Starting a business

Ten Things You Need to Know about Your Competition

November 16, 2017 by Marcia Ming Leave a Comment

After evaluating your own business, it’s time to take a detailed look at the competition. Without such an evaluation, you may miss opportunities and threats that might affect your success. Here are ten things you need to know about your competition to identify your path to success.

1. Identify your competitors – The first and most important aspect of checking out your competitors is to identify who they are. Start by doing an internet search of similar products or services. Search the local magazines and newspapers to get a feel for how many businesses of this type there are in your area.

2. Know their strengths – Knowing your competitors’ strengths is important, as it can highlight your own weaknesses. If you know your competition’s strength then you will be able to improvise and be innovative with your own products and services.

3. Know their weaknesses – If you know your competitors’ weaknesses, chances are you will be able to use that knowledge to maximize your company’s strengths.

4. Know their products, services, or goods – What products, goods, or services does your competition provide? Are they similar to yours? What unique twist might they offer on their services? How do they market them; is it through traditional advertising, online, or through video sales?

5. What their social media status looks like – Does your competition get many likes or comments as feedback on their blogs or websites?

6. Who owns this business and what kind of individual is he or she – Does the business owner stand out on the front line or behind corporate walls? Is the business owner someone who is philanthropic and altruistic? Does the persona of the business owner maximize its sales? Are they out in the public eye a lot?

7. What their price points are and are they competitive to yours – Do they have a lower price but cheaper quality as well? Do they mass produce, saving money for their customer? Are you able to compete with that?

8. Know their annual earnings (if this information is available) – Are their annual earnings public or private? Can you see their growth or decline in business over the last year?

9. Management analysis – Does this company or business have a quick turnaround of management professionals? If so, can you spot why and where their weaknesses are?

10. What types of guarantees and warranties do they put forth on their product or service – Does each competitor valiantly offer beneficial warranties and guarantees on their products and are their customers satisfied customers? Do their social media comments, tweets, and likes show happy consumers?

Only by studying these aspects of your competitors’ businesses will you identify opportunities to bring added value to the marketplace. When you identify things your competitors are not doing, that you can add, you will find a way to set your business apart.

Vision Boards – Creative Ways to Develop a Business Plan

November 16, 2017 by Marcia Ming 2 Comments

If you read my last post about planning your business and creating a timeline, you may have lost all of your enthusiasm — especially if you are not a numbers type. Before you throw up your hands and give up on your entrepreneurial dreams, look for creative ways to capture your thoughts.

We talked in an earlier post about mind maps. If you didn’t read that post, you can find it here. There are other ways too. Some people use vision boards to capture their vision before attempting to turn their ideas into written plans.

What is a Vision Board?

A vision board is a collection of images, quotes and symbols that have meaning to you and which bring out feelings of joy, peace, love and happiness. They represent your dream life.

Vision boards come in many different formats, both digital and physical. We’ll talk more about that later, but for now, let’s take a look at the types of content. Images – by far the most common item to find on vision boards – can be photos, drawings, mind maps, sketches or anything else that has meaning for you.

In addition to images, people often include inspirational quotes, motivational messages and anything else that embodies the vision of the company you are trying to create.

Mind Mapping to Assess Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

November 16, 2017 by Marcia Ming Leave a Comment

Running a business successfully will require that you tap all of your strengths, while finding ways to minimize or overcome your weaknesses. You will need to be as innovative, productive, and forward moving as possible, while anticipating the threats and opportunities your business may face. There are many tools you can use to boost your creativity. Mind mapping is one of those tools.

First, let’s examine what mind mapping is. Mind mapping is a way of brainstorming on paper. It is extremely beneficial as it is a visual tool that stimulates creative thinking preparing you to organize, evaluate, and analyze data you create for your business ideas. It is sort of like brainstorming with yourself on paper.

To begin with, you place a key word in the center of the paper that is a sort of main character in the mind mapping system. Next, you branch out ideas from that internal word and continue to branch out new words in a circle around that original word or theme.

It is similar to choosing a theme and several subthemes or topics and subtopics. The more you extend the circles and branch them out, the more creative you will find yourself being. Mind mapping is similar to choosing a niche and then a sub-niche and then another sub-niche within a sub-niche.

What Are the Benefits of Mind Mapping?

Mind mapping offers several benefits. For one thing, mind mapping is a visual tool. It helps you to organize information, create new concepts and themes while stretching your imagination, and offers the possibility of analyzing and visualizing ideas on paper in a new and creative fashion.

Mind mapping is an excellent tool to evaluate the strengths of your company or business. By placing several key themes on paper, you can visually pinpoint where your company’s strengths are. From there, you can gain momentum by brainstorming creative and innovative ideas to enhance and maximize those strengths.

Mind mapping is also useful in examining weaknesses. Weak areas are highlighted when using mind mapping. This is useful because sometimes a discussion about weaknesses does not produce any tangible results for improvement. However, using mind mapping creates a visual board for where weaknesses lie.

If you want to explore opportunities that you can take advantage of, mind mapping is an excellent tool for this. If you have one or two tried and true ideas for success, you can create sub-categories and sub-topics for those opportunities. This, in turn will create even bigger and more advantageous opportunities.

