Let's Talk Wealth

How to be a Successful Entrepreneur

2008-09-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

If you are thinking of running a business from home, there are a few basic tips you should know. This essential knowledge holds the key to whether you will be successful in your venture or not. Let's start by looking at ways to start planning for your business.

Wasting precious time on small details

When setting up a new company, do not get bogged down in detail when preparing the ground for setting it up. The important thing is to set up the business in as simple form as possible and keep improving as you go, making adjustment and changes according to the dictates of the moment. If you have spent too much time in your preparation, you will find it to be time not well spent. When you are running a business from home this is a very important factor.

Partnership woes

Starting a business on a partnership basis is a mistake because the company can break up easily at any time even due to the slightest hitch. A multitude of problems will crop up from time to time which results in disagreements leading to a split.

Ask your worth

Entrepreneurs should ask for what they are worth and get it. It is a folly to enter a market and wanting to be cheaper than competitors. Entrepreneurs must find ways to get what they are worth by adding value. Start-ups have a particular advantage on this because since they have not started something they can embark on anything. They have the advantage of studying what works and what doesn't work for their competitors.

Payments

Late payments are one of the bugbears of small business owner. Whatever it is, do not forget that you are not a bank and don't behave like one. There is nothing wrong about asking for money before a product or service is provided. Useful method is offering a discount if payment is received up front. Set a dateline for special discounts to be effective.

Frugal

Overspending is a vital erroneous practice of many small businesses running a business from home. When buying office furniture, go for the second hand ones. That will save money which can be used to replenish money capital investment and cut down loss should the business fail. Two companies in the same building can share a photo copier.

Form filling

Don't use your prime time bogged up in form filling because that can be done during the part of the day that are not productive. At other times concentrate on selling because that is the business you are in ---- selling and making money and not practicing filling forms.

Feedback

Never ignore positive feedback. Helpful feed back is free but they can help remedy your weaknesses. Feedback usually comes from distributors of your products who are in close contact with consumers. They know what makes the customers happy or otherwise with the company's products or services. Use these feedbacks to your advantage by making the necessary adjustments to your operations.

One example of ignoring feedback was made by a new company with great potential to capture the market both locally and abroad. Customers clamored for the company's products but suddenly sales dropped a lot. The company received feedback from distributors that the quality of the product had dropped. Instead of listening to the feedback and improving quality, the company's CEO ignored the feedback and boast of the company's million- dollars status that would not get the company out of business. He brushed the feedback as insignificant. What happened told the whole story. The company went out of business and the arrogant CEO is now hunting for a new job.

Growing too fast

Growing too big too fast is also not advantageous when you are running a business from home unless you can handle the expansion meticulously. Don't grow into a business empire that will give you a headache.

Advertising

To be a successful entrepreneur running a business from home, be careful in your advertising. Identify your customers and advertise accordingly. Never simply spend a lot of money advertising and then pray for the results. Do some research before you go on an advertising campaign. You will hit the bull's eye.

Finally remember that you never know who knows who. If you offer a great deal to one customer before long others will know including those that bought the product or service at a higher price. If you are spreading positive news, it is good to let things slip. People like talking about other people. You can take advantage of the mouth-to-mouth gossiping patterns to inform others about the uniqueness and exclusivity of your business operations. If you follow these steps meticulously, you will be a successful entrepreneur running a business from home.

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Tax Preparation: Employee or Contractor?

2008-09-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

If you are engaged with a company you will either receive a W-2 form or a 1099 or the related tax forms for your country, depending whether you are an employee of the company or a contractor. You should take notice of this because the tax you pay as an employee or as a contractor are different. If you are an employee, your employer pays a percentage of your tax. But as a contractor, you will have to foot the bill totally by yourself. Be aware that some business mis-classifies employees as contractors to escape the tax burden. This is a crucial factor to take into account when making your tax preparations.

The term ETC (Exclusivity, Tools and Control) can help you determine your status.
Knowing the difference will enable you to contact your employer if you have been misclassified, to point out the problem. If you fail to get cooperation, contact the IRS or the regulating body in your country, to report the mis-classification as they will be able to remedy the situation.

