Essentials of a start-up
There are 10 essential things you need to know about running a successful business. Use it as a checklist to make sure your thinking and your business plan
are on the right track, or if you need to get more information, strategic education or clarity for yourself on your overall vision, your market, or your product or service.
---> Offer what people want to buy, not just what you want to sell. Too often, people jump into a business built around a product or service they think will be successful, rather than one that is already proven to have a market.

---> Get cash flowing ASAP. Cash flow is the lifeblood of business, and is absolutely essential to feed bottom-line profits. So you need to find ways to jump start cash flow immediately.

How do you do that? In a professional services business, you can ask for deposits on work up-front, with balances due on delivery.

You can do the same in retail, especially on high-ticket or specialty item and position it as an added value and a way to insure delivery by a specific date.

You can also add value to generic items by creating private labels, and develop continuity programs where customers pay an up-front monthly fee to insure delivery or availability of items they will buy on a repeat basis. Of course, the key is to make sure there is little or no gap between when you pay for labor, stock inventory and when you actually get paid. Ideally, you'll find ways to get money up front, and your cash gap will never be an issue.

---> Always find new ways to keep costs low. All the cash flow in the world is worthless if it's not positive cash flow, which means you have to bring in more cash than you pay out.

To do this, you need to keep your costs and expenses low. We've touched on this before, especially in terms of outfitting a startup. The main idea is to never pay retail, and look for used or gently used items to furnish your office or your retail space.

Paying vendors up front also gives you leverage for negotiating better prices. Especially in this economic environment, where credit is at a premium, vendors are more willing than ever to find creative ways to finance transactions, and that is a trend will likely continue over time.

So do some extra work and research now to discover how owners and vendors are finding ways to work out deals, and you just may hit on whole new ways of doing business.

---> When planning, always overestimate expenses and underestimate revenues. I was trained as an accountant, so the numbers side of business is part of my entrepreneurial DNA, and was also a big part of my early business education.

That said, I've never seen a startup business where expenses were at least 30 percent more than initially planned or anticipated, and revenues are at least that much less.

Being conservative in your numbers doesn't mean you are willing to accept those numbers, it just means you are arming yourself with information you can work with and work over. It means you can gauge the kinds of efforts and activities you will need to put into sales and marketing.

---> Focus on sales and marketing manically. In business, nothing happens until a sale is made. From the jump, you'll need to find a good way to get leads, convert leads into sales, and make sure you keep getting repeat sales from your customers.

The way to do this is to find or create a marketing and sales funnel system that you can work, test, measure; one that anyone in your company can utilize.

Too many entrepreneurs focus on getting their brand right before they start to generate leads. That is exactly the wrong way to go about business. Leads are always more important than your brand, so don't waste money getting your brand right at the expense of spending that same money to buy new customers.

Soon, you'll discover you can build your brand from the ground up, versus spending years and hundred of thousands of dollars building it from the top down. Don't presume you'll even survive that long, because without leads, you won't!

---> Find ways to exponentially increase profits. In business, there are five drivers that impact profits. If you can master them while keeping your costs in check, you will run a successful business.

It's as simple as getting more leads, converting more leads into customers, increasing the number of times those customers buy from you, increasing the average price point of your sales and increasing your profit margins.

---> Test and measure everything. You can't change what you don't measure, and you can't tell if a program or strategy is working if you are not faithfully testing, measuring and tracking your results.

Another way to look at this is to think in terms of doctors. Most like to get baseline stats of your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing before they delve into identifying symptoms or recommending corrective courses of action.

---> Accept that learning more equals earning more. If you've never run a million dollar business, you don't know how to run one--simple as that.

But you can learn to run one, even if it is your million dollar business you are building from the ground up.

However, you need to accept right now that learning always comes before "earning" (except in the dictionary). You'll need to be committed to learning as much as you can about sales and marketing and operations if you want to have a truly success business.

Once you do that, however, the sky is the limit. Knowing and applying those simple fundamentals in a highly leveraged way is one of the reasons many top executives and entrepreneurs earn so much.

---> Don't discount, add value. Whenever you discount, you are taking money directly out of your pocket and directly from your bottom-line profit. So don't do it. Instead, create added value propositions all the way up and down your product or service line.

Whatever the industry is, look to hold your price points, increase your margins with the low-cost or no-cost extras and any kind of freemium offerings.

