One of the simplest ways to learn to be humorous, when public speaking, is to use an introductory joke story. The opening of your presentation should actually comprise of two parts a pre-introduction and then an introduction.
Pre-Introduction Tips
The pre-introduction is for grabbing your audience’s attention. The introduction is then for introducing the topic of your speech. So technically, when public speaking, you need to start with your pre-introductory joke story.
Everything has to relate to the overall objective of presentation in order for it to be truly effective. The point of the story has to relate directly or indirectly to your main point.
Are there often stories that you tell at work related to what you do, that are clean and make people laugh? If so then as long as it’s succinct then you should absolutely use it.
“But I don’t have any funny stories”
Okay, here’s an alternative, use a street joke. You know those jokes that begin something like “two guys walk into a bar…” or “a Grandfather finds a magic watch” or a “Man goes into a store with an Alligator under his arm…” those are known as street jokes. Essentially they are jokes without an author, which people tell in social situations.
Professional Joke-Telling Secrets
The quick down and dirty little secret with these is to find short ones that relate to your content. Make sure that the fantastical element is restricted, so talking animals or objects, anything magical or fantastical needs to be avoided. The audience will feel like they’re being joked, you don’t want that. You want your audience to feel as though you’re being conversational.
The next thing you want to do is to adapt that street joke and make it personal to you. So instead of saying “this guy worked in this bar” you would say “I was working in this bar”
Be very careful over the nature of your street joke and the humour you use in your entire presentation. Make sure that no one’s going to be offended. Don’t target nay particular groups. The best person to laugh at is yourself!
Not only that, but you also want to make sure that the street joke that you’re going to use is authorless and doesn’t belong to a comedian. Don’t steal another comedian’s material as that’s immoral and illegal. Street jokes aren’t difficult to find if you set your mind to it.
Once you have delivered your introductory joke story you must then go into your introduction and inform your audience about the nature of your presentation. However, make sure you don’t give too much away. You want them to remain interested enough to stick around for the ending of your presentation.
Jason Peck is a Humorist, Speaker and Consultant based in London, England. For public speaking tips and to learn how to add humor to your speeches and presentations to win over your listeners visit: Pro Humorist.
Month: June 2009
Categories
Role of Franchisees and Franchisors
Franchisees and Franchisors…the two work together to create and expand a successful business concept. So what role does each play in relation to the other?
The Franchisor
The Franchisor has built a successful business system and is willing to sell you the right to use that system, and all that goes with it, to begin your own business. An important distinction is that the franchisor is not selling you a business—he/she is selling you a right to operate a business using an established system.
The objective of the franchisor is the same as any other business owner—to increase the value of their business. In the franchise world, this is accomplished by selling the right to use their business model so that there are more franchise locations doing business successfully. In this way they expand their market reach, increase the value of the franchise, and the brand as a whole grows. As the number of successful units grows, the franchisor’s royalty stream (the percentage of profits they get from each unit) also grows.
It is in the franchisor’s best interest to continue to support you as you exercise this right to do business. Some of the things you can expect from a franchisor are:
* Professional national marketing and advertising materials and campaigns: they will manage the overall strategy of the brand.
* Management of products and services for the brand as a whole, including research and development of new products and services. A proven system of doing business.
* Protected territory from other in-brand units: in other words, they will manage how close your market area is to another unit so there are both enough stores to have good market coverage, and also enough territory for each store to generate the business they each need to operate successfully.
* The ability and option to own more than one unit.
* A network of colleagues.
* Frequently, a buying cooperative—that is, a group of people who together have more buying power and ability to negotiate prices than does a single business owner.
The Franchisee
The Franchisee is ready to start a new business, but may not have enough experience in running a business to be comfortable starting one from nothing. Most new businesses have a fairly high failure rate—sometimes due to mistakes made by inexperienced business owners, other times due to unexpected conditions in the market. What the Franchisee is looking for is a leg-up in starting a business so they have an increased probability of success. This is exactly what purchasing the right to use an existing business system and brand name provides them.
What you need to keep in mind is that this is your business, but someone else’s brand. It’s your responsibility to find and negotiate your lease or building, but the Franchisor will usually provide guidance. You are responsible for hiring and training all employees, but again, the Franchisor can provide helpful tips for recruiting and employee development. You manage all of the pieces of the business yourself, tapping into the expertise of those from whom you’ve purchased this system whenever you need advice. You can also expect the franchise to provide training in the methods of running your business according to the system they licensed to you.