Here are some tips to help you identify whether you are an employee or an independent contractor.

1. Do you work exclusively for one company?

If you have been working for only one employer, then there is a higher chance that you are actually an employee instead of an independent contractor. If your workload is eight hours a day or more, then all the more you should be registered as an employee instead of an independent contractor!

2. Control

Who exercise control over what you do? An employee executes the orders of the employer in return for the wages paid. If your employer controls how you should be doing your job, when you should do it and how it should be done, then you are an employee and not an independent contractor!

3. Payroll

Do you receive payments according to the projects you do on a monthly basis? If you are paid on a monthly basis then you are indeed and employee and not an independent contractor! If you are an independent contractor you will receive payment only when projects assigned to you are completed and not according to the duration for time you work.

Employers tend to favor classifying employees as independent contractors since it gives them a lot of advantage when it comes to tax issues. For you it becomes a disadvantage that you would want to avoid. If you are an employee, you deserve all rights to be treated as such and that includes classification as an employee especially when it comes to the tax preparation issues. Mis-classification of employees as contractors is a serious affair and laws exist to help those that may be affected.

If you're like me and a few million other people, you may be thinking about getting off the 8 hour work train and getting on board the business train or you may in fact have ventured into business and is finding that there is so much more you need to learn.
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Running a Business from Home: The Importance of Business Planning

2008-09-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Starting a business without a business plan is suicide. Just as you have to plan your route for a journey, you will have to plan the route for your business as well. Without a planned route as a guide you will not know whether you are heading in the right direction or otherwise. If you thinking of running a business from home, proper planning is the key to starting your journey in the right direction.

A Brief Overview

Included in the business plan should be the nature of the business, its business aims and objectives, an analysis of its viability in a particular location, the company's image, fulfillment of the legal aspects, cash flow projecting the profit and loss projections and the break even analysis.

All the above will have to be discussed in details which will show the course that the company will steer to arrive at its destination.

A Decisive Target

The good business plan will obviously have a specific target to aim at. This target will keep you on track to achieve the developments and success you aim for. It also acts as a guide for you to make adjustments along the way if something is not working well.

Financial Aid

There are also other demands that insist you have a carefully drawn business plan showing how you intend to do the business, where you are heading for and how do you plan to get there. A good business plan is always required to be presented to lending banks or any other financial institutions that offer to finance the project.

Without a good business plan, you request for financial aid will usually be thrown off. At times, based on the business type you will be operating, you are qualified for government grants. These granting bodies also will want to look at your business plan. Finally the business owner will feel comfortable investing in a business that has a solid business plan to back it up.

Keeping Track

On the whole, as a sailing ship, a business plan will allow the business to track its actual program against its projected target. Since the business plan is drawn up in advance it is natural that it cannot be 100% accurate since it cannot take into account unexpected changes. That is why it is crucial that the business plan is revisited frequently by the business owner and adjusted if necessary

Steering in the Right Direction

The most common reason why a business plan is needed is to serve as a guide to the entrepreneur on the course of action it is to steer and keep him enlightened on whether his performance is right on track, homing in on the projected target or have gone off course and need to be adjusted accordingly.

Government grants

When you are running a business from home, there are however, other considerations that need a business plan to be drawn up. Banks will want to examine the business to determine if the project is viable before they commit to financing a loan for the company. In some cases the company may qualify for government grants. Under the circumstance the granting body will need to see the company's plan to determine if the company is qualified to receive the award of the grant. The plan will also make the business owner feel more comfortable with his investments that he has made the right decision.

Every business owner should make sure that they spend some time writing a business plan and use it as a map to guide them and their business towards their goals.

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Running A Business From Home: Is it for You?

2008-09-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

When you start a business, a cheap and effective way is to run it from home. However if you decide to do it from home, there are several factors you need to bear in mind. Running a business from home is easy but it isn't for everybody. Though it can provide greater flexibility than an external office based business basing your company in the same place as where you live can also gravely impact your family social life and lead to feelings of isolation.

Advantages

There are obviously many advantages that cannot be discounted when running a business from home. Among other things are you can earn an income on top of a full time job, it involves low risk and low cost, no shop front required, you can do business round the clock and work at your own pace without normal workplace distractions.

