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Topic: Business Failure Keep overheads low – This is one of the most important rules to follow for most small businesses. Unless you are a Silicon Valley start-up, with masses of funding, money will be tight at first. Most entrepreneurs put their life on the line here -investing in themselves, by using credit cards, or their homes as surety. Remember the statistics we looked at about business failure? Many of them fail because of lack of funding. Keep your overheads tight and protect your cash flow. Staff or contractors It is likely that at some point you may need assistance in the business. There are many pros and cons to employing staff. This will very much depend on the type of business that you have. A rapidly increasing trend is to take people on as subcontractors rather than staff. This merits a section of its own, so I will revisit it later in this module. Suffice to say for now, I would avoid taking on staff in the very early stages, until you ...

Topic: CONTINUATION OF PREVIOUS LESSON 6. Insurance The insurance you will require depends on the type of business you have, and the legal requirements in your region. Most businesses should have general liability insurance to cover against legal issues relating to accident, injuries and claims of negligence. If you have employees, you may need employer’s liability insurance. If your Business is selling products, you may need product liability insurance; if you are selling services, you may need professional liability insurance. If the business owns property, you may need commercial property insurance. If you work from home, you may need additional home-based business insurance if your normal home insurance policies do not cover business use. 7. Recruiting Staff This is a big step, so be sure you really need to employ someone and that the business can support the expense of payroll, and additional responsibilities of ensuring you meet minimum wage level re...

Topic: Ten (10) priority  things that concerns us when to start a business. 1 . Getting Customers and achieving sales. This is undoubtedly the single biggest issue facing any business. It has been said that businesses face two problems;- A) Sales B) Everything else. While this seems trite, it is definitely true. If the business has robust sales, then everything else can be fixed. If it doesn’t have adequate sales, then the business is in serious trouble, in fact there really isn’t a business. So the first concern has to be attracting new customers, and retaining existing customers. Developing a “route to market”, a marketing and advertising campaign, and, probably, building a website. The route to market that you choose will depend on your business and your target market. Consider online techniques including search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, social media marketing. Also consider offline techniques such as newspaper and magazine ad...

Topic: Successful entrepreneurs tend to have certain behaviours;- Personal They accept responsibility for their actions. They do not rely on others to take decisions for them, or to make their ideas work. If they have a Vision, they, and only they, can implement it. They have a can-do approach, to business and to life. They often create a culture around them of likeminded people They don’t prevaricate, they face facts, (having checked their accuracy) accept them, and deal with them. They accept failure with the same attitude-they just dust themselves off and move on. And learn lessons from it. They have passion and belief in what they are doing. They don’t procrastinate, they have an idea, a vision, and they grasp the opportunity They are always alert to new opportunities They see problems as opportunities They set themselves deadlines, sometimes audacious ones! And they are not perfectionists. They launch on the deadline with what ...