Tag Archives: business start up

How to Start an Online Business for $100 – Ramp Up As Needed Or Just For Surges

PC World – Business Center: How to Start an Online Business for $100.

These challenging economic times may be pushing you ever closer to the idea of launching your own business.  Whatever your reasons……whether it’s a life long dream, or a type of insurance against massive slow down in your day job, or you’ve been pink slipped out of the 9 to 5 work force and have no choice…. starting your own business has never been easier or less expensive.

How to Start an Online Business for $100, lays out a plan, with specifics, step by step, just how to do  this, covering just about every aspect that you need to consider.  Having “been there, done that”, many, many times, as a serial entrepreneur, I think they make very good points.  In the few instances I have a different take, I will point them out to you:

“Starting your own business doesn’t have to mean spending thousands of dollars on setup costs before you ever open your doors. Don’t get suckered into spending loads of money on services that you don’t need or that have far cheaper alternatives. Seriously: With $100, you can obtain everything you require to start just about any business online, with only minimal need to get up from your desk. Here’s how to do it.

Find an Affordable Web Host

The Web site for your new business has to reside somewhere. How do you pick a Web host that won’t leave you high and dry?

Most hosting plans for small companies offer similar features: basically unlimited storage space, support for common databases and publishing systems, and anywhere from a few gigabytes to 2 terabytes of data transfer per month. Expect to pay between $5 and $15 a month for the service, with a one- or two-year up-front contract.

Get Logos and Design Work

Numerous Web sites, such as Logo Ease and LogoMaker, will design a free logo for you based on options you set via a Web interface. The quality varies, but generally you can get the logo for free for online use. The services make money if you want to download the logo in EPS format, which is more suitable for printing on T-shirts and coffee mugs. A Web search for “free logo” will turn up dozens of additional alternatives.

Another, possibly better, approach is to seek out an independent designer to work on your logo. If you don’t need anything fancy, you can find someone to do the job for $50 or less through a simple Craigslist ad. The advantage is that you get to work with a live person (with genuine artistic skills) to create something unique for you rather than a cold, computer-generated logo. ( My advice: Later, when your business is roaring and cash is pouring in, you can splurge on a big time designer for your logo, which might cost a couple of thousand dollars. That’s what I did. I started out using a Matisse graphic of people holding hands around the globe since there were no online logo makers in 1995,1996. In 2001, I finally was able to go big time working alongside  Lara August, branding guru and Creative Director of Robot Creative, an award-winning creative marketing firm in San Antonio, Texas to create our present brand.)

Build an E-Commerce Site on the Cheap

If you’re planning to sell a lot of physical goods, you’ll need a service that can handle e-commerce transactions, process credit cards, and provide security for both. Setting all of this up on your own server is an expensive, time-consuming task laden with security risks. ( Forget about it!) It’s best to outsource the functions to a hosted service targeted at merchants. Such services can be surprisingly affordable. Yahoo’s popular Merchant Solutions start at $40 a month. E-commerce sites at Netfirms start at a mere $15 a month. You can customize both extensively to match your desired look and feel.

Find a Big Sales Partner

Thousands of merchants use Amazon to promote their goods, giving Amazon a cut when items sell. The big advantage: You don’t need a Web site at all to sell there. You can sell just about anything that Amazon stocks by registering as a merchant, finding the product page for the item you’re selling, and clicking Sell yours here. Merchants must pay $40 a month, plus a sliding scale of closing fees (6 to 20 percent). Individual sellers can sign up to sell with no monthly fees but must pay an extra 99 cent closing fee.

You’ll find similar services (though less of a selection) at Half.com (part of eBay), and of course you can always try your hand at dealing on eBay itself, which is still a popular venue for selling new and used merchandise, though one drowning in noise.

Think SEO, All the Time

Don’t underestimate the value of optimizing your Web site for Google. But you don’t need to pay an expert thousands of dollars to optimize your site for you: Check out the expert advice from SEOmoz and other search engine optimization writers to learn the basics of SEO, and instill your site with good SEO habits from day one. It takes time for the engines to get to know your site, so be patient. (Just make sure you’ve submitted your URL to all of them!) ( My advice: If you use WordPress as a content management system you can get a free SEO plug in with the click of a mouse which will automate the entire process for you, so you won’t have to learn all the tech stuff, which is not so much hard as detailed and complicated. Keep it simple.)

