Tag Archives: entrepreneur

What Sort of Business Plan Do You Need ?

Business plan guru, Tim Berry, will be reading and evaluating 75 or so business plans in a single month so he should know something about how to create them and how to judget them.

As Berry says: “This is business plan season for me. I just finished reading half a dozen plans for Notre Dame’s annual business plan competition (we (Palo Alto Software) give a prize to the best one), and another half dozen plans for the Rice business plan competition (I’m a judge, and we have a best business plan prize for that one too). I still have to read five plans for the University of Oregon’s New Venture Competition next weekend (I’m a judge), and I’m supposed to produce a first-cut on 43 plans for the Willamette Angel Conference (I’m one of the angel investors) by the end of the workday today.:

Here’s his take on what sort of business plan you need:

Can You Start A Legit & Profitable Business For Under $20?

: Image via Wikipedia

Can you start a business for under $20? Scott Allen says yes in 10 Legitimate Businesses You Can Start for Under $20. He also tells you exactly how to spend your 20 bucks in each case.

Some of these business, although a good idea, might take a little longer to get money rolling in like Webpreneur. I should know.

More promising for immediate cash flow:

eBay Seller

I have a cousin who haunts the garage and estate sales, specializes in silver, jewelry, old books and post cards and makes several thousand a month on eBay. Of course it does take time to buy, photograph, price and upload. Or you can let someone else do it for 30% of the take.

Or, as Scott says: “Yes, there really are people who make a decent living buying things at garage sales and flea markets and selling them on eBay. The big secrets? Stick to products you know (or learn before you start) extremely well, package your goods carefully, and provide impeccable customer service. It helps to have a digital camera or a scanner, but it’s not required.

Spend the $20 on: Your first inventory at a garage sale.

Other business I think are very doable and at a professional level you probably already have the necessary skills:

Consultant

As Scott says: “Getting into consulting is relatively simple. All you have to do is know how to do something better than most people do, and be able to either teach people how to do it or be willing to do it for them. Networking is the key to success in this business, so start by making a list of everyone you know and giving them all a call.

Spend the $20 on: $14 on a box of clean-edge laser or inkjet business cards and $6 buying your first prospect a cup of coffee one morning.”

Desktop Publishing

“It’s amazing how many people have a computer and still don’t know how to make a decent flyer! If you’ve got a good design sense, are extremely familiar with your word processor, and already have a laser or high-quality inkjet printer, you can get into desktop publishing. Create a really great-looking portfolio for yourself and go door-to-door.

Spend the $20 on: Some high-quality paper to create your samples on.”

Scott also mentions: Personal Services – Shopping & Errands and Tutoring, both of which you can get into and start making money immediately.

Others depend on your personal level of interest in them. If you like selling, for instance, Avon might be for you.

Housesitter / Petsitter
Avon Independent Sales Representative
Secretarial Service – Typing / Transcription / Proofreading

Others I think might take a little more skill and experience like

Professional Organizer

If you’re looking for extra income you might want to look over the details of all these possibilities at Legitimate Businesses You Can Start for Under $20

Hope this starts you thinking of all the ways you can start now, for very little and build a profitable business, one which will tide you over in tough times.

How To Survive: Diversify Your Offerings, Move From “Want” To “Need”, Pivot To Change

My father, who rose from a hardscrabble life to become an extremely successful entrepreneur, used to tell me:

“Always have at least three businesses because there will never be a time when one of them isn’t doing badly.”

Was he right on that! Particularly in the midst of a recession.

But even if you don’t have three entirely separate businesses, it is still possible to adjust your product mix so you have three or more entirely different offerings targeting different needs, possibly even from the same consumer. Look carefully at your business and learn to pivot. I have.

I was reading recently that for a number of years Target, even though much smaller, had been beating the brains out of Walmart, in terms of growth. Retail experts attributed this to it’s trendier clothes and name designers. Then, lo and behold, the recession hit and the trend flipped. Walmart is now beating the brains out of Target and the gurus tell us it all has to do with groceries. Yep, mundane old cereal and peanut butter.

