All posts by Dan Boudreau

Dan Boudreau has devoted the last 20 years to coaching and mentoring regular folks into the captivating world of business. He authors and facilitates lively, transformative workshops on the topics of entrepreneurship, business planning, and training for trainers. He has inspired thousands of entrepreneurs to become successful business owners and leaders. Launching into his first venture in 1980 with barely enough knowledge to fill the back of a beer cap, he has embraced (and survived) the wide spectrum of business ownership, from single owner home-based enterprises to ventures employing more than 300 workers. Dan's top mission essentials are: laughing, loving, and learning. Armed with the business planning process as a teaching tool, Dan empowers ordinary women and men to create the financial stability and lifestyle they dream of. He is most proud of being acknowledged and appreciated by peers and friends for his ability to bring entrepreneurial ideas to fruition with a nod towards his warm, engaging personable style. In 2006, Dan compiled his knowledge (and bruises) into his first book, Business Plan or BUST! In writing this book, he combined his practical experience as a business owner with his expertise as a lender for an economic development agency, and tossed in his unique brand of wit. The end result: A refreshing perspective and practical style that makes the time-worn topic of business planning easy, fast and fun! When Dan takes those occasional days off from navigating the business world you might find him stuffed into a floating toothpaste tube sometimes referred to as a kayak (rarely right side up), or perhaps coaxing disturbing sounds from his guitar. His ultimate relaxation always involves fresh air, clean water and beaches—from botched attempts to outsmart fish in the rivers of northern British Columbia to flopping around in the waves or practicing applied inertia on just about any tropical sandy beach…
Starting a Business

Five Tricks for Finding Hot New Business Ideas Fast

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New businesses don’t happen by accident. They start and grow when passionate souls burn the midnight oil to solve problems, and then find ways to sell the solution to others.

Emerging businesses, quite deservedly, occupy a special place in the mind of onlookers. Entrepreneurs somehow manage to get ahead of the curve and create profit where previously there was none. Great enterprises begin as mere ideas.

New businesses don’t happen by accident. They start and grow when passionate souls burn the midnight oil to solve problems, and then find ways to sell the solution to others.

Emerging businesses, quite deservedly, occupy a special place in the mind of onlookers. Entrepreneurs somehow manage to get ahead of the curve and create profit where previously there was none. Great enterprises begin as mere ideas.

Here are five inexpensive and easy ways to find hot new business ideas. Remarkably, all you need is a dash of curiosity a computer with an Internet connection.

1. Pick a topic you’re passionate about. What are your hobbies? What do you love to spend you time doing? Choose a topic and go hunting for a problem that others will pay you to solve.

2. About.com Hobbies. To get a sense of the amount of interest in a topic, click on www.about.com/hobbies. Once there, you can drill deeper on the hobbies that interest you. As you visit different pages, you’ll be treated to an abundance of articles, reviews, products, links, new developments and advertisements. Pay particular heed to the pay-per-click (PPC) ads – pages with more PPC ads usually indicate a higher level of competition. More PPC ads should mean there is more money flowing in any given area.

3. eBay Keywords. Click on the buy.shop.ebay.com/ and use the alphabetical index to find the keywords visitors are using to search for what they want at eBay. From the index you can narrow your search to topics of interest. Your visit to the eBay website should give you a sense of what people are buying and selling. More importantly, it tells you the words they use to search for what they want.

4. Google Keywords. This remarkable tool allows you to see which keywords people are using to search across the entire Internet. To use it, go to adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and plug in the keywords you want to research. After an enchanting couple of minutes at this website I can tell you there are 165,000 searches per month for the term “bald head” and a mere 18,100 searches per month for “doggy doo.” Who knew? While this particular revelation may not change your life today, know that this indicates a significant level of interest in both topics. Wherever there are problems, innovators are devising solutions and combing the planet for business opportunities.

5. Google Trends. I love Google, and although the business has grown to a disturbing size, they are continually evolving a number of interesting projects. So where better to go to get a glimpse of the trends and gain insight into the hottest topics? At http://www.google.com/trends you will have access to charts indicating Internet user’s level of focus on any topic you choose, which parts of the globe the interest is generated from, as well as links to broaden your research efforts.

Although the methods above are mostly Internet based, a lot of new business ideas arise from travelling to other communities. It’s always informative to see how problems are solved, what’s selling and what’s not.

If you’re looking to offer a new product or service in your area, a few minutes a day spent at any of the sites above can provide you with a fairly inexpensive education. And after sifting through a bit of clutter, you might just discover a new way of doing things that motivates you to plan and start your next business venture.

General

Things To Consider When Hiring Employees for the First Time

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Recently, while visiting a bustling business, I noticed that there were too many employees onsite for the amount of work being done. Overstaffing is just one of many pitfalls an owner will encounter when positioning for growth. Left unchecked, having too many workers will quickly drain your bank account and put you out of business.

There is much to learn when shifting from working solo to hiring others. This phase is a minefield for owners who have not previously managed employees. Here are a few things to consider when building your team. Read the article.

Social Media

Seven Ways to Tweet your Followers on Twitter

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While Twitter paused to grapple with hacker issues last week, we experienced a rare interruption to our daily influx of new followers. They’re back up this morning, but the incident was a gentle reminder of how integral Twitter has become to our marketing strategy in a very short time.

We are in business to facilitate practical business planning solutions for entrepreneurs. For this reason, we’ve opted to generate a steady diet of business planning tips for our followers. This and a few other tactics have enabled us to grow our list of followers to 2,300 with a reasonably limited effort.

If you’re using Twitter as part of your marketing strategy, here are seven different ways to tweet that are guaranteed to help you populate your list with the right followers. Read the article.