While recovering, Captain Algrun finds himself a prisoner in an environment he’s unfamiliar with and among people he doesn’t understand. One day after waking up from a bout with one of the samurai where Algrun was knocked unconscious, he meets Katsumoto, the leader of the samurai who is curious about his American prisoner.

During the conversation, Algrun find himself frustrated with the exchange of dialog and screams,

What do you want from me!?

What the hell am I doing here!?

Katsumoto replies,

What do you want for yourself?

The snows will melt in May, and the passages will open, and the events of the world will unfold. Until that time you are here.

Although the story is fiction, there is wisdom in the last words.

A lot of us are in a rat race, running around in circles starting projects and doing work without understanding the underlying purpose, nor taking a moment to evaluate whether or not it’s really the means to get what we ultimately want for ourselves and the means to make the impact we hope to have on this world.

If we don’t know the significance and purpose of what we’re doing, then we won’t have the internal fire to carry the project or business through the ebbs and flows of life. Before we engage in a project or business we need to ask ourselves: What’s the purpose behind going through with this?

Go beyond the short sighted idea of making money or profit, which isn’t a bad thing by the way, but understand what’s the fire that will drive you through the good and bad times.

I had the honor of meeting Jonas Thaler, the VP of post production for Walden Media a short while ago. He’s overseen the post production for the Narnia films and many other Walden movies.

He told me one of the men behind Walden, who happens to be one of the richest men in the world, isn’t motivated just by the idea of making money, but what really fuels his internal fire for the success of the company and the films it produces, is to see literacy and education prevail among youth and families. It’s for that reason many of Walden’s films are based off of existing books.

Its only after you know what you want for yourself will you be able to truly progress in areas of business, marketing and dawah.

According to statistics published by the small business administration, 30% businesses fail in the first two years and about 49% fail within the first five years. The number one reason why they fail is because they were started for the wrong reasons.

No one can tell you, “This is what you have to aim for.” You have to figure that out for yourself.

Everyone is different in the way they want to design their life, thus your goals and approach to business will be different from everyone else. I can’t tell you where to go, but I can ask you the questions that will help you figure it out.

Your First Action:

Think honestly about what you really want for yourself. The consequences of how you think can lead to your success. If you had a magic wand of sort to make life as you want it, what would that life look like?

Describe on paper, or in the comment section below, in as much detail as you can your vision and the purpose behind it.

Your Second Action:

Based on the written description, derive five short-term goals you will work to achieve in the next 6-months.

Be clear about what you want for yourself, but be flexible on how you go about getting it.

If you go to any Muslim convention, you can count on one hand the categories 80% of the vendors fall into. It’s either traditional clothing, t-shirts, books/education, charity organization seeking money or decorative art. The vendors in these categories are all identical to each other, making business that much harder to acquire for anyone operating in that space in a similar fashion. Read on to learn how to succeed despite this reality.

During my late high school and early college years I’d always hook up with a bazaar vendor in order to get into the conventions for free. Year in and year out I saw vendors always either loosing money or just barely breaking even.

When I was in college I was blessed with the opportunity to study retail marketing for a year and then later observed that theory in practice by briefly taking up employment during the holiday season at a fast growing retail tea business called Teavana. - They have some amazing tea by the way, from all around the world!

Photo by headphonaught

In ICNA 2010 I got the opportunity to help a friend of mine, Faraz Khan, sell his unique style of framed calligraphy and apply what I had learned and experienced. There was a learning curve in which we didn’t sell much the first day. However, after adapting to the situation, we walked away with a profitable weekend. The following year Faraz applied the approach we took in 2010 and walked away again with a profitable weekend.

Through that education and experience I’ve concluded the following three tips are necessary to gain an edge in the retail market place.

1: Be Different

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
- Henery Ford

If you take an initial thoughtless observation about an existing category such as clothing within the Muslim convention marketplace, you’d assume they want t-shirts and thobes. However, you’ll realize that people actually want to adorn themselves in stylish quality clothing so they can feel good about themselves. If you look good, you feel good and that’s what people want.

