A recent article at Inc. suggests that the easiest way to launch an e-business is not to have a great business plan but buy a website through a broker on which to launch it. I’d like to suggest that ‘easy’ is not a good route to business growth and that buying somebody else’s mistake is an unlikely way to achieve success.

Inc. suggested Ebiz brokers and eBay as the best places to find sites. There are more established locations to find sites for sale such as Flippa and Dalton’s Weekly

Looking at the ecommerce section of business brokers sites can also show up potential opportunities. UK brokers include:

Knightsbridge
Avondale.

Even if you can find a good site (and if they were going concerns with a good customer base why would they be on the open market, rather than brokering a goodwill deal with a competitor who can see their value?), there are inherent risks in this approach:

1.    The observable traffic on a site you purchase may have no value or even a negative value, if it’s not convertible
2.    Search engine rankings are fragile and Google, in particular is tough – if there are hidden dangers in the site you buy (cloaking, embedded automatic content generators, black hat blogging), stripping them out is costly and even when they’re gone, you’ll find yourself penalised by the Google algorithm
3.    The seller wont always give you the full story – it’s all very well asking questions but it’s quite another thing to get honest answers: when e-commerce fails, very few site owners are willing to own up to their mistakes in front of a buyer, even if they recognise them.

There aren’t any shortcuts to starting a successful online business. The business fundamentals have to be right

•    Products
•    Pricing
•    Promotion
•    Reaching the right customer base
•    Customer service.

If any of these are less than excellent, online customers find out quicker than any others, and spread their disillusion faster and wider than any others, using social media to inform a wide audience about your failure. They may be low barriers to entry in setting up an ecommerce business but without a clear strategy and unique selling proposition why will customers buy from a new online business?

If the fundamentals of the business are right, services like Volusion can help build a scalable online business. Volusion is an all in one software solution which already powers 30,000 online stores. It takes a lot of the headaches out of starting an online and, unlike many other solutions, it is targeted at UK merchants.

However if your aim is build the best possible online experience for your customers, starting from scratch with a bespoke website may not be the cheapest or easiest option but in the long run it still might be the best one.

How not to launch an e-business is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Google’s latest algorithms go after content farmers and bad online retailers Back in December, the Google algorithm was tweaked to deal...
2. How negativity can lead to business success There used to be a deeply offensive joke that did...
3. Real-Time Marketing and PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now This book is an exploration of value and speed. It’s...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This book is an exploration of value and speed. It’s like an equation in business physics – the businesses that learn to deliver value faster than others are the ones that gain market share and loyalty. Speed added to value provides competitive advantage in the internet age.

So how does it work?

Some people struggle with the insight and anecdote based approach that David Meerman Scott uses to take the reader through how people, and organisations, have coped (or failed) in using real-time opportunities to engage with the real world, in real time, by offering value rather than relying on a pre-determined PR formula.

From the Amazon reviews about it, there are people who complain about the anecdotal style Meerman Scott uses: that he doesn’t provide enough empirical detail; that the metrics just aren’t in the book.  And that’s precisely the problem that this book sets out to solve. You can’t operate in real time using a manual. You can’t know what’s going to come at you, and you can’t guess in advance how the world is going to change around you, and in relation to you.

A perfect example, and the most famous, is the ‘United Breaks Guitars’ saga. A musician whose guitar was broken by United Airlines became so disgusted by the way the different airports passed responsibility for his claim to each other, that he wrote a song about it and made a video. That video went viral on YouTube. Two associated businesses: Taylor Guitars and Carlton Cases, seized the real time opportunity to publicise the value of their products in relation to the video and gained market share as a result. United Airlines apparently lost $180 million by failing to respond to the story.

In a blog interview David Meerman Scott made a key point about the brutality of real-time marketing, “Losing control is the toughest principle. You have to let people talk about your organization in the way that they want to talk about it. You can’t complain that they didn’t use your key words”.

In other words, to succeed, a business has to take part in a real-time conversation, not control it, and that requires leadership.