What is important for you as the Franchisee to understand from the beginning is that while you are part of an entire franchise system and will work as a partnership, you are not actually a partner. This doesn’t mean that you have no say in how the business is run, but it does mean that your say is limited. In more established franchises, there is usually a franchise group that represents the franchisees’ interests and works with the franchisor to present ideas and resolve business issues to the benefit of the franchise as a whole.
If not quite a partner, the franchisee still can expect from the franchise those things outlined above. So what can the franchisor expect from you?
* Well…money, of course. You can think of it as leasing their ideas. Each month you will report on your financials and a certain percentage of the profit you make goes to the franchisor. They use this money to fund things like advertising campaigns and research and development of new products, and to grow the value of the brand.
* You to run your business according to their standards regarding products and services. Consistency from store to store is what brings customers into franchise businesses. A customer should expect to get the same product or service from that brand name regardless of which building they walk into. If you don’t, other units suffer.
It’s important to note that the services listed above are somewhat standard to all franchise systems, but the extent to which they are applied varies greatly. Your Franchise Agreement will explicitly state the levels of support you will get in terms of advertising, training, and other areas. If it isn’t in writing (in your Franchise Agreement) then it’s not required. Keep this in mind during your conversations with any franchise organization.
This article is contributed by: Franchise Genius
FranchiseGenius.com is the largest, most comprehensive online directory of franchise concepts, with 1,700+ concepts summarized, and includes a franchise resource center full of objective and useful information.
Article Contributed by Experienced-People
The dot com bust proved convincingly that business models involving a lot of gloss and very little prospect of consistent and growing profit find themselves on the scrap heap – and rightly so. However, in the years that followed, some internet businesses made it so big they forever changed how people buy products and how they live their lives. From Amazon’s colossal grip on the world of books, to Paypal’s hugely successful online payment system, to YouTube’s massive user base, many Internet businesses have innovated their way to fame and success. However, the big Internet Business Success Story isn’t any of those. Some of those leviathans have profit more in their imagination than in their bank.
The Facts and Figures
That the Internet population is growing by the day is not in doubt. From 2000-2008 the number of people online skyrocketed by 342%.1 Not only are more people online but users are spending more time on the ‘net, accessing more goods and services there, integrating their offline world with “social networks” and moving their spending online too. In 2008, nearly 900 million people bought something online and that number is growing at the rate of 40%2. The US accounts for less than 16% of global internet users, yet in the US alone people will spend over $160,000,000,000 online in the recession hit 2009.
The bulk of that money is not, as one would imagine, going to a few large companies that straddle internet commerce. For every dollar the Google behemoth makes from the Adsense ads seen on so many websites, a large chunk goes to the owners of those sites. In the first quarter of 2009 Google paid out $410 million every month to these small businesses3. For every £1 eBay makes in commission on goods sold, the “small” eBay retailer pockets up to £10 in profit. The top 1000 eBay sellers generated revenue of £785,000,000 in 2008, with an average turnover of £440,0004.
The Opportunities
Businesses like eBay and Google account for only a small fraction of the business transacted online. The big story is the millions of small businesses – from firms developing applications for Facebook to companies creating and providing electronic delivery goods like software and ebooks, to businesses supplying consultancy services to SMEs, multinationals and governments. There are huge opportunities, there are successful businesses showing amazingly healthy growth, and there’s a business in this sector to suit every taste and budget. They include
– small, low cost, work from home, part-time businesses making just a few hundred dollars a month
– information websites that have steady revenue from contextual ad programmes such as Adsense. (It’s like income from copyrights and patents – no active management required)
– “drop ship” retailers of everything from candles to yachts but without a warehouse, logistics or customer service
– domain businesses consisting of nothing more than a collection of domains earning steady income from “domain parking”
– franchises without the employees, premises, bureaucracy or tedious hours
and
– traditional businesses selling high street goods and services but conducting the advertising, selling, order processing etc., entirely online giving them a significant competitive advantage over older, more established players
Why Now?
Clinton Lee, author of 101 Ways to Make Money Online, has been involved in online businesses for the best part of the last decade. In his words, “I’ve moved from buying and developing B&Ms (Bricks and Mortar) to buying Internet businesses partly because they are so much better value. The P/Es are a lot more attractive. It’s not uncommon for a quality website to sell for less than a year’s EBITDA. There are real bargains to be had. Yet, these businesses are higher growth, more flexible, more scalable and better able to adapt to changing market conditions.”
