive officers all agreed that the ability to set priorities and then to get the job done fast were the two qualities that most readily led to promotion and increases in pay. Good work habits will bring you to the attention of the important people in your life as fast or faster than anything else you can do. In the final analysis, you always get paid for your results. If you develop a reputation for being the person who gets the job done fast, that alone can put you onto the fast track in your career.

Your Action Assignment
Now, here are two things you can do to leverage your financial potential:

First, get involved in the business, trade, civic and social organizations in your community. Once you become a member, offer to help and serve on committees. This will bring you to the attention of people who can help you faster than any other way.

Second, develop excellent work habits. Be punctual. Plan your work and work your plan. Always concentrate your conscious energies on high priority tasks and make sure that you are doing things that are important to your boss and to your company.

 

Functional Candy

Wrigley, Cadbury, Hershey's Sweet on Functional Candy

May 25, 2008

By Mike Beirne

Functional candy is making a comeback. But unlike previous years, when marketers stretched benefit claims too far, the newest batch of sweets better matches consumer expectations.

Wrigley will hit shelves this summer with Eclipse gum and mints containing magnolia bark extract, a natural bacteria-killing ingredient intended to not just mask bad breath but eliminate causes. MBE gum will come in Spearmint, Winterfrost, Polar Ice, Peppermint and Fresh & Cool; MBE mints will be available in four flavors.

Cadbury Adams spices things up with Trident Xtra Care, which contains Recaldent, a tooth enamel-building ingredient derived from calcium. Advances in flavor and manufacturing technology have enabled the company to double the Recaldent dosage now found in Trident White so that the ingredient stays on teeth longer.

An integrated marketing effort this summer, via JWT, New York, will point out its benefits and could include a tag trademarked by the company, "Demand more for your smile." That campaign could see the most overt mention of "clinically proven" benefits consumers will see in candy this year.

Hershey touts its new Ice Cube White chewing gum as being able to produce sparkling teeth as well as its breath-freshening efficacy. The soft gum product is Hershey's answer to Wrigley's Orbit White and Cadbury's Trident White, both of which are hard shell pellets.

Other companies are also playing the functional card. Bee M.D. throat drops, from BestSweet, Mooresville, N.C., have 40% honey, versus the 1-10% honey other lozenges list as an ingredient. Print breaks this fall; a portion of sales will fund research to protect the honeybee population.

These products arrive at a time when sales in the functional candy category are on an upswing. According to confection market research firm Vreeland and Associates, Harrisburg, Pa., sales of functional confections increased 1.8% to $1.5 billion in 2006, which reversed a 6.7% decline in 2005.

mbeirne@brandweek.com

Scooter Girls

On Saturday, my daughters and I went to a scooter riding training course to improve our scooter riding skills. They basically set up the same course that they would for motorcycle training and run the scooters through it.

 

Here's a photo of my 2 teenage daughters at the course. One is thrilled and excited to be there and the other is bored out of her mind. See if you can pick out the correct teen! (Chrissy on the left and Michelle on the right in the photo).

 

By the way, I purchased the Vespa LX50 model that Chrissy is riding. It's just under 50cc and has enough pep to get up to 45mph on straight aways, which is plenty for riding around town. I got it from Vespa Hartford that I found through the www.VespaUSA.com website.

 

My oldest daughter Michelle and I are taking a motorcycle training course together next month. Should be fun.

 

We really like the Vespa model. It's very well built and rides well.

 

Don’t brush off flossing

The conventional wisdom: Flossing is the best way to get rid of the bits of food and that whitish, smelly stuff that collects in the tiny furrows between your teeth and your gums. The white film is the "plaque buildup" they talk about so much on toothpaste commercials, although brushing actually does a poor job of removing it from between your teeth. Plaque is a biofilm — sticky collections of bacteria, their excretions, and other substances that form into an impervious little microbial ecosystem.

Recent research has sowed a little doubt about flossing. In 2002, Harvard researchers published a study of the oral hygiene practices of health care professionals and found that regular flossers were just as likely as nonflossers to have periodontitis (advanced gum disease). A year later, a study published in the Journal of the American Dental Association reported that using mouthwash twice a day was just as effective as flossing at reducing plaque and gingivitis.

