Starting Archives - Page 6 of 6

Reduce the Risk of Starting a Business

Most people consider starting your own business as one of the riskiest undertakings possible. Of course, most people are not entrepreneurs. True entrepreneurs know that successful startups are all about controlling and managing risk. Their entire outlook revolves around doing whatever it takes to identify threats and obstacles and find the way around, over, or through them.

The risks that non-entrepreneurs perceive cover four basic areas – financial, career, personal brand (ego), and lifestyle. Financial risk is the obvious concern. They worry that the failure of a startup will lead them directly to bankruptcy court. Of course, there are many ways to protect yourself and your personal assets…keeping your business and personal finances separate is just plain common sense.

Career and personal brand risk also cause worry. People are afraid that if they go out on their own and fail, they will lose traction on their previous career path and become known as the one who failed. In fact, if you have built a solid reputation and good networking relationships, returning to the workforce won’t be all that difficult (except that once you work for yourself, it is very difficult to report to someone else!). And, those who consider you a failure because your startup floundered are the type of people who cut others down just to feel better about themselves. Most people, especially those close to you, will consider you a hero for even giving it a shot!

The ideas about lifestyle risk are generally pretty accurate. Startups take up all of your thoughts and most of your time. You will probably not see your family and friends very much during the early stages, and when you do, you will probably not be the greatest company (unless they want to talk about your business). You are likely to be a walking ball of stress until your venture gets off the ground, and there is a possibility that you and your family will be enjoying Ramen noodles for every meal for a few months. But all of those lifestyle changes pay off in spades once your company takes off. As our favorite quote states, “Entrepreneurs are people who are willing to live like most won’t in order to live like most can’t!”

There are a number of specific actions a first-time entrepreneur can take to mitigate these risks into something manageable, if not unnoticeable. First, take the time to truly plan your business idea. Dig into the details of every aspect of your venture, break them down and look for better, faster, and smarter ways to get the job done. Second, be realistic about the financial repercussions of going out on your own. If you start a business with no working capital, you are going to be broke during the early stages. If you commit all of your personal resources to the effort, you are putting them all at risk. If you don’t learn to manage finances, both personal and business, you will have a hard time finding success in either area.

Third and finally, learn all you can about the fundamentals of business and the specifics of what you want to do. Striking a balance between the actual operations and the business of running a business is a critical, but often overlooked, necessity to controlling risk and finding the success you seek..

Starting a Cake Business – Ideas to Help You Put Up Your Small Business

If you have passion in decorating cakes and in baking, starting a cake business can be a wise idea and enjoy making money out of your hobby. Indeed, it can be enjoyable and profitable as well if you make money out of what you love doing. If you have the skills and creativity that you need in creating beautiful and delicious cakes, here are some tips and ideas that will help you put up your own business with what you already have.

– Make a business plan. Of course, you can’t just put up a business without having a plan. You have to have a business goal and strategies that will help you achieve them. You have to lay out who you want to sell your cakes to, what types of cakes you want to specialize, and how you will be able to compete your designs to those already existing in the market. With a good business plan, you will be able to answer and deal with the many questions that you will encounter in starting a cake business.

– Assess the cost you need in starting a cake business. Cost is one of the important factors that you need to consider in starting up your business. List down and prioritize what you need to have to put up your business. You may need to hire additional personnel, or get some equipment to make your baking and decorating fast, and consider your marketing costs as well.

– Find your specialty. In the many cake and pasty business already existing, it is important that you can compete with them and you can establish your own name in the business. Try to make your designs unique and find your place in the business.

– Don’t forget that beautiful designs should come with a delicious taste. In the cake and pastry industry, you have to get your client’s taste and impress them with your beautiful design.

– Make you marketing plan. In starting a cake business and in any business, you have to come up with a good marketing plan so you will know how to market your product and reach out to your customers. In these times that competition in stiff in business, you have to be creative in marketing your product. Take advantage of the internet in marketing your business. You can even set up an online cake shop and you make deliveries. Take advantage of marketing your products online. People these times go to the internet to find information so take advantage of internet marketing tools.

Don’t forget to improve your skills and products. It is important to find ways to improve your products. You can personalize, be more creative with your designs and make your customers happy. It is in these simple things that you get customer satisfaction and repeat purchases, so make sure you can offer quality products and services for your clients. If you are mindful of the contentment and joy you can give your clients, then you definitely can keep a good part of the market.

Internet Home Business Ideas – 5 Important Steps Towards Starting Your Internet Businesses

You must consider the following as you start in search of internet home business ideas:

Having read articles and watched videos on online marketing, I’m sure you are excited about how the internet has become the fastest business model in history to make so many people millionaires.

When entering into the world of internet marketing you need to remember that you own a business. You must consider the following prior starting your internet business:

Finding Your Niche – Anyone on the internet for anytime, soon realize the importance of establishing a niche. A niche can be defined as a highly targeted segment of a market.

Let me give you an example: A person searches for weight loss on Google and it comes up with 75,200,000 references available. To help narrow down their search to his exact need he could type into the search engine the word “fat burning exercises” (34,100 references), “weight loss exercise programs”, or “weight loss supplements”…

For a person to find exactly what he wants he needs to type in his desire outcome.

So to find or develop a niche you need to target your audiences desired outcome as close as possible to the product or service that you offer.

Those new to internet marketing will find it important to start in a niche that they find most interesting. Look around your house and see what you have amassed over the years. Check out your bookshelf or even your magazine subscriptions and you will zero in on what interest to you. Budget – At all cost try not to go broke just to get rich quick. Make sure to keep track of all your expense and how much you earn each month. Before you begin any business make sure that you can survive financially for a period of 6 to 18 months. Most businesses take about 18 months to truly get off the ground and begin returning a profit from their investment of time and money.