So how does a business use social media, crowdsourcing, videos, mobile devices, media alerts and so on to deliver value in real time?

Meerman Scott offers a range of tactics to help organisations speed up their information gathering and shorten their response time, but over and over he makes the point that what successful real-time marketing requires is a new mind-set that accepts that action is outward facing and fast, not inward looking and risk-assessment based.There are many examples of how other businesses learned to listen to more voices, act more swiftly, make rapid course adjustments and demonstrate their core values in both success, and failure.  He also talks about how to drive real-time customer value through an organisation with zeal and enthusiasm.

The examples recognise the need for speed and agility, while helping readers to understand when process applies and when it needs to take a back seat to swift communication. Moving quickly at the right time is prioritised in customer-facing business areas, while ensuring core values remain integral to decision-making is seen as part of the strategic function of a management team committed to integrity of response when under pressure.

There are many obvious tips that businesses still ignore – Meerman Scott says a business should respond in the same medium that the challenge arrived in. So United Airlines should have made a video apologising to the musician and loaded it on YouTube. Insisting on using ‘formal channels’ means not being heard by the same audience who get to hear the bad stuff about your brand, company or product, so all efforts are wasted because you’re talking to people who hadn’t heard about the problem (but have now you’ve pointed it out) and ignoring those who had heard about it. In other words, you’re damaging your own brand.

Real-Time Marketing and PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. How negativity can lead to business success There used to be a deeply offensive joke that did...
2. Gift-Giving as Business Growth Trigger John Ruhlin of Ruhlin Promotion Group may be unusual in...
3. The language of business Charlie Mullins has been looking at the way that employers...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tech Cocktail pared down the guidance at Software Advice on the five top systems for start-ups looking at CRM, while a recent LinkedIn discussion on which CRM systems work best for start-ups pulled out some key features that mattered and why companies found themselves needing to upscale their CRM functionality. Interestingly, there was only one overlap in the systems that Software Advice ranked highly and LinkedIn discussants recommended to other entrepreneurs.

For Tech Cocktail and Software Advice the market leaders were:

Sage Act! Integrates with the Microsoft platform and has two levels, one for fewer than ten users, one for ten upwards. Its weakness is no partner management function, which matters to many start-ups at present.

Sugar has a key feature that will appeal to many – the community based version of Sugar is free! It’s also very basic, but for entrepreneurs new to CRM, it could be the easiest route to exploring the field, before committing to the paid version with many more functions.

Salestrakr is a sales-led CRM platform which imports contact data in almost any format, making it exceptionally flexible for companies with high contact volumes and a lot of networking activity.

Maximizer has a different feature appeal – mobile integration. In the Entrepreneur version, Mazimizer offers complete integration with mobiles, whether Blackberry, iPhone or Android, and then simple upgrading as the organisation grows.

The one system that appears to be popular with both software reviewers and CRM users is Infusionsoft – considered  ideal for start-ups and good as an introduction to CRM for small companies, although not so highly ranked by users on LinkedIn on its sales-led functionality

Highrise – based on the Basecamp project management platform, was praised by LinkedIn contributors for its simple interface and excellent automated reports, but was considered not so strong on sales-led functions. The overall view was that it might quite quickly become too limited in function for companies with a wide range of CRM activity.

Salesforce was considered to be powerful, web-based and have a wide range of functions. It’s a system that’s popular with businesses that have pipeline reporting needs and accounts in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. The downsides of Salesforce were twofold: it can take a while to get used to which can feel like a drag on performance and it might be viewed as costly compared to other systems.

Zoho operates like Salesforce, but is built on a business apps based platform so it’s cheaper (but even less intuitive for new users to find their way around). Those using Zoho praised its good functionality but commented on the longer-than-expected learning curve which seems to have frustrated several users.

