Funding Your Business Part II The Benefit of Self-Funding and Sales-Funding

Funding Your Business Part II The Benefit of Self-Funding and Sales-Funding This week I wrote How much money do you need to start your new business?  In the comments, Kim write that it was a liberating post that helped free her mind of the layers of reasons why she couldnt start her own consulting business. This morning I had another thought kind of like a and another thing! that just came to me. Its a simple concept but very, very powerful. Imagine two scenarios: Scenario 1: Get $100,000 of funding. For whatever reason, you need a lot of money to get started. This could be for equipment, tools, clothes, staff, rent, salary, etc. Scenario 2: Fund-as-you-go, or funding through sales. You can start today, looking for a consulting customer, and you have everything you need (your brain, a phone, an email account, and thats it). Heres the thought I had this morning: Stopping a business that you have funded, with your own money or someone elses, is kind of hard.  Well, stopping it isnt hard, but what do you do about the $100,000 that you borrowed?  You could sell the stuff you bought, but you might not get dollar for dollar.  What if you have a basement full of stuff (like a heat press machine for  making custom designed shirts and hats and stuff), with a payment on them, or an investor that is expecting you to find customers and make sales that is hard to end. If you are funded through sales, then its easy to stop. You have no outbound financial obligations you just stop working. Take a few days off. Take a few months off. Perhaps pick it up next year no big deal.  And whats great about this? Its just as easy to start it up again as it is to stop it again. Im not saying to be fickle, but when we are taking about freeing and liberating, having a business that doesnt start out with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt is more flexible Pretty cool, huh? Funding Your Business Part II The Benefit of Self-Funding and Sales-Funding This week I wrote How much money do you need to start your new business?  In the comments, Kim write that it was a liberating post that helped free her mind of the layers of reasons why she couldnt start her own consulting business. This morning I had another thought kind of like a and another thing! that just came to me. Its a simple concept but very, very powerful. Imagine two scenarios: Scenario 1: Get $100,000 of funding. For whatever reason, you need a lot of money to get started. This could be for equipment, tools, clothes, staff, rent, salary, etc. Scenario 2: Fund-as-you-go, or funding through sales. You can start today, looking for a consulting customer, and you have everything you need (your brain, a phone, an email account, and thats it). Heres the thought I had this morning: Stopping a business that you have funded, with your own money or someone elses, is kind of hard.  Well, stopping it isnt hard, but what do you do about the $100,000 that you borrowed?  You could sell the stuff you bought, but you might not get dollar for dollar.  What if you have a basement full of stuff (like a heat press machine for  making custom designed shirts and hats and stuff), with a payment on them, or an investor that is expecting you to find customers and make sales that is hard to end. If you are funded through sales, then its easy to stop. You have no outbound financial obligations you just stop working. Take a few days off. Take a few months off. Perhaps pick it up next year no big deal.  And whats great about this? Its just as easy to start it up again as it is to stop it again. Im not saying to be fickle, but when we are taking about freeing and liberating, having a business that doesnt start out with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt is more flexible Pretty cool, huh? Funding Your Business Part II The Benefit of Self-Funding and Sales-Funding This week I wrote How much money do you need to start your new business?  In the comments, Kim write that it was a liberating post that helped free her mind of the layers of reasons why she couldnt start her own consulting business. This morning I had another thought kind of like a and another thing! that just came to me. Its a simple concept but very, very powerful. Imagine two scenarios: Scenario 1: Get $100,000 of funding. For whatever reason, you need a lot of money to get started. This could be for equipment, tools, clothes, staff, rent, salary, etc. Scenario 2: Fund-as-you-go, or funding through sales. You can start today, looking for a consulting customer, and you have everything you need (your brain, a phone, an email account, and thats it). Heres the thought I had this morning: Stopping a business that you have funded, with your own money or someone elses, is kind of hard.  Well, stopping it isnt hard, but what do you do about the $100,000 that you borrowed?  You could sell the stuff you bought, but you might not get dollar for dollar.  What if you have a basement full of stuff (like a heat press machine for  making custom designed shirts and hats and stuff), with a payment on them, or an investor that is expecting you to find customers and make sales that is hard to end. If you are funded through sales, then its easy to stop. You have no outbound financial obligations you just stop working. Take a few days off. Take a few months off. Perhaps pick it up next year no big deal.  And whats great about this? Its just as easy to start it up again as it is to stop it again. Im not saying to be fickle, but when we are taking about freeing and liberating, having a business that doesnt start out with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt is more flexible Pretty cool, huh?

