What Should Be Included in a Business Plan

I have heard on several occasions people ask, Do you know of someone who can write me a business plan? This question mostly comes when they want to seek outside financing and the potential investor or financier has asked for it. They thus rush to an accountant, a lawyer or anybody who can write one. What many entrepreneurs and business owners fail to understand is that by delegating this task to some else they miss out on one of the most valuable lessons they can learn about running their business.

How to Motivate Employees to be More Productive

To any entrepreneur or organization, your employees are the most valuable assets and thus understanding how to motivate them is essential for your success. In this post I will highlight 10 ways to motivate your employees to be more productive.

Starting a Business-The Importance of Having a Business Plan

As an entrepreneur you need a plan to help you determine which direction to take to get your business up and running. The written business plan serves four important functions:

First, it serves as your ‘plan of attack’ to get the business started. You can set goals, estimate the start up costs and expenses and decide how much you will charge for your services or product.

Top 5 Marketing Ideas for Entrepreneurs

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to attract ideal customers to your business. At times getting the right mix of strategies and tactics can be challenging. To help your business be seen, heard and have the flood gates of customers opened, I have compiled 5 simple marketing ideas that will increase your visibility and attract you more clients. Here they are:

Problem Solving Technique for Entrepreneurs

Here is some good news. There is no problem on the face of this earth that does not have a solution. Every problem known to man has been solved a thousand and one times by a thousand and one others. Even though your problem may seem unique to you, others have experienced and solved it. There is a way out and you are smarter than you have ever imagined. Your brainpower and creative ability have the ability to produce a solution to any problem.

Concealed within each problem, is a hidden truth.

How to Deal With Your Competitors Professionally

In today’s competitive world, every business has competition, and if you do not have, one will show up as soon as you start to operate. For any small business owner, competition is a reality and you must thus be prepared to compete and win. To get a clear perspective of the game, let’s pose and ask; who is your competitor? Your competitors are companies that satisfy the same customer need as your company.

 Now, there are two schools of thought on how to deal with competition: one school says that you should strive to kill or eliminate competition and the other one acknowledges that competition is there to stay in a liberalized market; hence companies have to find strategies to deal with it. I am of the latter.

The first thing to do is to identify your competitors.

Tips to Clear Your Debt and Get Your Finances in Order

By Guest blogger Marlon Powell: Debt Consolidation Care

The country is in debt crisis and same is the situation with the households. Most of the people are facing problems in managing their debts. So, is there no relief from this debt problem of yours? You can get out of your debt problem only if you spend at least some time for formulating a proper budget in order to find out your expenses. Though you can consolidate debt in order to become free of the financial obligations, it is much better for you to consider your expenditures too.

Optimizing your finances

In order to optimize your finances you will have to:

t         Take a hard look at your finances – It is important for you to take a hard look at your finances so that you can get a clear idea about your standing. What your financial position is and whom and what do you owe. This will help you to take at least some action in order to bring back your finances on track

t         Get rid of unnecessary expenses – You will have to try and get rid of the unnecessary expenses so that you can lower your spending and save more. This will help you to pay off your debts with the money that you are able to save form your expenditures

Setting and Reaching Goals-Tips for Achieving Your Goals

As an entrepreneur, what do you expect to get out of owning your own business? Do you want to be rich and famous or do you simply want to bring in more money each month to pay extra bills? You must get specific and know exactly what it is you want .How do you find out?

Well you should know your purpose and what you are passionate about. Then write down your goals. As you identify these goals, ensure that they consist of the following six components to attain success:

Customer Service Tips-How to Handle Irate Customers

No matter how good your product or service is, inevitably some disgruntled customers will show up at your business or call to register their displeasure with the level of service received from the company. And some of the customers may be emotional or hysterical about the whole issue. The ability to communicate another point of view to someone who is highly emotional is a very important skill which can be learnt.

The following are 19 skills that work regardless of how emotional, hysterical or unreasonable the other person may be.

How to Attracts Customers; Create a Marketing Message That Resonates

Are you having problems attracting   and connecting with prospects and customers?  Do they seem to be uninterested in listening to you talk about your product or service?  You can change this by creating a message that resonates with the prospect. 

Your prospects are interested in what your product or service can do for them.

How to Start a Fitness Training Business

Jared Kasuku runs a fitness club called Ruflo Fitness Centre. He opened it in early 2005 and is enjoying great success. I have brought this success story to find out what he is doing right and learn what strategies are working for him. I asked Kasuku to join me on a case study interview  to find out how he has managed to successfully run his business.

In this interview you will learn…

·       The strategies he used to achieve competitive edge.

·       Top traits every successful entrepreneur must have.

