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4 Tips to Help Your Self Employed Dream Come True

What’s your personal passion?

What drives you crazy each and every time?

If you could change one thing in your immediate community, what would it be?

These are just some of the questions you should ask your self in order to start thinking about your entrepreneurship dreams.

If you are like me then you have been working in the corporate world or for the same employer for a very long time.In my case I’ve been with my employer for over six years, yet it seems like it was only yesterday that I started.

Despite being gainfully employed for over six years with the same employer, numerous promotions, more money and greater perks – I still dream of being fully self employed one day.

I actually really like working in Marketing,  but I equally enjoy being my own boss.  I hope to one day become a successful full time entrepreneur. Despite having two mini side businesses on the go – office cleaning company and a successful online blog – I’ve yet to take the leap to fully work for my self.

If you’re dreaming of becoming self employed and starting your own business you may want consider these four tips:

1. Target a Niche Market

In my early days schooling days in Marketing, there was heavy talk about focusing on niche marketing. Find that niche, and run with it.You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but rather find a need that would appeal to your niche market – whoever they might be. Robert Deluce started Porter Airlines, based out of Toronto’s island airport. His visions was simple – offer effective, short-haul, hassle free flying experience for travelers. Rather than going to the airport, and dealing with all the busyness, you can fly out of the island airport for a fraction of the price and avoid all the typical airport hassle.

2. Persistance is Key

It can take years before a business becomes profitable. Most businesses don’t make it past the first year – most throw in the towel and head back to the corporate world and the security of a guaranteed paycheck.

Starting a business, running one, and driving forward isn’t easy, and if anyone told you it was….well they lied.

The key to being successful is to never give up; there will be obstacles, setbacks and in some cases you’ll be on the brink of falling off the edge, but start up business owners will never have success if they give up.

3. Have a Vision

Many people want to open a business but opening just another business on the corner or just another location in a shopping mall won’t get people’s attention.  Having a solid vision is much more important, because let’s be honest – this world doesn’t need another business that already exists, and probably has been around for generations.

How will your business be different from the rest?

Devon Brooks (from Vancouver) opened a new concept of hair salons that offer blow dry’s only.  There are no haircuts and no hair coloring, just washes and blow dry’s. There are now 25 locations of her blow dry only concept hair salon (Blo Blow Dry Only) throughout Canada and the US.

4. Start Small – Think Big

Focus one day at a time. Starting a business is like a puzzle, you start at one end with a few pieces, and slowly over time you build the puzzle, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. Think of the steps you need to take to get your small business to where you want it to be? Where do you see your business headed in the future?  Think realistically about the growth of your small business, do you need employees? Where will you work from? Who are your target clients?

As a wise man once said to me: “Slow and steady wins the race”

Readers, are you still dreaming of starting your own business? What’s holding you back?

Cheers!

Eddie

 Photo Credit (caribb)

5 Common Money Management Mistakes Small Business Owners Make

Two of the most important aspects of of owning a small business is to keep personal spending and business spending separate, and the life line of your business is a healthy cash flow.

Cash-flow management and planning has helped keep my small cleaning business profitable every year since it opened in 2009.

Keeping on top of cash entering and leaving a business is the most basic yet crucial aspect of cash-flow success, but it’s often overlooked by many small businesses owners.

Most business owners wait until the end of the year to find out whether they are making money.There’s one problem though – Waiting until the end of the year is simply not good enough, because fixing problems at the end of the year is simply the wrong way of running a business, and instead problems need to be addressed along the way. And when year end arrives, there’s no worry on whether the business made money, lost it or broke even.

Liquidity is important to maintain the day-to-day operations. Your employees need to be paid, you need to pay your self, and new stock needs to be ordered, and without liquidity it’s a tough stretch.

