Home Wealth Project
Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
Before You Quit Your Day Job: Read Startup From the Ground Up
Mar 19th
It’s been a long time since we’ve reviewed a book on becoming a small business owner or entrepreneur. So, when I received Startup From the Ground Up from a publicist, I thought it was time to give it a read and see what the most current advice is about getting out on your own.
About the Author
Cynthia Kocialski (@ckocialski) has been involved in 25 startups and writes the Start-Up Entrepreneurs’ Blog. All of the startups she’s been involved in have been acquired for nearly $20 billion. She’s also had a variety of executive positions in technical companies and served as a consultant. So she’s been on just about every side of the entrepreneur’s journey.
Kocialski wrote her own foreword and in it describes the book as being about making the entrepreneurial dream a reality. It will show you how to go from an idea to a launch. I think the benefit this book promises to today’s entrepreneur is the ability to learn from another’s experience and hopefully not make the same mistakes.
Startup From the Ground Up Is Ideal for Tech Startups That Need Investors
When I read the author’s background and the first few chapters of this book, I could see that it was really targeted to people who have a tech product and may be interested in getting investors.
This book covers a lot of topics very quickly and with broad brush strokes. It’s the book you would run out and get right after you and your tech buddies finished hashing out a plan for taking over the world with the next revolutionary tech product. Before you quit your day job, take the time to quickly go through this book, and when you find yourself flinching at any of the chapters, bookmark that one for further review.
There are quite a few chapters dedicated to marketing and sales topics. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a technical person, covering what they think might be important and what’s actually important from the customer’s or investor’s perspective.
How to Read This Book
I’m not sure if the book I received from the publicist was a review copy or a final copy. I’m mentioning this because I have to admit I was a bit overwhelmed when I looked at the table of contents. It looked like there were more than 30 chapters.
I thought they might be in sections because there were three or four chapters in a row that seemed to be on a similar topic, but I couldn’t tell what the sections were until I started reading. So I’m going to give you the sections here because they aren’t easy to spot in the table of contents without going through the book:
- Introduction
- Product and Business Concept
- Product
- Customer Understanding
- Market Opportunity
- The Team
- Product Development
- Some Marketing Implementation Issues
- Understanding Sales
- Funding
- Business Model and Planning
This is a book you would probably want to read from cover to cover the first time around. This book is a terrific litmus test to see if going into “startup mode” really what you want to do.
If you’ve gone through this book and are still fired up about your idea, go back to the sections that made you wince and get some professional advice as to how to handle that.
Startup From the Ground Up Will Give Budding Entrepreneurs the Lingo and a Road Map
Another benefit of Startup From the Ground Up is that it gives aspiring entrepreneurs the framework and phrases that they will need to use to get help in areas where they feel less comfortable.
Startup From the Ground Up is a realistic, real-life book about taking your idea out of your head and into the marketplace. If you’ve been sitting in a cubicle mulling over the next “Google-sized” idea, then this book is a great first step.
Before You Quit Your Day Job: Read Startup From the Ground Up
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
6 Steps to Take before Starting a Business
Feb 23rd
This is a guest post by Carol Roth.
Are you tired of working for someone else? Do you think starting your own business could get you off the unemployment line? Think again. The failure rate for new businesses within the first 5 years is as high as 90 percent.
Before you decide to join the ranks of America’s self-employed, find out if business ownership is right for you. Try these 6 steps.
Know your motives.
Are you bored, wanting to be free of a boss, or eager to jump on the bandwagon of a hot technology? These are not valid reasons to start a business. But if you’re focused on solving a customer problem, believe you can do better than anyone else, and are dying to work long hours, wear many hats, and balance responsibilities, you have the right start-up mindset.
Meet the people.
If you equate business ownership with solitude and freedom from annoying coworkers or managers, you’re in for a surprise. Entrepreneurs spend most of their time dealing with people — investors, professionals such as lawyers and accountants, suppliers, and customers.
Prepare yourself.
Ever managed employees and vendors? Do you know your industry inside and out, including aspects such as accounting and marketing? If you don’t have all the entrepreneurial skills you need, acquire them before starting your business. Spend time working in a similar company, shadow a business in your industry, or accept an internship.
Check your checkbook.
Be honest about your relationship with money. Do you have money to invest? Are you able to lose it all? Will you rely on others? Do you avoid financial risk at all costs? Are you “good” with money? How you handle money now will influence the type of financial manager you’ll be.
Know your competition.