Understanding this market desire, decide on what you’ll invest in to set yourself apart from others in the category. If for some reason you cannot come up with a distinct differentiation within the category your operating in, then either cut your loses and quit or create a new category that addresses an unfulfilled desire in the marketplace.

A good example of this is Baba Ali’s Half Our Deen.

This past ISNA 2011, during my observation I didn’t see any other matrimonial service vendor – other than ISNA’s own, which I hear is a sad excuse for a matrimonial service.

2 – Have a Relevant and Memorable “Fly Catcher” to Reel People In

In a retail situation, an effective fly catcher consists of a charming outgoing individual(s) calling people to get a delightful taste of what you have to offer. Something that is unique and attractive

Keep in mind however, if your actual product or service offering isn’t good enough to have them coming back then it doesn’t matter how effective your fly catcher is.

Teavana, the retail chain I mentioned earlier, is a privately owned business with about 150 stores nationwide and opening at a rate of 40 new locations a year gets only 30% of its business through sampling its tea (the fly catcher). The other 70% is from repeat customers.

The first sale is all about you making a promise to the buyer. The second sale is an indicator of you having fulfilled that promise. – This is more a business concept than a general rule of thumb. Which sale is an indicator of promise deliver varies from business to business. You need to figure out for your business how many times do they have to buy before they trust you to deliver the same desirable experience every time.

Take dry cleaners for example. Statistically if customers come once or twice, they almost never comeback. However those customers that come in at least three times over a brief period of time, that client is likely to keep coming back for the next 2 years.

An interesting flycatcher I saw in action was a personality test at the half our deen booth

The attractive thing about the test was first you were invited to take a 5 min test to see whether or not it was accurate. After you descover that it is, youre encouraged to wear your personality on your chest, prompting others to ask you about it, which then makes your curious to know the personality types of those you know.

3 – Create Path and Process to Follow From Entry to Sale

When ever clients say they want more exposure or traffic, I say thats the easy part. Question is, what are you going to do with all the new eyeballs? Once you get them into the door, how you gonna guide them to an experience that’ll keep them coming back?

You need a path or process for prospects to follow. Once you get a charming individual snare them into the fly catcher, then what?

When I was working at Teavana, all the people on the floor were “tea-ologists” and the idea was to expose people to a world of tea.

Photo by queenkv

We’d give them a delightful sample taste of some of the teas, to showcasing the top quality merchandise to tasing more tea samples, to next level merchandise to another tea tasting, to touring more stuff to finally bringing them to the tea counter, by which the prospect has tasted the different categories of teas and both the sales rep and the prospect has an understanding of what they like and dont like so then when we actually present the different loose leaf teas available for purchase, they’ll be better informed in their decision making.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it
- Henry Ford

Implementing these three tips requires some thought and it isn’t easy. However, isn’t taking the time and energy out to prepare for success worth the cost, as opposed to just winging it and losing lost of money in the process?

His advise was:

As a salesman, you’ll have a lot of opportunities to make money. Whenever you decide to work for a company to sell what they have, make sure they can deliver on what they promise.

Fast forward 4 years later to April 2011. My wife and I have just moved to the DC metro area from Northern NJ and are looking for a good deal to furnish our new home. We saw signs for store closing sale around town, so we checked it. Found a living room set we liked. Wife negotiated a good deal with the sales rep and paid for the furniture. The front desk person who took our order told us they’d ship that Saturday.

Saturday came and went and no furniture came. They said Monday. Monday passed by and then they assured us it be Wednesday. Wednesday, I came from work to find that the sofa delivered was the wrong color, the Chinese divider was the wrong color and the tables’ legs were assembled wrong.

You can imagine how upset we were. We called the store to tell to express our disappointment in the order only to be told that all sales are final and there “no refunds.”

Are you kidding me?! – You take the money and don’t even fulfill the right order? No wonder you’re going out of business!