But flossing scofflaws don't get off the hook that easily. Most studies still say flossing has oral health benefits. The study comparing mouthwash with flossing was paid for by Pfizer, which makes Listerine. And the American Dental Association points out that the study — and another one that was published earlier — didn't examine the effects on tooth decay and periodontitis.

Flossing also has a federal judge on its side. In January 2005, U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin sided with a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson that makes dental floss and ordered Pfizer to stop an ad campaign for Listerine that claimed mouthwash was as effective as flossing. "Dentists and hygienists have been telling their patients for decades to floss daily," wrote the judge, who we suspect dutifully flosses. "They have been doing so for good reason. The benefits of flossing are real —they are not a myth."

Mouthwash isn't the only competition these days. BrushPicks are springy, plastic toothpicks with a slender, serrated end that is supposed to be good for scraping away plaque. A 2002 study showed that they worked better than Glide, a high-tech floss. When we used them, we found it difficult to reach between the molars. But flossing is a chore, and it was fun to poke around with a toothpick for a change.

There are also interdental brushes that look like tiny, bristled bottle cleaners. Most involve buying a toothbrush-like holder for about $3 and replacement packs of the brushes for another $3. Fifty meters of dental floss costs about $3, so the brushes are the more expensive way to go. We tried a travel version that didn't require a separate holder. Tiny as the brushes are, we still found it difficult to squeeze them between our teeth. Using them was also a little messy. Maybe we just need some practice.

New Mouthwashes Promise Fresh Breath

New Mouthwashes Promise Fresh Breath
Joyce Cohen, USA Today

So the person you're talking to decides to chew on some gum or mints and offers you some, too. Hmmm. Does she think her breath smells bad or is she hinting yours does?

It's a vexing and often taboo topic. Despite shelves full of products to fight bad breath, there's little solid information on whether they really work.

Now, though, there seem to be alternate solutions to what some delicately call "breath control," with mouthwashes touting new combinations of ingredients.

Bad breath is a challenge. There are multiple causes from medical problems (like diabetes and sinus conditions) to dry mouth to stinky food to rare cases of tonsillolith, little reeking balls of hardened plaque that form in the tonsils.

There are also multiple variables from time of day to oral care that affect even garden-variety bad breath, which results from gaseous byproducts of bacteria that flourish in plaque.

 

Despite assorted rating techniques and machines to measure mouth gases, the "primary reference standard" remains the human nose, the American Dental Association says.

"You know it when you smell it," says Clifford Whall, director of the ADA's Seal of Acceptance program.

Some researchers say nearly all adults have, at the very least, some morning breath. Others claim that half the adult population has bad breath, with half of those having a severe, chronic problem.

In 2007, Americans spent nearly $6.7 billion on mouth-freshening products, according to Euromonitor International, a market-research firm.

That says nothing, however, about how well these products work. "I think most of them work, to varying levels," says Patricia Lenton, a dental hygienist and research fellow at the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry, who participated last summer in the seventh annual conference of the International Society for Breath Odor Research.

Sodium Chlorite to the Rescue?

There is a big difference, of course, between an odor-masker that will turn breath minty fresh for a few minutes and a rinse that will keep bad breath at bay all day. Oral malodor is a "complex problem," says Marvin Cohen, who studied microbiology before becoming a dentist. Cohen, of St. Louis, is the developer of SmartMouth, a mouthwash invented by Israel Kleinberg, professor of oral biology and pathology at Stony Brook University.

The brand-name "germ-killing" mouthwashes include mainstays like Listerine and Scope. They do kill bacteria, Lenton says, but it's unclear what that means for bad breath.

Says Laura Brinker, spokeswoman for Scope: "We think of fresh breath as provided by the minty flavor experience." Bad breath, she adds, "is very subjective." And Listerine spokeswoman Meghan Marschall argues that the product not only kills bad-breath germs but also fights gum disease, delivering "additional therapeutic oral care benefits."

The primary ingredient in this newer class of mouthwashes with clinical-sounding names such as TheraBreath, Oxyfresh, CloSYS and ProFresh is sodium chlorite, also known as stabilized chlorine dioxide, sometimes used as a water purifier. These rinses claim to freshen breath for up to six hours. But one independent study found that several different sodium chlorite rinses worked for anywhere from four to 42 minutes.

