Successful Blog

5 Things to Do BEFORE You Launch Your Business

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Congratulations! You’re ready to take the plunge, ditch the J-O-B, and pursue your dream of launching your own business. Chances are, you’ve spent a long time, perhaps even years, to reach this decision and set the wheels in motion. Before you propel down the path of entrepreneurship, consider these tips:

1. Save some money.

You’re going to need a chunk of change to invest in a variety of necessities. The costs you’ll face will vary based on the nature of your business but some typical costs most entrepreneurs face are advertising, insurance, rent, equipment, licenses, and legal fees. You should make a list of all the items (and prices) of what you think you’ll need. Undoubtedly other expenses will crop up. And if you are the main wage earner in your household, you’ll need cash set aside for living expenses for approximately 3-6 months. If you don’t have enough capital, you may want to consider applying for a business loan with a modest interest rate.

2. Decide on your niche and get to know your target market.

It can be tempting to grab any work that comes your way in the quest for new clients and the fact that the bills need to be paid. But most business owners claim as soon as they focused their niche, success followed. It’s important to find out who your current customers are, and why they buy your product or service. The best way to decide on who these people are is to make a list of the benefits that your product or service provides. Once you have this list you need to make a list of people who have problems that your benefit solves. Clients want to work with an “expert” and when you specialize, you position yourself as an expert. Chances are, your niche may change as your business evolves, but commit to at least one year. Remember to F.O.C.U.S.: Follow One Course Until Successful.

3. Create your marketing materials.

A website, logo, and business cards are the three essentials you need when launching your business. You don’t need to drop a bundle on a fancy website design when you’re first starting out. Forego the bells and whistles for a clean, error-free, navigable website. A company like Free Logo Services, can give you logo design ideas or help you create a look that’s professional and distinctive. Use this design to create a sharp business card can make you stand out when people are considering your business. Having a solid design on the card is crucial but you can’t forgo a great 2-line description on what your company does.

4. Get informed.

Knowledge is power: If you don’t have a degree or first-hand experience in your industry, don’t despair. Take online courses, download e-books, follow blogs, sign up for (and read) e-newsletters, join online groups, and educate yourself. There are many resources that small business have access too for free. The Small Business Administration offer many services for free to small business owners! Reaching out to your local office will get you access to free counseling and advice from professionals.

5. Design a roadmap for success.

Be crystal-clear on your goal for the first year. Develop 4-6 actionable objectives for your goal and then write out measurable tasks each month that will help you accomplish your objectives. Your work plan should address the following areas; Specific and concise goal, Measurement: how will your measure whether you achieve your goal, major problems anticipated, work steps: 3 or 4 essential steps and completion dates for them. Once you have written this out follow this roadmap! Revisit it monthly to assess your progress, make adjustments, and write new tasks for the upcoming month. Having an individual to help you be accountable to your goal and objectives is tremendously helpful. If you’re a solo-preneur, find a mentor/business coach/trusted friend to bounce ideas off of and provide mutual support.

You feel READY. Now you’re SET with these five tips. Before you GO, don’t forget about shifting your attitude. Becoming a business owner is vastly different from the life of an employee. You’ll gain autonomy over your schedule and freedom to make all the decisions…and there’s no one to blame but yourself when something goes wrong. Anticipate some setbacks, but believe you will succeed. Pour on the hard work with a mega-dose of patience, and.. Ready, set, go!

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Author’s Bio:
Dylan Mazeika is an online writer with a background in marketing and small business. He enjoys writing about the latest business and design trends, and assisting small business owners with logo design. Find him on twitter @dylan_mazeika

Thank you, Dylan!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Be Happy

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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You’re a hard-charging, forward-thinking, social entrepreneur master of the universe. But have you colored lately? Have you flown a kite? Have you read a novel?

No. Me neither.

Today’s post comes with a mission. If you accept, follow the steps below. Doctor’s orders.

  1. Take 15 minutes today and find a quiet, comfortable place. Turn off your phone, laptop, radio, etc.
  2. Close your eyes and picture your 12 year old self. School just let out and you just got home. You chucked your bookbag in the hallway, grabbed a snack, and you’re free.
  3. What are you going to do between now and dinner? Visualize as intensely as possible.
  4. Write down five things that came to your mind. Ride your bike? Curl up in your beanbag chair (don’t judge) and listen to music? Call your buddies and shoot some baskets?
  5. Now schedule time to do at least one of those activities this week. Schedule it. And while you’re doing the activity, you are not allowed to daydream about the TPS report or worry about how many Tweets you’ve missed. Simply revel in the joy of having fun.

