Business plan – write it down!

As much as you would want to do away with formalities and organization, a business plan is still best to follow. Basically, a business plan puts a “face” on your project and it makes everything official. As such, this will compel you to actually work and work at the things that will make your success chances bigger. These things include choosing the right product, knowing the people you’d want to work with, as well as studying the market conditions.

A business plan will help you detect both problems and opportunities in your market, lay down your goals and objectives, and create your financial framework. For example, you’d need to know how much to spend for manufacturing that’s good for a month or two. You’d also need to know where to get resources and materials as well as plan out your target sales for a given period. All this things shall guide you to learn how much working capital you’d need not only to put up your business but as well as to maintain it for the next five years or so.

You want to why risk is very important in marketing this article tells us why.

“What is it about entrepreneurs that enables them to live so far on the edge? Do they thrive on the adrenaline of risk-taking?” This made me think of another question that I frequently encounter when people find out that I love ice climbing: “How can you live with the risk? Do you actually enjoy flirting with death?”

I think that these are all the same question, founded on the same implicit but ill-founded assumption: that risk equates to danger. Now, I am not going to try and convince you that there aren’t people who do love the rush of throwing the dice—with their life or their bank account. But just because someone won a multimillion-dollar windfall by buying lottery tickets with their retirement fund, or survived running a treacherous river without any training, the fact is not altered that what they were doing was gambling, not investing. The end result is as unrepeatable as it can be inadvisable.

Calculated Risks

So if it’s not the thrill of gambling, what does distinguish the serial entrepreneur and the ice climber from the population at large? For a start, they understand the very clear distinction between risk and danger. Second, and—perhaps most importantly—they know that there are ways to approach an otherwise dangerous task in such a way that the risk is reduced to an acceptable level.

Why do entrepreneurs and ice climbers repeatedly prompt questions of flirting with death and disaster? My best guess is that a lack of familiarity prevents nonpractitioners from seeing what lies behind the surface: the serious and conscientious preparation that such people bring to their respective activities. To illustrate this, let me tell you a bit about ice climbing.

Essential Requirements

Anyone who has ever walked on a frozen lake, gone ice skating or tried curling knows that ice is slippery and that it takes practice to move with any kind of confidence. Now imagine that the ice sheet is vertical rather than horizontal. This should give you some sense of the challenge of ice-climbing. But then remember there are four things that the prepared ice-climber brings to the base of any climb: training, tools, fitness, and partner(s)

The need for training is pretty obvious. One has to know what one is doing. Just as you have to learn the rules of the road in order to drive on the freeway, the ice climber has to be educated about technique, the appropriate use of tools and procedures, reading the ice, and the evaluation of objective hazards.

Tools have improved significantly over the past decades. Strapped to one’s feet, in a manner not unlike roller-skates (but much more secure) are crampons. These have one or more long, sharp, surrogate toes that you can kick into the ice, thereby giving purchase to your feet. In each hand one has a short, curved, ice axe that is designed to enable one to smoothly drive the pick into the frozen water, thereby giving you something to hold onto. In the event that someone above knocks off some ice, one wears a helmet to protect the head. For protection in the event of a fall, one has a rope firmly tied to a harness around the waist. While ascending, the climber regularly sets a hollow titanium screw into the ice. This forms part of a system of running anchors.

The Element of Trust

This last point relates to the fact that the whole exercise is based on trust; trust in our training, our assessment of the situation, our tools, fitness, and—especially—our partner. You wouldn’t consent to being driven on the freeway by someone you didn’t trust, or who was impaired in one way or another. Nor would any reasonable person put their life in the hands of such a person in the mountains. Your partner is someone you trust with your life. Perhaps because of that, a partner is also the kind of person who makes the experience doubly enjoyable, being shared.

The lessons for business are simple: the four considerations employed by the ice climber are exactly the same as those used by the serial entrepreneur or the effective business person. Of course it could be argued that the rich scope of business constitutes a much more amorphous challenge than a frozen waterfall. But that makes it all the more rash to proceed without carefully considering the following:

Training: What, in fact are the skills that would best equip me to engage this problem? Are they evident in my team? If so, how do I hone them? If not, how do I bring them onboard?

Tools: What tools are relevant to the problem? What are the potentially useful processes, technologies or other instruments that might give me purchase and protection throughout the exercise?

Fitness: How does one prepare? How rusty are my skills? What would constitute a warm-up exercise, or a “preliminary heat” that would let me find out if I were ready for the game?

Partners: No matter how good you and your team are, in most significant cases you will need partners. Do you have the right ones? My approach in this is simple: Get the best. If you can’t, you might want to question the wisdom of proceeding. After all, if they aren’t working for you, they may be working for someone on the other side of the table.

Risk is not only not to be avoided, it is to be embraced—for survival.

Source

STEP UP!

Superiors and bosses love to have people in their organization who has the ability and the initiative to step up.