These products change the chemical composition of odiferous gases so they no longer smell, but underlying bacteria remain potent and continue producing odors, Cohen says.

SmartMouth uses sodium chlorite, but in a new twist, it must be mixed with zinc chloride just before use. The zinc ions find the bacteria that produce rancid gases after eating amino acids, then block the amino-acid receptor sites so the bacteria cannot produce gas, Cohen says. After the bacteria die in around 12 hours, they are replaced by new bacteria. Again, it's time to rinse.

The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus recently announced that a review of dental literature substantiated SmartMouth's claim that it prevents bad breath 12 times longer than any other mouthwash.

Another brand, Biotene, with its mouthwashes that combat dry mouth, takes a different approach. Its new PBF, or plaque-biofilm dissolving mouthwash, contains two enzymes that break down the biofilm and put the mouth bacteria into a healthy balance, says Michael Pellico, a Biotene chemist.

There's promising research on yet another liquid a combination of zinc and chlorhexidine.

'Equivocal' Results

Still, without reliable comparative testing, it is hard to know what works well, Lenton says. "People will tell you they have data, but then you see it" and find flawed methodology, she says. A report on oral malodor by the ADA found that results of most studies are "equivocal and proprietary."

The ADA's Whall stands by the report. Though the companies claim to have studies showing their mouth products are effective, "we can't verify" those claims, Whall says.

Even with the most effective products, however, some people practice such bad oral hygiene that nothing will help.

"There is still a lot of work to be done on bad breath," says Harold Katz, the California dentist who developed TheraBreath products.

Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. All Rights Reserved.

ACE at AACD..

From Dr. Ray Voller:

ACE must've called an 'audible' for a mini ACE meeting at the AACD on Bourbon St!
The tall guy btw is 7'3" Australian Olympic BB player (at least he said he was!)
Fun time last week!
Some of you know why!
Ray

ACERS at the AACD kicking it up a notch at Emeril's

From Dr. Bob Malone:

This is just a small sampling of all who got together at Emeril's. As you can see, a good time was had by all.
Bob Malone --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~

The Law of Forced Efficiency

The Law of Forced Efficiency
By: Brian Tracy

This law says that, "There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing."

You Always Find the Time
When you run out of time and the consequences for non-completion of a key task or project can be really serious, you always seem to find the time to get it done, often at the very last minute. You start early, you stay late and you drive yourself to complete the job rather than to face the negative consequences that would follow if you didn't get it completed within the time limit.

Rule: "There will never be enough time to do everything you have to do."

You Are Already Overwhelmed
The fact is that the average person today is working at 110% to 130% of capacity. And the jobs and responsibilities just keep piling up. Everyone has stacks of reading material they still have to go through. One study concluded recently that the average executive has 300-400 hours of reading and projects backlogged at home and at the office.

What this means is that you will never be caught up. Get that out of your mind. All you can hope for is to be on top of your most important responsibilities. The others will just have to wait.

 

Deadlines Can Be Counterproductive
Many people say that they work better under the pressure of deadlines. Unfortunately, years of research indicate that this is seldom true.

Under the pressure of deadlines, often self-created through procrastination and delay, people suffer greater stress, make more mistakes, and have to do redo more tasks, than under any other conditions. Often the mistakes that are made when people are working under tight deadlines lead to defects and cost overruns that lead to substantial financial losses in the long-term. Sometimes the job actually takes much longer to complete when people rush to get the job done at the last minute and then have to redo it.

The Key Question You Should Ask
The key question you can ask is: "What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?"

This is the core question of time management. This is the key to overcoming procrastination and becoming a highly productive person. Every hour of every day, there is an answer to this question. Your job is to ask yourself the question, over and over again, and to always be working on the answer to it, whatever it is.

Do first things first and second things not at all. As Goethe said, "The things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least."

The more accurate your answers to this question, the easier it will be for you to set clear priorities, to overcome procrastination and to get started on that one activity that represents the most valuable use of your time.

Action Exercises
Take a few minutes each day and sit quietly where you cannot be disturbed. During this time, let your mind relax and just think about your work and activities, without stress or pressure.

