idea for your business

Archive for August, 2009

During the current economic climate, there are factors that entrepreneurs look at more closely when it comes to starting up a business. The “where” and “how much” factors become a bigger part of the decision, as one looks to trim any unnecessary cost factors. Gone are the days where if you were technology based, you’d set up in Silicon Valley or if you needed to network with business contacts – set up shop in New York. Ironically, thanks to modern day technology, you can set up in a much wider range of locations.

Entrepreneurs look at factors like the ease of recruitment, and as a result – have looked into the central states of the US, such as Colorado, where the workforce is well educated, quality of life is good, and cost of living is a big step lower than on the coasts.

With hopes up about stabilisation of the economy, this is a great opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs and small business start ups alike to take things to the next level. Over the last few years, several angel groups and individual investors have started to set up shop in cities like St. Louis (such as the Arch Angel Investor Network), again bucking the general trends.

On the Central Investment Network – entrepreneurs in the Central states of the US get another chance to connect with angel investors. Members can get their business ideas and plans out to hundreds of local investors – and since Central Investment Network is part of the Angel Investment Network, members can connect with thousands of other investors from around the world. In fact the network grows continuously, with branches in over 40 countries and investments occurring both on a local and international basis.

Of course, the plans have to be well thought out and organised, as while entrepreneurs may have less competition, the investors are also more choosy. Still, there are signs that more successful angel investment strategies such as venture capital investments are occurring within the central states. While some venture capital backed companies have gone bankrupt this year in the U.S, almost all of them are California based, and none of them are in the states that the Central Investment Network covers – which includes Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Utah & Wyoming.

Find out more, by visiting http://www.centralinvestmentnetwork.com

A Guaranteed Investment Certificate, or GIC is a type of Canadian investment in which the rate of return is guaranteed over a fixed period of time. Guaranteed Investment Certificates are relatively low-risk investments, and thus yield smaller returns than that of stocks, bonds and mutual funds. GIC’s are typically offered by banks or trust companies. These safe and secure Canadian investments earn interest at a fixed rate, variable rate, or based on a market-based index. Many Canadians view Guaranteed Investment Certificates an excellent choice for an investment portfolio that requires a measure of safety.

How do Guaranteed Investment Certificates Work?

With GIC’s, you will invest an amount of money (determined by you) for a period of time that is determined by the specific type of Guaranteed Investment Certificate that you choose. Typically these periods of time vary greatly and can tend to range anywhere from 1 day to 10 years. GIC’s with longer terms will earn more interest than short term ones. When your Guaranteed Investment Certificate reaches the end of its term (otherwise known as ‘maturity,’) you will be able to access not only your initial investment, but the earned interest as well.

Some Canadian Guaranteed Investment Certificates require that the amount of money you invest initially remain ‘locked in’ for a minimum period of time (30 days for example). Other GIC’s will allow you to access your money before the investment matures. There are even Guaranteed Investment Certificates that allow you to add to your initial investment amount by making weekly, biweekly or monthly contributions.

Redeemable vs. Non-redeemable

Guaranteed Investment Certificates can be redeemable or non-redeemable. As aforementioned, there are some GIC’s which allow you to access your cash during the term. This is referred to as ‘redeemable.’ With a redeemable investment, you will be able to withdraw your cash before maturity. Some redeemable GIC’s specify that you will earn less interest if you cash out prior to maturity.

Non-redeemable Guaranteed Investment Certificates do not allow withdrawals before the maturity date. Non-redeemable GIC’s may offer higher interest rates than redeemable ones.

Interest

Guaranteed Investment Certificates in Canada can be offer either fixed or variable interest rates.

Fixed Rate GIC’s

With a fixed rate GIC, your investment will earn interest at a set rate. That is, the interest that your investment earns will be consistent throughout the term of the investment. The benefit of fixed rate GIC’s is that you can predict exactly how much your investment will be worth on the maturity date.

Variable Rate GIC’s

Variable rate Guaranteed Investment Certificates are either linked to the Canadian prime interest rate or to stock-market performance. With interest-rate linked GIC, you are guaranteed that your money will grow, but you will not know at which rate until maturity. With market-linked GIC’s, you can earn more interest if the stock market does well, but your initial investment will be protected either way.

Benefits of GIC’s

The most important benefit offered by this type of investment is safety and security. Your initial investment will be protected. With fixed-rate GIC’s you can also enjoy guaranteed growth and an easy way to project value at maturity. GIC’s are also known to offer excellent interest rates. Finally, GIC’s are typically pretty flexible investments. You can enjoy flexibility in length of term as well as how often you receive payments.

