Successful Blog

Setting Up Your Business for Long-Term Success

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Robert Cordray

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Setting Up Your Business for Long-Term Success

Start-up business owners learn two things very quickly. First, the idea that launches an entrepreneurship is invaluable. The seed of a business, or the initial idea, provides a source of motivation and initial direction.

However, the second notion often comes as an unpleasant discovery. The grand idea by itself is not enough to sustain long-term growth and success. No matter how great the business idea is, many other factors influence success and determine whether a business will flourish or fail.

The key to being successful in business is learning to make good business decisions. While success cannot be guaranteed, you can start your business with attention to a few important areas and increase your chances of achieving your goals.

Avoid the most common missteps entrepreneurs tend to make by following these suggestions:

Have a Business Plan

A business plan is an opportunity for business owners to understand their market, as it relates to their product or service, and map out their capabilities. Compiling a thorough business plan requires a bit of effort, but as it will serve as a guideline for your financial expectations and keep you on track, it is an essential part of any new business.

The business plan will also help you in the key area of setting realistic goals for when you will achieve profitability. Know how much time, effort and capital it will reasonably take to reach your goal of being profitable. Conservatively scaling your expectations to match reality will keep you on track and save you from disappointment if your hopes of becoming an overnight success are not realized.

Balance Your Capital

Having enough capital to launch your business is crucial, but you will want to avoid the mistake of taking on sizable loans at the outset. Use your business plan to ensure you have enough resources to see you through until you achieve profitability.

Understand Your Market

As a new business owner, you need to understand who your customers are. How large is your market? Who are your competitors? You will need to know what alternatives to your business are already available to consumers or if you are creating a new market. This will help you in your decisions on strategy.

Choose a Go-to Market Strategy

Having a focus on one strategy for your business will enable you to market your business effectively. Without a focus, you are likely to flounder, but attempting to pursue multiple strategies at once will also doom you to failure. Understand your business and choose one as your goal.

In general, there are three go-to market strategies that businesses use. The first is a focus on operational excellence. These businesses emphasize efficiency in their processes to lower their costs and provide consistency to a wide range of customers.

Another strategy is to develop customer intimacy by establishing strong relationships and fostering repeat business through customer care.

Third, businesses can seek an advantage through product innovation. This aspect depends upon the creation of a new and desirable product or service and founding a business where there are little to no existing competitors. This may be the most difficult of the three for a new entrepreneur to achieve.

Build an Effective Team

The path to becoming a successful entrepreneur should not be a lonely journey. Many businesses fail because the owner tried to manage too many decisions and responsibilities that could have been delegated to others. Find good support for your business such as those you can trust with general tasks while you focus on your role as an executive.

Seeking advice will be necessary, and finding a reliable source for information and direction may seem intimidating. However, there are several people who specialize in guidance and helping entrepreneurs maintain their focus. Through their services, you can rest assured that your business will profit from your well-directed efforts.

Author’s Bio:

Robert Cordray writes about business, entrepreneurship, and living better at noomii.com. He has acquired over 20 years of entrepreneurship and business consulting. You can find him on Twitter @RobertCordray

3 Ways Successful Women Entrepreneurs Apply Work Ethic

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Katie Donnelly

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Women Entrepreneurs and Work Ethic

There’s a lot we can learn from successful women entrepreneurs. Although there are many routes toward becoming a successful business woman and supporting workplace diversity, one thing all top entrepreneurs have in common: a tireless work ethic. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.”

3 Ways Successful Women Entrepreneurs Apply Work Ethic

Here are 3 lessons we can all learn from successful woman entrepreneurs who know how to apply a strong work ethic to achieve their goals.

Take initiative and follow through.

A 2011 Zenger Folkman study that surveyed 7,280 leaders across a wide range of successful organizations found that women excel in many leadership categories, outperforming men much of the time. In fact, the two categories in which women outscored men most dramatically were taking initiative and driving for results. It should come as no surprise that taking initiative pays off. Women entrepreneurs do not wait around for a lucky break to come to them. They identify opportunities, take initiative and follow through to achieve their goals.

Do whatever it takes.

To make it to the top, you will have to put in long hours. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer used to put in 130-hour workweeks at Google, including regular all-nighters in which she slept under her desk. She managed to avoid burnout by being invested in — and keeping a positive attitude toward — her work. As she told Joseph Walker, “I don’t really believe in burnout. A lot of people work really hard for decades and decades, like Winston Churchill and Einstein . . . Burnout is about resentment. It’s about knowing what matters to you so much that if you don’t get it that you’re resentful.”