Get Bonus Income With Google AdSense

Unless you’re selling physical merchandise, try adding Google AdSense ads to your site. You might pull in only a few dollars a month while your site is small, but that’s more than nothing–plus, it opens the door for bigger ad opportunities down the road. (Me:  Besides, it gets you on Google’s radar.)

Constantly Promote Your Business

How do one-person businesses get big? They’re always promoting themselves–always. Add your URL to your e-mail signature. Create a Facebook group for your business. Write a  about your product or industry.

Managing Your Growth, Scaling Up

Set Up a Switchboard

If you’re expecting a lot of incoming phone calls, an answering service might be worth the investment: You’ll seem more professional to customers, and you won’t be roused from bed at the crack of dawn by callers who don’t understand what time zones are.

You can have a live answering service (similar to the one your doctor uses) for $20 a month–or less, if you have minimal incoming calls. Another option is to do it virtually: For about $10 a month, you can get an 800-number-based system such as RingCentral that answers calls with an automated greeting, routing calls to you (or other employees or contractors) or to voice mail depending on button presses.

For a Little More: Get a Virtual Office

The world doesn’t need to know you’re working in your basement, so many business owners turn to a P.O. box for the official address of their company. A bare P.O. box, however, doesn’t seem all that professional, and you can’t receive UPS or FedEx shipments there.

Another option is a virtual mailbox service, such as that of Regus. With a virtual mailbox, you get a physical mailing address and someone who will sign for packages from other carriers. The catch is that people sending you mail still have to put a PMB code on the envelope, though it’s less conspicuous than with a regular post office box. You pick up the mail once a week, or the service forwards it to you at cost. The plans cost $100 to $150 per month.

You can step up from there to a more serious arrangement: A virtual office setup gets you not just mail service but a live receptionist who answers the phone however you like, plus access to a physical space with offices, conference rooms, and even videoconferencing facilities. Fees can range from $250 to $325 a month.

These costs are admittedly beyond our $100 budget, so consider whether you really need them before signing a contract. With so much business conducted online and via phone, you may never deal with visitors at all. ( My advice:  Skip it.  Should you ever need a conference room, you can rent one from an office company like Regus, or borrow one from a fellow entrepreneur in off hours.  Most likely, in an online business you would be doing teleconferences or conferences online anyway, from your own computer.)

For a Little More: Offload Fulfillment and Shipping

Selling physical goods online often means long hours spent in your garage packing up orders to ship to buyers, and then standing in long lines at the post office to mail it all off. Another option exists, thanks to the wonders of e-fulfillment: You pay someone else to do all the inventory handling and order shipping for you. Fees can be pricey unless you have the volume to mandate it: Efulfillment Service costs $70 a month flat, along with $1.85 per order processed and $0.25 per cubic foot per month for inventory stored, plus actual shipping fees.

Alternatively, you could hire a student or other temporary help to do the work for you a few days a week, but you’ll still have to find somewhere else to park your car.

Behind The Scenes Technicalities

I think it’s important to know how complete this piece is, in case you want to go back to it for things you’re not contemplating now and  use it for a reference.  It also goes into some nuts and bolts things you may want to consider such as filing for an assumed name ( Jane Smith doing business as, dba, “Fashion Forward”), additional licenses you may need, depending on what business you’re in, what kind of bank account to use, and whether to incorporate — the author recommends keeping it simple, opening as a sole propriertor ship, then incorporating later, if you want. ( My advice: Just don’t forget to do it as you get successful so you will not be personally liable for issues relating to your business).

What was left out here, was where to find outsourced help, which you can find in the link below.

Now, that is really a very thorough road map of getting started for $100.  If you have the burning interest, the drive and ambition that fuel an entrepreneurs rise, you will make it.  We wish you the best.  Write and tell us about your experiences so we can add them into our common well of shared knowledge.

Growth of Solo, Self-employed, Freelancers, Independent Contractor Businesses – How Do They Do It?
Does Your Logo Capture The Essence of Your Brand? If Not, It Should

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Bootstrapping A Green Business

The Future: Hot, Flat, Crowded…… And Full Of Opportunity For A Green Business

Thomas Friedman, one of my very favorite authors, who wrote the game changing The World is Flat has written a new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which takes a broad view of conditions around the globe and points us to the future.  In this instance, the sum of all Friedman says points us to the conclusion that, if we’re smart and capable, the best investment for someone starting out, and one with an unlimited upside and potential for growth, is a big investment in anything to do with clean technology and alternate energy technology.