After a week of back and forth, threatening a law suit on the phone and in person they took back the sofa and refunded our money.

Where did things go wrong?

Turned out that the store we purchase the sofa from initially was just a independent distributor of several brands of sofas. The fulfillment of the order was the manufacturer’s job and the delivery of it was outsourced to another company.

The manufacturer had run out of the color we wanted and decided to ship an alternative color – without notifying us (the purchaser). The delivery people wanting to fulfill their daily quota simply assembled the tables how ever they saw fit. When the legs didn’t match up they simply figured that it’s not their problem.

The retail distributor made a promise to us on something they didn’t have full control over.

Lets look at Zappos as a direct contrast to the company I dealt with. The promise they make to their customer is the following:

For the company I delt with, that would be an outrageous promise to make they dont control the manufacturing, warehousing or delivery.

Zappos understanding the remarkable nature of their promise, decided to have their own of fulfillment houses, instead of outsourcing, so they could have access their customers at all the touch points of their brand allowing for maximum exposure to a positive brand experience.

In reality most organizations don’t have the resources to have an army of competent customer service reps ready to answer your most trival inquiry. Nor is it easy to find or develop an organizational champion the would be the communications ringmaster, coordinating and managing client engagement at all major touchpoints in realtime.

However, where there is difficulty, there is opportunity. When you accomplish that which others cannot, then you’ve got yourself a brand.

Background For Context

In the past I’ve had a lot of people ask me a question along the lines of, “Why call your company ‘Leechon’? Won’t people associate negative emotions to it?”

When I was in high school I had this idea of starting a subscription online service like Napster. However, instead of downloading music, you’d be able to download movies and other like entertainment. The idea was that it would be an online system where I as the service provider enabled people to download full movies for a nominal token fee which they could watch to their enjoyment and fulfillment and the file itself would disable or self-destruct within a given time.

The service would be called “Leechon.”

On the Internet, a “leech” is someone who benefits, usually deliberately, from other people’s information or effort but doesn’t offer anything in return, or they make only token offerings in an attempt to avoid being called a leech.

- Wikipedia

The idea behind the name “Leechon” is that it’s a command. Meaning, go ahead and benefit without the concern of whether or not you’re sharing as well. There’s plenty of bandwidth for me to share, you don’t have to worry about having to share yours.

I went ahead got the company registered, but I soon found out that my idea was well ahead of its time and the technology available wasn’t going to be able to make it happen. Its only recently that companies have been able to offer such entertainment on demand via multiple channels of distribution through services such as iTunes, amazon.com, Netflicks, Blockbuster, etc.

The concept however still remained in my mind.

Most people are consumers. I am someone who wants to benefit people by understanding what they want or need and be able to say to them, “Leechon! There’s plenty more where that came from!” (marketing simplified). Similarly I want to enable other like-minded people to stand up and say the same to their people and deliver.

From the perspective of being a marketing services company, I’m working with companies and organizations that have a lot of offer society on a local, national and even global level. They want help in getting their target market to leechon to what they have to offer and that is where my company comes in!

Evolution of Leechon

Back when I registered the company in and realized that I wouldn’t be able to achieve what I wanted to achieve at the time, the corporate entity sat around for a little bit.

I started doing other creative projects ranging from online marketing to graphic design and video production. When I started making money from it, that’s when I decided to dust off the old corporate entity and start doing my work professionally.

Initially since most of my commissioned marketing worked was in the form of video, I naturally opted to name the company “Leechon Films.” However as time progressed and more and more of my work was focused less on video and more on digital marketing in general. I realized that I’d need to adjust the way I’m presenting Leechon.

Re-branding Thought Process

I needed to understand where I am and where I want to go and define my branding as such. The question for me was, which one of the below represented Leechon most accurately?

