Creating a successful business begins with gathering the necessary educational tools, including business and motivational skills, operational knowledge and client insight, understanding the schematics of the industry-focused business, and adapting to and following current and future trends in the world.
Budding entrepreneurs embarking on a new venture must first gather the appropriate knowledge and skills that will essentially become the foundation of their businesses. You can always take courses or attend workshops that talk about becoming a business owner, highlight the fundamentals of business 101, and gives pointers on building a business from scratch, including the internal and external factors.
These workshops offer the opportunity for you to be educated on legal steps, financial commitments and literacy, vested time and interest, return on interest, and other important dynamics you may not think of immediately. You will learn one of the most important aspects of any business or undertaking - communication skills. You will learn how to approach your potential clients, how to present your business, and how to communicate with the public. Taking classes can only enhance what you already know and help you build on your abilities.
Reading literature, spanning from topic-related books, magazines, and articles, will help you to grasp different points of views of the business world from a variety of industrial backgrounds and people. Reading The Road Ahead by Bill Gates may give you the skills to understand why assessing present-day trends and how your particular product will impact the future is important. Whereas Bloomberg by Bloomberg by Michael Bloomberg may give you insight on the steps you should take to build a system that generates millions of dollars.
Some your favorite business leaders have published works that portray their starts in the business from the inside out. Read them, understand them, follow them, and read them again. After all, there are a few reasons why they became successful. Reading is one of the most valuable tools we have at our fingertips. To waste it would be a shame.
Listening to motivational CDs and speakers who ignite determination and an “I can do it!” attitude is significant in helping to build one’s self-confidence and in motivating yourself to set high goals and achieve the most of your dreams. Sometimes we need to be pushed to dream big and accomplish big.
Have you ever heard this? “You’re on cloud nine if you think you’re going to become a billionaire in this lifetime. Only celebrities can do that.” I’m sure we’ve all heard it. But why can’t we be like Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates? Why can’t we be billionaires with shared assets in 20 companies spanning across the country?
Listening to successful people who have already accomplished what we are setting out to achieve and taking advice from those who believe they can do anything they set their minds to is a sure way to put us in a positive mind frame where we want to make it happen. We want to become rich and successful. Get rid of the negativity in your life and surrounding environment and replace it with positive energy.
Associating yourself with everything and anything that provides insight and knowledge into your endeavor will help you to better understand your venture and equip you with the fundamentals.
To know how a particular industry-focused business is run, you first must understand the industry itself. How can you open a clothing store without knowing about the retail industry? How can you launch a deli without understanding the food industry? Answer a few questions on your own first.
What makes this industry so popular?
Is this a fast-growing industry and why?
Who are the potential clients in this industry?
How can I market my business in this industry?
What do I need to become successful in this industry?
If you cannot answer these questions, you must turn to your predecessors or mentors in the industry. Understanding what they have done will give you the knowledge and background to be even better than they are. Learn from their mistakes and accomplishments. Take their advice and build on what they say. You have to be prepared for the field, ready for all obstacles, and have the expertise that will allow you to expand and duplicate your business.
Even if you can answer those questions, there are tons of other unanswered questions, and knowledge is neverending, so why not take the opportunity to learn? Being teachable and open to accept information is an important trait for any business owner. You always have to be willing to grasp knowledge.
How can you pursue a business without knowing what is hot and what is not in the world? Keeping up with the times and current societal trends is an important aspect of becoming successful.
For instance, those who recognized Facebook was becoming the number-one social networking site were able to reap the benefits of its success because they used Facebook as a source for marketing, networking, and associating. Those who found out about YouTube becoming the next big viral video site were able to leverage their talents by use of YouTube. Listen to people around you, read newspapers, take surveys in your neighborhoods, develop conversations with people, and get to them inside out from what they're wearing to what they're eating.
You must understand what the trends were yesterday, today, and what they could be tomorrow.
Becoming successful means wanting to learn and achieve high. Following the basics of building a foundation is the only we can accomplish our goals. Associate yourself with knowledge and anything that can provide education on your endeavor. Find a mentor and heed his advice. Keep up with society from networking, marketing, advertising, fashion, food, and more. Be up-to-date. Follow these few suggestions, and you’ll be on your path to success.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) reports that 85% of small businesses that go through a disaster event never recover. Key to ensuring that businesses not go under is planning for business continuity. Ensuring that a company is resilient is crucial to protecting the company from failure. This is the first of four articles on preparing a small business for disaster. For this series, a small business is any establishment that has fewer than 200 employees, and/or an income of less than $25 million in earnings per year. However for any business,whether it is a micro-business, a medium-sized business, or a major corporation, these tips are practical and worth exploring.
