So You Want Your Own Business!
There are many reasons for wanting to start your own business, and most of us get to this point. Which one of the following applies to you?
• Freedom from daily routine.
• Doing what I want when I want.
• Improve my living standard.
• I want creative freedom.
• I want to fully use my skills, knowledge and education.
• I have a product/idea/service that people need.
• I’ll have more time with the family.
• I won’t have a dress code.
• There are good tax breaks for business owners.
• I’m a Type B person and work best alone.
• I want to be my own boss.
• I want to make the decisions.
Now granted, every one of the above is a good reason for wanting your own business. The rub is, that not many people think the process through – step by step. There are 7 phases to business planning. They are:
1. Investigation Phase
2. Planning Phase
3. Start-up Phase
4. Operating/Monitoring Phase
5. Problem/Challenge resolution Phases
6. Renewal/Expansion Phase
7. Selling, Transferring, Retirement Phase
We’ll cover all of the above in my next few columns as a “Business Basics” refresher, but for today let’s take number one.
In the Investigation Phase you take a look at yourself and also your business options. There are careers that are suited to personality types, so the first thing you must discern is “Which personality type am I?”
Duty Fulfillers
This is an introverted personality who is serious, quiet, thorough, orderly, matter-of-fact, logical, realistic, and dependable. They take responsibility, are well organized, know what should be accomplished and work steadily toward it disregarding distractions. They are careful calculators, and 20% of this group become accountants.
The Mechanics
These are also introverts and are cool onlookers. They are quiet, reserved, observing, and analyzing life with a detached curiosity and have unexpected flashes of original humor. They’re usually interested in cause and effect, how and why mechanical things work, and in organizing facts using logical principles. They usually are craftsmen, mechanics, or handymen with about 10% becoming farmers.
The Doers
These people are extraverts who are good at on-the-spot problem solving, don’t worry, enjoy whatever comes along, are adaptable, tolerant, and generally conservative in values. They tend to like mechanical things and sports, and dislike long explanations. They are best with “real” things that can be worked, handled, taken apart, or put together. About 10% of this type go into marketing or become Impresarios.
The Executives
These are another extravert group and are hearty, frank, decisive, leaders in activities and usually good in anything that requires reasoning and intelligent talk, such as public speaking. They’re usually well informed and enjoy adding to their fund of knowledge. They may sometimes appear more positive and confident than their experience in an area warrants. They’re sometimes called “judgers” and “thinkers” and 21% of this group become legal administrators.
To go into each personality type would be far too complicated, but to give you an idea of the roles that personality types could fall into look at the following list. Beside the categories we covered in depth here are some simply broken down into Introvert or Extravert Personality.
Introverts choose careers that satisfy being:
• Nurturers
• Guardians
• Artists
• Scientists
• Protectors
• Idealists
Extraverts are usually:
• Performers
• Visionaries
• The Inspirers
• Givers
• Caregivers
The second part of the Investigating Phase is looking at your business options. When choosing the business you want to start consider the following:
• Do you like to work with your hands or brain, or both?
• Does working indoors or outdoors matter?
• Are you good at math, writing, puzzles, blueprints, installing things or fixing things?
• What interests you? What are your hobbies?
• Do you like to work alone or as part of a team?
• Do you like to plan things, or go to events?
• Do you like machines, computers?
• Do you like to drive or operate equipment?
• Do you like to travel, collect/display things, give/attend shows, or take pictures?
• Are you small, large, strong?
Make a list of your likes and dislikes. Keep a diary of things you do that relate to business and rate each entry from 1 to 5 based on your interest. Then prepare a list of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and concerns. After doing all that, you should have a list of candidate businesses that are right for you. Then you can make a list of the “candidate businesses” and rate them from 1 to 5 based on your own chosen criteria.
Some criteria could be is it feasible, low in cost to establish, meets my objectives, will make money, there is a “niche” market of existing customers, or it will produce residual income to name just a few.
By the time you’ve accomplished all that, you should seriously consider visiting the local chapter of S.C.O.R.E. or your own mentor to use as a sounding board for your plan. Next week, if I haven’t dissuaded you so far, we’ll cover the Planning Phase.
Make Money Working From The Comfort Of Your Own Home!
How many times have you heard that phrase, pitch, advertisement, or
whatever? Lots, I’m sure. It is used so much because marketers know that
staying home and making money is the fondest dream of millions of people.