If you live in Canada and are interested in investing your money in a safe instrument, a Guaranteed Investment Certificate may be right for you. To find out more about what is available in your area, visit your local bank.

Borrow More Money!

Small businesses can improve their credit rating by borrowing more money. You heard me right! Borrow money even when your business does not need it and pay it back on time or better still clear the loan early. Bizarrely, if you have never applied for a loan before then this will negatively impact on your credit score.

The clever way to improve your credit score is by taking advantage of offers that charge you zero percent interest if you pay by a certain date. Why pay the bank interest on a loan when you have money in the bank?

Some lenders offer some very low interest rate loans for asset purchases. Use their loans to buy cars, office equipment or machinery.

Use your cash in your bank to negotiate early payment discounts with your suppliers. Many suppliers with poor cash flow will even offer up to 2% extra discount if you pay their invoices within 7 days.

Lenders base your credit score on your payment history and the amounts of debts outstanding. If you have taken out many small loans and paid them back on time then this will stand you in good stead for when larger sums of monies are required.

Ask for a Quotation First.

When applying for credit make sure you get a quotation first before actually applying for the loan. Lenders will not do a credit search to give you a quotation. They will contact one or more credit reference agencies when you apply for a loan.

Every time you apply for a loan the search gets recorded. You want to keep this “credit footprint” as small as possible.

Do not Move House

Changing your house address can be disruptive to your credit score. Lenders like to see stability and moving house can add minus points to your credit score. If you are planning on moving house apply for your business loans before you move.

Know Your Credit Score

Lenders base their lending criteria based on reports from credit agencies and your businesses trading history. Sometimes credit agencies can get it wrong or still record a debt outstanding that was cleared years ago. For a small fee they will happily send you your businesses credit report. Make sure you examine it for errors and highlight them. They are obliged to change the report if you can prove that sums outstanding have been cleared.

You should check your credit score with the credit agencies at least every couple of years to make sure that there are no errors.

Do not Close Unused Accounts

If you have credit cards that you no longer need, destroy them every time a new one arrives. You credit scores benefits if you have credit facilities from many different lending institutions. Some lenders charge you a set annual fee for a credit card so make sure you cancel these.

Clean up Your Balance Sheet

Get rid of slow selling stock. Dispose of unwanted machinery. This will improve you balance sheet and enhance your credit score.

Boosting your credit score will not only improve your standing with the banks. Suppliers also check your credit score and some even offer better deals to companies that are less of a credit risk.

Better Customer Service is Not Optional

Providing better customer service is an obvious competitive strategy that creates the platform to achieve success in your market. For that reason, is is almost unbelievable that customer service is so poor from so many businesses. Most business owners I talk to want to provide better customer service. However, their attempts to develop customer service policies and behaviours throughout their business are often frustrated. In this article, we highlight why providing better customer service is not optional if you want to achieve business success and some ways to achieve better customer service, by approaching the topic somewhat differently than you might anticipate.

Provide Better Customer Service by Identifying Unmet Needs

One reason many businesses fail at providing better customer service is that they try to compete head-to-head with their competitors. They take them on at their own game. This strategy is difficult to make work, because of competitor reactions. Both you and your competitor either get stronger at customer service, or someone tries to take a shortcut and ends up undermining the reputation of everyone in the industry. A better approach is to try to identify unmet needs within your market that no competitor is paying attention to. This is a strategy that can propel your success to market domination like no other.

One company that used this strategy and grew from a neighborhood outlet to a world-wide phenomenon was Domino’s Pizza. In a commodity market such as pizza restaurants, where they were getting killed, Tom Monaghan identified a need that no one was paying much attention to – home delivery. At the time, home deliveries were seen as a way to top up the down times when the eat-in restaurant was a bit quiet. As a result, home deliveries were given low priority and often the customer received their pizza order after a long wait, by which time it arrived cold and unappetising.

Guarantee Better Customer Service to Achieve Market Domination

Monaghan saw a way he could provide better customer service by targeting this unmet need. He came up with a strategy to deliver to this market “fresh, hot pizza in 30 minutes, or it was free.” He saw a need and used a powerful guarantee of better customer service to gain a foothold in this market. His strategy was so successful, that the market for pizza grew phenomenally, as he created a whole new market of pizza lovers who preferred home delivery who would not eat at a pizza restaurant. He not only changed his business’s fate from a struggling also ran to a hugely successful multi-national operation, all on the strength of a uniquely audacious guarantee that no one else had the courage to copy.