Here are six common cash-flow errors and a few suggestions on how to avoid or fix them:

1. Not Paying Yourself

Often small business owners forget to pay them selves first, and if we think back to personal finance 101, the first basic aspect is paying your self first. Include a reasonable living wage for yourself in business and cash-flow planning. Planning ahead is essential, and if you go into a personal cash-flow crisis and need to pull cash out of the business, you’ve also created a business cash-flow crisis. That’s why you need to plan accordingly, so that you’re ready at the time of crisis.

2. Mismanaging Credit

How many times have you heard of a small business owner with maxed out credit? I’ve heard and know a few of them personally. They started their business, applied for credit (line of credit or credit-card), and a few months later the credit is maxed out because they went on a shopping spree.

As a small business owner you need to prearrange credit (such as lines of credit or cards) through financial institutions before you need it. You want to be proactive – if your cash flow is tight and you’re experiencing challenges, it will be more difficult for you to go to a bank and get it at the time when you need it the most. If using credit to defer cash outflow, ensure it’s paid back before high interest rates kick in – typically most business credit cards have a 21 day grace period.

Finally, please please please don’t make personal purchases with your business credit. Keep business and personal expenses separate or you’ll end up upside-down with personal and business debt.

3. No Reliable Cash Flow or Tracking System

Use special accounting software and online interactive tools that can help in cash-flow tracking and forecasting (i.e., what is likely to happen to a business over a day, month or year). For receivables, for instance, programs and online tools can send electronic invoices to clients with a link to a portal where bills can be paid online. If you have a company’s accountant, he or she should be providing the owner with information regularly. No information means no cash-flow management.

4. Neglecting the Bills

Just as much as you enjoy getting paid on time, so does everybody else. So, pay your taxes, suppliers, utilities and other bills on time to avoid interest charges and a bad reputation in the industry. Every supplier is different with their terms, some will give you 15 days, others 7 days, and some (very few these days) will give you 30 day terms. Use online programs to keep tabs for you on the due dates or possibly even setup pending payments.

Many companies are offering early-payment discounts, and why isn’t it worth while to get 5-10% knocked off your invoice for paying on time. If you can’t make a payment on time, have that conversation with vendors and let them know your situation, you’ll be amazed at how receptive people are to honesty, and making alternate arrangements.

5. Stagnant Growth

If your company is experiencing significant sales or expansion, update your cash-flow plan and projections to take the implications of growth into account. Businesses find cash flow comes under the biggest demand in rapid growth situations, which means you have to start funding more inventory, more receivables, higher expense levels. Experts say rapidly growing businesses can also benefit from hiring a special adviser, such as a chartered accountant, to aid in growth planning.

Final Thoughts

Being a small business owner online and offline requires tremendous planning, and money management. One aspect that always stuck with me was to keep my personal and business purchases separate. If you do this, you’re already half way there, and for those of you still trying to become effective at this, starting doing so now before it’s too late.

What were some of you money management mistakes? How did you handle them?

Cheers!

Eddie

Photo Credit (kenfagerdotcom)

Voip For Small Business

About 5 years ago, I expanded our business into an office location and brought on 4 staff. Being a life insurance brokerage working nationally, all 5 of us were on the phones all day long. Our phone bill had the potential to be a significant portion of the expenses of a growing business. My best estimate was about $2000+ per month in phone bills. By switching to Voip our monthly costs were frequently in the $250 range. Toll free number, ten lines with rollover, voice messaging and lots of Canada-wide calling, all included in that cost.

Are the saving starting to look worth it to you? I hope so, I believe you can realize almost 90% savings in your phone costs by switching your small business to Voip. The savings are realized in three ways:

  • You’ll pay $50-$75 per line for traditional phone systems. Plus an additional fee for rollovers between those lines, toll-free, voice mail, and call forwarding. This can easily add up to hundreds or thousands per month before you even pick up the phone. Compare to Voip where there are no real line fees and most of the features such as voice mail, call forwarding and conferencing are software driven and thus free. I currently pay $5 per month base cost for 5 lines with rollover and more features than I can use.
  • Long distance fees are reduced. I am currently paying 1 cent per minute for inbound toll-free calls and all my outbound calls. If I’m on the phone with someone in California for an hour, it costs me two quarters and a dime.
  • Equipment costs. While you will likely need new Voip telephones when you switch (figure $100-$150 per phone), the base system that runs all of this is normally done on some cheap computer you have lying around. And the software that controls all of this – again, free.