Is your market saturated with successful businesses? Is your industry littered with bad businesses? Is anyone doing what you want to do? If not, why not? To brand your business and woo investors, you’ll need to understand why and how you can outshine competitors.
Test your scalability.
Successful businesses rely on automation and delegation. Will you be able to teach other employees to do your work? If your business relies on your brain and skills alone, you might have a successful job, but not a successful business.
Official bio: A popular media personality on Fox News, MSNBC, and WGN-TV Chicago, among others, Carol Roth has an award-winning blog at www.CarolRoth.com. Her new book is The Entrepreneur Equation: Evaluating the Realities, Risks, and Rewards of Having Your Own Business (BenBella Books, March 2011).
View full post on Business Pundit
Ask Yourself These Questions Before Going for Funding
Dec 14th
Need extra cash to move your business forward? Maybe you want to hire new people, buy a building, expand your inventory, or take your business to the next level, whatever that may be. Word on the street is that banks have money to lend.
Here are five questions you should consider before you begin the funding process:
1. How much is my business worth, today?
This is crucial for banks and investors. Is your company/business worth enough to cover the investment? Hiring new workers is a key motivation in today’s high market of unemployment. Even with an investment or a loan, hiring new workers means having a sustainable business model that is going to last more than another year or two. Those new workers want some long-term security, as do your investors.
2. What is the money really for?
If you tell your banker that you need to hire new workers, you better be prepared to support that statement. How many new workers? What will they do? What are the working conditions? Do you have people in mind, already? Being able to describe the roles you need to fill and how much they need to be paid, along the ability to say, “I have four people I’ve been working with on a contract basis who are ready to be full-time employees,” goes a long way to building credibility.
3. Can’t you fund your expansion yourself?
For many of us, that’s a no-brainer. If you can help it, don’t take on an interest-bearing loan or become indebted to investors. The problem is that while many businesses today are doing well enough to limp along, they’re not well enough to hire new people or mortgage a bigger building. Without additional workers or extra space, these companies will not be able to grow.
4. What is your projected revenue for the next five years?
Some folks predict five years out, while some are only looking three years. Regardless of how long you’re willing to predict forward, you still need to show a revenue line that covers the growth and the investment. No one is going to give you funds if you’re merely trying to stay alive. You must show the opportunity for growth.
5. Do I have a strong executive team to manage growth?
Existing companies looking for growth funds need to show the ability to manage a solid executive team and the growth that follows. You can’t expect a bank or other investor to approve new cashflow if Cheryl from marketing hasn’t produced anything for the company except lunch expenses, or if Patrick has hired two mediocre sales people for his team and failed to meet quarterly goals, or if the head of Business Development needs some new development. If you’re doing all the work yourself despite having an executive team, you’re essentially asking someone to invest in you. And, seriously, how much are you really worth?
There are more questions to ask than just these five. In an economy that is struggling to bring back the good old days, establishments in the business of investing funds to small business owners are only doing so when the small business owner can justify those funds and show a profitable return.
If you think it’s personal, you’re right. It is personal — personal enough to ask you a lot of questions about prior year’s income, to the point of asking why you purchased a new car last year. Really, did you need a new car? It can get personal enough to ask why you haven’t used the $25,000 you have in savings, which they know you have because you gave them permission to review your finances. It’s even personal enough to include questions about why you haven’t tapped into family and friends first.
The act of supporting businesses with added funds, whether from family and friends, a bank or a VC, involves pretending you can guarantee a return on the investment. Everyone knows there is no guarantee.
“How much of your own money are you going to put in?” a banker asked a friend of mine looking for funding to expand her two year old business.
“If I had my own money,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here asking you for yours.”
She didn’t get the loan. Will you?
Editor’s Note: This article was previously published at OPENForum.com under the title: “5 Questions to Ask Before Going for Funding.” It is republished here with permission.
Ask Yourself These Questions Before Going for Funding
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Marketing Without Strategy is the Noise Before Failure
Nov 29th
Marketing Without Strategy is the Noise Before Failure
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Image: kainet via Flickr
Anyone that’s heard me speak or read my books knows that I believe marketing strategy is far more important to the small business than marketing tactics.
Any yet, the tactical idea of the week gets most of the mind share of the business owner.
Strategy and tactics must go hand in hand in order for a business to achieve a measure of true momentum, but an effective strategy must be in place before any set of tactics make sense.
