Small businesses actually formed the backbone of many countries, while most bigger corporations are scrambling for government bailout, there are many more small businesses who are able to weather through the rough water and doing thriving businesses.

The Harvard Business Publishing has suggested the following strategies for small business to outperform the economy

1. Action
2. Planning
3. Innovative Financing
4.Give the people what they want
5. Test, Measure, Refine, Repeat.

Read here to see How Small Businesses Win Big in Tough Economies

“How do you propose to increase your income?” Ask any small business owner, you will receive thousand and one different answers on their plans or strategies to increase their income. And if you continue to ask, “Why do you think all these plans and strategies of your will increase your income?” You will receive another one thousand and one different answers on how they are sure their plans and strategies will works.

It is not surprising and uncommon to see when a small business owner runs a sales campaign which increases their sales revenues; they often do not generate enough profit to sustain the downturn after the sales campaign. While the plans and strategies work well to increase their income, their expenses and cost also escalated.

Many small business owners whenever they run a sales campaign to generate sales, they often focus on the transactions rather than the customers whom they dealt with. They are so engrossed in concluding the sales and make the profit and forgotten about the source of the income.  As a small business owner, you must always remember that a dollar earned from sales will not give you a dollar in profit, whereas a dollar saved from expenses will immediately add a dollar to your profit. While this is not to say that small business or any other business should not spend to generate more income,  you must always know where the money goes to and how much income your generated from that dollar spend to conclude the transaction that bring in the sales or income.

Always bear this in mind, the source of any income for your come from your customers, without customers, there will be no business for you, period. So your focus should be on your customers and not the transaction. For the long tern benefits if your business, there are two factors that you must monitor;

1. The acquisition cost of your customer; this is the amount of money you spend to bring in that customer. Simply put, say if you run a newspaper advertisement which cost you one thousand dollars and bring in twenty new customers, your acquisition cost per customer will be fifty dollars.
2. The value that one customer will continue to bring to your business after the initial transaction. Assuming that that one customers will continue buying from your for the next couple of years; the life time value of the customer.

If you are not aware of the two factors, you may continue to run your sales campaign to generate sales but realized that at the end of the day, your expenses had eaten up all your profits.

— Paul Zane Pilzer :  Economist, entrepreneur, and author

So you want to build a business that qualifies the picture painted on the quote by Paul Zane Pilzer and  gives your self a sense of achievement, satisfaction time and financial freedom.

Before you go into the greatest opportunity, perhaps you should look at the greatest challenge first. According to statistic, most small business could not survive more than 5 years, the Office of Advocacy from The Small Business Administration has this statistic for 2007,

New Firms 637,100     Closures 560,300  Bankruptcies 28,322.

That works out to be a whooping 92% in one years on Failure vs New Start Ups. The reasons for such a high failure rate is obvious; many would be “entrepreneurs” rush into starting their own business without knowing much about the world of business. They tend to believe that with their experiences in corporate environment; the passion of becoming an Entrepreneur and perhaps arm with the new found knowledge from their business school;t they could taking charge of their time and make a different to their life and the life of others.

Success in business is never automatic nor guaranteed, it is a risky adventure. The reasons for small business failure can be many. But “entrepreneurs burnout” is seldom a reason for business failure, not many “fail entrepreneurs” wanted to admit that he or she just throw in the tower. Soon after getting in and survive the elimination process of the fitters survive; reality started to creeps in and frustration building up even when the business is growing steadily. The reason is simple, in 2007, the Office of Advocacy of SBA estimated that there are 27.2 million businesses in the United States, 20.4 million of these businesses are without employees. A staggering 75% of all existing businesses are operated, managed and ran by the business owner themselves. They are the business owner, manager, operator, shop attendant, book keeper, delivery man or woman, you name it, they do it. It is not surprising that these entrepreneurs got burnout so easily and throw in the tower. They do not own a business, they own a job for themselves. That’s it.

So, if you are running a business of your own, ask yourself this question, ” Am I Owning the Business or the Business Own Me?” The test, simply ask yourself this question, ” Can the business run smoothly without you attending to it.?” if the answer is positive, well, you might own a business and not owning a job. The next question is, ” For how long can you NOT attending to it?”

If you are having this entrepreneurs burnout feeling or you haven’t own a business yet and intending to start one, a very good suggestion here is to visit some of the most established fast-food chain or franchise business; observe who are doing the day to day operation and running the business. You would probably  find a groups of perhaps, collage students and young adults and never know who is the real owner. That’s the beauty of real business leverage!