What are the options for small businesses looking for a CRM System? is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. UK businesses face employment and finance hurdles This month has revealed the CBI’s newest analysis of the...
2. Growth businesses in 2011 IBISWorld Market Research has surveyed the global economy and picked...
3. Smart businesses have savvy social media… … but sometimes even the people who are supposed to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

From the Growing Business Awards through to the Queens Awards for Enterprise, taking in everything from awards for green business through to fast growth, social media use, family businesses or digital innovation, there are awards programmes that expose businesses to a rigorous analysis and reward those who ‘win’.

But what of those who don’t? Is it worth entering if you don’t scoop the top prize?

Yes, it is. For three reasons:

1.    The evaluation used by the judges helps a business to measure itself against the current and anticipated challenges in each category area. For a new enterprise in particular, but for businesses generally, this is an exposure to the likely threats to business growth as identified by international experts in that area of business – working through that assessment ‘future-proofs’ a business better than it could do alone.
2.    The scrutiny of your business will highlight weaknesses or areas of underdevelopment that could be holding the organisation back, so it gets a heavyweight consultancy on the impediments to business growth.
3.    Being exposed to a peer group of acknowledged leaders allows for sharing of information, networking and bench-marking – whether a business wins or loses the category, there are always new ideas, better systems or solutions to problems to absorb and utilise.

What’s also starting to emerge is that businesses that don’t get this kind of external competition may actually spin into hyper-competitive behaviour and poor decision-making. Donald C Langevoort’s study: Organizational Psychology of Hyper-Competition: Corporate Irresponsibility and the Lessons of Enron – suggests that when a culture of healthy competition isn’t properly established inside and outside an organisation, spiralling risk-taking can become ‘natural’ and, like subprime lending, it becomes normal for certain kinds of business to look at competition alone, not at the bottom line that being competitive delivers.

So the value of nominating your business for an award is not just about being the winner, it’s also an opportunity to learn from the best, to look at the future, and to see potential problems clearly and evidence from organisational psychology shows that a strong business thrives on organised, recognised and validated competitive structures.

Awards courtesy of Schipulites

Business Awards – in pursuit of excellence is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Radical reform of British business climate needed According to Simon Walker, who is taking over as Director...
2. Family Business – the future of SMEs? PricewaterhouseCoopers have just published a report that suggests over 20%...
3. How negativity can lead to business success There used to be a deeply offensive joke that did...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Many start-ups fail to thrive for reasons that couldn’t have been factored into the business plan but it’s equally true that the same mistakes are seen over and over again in business and there’s a point where an individual has to look at themselves and decide whether the problems are external or internal. Identifying mistakes is one thing, but where an innate trait, characteristic or behaviour in the entrepreneur is what causes the difficulties, it can definitely be considered a ‘sin’.