The articles will cover the following areas:
Protecting a Small Business from Disaster: A Different Approach
Risk Analysis and Mitigation
Creating and Executing a Business Continuity Plan
Realistic BCP Exercises and Testing: Beyond DR
Business continuity is not a project that ends when a document is created, signed by the Board, tested, and filed away. First, banish the word "recovery" from the company dictionary. The goal is not to recover from a disaster; it is to continuethrough the event without failing the company's primary stakeholders: the employees, the customer, and the owners, whether shareholders or the company founder(s). A business owner should consider business resiliency as integral to their business operations. Each area of the organization should be built to continue if there is a disaster. Resiliency is as much a part of the bottom line of any business as location, information technology (IT) support, or a loan from the local bank.
Do not look at continuity as an "add-on" duty. Take the approach of ensuring that the company's existence depends on the ability to continuefunctioning no matter what happens. Continuity planning should be someone's full time job. That person and their staff (if they have one) should report directly to the CEO or the COO. This makes it clear to everyone in the organization that continuity matters: resiliency is what will keep the organization flowing.
While the Business Continuity Manager may want to have a disaster recovery specialist on the team, the BCM manager should be someone who understands how businesses work and how resiliency can boost the bottom line. Focus on hiring someone who has the outlook that business continuity affects everyone from the janitor to the C-suite. If necessary, hire a consultant to help get the Business Continuity Management department started.
A steering committee should be formed that involves the managers or subject matter experts from throughout the organization. This may include the CEO/owner,COO, CFO/accountant, warehouse supervisor, head of retail management, or whatever is appropriate for the business. The steering committee will determine what the risks are to the organization, what the critical tasks/functions are, and what strategy to take for mitigation and continuous resiliency. The committee does not have to be static; people can be added or released as needed. But the top people in the company are permanent members. Again, this lets everyone know that resiliency is just as important to the organization as accounting, sales, and the fashion buyers.
Company management must be committed to looking at every area of the company and determining how to continue the business of business during a disaster.
The first issue is to expand the definition of the word "disaster" to this one, as defined in the Disaster Recovery Journal's Glossary of BCP terms: "A sudden, unplanned catastrophic event causing unacceptable damage or loss."
This definition is broad enough for the focus of this article. A sudden drop in stock prices that cuts the company's cash reserves in half in an hour is a disaster because the loss is unacceptable. Has your company already secured credit that can be tapped during a sudden downturn? At reasonable rates? The head of Accounting, who is actually the entire Accounting department, survives a heart attack on Thursday and decides to retire. Immediately. Who is going to take over on Friday morning and get the payroll processed? A wild fire burns down your warehouse full of spring fashions on February 28, just as the sales circular is arriving at prospective customer's houses. How quickly can stock be replenished?
Oh, and someone forgot to do the backups in the IT department for the last three days. So when the air conditioners go out and the servers crash from the heat (I have seen it happen), there is a good chance that the transactions for the last three days are not recoverable.
In traditional Business Continuity Plans, only the heart attack and the IT debacle are considered in planning. Challenge the BCP Steering Committee to create a list of all of the risks to the company. Do not worry about going overboard. Only colonization by Martians is off limits. Cutting the brainstorming list down to a reasonable and manageable number during a risk analysis will be discussed in the next article.
Finally, consider the day-to-day activities of the organization. What steps can be taken to ensure that, no matter what happens, the business continues to run? If the electricity goes out, do the cashiers have calculators? Do they know how to use them? If the price of gas goes up to $5 a gallon, have all of the landscapers been trained in fuel consumption, and do they use those procedures daily? If a fire breaks out at the charter school, have the students and teachers been trained in evacuation?
Resiliency requires the company management to create procedures that are not only efficient, saving money and time, but also resilient. Using laptops for every employee instead of desktops may allow the company to continue processing customer requests from the local coffee shop if the normal workspace is uninhabitable. Better yet, the company can save money on leasing office space by using telecommuters and increase the company's resiliency by disbursing the staff to different geographical areas. If a tornado hits one area, the entire staff will not be affected, and work may be able to continue.