There is a vast opportunity in the business world and the benefits is far greater than the challenge, the truth is,  are you owning the business or the business owns you?

]]> http://clickabiznes.com/small-business/own-your-business-or-your-business-owns-you/feed/ 2 http://clickabiznes.com/small-business/your-website-need-to-revive/ http://clickabiznes.com/small-business/your-website-need-to-revive/#comments Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:27:13 +0000 jaunesk http://clickabiznes.com/?p=115 I receive a phone call in my wife’s office a couple of days ago and briefly the call went like this,

Caller,”Good afternoon, I am soandso from hiscompany name. I saw that you have a website and we are doing web design and able to help you to grow your business with your website.”

Me, “How do you propose to do that?”

Caller, ” We do web design and can design a professional looking website and I can see that your current website need to revive and ….. (pointed out the mistakes of the current company website and he can work wonder for us.)”

Me.”How do you propose to market for us?”

Caller, “Well, if you want to do web marketing, we can have Keyword search, Content Management, Search Engine Marketing ……….’

Me, ” How do you propose to do SEM for us?”

caller, ” We can do the Meta Tag keyword and description on your webpage, Anchor Text on your Content and SEO …………..”

Me, “Sound Good. can you give me your website address/url for me to verify.?”

Caller, “I can give you my company profile and list of clients that we do the website for them for your to see.”

Me, “No I just want to see your website.”

Caller, “When you engage a consultant, you will want to see what they can do for their clients not for themselves.”

Me, “Fine, you can email to me, but I still want to see your own website.”

Caller,” I will email you my company profile and list of customers website we do for them.”

Me. “But I still want to see your website.”

Caller (not very comfortable, “We work from home ((That is fine for me, you don’t need a posh office to do online business)) but we have a team of web designer working for our customer and we have been doing this since 20……, more reasons and more credential given”

Me, “Is it that difficult to give me your website url?”

Caller, ” More reasons…….. we can do secure ordering…. customers contacts Optin ……..”

Me.” What secure payment are you proposing?”

Caller, “we use Paypal?”

Me, ” Ok, how do you propose for us to take the money out considering that paypal don’t even issue check to our country.?

Caller, “Well, there are various way, ……….

Me,” Can you give me your website URL….”

After a lengthy tussle the caller finally gave in and unwillingly gave me his website URL and informed that he will email his company profiles and list of “happy customers.”

I visited his website or should I say, his webpage as it is only one page with an Optin box and some sentences of sales pitch on what they can do for small business web presence. I did a whois search and some other checking, email the caller and informed him to remember to email his company profile and list of “happy customers” to me. 3 days over and I am still waiting for the reply.

This remind me of a conversation with another web designer about a year ago when I visited a friend. So happen he was discussing with a web designer marketing personnel on how the webdesigner company can do for his bakery shop.

I told him I also wanted someone to revive the website for my wife company and asking on the promotion and marketing aspect of website, Well, I must admit this marketing personnel was more equipped with the presentation, so the dialogue went smoothly and I requested him to email me his company webpage and profile and job done,  Almost a year now,I am still waiting for his email.

Many small business owners are being persuaded to build a website for their business web presence without know the objective, system and strategy to market through the web. All they have is a fanciful web site with flash design and receive praises from friends, associates and customers and then buried in the tons and ever increasing websites on the the Internet.

So the next time when some one offer to design a website for you, apart from asking then what they can offer to build the site, asked tham what they would do to help you market your site and get Targeted Customer, not just see your site on the first page of SERO with your chosen “Keyword or anchor text” and see your traffic log with log of traffic to your site.

It is much easier you pay me $100 every month  and I will send 50,000 visitors to your site a month; sales not guarantee, just Kidding . Know the tricks now.  Just keep visiting this blog so that you will make an informed judgement on your small business decision.

• lack of special trade knowledge
• lack of skill on account, marketing and sales
• lack of capital
• lack of premises
• lack of suppliers etc etc

With all the reasons above, many will give a final reason that they wanted to have more information on various things before they started their own business. Now, what happen here is, lots of people do not realize that while they are looking for more information, they can actually start their business in a small scale, perhaps started with a home based business, learn their trade skill before they quit their day job and full time into business.

If the information inadequacy is your main reason, I want to share this video with you so that it can at least clear some doubt for you. enjoy the video and have a good thought about it.