Do You Want Profits or Paychecks? - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kevin L. Smith, an advocate for practical financial
training for African Americans is a business coach, real estate and
finance broker, financial services entrepreneur, seminar speaker, and
author. His "market" approach to basic financial thought provides
catalysts that parents, teachers, coaches and preachers can use to
steer our contemporary generations into avenues of financial inde
pendence and major economic influence.

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This book is a tool for thought for African Americans. It
asks you to consciously answer one of the most determinant questions
of your life: Do you want profits or paychecks? Your answer to this
question will set the course to which you must apply your God given
abilities to finance your survival, your ambitions, and your dreams.
However, your attitudes about America's past, present, and future, are
major factors in how you have or will answer. The unique attitudes
that African Am ericans must embrace, relative to the quality of our
future individual and collective financial survival in America, are
the subjects of this writing.

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The further financial advancement of African Americans will
come when more of our day to day conversations and God given abilities
are focused on financial possibilities vs. impossibilities, on
production vs. consumption, and on profits vs. paychecks. What if all
African Americans understoo d the concepts, instruments, and
mechanics, of real and personal property ownership, of capital inve
stment, of appreciation, depreciation, and compound returns? What if
we had a common fundamental knowledge of research and development,
manufacturing, marketing, advertising, public relations, broker age,
distribution, and transportation? What if we knew the characteristics
of the stock markets as well as many know the characters of their
favorite television programs? What if we all had a working knowledge
of financial institutions rather than the "take it for granted"
attitude we patronize th em with most of our lives? What if the
principles of estate planning and preservation, and the concepts of
generation to generation investment and inheritance were "culturally"
instilled in African American families? If the "applications" of
these various principles were the concerns that African American
children heard their parents discussing in daily casual breakfast and
dinner conversations, from the perspective of "can do" rather than
"can not do", what might the possibilities be for African Americans?

The financial advancement of African Americans will NOT come as a
result of some form of mass reparation. There is no person, no
government program, no major corporation, and no industry that has the
resources to endow every African American with a significant
reparatory lump sum of money - whether some think it is owed or not.
For African Americans to rally around such ideas is just plain econo
mic and financial ignorance. History records that certain freed
slaves were supposed to have been g iven forty acres and a mule. That
didn't happen. I suppose the case could be made that by right, it is
a debt still owed. Should African Americans collectively march on
Washington D.C and demand from Congress, land and mules or a cash
equivalent? Some still maintain that as a matter of principle , we
should, touting the benefits of mass solidarity. What good will it
serve to be solid behind so mething that first and foremost, is a
financial impossibility? There ain't gonna be no forty acres,
no mules, and no cash equivalent! So...why spend "unredeemable" time
talking about it?

This book is intended to serve as a catalyst to focus the discussion
of African Americans squarely on the principles, applications and
attitudes necessary to generate net profit. (Notice I said generate
net profit, not spend net profit!) Net profit is quite simply the
money remaining over and abov e what it cost to produce and sell a
product or service. Net profit is the guiding beacon that African
Americans must keep in sight at all times as we evolve financially.
Let me be more direct, YOU must keep profit in YOUR sight at all
times. As long as you can determine where your profit is, you have an
opportunity to position yourself for basic financial survival and
perhaps even abundant prosperity.

As you read, you will become acutely aware of two factors as they
relate to African Americans and profit. First, African Americans as
a group are not profit minded. There are only individuals within
African America who are profit minded. Secondly, all profit minded
individuals regardless of their race, religion, or nationality, follow
the same two fundamental steps to profit. The first step is to learn
the principles of profit and the second step is to apply the
principles in a world that is a treacherous jungle of diverse
attitudes, beliefs, and intelligence. Some individuals devise a way
to profit in this jungle and most don't. Some that profit do so
fleetingly while others build a s ustainable legacy. What then is the
mind set of a person who profits? More specifically, what must
be the mind-set of an African-American in order to profit? The
answers to these two questions will serve as the underlying theme of
this book.