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Top small business ideas – outsource to build your business

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Whilst you continue to be a one person business, you are self employed, selling your own time.  If you are looking for a top small business idea, start outsourcing to other people and start leveraging and building a business.

Outsourcing is the key!  Online you can find anybody to do anything at a highly competitive price.  I have outsourced most functions of my business to other people.  Good people around the world will be ecstatic to work for you for between USD $2 – $10 per hour but as usual you get what you pay for.

When you find the right person (which is not hard), you will find that they are well qualified, very efficient and meet deadlines, most of the time with a 24-hour turnaround.  They also follow up and do it all with friendly cooperation.

Offline recruitment agencies may still be necessary for high end recruitment where the position is senior or supervisory, hands on and face to face, but for lower level work, technical work, specialist skills, online work where working remotely is fine, recruitment agencies will become obsolete unless they move their businesses online and become outsourcing hubs.

One of the advantages of growing your business online is that everything you need night and day is available from outsourced talent.  Just some of these functions are:

  • Virtual Secretary / assistant
  • Administration
  • Content / article writing
  • Sales page / landing page writing
  • Website updating
  • Keyword research
  • Blogging
  • Image management
  • Link building
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Social network marketing
  • Forum marketing

Work goes on for you while you sleep and you will slash your overheads.

If you would like to know more about how to build your online business contact me at gary@garyweigh.com and visit http://www.garyweigh.com/blog/business-startup

If you would like to read some ground breaking articles on Aiki-management visit my Aikido Secrets site at http://www.aikido-secrets-to-calm-success.com

Until next time!

Gary

topsmallbusinessideas

Top small business ideas – earn more, work less

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The calm relaxed power of Aikido, courtesy of Spiral Photography

The time you spend in your business can be divided into two parts

  • Money making time
  • Non money making time

The more time you spend making money or the more money you make in the time you allow yourself, the more time you can spend doing the non money making activities.

Just to be clear, my definition of non money making activities includes admin time, down time, talking time and time spent not being at work at all.  That is, leisure time.

So the challenge becomes how to earn more and work less and ultimately increase family and leisure time!

There are several ways to achieve this but here are three (3) that you should think about early:

Become a specialist

If you become a specialist then you can place a price premium on your work.  If you are a generalist who will do anything because you are desperate for work, then you place yourself in the price competitive category.  It is the dreaded scattergun approach and you feel as though you are competing with the whole world.  One word of warning though!  To be a specialist, you must be good at what you do.

Raise your prices

If you are like most new owners of small business, you take a vow of poverty before you make your first sale.  You become reluctant to charge too much.  When you are just starting out, you don’t have the confidence to place much value on your own time and you are also worried that existing customers will leave and new customers will stop coming.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Customers do not place much value on a service that you give cheaply.  In the minds of many customers – if it is dearer it must be better, particularly if you do things a little differently.  People who are happy with your service rarely leave just because you raised prices.  It is too much hassle for people who have come to rely on you.

Play hard to get

Customers hate the feeling of missing out.  You will see this phenomenon if you watch restaurant browsers.  Customers walking past a row of restaurants will avoid the empty ones and go into the one where all the people are.  The famous movie line, “I’ll have what she’s having!” holds true.

Don’t be available ‘now’ all of the time.  For most customers, schedule an appointment.  For your best customers, make them feel special by giving your time at short notice.  If you make your time scarce to others, then you give the impression that you are busy all the time.  And if you are busy, you must be good, right?

If you want to read some interesting articles on Aiki-business (how the Japanese art of Aikido applies to Western business) visit my other blog at: http://www.aikido-secrets-to-calm-success.com

Thank you Dean Miscamble for your amazing action photo http://www.spiralphotography.com.au

Until next time!

Gary

Top small business ideas – money saving ideas

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Chili's restaurant in beautiful Banff, Alberta, Canada

I would like to share with you some more top small business ideas.  These are money saving ideas to keep in mind during your business strategy implementation phase:

  • Negotiate rent free periods on leased premises
  • Buy second hand furniture and equipment to start
  • Prioritise your spending so that you put more into areas that the customer sees and less into areas that they don’t see.
  • Review your need for advertising.  It can take a long time to find out what works and what doesn’t and you can chew through a lot of money in the meantime.  This is an area of enormous waste in many businesses, both small and large.  Small businesses however have much less capacity to get it wrong.
  • Advertising is generally passive and impersonal form of marketing.  Try getting out there and becoming more interactive and personal.
  • Use online printing services (e.g. Vistaprint) for stationary and marketing materials. It is great for testing campaigns because you can get small amounts of material at low cost and some products and services are free.
  • When starting up your own business, shop around on your merchant services because you may find some big savings.  A fraction of a percent on practically every sale will add up over time.  Also make sure that you are charged a flat fee per transaction (rather than a percentage) on debit cards.
  • During business strategy implementation, not everything goes according to plan.  Start a ‘Grow from our Mistakes’ book where everything that goes wrong, that loses time or money, or causes customer inconvenience is recorded.  Write a few lines about what happened and when; the estimated $ loss and how it was fixed.  This serves two purposes.  Mistakes are assigned a dollar value and when recorded, very few mistakes are ever repeated.  The key to a successful Mistake Book is to keep it low key and not make it the subject of an inquisition, otherwise people will cover up mistakes.  Over time, it can become a valuable book of solutions – i.e. this is the way things are done around here.
  • If you are starting up your own business and you are looking for more top small business ideas then stay tuned.

