From: snjezana.adamovic@tiscali.ca
To: Full Mail List
Subject: Seven Easy Steps To A Better Business
Dear Friend:
My name is Dr. Snazzy Caulfield. I am much pleased to make your acquaintance, since having recently received your email, I realized that we are in the same business. You will understand why I cannot name exactly our business. Nevertheless, I think you will know it. I have developed a very good system to improve what we do, which I call Seven Easy Steps To A Better Business.
Step One
Pick yourself a good name and title. It must sound dignified and banker-like, with only a hint of foreignness. (Nigerian or otherwise.) The idea of preceding your chosen name with Barrister is good. So, Barrister Frank Obasi is a good name. Prof. Philip Batoma (CPA) is another good name. If your name is Lucky Koffo or Kennedy Mambo, change it. If your name really is Harry Sithole, and you don’t see why you should change it, consider step two below. If your name is too foreign-sounding, consider modifying it to something more English-friendly. Too foreign-sounding names are frightening to our potential clients. For example, I have changed my original name from Snjezana to Snazzy.
Step Two
Make sure your English is very strong. Very strong English is important in this business. While a charming foreign accent is a help in making the initial connection, and is also a sign of your verity, a lack of good English will ultimately bring you problems. In regard to a different but related business, a Mr. David Caulfield once said to me, “At first, Snazzy, I thought your accent was charming, but now I never know what the hell you are saying.” That was two years ago. But I am proof with hard work, starting only with Croatian (Hrvatski) and German (Deutsch) you can master this English very well. Contact me at snazzy.caulfield@tiscali.ca for further information on how I can help you improve your English. (Wollen Sie deutsch utilisieren? Auch ich kann Sie helfen!)
Step Three
The personal detail is very important in our business. It is better still if it is something verifiable. I have here an otherwise good email from a Dr. John Chijioke, of Lagos. “I was the personal attorney to Mr. Arthur Caulfield, a national of your country, who unfortunately died in a plane crash accident in neighboring Benin. For more information on this crash, please see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/world/africa/27003229.stm. I am most anxious that despite the similarity of family name, this person is not actually a relative of yours.” This was an excellent idea, but it is most unfortunate that this website leads to nothing. Do not make this same mistake. In the next point I will discuss how to avoid this.
Step Four
It is very important to invest in this business of ours. Do not be cheap! Investment can take many forms, but one of them is certainly technical investment. Consider the possibility of producing your own website. Then it would be possible to have exactly the information you wanted directly available! I myself am a very experienced web designer, having recently completed a course at Learningisbusiness computer school here in Toronto, Canada. See my happy picture on their website: http://www.learningisbusiness.ca/student_profiles/s_caulfield.htm. It is a very good picture and no more than two years old. Please do look at my qualifications and then contact me at snjezana.adamovic@tiscali.ca. Rates are very reasonable, and I might also suggest we can arrange a very close partnership.
Step Five
At the same time it is important not to be too forward in a business like ours. Do not seem too heated: you must be cool. I have here an email from Engineer Michael Nduka, in many ways well-phrased, that reads, “Your reply means a lot, Mrs. Caulfield. Unclaimed funds, by Nigerian law, are donated to the Arms and Armunitions fund. We have enough war in Africa! You must act within four days, or the monies will be transferred.” This is a good idea, but it is too much, too much pressure. As I say above, you must be cool. Make yourself appear valuable; do not make yourself appear desperate. Offer, don’t require. It can be a very hard hair to split.
Step Six
Take chances! You must put yourself on the line to succeed in this business. You must get yourself ‘out there.’ How do a boy and a girl ever get together if they each stay in their room and don’t ever go out into the cold? It’s not like that in the movies and it’s not for us, either. Consider: if you send out 100,000 emails and you get one response, that’s a response rate of 0.001%. But if you had only sent out 10,000 emails, then maybe nothing happened! As an Anglo-Canadian once close to me would always say, get in the game! So I say, start a dialogue! You yourself must reply to every email you receive. You must try, try, try!
Step Seven
And finally, have faith. Though there is always the possibility of failure, you must continue to have faith. It may be you went on with a contact for one, two, almost three years, but in the end nothing came of it. Do not despair. (It may be inevitable you despair a little bit, but then stop.) Pick yourself up, and make new contacts. Your prince (or princess) will come. They will have a small, paid-off house in Florida, maybe $70,000 in the bank, and a good pension. They will also have broken teeth and streaked-through gray hair. This does not matter. That is the beauty of this business. They will not know that you are not really a senior vice-president for accounting of Nigeria Petro-Chemicals, PLC, or that you have put on seventy pounds in the first two years since the divorce and your last picture was taken. We can make an excellent partnership in this business of ours. I am available now. And remember: all is fair in this business. Our business. Whatever it is.
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