In the end, those little things won't cost you a lot, but will build up tremendous goodwill and word-of-mouth with your customers and customer base.

---> Get a coach. Even if you don't get a business coach at first to help you and guide you in your planning and operation, get someone who is objective and outside of your business you can rely on for nitty gritty business advice and to hold you accountable to getting results.

Too often, we think we have all the answers and are the only people who can really get things done. The reality is that another set of eyes can work wonders for how you operate both on and in your business. An outsider can also make sure you are getting the numbers you need both on the top line and the bottom line to survive.

Hope that was helpful and encouraging...however in an entrepreneurs life everything varies there is no fixed "MANTRA" :-)
Please feel free to comment on the post!!!

starting up basics!!!!

well there could be more than what I think in starting up a business, but the following are just basic points, any more inputs from successful entrepreneurs are always welcomed to make this post more valuable ...:-)
How to start a business

 Idea
 Evaluation of idea, market
 type of skills needed, labour,
 Capital – money-investment


Idea – To start any business the most imp aspect is the idea which acts as a seed of the business-money tree. But the most imp question is how to get an idea or rather many are faced with a dilemma from where to get an idea? Answer is simple, observe your surroundings, analyse your passion and imagine the activity which you love doing the most. For eg. you have a zeel for food preparation and like to explore varieties of cuisines, a chef or a restaurant business might attract you. You can get a clue from your hobbies as hobbies are the activities which we like to do the most in our free time(not the hobbies which we usually mention on our RESUMES of which we rarely know anything…  )


Evaluating your idea
Once you have realized what you enjoy to do the most and decided to call the shots on something, its time to evaluate your idea from different angles. Further, one need to know how much feasible that idea is for you, the type of investment needed, what is required to turn the idea into a real profitable business. But the niche is the feasibility of the idea….eg. if you have a passion for real estate but have no time to get information on local/international land prices or don’t have money to invest in the stock market than it would not serve the purpose… But if you have a passion for food or making sandwiches and plan to open a small sandwich shop than you can evaluate the idea by considering many factors like land, locality, are there any other sandwich outlets in your area, do you have the time to invest in the business, minimum capital required etc..

Skills
After making the necessary evaluation you need to know the skill which would be required to run the business, eg. If you are planning to open a food outlet but you are not a good cook than you need to know who can cook for you, i.e labour required , cost involved in it etc. Generally one should start a business where he/she has a hands on expertise so as to understand the business from the roots instead of relying on other human resource.

Capital- “its all about money honey”
Last the most important aspect of your venture is money , you need to know if any capital or money is required to start up the business eg. Machinery, marketing costs, labour capital etc.. It is very important to find a way on how you will get the money, there are different ways to pour the capital you need through banks, VCs, partnerships etc..the list goes on .

The above points are not exhaustive but they can be the pillars of your venture and would prove to be the most important aspect in deciding your venture vision..anything else if you feel can always be posted here… cheers!! 

common mistakes by business owners and ceos

It is often a dilemma for business owners and ceos to determine how to get ahead of the competition and when is the right time. According to me instead of going in depth of the so called ‘business management principles” and using really hard “jargons” as usually mentioned by today’s manager theys should focus only on the basics.

I term these basics as I and Money which can be inferred or interpreted in different ways. The first way is I and Money which means how am I earning Money , from the customer’s perspective it means  how am I spending Money. The “I” has various interesting words if we look at it more creatively. I have coined, rather just found three words from the very “I” which are :

Impact, Innovation and Information.

If we talk about Impact its just very simple to imagine or visualize with the word itself, the most important thing for business owners to know is that how is their product “impacting” the real consumer or rather the customers? How it is impacting their lives and if you are a little more creative you can visualize by comparing it with various industry practices.

Innovation – We often forget to ask ourselves how much Innovative we have been in our line of business ever since we started or ever since we started to lose money. The answer signifies its value to you .

Information – Information age as we often call today to the world, what are we doing to get the information and what steps are we taking to stay updated.

Money – last a very important factor in business or in a relationship is m oney, what are we doing with it , how are we channelising our energies to synchronise with the money around us.

aBOUT me

hiya all, the main purpose of the blog is to make the blog a real platform which would act as a place for tech passionate youth of the country to participate and share ideas, develop ideas and ultimately turn into a successful entity....cheers!