·       How to start and run a successful fitness training business.

Here’s the download link for the Interview-

·       DownloadText Transcript [ 4 Pages - PDF ]

How to Plan Before Starting a Business

Many successful businesses have been started by entrepreneurs without prior planning, propelled only by the burning desire to own a business and sheer luck. These stories are however few and far between. And as these businesses grew, many of the entrepreneurs wished they had carefully evaluated their choices and the business potentials, because they made several mistakes along the way. So, plan, in the beginning stages of your business and also assess its success potential. You do not want to spend precious time and money on a business that is not feasible.

Top 2 Fantastic Ways to Make Money Online

 From my experience, there are two fantastic ways to make money online through your blog or website. They are, affiliate marketing and direct advertisers (sponsors).

Affiliate marketing is selling the services or products of another company or person in exchange for a commission for each sale. For instance, if you sell a service that costs $44 and has a 50% affiliate program you will receive $22 commission per sale.

Top 5 Ways to Control Money for a Small Business

Cash flow management is every entrepreneur’s nightmare. Even for the financially astute, it is one of the toughest challenges every small business owners faces. Most have gone through the school of hard knocks and experienced cash flow crunches.

A small business that fails to manage its cash flow well, places its long term success and continuance in grave, grave danger.

Below are five ways to control your cash:

Big 5 Tips on Starting a Business

The big 5 tips weekly post is as always full of advice and tips for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses owners. This week’s post has advice on what to do before you start a business. Check them out and then share with a friend.

1. Find out your talent or passion and then use it.
2. Research, research, research. Understand the business you want to go into inside out.
3. Start your business from home or part time and grow it slowly and methodically.

Top 10 Mistakes Every Entrepreneur Should Avoid

More often than not we hear a lot about how to be a successful entrepreneur and very little on what mistakes to avoid when starting in business.

Starting a business is always risky, and the chances of success are slim. Research on several entrepreneur businesses has revealed that, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first year and 95% fail within the first five years.

What contributes to the failure of 95% of small businesses and success of only 5% of the entrepreneurs? Chances are that the failure types are making one or all of the following mistakes. Read on to increase your odds of succeeding.

Big 5 Tips For Being a Successful Entrepreneur

The big 5 tips weekly post is as always full of advice and tips for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses owners. This weeks post has the big 5 aspects necessary to being a successful entrepreneur. Make these traits your own,then share them with a friend.

1. Tenacity: This is not giving up when everybody else says you should. It is keeping on your path, even if you feel in your heart you might get pushed back or your journey is going slower than you thought.

Business Quotes

Entrepreneurs are fascinated by quotes. They spark your creativity, motivate you to action and inspire you to greatness. The right words at the right time can be fundamental to your success. Below are this week’s quotes. Be inspired;

1.      “My will shall shape the future.  Whether I fail or succeed shall be no one’s doing but my own.  I am the force. I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice. My responsibility.  Win or lose; only I hold the key to my destiny.” - Elaine Maxwell, Author

2.      “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” William Butler Yeats, Poet

3.      “How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.” – Coco Chanel, Entrepreneur

4.      “The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.” – Ben Stein

5.      “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars.” –Les Brown

Strategic Plan: The Process of Developing and Implementing One for Your Business

Woody Allen says that “Relationships are like sharks; if they don’t move forward they die.” I would like to add one more category of things that also have to move forward: Businesses. To move forward, you have to know where you are going.

Successful entrepreneurs and business owners develop and implement a strategic plan to identify improvement opportunities, define profit improvement avenues, and set goals. Strategic planning has 5 parts namely: internal assessment of the business, external assessment of the business, management and leadership planning sessions, implementation of the plan and finally evaluation of how the plan is going. Let us then look into each of these phases.

Starting a Business-The Importance of Having a Strategic Plan

A recent survey found that companies with a written strategic plan had 100% higher profits than the other companies. The companies with strategic plan had annual revenue growth of 6.2% as opposed to 3.8% of the other companies. But what is a strategic plan and why should you as an entrepreneur have it.

Strategic planning is the process of deciding where you want to go and how you are going to get there. It is not an operating plan or your next year’s budget.

Entrepreneur: 5 Common Pitfalls to Avoid to Grow a Business

You have all heard or seen entrepreneurs whose great idea has worked and the business has grown from leaps to bounds, the entrepreneur and the management team have worked very hard and opened 2 to 3 more branches, then suddenly the business stagnates or it starts declining. You then wonder, what went wrong.

