Leisure … more than a word, it's a lifestyle

Florida is known for its theme parks, warm weather and its thrill a minute environment. The Sunshine State is also a hot place to visit for motorsport enthusiasts as it is home to some of the most important events in the world.

Perhaps one of the most famous races is the Daytona 500, otherwise known as “The Great American Race.” The Daytona 500 usually takes place at Daytona International Speedway at Daytona Beach in February each year and it is the place where 43 of the very best stock car drivers in the world take center stage as they compete in NASCAR’s biggest richest and most prestigious race. The race is 500 miles long and is the opening race in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

Daytona International Speedway is also home to many other racing events such as the Camping World Truck series for pickup trucks, the Nationwide Series and the Pepsi 400.

Located in the orange groves and cattle ranches of Central Florida is Sebring International Raceway. Sebring is considered America’s premier sports car racing facility by many and is the oldest permanent road racing track in North America. Its most famous race is the annual 12 Hours of Sebring endurance race which is part of the prestigious American Le Mans Series. Every year on the third Saturday of March, the raceway hosts thousands of race fans from around the world to witness the historic 12 hour classic. Many motor racing legends have raced at Sebring; Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, Stirling Moss, Juan Manuel Fangio and dozens of other international motor racing legends, who have driven some of the fastest race cars built by the world’s top manufacturers such as Ferrari, Porsche, Jaguar, Audi, Ford, Maserati, Aston Martin and Nissan.

If you’re looking for Florida’s fastest 1/8 of a mile then you’ll want to visit Lakeland Dragstrip. This is where you’ll find drag racing at its best as all types of vehicles and bikes are put through their paces.

For those wanting to get involved in the action then Walt Disney World Resort has the Richard Petty Experience and this is where you can drive or ride shotgun in true NASCAR-style stock cars which achieve speeds of up to 120mph.

One of the most complete motor sport facilities is The European Rally School & Motorsport Park, based in North Central Florida. They have many different courses to satisfy all tastes. Whether you are in to rallying, high performance driving, ATV, SUV, 4×4, or karting, this place has you covered.

Orlando Speedworld plays host to numerous events throughout the year. Along with the FASCAR Weekly Racing Series, OSW is also home to CRASH-A-RAMA, STUNT WARS, and the annual INEX/600 Racing Winter Nationals.

The FASCAR Weekly Racing Series includes Super Late Models, Limited Late Models, Modifieds, Pro-Trucks and Sportsman that run on a rotating schedule, along with the Super Stocks and Strictly Stocks, which can be seen every Friday night throughout the season.

So, as you can see, if it’s speed you want, there’s plenty of it in Central Florida to thrill and excite you.

Footnote: Indulge me here… this is the motorsport I loved to take part in … and for those of you not familiar with rallying…here’s some in car action with the late Colin McRae in Ireland…

Visiting Orlando this week was the Peter and Tamara Lowe event “Get Motivated“. For those that don’t know anything about it’s origins you’ll need a little background. For more than 25 years, corporate leaders, Fortune 500 companies, educators, business owners, sales people, medical professionals and a whole host more have been attending Peter & Tamara Lowe’s events, making them the leading seminar business in America. Peter and Tamara co-founded the business all those years ago and since then over 3 million people have attended to listen to the truly great speakers that Peter and Tamara have put on stage.

The list of the rich and the famous is enormous. Five United States Presidents (Bush, Carter, Clinton, Ford, & Reagan) have spoken and numerous world leaders and news makers like Lt. Col. Oliver North, Lady Margaret Thatcher, Barbara Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. Additionally, there have been entertainers and journalists like Bill Cosby, Goldie Hawn, Charleton Heston, Ed McMahon, Mary Tyler Moore, Christopher Reeve and people from the music world, Johnny Cash and Reba McEntire, to name but two, have given their words of wisdom from the Lowe stage. Astronauts Aldrin, Duke, Kranz, Lovell and Aldrin have spoken along with many stars of the sports arenas, people like Curt Schilling, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, Joe Montana, Don Shula, Larry Bird, Muhammad Ali, Evander Holyfield, Jackie Joyner Kersee and Jeff Gordon. From the business and literary world such names as Debbi Fields, Seth Godin, Billy Graham, Mark Victor Hansen, Tom Hopkins, John Maxwell, Suze Orman, Tom Peters, Jim Rohn, George Ross, Brian Tracy and I could go on and on. The list is practically endless.

