Your Small Business

Check out the website www.linkedin.com. This is a great tool that allows you to network with people online. You start out by creating your profile and then inviting people that you know into your network.

As your network grows you have more people that you can contact for help, find people who can vouch for you and your work, build and maintain relationships and keep up with friends and Colleagues.

My wife recently picked up the four Tom Peters Essentials pocket books. The include, Talent, Leadership, Designs, and Trends.

I am reading Talent right now. He is basically taking the messages from his book Re-Imagine Breaking down the message from his bestselling book Re-Imagine! These are great inspirational books to get you excited and thinking about the current state of business.

Tom Peters is great at getting you thinking about business in a new way and helps shake some of the old thought patterns out of you mind.

New books on business are being published all the time. To help me keep up with them I use the Business Book Club, the best part is it’s free.

Each week a new business book is chosen and you receive an e-mail everyday with an excerpt from the book. During the week you typically get through the first couple of chapters. Based on this information you can decide if it is something that you want to read or not. It has been great to be introduced to books that I would otherwise have not been introduced to. Here is a link to the website where you can sign up, http://www.emailbookclub.com/book/subusiness.html.

One of the safest ways to get started in owning your own business is to buy a franchise. Buying a franchise is not for everyone, so how do you know if it is for you? Well the folks at The International Franchise Association offers a free online class on the basics of franchising. Check the course out at http://www.ifa-university.com/courses/ilviewer.cfm?course=IFA01&begin_uni=y&dcode=.

This course will help answer all of your questions at franchising. There are great lessons on the benefits and the challenges of this type of business.

Feel free to post any questions.

When starting a business sometimes it is hard to know where to begin. One of the first things that you need is a business plan. Your business plan is critical for many reasons, especially when trying to obtain financing.

The Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) has a great resource on their web site, www.score.org, it is a list of free templates for your business. They offer more that a dozen templates to help you get started, two of the templates are for business plans.

While there take a look at all of the great resources available. When you are ready to the plunge do not hesitate to contact your local Scores office, they are a great help.

If you have been thinking about starting your own business, check out www.sba.gov/starting_business/index.html.

The Small Business Administration has an incredible amount of information available. The section on starting your own business is great, it has sections to help you know if you are ready to take this big step, business planning, financing, marketing, taxes, legal and many others.

If you are serious about this, take the time to educate yourself. All of the time spent reading, listening to others, and planning is time well spent. Take the time to sign up for some of the free online classes that are offer at www.sba.gov/training/courses.html. There are some very basic classes on subjects such as writing a business plan and a basic checklist for starting your business.

Good luck and feel free to post any questions.

This weekend I was talking with someone who has been successful in running their own business. He asked me how the first year and a half had been and I told him that it had been a great learning experience. We have worked hard and made some progress and we had made mistakes and suffered a few set backs. However, the most important thing was that we had learned from our success and failures. Changes are constantly being made to reflect what we are learning.

He said that one of the keys to long term success in business is to constantly make base hits. Businesses that have been around along time typically provide the customer with a good product or service consistently over the long haul. They are always looking for ways to improve on what they know and already do well. These businesses do not rest on past performance but are building on the base that is already there.

Sometimes these companies will introduce a completely new product or service but only after they have done their research. But they will not risk the entire company on it, only what they can afford to lose.

Of course there will always be exceptions to this, someone will risk it all and hit that home run and make it big. But it is unlikely that they will have the staying power to be there at the end.

Just get out there, work hard and keep building on what is working and most likely you will be successful!