The lack of geographical restriction when choosing a business makes for phenomenal amount of choice. Most can be run from anywhere, even if the owner decides to emigrate. The ownership of online business and their cash flow can be directed outside a home country making them ideal tax planning vehicles. Internet businesses are easier to grow than local businesses, can grow much further, can employ talent anywhere in the world and tap into the larger global market.
So why are do online businesses sell for what would be considered bargain basement prices elsewhere?
Traditional valuation principles still apply. It’s still about quantifying future Profit and Risk. The values exist …but the buyers don’t.
There is still a mind-set among buyers that associates Internet businesses with new-fangled, high risk or requiring specialist technical skills to own/manage. Nothing could be further from the truth. While no Internet business can boast the 50 year history that some cafes, hotels or pubs take pride in, many have been generating substantial and growing profits for several years. With staff to do the technical work, long-term contracts in place with blue chip companies, solid business plans and motivated management teams, many of these businesses have everything that excites buyers.
Except the Marketplace
There’s another price dampener: the lack of a proper forum for the buying and selling of these businesses. Apart from particularly large businesses, Internet concerns are unlikely to catch the attention of the right audience when listed in a general business-for-sale publication. A typical website owner wishing to sell needs to contact owners of similar sites or post threads on webmaster community boards – hardly the best places to find savvy business investors.
What’s very evident in these website-for-sale threads is the average sellers’ obvious inexperience with selling businesses. Their pitch is targeted squarely at their audience of webmasters and usually refers to Page Rank, DMOZ listings, site design and backend, how high the PPC is etc.. but rarely a proper analysis of the profits, cash flow or projections. Presenting a proper financial case is a turn-off for that specific audience. The experienced business buyer would ask the right questions to get at the figures.
The new Daltonsbusiness sector devoted to Internet businesses should bring these business opportunities to a wider audience and expose business buyers to a largely untapped sector.
Isn’t it time you considered buying an Internet business?
If you are giving a speech or presentation and you want to inject a little humour, it would be fair to say that you have to learn to how to be humorous on purpose. I am going to do a very dangerous thing and assume that you already have a method for creating humorous material. I am doing that as the discussion of creating material and speeches is beyond the scope of this article.
The best thing to do is to create your speech first, then think about the humour. What can happen is that if you try and be funny first, before getting your message clarified, you can creatively run aground. You’ll spend more time worrying about how to be humorous rather than focusing on your message.
Be specific about your message, what the point of your speech or presentation is and then write your speech “from the heart; meaning you should write as quickly as you can. At this stage don’t think too much about what you’re writing, otherwise you’ll end up second guessing yourself. The idea being you short-circuit your inner critic, that little doubting voice that we all have.
Once you have the raw material for your speech down, now is the time to “edit from the head”. At this point you can unleash your inner critic to help you. Make sure everything you say and every point that you make reflects the overall point of your speech.
Now we can look at some of the mechanics of humour. I’ve met people who are really funny who still don’t know what a punchline is, that’s something that baffles me as these are the tools of their trade and yet they’re using them blindly. So here’s a quick run down of terms (apologies if you know this already, but I want us to be on the same page):
The Secrets of Set-up Lines
A set-up line is the bit before you get a laugh. It’s usually normal and provides information required to make the punchline work. A set-up line is equally important as the punchline is. Without the set-up line the punchline fails.
Consider this joke:
During his annual physical, the elderly man says to his doctor “I may be having a problem with my memory. I keep forgetting to take my medicine. I can’t remember to take out the trash. Sometimes, I can’t even remember my own name.” The doctor says, “When did this start happening?” The man looks at the doctor and says, “When did what start happening?”
Everything up until the word “says” is the set-up. It provides the necessary mini story and helps to orientate us.
Ideally, the shorter this part the better. You want to get to the punchline as fast as you can, but without rushing your delivery. You should still be speaking in your own natural rhythm and pace.
If you consider that the average headline stand-up comedian gets 4-6 laughs per minute, an act containing jokes of this nature probably wouldn’t achieve that. In order to achieve that there would need to be a punchline every three sentences, or one laugh every 10 seconds.
As you can see I am very serious when it comes to learning how to be humorous.
Joke stories, such as the one of just outlined, tend to be a little long-winded and have only one punchline at the end. That’s a lot of time and a lot of faith to have in that one punchline working.