BootStrapMe: Great bootstrap business ideas at BootStrapMe.com suggests, among 10 or so other practical ideas for bootstrapped businesses,  the potential of going green with a Green business.

“Environmentally friendly businesses may be the perfect bootstrapped startup because they have a natural niche from which to build a customer base.

Consider Brilliant Earth, a business built around conflict free diamonds and renewed gold. Read more.

In this interview with Leah Edwards at Ecopreneurist, Brilliant Earth co-founder Beth Gerstein explains how the company was founded with little capital investment.

Additional thoughts on bootstrapping environmentally responsible of other ethically responsible products:
• Focus on selling. Many products from free range non-factory farmed meats to fair trade products are already available somewhere in the world. Focus your efforts on connecting buyers with sellers as Brilliant Earth did rather than on capital-intense production.
• Educate don’t advertise. Customers for ethically or environmentally responsible products will seek out and even pay extra for what they value as long as they know where to look and new customers can be developed simply by educating them about that value.
• Cash first is key. Finding customers first instead of purchasing inventory was a major part of Gerstein and Grossberg’s business model and a major departure from the industry they were entering, but the approach replaced costly risk with hard work.
• Raise awareness. Peter Thum, founder of ethos waterlinks, which was bought by Starbucks in 2005, found that donating portions of his company’s proceeds to clean-water initiatives in impoverished communities worldwide was a natural selling point.
• Seek volunteers. Your higher ethical values may attract those passionate about your product, something Shelli Styles founder of Strappity-do-da, a company helping to raise women out of poverty in Columbia, found gave her a volunteer sales force in the early days.”

If any of this sounds like your cup of organic tea, then go for it! We wish you the best.  And don’t forget to write and tell us how you’re doing.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Don’t Raise Money – Bootstrap A Niche Market Online

This is the third in a series on financing your business.  But this time we’ll discuss starting small, counting your pennies, inching your way up, (commonly called “boot strapping”, pulling yourself up by your boot straps) until you are making a profit.

Martha Stewart at a 2006 Cynthia Rowley fashio...

Entrepreneur Martha Stewart Image via Wikipedia

One way to do this, with low barriers to entry, ie. not much money to start, is to launch an online business in a niche market. Many entrepreneurs are willing to risk their careers and their homes and work until they drop in order to own their own business. The problem is there are a lot of really big players with billion dollar pocket books chasing the same markets. What to do? One answer is to think small, or at least smaller. Consider a “niche” market.

Defining Your Niche

First you have to discover what your niche should be. One way to approach this is to zero in on what niche you would excel in, which would make the most of your own special knowledge and talents. Just as Martha Stewart started by baking and catering out of her home kitchen and with a flair for elegant living, not to mention superhuman drive and perfectionism, and Debra Fields’ had her cookie recipe, you probably have your own unique talents, interests and aptitudes,if you look deep enough. It may be found in your ability with graphics, or your talent for getting an office organized or inspiring people to join your project. Being smart about specific,marketable things has value; it is “the raw material from which financial results are produced”. Taking a hard,objective look at yourself, assembling a knowledge and skills inventory, allows you to find your particular niche, something you do better even than others in your same field. It is a way of narrowing and refining your niche so you can focus on only those things you do best and know more about than those around you. This should tell you also what niche market you should target.

Sometimes this happens in a more evolutionary way. You set up a dot com on the Net to sell books and the next thing you know, Amazon.com turns into Godzilla, about to stamp you under his giant foot. Do you stand there, stare Amazon.com in the eye and go head to head in combat? You do no such thing. You think through your best niche and move a step in that direction. Let’s say you start marketing rare old books. If Amazon.com moves in that direction, you start marketing rare old books on Texana, a quite profitable business, believe it or not. In other words, you keep moving another step away from the center of the market. And eventually you’ll find a niche which is too small for Amazon.com but may be specialized enough so that it requires considerable expertise for entry. And that’s what you have to dig deep into yourself to find… the area you can execute better than most people, a market too small for the giants, but extremely profitable, perhaps because you have the field almost to yourself.

Using the niche concept, you have positioned yourself for success. Build a reputation and the giants may even send people your way for products they don’t stock.

And there are other benefits in a niche market business model:

Financing

You won”t need as much money.