Business Quotes

Entrepreneurs are fascinated by quotes. They spark your creativity, motivate you to action and inspire you to greatness. The right words at the right time can be fundamental to your success. Below are this week’s quotes. Be inspired;

1.      “Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.” - William M. Winans, Clergyman

2.      “It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.” – Havelock Ellis, Physician and Author

3.      “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc, Entrepreneur

4.      “Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes; work never begun.” – Christina Rossetti, Author

5.      “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poet

Vision: How to Develop a Vision for Your Business

Entrepreneurs and business managers like you can benefit from the realization that having a vision can provide the required competitive edge to your company strategy and enable you to be successful and profitable.

A vision can serve you in carrying out your leadership role, unifying your employee’s efforts towards the common goal and building loyalty among staff.

Thus far, it is important to have a clear vision which will guide decision making and goal setting.

But, how to you develop that clear and shared vision?

Vision: Importance of Vision Statement in a Business

The greatest responsibility for the entrepreneur or business leader is to midwife a clear and shared vision for the company and to get commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.

Research has shown that businesses that perform well over a long period had their leaders instill a compelling vision into the company while the company was relatively small.

So, why is a vision important to business?

The corporate vision plays four very important roles:

Big 5 Work Habit Tips for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses

The big 5 tips weekly post is as always full of advice and tips for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses owners.Check them out ,then share with a friend.

1. Have self drive. Get right on the task. Avoid procrastination and short cuts.
2. Always tell the truth and particularly the most difficult to tell and without exceptions.
3. Use available resources first to solve problems   before seeking additional resources or asking for assistance from other sources.
4. Work at a steady pace that’s faster than required for the task and faster than anyone else.
5. Think through actions before taking them and consider the consequences.

If you have additional work habit for entrepreneurs and small businesses, share them in the comments section below.

Customer Care: Handling Customer Complaints

As small businesses begin to realize rapid growth and expansion, you may have realized that there is also an increase in the number of complaints from the Clients and an indifferent attitude of the employees towards customers, which in the long run, affects the business and the reputation of the company. 

The most common complaints from the Clients are usually:-- 

Business Quotes

Entrepreneurs are fascinated by quotes. They spark your creativity, motivate you to action and inspire you to greatness. The right words at the right time can be fundamental to your success. Below are this week’s quotes. Be inspired;

1.      “Some people have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.” Willis R. Whitney, American Chemist

2.      “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” - Thomas Alva Edison, Inventor and Entrepreneur

3.      “Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.” William Menninger, Entrepreneur

4.      “With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.” - Keshavan Nair, Author – Gandhi Biographer

5.      “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” - Anatole France, Poet

How to Sell To People

An entrepreneur’s job is to sell all the time. You have to sell your idea(s), sell your image and sell your vision to your employees, your customers, the public, the bankers and the media.

Selling is not about arm twisting or swindling, it’s about marketing your ideas, your product and your business constantly. Selling is giving your stakeholders (customers, employees, public, bankers, media) what they want in a way that works for you and them.

There is no one way of doing it, though it has to be hard core, purposeful, directed and goal achieving selling. Soft fuzzy selling will not work.

Following is a compilation of how to sell to people.

Big 5 Tips to Run Productive Meetings for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses

The big 5 tips weekly post is as always full of advice and tips for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses owners.Check them out ,then share with a friend.

1.      Have fewer meetings. Get together for very important reasons only: to identify a problem, solve a problem or dispense information to a group. Do away with a meeting if the only reason to have it is that it’s a Monday morning, unless it’s an informal gathering to simply stay in touch with the staff.

2.      Prepare so you can focus. Use an agenda as the tool to keep focused on the issues to be dealt with. Send out an agenda in advance if possible.

3.       Keep the number of people at the meeting as small as possible while still including everyone who needs to be there. A meeting becomes more complex with more people.

4.       Decide on who will run the meeting in advance and how others will get feedback from the meeting.

5.      Physically set up the meeting. Arrange the configuration of the room, where various people should sit to enhance the meeting objective. To make the meeting more effective use the board room or a neural place. 

Successful Meetings: How to Plan, Prepare, and Execute Top-Notch Business Meetings 

If you have additional tips on how to run productive meetings, share them in the comments section below.

Business Quotes

Entrepreneurs are fascinated by quotes. They spark your creativity, motivate you to action and inspire you to greatness. The right words at the right time can be fundamental to your success. Below are this week’s quotes. Be inspired;

1.      “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” - Henry Ford, Entrepreneur

2.      “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible — and achieve it, generation after generation.” - Pearl S. Buck, Author

3.      “In life and business, there are two cardinal sins: The first is to act without thought, and the second is to not act at all.” – Carl Icahn, Investor and Entrepreneur

4.      “Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Alva Edison, Inventor and Entrepreneur

5.      “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32^nd American President

Building Your Network Marketing Business