In almost every case, during this time of solitude, you will receive wonderful insights and ideas that will save you enormous amounts of time when you apply them back on the job. Often you will experience breakthroughs that will change the direction of your life and work.

The Law of Vibration

High Velocity E-Zine

The Law of Vibration by James Arthur Ray

This law states that everything in the universe--from a thought to a mountain, from the smallest electron to the entire cosmos-- is in a constant state of vibration. The levels of vibration vary, and we call the most intense vibrations the higher frequencies. Rocks, people, the Earth and the universe are all energy vibrating at different frequencies.

Thought is one of the most potent forms of energy, vibrating at one of the highest frequencies. Just as x-rays and gamma rays can penetrate "solids," thought waves can penetrate not only "solids," but also time and space. This means that your thoughts are actually things. Every thought creates a vibration, an impulse of energy that goes out into the cosmos and stays there forever.

 

The Law of Vibration tells us, "What you think about, you bring about." When you think positive thoughts, you attract positive people and circumstances to you. When you think negative thoughts, you attract negative people and circumstances. Like attracts like.

Every thought you think attracts to you things that are like itself. Your thoughts can attract your dreams or your fears. If you think about your dreams, you will attract them. If you think about your fears, you will attract the things you fear.

The choice is entirely yours.

To your continued wealth and happiness…

 

Is Your "Best" Costing You Big?

Is Your “Best” Costing You Big?
by Sally McKenzie CEO

Remember the parable about the six blind men and the elephant? They each touched a different part of the elephant and walked away with very different impressions of what the elephant really was. Each of them was correct about what he had experienced but all of them were wrong in their understanding of the whole.

Telephone communication can be much like the experience of the six blind men. For the dental employee, the phone is often viewed as a constant interruption to more important job duties. Few realize the powerful impact of this “annoyance” on the total success of the practice. Dentists commonly view the phone simply as a perfunctory duty. It rings, someone answers it and schedules an appointment, and that’s it. Then there’s the patient. Their take on the phone—the only door to your practice—is considerably different. Just ask Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is new to the area, so she’s calling a few practices to inquire as to when she and her family can get in for their appointments. Elizabeth is an intelligent consumer. She has little patience for businesses that are not accommodating and friendly, and that do not put the consumer first. Let me assure you, Elizabeth is not the exception. Her attitudes are today’s norms.

When the dental employee finally answers the phone on the fifth ring, the greeting is an unenthusiastic, “Dr. Bolton’s office.” The employee doesn’t identify herself, nor does she ask how she can help the patient. Unimpressed, Elizabeth tries to keep an open mind. “Yes, I’d like to schedule an appointment for me and my two children.” Silence. The employee hesitates before she says in a discouraging tone, “Well, that’s going to be challenges because the doctor…oh, could you hold for just a minute, please?” Click. Elizabeth ignores the urge to end the call now. Instead, she waits and listens to the annoying music.

The unidentified staff member returns to the line. “I’m sorry. Now what is it that you need again?” Elizabeth grits her teeth. “An appointment for me and my two children.” “Oh yeah, that’s’ right. Now, hmmm, gosh, I don’t know when we’re going to get you in. I hope no one is having any problems because it’s going to be at least three months. But I could get one of you in on August 4 at 2 p.m. I could get someone else in on Thursday, August 21 at 11 a.m., and, let’s see, oh. Here’s an opening on August 26.” Elizabeth is shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “Can’t you get all three of us in on the same day?” “Oh sure. We could do that in December if you would like; I have plenty of openings then.” “But December is seven months away!” “I know. It’s a busy place.”

The staff member believes that she is doing the best she can. Elizabeth feels this office doesn’t care about serving new patients. The doctor, meanwhile, is oblivious to the entire exchange. As far as she can tell, the staff member handles the telephone just fine. But then again, like one of the six blind men, Dr. Bolton doesn’t have the full picture. Many dentists are blissfully unaware of how their practices are presented daily to the buying public.

This practice had one chance to win three new patients and the opportunity was lost.
It is for this reason that McKenzie Management recently began offering a 28-point telephone assessment in which a professionally trained and certified “mystery shopper” calls a practice and assesses the effectiveness of a team’s telephone skills on multiple occasions. Dentists receive a written report as well as a recording of the conversations.