After you’ve exhausted the savings you’ve set aside to sustain you in the beginning, hit on your family and friends first, just not too much. You want to be able to look your mother or your sister in th eye when you go other to holiday dinners.

Don’t try to play with the big boys too soon. Prove up one part of your plan at a time. Start small, keep building, look good before you go to your bank or your first real investor.

(See
Start Your Own Small Business Using More Ingenuity, Less Cash

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

How To Grow Your Business: Getting From Good To Great

Book cover of

Book cover via Amazon

Let’s say you’re a super talented, hyper ambitious, very focused and hard working entrepreneur. You’ve launched your business and taken it to a certain level.

At some point in the growth of your business you’re going to reach a place where, even if prospects are rosy and revenues are rising, you feel like you are treading water.  Well, not exactly treading water.  More like thrashing about, spending a whole lot of energy, when you haven’t much to spare, trying to tread water and stay afloat.

Here’s some insight for you….. trust me on this…..you’ve reached your tipping point. When you started, if you were like most entrepreneurs, you were a “jack of all trades”, wearing many different hats and juggling  many different tasks.  Maybe, if you were like me, you were caught in the down draft of the dot com speed bump, and had to lighten up the pay roll and re-assume some tasks you thought you’d escaped forever, like, in my case, doing my own tech work.  ( I wasn’t freaked out however, because every business I’ve ever been in has had its roller coaster moments, if you’re in it long enough. You learn, over time, the important thing is to survive, so , if you’re a true entrepreneur, just like betting in a card game, you know when you have to lighten up and when you have to start putting more chips in to stay in the game.)

When you feel like you’re thrashing about, trying to tread water, it’s time for you to put in more chips and and start to build a team.  It doesn’t have to be a full fledged in house team at this early stage.  Start small with a few out sourced helpers to share some of the tasks. All the help you need is in “the cloud” somewhere or in your “hood” whether that be real or virtual, your corner of the Net.

Outsource

Need a worker or a team?  Go to Elance.com and hire them. Or go to Google and find a contractor who specializes in the work you need. It’s a tried and true entrepreneur strategy at this early stage of growth when your needs have increased but your revenue won’t yet support a full staff.

I would suggest starting with specialists who just work on one area of your business.  In other words, you don’t necessarily want your first hire to consist of that “Gal Friday” or “Guy Friday”, the jack of all trades administrative assistant who can answer your phone, arrange your appointments, hand you your schedule or line up vendors.

Victoria Colligan, founder of Ladies Who Launch, which provides resources and connections for women entrepreneurs says in Getting From Good To Great | Starting a Business and Growing your Company, ” In the start-up environment we have a tendency to choose helpers who are “jacks of all trades” and can juggle and handle many different roles. This works in the beginning but not for growth. If you want to take it up a notch, give each person a crystal clear role and hold everyone accountable by establishing metrics and a strategy for each area of the business.”

This method also provides a skeletal structure capable of supporting growth for your company.  You begin to see your company not as an outgrowth of your personality but as a separate, stand alone system, powered  by the different parts of it :  Joe who has the technology role, Pamela who has the marketing role.  The system is supported by the different roles, not the people who fill them as that may change.  It almost always does change, particularly as you grow.  But, at the moment, “We Are Techs” Inc., or whatever outsourced company, can fill your technology role.  Perhaps “Yellow Pages” can fill your sales role.

Collaboration

Victoria makes another really sound point.  You can also handle growth by collaboration with other companies or individuals:

“Supplement your weak areas: Surround yourself with those who have complementary skills. Network, network, network to find them. Find what you are good at and what you enjoy doing and partner with those that can fill in the gaps.”

As you build your team, you will begin to realize the old limitations are longer there.  You have moved beyond them.  You are no longer treading water, you are powering through it. When you have your team in place you will experience an amazing dynamic: you will be free to soar -  you can work on those things you are best at and you can make new break throughs and start to lead your team and your business into exciting new frontiers.

Growth of Solo, Self-employed, Freelancers, Independent Contractor Businesses – How Do They Do It?

Working In Teams Produces Better Results, Gives You An Exit Strategy

In the start-up environment we have a tendency to choose helpers who are “jacks of all trades” and can juggle and handle many different roles. This works in the beginning but not for growth. If you want to take it up a notch, give each person a crystal clear role and hold everyone accountable by establishing metrics and a strategy for each area of the business.