As for me? You’ll find me in the hammock with the latest issue of Bon Appetit.

Would you like to share what your 12-year-old self was up to this week? I’d love it if you’d report back with your results in the comments.

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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 their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
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Begged, Borrowed, or Stolen … The Economics of Influence

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Asking for Influence Gets You Something Else

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Earlier this month I received a string of private, direct messages (DMs) on Twitter from someone who has never sent me a public or private via Twitter or other social network. She’s never sent me an email. I’m pretty sure she’s never commented on my blog or my Instagram photos. She’s not a shareholder on Empire Avenue. As far as I recall, we’ve not met me at a conference or had a conversation on the telephone. Our sole relationship is that she is a human being with a Twitter account who chose to follow me whom I chose to follow back because she has an interesting Twitter bio.

The first direct message asked me if I could “get out the vote” because she wanted to win some prize being given to the person who got the most votes. I don’t know anything about her beyond her Twitter bio. How could I ask my friends to “get out the vote”? The choice seemed simple choose for my friends and my network — by not asking them to invest time — or choose for someone I don’t know.

That’s when it got interesting. The string of messages that came next thanked me for my help and asked me for help again. One in the mix — most likely meant to explain the behavior said, “she was crazy for the prize,” but she’d be happy to get noticed even if she couldn’t “take it home.”

The experience reminded me of a wave of similar requests that flooded my Twitter account during the run of the Fast Company Influencer Project in 2010 and a blog post I wrote about influence back then. What follows with some further explanation is what still applies now.

Recently Jason Pollock commented on Twitter about the Fast Company Influencer Project Project @Jason_Pollack said, I signed up for the “influence project” but quickly realized those at the top were just being very spammy to be there.

Robert Scoble replied with some true words of wisdom … @Scobleizer said, “Seems to me @Jason_Pollock that people with real influence never have to point it out or beg for it.”

They have a point.

Begged, Borrowed, or Stolen … The Economics of Influence

People rich with influence understand it as a currency. True and lasting influence — like true and lasting wealth — is earned through investment of time and resources. But it’s also a way of thinking and valuing what we do and the people we do it with. But influence, unlike monetary currency, cannot be begged, borrowed, or stolen. It can only be earned.

When a stranger asks me to “get out the vote,” she’s begging to borrow my influence as if it’s a limitless commodity that I’m at liberty to share. Were I so frivolous as to offer my network so freely to people I don’t know, I’d soon find that I’d spent what influence I had foolishly by not valuing the people who had valued my word. Or to paraphrase the axiom …

A fool and her influence are soon parted. Here are four ways to use the economics of influence to build influence of your own.

The difference between begging and building influence is the difference between giving to get and investing wisely.

  • The exchange rate. In economics, influence would be a local currency. It’s value is only worth what your network agrees that it might be. The ideal is that you might take a single contact to move people to action. Contests that require millions of votes to choose a winner are an example of hyperinflation.

    Power up your network. Be willing to work to prove your value.

    How can you connect with the people who most represent what you value?

  • The production costs. Producing influence takes resources — spent in building quality relationships, systems to maintain them, content to keep connected with them, and ways to grow those relationships. True influence grows from aligning our goals with others.

    Share your influence as an equal partner.

    How can others be better because you helped?

  • Specialization. People rich with influence have integrated their passions and skills into their sphere of influence. They choose their networks on values and ethics and by doing so have established an automatic barrier to entry.

    Know and value what has drawn you to each and all of your contacts.

    How do you describe your network?

  • Scarcity: Supply and Demand. If oak leaves were currency. They would only be valuable where oak trees don’t grow. People who have influence choose and feel no need to showcase their influence bank account. Their generosity is from a place of strength. They promote what they value in others, not what they hope will return.

    Value your word and the power it has.

    How do you know what not to influence?

When we know the value of our influence, we can invest it wisely in people who invest back. We don’t give our value promiscuously to every person who asks. Influence is earned. It’s given as a trust and kept by those who understand its value. It can’t be begged, borrowed or stolen, and in like manner, it can’t be bought or sold.