Take Courses & Classes to Gather Fundamental Business & Communication Skills
Budding entrepreneurs embarking on a new venture must first gather the appropriate knowledge and skills that will essentially become the foundation of their businesses. You can always take courses or attend workshops that talk about becoming a business owner, highlight the fundamentals of business 101, and gives pointers on building a business from scratch, including the internal and external factors.
These workshops offer the opportunity for you to be educated on legal steps, financial commitments and literacy, vested time and interest, return on interest, and other important dynamics you may not think of immediately. You will learn one of the most important aspects of any business or undertaking - communication skills. You will learn how to approach your potential clients, how to present your business, and how to communicate with the public. Taking classes can only enhance what you already know and help you build on your abilities.
Reading Is a Valuable Learning Tool - Use It
Reading literature, spanning from topic-related books, magazines, and articles, will help you to grasp different points of views of the business world from a variety of industrial backgrounds and people. Reading The Road Ahead by Bill Gates may give you the skills to understand why assessing present-day trends and how your particular product will impact the future is important. Whereas Bloomberg by Bloomberg by Michael Bloomberg may give you insight on the steps you should take to build a system that generates millions of dollars.
Some your favorite business leaders have published works that portray their starts in the business from the inside out. Read them, understand them, follow them, and read them again. After all, there are a few reasons why they became successful. Reading is one of the most valuable tools we have at our fingertips. To waste it would be a shame.
Take Advice from Your Business Guru or Mentor
Listening to motivational CDs and speakers who ignite determination and an “I can do it!” attitude is significant in helping to build one’s self-confidence and in motivating yourself to set high goals and achieve the most of your dreams. Sometimes we need to be pushed to dream big and accomplish big.
Have you ever heard this? “You’re on cloud nine if you think you’re going to become a billionaire in this lifetime. Only celebrities can do that.” I’m sure we’ve all heard it. But why can’t we be like Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates? Why can’t we be billionaires with shared assets in 20 companies spanning across the country?
Listening to successful people who have already accomplished what we are setting out to achieve and taking advice from those who believe they can do anything they set their minds to is a sure way to put us in a positive mind frame where we want to make it happen. We want to become rich and successful. Get rid of the negativity in your life and surrounding environment and replace it with positive energy.
Associating yourself with everything and anything that provides insight and knowledge into your endeavor will help you to better understand your venture and equip you with the fundamentals.
Learn About Your Business Industry
To know how a particular industry-focused business is run, you first must understand the industry itself. How can you open a clothing store without knowing about the retail industry? How can you launch a deli without understanding the food industry? Answer a few questions on your own first.
What makes this industry so popular?
Is this a fast-growing industry and why?
Who are the potential clients in this industry?
How can I market my business in this industry?
What do I need to become successful in this industry?
If you cannot answer these questions, you must turn to your predecessors or mentors in the industry. Understanding what they have done will give you the knowledge and background to be even better than they are. Learn from their mistakes and accomplishments. Take their advice and build on what they say. You have to be prepared for the field, ready for all obstacles, and have the expertise that will allow you to expand and duplicate your business.
Even if you can answer those questions, there are tons of other unanswered questions, and knowledge is neverending, so why not take the opportunity to learn? Being teachable and open to accept information is an important trait for any business owner. You always have to be willing to grasp knowledge.
Follow Current & Future Industry Trends to Launch a Successful Business
How can you pursue a business without knowing what is hot and what is not in the world? Keeping up with the times and current societal trends is an important aspect of becoming successful.
For instance, those who recognized Facebook was becoming the number-one social networking site were able to reap the benefits of its success because they used Facebook as a source for marketing, networking, and associating. Those who found out about YouTube becoming the next big viral video site were able to leverage their talents by use of YouTube. Listen to people around you, read newspapers, take surveys in your neighborhoods, develop conversations with people, and get to them inside out from what they're wearing to what they're eating.
You must understand what the trends were yesterday, today, and what they could be tomorrow.
Becoming successful means wanting to learn and achieve high. Following the basics of building a foundation is the only we can accomplish our goals. Associate yourself with knowledge and anything that can provide education on your endeavor. Find a mentor and heed his advice. Keep up with society from networking, marketing, advertising, fashion, food, and more. Be up-to-date. Follow these few suggestions, and you’ll be on your path to success.
Protecting a Small Business from Disaster: A Different Approach
The Small Business Administration (SBA) reports that 85% of small businesses that go through a disaster event never recover. Key to ensuring that businesses not go under is planning for business continuity. Ensuring that a company is resilient is crucial to protecting the company from failure. This is the first of four articles on preparing a small business for disaster. For this series, a small business is any establishment that has fewer than 200 employees, and/or an income of less than $25 million in earnings per year. However for any business,whether it is a micro-business, a medium-sized business, or a major corporation, these tips are practical and worth exploring.