And why not? Did you know that the majority of fatal heart attacks happen
at 9 a.m. Monday morning? It’s true. It seems a lot of people would
rather die than get back to the old grind after a weekend of freedom.
So when someone offers an opportunity or plan for you to take your job and
shove it, yet still make enough money to live and pay all your bills, it
sounds blissfully irresistible.
Of course, bliss and reality are always two different things. Is it
really possible to run a business from your own home that is more than a
hobby or source of part-time income? Can you get rich working out of your
own home? Can you really trade your cubical and necktie for blue jeans and
the comfort of your own den?
Well, for your information, home-based businesses are one of the fastest
growing kinds of enterprises in America today. As this is being written,
some 40 million Americans are doing at least some form of work out of their
homes, and the numbers are rising rapidly. According to the U.S.
Department of Labor, as many as 70 million people will be working out of
their homes by the year 2005. Government studies have indicated that as
much as 75% of all work done in this country could eventually be moved
home.
The overwhelming majority of home workers, however, are not exactly getting
rich. The average work-at-home American earns less than $15,000 per year.
That may not be bad as a supplement to a spouse’s full-time income, but
let’s face it, fifteen grand in and of itself is not much better than poverty.
As master marketer and author Dr. Jeffrey Lant said: “Frankly, I never saw
any benefit to staying home and being poor.”
Lant, without so much as a business card, became a work-at-home
millionaire, and is a perfect example of what truly can be achieved if you
are serious about chucking your day job, staying home, and not settling for
peanuts in exchange for your freedom. You can have it all — you can stay
home and make as much — and more — money than your current job provides
you.
In this report, we are going to outline and discuss five key rules on how
to work at home and make big bucks, no matter where you live. After these
five rules, we’ll talk about the most important aspect of any business,
whether it be home-based or a giant factory — cash flow. Starting your
own business out of your home is all about attitude and inspiration, but
all the attitude in the world won’t help you without money!
1. It Takes Commitment
Is it any secret in America that most people detest their jobs? Study
after study proves that most people simply dread going to work Monday
morning, and they live for the freedom of the weekend. But even that
freedom is not pure because we know that it is only temporary. It’s hard
to enjoy a Sunday evening when the Monday morning alarm clock is just a few
hours away.
It makes sense that people hate their jobs. Everyday, there is a lot of
butt kissing that needs to be done. There are endless meetings which
usually accomplish nothing. There are pointless interruptions, a lot of
drifting this way and that, and lot of idiot supervisors who do nothing but
waste your time and then dog you for not accomplishing your share of work.
There are co-workers you hate, and who would stab you in the back in a
minute if it meant a raise for them instead of you.
When you work for someone else, you live a regimented life. Your body may
not want to get up at 7 a.m., but you have to be at work by 8 a.m. so you
lurch out of bed with a head full of sleep.
People who choose to work at home are doing more than just escaping the
yoke of their master; they have made a deep, firm, life-altering decision
which says that health, happiness and prosperity depend vitally on the
freedom to work for ourselves, and in doing so in the comfort of the home.
We want to really emphasize that fact that to be successful in a
work-at-home situation, you have to be nothing less than a fanatic; a
zealot, who is utterly committed to making work-at-home not only a
successful venture, but a profound commitment for life. You must be
convinced that a return to an outside office job would be the equivalent of
a spiritual death sentence.
Many people hate their office jobs, but they have made an inner compromise
with themselves. They have convinced themselves that their job is “not so
bad,” pays the bills, and that they can stick out because they have to.
If you want to be truly successful at quitting your day job, there cannot
be any room for such compromises in your soul. You have to take the
attitude that to work any longer at your hateful job is akin to fouling
your inner being with a spiritual cancer the will sicken and kill you.
2. Eliminating the Home-Office Mentality
To move our work home, however, does not mean we eliminate every single
thing about the traditional American office. Rather, we should select what
is useful and what is not.
It’s a mistake to quit your job and go home with a “home-office” mentality.
By this we mean thinking small, and believing that you will automatically
sacrifice a decent income in exchange for your freedom. Please! Do not
think small!
To quote Jeffrey Lant again: “Too many home-based practitioners fail to
understand the benefits that accrue because of the professional style they
have selected. They focus on the “home” part of the business rather than
the “business” portion, and as a result are doomed to small incomes.”
