Daily Biz Solutions

Guest Post By Nancy Wurtzel, All About Baby

Owning a home used to be the “American Dream.”  However, this long-standing goal that so many aspired to, and ultimately reached, has been replaced with a new goal — becoming a business owner.

At first glance it sounds perfect: Leave the corporate world behind and become an entrepreneur.  No more commuting, office politics, difficult co-workers and demanding supervisors.  You’ll be your own boss and reap all the financial rewards.  It will be a brand-new lifestyle with incredible opportunities and much less stress.

Others have achieved the new “American Dream.”  Look at the young kids who started Apple on a shoestring in the late 1970s.  Don’t forget the two engineers who launched a little company called Hewlett Packard out of a small backyard garage.  Mrs. Fields took a cookie recipe — of all things — and built it into a national model that is taught in many business schools.

Why not you?  Yes, you could have the next great business idea, but that alone might not be enough.  Ask yourself, do you have the right stuff to launch and run a successful business?  Here are five questions to consider before making the big leap from a steady paycheck to business owner.

1.  Are you a self-starter?
With no one looking over your shoulder, it’s easy to procrastinate.  You must have the discipline that is needed to plan, set goals and stay focused.

Since many small businesses initially start out as home-based to keep overhead low, working from home brings additional distractions.  Can you resist the temptation to eat cookies and watch reruns of “Law and Order” when you should be making marketing calls?

2.  What are your expectations?
If your goal is to work fewer hours and feel less stress, then think again.

The U.S. Small Business Administration estimates that business ownership requires a tremendous commitment, with 12-hour workdays, often seven days a week.  Needless to say, this can be a strain on family life.  If you think it might be too much, then consider a job change or a new career with an established company rather than launching your own business.

3.  What are your financial goals?
In the short-term your income will probably be lower, and it could stay this way for a long time.  Additionally, no one pays for vacations, health care plan, profit sharing or stock options.  You must set up your own retirement plan as well.

The U.S. Small Business Administration offers some sobering statistics.  It  reports that half of the small businesses started will fail within the first year.  Furthermore, by the fifth year 95 percent will have ceased operations.  While the reasons for failure vary, one of the most common is a lack of adequate financing.  To beat the odds, meet with an independent accountant to honestly discuss your finances and expectations.  The good news is that if your business takes off you will reap the financial benefits.

4.  Are you a “water-cooler person” at heart?
When you become a business owner, your days of taking a long lunch or chatting with the guys around the water cooler are over.  Can you make the transition from “worker bee” to boss?  It can be lonely.

On your own, you’ll be making countless decisions every day — from the mundane to the critical.  And, you alone must shoulder the daily ups and downs that come with running a business.  However, it can also have tremendous rewards in that you are building something from scratch.  So, if you believe you can weather the isolation and roll with the punches, you might be a good candidate for owning your own business.

5.  Can you create an organized environment?
Where you work is certainly important.  You’ll need an acceptable work space and the right office tools in order to be creative and successful.  Even more important, however, is how you work.

For example, you can have an incredible sales presentation with the latest technology that will wow clients, but if you’re constantly late for meetings and lose important documents, you’ll probably also lose business.  Ask yourself if you can flourish in an environment where creativity and operational systems are equally important?  Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking the company will simply “run itself” if they just come up with great ideas and business leads.  They pay scant attention to the details of building a business.  Too often this is a recipe for failure.

To be a success, you must combine your fantastic ideas and business tools with solid planning and organization.

Success for any new business is never guaranteed.  There are too many variables, and many factors will be totally out of your control.  But you can avoid making a costly mistake by asking yourself, honestly — before you take the plunge: Do I have what it takes to run a business?  The answer should tell you if the new “American Dream” is the right fit for you.

About the Author

Nancy Wurtzel is the founder and owner of All About Baby, an ecommerce site located at http://www.allbaby.com.  All About Baby specializes in personalized and memorable gifts for children as well as interesting and helpful child-related site content.  Ms. Wurtzel has over 20 years of marketing and communications experience.  She consults with small businesses seeking to enter the marketplace

Interesting in starting a business with unlimited earning potential? Maybe you should consider becoming an independent insurance agent. If you start this type of business, you’ll need to earn licensure specific to the state where you plan to work and for the types of insurance you want to represent. You can then go to work for an existing company or start your own agency. Whichever option you choose, you can enjoy a rewarding career helping clients protect their interests with products such as property and casualty insurance, health coverage, term and whole life insurance, and other important risk management products.

Are you interested in starting a personal training business? If you have a passion for fitness and want to help other people improve their health and overall well being, this just might be the perfect small business idea for you to launch. You may be able to lease space in a health club or other health-related business, or you can open your own studio or work from home, seeing clients in their homes or places of business. Whatever option you choose, you’ll likely find that helping your clients burn fat and get in shape is very rewarding.