Achieve Better Customer Service by Selling Them More

One of the disappointing aspects of customer service in many businesses, particularly obvious in retail stores, emanates from the lack of sales skill of most retail sales people. Many business owners and sales people seem to think that selling is the antipathy of providing service. People don’t want high pressure, you say. Absolutely correct. But neither do they want insipid sales people who cannot offer quality service because they can’t think proactively about what customers may need and are too weak to offer additional opportunities to buy when they have a willing customer giving them their attention. This poor service comes at a high cost to both the customer and the business owner, as well as the salesperson if they earn any type of remuneration based on performance.

Better customer service can be achieved by being aware of what else your customer might need if they buy a particular item, and ensuring that your sales people ask if they would like it. McDonald’s made this an art form with the question, “Would you like fries with that?” You need to think about what products or services, or combinations of products and services, go naturally together. Offering these extra items is not high pressure sales tactics. It is better customer service to help someone who needs your product to identify what they want and how they can get them. If you don’t offer these things to your customer you are negligent and uncaring. As long as you offer them without pressure and allow your customer to decide, you are providing better customer service.

Provide Better Customer Service by Building Intimate Relationships

Intimacy is about knowing more about another person than the norm. When you build intimate relationships with your customers, you are get to know them in a way that you can anticipate their needs and provide better customer service. When you are aware of what your customers want and find a way for them to get it, you are not being pushy, as long as you relate to your customer in a way that honors and respects them. These days there are many tools you can use to increase your ability to communicate with customers and get to know their needs and wants. You don’t enhance your ability to provide better customer service by being back-footed and waiting for customers to ask first. Your service levels increase greatly when you let your valued customers know how they can get their special favorites first, or how they can jump the queue to get the newest item that may take their fancy, before it is made known widely to the general public.

Be creative and find ways to develop intimacy with your customers.

Providing better customer service is not difficult if you use your imagination and creativity. Don’t go head-to-head with your competitors and try to out do them where can compete directly against you. Come up with innovative ways to provide better customer service by looking for unmet needs, or selling your customers more, or by getting to know them better. It’s not that hard and the results can be phenomenal.

When you start an online business, do you want to pass the successful people and to try everything by yourself? How to start online business is not a guesswork, where every newbie tries to invent how to start my own online business by trying and trying.

If you want to start your online business that way, stop reading now, this article is not for you. But if you want to follow another, proven route starting an online business, keep on reading. Here comes the method, I recommend.

1. First, Make A Self Research.

Sounds funny, but you will be the engine for your online business and it is very useful to do everything so, that they will utilize your strengths. Starting online business after this research means, that it will rest on a solid rock.

Make a tour to your history, school years and other meaningful happenings and think, what were the things you liked, where you were especially good at, and bad, what others said about you and so on.

The target is to clarify your skills, professionalism, wants, talents and style. When you start your online business, these are very important and already at the very beginning. You see, your online business start will be different depending, whether you are HTML, product or marketing oriented.

Finally do a brief summary about yourself, a profile, which includes all the major features of yourself. It is like a list of your technical data, which is the starting point, when you direct yourself further.

2. Find A Proven And Respected Marketer.

When you start your online business, it is extremely important, a must, that it starts to go to the right direction right in the beginning. Who else can guide you, than a proven and respected marketer. The better, if his online business idea is based on the tutoring and helping newbies.

There is one thing, which is very useful and that is your own website, which you can customize later. This is the tool by which you will start to build your own brand. There are principals, who offer this service too.

The requirements for your principal is that he can offer the full set of tools and help: DVD, ebooks, email courses, training pages online, online marketing forum and quick online help. These will offer you a great help, when you start your online business.

3. I Recommend That You Start Your Online Business As An Affiliate.

To start as an affiliate is the best way, because it is easy and offer you a full set of marketing material, tutoring and needed tools. The merchant has done so much ready for you, which you just cannot do by yourself.

4. Be Realistic With The Timetable.

When you are about to start your online business, you are very enthusiastic and are waiting big money overnight. That is not realistic. The realistic way to think, is to understand that online business grows step by step and it takes a couple of years, yes years, to make a decent income. Forget millions right away.

As you see, the method to start your online business successfully is simple, like all successful methods are. I recall once more about the fact, that you have to research yourself, before you will start your online business. Do it, you will thank you later on!