In addition to putting in long hours, sometimes entrepreneurs have to be willing to do work that no one else wants to do. Especially when you are first starting out, you will probably have to put in some grunt work before you can move up.

Practice self-development.

Finally, always be willing to practice self-development: women who are always looking for ways to improve have an advantage in business. The Zenger Folkman study also found that women were more likely than men to seek out personal and professional development. Katy Cowan, who runs the PR agency Boomerang and founded the online community Creative Boom, identifies a “willingness to learn” as one of the “top ten traits of successful, creative businesswomen.” She writes:

You cannot rest on your laurels when you run your own business. The creative industries are always changing, so you will constantly need to keep up and innovate. Successful female entrepreneurs know this and will work hard to learn and improve all the time. They’ll read books, go to workshops and be willing to learn from others.

There is no secret recipe to becoming a successful female entrepreneur. However, this combination of working hard, putting in the time and always being willing to learn something new has propelled plenty of women to the top.

Author’s Bio:
Katie Donnelly is a freelance writer in Philadelphia, who wrote this post on behalf of Navex Global, a leading provider in ethics and diversity training in the workplace.

Thank you for adding to the conversation!

Know lots of things

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Rosemary O’Neill

Know lots of things

Intellectual curiosity is a hugely valuable asset for entrepreneurs and small business owners alike. Stoking the fires of learning should be a lifelong, never-ending quest, and the input to your brain should be much more than just a steady stream of blog posts and Pinterest photos.

Last night, I was working on the NYTimes crossword puzzle (on my iPad—I’ve finally given up my beloved paper copy) when my 8 year old son came over and asked me what I was doing.

As I was explaining how crossword puzzles work, I realized that the fundamental skill for doing a crossword is to know a little bit about a lot of things. Random opera characters, book titles, TV shows from the 50’s, words from your Barron’s vocabulary tests in 8th grade, all of these things lay the groundwork for being able to solve the puzzle.

The conversation with my son left me wondering whether, in this age of immersion in blogs, rapid-fire videos, and Tweets, we are going to lose the ability to do the New York Times crossword.

Are we going to lose our broad curiosity about things that don’t relate to Facebook or smartphones? Does that also hinder our ability to patiently noodle through complex problems with multiple layers of connection?

Our challenge in 2012 is finding the long, difficult knowledge rather than the quick hit. Let’s make sure that we still listen to a full length symphony, read War and Peace, visit the Louvre. And let’s not stopping doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. In ink.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Improve Integration & Communication in Your SMB with Document Management

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Samantha McCollough

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Improve Integration & Communication in Your SMB with Document Management

According to a research report by Solgenia, the amount of unstructured data and the volume of documents is growing more than 30% per year within small and medium-sized businesses. So it is not surprising that over 60% of SMB’s have adopted document management of some kind. Unfortunately, these companies are often missing greater opportunities for integration and communication that this technology provides.

This research should be a wake-up call for small business owners who think document management software is only for larger corporations. Rowe stated that big statistics make a good impression, but there’s no telling the size of each digital document project. Many companies may have great document management programs but are not properly trained on it or perhaps haven’t integrated it well enough.

“Almost one-quarter of the companies in the SMB category are researching new document management technologies,” Rowe said. “Major consideration is being given to collaboration tools and automation. Collaboration is important because of the traditional silos of information that make sharing difficult. It prevents information accessibility to various departments that own a portion of the business process. It can take a long time to gain access to some of those silos.”

Document management can-and should-be more than just a document repository. But too often SMB’s lack the knowledge or skills to take full use of the software. Many companies are not fully aware of the hidden benefits such a system can provide. A common problem is a lack of tight integration with other systems, so collaboration, communication and workflow all suffer.

The key to improving integration and communication is to properly define your processes before implementation, connect the workflow across the organization and separate systems and choose a solution that will be powerful enough to achieve this but simple and flexible enough to be managed. Training is also key, if employees aren’t utilizing the system or are finding ways around it, then the company will not realize the benefits associated with the system.

Author’s Bio:
Samantha McCollough write about business and technology at http://www.idatix.com. You can find her on twitter @smccollo.

