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.