Working at home provides many benefits. We can save a lot of time because
we don’t need to commute and we have more control over our schedule. We
can save a lot of costs because we don’t have the overhead requirements of
larger businesses. We can cut our stress — and so have more energy –
because we avoid many of the characteristic problems of life in the late
20th-Century office. We must work these advantages to our profit.
3. Your International Headquarters
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that if you sit at home alone at
your empty kitchen table, eventually, the “whole world will come to you.”
Well, today you don’t need the great mind of a philosopher to make the
entire world come into your living room. What you need is a phone jack.
We live in a unique time in history. Satellites, fiber optics, the
integrated circuit and other communications miracles means that you can be
just about anywhere in the developed world and establish communication with
anyone.
The telephone, the fax machine, the computer, the modem — all of these are
not only affordable by any middle-class citizen; they are the key to
eliminating your need to drive a hectic freeway everyday to get to a place
of business outside your home.
With these devices at our disposal, we should allow ourselves to “think
globally.” Too often, home-based businesses focus on the narrowest market,
the neighborhood, the county, the city or state. This is fine if you are
providing a local service and are content with a certain moderate level of
income. But if you want the big bucks, you should not think small. Also,
you should not believe that, just because you are home-based, you cannot
compete with the big guys.
The purpose of any business is to seek assess and seek out every possible
market for its products and services, to ascertain whether these markets
have the ability to buy these products/services, to determine whether there
is sufficient profit in these markets to warrant approaching them, and,
once positive assessment has been made, to launch a sustained marketing
campaign that gets a significant percentage of this market to purchase the
product or service in question.
Your home telecommunications machines will not only enable you to do this,
but they can also help you overwhelm larger, more cumbersome traditional
businesses that are your competition.
As a home-based entrepreneur, you will not have all of the disadvantages of
your more traditional competitors: no office rent, equipment or expense;
no employees to pay salaries and fringe benefits for; no time wasted on
meetings, employee problems, paid sick leave, etc.
All the money your competitors spend on heating the office and buying
furniture could better be spent on the actual marketing itself.
As a home-based business, you will be already positioned where the
traditional business is currently struggling to move: toward the lowest
possible overhead and the greatest possible concentration of dollars on
products/service development and product/service marketing.
So, a home-based business takes full advantage of three major goals of
modern business success:
(1) Vastly reduced overhead
(2) Easy access to a global market
(3) Full advantage of telecommunications.
To not have the basic telecommunications toys — computer, modem, fax, and
telephones is impossibly stupid. Still, even in this day and age, many of
people strongly resist the one element that is undoubtedly the heart and
brain of any successful home business — the computer. The computer is so
important in fact, we have made it a category all itself.
And remember, learning to use a modern computer is easier than learning to
drive a car, so you have no excuse not to plunge forward.
4. The Computer
You should pay close attention to what computers can do for you in your
plans to escape your job and make your work-at-home dreams come true.
People who want to run a home business usually have a very small staff — in
fact, a staff of one — yourself! The rest of your needs are handled by
independent contractors, depending on the kind of business you are in and
the services you need.
To run a serious, truly global home business, a computer is as necessary as
oxygen is to life on earth. Those who try to fool themselves into thinking
they will ever make a serious go of their home-based business without a
computer are sadly mistaken.
Computers give you two primary advantages:
(1) They enable you to store large amounts of data and to sort by data
field so that you can easily get the information you need.
(2) They enable you to develop a pattern document for every situation
you’ll ever be in in your business. To run a home-based business
successfully, you must anticipate just what situation will emerge and
prepare accordingly.
A business is based on a characteristic series of situations and a
characteristic set of things that happen — or that do not happen. You
must be prepared with the proper document for each situation. Once you
have established all the protocols, and have experienced all the situations
associated with your kind of business, the time will come when running your
business is, in large part, a repetition of certain key tasks. Computers
are all about handling repetition swiftly and efficiently.
But the computer is much more. Today, by connecting a computer to the
phone line with a modem, your machine becomes more than a data storage
system and repetitive task handler. It becomes a multi-task, multi-level
communications processing center that connects you to the globe.
Such things as e-mail, on-line services, the Internet, the Web and more
can’t help but revolutionize the way business is done. If you do not
become a part of it today, you certainly are going to suffer for it greatly
in the near future.
If there is an effective way to market products on the Internet or any
other on-line venue, no one has truly discovered it yet. The only people
making money on Internet marketing are the people who are selling the
concept of doing it. If you have a product or a service and expect to
reach millions of buyers through computer screens, you are sadly mistaken.