1.    Self-sufficiency – some businesses work as solo enterprises but most need to be scalable and if you don’t know how you’re going to grow your business without cloning yourself, you have committed to a life of hard labour with an unappreciative boss: yourself! It’s a better idea to build enough margin into your pricing to allow you to hire or outsource all the aspects of business that you don’t need to be doing, so that you have more face time with clients and more time to focus on business growth, problem-solving and networking.
2.    Product worship – being product-driven is a fast road to failure. It really doesn’t matter how good your product is, if the customer doesn’t want it. The history of product development is littered with excellent products that didn’t make it, and less good products (in the technical sense) that become world-leaders. Know what the customer wants, what they need, and what it takes to get what they want and need to them – so don’t just know the customer, be savvy about distribution.
3.    Neglect – most often seen in terms of legality, neglect also extends into business plans, accounting and hiring. It can be crippling to a good venture to indulge in neglect. When somebody mentions to you that you really ought to be thinking about ‘X’, make a note of it and ensure that ‘X’ is on your to do list in the next 30 days. Sometimes ‘X’ turns out to be not a problem, but if it’s a legal blunder that comes back to bite you in a year’s time, or a financial misstep that leads you into decades of scrutiny from the revenue services, you will spend time and money solving a problem that never needed to exist.
4.    Picking a tiny target – this is a sin that most entrepreneurs commit at some point, but a good business plan should reveal the problem long before it damages a growing business. Basically, if you’ve picked too small a niche for your business, growth will cease very quickly, either because your competitors have cornered all the space or because you expand to fill the niche and then find there’s nowhere else to go. Of course you might be happy being the big fish in a very small puddle, but it’s better to know that’s your potential future before you jump in and muddy the water.
5.    Playing the equals game – this one doesn’t look like a sin at all, but it’s a business destroyer all the same. If you have business partners, particularly if your business is a technical one and you all contribute to the intellectual property, it’s tempting (and often seems fair) to have equal shares in the ownership. In the longer term though, it’s unlikely that you’ll all agree on all aspects of business direction: you might want to put in different amounts of time to running the business, often people disagree about who should be hired; getting outside funding can cause major arguments as partners fight about the constraints imposed by the funder … it’s a recipe for business death and it’s unnecessary as long as you’ve had the foresight to decide which one of you will have the authority to make the tough decisions – and of course, that individual needs to have sufficient investment in the business to stay motivated when taking the flack from the other partners!
6.    Time-is-right-ism. This one’s incredibly common, not so much in start-ups as in potential start-ups and it’s important to be aware that there are many wannabe entrepreneurs out there who never get a business off the ground because they want a guarantee of success. They hone and perfect their business plan, obsessively research the opposition and craft their pitch until it’s awesome –but they never get to deliver it because they are too scared. For true entrepreneurs the leap of faith is the launch pad, but for ‘when the time is right’ entrepreneurs, it’s the point when they stop dead. So if you’re introduced to somebody who seems like the perfect business partner and they already have the perfect business plan, do some research of your own – you may find they’ve been here before, again and again, and they just never quite get started ….
7.    Overpaying for market share. It’s a classic mistake and probably most businesses make it at some time but habitually spending too much on advertising or offering incentives is certain death to a business. The answer is simple. Perform a rigorous assessment of the potential return. Test your assessment thoroughly. Ensure that you are unlikely to spend more money getting customers than selling to them. Enshrine your assessment as a rule so that as the business grows, anybody who has authority to spend money on customer acquisition knows how to measure the cost of advertising, incentives or promotions against the potential return.

Image courtesy of Euii-Brain

Seven Deadly Sins of Entrepreneurs is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Getting the right structure for business growth means establishing a leadership base before you need it so that as the organisation grows and you’re ready to take on employees, the operating system is equal to the demands of rapid growth:

1.    Vision – building your values into your vision seems essential, but for many entrepreneurs, taking their values for granted can lead to slippage if the business grows rapidly, and they are not able to ingrain their belief system and business ethics into each new employee. Make sure you have a vision document and that it lists values that you expect all employees to activate in their work day.
2.    Assessment – measuring the performance of individuals, and the organisation, against the vision and values is essential and can provide good guidance about the skills and activities that the company will need to integrate in years one to five of growth. This means there’s more opportunity to spot gaps in competence and to exploit opportunities.
3.    Enthusiasm – leaders have to lead and by embracing the core values of the organisation both emotionally and intellectually, an entrepreneur can drive and validate a company vision. It’s not enough to demand, leaders have to demonstrate: whether it’s excellent customer service or ruthless analysis of failing product lines, value-led behaviour comes from the top down.
4.    Goal orientation – the ability to articulate the outcomes a business, team or unit needs to achieve is crucial to creating an organisation that continually plans for, sets and achieves goals. Fuzzy business planning leads to diffuse outcomes and the inability to measure effectiveness at the key times when resources are allocated – for a start-up, getting resource allocation wrong can break an otherwise healthy business.
5.    Recognition – acknowledging success and creating the habit of generous and public recognition of outstanding performance, leads to a culture of excellence that can lead to exponential growth both in business and in the skills and capacities of individuals. Leaders can either turbo charge their teams or let them run at their own pace. Lance Armstrong in his autobiography It’s Not About the Bike suggests that leadership skills may be innate or learnt but that once they are established anywhere in a team, they become the main driver of performance, so a business leader who isn’t great at recognising and rewarding success needs a team member who can do that, or the whole organisation will suffer from sluggish development.

