When you have a good business idea the money never is a problem because if you know to sell it you will always find someone who wants to invest in it.

But like everything in life, business ideas have to be sell.

In an interesting article in Cnn Money , they recommend that we should divide their work into two parts:

1. Preparation of business analysis that will present to potential investors and,

2. The creation of an adequate social network that allows me to reach potential investors to which I will sell my business ideas.

In the interview with the potential investor one must be prepared to answer the following questions:

• 1. Who is the customer?
• 2. What is the product or service?
• 3. What is our goal in this business idea?
• 4. What is the value of our business proposition?
• 5. What is our market or target markets?
• 6. What is our past, present and future financial conditions?

You can read the full article at Money Cnn website by clicking here on this link

If businesses were easy any one will have a business. The true is that start a new business is a hard process where only few survive.

If you look around you many businesses are open every day but many also closed all day. According Money CNN in 5 years there is a 50% chance that a small business to survive.

The secret that you are not among those who fail is based on 3 aspects:

1. Education. You should be educated permanently in business. Attend conferences or seminars in your country, read, learn.

2. Planning. The famous business plan that we have stressed several times.

3. Careful cash flow. This is a vital issue, many businesses fail because had not adequate cash flow even though the business was very good.

Where to start?  As I said in another article, the passion is not everything, investigate, educate yourself, plan and watch your cash flow. Never forget that you are a winner and the success is inside you.

Photo via Sxc. You can read the article cited at Money CNN by clicking here on this link

There are a lot of research about the risks of a restaurant as a business (read Why Some Restaurants Fails as Business Idea).

However the restaurant business is still an attractive idea for make money. As the market is already saturated maybe you should think to focus your restaurant in specialized food.

Look these ideas about it:

1. Food Allergy specialist. Here there are several alternatives depending on the type of allergies. You should do an investigation of population density in your city that suffers from allergies so determined to give more prominence to a product over another.

2. Food Diabetic specialist. The importance of this market is indisputable. On supermarkets you can find special lines of this kind of food.

3. Food organic specialist. This item is perhaps one of the most exploited, but the suggestion is to distinguish the presentation of the other specializations.

4. Food specialized athletes. This item is also over-exploited but more from the perspective of vitamins and supplements. You can give a new approach with special recipes provide effective counseling with a nutritionist.

5. Food for weight loss specialist. Here you need the advice of a nutritionist to do business differently. You could sell not only products but also how to use them together to achieve goals.

6. Food specialist to reduce certain pathogens in the body. One example of this is people with high cholesterol that should to do special diets. So there are several diseases that require special diets. Visit your city clinics and find out where they will be more successful.

The passion is not everything.

Business Week give us that explanation as a  the reason because some business fail and others not.

In an interesting article, Business Week detail how some restaurants fail and other has success. All of them start from the same business idea, so the problem is not the idea. So what happens?

Simple, passion is not everything. Maybe you heard or read that to succeed you need passion and if well it is true, that’s not all.

As developed in Business Week you should know business management, dealing with clients, marketing, management tools, among others knowledge.

There is the misconception that you’re going to lunch at a restaurant may already know everything about the restaurant business and that is not true.

Business Week cites a successful case where just to avoid that problem, the entrepreneur first gave up his job to work in a restaurant and order and learn a few things that had never encountered in their previous research.

You can read the full article at Business Week website by clicking here on this link

The design of these cups or mugs are very funny and simples as should be any business idea.

If you want make money with a new business you will try to start looking stuff around. With something of imagination I am sure that you find new business ideas.

Money and money, many people think that only if you have a good position with a lot of contacts you can grow as person. If you read our blog frequently you might think that many business ideas that come here are impossible to achieve.

Well the Christian Science Monitor give us an experiment that show us that your are wrong.

Adam Shepard, did an experiment. He left home and went to live in a homeless shelter in a community of people with no money, only $ 25 in his pocket.

Without using any of your contacts and friends, after 10 months, came to have an apartment, a car and a U.S. $ 5000.00 savings.  

Find inspiration in the story of Adam Shepard to move forward with your business ideas, save money for capital that will serve to develop your business tomorrow.

“Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor’s degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charles ton, S.C.

But Shepard’s descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents’ home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.”

Read the interview to Adam Shepard by clicking here on this link

The title of this post is a usual question when you explore the business world, well the answer is very easy, the best product to make money is yourself. You should start selling to yourself before trying to make money with anything.

When you go to a store what products you chose? … the products that you need and among them the products that look better or maybe has more gadgets.

If you think that you are a product … will you buy to yourself?

You are always “selling” you, as a husband or wife, as a father or mother, as employee or boss. As any product of a store, you should look the best way that you can, you have to project an image of success.

Projecting an image of success is a powerful tool that gives you authority. If you see someone with a BMW or Mercedes and another who did not even have a car and both give you a tip for making money, which of them would believe more?

Then the first business idea you have to develop and sell is yourself, apply all rules of marketing to yourself.

Many of us have still CDs which not upload to our iPods or iPhone or any device that we used for play our favorite music.

Happen also that our iPhone is a total mess where is impossible to find our play lists.

Well, if you like the music, here there is a field to develop a business idea that you can do from home with very little investment as is the case of  HungryPod, its founder Catherine Keane (23) now earns thousands of dollars in it.

Their business is basically to convert music CDs to format for iPods or other MP3 music player or other digital medium.Obviously she adds value to their services, sorting music and even give recommendations on which to listen.

Her market is people without time but with a lot of money for sped in this kind of services.

The New York Times made a report about HungryPod, they said:

“For those who lack the time or the know-how to transfer their record collections to their iPods, an entrepreneur has created a service that will do the trick. The service, HungryPod (hungrypod.com), converts CD’s to MP3 format and loads them into an iPod or any other digital music player.”

You can visit HungryPod by clicking here on this link

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Saving only U.S.$100 per month beginning at age 4 and ending at age 18 you could become millionaire if you invest that money and remains untouched until age 62 as the above chart show.

The picture has been taken from Yahoo Finance. The secret to being a millionaire is to start as soon as possible. Instead of buying toys for your children you should start saving in your child’s name and teach them the value of money. About it at Yahoo Finance website you can find interesting guides about How To Teach Your Children The Value of Money. You can read there: 

“5. Make Saving Interesting

You hear it every time you walk by a toy store: “I want…Buy me this… !” Again, pause and take a moment before responding. This situation presents a great opportunity to teach another important lesson about personal finance: savings and interest. Explain that people often save their money for items they want to buy.

A simple savings lesson involves using a piggy bank, shoe box, or empty peanut butter jar. Make the lesson fun by having your children decorate the “bank,” while explaining to them how you also use a real bank to save your money. Encourage your children to save a portion of their allowance for a special goal. As they save money, you might reward them with a small additional amount, just like a bank pays interest. At the end of each month, calculate how much they have saved and then chip in a certain percentage as interest.

Last, to further encourage the learning process, you might consider plotting a visual chart of their savings (include the goal) so they can easily see their savings grow. Remember to keep it as simple as possible, geared toward each child’s level of understanding.”

You can read these guides on Yahoo Finance by clicking here on this link

The Wall Street Journal report that Harvard, Yale Are Big Losers in ‘The Game’ of Investing. The report said:

The schools were hurt by investments in assets that can’t readily be sold, such as private-equity partnerships, which were pummeled in the past year after stellar results over the previous decade. In the category Harvard calls “real assets,” including timber, commodities and real estate, annual losses neared 40%.

However the advices of David F. Swensen who manages no less than U.S. $ 22.5 billion Yale Foundation in the United States, still are valid.

On an interesting interview given to The New York Times, he gives us 3 simple tips for the individual investor wants to invest in securities:

1. Keep things simple and not complicated to make any investment.
2. Keep investment costs low and
3. Make a periodic review of our investments in line with our long term goals.

I recommend you to buy and read his book “Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment” (Free Press, 2005):

He proposes a portfolio of 30 percent domestic stocks, 15 percent foreign stocks, and 5 percent emerging-market stocks, as well as 20 percent in real estate and 15 percent each in Treasury bonds and Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS.

The idea that diversification is that you get an adequate return. Anyway always remember that any investment involves risk.