The Internet is definitely where a lot of innovative things are happening.
It’s a great place to exchange ideas, find out what hot, what’s not, and
stay on the cutting edge whatever your particular business is.
5. Your Business Hours
If you’ve been paying attention to the first four points, you’re well on
your way to becoming a successful home-based business owner. Now we don’t
want you to blow it by thinking you can keep banker’s hours.
The global market is a 24-hour per day market, and a 365-day per year
market. Let the others sleep late on Saturdays and take Sundays off.
Those times could be your day to move and corner loads of customers that
the others miss.
You should get up earlier and quit work later. You should be open for
business on holidays and be available 24-hours a day either personally or
through your answering service.
“But wait a minute!” you might be thinking at this point! “I thought that
working at home was all about freedom and an end to drudgery. This sounds
like nothing but endless work!”
Well, here’s the thing. For most of you who quit your regular jobs to go
to work for yourself, you’ll discover something magical. You’ll discover
that when you are working for yourself, when you are building your own
business, a lot of what you does not seem like work at all.
The great writer Jane Roberts said, “Inspiration is its own motivator.”
Running your own business is all about being inspired 24-hours-a-day. When
you stop selling your body and soul to some company or corporation and
start giving your energy to yourself, work has a way of turning into
inspiration and play.
The perfect work for you is that which you don’t think of as work, yet
doing it makes money and provides you with the bread and shelter of life.
You’ll see what it’s like if you make a true commitment to being self
employed, put all your energy into it, and stick with it for the long run.
Your 5 minutes daily program to Stress management
We all have this favorite expression when it comes to being stressed out, and I wouldn’t bother naming all of them since it may also vary in different languages. But when it comes down to it, I think that it is how we work or even relax, for that matter that triggers stress. Ever been stressed even when you’re well relaxed and bored? I know I have.
Since Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. is unavoidable in life, it is important to find ways to decrease and prevent stressful incidents and decrease negative reactions to stress. Here are some of the things that can be done by just remembering it, since life is basically a routine to follow like brushing your teeth or eating breakfast. You can do a few of them in a longer span of time, but as they say– every minute counts.
Managing time
Time management skills can allow you more time with your family and friends and possibly increase your performance and productivity. This will help reduce your stress.
To improve your time management:
· Save time by focusing and concentrating, delegating, and scheduling time for yourself.
· Keep a record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure time.
· Prioritize your time by rating tasks by importance and urgency. Redirect your time to those activities that are important and meaningful to you.
· Manage your commitments by not over- or undercommitting. Don’t commit to what is not important to you.
· Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines.
· Examine your beliefs to reduce conflict between what you believe and what your life is like.
Build healthy coping strategies
It is important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording the stressful event, your reaction, and how you cope in a stress journal. With this information, you can work to change unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones-those that help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.
Lifestyle
Some behaviors and lifestyle choices affect your stress level. They may not cause stress directly, but they can interfere with the ways your body seeks relief from stress. Try to:
· Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations.
· Have a sense of purpose in life.
· Get enough sleep, since your body recovers from the stresses of the day while you are sleeping.
· Eat a balanced diet for a nutritional defense against stress.
· Get moderate exercise throughout the week.
· Limit your consumption of alcohol.
· Don’t smoke.
Social support
Social support is a major factor in how we experience stress. Social support is the positive support you receive from family, friends, and the community. It is the knowledge that you are cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued. More and more research indicates a strong relationship between social support and better mental and physical health.
Changing thinking
When an event triggers negative thoughts, you may experience fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. These emotions trigger the body’s stress, just as an actual threat does. Dealing with your negative thoughts and how you see things can help reduce stress.
· Thought-stopping helps you stop a negative thought to help eliminate stress.
· Disproving irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating the negative thought, anticipating the worst, and interpreting an event incorrectly.
· Problem solving helps you identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it.
· Changing your communication style helps you communicate in a way that makes your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, or intimidated. This reduces the stress that comes from poor communication. Use the assertiveness ladder to improve your communication style.
Even writers like me can get stressed even though we’re just using our hands to do the talking, but having to sit for 7 or 8 hours is already stressful enough and have our own way to relieve stress. Whether you’re the mail guy, the CEO, or probably the average working parent, stress is one unwanted visitor you would love to boot out of your homes, especially your life.