Lance Armstrong courtesy of AngusKingston

Five tips for start-up leadership is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Big Venture start-up funding The Big Venture Challenge will reward 25 UK-based social entrepreneurs...
2. Five tips to copy-cat your way to business success It’s not considered clever to be ‘late to the party’...
3. Six ways to benefit from the Bribery Act From next month, British-based firms of every size will be...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

It’s not considered clever to be ‘late to the party’ in business, but almost every business success is not a story of ground-breaking innovation but of location-choosing refinement.

Let’s look at some examples: there were several stores like Woolworths in the decade leading up to the first Woolworths store, and in fact the very first Woolworths, in New York, failed ten months after opening. The second, in Pennsylvania, was the flagship of a retail empire that spread worldwide. Google had a whole series of predecessors like Magellan and InfoSeek but now we think of it as being ‘the first’ search engine, just as we think of Facebook as the first social networking site (actually Friendster) and Hollywood as the first moving picture Mecca (actually Brighton)

So what did Woolworths, Facebook and Hollywood do?

1.    They were late movers: and that meant they could analyse the successes and failures of the pioneers, improving on the former and avoiding the latter. This means they avoided funding the learning curve and were able to invest in perfecting whatever already worked: they were quicker, smarter, more extensive, better laid-out and/or more fun than the originals they replaced.
2.    They were able to begin where others left off: instead of benchmarking against a bunch of other pioneers, all struggling to make way against unknown problems, copy-cats arrive in time to benchmark against best practice, so they start as high up the ladder as the pioneers have managed to get – this means they start with excellence as their benchmark
3.    Copy-cats benefited from not having to create a market. Even if an idea is the best thing ever, somebody has to teach people what it is, that they want it, and how to get it. That cost is non-recoverable because it’s not differentiated. This means anybody moving into a newly created market benefits from the original spend in educating the marketplace and can focus on making a niche from the broad market base. However well a front-runner does the job, latecomers will find it easier to differentiate themselves within the range of need than the front-runner did to establish need in the first place.
4.    They found ways to be quicker off the mark: the light was just as great in Brighton as in Hollywood, but Hollywood had an unlimited supply of ready labour of orange pickers and gold prospectors who were able to build sets and move equipment around so films could be made quicker, therefore more cheaply, and therefore flooded the market and won the distribution race.
5.    They learned their marketing from their predecessors – Woolworths made their staff wear white gloves so that shoppers could see how much care they took of their goods after watching staff in other stores wipe their hands on their aprons after handling dusty stock.

So there are many ways to be a better business by copy-cat behaviour, not least of which is the chance to get funding for a business idea that resembles something already being pioneered elsewhere, and learning from front-runners may be a better business strategy than most people think.

Gold-miners courtesy of RickC

Five tips to copy-cat your way to business success is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Management style and decision-making for business success The business world is changing fast, and management styles have...
2. How negativity can lead to business success There used to be a deeply offensive joke that did...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Kickstarter’s platform has got a lot of attention recently, as it exposes different forms of innovation: there’s the creative ideas that are seeking funding, and then there’s the way that the ideas are being funded – Kickstarter is a testing ground for ways to raise funds. The ideas that don’t get funded might be bad ideas, or they might be approaching funding in bad ways. Every entrepreneur can learn from the Kickstarter successes – and failures!

Funder fatigue

Some Kickstarter projects have had fantastic funding success, but increasing levels of unhappiness on social networks show that the same potential funders are getting hit, again and again, for funding and that they are becoming fed up with unsophisticated approaches from the website.

The problem is that if a product can’t communicate its values well, it’s doomed to failure, whether it’s a new toaster, a new band or a new b2b service. By this logic, failed Kickstarter campaigns are all about failing to convert potential audience to actual backers and that comes back to the classic question – how do you close the deal?

