Posts Tagged ‘ Entrepreneur ’

In my part of Tempe, Arizona, I am Varsity Coach for the Boy Scout troop. So one thing that interests me is teaching young people to be creative and look at the world around them for ideas.

The Boy Scouts of America recently announced a new merit badge – Inventing – that fosters creativity and innovation.

The requirements for the Inventing Merit Badge are essential skills for any entrepreneur.  Let’s see how you stack up.

For some business owners, starting their business is their opportunity to live their dreams. For others, the dream is what comes after the business.

There are some simple steps you can take to get the most future value out of your current business. It is all about how you structure your business.

The federal government is very interested in you paying for your own retirement.  There are some wonderful tax incentives to get you to set aside money for the future.

Let’s face it, Social Security is not going to pay much to anyone in the younger generation. (Like it pays that much now!)

Another reader question asked about how to do market research.

There are several main purposes for market research.  Market research can help you, (in no particular order):

• see the size of your potential market,
• anticipate the needs of your market,
• develop an advertising strategy,
• know what price your product can bring in the market, and
• know where to reach your market (online sales, stick and brick, affiliate marketing, etc.).

A complete market analysis will address five main questions.  First, and perhaps most important, how do your customers hurt?  Their pain will drive your marketing strategy.

Adam Stephenson is a patent attorney at Adam R. Stephenson, LTD.  Check out his business here.

Adam started out with a business plan created from a template, so we took it and made it better.  The template told him format, but we spent the time to create a plan that will give him specific milestones to measure his success as the business grows.  I helped him with the financial projections, cash flow planning, and other business management strategies.

I wanted to include his recommendation from my LinkedIn profile here:

“Tony reviewed my business plan in detail, examined my financial projections, and sat down with me face to face to analyze my market’s opportunities and challenges aspect by aspect. His advice about how to successfully navigate the startup period and manage cash flow by using ways to encourage early payments has been extremely valuable.

It doesn’t matter if you start a dry cleaning business, a pizza franchise, or a construction business, you need to understand what strategy will make you successful.  But you also need to know how to implement your strategy.  Your team needs to know how and why and why it works.  Any ambiguity will undermine your success.

So what do you do to identify a crystal clear strategy that drives your entire business plan?  Well, it starts with asking the right questions.  For example: What business is McDonald’s in?

So you are thinking about starting a business.  Congratulations!  Now what?

Where do you start?  How do you know what kind of business to create?

Rule #1 is, don’t go do something you don’t know anything about! That seems obvious, but people break this rule all the time.  The internet is full of people who will sell you their system that is “guaranteed” to make you money.  Buying their system is only guaranteed only to make THEM money.  Admittedly, some of those people have a pretty good product to offer, but if you buy some system, be SURE you will use it.