Many times setting up small businesses are easy but running them successfully is very difficult. Statistics shows that more than 50 percent of newly formed small businesses do not run into second year – they collapse. Although the major causes for this collapse are poor money management and poor resource management there is one another cause – poor support.

A successfully running small business need plenty of support; support as money, as systems, as workforce, as time and as plans. Money is perhaps the most difficult support to arrange, but once it is arranged you can feel that you are in a better position to arrange all other support. One of the most favorite ways to arrange support is in partnerships or in mutual understandings; you help them and they help you.

With respect to your need of support, they can be of plenty of types – those you need continuously and constantly, those you need frequently and those you need rarely. For supports that you need continuously you should look for buying/arranging permanent and cost-efficient systems which are scalable to your needs. For supports you need frequently, you should look for options like partnerships, pay-as-you-use, and mutual understandings. And for systems that you are going to use rarely, you can afford to plan those with respect to the time of need.

We are taking a one month break from posting blogs. Be sure to re-join us after one month. We don’t want to lose our valuable readers like you.

We all know that advancements in technology had changed our life considerably. That change is clearer in business and we today terribly depend on our computers and supporting systems to do our business processes and to plan our business strategies in a faster, more accurate and systematic way. But like every thing else in this universe, this eagerness to adopt to new technologies have both pros and cons.

We all also know the fact that every successful business run on successful utilization of resources; this resource can be workforce, technology, systems, money, local, or any thing. What ever technology we adopt should enhance (or at least go in line with) our resource utilization strategy. In simple words, we should adopt technologies which only help our business and which do not add too much pressure at our resources. We should not look for technologies that eat up too much of our money, time and brain power to do a process. We should not look for technologies that negatively affect our basic business strategies – like quality product, value-for-money and good customer service.

When we look for technologies to improve our businesses we should always look for choices. Today we can find too much technological solutions for our needs with different pricing, capability and scalability. We should adopt the one that best suit our mode of business.

There are many benefits and pitfalls of having business partners. In short words, if you have a right and good business partner there will be more advantages and if you have wrong partners there will be more disadvantages. So choose the right one.

Advantages of having business partners

• Division of labor, and better exploitation of resources.
• Less responsibility because of division of responsibilities.
• Financial benefits and more sound financial background.
• Better changes with time and resources, abilities and experiences of partners help in this.
• Easiness in business administration and sharing of stress.
• Sharing of loss and easiness to arrange quick money.

Disadvantages of having business partners

• Troubles in accounting, investing, profit sharing and resource management.
• Inability to make quick decisions, and difficulty in getting unanimous decisions.
• Reduction in authority and lesser control over employees; and also better chance of workplace conflicts.
• Possible conflicts over business management and money management, many times because of poorly defined rules and responsibilities.

We, and also many others, have talked about these many times. Here is once again – as tips. The basics to be keep right for business survival. Before we start one note - ‘the most basic way to ensure survival is to keep the basics right’.

• Effective utilization of resources. Make sure that no penny is wasted.
• Diversifying products. So that fall of one product does not make any significant impact on your business.
• Reaching to vast number of customers, so that no single customer/customer group can decide your business future.
• Keeping the strategies right and up-to-date. Strategies involving production, marketing, selling, customer service, office management, events, and more.
• Keep the backups open. Make sure that you are prepared for overcome at least one day of stagnancy in money flow, web-site crash, intruder attack, database problem.
• Keep your nerves cool. Over reacting to impulses are bad, especially when there is not much planning behind them. Analysis all things and market he right move, for survival you don’t have to defeat all.
• Respect everyone and every force. Neglecting persons, events, issues and factors.

Many times slowing down of business processes become necessary for business survival. Situations like economic crisis, inadequate money flow, over-competition, seasonal changes, and customer preference changes, all necessitate businesses to slow down. The slowing down strategy really work for small and medium sized companies.

It is also a good business tactics to slow down businesses when one of your competitions is going extremes with their advertising and marketing strategies. Let them burnout of their resources and then you can easily defeat them with the resource you preserved. In danger many businesses speeds up their processes to overcome the danger, but often it is the slow and steady strategy that wins the race; because this strategy give you enough time and resources to acclimatize to the situation and to adjust your business strategies.

There are many things which are to be considered when slowing down your business.

• You have to keep the basics right – good product, good marketing, good sales and good customer service.
• Make sure the slowness produces a positive effect on your resources.
• Keep a lower limit for speed according to your financial status, money flow, resources and competition. Never slow down too much.
• Frequently evaluate your strategies, practices and resources. Speed up at right time.
• Keep a definite time limit. And think positively.