What potential Kickstarter funders resent

Being hit again and again (nagging)

If you hit the same potential funders as everybody else, you are likely to fail. First, they are probably recoiling from somebody else’s botched proposal or wrapped up in somebody else’s successful pitch – neither scenario bodes well for your approach. Second, even if they haven’t heard from you before, they will have heard from many others, quite a few of whom are like you – you’re competing with everybody for a little bit of something.

Alternative – what about asking other funding sources? It’s difficult to find new funding opportunities, but if you do, you’re likely to find a more receptive audience and one that is judging your idea and you, with a fresh perspective. And if you can’t find fresh funders, maybe you haven’t researched at depth? Consider whether you can ask potential funders to point you towards other funders – sometimes that request for a referral, rather than funding, has the paradoxical effect of getting you an enthusiastic hearing.

Unrealistic funding objectives/Padding of funding

Your potential funders should, and probably do, have a very clear idea what it takes to get a project/idea/business off the ground. When a funding request contains unrealistic amounts or unclear objectives big red distress flares go up for both seasoned dragons and enthusiastic friends and family.

Alternative – don’t just research your idea, research similar ideas and the costs entailed in getting them off the ground. If you can demonstrate the need for expenditure and that you’ve pared the unnecessary out of your approach, you stand a fair chance of getting funded.

Begging (last minute pleas and drama as the deadline approaches)

While deadlines add energy to business-based funding appeals, they can also lead to histrionic behaviour. Emails begging people to give £10 or $20 because if ‘fifty of you do, I can still make my dream come true’ sap the goodwill of the donor and make a nonsense of the project. The minute you ask for charity, you’re admitting that your business idea is an empty well down which you’re asking people to throw their hard-earned cash.

Alternative – set up the last minute first. Approach your last-step donors and get a commitment from them that if you get 80% of the money, they will give the final few % in the last seven days. Don’t rely on this cushion though, instead try to raise 100% and give yourself the last 7 days to go back to agreed funders and show them that your project is oversubscribed: a year or couple of years down the line, you can call on that cushion to expand your business or even fund another business idea.

New approaches photo by Office Now

Raising funds for business ideas is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. FundedApps: Turn ideas into cash Many of us think we have a great idea for...
2. Starting a business in a recession A serial entrepreneur, Jenn Hauser, offers five tips to starting...
3. Family Business – the future of SMEs? PricewaterhouseCoopers have just published a report that suggests over 20%...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

From the beginning of July there have been concerns expressed over the pace of the UK’s economic recovery after evidence that the manufacturing sector in Britain is growing at the slowest pace for nearly three years.  Ireland’s manufacturing industry is shrinking and the economic boom in China is also dropping in pace. While the UK is not reversing direction or even stagnating, the healthy expansion seen earlier in 2011 is definitely on the decline.

However, while the making of things might be dropping, the buying of things is still growing, as in the space in which things can be bought! The top ‘retail destinations’ in the UK – London, Glasgow and Birmingham are about to be joined by Leeds, where a vast circular shopping centre is under construction. As property developers continue to invest in massive retail parks and shopping centres, UK high streets are seen as being under threat and in decline. Many familiar names have vanished in the past two years: Woolworths, Jane Norman and Habitat from city centres and Focus DIY from out of town shopping parks. So what makes speculators confident that big shopping venues will continue to thrive?

Retail analysts believe that three forms of shopping will grow in the next few decades:
1.    Diversity shopping – shopping with added extras; shopping centres with open markets attached to them are proving particularly popular, especially if the markets have theme days such as ‘organic’ or ‘local’ or events like chocolate festivals, beer fests or Christmas fairs
2.    Super centres – the bigger the centre, the more scope it has for appealing to the entire family: shopping with bowling or trips to the cinema added in, dropping of the kids for swimming or karate lessons while you buy the groceries, or mall walks for senior citizens that finish with a cup of tea and biscuit in a café – all currently bringing in multi-generational shoppers on a daily basis
3.    Online retail – the biggest growth centre for many retailers has been online shopping: the recognition that customer service is key to good online retailing has changed the internet-based marketplace and driven standards up so that many online retailers have the same kind of reputation in virtual reality as high street shops once had through word of mouth.