Victoria Colligan is the Founder of Ladies Who Launch, which provide resources and connections for women entrepreneurs. Women are launching businesses at twice the rate of men, and they are doing it primarily for lifestyle reasons–they want more freedom, flexibility, and creativity in their lives.

n Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t,
Jim Collins shares the results of a study of a set of elite companies, defined by tough benchmarks, that have achieved great results over a sustained period of time.


Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Start Your Own Small Business Using More Ingenuity, Less Cash

Image representing Yahoo! as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Starting one’s own business is always an invigorating but somewhat anxiety provoking experience. You are about to leave the comfort zone of college, your home, a big corporation or even a non-profit or any other type of salaried employment. In exchange you have independence and the chance to pursue your dream. The flip side is you no longer have large resources –money, manpower, credit, expertise, contacts, name recognition– all you have is …. you. You also have the rent or the telephone, the travel , marketing , research , direct mail and whatever else to pay for. If you have a payroll or even someone to come in and water the plants every two weeks, that’s your responsibility, too. No wonder it’s an anxiety provoking experience.

The thought that keeps most entrepreneurs motivated at those first insecure moments is the firm knowledge that great risk can reap great rewards.

How do you get started?

I was reading this advice by Mark Cuban, Owner of Dallas Mavericks, entrepreneur with a $2.5 billion net worth who made his fortune  starting Audionet with a partner in 1995, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. Audionet launched with a single server and ISDN line, went on to become Broadcast.com and, in 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock. ( Parenthetically, Mark was booted off “Dancing with the Stars” in almost no time flat, proving that being a billionaire does not give you smooth co-ordination, much less allow you to glide across the dance floor like Fred Astaire.)

Mark’s blog is blog maverick.  He wrote a blog about How to Get Rich which starts out advising us to be  obsessive about saving our money.  He goes on to say:

“The 2nd rule for getting rich is getting smart. Investing your time in yourself and becoming knowledgeable about the business of something you really love to do

It doesn’t matter what it is. Whatever your hobbies, interests, passions are. Find the one you love the best and GET A JOB in the business that supports it.

It could be as a clerk, a salesperson, whatever you can find. You have to start learning the business somewhere.  Instead of paying to go to school somewhere, you are getting paid to learn.  It may not be the perfect job, but there is no perfect path to getting rich.

Before or after work and on weekends, every single day, read everything there is to read about the business. Go to trade shows, read the trade magazines, spend a lot of time talking to the people you do business with about their business and the people they buy from.

This is not a short term project. We aren’t talking days. We aren’t talking months. We are talking years. Lots of years and maybe decades. I didn’t say this was a get rich quick scheme. This is a get rich path.”

Cuban goes on to talk about times of uncertainty in business, that there will always be booms and busts and one has to take advantage of them: “Booms are when the smart people sell. Busts are when rich people started on their path to wealth.”

That, of course, is easier said than done since no one really knows when there will be a boom or, more ominously, a bust.  One has to wonder if, when Cuban sold to Yahoo he knew he was in the middle of the boom.

AdvancingWomen.com believes, whether boom or bust, in order to have staying power, one needs to operate their business on lean, mean principles so you can ride out the busts and be ready for the boom times, whether you choose to sell or not:

Watch Your Pennies; They’re Coming Out of Your Pocket Now

Starting your own business, whether home-based, in a loft , strip mall , business incubator, or at a seriously impressive office space, requires some serious thinking about whether you are ready to accept certain realities. Very probably, if you are leaving a large well- financed corporation , organization, university or government agency, you are going to have to work harder and make do with less.

For some, it is a wrenching adjustment to scale down and have to balance decisions about spending money to save time, or working longer hours to save cash and increase cash flow. Necessities, like receptionists and clerks in large offices become luxuries in small offices. If you can do it yourself , it costs nothing. Yes, your time may be worth $100 an hour, but is anyone paying you that between 8 pm and midnight.?

As humbling at it may be, you may realize, not only can you not afford to have someone else water and fertilize the plants in your office, you can’t even afford the plants. The good news is that professional business analysts like Peter Lynch who ran the Magellen Fund and studied thousands of businesses, didn’t like seeing a ficus in an office…. or a mahogany desk, or good art or fine china. Lynch only felt good about start up companies on the second floors of strip centers with metal desks and linoleum flooring… or something comparable… because that made a statement the people running the company were serious about making and saving money. So, often, Lynch invested Magellan’s money in their company’s stocks and that cash infusion got them roaring. If you watch your pennies and forego the ficus and the palms, this could happen to you.

