Step-by-Step Entrepreneurial Learning

Step-by-Step Entrepreneurial Learning

The Right Lesson for The Right Business Need

Thanks to continued economic uncertainty and sustained high unemployment, many individuals are turning to self-employment and launching a small business venture as the preferred career choice. The good news is that there are proven approaches to both of these pursuits. The key to success is to follow a process of venture development that has worked for decades. Depending on your interest and personal situation, below are four options to venture development. Each includes step-by-step learning techniques, customizable worksheets and real-world references to support your immediately incorporating what you learn into your real life situation.

• 4-Steps to Career Focus: Discover how Who You Are fits with What You Do for a living “naturally!”
• 5-Steps to Self-Employment: Learn what it takes, whether it will sell, how much money you’ll make and how to launch your own self-employment venture.
• 10-Steps to Venture Launch: Follow ten interactive steps for launching a profitable small business venture.
• 12-Steps to Venture Growth: Develop skills, knowledge and 12 core business management systems to support growth and profitability.

8-Tips to Successful Business Launch

8-Tips to Successful Business Launch

When You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail

Starting and running a profitable business is not rocket science. The #1 reason many people fail is they fail to follow a well-established business development process. Below are 8 tips to business development that, when followed with purpose, will significantly advance your chances for success:

• Test the Waters: Close a sale. While this is not possible for all venture offerings, making a sale validates your business idea on multiple levels, such as who will buy, why they buy, what they’ll pay, how much it costs and how much you’ll make.
• Research, Research, Research: Surf the Web or shop the competition to learn how similar businesses define, price, market and sell their offerings. LIttle is new. Take advantage of what works.
• Connect With a Mentor: There are over 33,000 “volunteer” business mentors in the U.S. offering no-cost experience on-call. Make one of them your trusted advisor.
• Write Your Own Business Plan: While a mentor can help, your ideas, time, hard work, learning and focus are the keys to success.
• Fund Innovatively: Banks are rarely lending these days. Get creative. Will customers invest or prepay? Is joining forces an option where you have “x,” they have “y” and together you’re better off? Is contracting for a service versus buying equipment an option?
• Recordkeeping: Secure reliable expertise and easy-to-use templates to understand and maintain breakeven, forecasting, cash flow and bookkeeping records. Business success lies in the details of managing the numbers.
• Defeat Fear Through Knowledge: Asking for the sale is scary. Maintaining financial records can be intimidating. Investing in your future is risky. Yet millions of people just like you are doing this every day with success. Tap no-cost business assistance networks to learn how you can do it too.
• Focus, Focus, Focus. Profitability is the first objective in business. Focus on a sales cycle where revenues exceed expenses. Refine and repeat this process before starting something new.

Like most things in life, the more purposefully you engage, the more likely you’ll get the results you seek. Good luck!

Title: 21st Century Funding for Small Business

21st Century Funding for Small Business

Thinking Out of the Box and Into the Clouds

Over two years of cancelled credit lines, called business loans and little to no new business funding has people getting creative about funding new and growing ventures! If you think they have their heads in clouds, you are correct!

Cloud Funding, also referred to as social funding or crowd source capital, is a new and fast-growing practice that involves leveraging social media to fund business initiatives. Unlike traditional funding approaches, money raised through Cloud Funding is not paid back, does not require collateral/guarantees, and there’s no giving up equity or control. Sources include Spot.Us, IndieGoGo, RocketHub, Funding4Learning, Invested.In, Kickstarter, Pledge Music and SellaBand. There are terms and conditions, however, and different sources focus on different industries. Learn more about the pros and cons.