If you seek startup advice or a powerful online business presence when starting up your own business visit http://garyweigh.com/business-startup

Until next time!

Gary

Top small business ideas – business storytelling

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Make sure that you're still telling the same business story when it is translated into English

by Gary Weigh Business Coach Mentor

As you plan your business strategy implementation, remember the magic of stories. Business storytelling ranks up there with the top small business ideas. Stories build families and communities. They build emotional connections and it is well known that people buy largely on emotion rather than logic. Stories build faith but only if the story becomes real for the listener personally. Once people make your story their story, you have tapped into the powerful force of faith.

Can you remember when you were a child and one of your parents read you a story at bed time. Remember how it fired your interest and imagination. In business, a good story is more valuable than a thousand words of information and techno-babble.

When Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, was asked why she chose skin care, she replied: “Because it’s storytelling. In every group I have spent time with, women will always corral around a well and tell stories about the body, birth, marriage and death. Men only have conversations or memories about their first shave. But women will always use the body as a canvas, a playground. ”

Traditionally, good stories become better in the retelling. It is the stuff that myth and legend is made of. The Anita Roddick story (below) is a great example. Although she died in 2007, her legend lives on. That is why leaders and successful merchants tell stories. They know that stories captivate attention and allow the listener to connect on an emotional level. Stories are remembered forever, whereas information is largely forgotten by the end of the day.

People, with whom you have made a story connection, become more relaxed, more interested in what you have to say, and have fewer objections. There is a much greater chance that your audience will reach the same conclusions as you and enlist in your cause. In other words, they like you and trust you and have concluded that they will buy from you.

There are many types of stories that you can tell to get your business message across. For example, your business storytelling can be about your self and your journey, the origin of your innovative product line, or you can share your vision and values. Make it an integral part of your business strategy implementation. But please – make it short; make it interesting and, above all, make it honest. Oh and one last thing – don’t let your inner demons tell the story unless you can also tell the story of how you overcame them.

For more top small business ideas visit Gary Weigh, Business Coach Mentor at http://www.garyweigh.com

Until next time!

Gary

Top small business ideas – when starting up your own business from home

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Home office space - simple and functional

There are a number of things to consider when starting up your own business from home.  Here are six top small business ideas to think about when setting up from home:

1. Find a quiet work space

Whatever you are doing from home usually requires quiet time to focus and concentrate.  So the room you select should be the quietest or most remote space on your property.  It should also be a dedicated space.  An office by day and a bedroom by night won’t work for very long.

2. Consider your fit out

The fit out of your home office space will largely depend on the nature of your business and whether you will be meeting clients there?  I work from home but have a purpose built separate office at the back of the house.  It is good enough to receive visitors but I rarely invite people there, preferring to meet at a local coffee shop.  I find that coffee shops are generally warm and inviting and certainly more congenial and more relaxing for clients.

3. Hire local facilities

For those bigger ‘meeting & greeting’ occasions, check your local area for meeting rooms, conference and catering facilities.  Generally these facilities are used so rarely, it is cheaper to rent by the hour or day, even for office based businesses.

4. Shut out distractions

You must find ways to make a definite and solid transition from home to work.  It is important to minimise distractions.  This is not easy with children and a television.  Going to work in your pyjamas is a not the way to get yourself into a good head space for work.  Tripping up and down the stairs to and from the refrigerator every 15 minutes is also something to avoid.  I make the transition by getting dressed for work, leaving the house via the back door and arriving at my dedicated office about five seconds and six steps later.

5. Check with Council

Whether you can operate legally from your home depends where you live.  Every local Council has its own view on what they will allow by way of a home business.  Some encourage home businesses while others are very strict.  The most common considerations include traffic, parking, unsightliness, noise and signage.  It is important that you check the rules in your area with your local Council. 

Here is an extraordinary example:

The guy who lived next door to me a few years ago bought a new house and moved away but retained the house next door as his work premises.  He was an accountant.  The one or two visitors he had on any day parked comfortably on his large driveway and he had a very small sign by his letterbox, the purpose of which was to let clients know they were at the right address.  He was the quietest neighbour I have ever had, until one day a rival accountant who lived down the road but had offices elsewhere, dobbed him into the Local Council.  His business was shut down.  He sold the house and moved his business to commercial premises.

6. Tax considerations

A frequently asked question when starting up your own business is whether you can claim all or part of your home office expenses as a tax deduction.  You should check with your accountant because there are a number of rules surrounding this area.  One of the downsides to claiming home business expenses in Australia is that the extent to which you use your home as an income producing premises, you ultimately sacrifice part of your ‘principal place of residence’ capital gains tax exemption when it comes time to sell your home.

These top small business ideas are brought to by http://www.garyweigh.com

Until next time!

Gary