Rewarding the customers who are loyal to you and have experienced your service/product for a reasonable period is good customer retention and marketing strategy. But this rewarding process should be well planned so that it will benefit both your company and customers. Here are some tips for rewarding your loyal customers.

• One very good practice is to make plans and offers. When ever you find a new customer teach them about the rewards/benefits they can get by being your customer for a period.
• When you take time as your rewarding basis, make sure that you are treating all your customers equally who fall in a specific category. Similar strategy should be adopted if you are rewarding on the basis of purchased costs or subscription fee.
• One other way is to make surprise rewards, especially at festival occasions or achieving some milestones.
• Customer incentives are also a good option, especially when you have excellent customer service history.
• Two things to remember when rewarding loyal customers include 1) to include most of your loyal customers to the beneficiary list and 2) to get the message reach to your existing customers and prospects.

As an employer you have to conduct interviews often in your life to recruit/hire the best persons for a job. But finding the best from a crowd is not always an easy task; and any one with best academic qualifications and experience need not to be the best guy you want. You know that, you need some specific questions to find out the best.

• Starting with personal questions is always better option, but you have to limit the number of personal questions. One or two questions about family and academic details will be enough.
• Now ask some thing about his general knowledge and opinions. The questions should be simple and only require a short answer.
• The aim is to figure out the mentality of the person. Is he positive with his thoughts, is he like challenges and willing to take risks, is he true to his words.
• Now something about his technical knowledge and problem solving ability to make sure that he fit to the position. Remember to carefully analyze his willingness to learn new things. Any one who learns fast but lack experience is also a good option.
• One as an employer you should be vigilant is to keep your expectations reasonable. You can’t get a professional at cheapest rates.

It is always been a debate to either purchase the needed business systems or to lease them. In simple words it depends on your requirements and your resources. Here are some useful suggestions when you are in dilemma.

• First ever concern is cash – If the equipment is too costly to buy, then leasing is more preferably option. If the equipment cost less or you have enough money in hand then purchasing the equipment is better.
• Equipment leasing is also the preferable option at business startups as you need money for too many other things, and also you are not sure about the success of your business.
• Equipment purchasing is better option when you need the equipment for frequent (regular) long-term use.
• Equipment purchasing is also preferable when there is not much update and maintenance requirement.
• Equipment leasing is not at all a preferred option when the monthly charges are too high and the contracts have complex rules.
• Equipment leasing is also not good with old less functional equipments.
• One other thing to be considered is your workforce. Leasing is better option with less experienced/learned workforce.

Bad economic news has become the order of the day; everyone is dull and is only ready to preserve what they have. No one is talking about growing their business; no one is willing to invest more. But everyone (try to) forget the fact that there are many services and systems which are becoming increasingly cheaper but astonishingly effective.

The wide spreading of fast internet has created a new range of opportunities to small businesses. They now need much less workforce to do a specific task; and they now have access to that cutting-edge technology, which once were monopoly of some giant technically advanced companies only. There are now many low cost (or even free) applications now available to do most company processes like accounting, customer service, production, marketing, sales, back-office, data warehousing, for all. Software as a Service, Open-source movement, freeware, all contribute considerably for this ‘going cheap strategy’; and now cheap no longer mean less-effective.

Add to above is the availability of cheap workforce. Outsourcing of services and tasks made companies more competitive and stable. The developing of internet as a worldwide market place have offered opportunities to even smaller firms.

Simply speaking, you know the answer!!! Yet you are trying to forget your business failures and the mistakes you made. In real business world mistakes/failures are more important as they offer the opportunities to learn more things. After all for learning/making some thing or for developing a new skill you have to spend some thing; it can be time, money, relationships or physical activity.

There are some things which are more important, including,

• Limiting the effect/spreading of the failure or mistake.
• Not repeating the mistake in future.
• Finding and healing the cause of the mistake/failure.
• Analyzing competitors and others for same mistake/failure. It should be much easy to outperform them.
• And keeping the spirit up.

There is no perfect business strategy in this world, every thing has advantages and disadvantages. It is the time and situation that causes either advantage or disadvantage to outperform the other. Mistakes happen so common in out life that we many times fail to identify them, or if we find them we have no time to correct them (which is simply ‘one another mistake’). A good businessman is one who can identify the mistake he made and is willing to correct that as soon as possible.

Managing all business operations is undoubtedly a hard task. Here is some simple, yet must follow, business strategies to succeed in long-run.