Because now vendors need to be selling more of what people need not what they want. As this article put it, why buy a new shirt when you can just reach in the closet and get one. On the other hand you need to eat. So you need to buy groceries and Walmart has more of them, although Target is scrambling to catch up.

Which brings up to the Web. And to other businesses as well. I was also reading about an entrepreneur who was burning through cash and man hours and scrimping to develop a new, hopefully game changing, software product. When the recession hit, he put that on hold to offer a web design and development service. Cash now for something businesses need to have not want to have.

The lesson here is that there is, no doubt, some way you can think through your offerings and, for the moment, move away from the big ideas and toward the practical, the everyday needs, the things you can execute efficiently in a shorter time frame for a customer.

Seth Godin wrote about this on on March 13, 2009

Pivots for change

“When industry norms start to die, people panic. It’s difficult to change when you think that you must change everything in order to succeed. Changing everything is too difficult.

Consider for a minute the pivot points available to you:

Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.
Keep your customers, but change what you sell to them.
Keep your providers, but change the profit structure.
Keep your industry but change where the money comes from.
Keep your staff, but change what you do.
Keep your mission, but change your scale.
Keep your products, but change the way you market them.
Keep your customers, but change how much you sell each one.
Keep your technology, but use it to do something else.
Keep your reputation, but apply it to a different industry or problem.

Simple examples:

Keep the musicians, but change how you make money (sell concerts, not CDs).
Keep making guitars, but make bespoke expensive ones, not the mass market ones that overseas competition has made obsolete.
Keep the punch press and the lathe, but make large scale art installations, not car parts.
Keep your wealthy travel clients, but sell them personal services instead of trips to Europe.
Keep the factory that makes missiles, but figure out how to make high-efficiency turbines instead.”

There you have it. If you like this post, Tweet me. Thanks.

Seth Godin’s 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market

You know, I’m always looking for ways to do business better, faster and leaner. Well, I guess what all of that boils down to is doing business smarter. And two of the smartest people out there dishing out smart advice about doing business are Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. For this interview I have to thank Andrew Warner Internet entrepreneur and founder of Mixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it. Here’s his take from Seth Godin’s 7 Tips for Startups in a Down Market.

“Seth Godin, Squidoo’s founder, is the best-selling author of 10 books that have helped companies build remarkable products and promote them. He’s never written a book about how to grow in a down market, so I called him up and interviewed him about it for Mashable.

Here’s what he said:

1. Recognize that you’ll have less competition

You should know that this is the best thing that ever happened to you because it makes it easier to be the winner when so many people are dropping out.

The dip is closer and shallower then it would be if these were the boom times.

2. Focus on building value

The emphasis should not be on “how do I raise money and hire people.” The emphasis should be on “how do I build value today.”

Because, every day you’re doing this, you’re building value, connecting with people who find you irreplaceable, then you will become irreplaceable.

3. Expect your costs to go down

Understand that in a down economy, not only is there less money for people to spend on you, but you have to spend less money to make stuff that’s worthwhile.

4. Don’t hire like it’s 1999

It makes me sick to see organizations that race out to hire 50 people, because they think that get big fast matters. And then “it’s not their fault” when they lay off 20.

Well sure it is. It’s totally your fault Mr. entrepreneur, because you shouldn’t have hired 50 people to start with.

5. Focus on the irreplaceable

The goal is NOT how fast can you hire as many people as you can. The goal is how irreplaceable are your people. How much can you boil down the essence of what you’re building?

6. Get lean to beat the behemoths

When we look at the home runs online. They are not the Daily Beast with $18 million and hundreds and hundreds of people. They’re Twitter, with a tiny team of people who have a very fine focused, vision.

7. Be disciplined about what you’re building

One of the things the guys at 37signals say is, if you want to be on budget and on time, what you have to do is, the day you hit the budget, or the day you hit the deadline, you have to ship. And it’s a race.

So that’s how you do it. You don’t say how do I get more money to match the spec? You say, how can I get the spec out there for the money I have?

- HOW TO: Raise Money in a Down Economy
- Startup Hacks: An Early Stage Checklist
- Startup Hacks: Seven Ideas for Building Your Team
- Startup Hacks: 7 Questions VCs Will Ask You, What They Really Mean and How You Can Answer Them

To Entrepreneur, Consider What Processes You Are Really Good At?

Seth Godin, marketer extroidinaire and internet guru makes the case that, when trying to figure out the direction you need to go in your work life, you need to look at two things: content/domain knowledge and process. He explains that “process refers to the emotional intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view, dealing with multiple priorities etc.”

I have to admit, when I started entrepreneuring I had neither. My father died and I was suddenly thrust into managing ranchland, mineral rights, cattle, grazing, tough as leather cowhands, and swarms of immigrants crossing over and across our land which was like the Camino Real into the States, as old as the ancient Indian trails crisscrossing the Southwest. It was a bit disconcerting to a young woman who had just come back from the East, from Wellesley with its crew neck sweaters and circle pins, having graduated from Columbia, that egg-head paradise, a stone’s throw from the Broadway theaters, which I frequented regularly. Yet, here I was in the South Texas sun and red dust or mud, depending on the season, wearing boots for fear of rattlesnakes and carrying firearms for fear of all else, trying to run a busines But what’s a gal to do? I learned.

What I did have when I started was the fearlessness of someone trained since birth to be an entrepreneur and considering risk taking as natural as breathing. So even though I might have been put off by rattlesnakes, I assumed I could learn a business, any business, just as well as anyone else, because my father had convinced me I could. And I did.

But I have to agree with Seth. Perhaps the most important things I learned were high level things that I didn’t even realize at the time involved process, perhaps because my father didn’t call it that. What he had were certain maxims that I had to learn to decode. Statements like ” You have to be around money to make money.” Or, go into a lucrative market, not one that’s hanging on by its fingernails. Or, my favorite. At the age of 5 or so, my father would point to a building and ask “What’s that building worth?” The correct answer was, “As much as you can get for it.”

Those are the kind of processes that are invaluable and here’s Seth’s take on it from Seth’s Blog: What are you good at?.

“As you consider marketing yourself for your next gig, consider the difference between process and content.

Content is domain knowledge. People you know or skills you’ve developed. Playing the piano or writing copy about furniture sales. A rolodex of movers in a given industry, or your ability to compute stress ratios in your head.

Domain knowledge is important, but it’s (often) easily learnable.

Process, on the other hand, refers to the emotional intelligence skills you have about managing projects, visualizing success, persuading other people of your point of view, dealing with multiple priorities, etc. This stuff is insanely valuable and hard to learn. Unfortunately, it’s usually overlooked by headhunters and HR folks, partly because it’s hard to accredit or check off in a database.

Venture capitalists like hiring second or third time entrepreneurs because they understand process, not because they can do a spreadsheet.

As the world changes ever faster, as industries shrink and others grow, process ability is priceless. Figure out which sort of process you’re world-class at and get even better at it. Then, learn the domain… that’s what the internet is for.

One of the reasons that super-talented people become entrepreneurs is that they can put their process expertise to work in a world that often undervalues it.

Green Tech – Next Boom Or Bubble Set To Burst?

My company is located in the high tech corridor that runs between San Antonio and Austin, Texas, so I am more than a bit familiar with the wild swings and boom and bust cycles in both high tech and housing.

I was slam bang in the middle of the dot com bust of 2001, having gotten on the Net with the pioneers at the onset of Netscape and the graphical browser. I remember the wailing and the moaning. I even remember a “friend”…… a rather cliche-ridden friend, and not such a rock solid friend, it turns out… saying: “Rather see ya than be ya.” Even in the midst of the crash and the doom and gloom, I retorted,”Are you kidding? A very small per cent of the people are on the Net yet. It’s in its very earliest stages. Bubbles are about over hype and not real profits. The Net is the future.”

Of course, I had kept my costs low and had to make a profit. I didn’t have a venture capitalist leaning over my shoulder and breathing down my neck saying “Capture eyeballs, forget profit. It’s a real estate grab and a race to critical mass.” I was slowed down by the need to build a profitable business now, not later. And, that turned out to be a good thing.

So the question is, will green tech be the next big bubble that bursts?

Here’s how I look at it.

Business is all about cycles. If a particular sector becomes overheated and rampant with speculation, there naturally are going to be some wild rides.

Let me put it this way. If you got all excited about real estate values booming and put your money down on two high dollar condos in Miami or a couple of spec houses in Phoenix, you may have to walk away from your investment with only your experience to show for it.

If, on the other hand, you bought your own home, or a rent house in Phoenix, at a reasonable price, you can just live in it, or rent it out for enough to cover the mortgage, for two or three years or most of your life. The real estate market will recover and your investment will recoup its losses and continue to rise. All you need is time. And, if you structure your investments or your business right, you will have time.

Time is the answer to most investments and most businesses. Time to grow. Time to accumulate…..assets, customers, understanding, markets. Time to ride out the downturns and take advantage of the upturns.

That’s why it’s so important to conserve your cash, and if you’re a small business or an entrepreneur, run your business with an eye towards thrift. That will give you the ability to withstand the sometimes sudden shocks and typhoons that hit the market and your business in particular.

If you create a business that offers real value, and you are careful with your cash, you will survive and thrive.

Green business, or the green tech sector, is no different I think. It offers a lot of value and increasing efficiency for the future. It is only at the very beginning, as the Net was in the 90′s. It’s a good time to get in before the field becomes incredibly overcrowded. Will it be here for the long term? I would make a serious bet on it. In fact, I am making some serious bets on it. Just put on your hard hat for that inevitable fall out when the speculators have climbed too high and created an avalanche of nay sayers. But that, too , will pass. And you will still be there to reap the rewards.

A Viable Path To Bootstrap A Startup

I have bootstrapped a number of startups in different industries. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that bootstrapping consists of using your own brain, wiliness, sweat equity and resources, rather than have a bank or investor fund you. Which ….99 to 1…. they won’t anyway. So it’s a good thing you’re looking at bootstrapping

And in the current economic climate more people are looking at bootstrapping…. or freelancing as an entry into bootstrapping… than perhaps ever before.

There are a number of tried and true formulas, which will help you bootstrap, and we’ve shared some of those before. But the advice that follows stands out, in part, because the author, Evan Carmichael, YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager, takes some of it a step further. We always tell you to outsource. But Evan discusses how to stairstep your outsourcing from free labor to part time help, to hiring full time, which is exactly the smartest way to do it, I think.

Well, here’s Evan himself in YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog » 7 Steps To Build A Startup From Scratch With No Money.

“I recently did an interview about how to build a business up from scratch with little or no money and I used my own story as an example.

Here are the steps that I took.

This process helped me build my business with $0 in startup capital.

Hopefully you can learn from my experience and make it even better.

Step 1: Moonlight Until You Find Something That Works

I’m a big believer in not spending until I’m earning so I started my company while working at a venture capital firm in Toronto. I used my site to drive traffic, expose myself as an expert, and drive leads for the venture capital firm. I was driving thousands of people to my website and began to wonder if there was a way to monetize that traffic beyond lead generation for the venture capital company.

I found out about Google AdSense and put it up on the site as an additional revenue generator. In my first month (January 2005), I made $8.38 – not much to write home about.

Step 2: Tweak, Tweak, Tweak

Too many entrepreneurs jump full in with no plan and no proof that your idea will work. It’s always better to tweak the concept while you already have some sort of stability in your income. I wasn’t about to go full time making $8.38 a month.

My next step was to learn as much as I could about how to better optimize my ads and how to drive more traffic to my site. I read every ebook, blog, newspaper article, and website that I could get my hands on. There were a lot fewer resources than there are today. I learned as much as I could in the extra time I had and implemented the ideas I learned. Slowly I started making more and more money.

Step 3: Go Full Time

I looked at how much I was spending on my apartment, food, entertainment, etc and once I started to hit that revenue number with my website, I jumped ship and did my business full time. It wasn’t a lavish lifestyle by any stretch but I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my monthly bills. I knew that if I was able to build a site in my spare time that could support my entire lifestyle, then if I gave it a full go, I would be able to do much much more!

Step 4: Get Free Help

As your typical entrepreneur I wanted to grow very quickly and took on too many responsibilities. I was doing manual data entry when I should have been doing more value-add work. But that manual work still needed to get done. The solution? Get free interns. I started with foreign language interns. They were basically university students who came to Canada on a student visa for work experience but they couldn’t get paid for the work. I couldn’t give them too many communications projects because English was their second language but I was able to unload a lot of the work off of my plate.

The next free help I got was from high school students who were on a co-op term. I was able to give them more tasks where they were able to connect with partners and customers because they were fluent in English. They sounded very young on the phone so they usually stuck with email.

Step 5: Hire Part Time Help

At some point you’re going to need more skilled labor than the free interns. They were a stepping stone to help you grow and take some of the work off of your plate but you’ll eventually get to the stage where you need people who don’t need as much hand-holding. But you don’t have enough money coming in to support both you and them. The solution? Hire part time workers. The first guy I hired was for one hour per day to update my database. He worked for me for five hours per week which was much more easy to manage. I wasn’t going broke and I got a skilled worker to help me grow my business. It wasn’t as fast as I would have liked, but it was growing nonetheless.

I hired people to create code for my website, write articles, do marketing projects, edit content, sell advertising… almost anything you can think of. But they were all part time to start. I had an entire organization running with people working only a couple of hours per day. The good thing was that they worked every day… so every day we made progress forward. I found people using elance as well as hired friends and family who wanted to help as well as make an extra pay check. At one point I had eight part time people working for me.

Step 6: Hire Full Time Help

Just like you eventually outgrow your interns, you will also eventually outgrow your part time help. At some point you’ll realize that it’s too much work to co-ordinate all the various part time staff and you need more from them. Some may be able to step into full time roles while others will not be able to commit to more hours because of the other jobs they have. You’ll likely end up having less workers but will get more work done. For example, when I hired my marketing manager, he was originally one of the guys working for me on a part time basis. By hiring him I ended up not needing four other people who were working with me in marketing related positions part time.

Step 7: Figure Out Your Job Description

This is where I’m at now. What is it that I love to do and who do I need to hire to take over the jobs that I don’t want to do anymore? In January I brought on two new full time people to free up more of my time. When you’re first starting a business you end up wearing all the hats but as you grow I believe the whole point of entrepreneurship is to do something you love doing. If you have the opportunity to design the perfect job, why not go for it?

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve built your business up or how you plan to do it if you had a $0 budget.”

For more pearls of wisdom on entrepreneuring, from Evan and others like him, go to YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog

And if you have any thoughts yourself on bootstrapping or entrepreneuring, and you’d like to share them, we’d love to hear them

Do You Have The Entrepreneur Temperament?

Andrew of BizLaunchBlog offers this on the entrepreneur temperament. Do you see yourself in here? Do you see even a little of yourself in here?

Signs you’re probably an entrepreneur

You business is your life and hobby
You often do and then think
You don’t like being told what to do
You often have dreams about your business
You constantly find ways to innovate everything
You hate small talk
You don’t REALLY read long contracts even though you say you did and recommend people should
You’re very impatient
You hate standing in line(queue if you’re English) to buy something
You hate meetings
You look forward to Mondays
You have a short attention span
You don’t read long emails
You send out short emails and sometimes people think you’re rude
You hate being told you’re wrong

If you think this is you, don’t just sit there, go out and start and business!

Need a job? CREATE one! Personal Coaching To Help You

Need a job? CREATE one!