If your company or business has the potential for external threats, using a mind map will clearly hone in on those threats and spotlight them. This has a benefit because you can now see where you need to put your attention to ward off potential outside threats in the future.

In the business world, this assessment of a company’s strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats is often described as a SWOT analysis. Mind mapping is a useful tool for visualizing your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It also can be a creative way to record the information visually in a meeting setting with your team, advisory board or mentor.

Creating Your Action Plan and Online Business Timeline

November 16, 2017 by Marcia Ming Leave a Comment

When you think of creating a business plan, you may imagine a boring document your lender may ask for. What you need to consider is that most businesses start out with a dream and an inspiration, but that is where it ends. Even the most innovative businesses can wind up closing their doors because a good action plan and a focused timeline were not in place at conception.

There are many benefits to creating your action plan and online business timeline. When you have an action plan put into place and follow it regularly and continue to focus on your business timeline, things will run much more smoothly for your new business, your employees, and your customers.

Tips to Create a Powerful Action Plan

* Streamline Your Path – If you have a dream and a vision – excellent. Now, you must have knowledge of where your business is heading down the line. It is important to focus on a streamlined path when you first start your business. Otherwise, you are likely to find that your business is “all over the place.” Be sure to be specific in where you expect your business to go in the first twelve months.

* Put It in Writing – In the early stages of creating your business, it is important to create an action plan in writing. Without this piece of the puzzle, it can get messy quite quickly. Having an action plan in your head or verbalizing it with other team members is not nearly as efficient as putting it down in writing.

* Measure Your Goals Consistently – Make sure to check up on your goals often. By measuring your goals, you consistently marry those goals against where you are at the moment. If your goals are not in alignment with where they should be, then it is time to re-evaluate.

* Break Down Bigger Projects into More Manageable Ones – When you create your action plan, make certain to break down bigger projects into more manageable ones. In this way, you will be able to get the whole job done without it feeling overwhelming.

* Delegate – Do not be afraid to delegate some of your action plan. If you try to do everything all on your own, chances are all those balls you are juggling will come tumbling down sooner rather than later.

Tips to Create an Online Business Timeline

* Create a Timeline for Every Task – You may think it is not necessary to create a timeline for each and every task; however, a timeline is essential for success. Creating a timeline will help you to manage your time and your business.

* Keep It Real – A timeline should have manageable date attached to each task. If you create a timeline goal too soon, then you may set yourself up for failure. By being realistic, you set yourself up for success.

* Differentiate Your Tasks – Make certain to differentiate your short-term tasks from your long-term tasks. For example, a short-term task would be to hire employees and a long-term task would be to improve your social media status.

* Stick to Your Timeline No Matter What – You have to have integrity in this area. You need to stick with your timeline no matter what, as this is the only way to achieve success.

* Stay Focused – It is very easy to let a task go because other “stuff” gets in the way. Stay focused and stick to your timeline. Check your progress as you go along the way.

Do You Have an Entrepreneurial Mindset?

November 16, 2017 by Marcia Ming Leave a Comment

If you are thinking of starting a business, you may be wondering if you have what it takes to succeed. It’s smart to give that some real thought given all that you read about small business failures.

There are several ways to tell if you have this entrepreneurial mindset. Moreover, there are just as many ways to clear the road to becoming an entrepreneur.

Do You Have the Entrepreneurial Mindset?

Consider these personality traits:

* Leadership qualities
* Creative thinking
* A feeling that there is something more than what you are doing in your current job
* Innovative ideas

If you show any or all of these qualities, you could very well be on your way to owning your own business because you do have that entrepreneurial spirit.

How to Clear the Road toward Entrepreneurial Success

Going from the 9:00 to 5:00 grind to the entrepreneurial spirit may not be the easiest path, but it is something you can achieve. However, there are several steps you need to take before forging head first into business ownership.

* Get clear – Getting clear on what it is you want to achieve is an integral first step. It is not as simple as coming up with an idea and writing it down. You have to write down your goals, but even more importantly, you have to break them down. Being specific is not an option; it is mandatory. You need to have clear, specific goals when it comes to starting a new business.

* Create a plan – Once you are clear on what your goal for your new business is, you have to create a plan for success. Write down what your goal is, how you will achieve that goal in smaller steps and then break that list down even further.

* Take action – Next, it is time to take action steps. Action steps need more than just thinking about taking them. Declare aloud and to everyone you can what your action steps are; in this way, you are accountable to your word.

* Delegate – If you are starting a new business of your own, do not be afraid to delegate tasks, even if you do not have a business partner or associates yet. One day delegating will be a task you will have to learn anyhow.

Allow family members and friends to help take the load off somewhere else while you learn all you need to know about your new business endeavor.

* Letting go – Sometimes in order to create something new, we need to let go of something old. In order to clear the path to creating a new business, something else will have to fall by the wayside. Your home may need to be a little cluttered or less clean. You may have to let go of a favorite sport or activity for a while, but it is well worth it in the end.

One last bit of advice: Keep your day job until your business finds it footing. It can take anywhere from months to several years for a new business to become profitable. Having money set aside to cover your personal financial needs or a reliable source of income will give you the time you need to develop that entrepreneurial mindset.