• Good customer service strategy – this is most important principle, because customers are the ultimate success determining factor.
• Establishing benchmarks – which should be your first and immediate aim to achieve.
• Establishing minimums – making it clear that you should not accept anything below them.
• Reviewing your resources – including your suppliers, inventory, capital in hand, money inflow, and more.
• Reviewing your limits – is you better performed better than previous quarter/year? Is still there is some thing with shadows your growth prospective? Find them.
• Modifying and updating policies – with respective to new data, new customers, new products, new developments, new systems, new resources and new limits.
• Establishing long term goals – and breaking them into small short-term goals.
• Diversification and reaching to new niches – this is the simple but most effective way of growing a business or company.
• Keeping your workforce happy – A well oiled machine runs faster and smoother.

Keeping regular updates on completion and competitor strategies is the key to business success. Failing to do so may doom the future of a business, especially small businesses. Here are some tips for knowing your competition and analyzing your competitors.

• For knowing your competitors there are many choices; local phone books, yellow pages, web directories, press media, business info centers, agencies, and your customers.
• You can use many different ways to analyze and evaluate your competitor, by checking their company/office, by being their customer, through their customers, through business information centers, from their ads, from yellow pages, and more.
• Things to be carefully analyzed include their product quality, pricing, marketing strategies, advertising methods, marketing budget, company size and number of employees, financial stability and customer service.
• Compare their websites, and sales, marketing and customer service strategies with yours.
• It is always a good tactics to keep the data you collected for future your, update your data regularly and do comparison of new data with historical one to evaluate their competitive strength.
• It is also a good practice to short-list your top competitors and chase them out.

One thing on that all businesses spent too much money is their branding. Branding is undoubtedly is an important business strategy, is greatly contribute to the long-term success of the businesses. Branding it self wont produce you much success, you have to back it up with good product, right customer service, good after sale service and plenty more. Failing to do so is perhaps the best ever way to lose your money.

Many companies spent too much of their money in designing and redesigning company logo, creating product images, printing costly wrappers and banners, advertising on media, etc. But they often forget the facts that the only way they can earn this money is through their customers who want quality products which offer good value for money. Remember no customer stick with overvalued products, if there are other choices available.

It is strongly recommended that initiate a business branding campaign only after all other things are properly arranged. You have to arrange and check for things like product quality checking, product production management, website forms, marketing professionals and systems, sales persons, customer services representatives and supporting systems, business databases, and prospect tracking mechanisms. Also verify that you are implementing the most suitable branding campaign according to your product, company, industry, customer and budget.

Pay-Per-Click advertising has emerged as a powerful yet cheap marketing strategy for all businesses. One really good advantage of PPC advertising is its feature that enables advertisers to create custom ad and to determine daily budget. Although there are many PPC services available today, Google’s AdWords dominate the industry. Here are some tips for starting and running a successful PPC advertising campaign.

• First ever concern is your customers: is your proposed customers are in search of your product/service? Is they are going on to internet to find their needs? If yes, then proceed.
• 2nd is the keywords: Make sure that you are targeting proper keywords. For example it is better to target the keyword “CRM software” than just “CRM” as the first keyword is the real search if one is looking for CRM software.
• 3rd is your ads: It must provide a clear idea of what you have to offer, how you offer that, and how good is you at it.
• 4th is budgeting: As said Adwords suits all. It is a better practice to start at small budget and do some experiments with your ads, track results and then continue with successful ones; by increasing the budget as your business increase.

Many businesses are now shifting work to homes (of workers) from their office space to reduce working costs. The process has really speeded up after the announcement of so called recession. While the process a simple alternative to reduce costs required for office space and complex office systems, it has many disadvantages. Here are some important disadvantages of working from home.

• Working from home is not suitable for all businesses. Businesses which require complex production techniques and supporting systems are good with office spaces.
• Decreased product/service quality. Doing business from home diminishes many factors like office competition and good working environment. This can result in low quality products.
• Less working hours and fragmented working schedule. Studies have shown that more than 40% of employees working from home can only work below 70% of their supposed working time. And also most work in fragmented work sessions which often make work more difficult; and result in low productivity.
• More distractions than office workplace.
• Reduced communication – No other communication method is as perfect and effective as direct (face-to-face) communication.
• Difficulties in budgeting, managing employee account and timely finishing projects.

Being responsive to impulses and changes is a vital aspect of success. Studies have shown that workers under responsive managers outperform others, simply because of the support they receive from their manager. Responsive managers get quick responses and good reputation from their workers; and also others. Here are some questions to analyze whether you are a good responsive manager.