Keeping track of your expenses will save you many headaches when it comes to tax time. If you have expenses related to your business you can use these to lower the amount of tax expenses that you must pay at the end of the year.

Taxes and Legal Protection – OK, I want to give you fair warning, I am not a legal or tax professional nor do I play one on television. Now that I have gotten that out the way let me tell you about what I do know.

PROTECT YOUR ASSESTS! Please heed this call to protect yourself. If you do not, you will find yourself in a world of trouble when some unscrupulous individual decides that he does not like the fair way in which you practice your business.

Make your lawyer and account your best friends when it comes to development and protection of your business. Believe me this will save you from many late nights of worry.

In fact my friend Jose the Economist, says “You should tip your lawyer and accountant before your waiter because they save you the most money.”

I agree your accountant will show you how to legally cut corners to keep your hard earned money and your attorney will show you how to protect it.

Developing your website(s) – I will keep this short and sweet because I will go into details about this important component of your internet business in a later article. When developing websites for your business you have several options.

Learn HTML – This is highly recommend because when you want to make a change you don’t have to wait for your webmaster to do so.

There are several options to choose from when it comes to developing your own sites.

Community college class on HTML

Search You Tube for lessons on HTML

Purchase a webpage creation program

Hire a webmaster – By searching websites like Elance.com, you can hire a webmaster for little out of pocket expense.

Marketing Plan – How would you like to approach your marketing? With so many choices you can’t go wrong? My recommendation is to pick one and get really good at it. The following list is by no means an exhaustive:

Affiliate Driven – Create a product that can be sold to others and allow them to also market the product giving them a commission for sells made.

Viral Marketing – You can create a product such as an ebook give it away to others to freely distribute. This particular ebook should have links driving traffic back to your website allowing for more opportunities to sell your product.

How to Generate Home Based Business Ideas – My BEST Tips For Anyone Starting a Business at Home

Want to know the absolute BEST way to generate ideas for your home based business? It always amazes me how many people STRUGGLE, and suffer through the process of picking what it is they want to do. Want to know the truth? There is only ONE sure fire way to pick a winning strategy that almost NEVER fails to work.

It’s NOT stuffing envelopes.
It’s NOT MLM or network marketing.
It’s NOT surveys.
It’s not buying and selling on Ebay.

The absolute BEST way to generate ideas for your home based business?

Identify what you are MOST passionate about first. And then come up with a cacophony of creative ways to parlay your passion…..into PROFIT. Period!

Let me share with you a little unfortunate secret that most “gurus” DON’T want you to know…….

90% of home based business people will fail. Most will SPEND far more money “learning” than they’ll ever make. The people who almost ALWAYS end up on top are those that LOVE what they do, and then generate an avalanche of ways to monetize that passion with marketing.

So the REAL secret is not necessarily PICKING the idea…..you already have that in your heart and soul. Each of us has things we are passionate about right now…and it could be anything from cooking, to gardening to martial arts to providing services like coaching and consulting like me.

It’s actually figuring out how to MONETIZE that idea, which is often far easier than you realize.

Ask yourself the following questions to start.

Who NEEDS what I do best?
Who BENEFITS most from my unique skill set?
And who has the EASIEST access to these people already?

Often, the FASTEST way to turn your simple idea into an amazing “overnight” success, is to simply find the people who already HAVE your customers in their sphere of influence and simply contact them. Do it on Twitter. Do it via email. Leave a comment on their blog.

The key is to simply take what you love, and identify the ways that are MOST amenable to make money from them. And then build relationships with people already DOING what you love…and make a WIN/WIN proposition that works for all! (it really IS that easy as well..:-)

Starting a Business by Getting Business Ideas

For most people, working for a company is just simply not enough. People are natural entrepreneurs who would want to start their own business and be their own boss. It is something that you, as a budding entrepreneur would really want.

Of course, to start a business, you will have to think of a business idea that will really sell. Lots of people have ideas on what kind of business they would want and a lot of them have made it into a reality. Now, the question is, what kind of business you would want to start?

Answering this question may seem easy, but a lot of people would have no idea at all on what kind of business they plan to put up or have second thoughts about it. This is why you need to assess everything before you start thinking of different businesses.

To get an idea on what kind of business you want and what kind of business that you will likely be good at is by first figuring out what your interests are. Your interests will play an important role when starting your own business. This is because you have an idea on how you want your business to be and will be much easier for you to make it grow.

For example, if you like cooking and think you have enough talent for it where people will really like what you cook, then why not start a business in the food industry? You can put up your own restaurant or you can even sell packaged food.

Now that you have an idea on what kind of business you like, the next thing you have to consider is the location on where you want your business to be. First of all, make sure that the product or services you plan on selling are in an area where it is needed. Besides, if you plan on selling winter coats, you don’t want to sell it in a tropical location where it doesn’t even snow. An ideal location would be in areas where it snows.

Another example is that if you plan on selling ice creams, you would want your business to be in hot locations, like in southern Florida beaches or maybe in California. Sell your ice cream where people would want to buy ice cream.

Thinking of the location on where you plan on putting up your business and relating it to the products and services you sell. If you do this, your business will really be a success.

The next and perhaps the most important thing you have to consider when starting a business or when thinking of a business idea is by determining if you have the money for it to make your business idea a reality. Getting the capital is probably one of the most common problems of people wanting to start their own business.

Try to consider a loan. There are financial institutions that can help you secure a loan. You can also try to convince a venture capitalist to provide you with the capital you need to start your business.

In every kind of business, there is a risk. If you don’t take this risk, you will end up not turning your business ideas into a reality. So, when starting a business, you need to consider all of the factors in order to make your business ideas turn into reality.