Individuals considering establishing a home-based business would do well to sit back and consider several key questions to work out if the project is suitable for them.

Hobbies into Careers

Entrepreneurs opting to turn their hobbies into a career are good to start a work at home business. These includes

arts and crafts services such as painting and pottery
childcare
teaching and tutoring
pet grooming
dog walking and
language translation.

It is service businesses that works particularly well to run from home because these businesses do not receive customers on the doorstep. The range is varied and even involves large scale importers, wholesalers and distributors as well as office based business like consultancy and
professional services such as communications, public relations, accountancy and human resources administration. It also includes telesales and marketing, writing and editing, customer service and web based business

Some Vital Questions

Jumping into a home business without first thinking whether it is for you would be unwise. There are questions you need to ask to ensure that you will not be caught on the wrong foot. Among them,

Question One: Will I have the support of my partner and children if any?

Support from family members is important as you may need to allocate some personal space for your work area. These areas cannot simply be trodden upon by some naughty kids or even your friend's kids when they come around.

Question Two: Am I good at setting priorities?

There are a zillion distractions when you work form home. To be successful running a business from home, you need to know if you good at setting priorities and if you are able to get yourself away from what is exciting to what is important?

Question Three: Will I have the discipline to work hard every day without a boss always looking to see that that work is done?

Procrastination is the number one killer of productivity. When you are running a business from home, beware not to fall into this trap.

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Running a Business from Home

2008-08-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

It is only through lack of imagination that a person will find it difficult to find a suitable business from home. The abundance of imagination of a vast majority of individuals is clearly depicted in the number and variety of businesses that are now being carried out successfully from home.
To few considerations of business opportunities include:

home-based coffee stall
provisions mini-markets
photocopying
barber services and
academic tuition centers

All these business undertakings can be run with minimum capital and comfortably operated from home.

One of the types of running a business from home that is yet to catch the imagination of home-based operators is to set up a 'for adults only' coffee stall and snacks centre, catering for the needs of special adults only. This requires little space; the front porch of a house can be conveniently converted and designed for the purpose. You need a couple of exclusive tables and comfortable chairs for clients. The main attraction will be foods and drinks that will boost the manly energies of clients.

For this you will require a special coffee premixed with aphrodisiac powder that will turn the person on in the space of half an hour after drinking.
Should this effect be experienced after the first drink, you can be sure that the client will be back faster than you can imagine and when words spread around about your specialty, you can expect clients lining up waiting to be serviced in a row.
Apart from doing a service to yourself and making good money, you will also be doing a service to adult males who have lost touch with the realities of married sex life. This is a great niche you can undertake when thinking of running a business from home. Gratitude will be experienced all around.

The only thing that may hold you back will be to gain approval from your own family as this business touches on the sensitive issue of sex. Do not let this 'negative yellow thinking' prevent you from proceeding with this plan. Pretense will not take anybody anywhere beneficial. Discuss it openly with your family and drop all the pretenses and you will have yourself a good if not excellent business opportunity.

With your aphrodisiac coffee drinks as an opener, you can graduate into other food items such as fast foods like beef burgers, fried spaghetti, roasted or fried chicken (home made), and as most people smoke cigarettes, you can include cigarettes too. Why not?

To be successful in the long term running a business from home, you must always remember that you must maintain the quality of your product. Any drop in quality will slowly diminish the number of your clients accordingly. Pay careful attention to this aspect. Maintain excellent services and also attempt to upgrade the quality of your products as well as your customer relations and customer services.

This may sound trivial to amateurs but believe me, there is nothing that will drive customers away from your stall faster than bad customer relations and bad customer services. Try as far as possible to attend to your customers personally because assistants would not care a dime about customer services as long as they are paid wages. So there is no alternative but for you to do it yourself. Maybe your family can help you in this.

Olympic Poll

2008-08-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

Well, well the gap between China and the United States, have widened.

At the time of writing this post. The Medal Standing showed:
China on 45 medals and USA on 52.

With over a week to go; Can it still be anyone's game?

