When starting your own business everyone expects things to start slow and pick up slowly but surely until they are running a business capable of sustaining themselves or even a staff of people. When considering starting up a small business unless what you are offering is something completely unique or far superior in price/quality/service than that of the competition the business will be a lifestyle business rather than a “make me a millionaire” business which is all good and well but there are several things that you may not expect to deal with when starting a business and running it for the first 3 years.
Without a doubt their are endless benefits that running your own business can bring you and your loved ones besides financial benefits however there exists downsides to a business and this can seem far worse than they truly are until you are out of the ditch.
Once you have figured out the basics of your business plan, worked out your start up costs, running costs, cash flow and sources of finance, developed your marketing plan and started to “get going” with your new business certainly within the first year and most likely for the first three years you may run into the following problems and these are things that people and books often forget to tell you.
Your business will swallow more money than you expected at the start
You will spend far more time and energy than anticipated getting it rolling
Your first year will most likely make a loss
You will become far more stressed out than you imagine
You may loose friends because of your dedication or out of their jealousy
Your second and third year will probably make a loss
You will become depressed from time to time
You will need a good support network of friends and family to rely on
Having other time commitments such as job or family will make things VERY difficult but if you are sure about your product then you will succeed
Don’t feel bad, depressed or want to give up on doing what you love if you do come against these problems. Remember there are always ways around them and that the first three years are often the most difficult. Don’t loose faith in yourself, your product or your service.
As a business owner I know how difficult it is to get your website running and getting things right for people so at iBox-Security we have teamed up with the fabulous Crystal Jewels (www.crystal-jewels.co.uk & twitter.com/crystal_jewels1) to offer you a fantastic deal whereby we are simply asking you to take 2 minutes of your time and view these three individual pages and let us know in an email three things on each page we could improve to make the site a better experience for you to navigate around and purchase items.
The three pages we would like you to review are as follows together with some examples of the three things for each page you could let us know we may need to improve on or could make the site better for you:
More images and bigger to see the quality of the product are needed
Once you have three things for each page – send us an email to comp@ibox-security.net with your suggestions and which of the following prizes you wish to claim if you are selected at random as the winner of our competition.
The prizes can be chosen as one of the following:
Your choice of any piece of jewellery from the Crystal Jewels website
Last year in October I made delivered a talk for Weston Super Mare’s Chamber of Trade and Commerce on the benefits of social media by introducing the basics and how to use it in a business environment; the talk which lasted approximately 45 minutes followed by 20 mins Q&A was a success and lead to several businesses in the area taking to the social network arena and trying it out for themselves.
The event held last year aptly named “Wired Weston” at The Royal Hotel in Weston-super-Mare had a great turn out and proved to be a great chance to network with like minded people and talk about business moving online in a town which is very much sat in its old ways.
This February 17th at the Royal Hotel sees the Chamber of Trade and Commerce come back with their 2nd part of the event with “Wired Weston II” – (I wish they would call it “Revenge of the tweets”) where by this time the event will touch on content from the previous event briefly and then move deeper into how you can benefit greatly from using Social Media on both a personal and business branding level.
My talk this year will be approximately 30 minutes followed by Q&A and I would love to answer as many questions as possible. If you are interested in coming along to the event please visit the Weston chamber of Trade & Commerce website - the event is completely free of charge, a buffet and refreshments will be provided, no pushy selling to join the Chamber, come along and learn, ask questions and network.
Productivity can be influenced or affected by so many things especially in the digital age where computers and mobile phones are so close knit to our daily routines.
Here I explain how I personally manage to keep on top of multiple projects and maintain a stress free (mostly) productive life while on the road.
This weekend I took a trip away without a laptop for once which is something I very rarely ever do as I like to stay connected especially for business purposes. I take a blackberry with me everywhere which is my main email / work mobile weapon of choice but to increase my productivity nothing can rival the iPhone (possibly soon to be an android when I get my hands on a nexus one!) this tool allows me to use several tools and applications that I would generally use on my day to day activities during work.
Despite not having a laptop my 3hr train journey allowed me to capture and sort all of the things in my head (GTD) and put them into the necessary collection points I use be that a moleskin notebook or my evernote and remember the milk GTD system I have setup.
With evernote this is your external brain whereby you can capture information in a variety of ways either through writing a text note, scan a document/image, record an audio note or snap a picture with you camera. Later you can tag and store all these items.
Remember the milk I take many of my to-do items and add them here. You can create as many lists as you like I have approximately 20 lists currently that range from the basic weekly-work-todo to shopping list, things to see at the movies or books to read. With all my tasks setup and contextualized I can clearly see what I need to do, where and when.
The great thing of remember the milk and evernote is that the both have web apps as well as evernote having native mac/windows/iPhone and android apps both applications sync their data so you are never out of date wherever you access your data from.
Catching up with audio-books on the journey was great as audio-books allow you to read books your interested in and stay actively working on whatever you could be doing. The weekend went smoothly for the most and creating an emergency only profile on the blackberry allowed me to keep the phone in my pocket without constant worry about incoming emails. With filters setup for only emergency or highly important emails to trigger alerts.
How do you manage productivity while travelling, on vacation or just away from the office?
Getting your website ranked high on Google is fantastic – figures show that a front page result can increase your traffic 10 fold with a top 3 position bringing in even more so. Trying to keep on track with your preferred keywords and tracking their position on Google (and other search engines – yes there are some left!) is a difficult thing to do and is often a choice of many businesses to hire a search engine optimization specialist typically local for best results (Such as Bristol – South West Search Engine Optimization).
So why would you possibly pay fees for a SEO which can range from a couple of hundred to a couple of THOUSAND pounds per month?
Its their job to manage your website rankings, reports, changes and optimizations while you can get on running your business
Don’t ask for Pay Per Results from an SEO specialist as many will not go for this – getting paid for results is acceptable by some but most will want paying for their work – makes sense right?
Search engine rankings are not set once and forget about with rankings changing on a rapid basis but also the algorithms behind them changing constantly
You run your business – you wouldn’t to do a plumbers job in place of a plumber doing your job – so don’t pretend to do an SEO’s job as this could have drastic effects of having your site not only loose rankings but in the case of some of our clients who tried it themselves also got their websites blacklisted and removed from Google altogether
It may cost a few hundred pounds per month but rather than do it yourself and get possibly blacklisted or at the least lose positions and when your monthly traffic is made up of 50% Google organic traffic as most people’s traffic is – that is a huge drop which could be a substantial loss of revenue