One always has to make tough choices to cut costs. Here are some suggestions from experienced start up entrepreneurs:

  • Keep overhead costs to a minimum. Rent a modest office. Or work out of your home. Many entrepreneurs today keep costs low with “virtual offices” and outsourced workers across the city or the globe.
  • Keep your desks and equipment functional not “showy”. ( The impression you make with showy equipment might not be what you intend… too much money spent on decor spells “inexperience” to the battle scarred.)
  • Buy second hand. Do you think any good antique dealers either buy retail or shop at Office City? That’s not where the bargains are or the best looking furniture either.
  • Forget support staff…. call don’t write… use your email…avoid paper. If you are really cheap, or don’t have $100 bucks for a copier/scanner, you can email it over to Fedex-Kinko’s every evening and pick it up in the morning.
  • Answer your own phone and dispense with calls in a few minutes… or spend $30 have a “virtual receptionist” like One Box, routing your calls to any phone number or associate, forwarding email, voice mail, fax notifications to your inbox where you can handle them at your leisure.
  • Work until seven and eat a little later. You can do all your “support” chores after regular office hours. Tell people you were raised in Europe or Latin America and are accustomed to later evening hours.
  • Don’t skimp on a professional logo, business cards or letterhead stationary. They are part of your direct dealing with the public and come under the category of marketing, which should always be first rate. But with today’s software programs you should be able to stick to simple design, with a professional logo and just send it out to be printed.
  • And don’t forget to market. No matter how small or how thrifty you are, you can’t afford not to have a budget for this. Just be sure you make the effort to learn what really works and is effective in your field before you actually spend money marketing. You have to make every dollar and every penny count. The journey to success is long and full of unexpected pot holes… you never want to run out of cash along the way.
  • Remember how and where you do your work isn’t as important as what you do. If working in your small business is giving you the opportunity to do interesting and useful work, that’s more important and more gratifying than having either a ficus or a $5,000 copier.
Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

How Did You Get the Confidence to Start Your Business? | Small Business Trends

How Did You Get the Confidence to Start Your Business? | Small Business Trends.

If you’ve reached that fork in the road where you are trying to decide whether to keep pursuing your own career or starting your own business, this is a very insightful article for you to read.

Perhaps the most helpful comments are from Scott Belsky, Behance.com.

Scott tell us not just how to get the confidence to start a business but actually how to make it work. The ideas he fleshes out in this articles are the following:

1) Gathering the Panel: get a small group of like-minded individuals together to consider a new idea

(2) Put Your Money (or Time) Where Your Mouth Is: When an idea starts gaining traction in your mind, it is time to “invest” something in it.
(3) The Controlled Test: When the time is right, you will feel a rush of motivation to “test” your concept. Often times this is a controlled microcosm of the business you have in mind
(4) Listen Listen Listen: The first realization you must have is that your business plan is (likely) wrong, and that the “needs” you first identified may differ from the actual needs and frustrations you must address among your potential customers. To identify the true market opportunity, you must listen.
(5) Debate Toward Shared Conviction: As you incorporate the feedback you are getting and prepare to launch a real business, encourage debate among your team and advisors about the decisions you are making. As debate ensues, try to reach some level of shared conviction in your team


Confidence ultimately comes from data (feedback), honest communication, and a team with a shared commitment.

The Cold, Hard Facts About Business Plans, Elevator Pitches And VC Presentations

It takes either rare blind luck or enormous business savvy, determination and skill..not to mention the nerves of a cat burglar and the daring of a trapeze artist to bootstrap a company successfully. More than likely you will be looking for outside capital as your needs will outstrip your revenue fairly rapidly, early on.

The first cold, hard fact about business plans is that no one reads them. This is not to discourage but to wise up those who have not met venture capitalists face to face, or had to ask their banker for a working capital loan. These people are busy and every micro -second counts.

What to do? Should you have a plan? Absolutely. In fact, you should have a number of presentations of the same plan, in different stages of condensation, to draw on and use, depending on whom your audience is.

For Yourself – A Road map

You will first need a business plan for yourself and your team. This will become your road map; when completed it will tell you how to take this business where you want it to go.

