Tag Archives: small business

Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business

Advice for Young Entrepreneurs

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Dear Young Entrepreneur,

Do you have a dream of owning your own business?

In my role as facilitator, I help women and men into self-employment. For the most part they are 30-something and older, and I often wonder how we might encourage more young people to get interested in business.

There are many reasons why young people would opt for a job over the uncertain world of entrepreneurship. Jobs can offer a steady paycheque and security, while business is risky and anything but a slam dunk. If you’re new on the job market and thinking about starting a business, here are a few points to consider.

  1. Risk your own money to get started, even if you’re fortunate enough to have loving grandparents willing to invest in your venture. Don’t rush into debt. Debt can drain the profit from a business. It tends to up a lot of the energy you could instead be using to serve customers.
  2. Start small and learn all you can while your business is tiny. The inexpensive lessons learned during the early stages will serve you well once your enterprise starts to grow.
  3. Learn how to manage money with the smaller amounts that filter through your life while you’re young. Good personal financial habits will be an advantage as you learn to manage your business.
  4. Save 10% of all the cash that flows through your bank account. Start as soon as you read this. Even a small amount of saving will improve a negative financial situation, almost immediately.
  5. Before jumping into a partnership, get to know the person or people you are teaming up with. A great partnership can serve you well, a bad one is sure to bring the business down. Have an exit plan going in.
  6. Be cautious about deals that look too good to be true. These tend to have a flavour of “get rich quick without breaking a sweat.” If a deal looks too good to be true, there’s a good chance it’s false.
  7. A business is a lot of hard work, if anything it’s a “get rich slow” plan. There are many reasons, beyond profit, to start a business—making a difference, pride in providing a great service in your community, lifestyle, and recognition for a job well done.
  8. Most of what you need to know to run a business, you probably learned in school— treat others fairly, say please and thank you, and smile—all essential business skills.
  9. If you’re risking any more than pocket change, write a business plan. It will help you learn about your venture and the industry around it. Be a learner.

It’s the start of 2012 and there are more business opportunities than ever before. A number of trends make this an ideal time to begin dabbling in the world of business. Demographics tell us that a large percentage of our aging workforce will soon be retiring, which will open up career and business opportunities right across the marketplace. Over the past decade, technology and the Internet have propelled us into the information age. These demographic and technological changes create an ongoing flow of new business opportunities for those with the vision to recognize them and the urge to take action.

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Business Growth, Starting a Business, Writing a Business Plan

5 Ways to Use Your Business Plan

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It takes guts to defy chaos and predict the future of your business, and yet that’s precisely what an entrepreneur does when writing a business plan. Considering it’s a written roadmap that can be used at any point in the future to measure whether the business succeeded or failed, most people will put it off as long as they can. Of course, most people don’t own businesses either. But those who develop business plans quickly come to realize an abundance of benefits.

The most important reason to do a business plan is to gain understanding about, and create a blueprint for starting or growing a business. Once the plan is done it can easily be adapted to communicate with different audiences.

Here are 5 different ways to reconfigure your business plan, from longest to shortest.

1. The Complete Business Plan. Your full business plan will include an executive summary, the narrative and financial components, and a number of supporting documents. By adding well-crafted, personalized cover letters for each contact, you will be able to use your business plan to communicate with potential partners, grant fund managers, bankers and other debt financing agencies.

2. The Investors Business Plan. Right up front, investors will want to know your pitch; what problem your business solves, what value you place on your business, how much money you need, and what are you are offering in return. They will also need to know whether you are seeking debt or equity financing, the expected return on the investment, how you plan to deal with the risks, and what your exit strategy is. Most importantly, investors will want to know all about you, the owner.

3. The Employees Business Plan. The scope of the business plan you present for employees will be guided by your philosophy on how much employees should know about the inner workings of your business. For example, you might use the narrative portion of the business plan plus the sales forecast, but exclude the historical and current financials and supporting documentation. The main benefit of sharing relevant parts of your business plan with employees is to have all members of your team on the same page.

4. The Business Plan Brief. Also known as an executive summary, this 1 to 2 page version can be used to introduce your business to various audiences. It can be added to presentations and proposals, or hung on the office wall to serve as visible reminder of the corporate direction. The brief can include things like the business vision, the mission statement, the strategic and marketing goals, sales, and profit targets. It provides most of the content needed to build a business website or to design flyers, brochures, prospectuses and other marketing materials.

5. The Elevator Pitch. An elevator pitch is a brief introduction to your business. The term is often used in the context of an entrepreneur pitching a business idea to someone during the time it takes for an average elevator ride. It might be as long as thirty seconds or 100 words.

Those who do step up and develop a business plan will usually discover that it’s not quite as formidable as it seems at first. Business planning can be a lot of fun, and whatever else can be said, it’s a remarkable confidence builder and an amazing learning experience for those who go for it.