Stepping up is a great way to prove your superiors that you are reliable, professional, cooperative, and simply worthy of promotion.

By doing so, you may also discover how to maximize the use of your skills for the benefit of the company. Show everyone that you are versatile and that you are willing to do any task that would profit the whole corporation.

Also the more you do things, the more you will realize and enrich your capabilities.
Tell people about your value in actions not in words.

It is very common to see businesses spring one after the other and it is common that they fail simultaneously as well. The flourishing and dying of businesses have many reasons: tough competition, poor market, and so on. With the businesses that stay tough and thriving, it is common to think that the people behind these are born businessmen.

But are there really born businessmen or entrepreneurs? Born to do business? Born to have a successful business?

Like with all other things, you must assess yourself before you start doing anything. What are your skills? What are your capabilities? Best of all, what knowledge do you have and how much of it do you really know? Can you tell your own strengths and weaknesses? Do you have the willingness to work long hours to maintain your business? Do you have the willingness to actually devote time to build an enterprise? These questions will help you know what it is that you want and can actually do.

Be Noticed

Make yourself visible don’t be just some passive employee who just punches his time card everyday for his monthly salary. Show passion and dedication to work. However avoid feigning passion because your co-workers and superiors will just see it through. Develop passion and love for your work and do what you think needs to be done.

Try assessing for an unresolved problem within your company. And what method you can suggest or do to solve it that will highlight your skills and experience.

Think of how you can contribute to the immediate objectives of the team or department involved.

When you’ve come up with a plan, you can present it to your superiors.

With this they will notice that you are pro active and they will think you deserve a promotion.

To be continued…

Are you the type who just sits in a corner watching your colleagues achieve success in their careers while you yourself stagnate in your position?

You put everything in Lady Luck’s hands, and you wait for your so-called “break” which never seems to come.

Sorry to burst your bubble my friend, but in the real world promotion is not all pure luck, first you must have the necessary skills and abilities for the job, but more importantly you have to have a goal and the desire to reach it.

You shouldn’t just wait for the right opportunity because opportunities will not just show themselves to you.

You should make your own.

To be continued

There are diverse earnings that you can expect in this field, and it will depend on your specific job in the field. Tellers are the lowest paid people in the banking industry, but they still make around $8-11 per hour, and sometimes even more if they have been with the company for a long time. Secretaries and clerks can expect to make between $10-12 an hour, while bookkeepers and customer service reps make $11-13 per hour. If you are able to climb the ladder to become an administrative assistant or executive secretary, you will see a significant pay raise and will make probably between $15-17 per hour. Financial managers and loan officers usually make the most in the field, with loan officers making around $20 per hour and financial managers make about $30 per hour.

There are two ways wherein you can become optimistic in your job and put your conviction at work.One way is to visualize a job greater than what you have. While you may not be a CEO or not even a manager, imagine yourself to be at least a team leader. How would you settle possible problems that your company may encounter? It’s not so much of having an illusion of being THE top man but it’s more of putting yourself in a bigger responsibility in order to train yourself for the actual sense of duty that you will meet later on.Having this self-commitment to undertake a greater role, you will be able to open up a panorama of brilliant business ideas that are sure to contribute to your company’s success.The other way to put your commitment to work is through sharing of your imagination. Most of us are afraid to be deemed as eccentric or foolish upon having images in our heads. But little do we know that these kept images can be the genius that will change things positively. You just might have a “business intuition” that not anyone can realize in himself. Every company needs a business “artist” and eccentricity can be the key. Don’t be afraid to share your vision/s.As long as you know that you can make it work, hinting your associates about what you see can start things to get moving. Think of yourself as a “mission maker” – both to yourself and to your colleagues.

A Visionary in Action

To have the passion for a product or to be familiar with the industry is not enough. As in all businesses, you have to study it, research about it, and assess your competition.

The point here is that you must know who your market will be. You don’t need to be a scientist to research your market and you won’t even need to hire a market researcher whom you’ll end up paying thousands just for that simple task. For the most part, all you have to do is talk to your friends and they’ll talk to their relatives.

Chat up with your relatives and have their friends come over as well. You can also simply ask some random person on the street. Engage in small talks in the supermarkets or malls, as all the potential target consumers are all in those kinds of places. Ask them general questions that you can relate to the product you have in mind. It might be too informal to record but the spontaneity is what gives it its validity. Simple, but reliable research is what you have!

Who’s Your Market?

Sometimes we wonder what really drives us to do better, or at least what makes us do the things we do. There are a lot of reasons, but behind these reasons, there are always principles that determine the way we carry out our actions. It is very important that we know our values and that we are not uncertain to enact them. We may have all the goals in mind but if we don’t put value first, the end result won’t be what we expect. Putting value in everything that we do, especially in our work, would prove that there is more to just living life in the economic sense. Upholding values proves that we answer to a calling of survival and success that will last a lifetime.