Today there are many sites from which you can download a template and fill in the blanks. These will give you an acceptable form for a business plan, although the creation of one may be just as much of an art as it is a science.

The important, irreplaceable dynamic of creating a business plan is that it assures that you address and think through the issues confronting the industry you want to enter; how is it regulated; who are it’s customers; is the customer base growing or shrinking; who are your competitors and what competitive advantage do you perceive you will have to allow to compete successfully against them; all the details of your operation, whether it is capital or labor intensive, seasonal and , ultimately, how you are going to wrest a profit from it.

Many organizations, without any further interest in inspecting your business plan, will ask if you have one. Putting yourself through the discipline of creating one provides evidence you are not a “shoot from the hip” kind of gal, and that you have thoroughly thought every aspect of this venture through. You also can turn back to your plan time and again to test your assumptions. You can see if business is developing along as you believed it would, if external circumstances† the stock market, the Net, the health of the economy†.are as you envisioned them or if you need to tweak your plan or even completely overhaul it. If you’ve taken a detour, or even run off the road into a ditch and need to get up, dust yourself off and put the wheels back on, you can consult your map and find your direction or set a new course.

That’s what your business plan will do for you. Don’t confuse that with the pitch you plan to give banks or investors.

Bootstrap or Seek Outside Capital?

Can you create your business without outside investors? Possibly. People have done it and some do it today. The art of bootstrapping is the ability to plunge in with the money you have and, with the skill of a Swiss watchmaker, carefully balance whatever revenues you have, with whatever outflows are required to generate them, continuously guarding your downside, while cautiously inching upward. Sometimes, even after a company is fairly large and well on its way, a boot strapper is counting her greenbacks, one by one, on the desk at night, because there is precious little margin for error. It takes either rare blind luck or enormous business savvy, determination and skill..not to mention the nerves of a cat burglar and the daring of a trapeze artist…to bootstrap a company successfully. More than likely you will be looking for outside capital as your needs will outstrip your revenue fairly rapidly, early on. Growth costs money, and, even if you are very successful at selling your product or service, you will go through an expensive period of having to ramp up quickly to build the infrastructure to meet the demand.

The Elevator Pitch

The first people to invest in your company are, generally, family and friends. Or, as some say, the 3 F’s: fools, family and friends, although those fools sometimes turn out to be staggeringly well rewarded. But at some point, you can no longer moon light to support your business, a hard working spouse or trusting parents, even admiring friends, are no longer enough to feed your constantly hungry child† that is, your growing, cash consuming business.

To move on to the next step, you first have to meet an investor or a venture capitalist or someone who will provide you with an introduction to a venture capitalist or, as an intermediate step, someone who will groom you to be ready to meet one. This might be a lawyer or an attorney, who travel in these circles, and who like to keep feeding their investors, and help grow their mega-bucks clients of tomorrow.

To even make it to first base with the people who can provide introductions to help you bridge the chasm between friends and family and professional investors, you can forget the full blown business plan; you will need to develop what is known as “an elevator pitch.” This is a description of your concept or company which is short enough to be delivered to someone whom you or your attorney run into and have the opportunity to pitch on the elevator, somewhere between the 10th and the 3rd floor. Three to five sentences would make a good elevator pitch, so they’d better be good ones, whetting the appetite for more.

The VC Presentation

Again, forget your business plan. Venture capitalists receive thousands and review hundreds of business plans. They have been known to complain the plans are too long, filled with big, generic numbers, like “billion dollar market”, are not sufficiently specific about customers, and can not convey the quality of your team’s interaction. Who is your customer, precisely? How much is she willing to spend on your product and how do you reach her and convince her to try it. If you already have customers, revenues and referrals, so much the better. That is the kind of hard evidence a potential investor likes to see.

Get your team together and prepare a brief verbal presentation. Don’t go in alone. You want to show you can work as a team. And you will need someone tracking the time, scanning the crowd for body language and taking notes on reactions.

The importance of the team aspect can not be over stated. The most critical factor for any investor will be the team, as much as the quality of the concept and the size of the potential market. On the same theory that crises soon outstrip one person’s ability to solve them, so too, new companies in dynamic markets and today’s fast paced, 24/7, global environment, quickly outstrip one person’s ability to master all the details. Focus on being a leader; develop a team where each person has his specialty; you see the forest, but let each grow the trees in his or her own area.