There is an Olympic Poll going on, on the Daily Special page, so please hop over and place your poll.

The Heat Is On. Lets Have Your Comments.

Olympics

2008-08-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

Well, the battle is on between China and the United States. Personally I am no sports guru and so I will not be making any predictions, but I would like to hear from all of you who consider yourselves to be good at predicting these things.

There is an Olympic Poll going on, on the Daily Special page, so please hop over and place your poll.

At the time of writing this post. The Medal Standing showed.

China on 35 medals and USA on 34

The Heat Is On. Lets Have Your Comments.

Communication

2008-08-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

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Global Warming

2008-08-07T01:50:00.000-07:00

The island's nation of Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia is being threatened by record high tides.

Being one of the lowest-lying countries in the world; no point in Tuvalu is more than 13ft. above sea level.
There, Global Warming is not an abstract science but ‘a daily reality’ says the Herald.
Thousands have already abandoned their homeland and many more are preparing to go.

Meanwhile, Australia is experiencing its worst drought in 1000 years. Scientists say that without sufficient water flow by October, the unique ecology of the lower reaches of the river system will be irreversibly damaged.

Are the problems in Tuvalu and Australia, evidence of Global Warming?

What are your views? Please leave your comments.

Is America Stressed Out?

2008-08-04T20:56:00.000-07:00

The number of Americans seeking psychiatric care has gone up by 20% in the past three months, according to ComPsych, the largest private mental health consultant in the US.

This sharp rise suggests, economic woes are generating depression, sleep problems and marital conflicts.
“Even upper-middle-class people are taking a hit to their emotional wellbeing,” reported USA Today.

What are your views? Please leave your comments.

The Results Are In

2008-08-03T06:14:00.000-07:00

I read this article a few days ago, and I would like to hear your views on the matter.
According to this article An Active Sex Life Is Vital to Good Health.

Here is what I read:

Results of an eighteen-year study by a Scottish researcher showed that:

Men who had sex 3 or more times a week looked an average of 12 years younger than they actually were.
Having sex helps the body produce growth hormones that produce lean muscle tissue and decrease body fat, which can make you look younger.

The article went on to say that a survey was conducted by Pfizer Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors (Feb.2002) – under the topic Age is no barrier to having an active sex life, and the results showed that:

worldwide, 80% of men and 60% of women ages 40 to 80 responded that sex remained an important part of their lives.
70% of those surveyed who reported that their physical relationship with their partner was very or extremely pleasurable, also reported being in excellent health.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen. Now, what are you views?

Court Room Drama

2008-08-01T23:06:00.000-07:00

Life can be really stressing at times, and we sometimes have to take a break... and smile awhile. A friend sent me this joke and so I'm passing it on to you.

These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by Court Reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place.

ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.

ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?

ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, 'where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until then next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-one-year-old, How old is he?
WITNESS: Uh, he's twenty-one.

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Is this a trick question?

ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Uh.... I was getting laid!

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Now whose death do you suppose terminated it?

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Guess.

ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your Attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All my autopsies are performed on dead people. Would you like to rephrase that?

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.

-- And the best for last: ---

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: No, he was sitting on the table wondering whyI was doing an autopsy on him!

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Are you shittin' me? Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
********************
Now please get back to being productive. LOL

Ice Breaker

2008-08-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my first post on Let's Talk...
I hope this will be the start of a beautiful relationship between us. Anyway, enough of the sentiments. Let me share some words of inspiration I once received from a friend; here goes:

Hold Your Head High

Standing for what you believe in, regardless of the odds against you, and the pressure that tears at your resistance ...is Courage.

Keeping a smile on your face for the sake of supporting others, when inside you feel like dying ...is Strength.

Stopping at nothing and doing what's in your heart because you know it's right ...is Determination.

Doing more than is expected, to make another's life a little more bearable, without uttering a single complaint ...is Compassion.

Helping a friend in need, no matter the time or effort, to the best of your ability ...is Loyalty.

Holding your head high and being the best you know you can be when life seems to fall apart at your feet, facing each difficulty with the confidence that time will bring you better tomorrows, and never giving up... ...is Confidence.

Hold your head high and make your life better every day!