So, having never been to one of these events before I decided that it was time to trot along. The line up was equally impressive, Rudy Giuliani, Gen. Colin Powell, Laura Bush, Lou Holtz, Zig Ziglar, Dr. Robert Schuller, Terry Bradshaw and Tamara Lowe herself.

I found myself arriving fairly early at the Orange County Convention and Visitors Center and it wasn’t long before I was seated in an excellent seat just four rows from the stage. A great view. Lou Holtz, the football head coach, was one of the first to enter the arena and he gave a rousing opening speech about life being the attitude you choose to take. After that Zig Ziglar came on stage. I wrote about Zig in an earlier blog so check that out here. We then listened to former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani as he recounted the events of 9/11 and the way the City came together under his leadership to overcome the events of those sad days.

General Colin Powell then made his way to the stage and told us about the afterlife of his days as Secretary of State and Commander in Chief and how he can now get a hot dog in New York without being troubled too much. Laura Bush was up next and she went into quite a bit of detail about the events of September 11th and how deeply they affected her husband President George Bush at that time. She spoke from the heart of the upset she felt when the media attacked her husband and also, about how her family is now doing now the spotlight has moved away from them.

Overall it was well worth a visit and a day away from the office to hear the stories told by these people and of the one common theme they shared… a real determination to succeed. To not let bad times affect them and to fight back in adversity. The seminar was also well timed as we start to pull out of the recession…if we choose to believe the media that is! Around 10,000 people attended the event and hopefully the message sank home to those that were there… “don’t rely on the Government to pull us out of this… it’s you, the people, who will do that”. And I guess, we always have and that we always will.

Not often I get chance to wade into politics or things of that nature on this blog but I went along to see Michael Moore’s new film “Capitalism – A Love Story” earlier this week and I thought I’d write a review about it as below. If you’ve seen the movie, let me know what you think… feel free to comment below.

Capitalism

Capitalism is the title of Michael Moore’s new movie and I went along to see it just recently. As always Moore has his own agenda to keep but this movie does have some thought provoking moments that keep the viewer interested and entertained. The movie starts by showing a family being evicted after a mortgage foreclosure. From there it moves on to attack companies such as Wal-Mart who took out over 350,000 separate life insurance policies on their ‘dead peasants” just so they can make a profit out of the employee should he or she die.

After that Moore addresses the salaries of pilots who we are led to believe only do it for the love of flying, and then he revisits the foreclosure issue by revealing that ironically 60% of the foreclosure notices come from Flint, Michigan so, therefore, there is a conspiracy to make the whole country a similar place to how Flint is today.

From there we move into an attack on corruption in Government as he accuses many public figures of getting favorable loans as VIP friends of Angelo Mozilo, former head of Countrywide before we get to the public bail out of Bank of America, GM, AIG, Chrysler etc and his quite ludicrous but comical attempts to recover some of the public money given out to these companies. Moore then goes further as he points out that it is the failed executives at Goldman Sachs who are now advising Government leaders and that there is effectively a “jobs for the boys” mentality leading the nation.

Moore then highlights the workers at Republic Doors & Windows, Chicago, as innocent victims who then organized a sit in when the factory closed and they weren’t paid what was owed to them. It took just six days for Bank of America and the company owners to come to a deal with them to pay them off and buy their silence.

Of course, much of this movie is rhetoric and designed to shock the audience. It’s also quite amusing in places and the comment “there is a reason why I can’t take out fire insurance on other people’s houses” deals pretty well with the life insurance issue but fails to ask the question why the families concerned didn’t take out such insurance themselves?

Moore clearly loves the idea of “fairness in the work place” and champions Alvarado Street Bakery as the business of the future where every employee comes together in a “true democracy” to vote on the direction of the company. His working for the common good theme continues as he talks about Dr. Jonas Salk who refused to patent his vaccine for polio, thus saving him from the sin of getting really rich and he praises the unselfish work of the police and the firemen who go out to work each day to help the common good as if to solidify his point that enough money is enough money and we should all do more for others.

Finally, Moore gets to Roosevelt’s 1944 second bill of rights. This was the proposed bill that would have allegedly guaranteed that every person in the United States would have a job with a living wage, freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, a home, medical care, education and recreation. Grand ideals but unfortunately (for Moore) none of this came to fruition as Roosevelt passed away in 1945 and we can only wonder what might have been had it come to pass, even though Moore makes the point that after the 2^nd World War the people of Europe and Japan got all of the items on the Roosevelt wish list.

I have to admit that I quite enjoyed the movie but the big problem for me was the lack of balance. Moore fails to bring in one single small or large business owner to tell their side of the story and about the struggles or successes they have in running their own business to create jobs and wealth. The film also fails to mention the current work of people like Buffett, Gates and many other great philanthropists (Carnegie, Rowntree, Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg) who have created wealth from literally nothing, not to mention capitalism, and then given huge sums of money away in an effort to help human beings all over the world, arguably doing more for society than all previous governments put together have ever done.

So Mr. Moore, you might have found a couple of clergymen to say that capitalism is the root of all evil and you may have made a watchable and somewhat thought provoking movie but the real irony in all of this is that without capitalism, this film wouldn’t have been made at all. It would also have been nice to see you address how capitalism has or hasn’t helped you create your own media empire and your own personal fortune.

Perhaps a better title for the movie should have been “Greed”. After all, it was the greed of the banks, the government, many people in business and lastly the people themselves that caused much of today’s problems and I’d strongly argue that it isn’t “capitalism” that has “failed” us…it’s only people who have done that.

Day three at World Internet Summit was packed with some excellent speakers and we didn’t finish until just after 8pm so it was a long day. I picked up several great tips along the way and that’s going to guarantee a busy week ahead in the office for my people! (LOL)

Anyway, I managed to catch up with Matt Bacak and Sean Roach…both two amazingly successful guys. Matt was the guy who set the record for the largest customer acquisition in the Internet marking community’s history while Sean has worked with renowned companies like Coldwell Banker, Ford, Mirage Resorts, Firstplus Mortgage, Century 21, Subaru, BMW, MGM, Realty Executives, Inomati, and Bertelsmann.

Nigel Worrall & Matt Bacak

Nigel Worrall & Sean Roach

Every week I send out an email newsletter to a bunch of other small business owners and this week’s article has brought me a big reaction. I thought I’d share it with you. If you like it or have a viewpoint …or if you’d like to see more just let me know:

More Lessons from the Dumb Car Industry…

Last week we talked about the cheapest car on earth the Tata Nino and why being cheap isn’t a good business strategy and this week we’re going to stay on a similar theme exploring more reasons why the car industry is on its knees and the lessons we can all learn.

Yesterday it was announced that Rick Wagoner, chief executive of General Motors, was ordered to step down by US President Barack Obama and that he will leave immediately. This comes on the back of GM and fellow auto maker Chrysler having already received $17.4 billion in bail outs and now both are back asking for more. In GM’s case $16.7 billion more. Incredible.

Obama has apparently told both manufacturers that their turnaround plans are unrealistic and he wants to see the car industry “much more lean, mean and competitive than it currently is”. 

Well Obama if you really want to understand why these companies are failing you need do no more than spend an hour in front of your TV. I was feeling unwell yesterday so I spent most of the day in bed watching the golf at Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill club. Naturally every so often the action was interrupted as we went to a commercial break and it was during the commercial breaks that I really began to understand where the car giants have got it so horribly wrong.

Let me give you an idea; in their ads Ford focused on 0% financing over 72 months for “well qualified” applicants, Chrysler/Jeep gave us “employee pricing”, Acura gave us “what happens in a collision and why our cars are so strong” and then we had the local dealers with their cringe worthy kids enticing us with “See ya in a Kia”, “The other dealers won’t but we will” not to mention the earth shattering slogans “great choices, great service” and “the way car buying should be”.

Brilliant. Makes you want to rush out and buy a vehicle now doesn’t it?

Why is it that the whole industry is so pathetically dumb? Why is it that the people who create this garbage think this is what the driving public wants?

I don’t know about you but when I’m considering getting a new car I want to have an experience. I rarely go into a car showroom any more simply because I know full well how they are going to try to sell me and while I appreciate that they have a system, it’s just out of date with the real world and it doesn’t deliver what I need.

I don’t want to be a prospect or an “UP” as they call us. . I want to be treated as if I’m special and I want to be treated like a human being who might just want to buy a car based on how it makes me feel. I want to see ad campaigns that appeal to the heart and that engage my senses. Currently none of the car makers deliver that with their crummy ads and that’s “a” if not “the” major reason they are in trouble today.

Instead of asking themselves “How can we make it easier, simpler and more fun to do business with us?” these morons want even more public money to go about repeating the same mistakes they have already made.

The real point though is how does anyone win when they’re playing the same game? If everybody is selling the same thing, what’s the tie breaker?