Timing Is Everything

Remember, timing is everything. There will be a time for you to sit down and develop a complete, full blown, well thought out business plan. Its purpose is, as much as anything, to document the process of your thinking and allow you to make orderly changes. It will also keep you and your team singing from the same sheet of music. There will be a time to condense this into your “elevator pitch” and then to translate it into graphics and a well rehearsed group performance for investors. Developing a business is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Creating your plan is only the beginning. Then you must create the business, but that’s when it gets exciting.

A Fork In The Road: Career Path Or Entrepreneurship

Most women today, particularly after they’ve been in middle management for awhile, and have not yet cleared the hurdle to top management, or even those in top management who feel stalled or pressured by constant travel or family obligations, reach a point where they have to decide whether to continue in their careers or set up their own shop and go for the gold.

The Crucial Decision

This decision forms a common flash point in the careers of women. It can be wrenching. On the one hand, you are faced with giving up the company you’ve probably grown comfortable with and where your friends are. At the same time, you will lose your financial security, some of your retirement, the continued growth of your 401K and perhaps even stock options which have not yet vested. On the other hand, you will achieve more independence and flexibility, better balance work and family, become CEO of your own firm and..where there is risk, there is reward…. you could become very rich, indeed.

Part of the decision making process must be your looking deep inside yourself and facing honestly just how much risk you can tolerate. There is only one thing all entrepreneurs have in common and that is the ability and willingness to take risks. People who are most comfortable being entrepreneurs are those who have a high tolerance for the unstructured and learn to accept ambiguity . They decide to take each day as it comes, do their strategic planning, tend to the marketing, be obsessive about details, produce the best quality product or service they can, and believe the business will come.

Starting Your Own Business

So, you decide to take the plunge. Starting one’s own business is always an invigorating but somewhat anxiety provoking experience. You are about to leave the comfort zone of salaried employment. In exchange you have independence and the chance to pursue your dream. The flip side is you no longer have large resources –money, manpower, credit ,expertise, contacts, name recognition– all you have is …. you. You also have the rent or the telephone, the travel , marketing , research , direct mail and whatever else to pay for. If you have a payroll or even someone to come in and water the plants every 2 weeks, that’s your responsibility too. No wonder it’s an anxiety provoking experience.

The Business Plan

You will definitely need a business plan. This will become your road map; when completed it will tell you how to take this business where you want it to go. It may even convince your bankers to take the ride with you. But the really important point about a business plan is the act of producing one. The irreplacable dynamic is that you address and think through the issues confronting the industry you want to enter. You can turn back to it time and again to test your assumptions and make any necessary adjustments. To make the process even simpler, you can download a template from a number of financial sites on the Net, then fill in the blanks.

Financing- The Biggest Hurdle

This is definitely going to be one of the biggest hurdles you face. Since it’s highly unlikely you will get as much financing as you, ideally, would want from a lender outside your friends or family in the beginning, you will need to make some very basic decisions about how to run your company. If you run it with an eye towards economy which resembles a tiger proecting her young, pay cash as often as you can, do more things yourself, outsource, don’t pay for fancy trappings, flashy stationary or lunches out with the people you want to impress— impress them with your profits instead– you have a better, more stress free chance of making it to the finish line a winner.

Be Persistent

Business is about problems. You will have problems to solve day in, day out, every day you are in business. As the great manager of ITT, Harold Geneen, used to say ” If you’ve tried 23 times and failed, you must try the 24th time. You must keep searching for a solution that is not just for the moment, but which is strategic and generic and forms a permanent solution to the problem.”

You should also realize that success itself is about persistence. Not genius or inspiration, or even abundant financing can take the place of persistence. The workplace is littered with failed geniuses or yesterday’s stars who are today’s old news. Persistence is the fuel which keeps the engine chugging up the hill. In the long run, it also helps to have integrity, to stick by your word with your employees and cllients, who will then stick by you and your company, in both the peaks and the valleys. But to keep chugging ahead, and get past those many speed bumps, you will definitely need a large dose of persistence. Remember, you’re in this for you, not for what others may think at any given moment; and you’re in it for the long haul.

Whether it’s a one person shop juggling a dozen outsourced tasks, or a multi-million dollar enterprise setting new profit records, thousands of women today have made the decision to call their own shots, take the heat and make the payroll. You are not alone. So, if you’re ready, take the plunge. The water’s just fine.