Author Contributed by CareerAlley

Sales are down in just about every industry and in many cases, sales jobs have followed. Looking at the trends, the number of sales jobs posted has not really decreased that much. Of course, much depends on the industry you are in and how that industry has performed. As an example, compare car salesman job trends to retail sales and you can see what I mean. Not being a sales person myself, I really don’t know how much truth there is to the view that a good salesman can sell anything, however, there is truth to the saying that if you can’t sell yourself it is likely you won’t get the job. But if you look hard enough, there are plenty of sales jobs out there. As with all targeted searches, there are a number of avenues you can use to focus your search. A broad range of traditional methods should be used, such as:

• Networking
• Job Search Sites
• Recruiters
• Company websites

But there are other methods as well which can be leveraged in your job search such as associations, unions, alumni / college career sites and professional organizations. Today’s post will cover a few

• Salesjobs.com – This is the “World’s largest Sales Employment Site” according their tag line. And, according to the stats on their main page, there are over 59,000 jobs on their site. The main page has tabs at the top, but Candidates seems to be the only one that would be of interest. Below this (middle of the page) is a quick search box (using industry and area code). Bottom left hand side is the candidates section where you can upload your resume, login or get advice. Clicking the Candidates tab at the top leads to a page with dedicated resources such as Search, post resume, advice, sales links and more.
• National Association of Sales Professionals – This is an example of a professional organization (this one focusing on sales). In addition to other services, this association also has a career center (one of the tabs at the top of the page). Click on career center and the left hand side of the page is dedicated to Job Seekers where you can post a resume, View jobs, create personal alerts and more. When I clicked on the view jobs link, over 9,700 jobs were available on this site.
• Sales Talent – This is a national recruiting firm that specializes in the placement of sales professionals. Click the “Find Sales Jobs” link to see their current searchs (there were 69 when I checked). At the top of the page there are links for Job Agent and Ask our Recruiter. On the lef hand side of the page there are additional links for “contact us” where you can find all of the information you need to submit your resume.
• Macy’s Retail Sales Job – I’ve used Macy’s as an example of a company career site as a resource for sales positions. Using the link to the left will lead to Macy’s Job Recruiting site. Click on search jobs and, when the next page is viewed, type in Sales in the keywords field. This will lead to a page of jobs related to sales. Use this same concept for other companies that have sales forces.
• Bestheadhunters.com – “Best Headhunters, a nationwide professional Executive Search Firm, helps organizations recruit the best executive star talent in the market” according to their website. Top of the page has a number of links to Job List, Blog, How to Use this Site and more. On the right hand side of the page are a number of functional links, click Sales to go to the sales specific site. You will immediately see a list of jobs. Click on any job to see a full page job description along with a link (at the bottom of the page) to apply.

Good luck in your search.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

By: Melissa Crowe

When I first entered marketing one of the things that appealed to me was gaining a better understanding of the customer and in turn making products interesting to the consumer and then by extension increase revenue for my company or clients. Many times, marketers build their ads and other creative materials based on gut feel or other various forms of research such as focus groups or surveys.  This approach is oftentimes highly successful, but it can often lead to companies losing direct touch with their customers.

Many products have obvious applications, for instance Nintendo’s Wii is one of the hottest video games on the market now. It is easy to see that the gaming system would be used to play games by a variety of age groups, but who would have guessed that it was being used for types of physical therapy and as a source of exercise in retirement homes? Chances are that Nintendo’s marketing team did not have this in mind in their initial plans; but now their new commercials show a wide spectrum of generations playing the system.

The lesson learned is that your customers may use your products and or services in a variety of ways. Your company could invest a lot of money on researching how the product is used, but may not nail down an opportunity that could reap large benefits.  The question is how can you get to know your customer directly without expending resources?

My company was faced with this exact dilemma. We sell fully designed and printed marketing materials and promotional products for small business and consumers worldwide that can be used in virtually limitless ways.  Instead of doing a large scale research project to learn our customer, we decided to go back to one of the earliest forms of learning and research – listening. It may sound like an obvious solution, but our management team implemented a program that provides all employees the opportunity to field customer service calls that were routed from our call center.

Like many people who have called into a call center, the company knew that the calls coming in were often from customers who had problems with their orders or needed help designing a product on our site. So in a sense, we were dealing with customers who may have been frustrated heading into the calls.

At a glance it may seem like these calls should be handled by call center specialists that are trained to deal with conflict resolution but we saw this as an opportunity to really get to know our customers.
After enrolling in the program, I fielded calls for 14 weeks and talked to a countless number of customers. The callers ranged everywhere from dentists sending out appointment reminder cards to construction companies creating brochures to mothers creating birthday invitations for their children to college students creating personal business cards for networking. Their problems were just as varied but it was often quite easy to correct the issues and get them a new order in a matter of minutes.

The calls may have lasted only a few minutes, but while looking over their order, we were able to see their materials and also saw how they were altering our templates for their needs. Although the old adage preaches “seeing is believing,” speaking with the customer and listening to what they had to say was just as effective.

A common theme among the callers was that they were always happy to speak about their businesses and how they are going to use the products. They also let us know when we had a great offer or product that they loved. Much like a customer commenting on things that we do well, or what they were doing with the products, they were just as quick to let us know where we needed improvement. These issues ranged from site and upload issues to products that they would like us to offer and designs that they would like to see.

This feedback gave us great insight into how our customers view our product and in turn a number of ways to improve our site, products and services. By being passionate on both sides of the spectrum, it gave us a chance to evaluate what we are doing both positively and negatively.  The program served as a viable example for a company looking to truly learn from their customers.

No matter what the budget your company has available for research and marketing, directly touching base with your customers can give you some great insight. If you don’t have the resources to do a similar test you can always reach out to some of your high-value customers or most consistent purchasers to gain valuable feedback. You can usually do this for free and the input that you receive in return can often be priceless.

About the Author

Melissa Crowe is the vice president of marketing services at Vistaprint (www.vistaprint.com), an online supplier of graphic design and printed products to small businesses and consumers.