Social Media Decoded for Small Business Owners

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Kenneth Javellana

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Social Media Decoded for Small Business Owners

Every small business has a chance to become a bigger fish in a bigger pond, but this opportunity is always tied in with your ability to take full advantage of social media. Unlike other marketing platforms, social media consists of numerous ways to advertise about your business effectively but without paying a single penny for such services. More importantly, social media is a platform in which you rarely require third party services like an advertising firm or a marketing consultant to create and handle your company’s online marketing campaign. Social media is yours to conquer but only if you are willing to work hard at learning its fundamental principles and continuously hone the skills required by online marketing.

Always have a specific goal in mind.

When people talk about social media, you often hear people say it’s incredibly important to be “creative” and “unique”. That’s all well and good, but at the end of the day, social media marketing is still about making money. You still need to establish goals that would result into higher profit margins. As such, the same principles for goal setting still apply. The best goals are still SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

Prepare a solid foundation.

At present, every small business should have a consistently active account on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Having your own private-domain website and blog are also critical components of the foundation of your social media campaign.

Be where your market is.

You also hear a lot of people saying that Facebook should be the hub of your social media campaign. That may be true for most markets, but it’s not always so. In the end, you should focus on the websites which your target market spends most of its time in. Are they really active on Facebook or do they prefer LinkedIn?

Knowing which websites your target market frequents allows you to allocate your time and resources more effectively. Of course, this does not mean you should ignore other aspects of your social media campaign. Rather, it just helps make your priorities clear.

Make good use of feedback.

Feedback is incredibly important in social media. It’s the best basis for determining whether a particular technique is successful or not. You can create opportunities for receiving feedback by inviting readers to comment on your posts or email you their opinions. As for unsolicited feedback, you can configure search settings of Google so that it will notify you every time the name of your business crops up in the Internet.

Prioritize quality over quantity.

It’s been said over and over again, but it’s remarkable how so many small business owners still ignore this all-important social media tip. If you want your presence to matter online, then you need to give people a very good reason to follow you on Twitter, like your page on Facebook, and link to your website or blog. For that to happen, you need to consistently provide them with high-quality posts instead of simply maintaining a specific number of posts each week.

Social media success is ultimately dependent on the consistency of your efforts. As such, it is important that you spend as much time online as needed. For this to happen, you may want to contact a broadband expert about upgrading your current Internet service plan.

Author’s Bio:
Kenneth Javellana is a writer on technology, lifestyle and businesses at Broadband Expert. During his free time, Kenneth writes for relevant blogs in order to share his ideas on his favorite niches.

How to Choose an SEO Agency for Your Business

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Brian Taylor

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How to Choose an SEO Agency for Your Business

Well-optimized, effective websites aren’t just for Fortune 500 companies and tech companies anymore. Now more than ever, it’s important for small business owners to fully understand just how beneficial a successfully executed website can be for them as well.

In order to make your website successful, you need to make sure it’s fully search engine optimized and unless you’re an SEO expert yourself, you’ll no doubt want to hire a team of experts to help you get the job done right. Here’s how to make sure the experience goes as pleasantly as possible.

Have Faith in the Professionals You Choose

As is the case with hiring any other team of professionals to help you with your business, trust is an extremely important factor in your relationship with your SEO team. Once you’ve chosen the right professionals for the job, it’s important to have faith in their ability to do the job right and deliver you the results they promised. Avoid micromanaging and nagging at all costs.

Be Patient

Even once a given SEO strategy has been formulated and officially set in motion, it still takes time for the changes to yield results. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all! The SEO agency you’re working with most likely gave you an estimate as far as how long it would take for you to start to notice results. Definitely give it that much time to work and take root.

Treat Your SEO Agency as a Partner

When working with any SEO agency, it’s of the utmost importance that you treat them as the partners they are. These are trained experts who know their craft just as well as you know yours, so they should be treated as equals working toward a common goal. Be professional in your communications and realistic in your expectations. Definitely address questions or concerns politely and with respect.

Pay for Quality Work

The SEO agency you hire to help you make the most of your website is made up of qualified business professionals that are doing what they do for the same reasons you are – because it’s their profession. As such, they expect to collect payment for services rendered according to their terms of service. Respect and adhere to the company’s business terms and be sure to pay them promptly for good services rendered. Always be sure to hold up your end of your business contract in every way, shape, and form as well.

Teaming up with an SEO agency in order to get results that deliver for you is simple when you follow a few simple guidelines.

Author’s Bio:
Brian Taylor is the VP, Business Development at Forix SEO in Portland, OR. a team of crack SEO experts with an impressive record when it comes to results, experience, and expertise. Forix offers affordable and ethical SEO services in Portland helping small businesses with their Internet marketing needs.