This Sun Tzu quote, borrowed from the Art of War and adapted for the title of this post, pretty much sums up my feeling on the subject – “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
The reason strategy gets mostly lip service when it comes to marketing planning is because most people misunderstand what a marketing strategy really is.
So, let me start with what it’s not. Strategy is not a wish list, set of goals, mission statement, or litany of objectives.
How not what
A marketing strategy is a clear explanation of how you’re going to get there, not where or what there is. An effective marketing strategy is a concise explanation of your stated plan of execution to reach your objectives
To become the market leader is not a strategy – it’s an objective. To serve our customers with honor and dignity is not a strategy – it’s mission. To double the number of new customers is not a strategy – it’s a goal.
Goals and missions and objectives are nice, but how you plan to achieve them – otherwise known as strategy paired with a logical set of tactics – is the surest route to victory.
To become a market leader you may find that an effective strategy is to carve out one very narrow market niche and dominate it. To serve your customers with honor and dignity you may find that an effective marketing strategy starts somewhere in your hiring process. To double the number of new customers you may find that an effective marketing strategy is to build a formal network of strategic referral partners.
Now each of these strategies will have a corresponding list of tactics and action steps, but the action plans and campaigns will all have your stated strategy as a filter for decision making and planning.
After working with thousands of small business owners I’ve developed a bit of a 3-step process for developing a marketing strategy. I must warn you though that market conditions, competitive environments and trending opportunities all play wild card roles in the process.
A company considering a marketing strategy in a mature market with entrenched players will have a much different view of things than a company trying to bring a new technology to a market with no proven purchase habit.
I wrote a post titled 5 Attributes of a Sure Fire Start-up that might shed more light on the start-up view.
When developing a marketing strategy for your business the following steps come into play.
Who matters
For any strategy and corresponding set of tactics to work they must appeal to someone. The first element, and in some cases the primary element, is who. Develop your marketing strategy around a narrowly defined ideal client above all. This post titled How to Discover and Attract More of Your Ideal Client goes deeply into this process.
As stated before this step alone may actually prove to be your strategy – to get good at serving a niche market.
Using your ideal client profile as the basis of your strategy also allows you to think very personally about how you serve them and how you use your tactics to attract them. Without this concentration on an ideal segment your marketing strategy will often lack focus.
Be different
After developing a profile of an ideal client it’s time to find a way to appeal to this group. In my experience the only sure way to do this is discovering or creating an approach, product, or service that clearly differentiates you from the rest of the market.
The market needs a way to compare and differ and if you don’t give them one they’ll default to price comparison.
You need to dig in and find that way of doing things that your customers truly value, what’s going on your industry that frustrates people or how to turn the way people have always done it into an opportunity for innovation. This post titled 5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer unveils the best way to discover what your customers really value.
In some cases you may be doing something truly unique, you just aren’t communicating as your core marketing message.
If you don’t take this step seriously everything else you do in terms of marketing will be far less effective. That’s how serious being different is.
Connect the dots
The final step in the marketing strategy game is to take what we’ve done previously – defining an ideal client and creating a core differentiator – and turning it into your stated strategy.
When I created Duct Tape Marketing my stated strategy was to create a recognizable small business marketing brand by turning marketing for small business into a system and product. This strategy contained a narrowly defined ideal client and a clear point of differentiation.
Our mission was to radically change the way small business owners think about marketing and our “marketing as system” strategy became how we would do that.
Like most effective strategy the gap in current offerings and positioning was what offered the clear opportunity. Connecting your strategy will also include careful study of the competitive environment and that of other unrelated industries in order to fill a need with your innovation or differentiation.
Let me return once again to Sun Tzu and The Art of War – “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
Now, before you determine whether Facebook is better for your business than LinkedIn or if direct mail is still an effective way to generate leads, start at the point where you will ultimately create the greatest possible impact – strategy!
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Read Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us Before You Call Customer Service
Oct 31st
Who’s got a bad customer service experience story? If we were all in a giant room, I’m sure everyone’s hands would go up at that question. In fact, we could probably regale each other with numerous stories of rude, stupid and just plain bad customer service behavior. So, why has customer service on the phone become such an ordeal for everyone?
That’s what Emily Yellin, the author of Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us, wanted to know. Her intention was to research what was going on at call centers so that she could “demystify the current maze of aggravation” for herself and the rest of us.
As it turns out, the corporations and the call centers are not conspiring against us. In fact, they are just as frustrated with the current state of customer service as we are. And this is what makes Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us such an interesting read.