Who influences you simply by the way he or she influences others?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

25 Secrets to Live and Work Intelligently from the Heart

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Dynamic Tension Is the Art

On Valentine’s Day, 2008, I wrote How to Write Intelligently from the Heart. It explored how to create the dynamic tension between structure and expression that makes our writing live on.

We can think and write. We can craft our sentences to be clever. We can make sure that each part is factually, structurally, grammatically correct. But clever and accurate only go so far in satisfying readers. If we want our writing to resonate long after, our words need to come from the heart.

As I read that post today, it leads me to think about the dynamic tension between head and heart that are part of any successful business and any successful life.

In the same way, our work needs to come from the heart.

How to Live and Work Intelligently from the Heart

We can think and plan life. We can think and plan a business. We can build brilliant business strategy and savvy life design. We can make sure we’re on budget, we manage our time, and delivering high ROI that sees to the needs of work, friends, and family. But savvy and brilliant only go so far. If we want build a lasting business inside a meaningful life we need our head hardwired to our heart.

Here are 25 secrets I’ve learned about living and working intelligently from the heart.

  1. Decide who you want to be and what you’re building. It’s not a process. It’s a decision. We don’t have enough future. See it and be it now.
  2. See it as a quest and a mission. Just having a goal keeps that vision and mission in our head. A quest is noble requires us to invest our heart. /li>
  3. If we don’t believe we’ll get there, We’ll give up as soon as it gets hard. No one else will believe in us either.
  4. When we align our mission with our values, we attract people who share them and want to help. Work and life get faster, simpler, and more meaningful.
  5. When we speak the hard intelligent truth gently from our hearts, we never regret it. When we don’t, we always wish we had.
  6. We can’t love and punish someone, anyone, in the same moment. See with intelligent love and you might be surprised with the response.
  7. Know what’s at the heart of the quest before building the campaign to move it forward. An idea still being formed by a heart won’t survive the plan being built by an intelligent brain. A brain can forget how that plan impacts the people we care about and who care about us.
  8. Make a heartfelt commitment to yourself. That’s how integrity starts. Integrity makes us safe, predictable, and easy to trust. Being trustworthy is intelligent.
  9. Except when a life is threatened, wanting to run fast is a signal to slow down. Knee jerk responses rarely deliver as we expect.
  10. The less time we have for the people we care about, the more that making time to be with them would do us good.
  11. When we want want to hold things tightest is when to let go … Holding something tightly is a sign of fear.
  12. When we most want the light to shine on us is the best time to let someone else go first.
  13. When we want anything we don’t need, it feels better to give something away.
  14. Whenever we feel righteous, we’re wrong. Righteous means angelic, godlike, and saintly. Taking that view is bad from the start.
  15. The universe does not need us to keep it going. The stars do all right without us.
  16. People are made of the same carbon stuff as stars. Even the humblest star shines. We should too.
  17. Everybody cries, but not everybody cares. The best people do both.
  18. We win ourselves when we choose our opinion of ourselves over what we want other people to think.
  19. Gratitude is a giving, gracious attitude given from strength. We never have enough gratitude, but we can be too needy.
  20. Every act of generosity goes both ways.
  21. Everyone wants to look forward to something and needs a safe place to stand. Remembering that can deliver it to us.
  22. Everybody gets lost sometimes, but most of us find our way home. Helping someone who wants to find their way is easy. Helping someone who doesn’t want to move is difficult.
  23. Life is about what things are worth, not what they cost.
  24. To know who we are all that we have to do is look at our friends.
  25. We can’t separate work from life. We’re spending the time of our life when we work. Trying to balance work and life is like trying to balance your head with your body can’t pull them apart.

People who live and work intelligently from the heart share the humanity of who they are. It’s the in the humanity that we connect to them with our minds and with our hearts. They have boundaries to structure their work and their lives but their hearts touch other people. And it shows in the way that their lives and their work are art. You see the intelligence from the heart in the thoughtful unexpected gesture at the moment it’s needed most, in the compassion and forgiveness offered by a human with strong sense of self, in the way they seem to breathe an intelligent heartfelt belief that people are meant to be all they are. Head and heart together make meaning in a way that intelligence alone cannot.

It’s the style, the color, and the light — the playful feeling that took skill and thought to express — that makes this photo more than a heart in a frame.