Entrepreneurship, Self-Employment, Starting a Business

Entrepreneurs Can Be Unreasonable

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entrepreneurs_unreasonableAnyone starting a business will encounter speed bumps along the way. There are always plenty of reasons not to start a business, but entrepreneurs push past the obstacles, get the business plan done, and do it anyway. That’s because they defy the restraints of rationality and instead choose to be “unreasonable.”

Here are a few of the challenges that life might toss into the path of a fledgling business.

  1. Bad Economy. No matter how tough the economy gets, people still need to eat, drink and live; which means there are always opportunities to serve. If you believe in the old adage of “buy-low-sell-high” the depths of an economic dip should be the best time to start a business. When the economy gets ugly, entrepreneurs get unreasonable.
  2. Lack of money. It’s hard to stay enthusiastic about starting a business while struggling to pay for food, shelter and clothing. Yet owning a successful business is the best way to get beyond basic survival worries. If poverty is holding you back, perhaps you just need to get unreasonable, start your business plan and get your business going anyway.
  3. Raising a family. The first few years of child-rearing will seriously reduce the amount of time and energy available for building a business. Recently I visited an amazing home-based retail store, owned by a mother of two pre-school children. The mother built the business while managing two pregnancies and raising two infants. That’s just plain unreasonable, yet she did it anyway.
  4. Divorce. There’s nothing quite like a prolonged marital breakup to throw a kink into a business plan. It’ll drain your time and nuke your bank account. Yet, entrepreneurs will usually find ways to redirect some energy toward starting a business.
  5. Burnout. This is the most deceptive roadblock of all, because it quietly erodes our ability to reason. Like slowly boiled frogs, we are unaware of the problem until it’s too late and we’re cooked. If life and work are wearing you to a frazzle, you may have to get unreasonable to make the needed changes to your environment.
  6. Self-limiting beliefs. Do you hold yourself back with limiting or negative thoughts? Something within the entrepreneur enables her to keep her eyes on the prize, and to focus on the business no matter what obstacles block the path. Absolutely unreasonable.
  7. Good Economy. When faced with the perceived uncertainty of owning a business, a lot of rational people will toss the business plan and opt instead for a job – which creates the illusion of security… until it comes to an end. Yet some businesses are best started when the economy is booming. Or is that just unreasonable?

If you wait for government to solve your problems, or for the economic stars to line up perfectly, or to win the lottery, or for life to remove all barriers from your path – you likely never will start that dream business.

Businesses thrive not because entrepreneurs have perfect lives, but because they choose to build their enterprises while wading chest deep in the river of life.

You can start your business today wherever you are, with whatever you have, right now. It might be a matter of choosing to be unreasonable and simply getting on with your plan.

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Entrepreneurship, Owning a Business, Starting a Business

Running a Business Is Like Riding a Snowboard

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A couple years ago I tempted fate by tackling my first snowboarding lesson. I was 51. Though my future was in doubt for the entire incident, I survived. Whether from repeatedly landing on my head or from the hot toddies that followed, I felt compelled to apply the lessons of snowboarding to running a business.

  1. A rider becomes one with the snowboard; an owner gets immersed in the business. Neither business nor snowboard will run smoothly until you learn some skills and tune into the conditions. Until you reach that point you might look like a newborn calf – gangly, uncoordinated and off-balance.
  2. Snowboarding and business are both learned by doing. A bit of theory is nice, but the real thrill comes from getting out there and doing it. No amount of theory compares to a real ride down the mountainside or a day of running your own business.
  3. Fitness and flexibility are important. This seemed quite clear as, from a variety of unflattering positions I observed skilled snowboarders flying over jumps and loving the airtime. Ah yes, I thought, I really should have stuck with the cardio program. It’s also easier to withstand the rigors of business ownership when you’re fit.
  4. Dignity may abandon you at times. Why is it that people love to see skiers and aging snowboarders do face-plants? Furthermore, why is there always a crowd handy to cheer when you blow it and land in a heap? One gains a disturbing sense of humility while skidding to a stop on elbows and tailbone at the feet of the entire T-Bar line up. Make a mistake in business and the crowd will probably laugh – you might too once you get over the pain.
  5. Snowboarding and business are risky. Friends and family get concerned and start reciting horrifying statistics of bruises and injuries. Everybody knows someone who has hurt themselves snowboarding or who has lost everything they own in a bankruptcy. Things don’t always turn out the way you plan. In fact, if you don’t land upside down occasionally, perhaps you aren’t trying hard enough. Your survival depends upon your ability to assess and manage risk.
  6. Snowboarding and business are both manageable. The secret to success is to start by learning the basics, like standing upright and controlling your direction. Until I learned to use the edges of my snowboard, I changed direction by landing on various body parts and by careening off trees and unsuspecting skiers. You bump into some of the nicest people on the hill… and in business.

Whatever else can be said, snowboarding and business ownership will both get you outside your comfort zone and present opportunities to learn.

Ready to hit the slopes of business ownership?  Get started on your business plan today. We’ve got free resources and tools to make your business planning fast, easy and fun.

See you on the slopes!