The high street isn’t extinct, according to Anna Smee, director of business strategy at Hundred Consulting, rather it’s evolving, ‘… [it] has undergone a huge transformation in recent years, which is a result not just of the recession but the growing momentum of online shopping. We are seeing a shift back to specialist, often owner-managed retailers that offer a high level of personal service or an unusual mix of products that are not available in the big retail outlets on the outskirts of the UK’s towns and cities.’ And that could mean that the next Habitat or Woolworths will begin trading online, with a market stall that travels around big shopping centres, and builds a reputation for exceptional service before expanding through franchise or other entrepreneur-led systems to create a business empire based on an intensely personal experience for both shopper and shop-owner.

High street shopping courtesy of Maxwell Hamilton

Economic slow-downs around the world but shopping on the increase? is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A serial entrepreneur, Jenn Hauser, offers five tips to starting a new business over at Inc.com. A major insight into the entrepreneurial mind is the way that she constantly comes up with, and discards, business ideas – it’s not a ‘perfect idea for the rest of my business life’ approach but a constant thinking up and letting go of potential businesses.

Once an idea starts to take hold of her, she sets to work on it. But what does it mean to convert an idea to a viable start-up and how is it done? Her tips include:

1.    Take a step, any step – don’t allow an avalanche of planning to crash down on simple action. Whether you begin with sorting out financing, writing out a product description or checking out the competition, you’re making a start and any start leads organically into the process of business creation. It’s not so important where you begin, as that you begin.
2.    Keep it simple and forget perfect – here the message in the article is slightly confused, I think. What Hauser says is that you need to find the key point of the business idea and forget all the frills around the edges. It’s not always easy to pick out the key point though, and sometimes the frills are what makes all the difference – simplicity is great, as long as it doesn’t miss identifying the key advantage or USP that makes your business idea niche or viable if the marketplace is already crowded. Work out what’s key and forget perfection and you’ll have something to run with.
3.    Don’t reinvent the wheel – here Hauser is right on the money. Too many start-ups think they have to start everything from scratch. Look at what you can rent, lease, or use without starting from the ground up.
4.    Tell people you’re starting – of course, you don’t want to give away your great idea, concept or niche, but you don’t have to. You can simply talk about the process without talking about the ‘product’. As you talk to people you start to network – they know somebody who can help or who might be interested in what you’re doing. They offer their own experience, ask questions that help you refine your approach and maybe even suggest contacts or competitors for you to look at.
5.    Tell people what you need – Hauser suggests that when you’ve told people what you plan, you should tell them what you need – this is a good idea but it could, if you’re not careful, turn off your contacts. Don’t be needy. Say what you’ve already got before mentioning what would help. And remember that when somebody tells you what they are doing, you may be able to help them and should offer. Two way streets get more traffic!

It’s interesting to look at these start points in relation to a new study by the Kauffman Foundation that suggests American start-ups have fewer employees when they launch and stay smaller than before. ‘…businesses have been starting smaller and growing less for the last several years,’ said one of the researchers. It means that the job deficit is not being addressed by the start-ups in the way that it was before 2007 and that although the level of start-ups has held steady or even edged up since the recession, when including new employer businesses and newly self-employed workers, the research suggests it did not grow enough to generate the new jobs needed to support overall economic growth in the USA.

This may mean that more and more of us need to become entrepreneurs, running small enterprises even on a part-time basis, and that getting started may be the key to personal success and fulfilment as well as business and economic prosperity.

start-up diagram by dgray_xplane

Starting a business in a recession is a post from: On Internet Business

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Recession, Business and Thinking The deep recession that has been choking growth in many...
2. Developing and implementing business strategy Following on from the last post, a business needs to...
3. Scaling your business Robert Craven has an interesting think-piece in Real Business, exploring...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.