4 Different Tools to Help Your Business Grow

4 Different Tools to Help Your Business Grow Today, when businesses talk about tools, they usually refer to conceptual tools; in other words, software. This is because these tools can make a huge difference in helping a small business grow. Since the list of possibilities is overwhelming, let’s confine ourselves to discuss the pros and cons of four popular tools that are commonly believed to progressively increase a company’s growth over time. 1. Payment Processors. Online transactions require merchants to handle multiple types of transactions. For this, they must appoint a third party to manage credit and debit card transaction associated with a diverse number of financial institutions. Additionally, since online businesses rarely just process money of a single currency but must be facile enough to convert from one currency to another, it’s necessary for a merchant to work with a  global payment processor. Pros: It is easy for the customers to buy online, regardless of time and location, and it is highly profitable for merchants to offer this service. If merchants relied on an obsolete transaction process, like asking customers to mail personal checks or money orders before they ship out merchandise, they would lose a large number of customers because a large number prefer the convenience of using a credit or debit card to secure their merchandise. In short, payment processors make buying and selling online a streamlined and efficient process. Cons:   Merchants must be highly selective in choosing a reputable provider to protect their own business as well as to protect their customers. Consequently, they should only work with a service that can provide features like fraud prevention, top-level security, intelligent payment routing, and subscription billing. 2. Website Builders Businesses that offer website building help people who are not tech savvy to create their own websites and blogs. Using drag-and-drop templates, users don’t have to know coding or the multiple features that have to be considered when designing a website. These services allow anyone to create a fully customized website. Pros: These website builders make it easy for anyone who desires a website, but can’t afford to hire a website developer or dont want to take the time to learn the technical skills necessary to create a website. Cons: While a website looks good, it has limited functionality compared to all the possibilities that a professionally designed website can offer. In other words, its functional, but not robust, and only superficially customizable. 3. Analytics software. Analytics software can help a website owner gather essential information about the performance of their business. It helps them to use individual data to understand aggregate data. For instance, it can provide information about how much traffic the website receives, the demographics of the target audience, and the keywords they used to find the website. Pros:  An analytics program can provide a website owner with metrics that will help them improve their business. Without this feedback, it’s difficult to understand how well or how poorly a website is performing. Without the ability to discern what’s working and what’s not working, a website owner would have to rely on guesswork to improve their business. Cons: The main drawback to analytic programs is that they can become overwhelming for someone who is not educated in how to use them properly. In order to get the most value from this software, a sufficient level of knowledge and experience is necessary. 4. Outsourcing job sites for technical skills A job site for freelance workers with different technical skills like graphics, video creation, web development, professional writing, etc, helps link up two different communities who would not otherwise find each other: employers and independent contract workers. Usually, the job site has an escrow and mediation system to make sure the integrity of the transactions. Pros: This is a simple system that benefits entrepreneurs looking to temporarily hire people with high technical skills, say building an e-commerce website or designing customized software and technically skilled people who can’t easily find project-based work on traditional job boards. Cons: Entrepreneurs could end up working with someone who is not as good as their profile suggested and get a poor return on their investment. Meanwhile, for independent contractors, such sites can often pay far less than if they found their own clients because numerous other freelancers tend to make offers below-market value pricing. The primary benefit of these four tools is that if used correctly they can help a small business overcome obstacles like limited time and manpower, a tight budget, and a high workload. However, as your business grows, you will want to use more specialized tools. For instance, if you are hosting a big event, you can benefit from using live interactive broadcasting.

Whats Worse than No Plan - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

What’s Worse than No Plan - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career There are times in life when it’s great to have no plan. Days at the beach, drives in the car, and if you are lucky … the time to be able to spend weeks exploring back roads at your leisure. Take advantage of those times while you can. However, for most people, they don’t last long. Ironically, many of those unplanned trips do in fact take a lot of planning. This is especially true as you get older and have mortgages to pay, pets to feed and more people and processes that require your time and attention. But, this post is not about accountability. This is a post about what happens when there are no actions associated with a plan. The simple answer is … usually nothing! Corollary: If your plan is to have no results then you can quickly check this off on your list (wait … that’s a plan doh!) When it comes to getting things done it’s much better to have a plan. A roadmap. A guideline. Whether it’s just a plan for yourself and especially if you have a whole crew of people counting on you. Having something to insure you and the team on board, and having something that can be measured against, is important. “If you dont know where you are going, any road will take you there”  ~Lewis Carroll What could be worse that having no plan? The only thing worse than having no plan is … having no actions. Action is Required … Or Else! Assigning actions to your plans is critical. It is an art to assign the right actions at the right time and to the right people (if there are others involved). Be prepared to spend the necessary time to think through all the implications of Action Assignments. There are a lot of factors that need to be considered and evaluated related to expertise, timing, availability of resources, how to measure success, and many other elements. One critical element to keep in mind is that plans are in constant motion â€" even if that motion is just the movement of time. If motion is not considered and accounted for the plan can fall victim to what Will Rogers said. “Even if youre on the right track, youll get run over if you just sit there.” ~ Will Rogers Why Have a Plan? Because if you don’t … not only will you never get anywhere, you wont even know you’ve never arrived. This might seem counter-intuitive, but the point is … A Plan without Action is just a dream. Planning without action is futile,  action without planning is fatal. A plan implies there will be actions. But, unless actions are assigned to tasks the plan is destined to fail. Show me a plan without actions and I’ll show you a happy coincidence Plans Have a Lifecycle Just like a homebuilder cannot build the roof before the foundation. Plans have a lifecycle and a logical flow for how things need to happen. Actions need to be tied to that flow. Architect your plans. Architect your actions. Very much like SMART Goal, plans and actions need to be time based too. They have a shelf life. They do go stale. Plan for Action. Caveats, Tips and Things to Look Out For: Just having a plan does not mean it’s a good plan. Sanity check the plan with various stakeholders and also with outsiders when possible. Your mentors are a good place to start. Share Your Plan Studies have shown that telling people is one more way to make yourself accountable and it gives others permission to check in on you. Expect to put in the work to think through the implications for each Action Assignment. Don’t get complacent with each accomplishment. Enjoy the moment and get ready for the next action. Plan For the Future, but not too far. Going out too far into the future with a plan can paralyze the process which defeats the purpose of assigning Actions to Plans. A goal is a dream with a deadline.  ~Napoleon Hill What’s your plan? Do you have one? More than one? Have you assigned specific actions to each step? How do you know when a plan has been successful? Author: Jeff   is a veteran in the Enterprise Content Management industry. Over the past 20 years he has worked with customers and partners to design, develop and deploy solutions around the world. Jeff is currently the Director of Strategic Alliances at Winshuttle. He has worked for Microsoft, FileNet (IBM), K2, Captaris, Open Text, Kofax and Kodak. He speaks and blogs about ECM and the Intersection between Social, Mobile and Cloud Computing Image Credit: will ockenden