The articles will cover the following areas:
Protecting a Small Business from Disaster: A Different Approach
Risk Analysis and Mitigation
Creating and Executing a Business Continuity Plan
Realistic BCP Exercises and Testing: Beyond DR
Business Continuity = RESILIENCY
Business continuity is not a project that ends when a document is created, signed by the Board, tested, and filed away. First, banish the word "recovery" from the company dictionary. The goal is not to recover from a disaster; it is to continuethrough the event without failing the company's primary stakeholders: the employees, the customer, and the owners, whether shareholders or the company founder(s). A business owner should consider business resiliency as integral to their business operations. Each area of the organization should be built to continue if there is a disaster. Resiliency is as much a part of the bottom line of any business as location, information technology (IT) support, or a loan from the local bank.
Send a message: this is serious business
Do not look at continuity as an "add-on" duty. Take the approach of ensuring that the company's existence depends on the ability to continuefunctioning no matter what happens. Continuity planning should be someone's full time job. That person and their staff (if they have one) should report directly to the CEO or the COO. This makes it clear to everyone in the organization that continuity matters: resiliency is what will keep the organization flowing.
While the Business Continuity Manager may want to have a disaster recovery specialist on the team, the BCM manager should be someone who understands how businesses work and how resiliency can boost the bottom line. Focus on hiring someone who has the outlook that business continuity affects everyone from the janitor to the C-suite. If necessary, hire a consultant to help get the Business Continuity Management department started.
A steering committee should be formed that involves the managers or subject matter experts from throughout the organization. This may include the CEO/owner,COO, CFO/accountant, warehouse supervisor, head of retail management, or whatever is appropriate for the business. The steering committee will determine what the risks are to the organization, what the critical tasks/functions are, and what strategy to take for mitigation and continuous resiliency. The committee does not have to be static; people can be added or released as needed. But the top people in the company are permanent members. Again, this lets everyone know that resiliency is just as important to the organization as accounting, sales, and the fashion buyers.
Focus on Resiliency
Company management must be committed to looking at every area of the company and determining how to continue the business of business during a disaster.
The first issue is to expand the definition of the word "disaster" to this one, as defined in the Disaster Recovery Journal's Glossary of BCP terms: "A sudden, unplanned catastrophic event causing unacceptable damage or loss."
This definition is broad enough for the focus of this article. A sudden drop in stock prices that cuts the company's cash reserves in half in an hour is a disaster because the loss is unacceptable. Has your company already secured credit that can be tapped during a sudden downturn? At reasonable rates? The head of Accounting, who is actually the entire Accounting department, survives a heart attack on Thursday and decides to retire. Immediately. Who is going to take over on Friday morning and get the payroll processed? A wild fire burns down your warehouse full of spring fashions on February 28, just as the sales circular is arriving at prospective customer's houses. How quickly can stock be replenished?
Oh, and someone forgot to do the backups in the IT department for the last three days. So when the air conditioners go out and the servers crash from the heat (I have seen it happen), there is a good chance that the transactions for the last three days are not recoverable.
In traditional Business Continuity Plans, only the heart attack and the IT debacle are considered in planning. Challenge the BCP Steering Committee to create a list of all of the risks to the company. Do not worry about going overboard. Only colonization by Martians is off limits. Cutting the brainstorming list down to a reasonable and manageable number during a risk analysis will be discussed in the next article.
Continuous Resiliency
Finally, consider the day-to-day activities of the organization. What steps can be taken to ensure that, no matter what happens, the business continues to run? If the electricity goes out, do the cashiers have calculators? Do they know how to use them? If the price of gas goes up to $5 a gallon, have all of the landscapers been trained in fuel consumption, and do they use those procedures daily? If a fire breaks out at the charter school, have the students and teachers been trained in evacuation?
Resiliency requires the company management to create procedures that are not only efficient, saving money and time, but also resilient. Using laptops for every employee instead of desktops may allow the company to continue processing customer requests from the local coffee shop if the normal workspace is uninhabitable. Better yet, the company can save money on leasing office space by using telecommuters and increase the company's resiliency by disbursing the staff to different geographical areas. If a tornado hits one area, the entire staff will not be affected, and work may be able to continue.
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