Small business Archives - Page 3 of 3

I’ve been having this discussion on Linked In about whether a start up company needs a business plan or not. If you ask any Ivy League MBA you will probably hear that you absolutely do need one. And you need to spend thousands of dollars to have someone smarter than you put one together.

Do you need a business plan?

But if you ask my friend Oliver who owns a print shop or the dog groomers around the corner or my acupuncturist, they would tell you they never had one. I’ve run 3 businesses and have never written a formal business plan. One of them is an international manufacturing company and I’ve never had a business plan for it. Once I had already been in business for years I was planning to expand and needed to raise money. That’s the only time I have put anything down on paper, but it still wasn’t a business plan, more like a presentation with corporate bios and projections of how many would be sold, etc.

I took that presentation out of the closet and read through it. 90% of what was in it wasn’t even true anymore. None of my employees are with me anymore because of the downturn in the economy. So, what I thought my business was going to be, which was sales reps and full time employees, wasn’t even close to what I ended up with. Now I have distributors who are independent and simply buy the product from me and get marketing and PR support. [Read more…] about Do You Need a Business Plan?

For all those people that would rather get their teeth drilled than make cold calls, listen up. I don’t know many people who enjoy making cold calls. But if you want your business to be successful you will have to get used to the fact that you are going to have to do it. You’ll have to learn to love cold calling.

I know what you’re thinking, “I’ll just hire someone to do that”. Well, you could do that, but you also need to learn how to do it yourself. Nobody can sell your company, products, or services, like you.

Instead of dreading it, learn to love it. “No way!” you’re saying. “I will never learn to love cold calling”. It is especially hard when the economy is down. People are less likely to want to talk to you, and definitely not in the mood to be spending money. But that is why you need to be doing it now. If you can succeed at cold calling when things are tough it will only get easier. [Read more…] about Learn to Love Cold Calling