The Telephone Mystery Shopper monitors several areas aspects of service, including phone etiquette, hold times and scheduling procedures, for starters. In addition, the assessment gives dentists a much clearer sense of the tone and attitude that the practice employees convey to current and prospective patients over the telephone. Moreover, this service helps practices determine the number of potential new patients they may be losing.

Oftentimes, very capable dental employees unwittingly drive new patients away because they have never been trained on how to effectively use the telephone—a practice’s most vital link to patients. In many cases, simply educating staff on effective telephone communication can significantly improve their approach. Moreover, it can prevent the loss of hundreds of patients and tens of thousands of dollars every year.

Schedule your mystery patient telephone call—Go here

Interested in speaking to Sally about your practice concerns? Email her at sallymck@mckenziemgmt.com.
Interested in having Sally speak to your dental society or study club? Click Here.

Forward this article to a friend

 

 

Dr. Mike Maroon

Founder & Fellow Academy of Comprehensive Esthetics

 

ACE 2008 North American Conference on No-Prep Veneers ~ June 13-14, 2008 ~ The Scottsdale Center ~ Scottsdale, AZ

ACE 2008 Symposium on Esthetic Dentistry ~ Nov 5-8, 2008 ~ Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa ~ Bonita Springs, FL

 

Learn more about upcoming events at www.ACEsthetics.com or call 800.701.6223

 

 

The Key To Long-Term Success

 

 

 

 

The Key to Long-Term Success
By: Brian Tracy

Successful people have been studied in depth for more than 100 years. They have been interviewed extensively to determine what it is they do and how they think that enables them to accomplish so much more than the average person.

In this Newsletter, you learn the most important single factor of long-term success and how you can build it into your personality and your attitude. You learn how to virtually guarantee yourself a great future.

The Harvard Discovery on Success
In 1970, sociologist Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University wrote a book entitled The Unheavenly City. He described one of the most profound studies on success and priority setting ever conducted.

Banfield's goal was to find out how and why some people became financially independent during the course of their working lifetimes. He started off convinced that the answer to this question would be found in factors such as family background, education, intelligence, influential contacts, or some other concrete factor. What he finally discovered was that the major reason for success in life was a particular attitude of mind.

 

Develop Long Time Perspective
Banfield called this attitude "long time perspective." He said that men and women who were the most successful in life and the most likely to move up economically were those who took the future into consideration with every decision they made in the present. He found that the longer the period of time a person took into consideration while planning and acting, the more likely it was that he would achieve greatly during his career.

For example, one of the reasons your family doctor is among the most respected people in America is because he or she has invested many years of hard work and study to finally earn the right to practice medicine. After university courses, internship, residency and practical training, a doctor may be more than 30 years old before he or she is capable of earning a good living. But from that point onward, these men and women are some of the most respected and most successful professional people in any society. They had long time perspectives.

Measure the Potential Future Impact
The key to success in setting priorities is having a long time perspective. You can tell how important something is today by measuring its potential future impact on your life.

For example, if you come home from work at night and choose to play with your children or spend time with your spouse, rather than watch TV or read the paper, you have a long time perspective. You know that investing time in the health and happiness of your children and your spouse is a very valuable, high-priority use of time. The potential future impact of quality time with your family is very high.

If you take additional courses in the evening to upgrade your skills and make yourself more valuable to your employer, you're acting with a long time perspective. Learning something practical and useful can have a long-term effect on your career.

Practice Delayed Gratification
Economists say that the inability to delay gratification-that is, the natural tendency of individuals to spend everything they earn plus a little bit more, and the mind-set of doing what is fun, easy and enjoyable-is the primary cause of economic and personal failure in life. On the other hand, disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction.

The long term comes soon enough, and every sacrifice that you make today will be rewarded with compound interest in the great future that lies ahead for you.

Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, think long-term. Sit down today and write out a description of your ideal life ten and twenty years into the future. This automatically develops longer-time perspective.

Second, look at everything you do in terms of its long-term potential impact on your life. Do more things that have greater long-term value to you.

Third, develop the habit of delaying gratification in small things, small expenditures, small pleasures, so that you can enjoy greater rewards and greater satisfaction in the future.