The good thing is we’re not about learning how to become a stand-up comedian. These types of jokes could work in a speech or presentation and you should make sure that you speak them out loud a few times to put them into your own words. This will mean that you find yourself editing the joke naturally.
Obviously, when you are delivering a presentation everything you say is not divided into either set-up lines or punchlines. You’re not a comedian. You’re someone giving a presentation that uses humour to help make your point, so a large proportion of what you say will be focused on your message.
That said, when you get to the humour, you want to get to the laugh as fast as possible, without rushing what you’re saying.
The Secrets of Funny Punchlines
Your punchlines should be short and to the point. This is where you get the punch of punchlines. Consider the punchline of the earlier joke and imagine what it would be like if it was like this:
“I’m a little confused about what it is you’re saying to me Doctor. When did what start happening?”
I personally fell asleep about half-way through that sentence. The set-up line creates the tension of expectation in the audience. This means that the punchline should be terse enough to release that tension. But if the punchline rambles on like in my above example, then that effect is lost.
Everything that needs to be conveyed for this mini story to work, is found in the final sentence.
Here’s another key part for a successful punchline, make sure that the key word is as close to the end of the sentence as possible. This will keep the audience tension right up until the last possible minute.
In the previous example the key word is “what”. It’s a direct swap of the previous word used in the same place which was “this”. It’s also important, in this example, that the line that the elderly man says is exactly the same as what the doctor said, with just one slight difference.
These tips can not only be applied to the editing of street jokes, but also to most other forms of spoken humour that appear in humorous speeches. If you can apply these tips you can learn how to be humorous and improve the funny you already have.
Jason Peck is a Humorist, Speaker and Consultant based in London, England. For public speaking tips and to learn how to add humor to your speeches and presentations to win over your listeners visit: Pro Humorist.
It?s hard to look anywhere these days and not see someone who hasn?t been affected by unemployment and the gloomy economy. With some states experiencing up to a 20% unemployment rate, you often wonder if there is anyone succeeding today? Fortunately, there is. In fact, some businesses are not only succeeding, but thriving as well. For example, the Home Tutoring Industry and educational-based companies are experiencing record growth. Not only is it the right time for a home tutoring business, but the right industry as well.
This is primarily due to the fact that in order for students to excel today, they need to be able to get additional help. With school districts faced with larger class sizes, teacher layoffs, and even some schools canceling summer schools programs, students are faced with obstacles rarely seen before. In order for them to keep up and thrive, they need support and educational assistance. That?s where tutoring from home comes into play. Students get the help they need and most importantly at a price that parents can afford.
As the demand for tutors rises, so does the need for good home tutoring businesses. With the opportunity to not only make a great income, but make a difference in a child?s life, more and more are starting their own home tutoring businesses. It can be a perfect match for teachers and educators, women or men entering the workforce after staying home to care for family, or people who worked in Corporate America for many years and are looking for a change.
By starting your own home tutoring business, you become a tutor broker. Here you manage a network of professional teachers and educators, matching them with students in need of one-on-one in-home tutoring. In a sense you are establishing a home tutoring referral network in your community. The owner of the business, you, becomes a matchmaker, or broker, matching qualified tutors and teachers with children in need of individualized tutoring.
There are numerous programs out there that will help you start your own business. However, there are many things to consider before you make a final decision. What you are looking for is a company that is cost-effective. Now more than ever it?s important to find the right company
that not only offers the best advice, but has everything you need to get started. Therefore, whenever possible look for a company that can provide more than just a book and information. There are some companies out today, such as Home Tutoring Business, that provide not only the how to?s to starting a home tutoring business, but individualized coaching, website
design and optimization, marketing and advertising copy tailored to your new company, specialized accounting software unique to the tutoring industry, etc.
Steer clear of franchises. To be successful you don?t want to have to pay royalties and be at the beck and call of the franchise. As you?ve seen recently with the auto industry, when you are part of a franchise, they still make the decisions for you. You want a business that allows you total control and earning potential.
Finally, find a company that will stay in touch with you even after you purchase their information. Starting a business can be challenging and if you can find a company that will frequently stay connected via newsletters, cards, additional coaching, etc., you will benefit greatly.
About the Author:
Laurie Hurley based in Newbury Park, CA is the President and Founder of Home Tutoring Business, http://www.hometutoringbusiness.com. She has helped more than 100 people establish lucrative tutor referral services in their community. Laurie has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Woman’s World, Redbook Magazine, etc. Laurie also owns her own in-home tutoring company and has seen an unprecedented growth in business since the economic downturn.