How do you recognize someone who lives and works intelligently from the heart?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Finding the Right Talent Mix For Your Start-Up Enterprise

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A Mixture of Key Personality Traits

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For the entrepreneur, the early months of developing a start-up are some of the most hectic and arduous: you need to secure financing, explore legal limitations, and forecast your financials for the years ahead. You need to take your idea and turn it into a product or a service, along the way keeping a close attention to quality, profitability, and logistics. You may even need to start thinking about your personal financial future; you may want to open an IRA, for example, or conversely consider how much of your funds you can afford to allocate to the venture.

Amidst all of this commotion, moreover, you find yourself in the position to make one of the most important decisions a new business can make – the decision of hiring employees, in the process surrounding yourself with the best talent possible designed to help your start-up grow.

While different businesses and different industries have a wide variety of talent needs, the most successful start-ups usually share several commonalities. They possess drive, motivated individuals. They hire people who are truly passionate about their work. And they assemble a diverse mixture of several key personality traits and personal attributes.

That last point is an oft-overlooked one. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who assembled a “Team of Rivals” in his Cabinet in order to maximize diversity and individual talents, few entrepreneurs hire their start-up team with such an outlook in mind. Don’t make this mistake if you’re starting a business, or plan to do so in the future. Instead, look to creative a mixture of the most important personality traits and personal attributes necessary to get a new company up and running. I believe that the most important of these are charisma, having a mathematical mind, creativity, and possessing the ability to network. Here’s a quick breakdown:

  1. Charisma: This person can be the face of your start-up and an excellent salesperson.
  2. Mathematical Mind: This person can oversee your budgets and all your financials. A good start-up doesn’t need a full accounting department – just one talented employee.
  3. Creativity: Whatever your product, this person is the one best equipped to turn it from an idea into a reality. They should be incredibly hard-working and driven.
  4. Ability to Network: Along with our charismatic leader, this employee has strong inter-personal skills. However, they operate more behind the scenes and use their connections and networking abilities to market the business and secure investors.

While you certainly may possess one of these traits, don’t lull yourself into thinking that you could do all of them better than a team of specialists can. To this end you want to diversify as you seek quality talent; even if you don’t end up with a team exactly like the one above, insure that a variety of strengths and capabilities are exhibited in your force. Your start-up’s long-term prospects will be much rosier as a result.

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Author’s Bio:
Alex S. writes about education and business at theeducationupdate.com

Thank you, Alex!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Be a Good Citizen

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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Like it or not, it’s political season in the United States. We must sort through the debates, talking heads, and town halls, and do our duty as citizens.

There are clear rules to being a good citizen of the US. Obey the law and vote, and you’re pretty much good. Throw in some volunteering, and that’s even better.

Online, in the social world, it’s a different story. Depending on where you are, the rules are different, and often unwritten. It can be tricky.

But don’t fear, I’m here to give you some simple tips that will keep you out of the Internet version of Turkish prison. We’ll cover Twitter and LinkedIn today:

Twitter

  • Fill out your bio – it’s the equivalent of politely introducing yourself.
  • Replace the “egg” with an avatar – you don’t walk around town with a mask on, do you?
  • Don’t use auto-direct messages – unless you’re getting hundreds of new followers every day, you can spare 5 minutes to send a personal greeting.
  • Don’t order people to “like” you on Facebook – need I say that this is rude?
  • Vary your stream – don’t just be all retweets, all quotes, all broadcast. Throw in some mentions, replies, original thoughts.
  • Don’t follow hundreds of people at once – it’s best to grow your following organically, over time. Get to know them first, then add more. Also, if your ratio of following to followers is way out of whack, you look desperate.
  • Help people – if you see a Tweet like, “can anyone recommend a good Chinese restaurant in Phoenix” and you know one, jump on it!

LinkedIn

  • Go in with a plan, are you open or not – if you decide to accept invitations from people you haven’t actually met, you are a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker); most people do not accept invitations from strangers, so tread carefully.
  • Be a contributor – when you first join a group, don’t make your first post a “promotion.”
  • Webinar spam – likewise, don’t make your first contribution a webinar announcement.
  • Don’t direct-link your Twitter stream to your activity stream – if I see you in both places, I want different content; come on, it’s not that much work!
  • Answer questions – go to the Answer section and help where you can; remember your manners and thank people who answer your questions as well.
  • Be generous with your recommendations – this falls into the “good karma” category. Spread your good recommendations where they’re appropriate, without expectations. Trust me, it’s good.

If you keep these guidelines in mind, you’re well on your way to being a solid social citizen. And don’t forget to vote.

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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 their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
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Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss