Posted by hecto on March 30, 2009 under General Management, Starting your business | 
Starting a small business can be hard work and preparation is vital to the success of your small business. In this post there will be five tips on helping you start and run your business efficiently so that you don’t fall into any traps at the beginning.
1. Have a business plan. It is very important that you have a plan for your business, as the famous quote goes “Failure to Plan is a Plan for Failure” and this is particular true when you are starting out in business. You may have the best business idea in the world however not having a plan could mean you will ultimately lead to failure. So make a business plan work out the numbers such as the brake-even analysis, profit and loss forecast and cash flow projections. It may be that you sell a product to a large customer who will only pay you in 120 days, that’s 120 day without any cash and if you do not have a plan it could mean that you are will be out of business within the first few months.
2. Save as much money as possible before you start. Now the reason you need a really good business plan is because money is short when starting out, once you start getting paid then this problem will start to disappear up to a certain extend. So make sure you save enough money or have enough financing to overcome any problems.
3. Think big but act small. This is the key to success, if you think big it means that you plan for a successful future however it is important that when starting out you act small and try and run your business in the cheapest possible way. If you do not have money to rent big modern offices then old offices will have to do considering that they are also much cheaper and do the same job more or less. Keep the big offices in mind for when your business becomes bigger and more successful.
4. Employ people better then you. Having people who are better then you in a certain field of business means that you can learn something from them and at the same time the business can benefit from their knowledge, so always look for people with experience or who are really skilful in a certain area as they will bring your business to the next level.
5. Protect your personal assets. Ok you could do everything right but sometimes in business things just do not work out, so it is important that you are not personally liable as otherwise you could end up losing all your personal assets which you may own such as your house. What you could do to overcome this is register your business as a Limited Liability Company (Ltd), this will protect your personal assets and it will mean that if the business goes wrong you can always try again without having to lose all your personal assets.
Now these were five elementary tips that you should know before starting any small business, so keep a note of them because a lot of people miss out one of these points and end up running into trouble.
Posted by hecto on March 17, 2009 under Starting your business, The Internet, Tips |
Small business domain registration is not such an easy task anymore. The domain business has got a lot of competition and there are many different top level domains (TLD) such as .com, .co.uk, .net, .biz. However finding a top domain is not easy anymore as most of them have been registered years ago and buying a domain names in the aftermarket can be pretty expensive for a small business. To be honest there really is no need of buying in the aftermarket most of the time, all you have to do is be a bit creative and you can come up with a really good domain.
A domain name can help your business and at times it may be a good idea to check in the aftermarket for the right one if you feel that’s the only option left. However you can also register the best domain for you with just spending the normal fee of about $10 or €7, only because you pay so little for the domain it does not mean that it is a cheap domain, it only means that you were the first one to think of that domain. During your domain search I would recommend that you include generic words in it, for example if you are a wholesale business it may be an idea to include wholesale in your company domain, so wholesalesomething.com. Including a generic word that relates to your business will prove beneficial as the search engines will also favour you and your customer will be able to identify your business area much easier.
What Top Level Domain (TLD) should we pick?
I will touch on this a bit here as it may be a confusing with so many different TLD´s available but I will write something in more detail about it soon. The .com TLD is King of them all as it is the mostly used worldwide. However it is not necessary to have it, if you are targeting the UK market then .co.uk will do the same job, on the other hand if the .com is also available I would registering it too.
Domain Registration
Well this is the easy there are so many companies around so you have a great choice. Godaddy.com is the biggest domain register and has competitive prices, at Godaddy.com it may be wise to find discount coupons in forums and use them when buying some even offer up to 30% discount. There are also other registrars like Name.com that is a bit cheaper but it may be that you want to get web hosting with your domain so I would suggest shopping around and finding the best deal.
Posted by hecto on March 9, 2009 under Finance, Management, Starting your business, Tips |
You have a great idea and want to start a new business or you may just want to expand your small business and take it to the next level. One of the major obstacles to this is not having the finance to do so. Therefore I will give you some tips on how to raise finance.
1. When negotiating for money make sure you take is serious and think about everything carefully. The same planning and thought as making a sale should go into it.
2. Make sure you know how much you want to raise as it can be very difficult to go and ask for more and that is not advised.
3. Think of overdrafts for the short term because usually you need to pay it back usually 12 months. If you want to raise long term finance you may have to sell shares, that’s if you have a company. You could also ask for long-term loan from the bank.
4. Usually you are expected to invest as much as an outside investor or maybe half. You may find that if an outside investor invests a lot more then you in the business you will end up losing control.
5. Talk and plan with your family before you go and secure loans on your house or give personal guarantees; while the reward may be great you do not want to put your family’s main assets at risk.
6. While you can use banks to raise money there are a number of other ways you could use to raise money, such as; private individuals and companies, fiends and family, local authorities and venture capitalists.
Starting a small business can be hard work and preparation is vital to the success of your small business. In this post there will be five tips on helping you start and run your business efficiently so that you don’t fall into any traps at the beginning.