• “Independent” production studio - ie: NewsCorp -
  Self financing, producing and distributing my own content through multiple established channels of delivery. Past projects that could possibly fall under this category are: The Strangers, Darkness2Light, Browntourage, Free Parking (fail), Love Noted (never produced), Tufaan (incomplete), MessageMastery.com

• “Dependent” Production Studio - ie: Warner Bros. -
  Either producing and distributing your own content and brands with the help of financiers such as Relativity Media or Summit Entertainment — or — Producing distributing content/media commissioned by other entities such as Walden Media. I haven’t done any projects that fall under the first part. However, past projects that could possible fall under the second part are: The Opener (Faraz Khan), Abdullah Puppet (Minbar Media), Back2School Giveaway (ICNA NY).

• Private Equity Fund – ie: Relativity Media or The Carlyle Group -
  Financing projects via private equity with your own risk and business analysis systems in place. I wish I had this.

• Advertising Agency - ie: WPP or MediaCom -
  Producing video and print media for advertising purposes — and/or — Having digital ad services in place that can be digitally monitored and accurately measure reach and impact. When it comes to adsoftware and systems, I don’t have any of my own propitiatory stuff. However, I have leveraged Google Ad words and Social ads for clients on several occasions. Regarding production design material in the form of print, digital and video for the purposes of advertising – projects that can fall under that category are: AlMaghrib Trailers and other graphic work I’ve done for them, DawahCorps and AlMishkat.
• Public Relations Firm - ie: Edelman Digital or Fleishman & Hillard -
  Levering contacts in traditional and/or social media to bring forth positive publicity and third party trust for a project over an extended period of time to in the process of building and establishing a brand. I personally haven’t done much in terms of leveraging traditional media. However client projects that I’ve helped in leveraging social media are: AlMaghrib Institute with the use of GemReel.com and IlmCast.com coupled with activism and social networking. iAmAmmar.com and Bayyinah with the initial launch of the Divine Speech seminar.

Having gone through the above I realized that the work I do would be better categorized under “digital marketing” as opposed to “films.”

–

“I guess extremest have rights too.”

- Seminar Attendee

–

This statement explains why its not that easy combating “recruitment” from extremists.

About a month ago Farhad Chowdhury from M100 Foundation sent me an invite to attend a seminar organized by New America Foundation in Washington D.C. hosted at Google’s office

The intent of the seminar was to train leading Muslim non-profits in the tools and processes of online marketing, covering tools provided by Google, YouTube and Facebook as a means of combating increased extremist online activity.

A big part of being effective in marketing online and building a loyal following has to do with continuously giving value to the community you’re targeting.

The challenge with combating content posted/uploaded by post-prison Anwar Alawlaki fans is that they have the same rights and privileges and access that we all have.

Anwar Alawlaki is one of those individuals who has plenty of beneficial content from his pre-prison days that continuously builds social capital. So if someone were to post a video of him saying attack certain people and how its an obligation for all Muslims, it has potential of pulling some people in the wrong direction.

Muslims here in the west have the interesting challenge of not only having to combat religious extremists, but also combat extremists on the other side of the spectrum too. The likes such as Robert Spencer, Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, Daniel Pipes, Newt Gingrich, Pamela Geller and others.

People on both sides of the spectrum are using online marketing practices to get their message across quite effectively.

The thing with Muslims in the middle is that they have a lot of beneficial content to share but don’t understand technical tools or practices of getting their message out and its for that reason this seminar was held.

One of the prime examples that a Google instructor presented was MPAC. When you type “MPAC” into Google, you don’t find MPAC. Instead you find either a “performing arts center” in some city or you find content written by right wing extremists. If you’re going to search for your name on Google, YOU should come up. If you don’t then you’re not marketing yourself appropriately.

MPAC also has a decent YouTube page with over 100 videos, but due to bad SEO, no one gets to see it.

The following is an outline of what Google presented to the seminar attendees.

Some of these tools are quite powerful if you know how to use them. I was intrigued to find out that Google has a program called “Google Grants” where if you’re a tax excempt 501(c)3 while not being either a political party or a religious institution such as a church or mosque, then you can be eligible for free Ad Words credits between $100 – $10,000 a month.