Of all the car commercials I saw yesterday, Lexus came the closest to making me feel I might want to learn more about driving their vehicle. It was a clumsy advert which showed the viewer how a car was built and while it contained the somewhat nauseating slogan “reinventing the car” it at least gave me an idea of what it might feel like to be sitting behind the wheel.

There are real lessons in this for all of us and applying them to our businesses is what we must consider. If you can make a customer feel, smell, taste, see and touch what you have to sell then you can make a connection. And this is the real point…I don’t care about 0% financing, employee discounts, what’s going to happen to me in a crash (I ask you…is this realy the way to sell a car…based on how it’s going to make me feel in a crash!), or about “great choices, great service” until I can imagine myself driving the vehicle, i.e., connected to it.

Oh how I yearn for the days when cars were sold by touching the human emotions. Ads like “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock” that was created in the 60’s by the Ogilvy & Mather agency. This is the stuff that makes you feel, smell, taste and imagine what it would be like to drive such a vehicle and that’s ultimately what makes people decide to make a purchase.

So, how are you applying this to your business? Are you playing the same game as everyone else in your industry or are you going to be different and make real connections with your customers? The choice is yours but remember, in small business the Government doesn’t bail you out.

Until next week

Nigel

About Nigel Worrall:
Nigel Worrall is President / CEO of Florida Leisure Vacation Homes. He is also a Past President of Central Florida Property Manager’s Association, now called Central Florida Vacation Rental Manager’s Association, a National Real Estate Investment Coach with Real Mentor, and the President / CEO of Property Management Mastery, LLC., the leading coaching institute for vacation rental managers. Nigel has also served as President of Sunset Lakes HOA and is the current President of Cumbrian Lakes HOA. He can be contacted by email : nigel@floridaleisure.com

Time flies fast… this time last week I’d just arrived home from a business trip to Myrtle Beach. It was one of those trips I took alone and the 8 hr car journey from Orlando to Myrtle Beach soon passed as I caught up with some listening of cd’s I’d bought a few months back.

Nigel Worrall and George Ross

One of the highlights was meeting up with George Ross, one of the stars of The Apprentice and Donald Trump’s attorney at The Trump Organization. It was the second time this year I’d met him and he said something that sank home… “persistance + failure = success”.  I reflected on this on the way home and I realised that the times I’ve had the most success is when I’ve been dogmatic, persistant and not afraid of failure. 

I guess that’s why I’ve always studied the wealthy and admired the likes of Trump, Branson, Ford, Carnegie, etc who fought against the people who told them they couldn’t do something or who told them they were crazy. I guess that’s also why I’m my own boss… essentially unemployable… and I like it that way!

I like the freedom it brings,  I like doing things that benefit others and I like to own a business that gives great value to it’s customers. The trip to Myrtle Beach reinforced it… for a start there was the hotel the conference was being held in… a lovely venue with a marina… but at $ 249/night? Are they nuts?

One of the problems with being the CEO of Florida Leisure Vacation Homes is that I get used to top quality accommodations at affordable prices. The idea of paying $299/night for a 400 sq. ft room just doesn’t work for me…. so I shopped around and found another hotel at $149/night… the best deal in town. But still a 400 sq. ft hotel room ! And what made it worse… my neighbors had a noisy dog yapping away. Fun… I don’t think so.

That said, it’s been the story of my life recently. I’ve had to do a fair amount of travelling attending business events and each time I’ve had to stay in an overpriced hotel… if you want to see why I hate staying in hotels so much… click here

Anyway, I’ve sort of enjoyed it in an odd sort of way. It’s reinforced the value that staying in a vacation home brings. The enormous space you get… no comparison really… 400 sq. ft or 1500 sq. ft to 4000 sq. ft…. 1 room or 3 to 7 bedrooms plus lounge plus private pool plus fully equipped kitchen plus laundry plus, plus, plus… I could go on.

The nice thing about this trip was that I actually got to spend an hour on the beach… something I hardly ever do even though I live in Florida! I also got to check out some great restaurants such as LeGrand’s Alaskan Seafood and Steak,  Collectors Cafe & Gallery, BoneFish and a place I simply couldn’t resist because it felt like home, Cheeseburger in Paradise.

It was nice to get away for a few days on my own. It was pretty much the first time I’ve done that in twenty years and it was good to get time to simply think and reflect. It’s something everyone should do… so why not come to Orlando and indulging yourself by renting a vacation home? It’s nice to spoil yourself occassionally …