Create For Cash - Page 12 of 18 - Create Your Own Job

Do You Need a Business Plan?

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?

Learn to Love Cold Calling

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

Should You Pursue Small Business Venture Capital?

It’s rare that you’ll see me post an article from another website on this blog. But I read this and thought it was important. It’s also a topic I don’t know very much about. Small business venture capital. This is being reprinted with permission from Peter Ireland.

With my first business, HydroSport, I worked at least 2 jobs for about 10 years to fund it. If I had known then how much time and money it would take I don’t think I would have done it. It would have been way too overwhelming. But once I was about half way into it there was really no turning back. You get to a certain point where you just have too much time and money invested to give up.

Throughout the whole process I kept wishing a guardian angel investor would come along and save me. But that never happened. Now after reading this article by Peter Ireland, maybe I was on the right path after all and didn’t know it.

Small business venture capital

Are you really sure that you want to go this route? Most entrepreneurs who pursue small business venture capital don’t qualify. They merely end up wasting a lot of time and energy in a futile endeavor.

It gets worse, a venture capital firm will in most cases fire the founder and founding team within months of an early financing round. The Wall Street Journal pointed this out in a article by Barnaby Federer from September 30th, 2002:

“If you ask a VC what value they add, and you get
them after a few drinks, they’ll say, ‘We replace the CEO’ “,
he said. And that, he indicated, does not vary
with the economic climate. [Read more…]

Are You Creating Customers For Life?

customer service — creating customers for life

The other day I had an urgent swiggies order for a kid’s birthday party on the other side of the country. So I packaged up the box and headed down to the shipping company I normally use. You have to print everything up online and put the shipping label on the package before getting to the distribution station.

Creating customers for life

For some reason I couldn’t remember which log in and password I used, so I went down in person. The people there weren’t very helpful and just told me to go back home and call the company for help. So I did. And I waited and waited on the phone for what seemed like an eternity. When I finally got someone on the phone I was told to jump through some more hoops online, but it still didn’t work. I went back down and they basically told me there was nothing they could do.

So, I went to the competition. They both charge about the same thing, only the other company lets you walk in and just fill out the paperwork. You can do it online if you want to save time, but it’s not mandatory. By now you probably know which companies I’m talking about if you do a lot of shipping. [Read more…] about Are You Creating Customers For Life?

3 Reasons Competition is Good For Your Business

If you think having competition is like a thorn in your side maybe you’re not using it as “competitive advantage”. When there are plenty of jobs and business to go around we tend to get complacent and fail to do the things we need to do to be competitive ourselves. We tend to take customers and employers for granted. Customer service drops off and innovation goes by the wayside.

In today’s fast paced global economy you have to tread water faster and better just to keep up. It’s a lot more work than it used to be. But businesses, job seekers and individuals that work harder, try harder, act smarter, reinvent, and evolve will always land on their feet.

Here are 3 reasons competition is good for your business:

It Makes Your Customer Service Better – When you’re on the treadmill of a business boom there simply isn’t enough time in a day to stop and really evaluate every single customer. Things are moving fast and customers are lined up to buy your product or service. There are several yogurt stores in my neighborhood, but only one has lines around the block. It was the original, and somehow they were able to attract and retain those customers who have become so loyal they will wait in a long line rather than walk across the street for the same yogurt where there’s no line. Great customer service goes a long way and it’s free. Make customers fall in love with you and treat them right. Then when competition comes along they won’t even think of going anywhere else. [Read more…] about 3 Reasons Competition is Good For Your Business