In addition to Google, YouTube and Facebook were there presenting their systems too and how to effectively read the metrics they publish for their users to reach out to specific target audiences. Below is the YouTube insights view.

Personally, while most of the stuff was a refresher, some of the Google content was new.

I personally don’t like to get into the politics of extremeism. However, I do find that the content presented in the seminar can be useful in dawah and depolarization of views on Islam.

Earlier I had announced that Leechon had finally become a YouTube partner. This means that as a partner, Google will share some of the ad revenue that they get with Leechon, Inc.

What I’ve Learned So Far:

• Appropriate Keywords Are Important –
  The Google Adsense ads that appear in the lower third of the video are based on the tags and keywords placed in the video description. For example, most of the videos I’ve filmed have been shot with Canon cameras, thus I always put “canon” and the model of the camera into the tag space. You’ll notice those specific videos get ads that link to brands of digital video cameras.

• Pay Attention To Conversion Ratios -
  Paying attention to my conversion ratios for the past few days as well as reading up on forums discussing money making potential of the YouTube Partnership program, I’ve learned that YouTube video Adsense ads have a click-through rate of 0.3% – 0.5%. This ratio means that for every 2000 ad impressions the content get , Leechon will earn about $1.

Obviously, the number’s aren’t glorious. For a moment they’re downright depressing.

However, they are an extra income stream. Over time (probably a looong time) as the subscriber base grows, the video count increases and quality of entertainment content put forth improves, this number can grow into something substantial.

All I can say is, (deep breath) “Alhumdulillah…”

The great thing about this is that this provides Leechon with new source of passive revenue for producing videos and now videos longer than 10 minutes can be hosted on the Leechon Films YouTube account!

Look forward to more videos being posted

Asalaamu alaikum,

I took Shaykh Muhammad Alshareef’s Time Traveller.

For your vision of Leechon and everything, did you create a separate binder with your ultimate vision and purpose and goals? How often did you check them and how did you measure them?

I’m having troubles setting up my binder to do some major change in my life! If you could help, would be awesome. I missed opportunity to be an intern.

Walaikum asalaam Ahmad,

–

Regarding Leechon’s vision, purpose and goals -
They have evolved as I’ve learned more about the business and developed myself and my own visions and goals.

I believe the point of the exercise in Muhammad Alshareef’s Time Traveler series is to help develop a strategy and to have direction in what you’re doing.

The key to developing and executing an effective strategy has a lot to do with having orderly arrangement of resources positioned appropriately. At times you may have to develop the very resources you need in order to move forward.

Resources can be things such as money, people, systems, goals and other types of assets.

Obviously you wont have everything you want when you start. It’s important to move forward with what you have available in the smartest possible way. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to get going.

If you study physics in school – you’ll learn that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. The key is to get into motion and keep moving within the strategy and resources you have positioned.

It’s also important to plan in the eventuality that you succeed. However, you can only see fo sar into the horizon. Therefore you need to put most of your efforts towards planning your opening moves.

It’s like a game of chess.

You can’t really see beyond the opening moves due to the massive amounts of variability that exists in life. As the situation changes and the realities of the new horizon are understood, you adjust and plan your next opening moves with your new found resources.

I believe its very important to sit down and understand what you personally want to be. I periodically brainstorm for 8-10 hrs at a time so I can readjust and develop my strategy further.

First time I did this back in 2008. I came to the conclusion that ultimately I personally want to become an executive producer. With that new understanding, all the moves I make, the decisions I say “yes” or “no” to are in context to whether or not it’ll help me fulfill that vision.

–

Regarding Binder -
I never kept a binder. My work with my company has evolved as time progressed.