Simply Hired is partnering with Sramana Mitra, Forbes columnist and author of Entrepreneur Journeys, to bring you an online entrepreneurship forum. The open forum will take place on January 14th, 2009 at 11am PT/2pm ET and will center on job seekers taking their careers in their own hands by learning to create jobs now.

During the 60-minute session, Sramana Mitra will answer participant questions in real-time about all aspects of entrepreneurship including:

* forming a business idea

* finding great mentors

* funding your business idea

* mistakes to avoid

* anything else participants might ask

The session is open to everyone, however only the first 15 participants to register will have the opportunity to interact with Mitra.

The forum is free to all participants and will be run on the Dimdim Web Conferencing platform. To register for this event, go to http://entrepreneurshipforum.eventbrite.com or visit http://www.dimdim.com.

Check out the press release for more info!

Hello Plinky! Hello Jane And Robot ! And Other Tales of Courage

Our hat is off to Jason Shellen! And to Vanessa Fox! These two brave souls left Google to start their own companies in the midst of a recession.

They don’t talk about gutsy, they epitomize gutsy.

“Jason Shellen, resigned as Google’s manager of new business development in 2007 to launch Plinky.com, a startup that’s designed to inspire bloggers and users of social media sites. Shellen says he was getting complacent working at Google, despite the company’s domination of the Web.”

Vanessa Fox, aka, the Google Lady Webmaster, the most well-known woman among the SEO community, who helped build Webmaster Central, one of the company’s most successful projects took the leap as well. A star at Google, Rand Fishkin, CEO of Seo Oz, in an anthem to her abilities and webmasters debt to her says:

” I don’t believe that anyone, outside of a few of Vanessa’s close friends, realize how much she’s done to help Google’s public image, their bottom line and their relations with webmasters, nor do most of us know how much Vanessa’s done to fight for webmasters internally at Google. … Webmaster Central was not only Vanessa’s department, it was her baby, her idea (right from inception), her show. If not for Vanessa, we might never have had the dedicated team of webmaster relations specialists (people like Jonathan, Amanda, Trevor, Susan & Maile). We might never have been able to send sitemaps to Google, see data about our sites (particularly the link data, for which Vanessa was always a fantastic advocate), verify ownership, select a preferred domain display or do any of the hundreds of other things that Webmaster Central enables.”

So, to Vanessa’s new company……. Hello Jane and Robot!

Most people in the high tech sector would kill to work at Google. All that money. All those stock options. Who could resist? And why would you want to?

In, CNN.com’s reporting, They left the corporate cocoon to blossom, Shellen says he decided to leave Google despite a shaky economy because he wanted to force himself to change.

“Being an entrepreneur is all about risk and innovation, not timing the market,” Shellen says. “A good idea doesn’t wait for the perfect time to emerge. The ability to build something new outweighed the need for stability.”

Now there’s a person with the entrepreneurial gene.

“Shellen believes the large resources of a company can actually slow down the creative process. A person might want to invent a product, but small things like the name of the product end up being discussed in a committee.

“You don’t find that in a small company,” he says. “At my new company, Plinky, we sometimes dream things up in the morning and by the afternoon have it live on the Web. That never happens at a big company.”

In another example of taking the giant leap, “greater freedom is also what inspired Vanessa Fox to resign from her position at Google. Today, Fox is the founder of “Jane and Robot,” which helps Web site developers ensure their sites can be found by potential customers, and “Nine By Blue,” which helps businesses use online data to better understand their customers.

Fox says the challenge of creating something in an evolving space like the Internet was too great to pass up.

“As hokey as it sounds, there’s more to life than money,” she says. “As much as I loved working at Google, I am really enjoying the flexibility I have now, as well as the ability to really make a difference in the direction I choose to go in.”

If any of these comments sound remotely like something you might say, if you took the leap then Congratuations! You have the entreprerial gene.

So go for it! Take the leap! I salute you, too. We hope to greet you out there launching your new business very soon. ( It certainly beats the cascading pink slips which will engulf many as gloomy economic times drag on and downwards, forcing many companies to cut back.)

In the meantime: Hello Plinky. Hello Jane and Robot!