And because Voip phone systems are software driven, anything you can imagine can happen. Want to have an extension phone ring at your home or at an associate’s office across country? Voip phone systems will do this. Have unlimited local calling on your cell phone but expensive long distance? Call your office and route your cell phone back out through your voip system and now you’re getting long distance from your office, on your cell phone calls.

If the savings seem interesting but the technology seems overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. You will need a tech to set up the initial system, but it’s not that complicated – a local linux tech person can easily set up a small office Voip system in a few hours. And future control and maintenance you can do yourself, right through your browser. Allow me to show you an overview of the steps required to set this up and hopefully it’ll be a lot less intimidating.

What you’ll need:

  • an account with a Voip provider. I use unlimitel.ca and get 1 cent per minute phone calling, but there are other companies out there that are just as good.
  • A voip server. This is the computer that will plug into your network and connect your phones to the voip provider. The server consists of two things – a computer, and the Voip control software. For the computer, pretty much anything will work – an old PC gathering dust, an old laptop, whatever. You do not need fast or powerful for this at all, so a castoff computer is fine. I’ve used an old laptop in the past, I’m now using this: zotac computer. For the Voip control software there are a variety of options but the two most common are AsteriskNow and FreePBX. Both are similar, both are entirely free, just download, burn to a DVD and install on your cheap computer.
  • Voip phones. Unfortunately your old phones won’t work without modification. It’ll be easier to just buy new Voip phone handsets. For this there are two options. The first are to purchase actual Voip phone handsets. These are physical business phones with extensions, lines, hold buttons, all the standard business handset features. The second, less expensive option is a ‘soft phone’. A soft phone consists of a USB headset you can get at Staples for about $50, and some free soft phone software you run on your PC. The free software plus the USB headset plugged into your desktop PC effectively turn your PC into an extension. Put your headset on and dial using your mouse on your screen. Either way works, it’s up to you what type of system you prefer.

I’m going to provide only broad setup steps as I do recommend you bring in a tech to do the setup, so broad steps are all you’ll need. Here’s the basic steps:

  • Get an account with a Voip provider (again, I use unlimitel.ca). They’ll give you your userid and password for your account.
  • Download AsteriskNow or FreePBX.
  • Plug your Voip phone into your network, or install ‘softphone’ software on your PC and add in a USB headset.
  • Your tech will install AsteriskNow or FreePBX on your Voip server. During the setup they’ll also connect in your extensions/Voip phones, secure the your router/firewall, and use the userid and password from your provider to connect to them. The Voip server gets plugged into your computer network and connects your new Voip phones to your Voip provider.

That’s it – you should now be able to pick up your phone and start making calls! And saving huge amounts of money. Going forward, with a quick tutorial from your tech, you should be able to change music on hold, do call forwarding, call conferencing, and everything else you want to do all through your browser on your PC.

One more cool thing with Voip. Because your phone system is now terminated at that voip server you built, your phones will ring anywhere you have that plugged into an internet connection. That means that if you want to move locations there are no phone techs involved, no cost, and no downtime. You simply power down the Voip computer at your old location, drive to the new location and plug it in – voila! Your phones are ringing at your new location. If you have high-speed internet at your cottage, there’s nothing stopping you from taking your business phones with you on vacation and then back home with you again when you return.

Glenn Cooke is president of Life Insurance Canada.com and has been using Voip in his office for 5 years.

Photo Credits (ari, 46145831@N00)