Leechon started as a result of 1-on-1 coaching I had with Shaykh Muhammad back in 2006. That led to producing a DVD which I sold for profit. At the time I kept a personal blog as per his instruction >> http://limitedimmortality.blogspot.com/

Later that blog led me to making one for Leechon – below is a link to my first project I did “professionally”

http://www.leechon.com/the-strangers-26.htm

Last year when I completed my coaching certification with Shaykh Muhammad, I got myself a nice suede journal that I use for coaching myself. Basically I write as if I’m talking with a coach, then I respond as if I am the coach – very effective for me personally. However, it doesn’t work for everyone nor does it beat out having a live coach talking directly with you.

Hope that helps.

As you can see, Millionaire Who Went to Jannah is LIVE. I’ve got some special news for you.

For everyone who buys from me, I’m giving away over $100 dollars in bonuses.

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Exclusive documentary movie with Muhammad Alshareef, the man behind it all. The following is just a screen capture from the movie – trailer coming soon!

It’s basically our story of spending time in Vancouver, Canada – one of the most beautiful places on earth. This documentary is a not a public YouTube release. See the man himself, when he’s not teaching!

– –

Not only will you get the benefit of learning how to master your money, but you’ll also be able to use video and marketing tools as taught in Message Mastery to promote your business. At the same time, the movie above lays down some real important principals when it comes to getting what you want to achieve. as well as an insight to who Muhammad Alshareef is.

All of the above for $247

COUNTING MONEY

One of the major responsibilities of a business is to make money for it’s stakeholders. That is the bottom line. It only makes sense you keep an eye on it regularly and measure it’s progress.

When keeping track of money you really have to pay attention to two things. (1) Accounts Receivable – money that is coming in into the business or is at least owed. (2) Accounts Payable – money that is going out. Basically the bills and invoices you have to pay.

A great habit to develop is to sit down every month and generate a monthly financial report.

A habit you should protect yourself from – I learned this the hard way – is waiting until the end of the year to see how your money is moving. You won’t like what you see. You’ll see fiscal mistakes that could have been prevented if only you stopped to see your progress and financial activities.

Work this habit of sitting down every month habit and seeing what direction you business’s life force is flowing.

You’ll learn you can consistently communicate hard numbers and progress to those who are invested in you and your project or those whom you’d like to invest in you.

It’ll allow you to make calculated budgets and plans for spending for the growth of the business and you can use it to forecast what situations you’ll run into in the near future.

MAKING MONEY

In January I made a blog post about 35 Ways To Grow The Business In 2010. A little over two months later looking back at that list I realized only a handful of them can be put into action immediately or within the next couple months. However, before any action could be taken, that overwhelming mind map of projects had to be cut down.

I canned everything that wasn’t directly bringing in revenue and started moving forward with those that do. The following is just some of the things that are already in motion or are soon to be:

1 -
Leechon Producership. This is an effort towards multiplying myself. The more leaders you train, the more potential you have to reach out to others exponentially. InshaAllah the idea is that inevitably will help the company’s bottom line while also creating some jobs. Part of the effort to raise some funds for the project will involve conducting paid workshops/events within the communities of the interns.

2 -
Islamic Kids Show. You may already be familiar with Abdullah the puppet. If you’re not, then click the puppet above or go here: facebook.com/abdullahkidshow. This project is simply a market test to decide whether or not we’re going to turn this into a full fledged venture.

3 -
Client Work. As part of client work, the focus won’t just be applied to producing videos, but developing marketing and business strategies where the client can use video increase sales and exposure online and offline. I’ve been doing this already, but never emphasized this. An addition to this is offering branding and PR services through my wife’s company MinbarMedia.

4 -
Expanding MessageMastery.com. I’m currently in the process of  relaunching “Secrets of Video Production” course. Developing the marketing plan right now as well as working toward building a continuity program. The objective is to expand the current members’ community and build passive ongoing revenue for the company.

5 -
Independent Feature Film on AlMaghrib Institute. The objective is to start seeking investors and taking pre-sales by Summer time. Currently in development stages. Should have a title by end of the week inshaAllah. Here’s a thread that explains a little bit more about it: http://forums.almaghrib.org/showthread.php?t=39623

Vote for the best title here:
http://forums.almaghrib.org/showthread.php?t=39691