A little background on the book
I received a review copy recently, but the book was actually published in 2009. The review copy was for an updated 2010 paperback version. Customer service call centers can be found all over the world, and rather than speaking broadly about customer call centers, Emily focuses on two emerging locations, Latin America and Africa. This was interesting to me–I had no idea that call centers were expanding to these two areas.
Another interesting update to the paperback edition is a new chapter on Twitter. Social media has been a thorn in some companies’ sides – just ask Comcast! The company has had to spend millions doing the damage control after a few unhappy customers created videos, web sites and general complaints that went viral with social media. Since then, they’ve hired Frank Eliason, who enlisted employees to monitor mentions of Comcast’s name and address them online. They created @ComcastCares, and soon customers learned that they actually got better service if they Tweeted their problem than if they called. This is an interesting trend.
Your Call will make you smile with satisfaction
Yellin really knows how to weave a story. I enjoyed the beginning chapters where she puts our relationship with the telephone in context with a little historical perspective that, of course, starts with Alexander Graham Bell, the early days of AT&T and what was called “the operator problem.” You see, the first call center operators were boys. The problem was that these boys were yelling, screaming and swearing at the customers! To solve the problem, call centers transitioned to using women as operators. As this shows, customer service hasn’t gotten worse – there have been issues from the start. It’s how we deal and interact with technology and each other that makes the difference.
After this history, Yellin shares wonderful examples of bad customer service and the insane tactics that customers use to be heard. I found myself smiling with sweet revenge and wishing I had been so creative with my dissatisfaction.
One of my favorite chapters was “To Send Us Your Firstborn, Please Press or Say “One.” This chapter is filled with hilarious examples of automated attendants. There’s IKEA’s Anna, which is an automated chat system. It was entertaining to read about – but even more entertaining to head over to the Web site and talk to Anna myself.
Then there is the story of “Amtrak Julie,” Amtrak’s automated phone system that’s gotten rave reviews from customers and the ultimate compliment by being featured on “Saturday Night Live.” Here is asnippet of the SNL skit featuring Jon Hader (Napoleon Dynamite) and Amtrack Julie on a date:
Hader: Um…what do you think Julie? A latte or a cappuccino, or something?
Julie: Did you say latte? Or Cappuccino?
Hader: Uh..well, I said both. Do you want a latte or cappuccino?
Julie: My mistake. Cappuccino would be great.
Julie (interjecting): Before we go any further, let me get some information.
Hader: Sure.
Julie: Please say your age……I think you said 19. Did I get that right?
Hader: No. Twenty-nine.
Julie: I think you said nine. Did I get that right?
This was a fun and educational chapter about the advantages and disadvantages of choosing and using automated attendants.
What I liked about the book
Your Call is both entertaining and educational. Each chapter takes you through aspects of call center customer service, explains the background and context, outlines good stories and bad experiences, and then leaves you to make your own decision based on what you’ve read.
I really liked Yellin’s tone as well. She wrote as a journalist, not as an evaluator. This was especially effective because the book is so full of customer complaints that if she had taken a point of view, the reader would become more focused on her opinion than on the circumstances and the lesson.
My only peeve about this book is that it contains yet another reference to Zappos. This is not a slight on Zappos or the author. Being included as a great customer service example in yet another business book deserves kudos. But it would be nice to see another company as an example for a change. Isn’t there any other contemporary company doing it right?
Read this before you call customer service
We’re all somebody’s customer, and one benefit Your Call provides us as consumers is a little insight into what happens behind the scenes at a call center. On the surface, it should be easy. And if Zappos has figured it out, what’s stopping the rest of them?
Read this book and get some ideas about how customer service can be improved. You can follow Emily Yellin on Twitter or visit her Web site Emily Yellin.
Read Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us Before You Call Customer Service
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Brand New 12 Part Video Series! Never Seen Before!
Oct 30th
Hot Internet Marketing Niche! Easy 65% Commissions! Get started quickly at: http://nichemembershipsleuth.com/affiliates.html (includes high end graphic images, pre-written content and rebrandable report
Brand New 12 Part Video Series! Never Seen Before!
Inspect Before You Buy.
Sep 4th
Ase Certified Automotive Technician Teaches You How To Properly Inspect A Used Vehicle.
Inspect Before You Buy.
Asian markets struggle before U.S. jobs data
Sep 3rd
| Asian markets were struggling to stay positive in afternoon trading on Friday on caution ahead of the release of U.S. nonfarm… |
|
||||
View full post on Home Wealth Project Riot!