• Do you recognize that your first ever duty to help your staff in their jobs?
• Do you a good listener of your employees’ concerns, doubts, suggestions and responses?
• Do you quick and polite to show your appreciation to staffs who achieve their goals?
• Do you support your staff in front of your boss(es)?
• Do you quick enough to respond to the needs of your bosses?
• Do you pick and fix tasks logically, so that your team-members can achieve those in time?
• Do you check regularly that your employees are getting adequate support and resources for finishing their tasks?
• Do you treat all employees under you equally (or almost equally)?

Before answering quickly to these questions, take one or two weekly to review all your workplace activities. After that, if most of your answers to above questions are ‘YES’, you surly is a good responsive manager.

Modern day business strategies, procedures and requirement make businessmen exhausted. There is so much stress that most of us who start our carrier/new job brilliantly often ends up in no where after two or three years. Here are some tips for minimizing workplace stress.

• First thing is to develop a good routine and work schedule. Keep those relatively tight, but enough flexible.
• Keep yourself entertained and relaxed when you are out of your workplace.
• In office, try to keep yourself happy as much as possible. Friendly chats with colleagues and customers help in this.
• When ever you feel tired, just relax for two or three minutes.
• Breathing exercise is a good workplace stress minimizing tool. Breath slowly but deeply.
• Whenever you get time, remember what you have achieved in past weeks/months. How much you have acclimatized to your job, how much you learned, how you differ from others and how you beat your competitors.
• Still stress, whenever you are in extreme tress told yourself that “you are born to win this extreme situations; no one can outperform you here”.

The number of spywares is increasing day by day; so do the damage by them. Spywares can badly damage a business by data spying, creating network problems, causing system failures and by damaging the business reputation. Getting yourself free from spywares require good knowledge, commonsense and control.

• Most (all) spywares uses human weaknesses such as greed, anxiety, preference to cheap (free) products, etc to get themselves in and establish on computers and networks. So take any decision after thinking twice or thrice.
• Never share your personal/business information with unknown sites or software.
• When you look for cheap alternatives of systems, try to find and use systems from market leader or companies which you know well.
• Avoid software with confusing or mimicking names.
• Use a quality spyware detecting program and do regular scanning. As said, use the system from market leader; it may cost high, but it can be more secure and reliable.
• Limit software downloads; and download programs only after making sure that they are not spywares.
• Avoid browsing unknown zones on internet. When ever you enter a site, access its quality with its appearance, loading nature, links, etc. One easy way to do so is to use Google toolbar with PageRank. Sites with high pagerank can be trusted.

So you have managed to build a team for your marketing or sales related processes. But for reaping the success, you have to go a long distance. There should be proper planning, resource management, conflict management and challenging tests for long-term team success. The process of team management can be divided into 3 steps.

1. Starting with your team.

• You have to train your team members about your strategies, products, company and systems.
• You have to do division of labor. Every team-member should get jobs that correspond to their skill and knowledge.
• You have to define the goals, and plans on what your team is going to do and how they are going to do that.

2. Developing your team.

• In this most difficult step, you have to reassess your strategies and team basics to develop more favorable approaches.
• You have to figure out (possible) problems and have to resolve them fast.
• You have to guide team-members in making their decisions.

3. Sustaining and growing your team.

• You have to constantly monetize and analyze team performances.
• You have to challenge the team with new goals and tasks.
• You have to growth your team by adapting to new strategies and niches and recruiting new good team members.

The invention of faster internet connectivity and powerful online tools has resulted in a new commerce arena – Ecommerce. Ecommerce offered many advantages to companies and customers but it also caused many problems.

Advantages of Ecommerce include

• Faster buying/selling procedure, as well as easy to find products.
• Buying/selling 24/7.
• More reach to customers, there is no theoretical geographic limitations.
• Low operational costs and better quality of services.
• No need of physical company set-ups.
• Easy to start and manage a business.
• Customers can easily select products from different providers without moving around physically.

Disadvantages of Ecommerce include

• Any one, good or bad, can easily start a business. And there are many bad sites which eat up customers’ money.
• There is no guarantee of product quality.
• Mechanical failures can cause unpredictable effects on the total processes.
• As there is minimum chance of direct customer to company interactions, customer loyalty is always on a check.
• There are many hackers who look for opportunities, and thus an ecommerce site, service, payment gateways, all are always prone to attack.

Starting and managing a business single handedly is always a challenging task. Home based businesses favor all types of persons who have the basic ability to market some thing and to face the challenges. Starting a home based business too require planning.

• Two major advantages of home based businesses are easy to get started and diversity of options (niches) available.
• What ever home based business you are thinking of starting, you must be thoroughly about it. How much it cost, how you can find customers, the competition around you, your advantages/limitations with that business, all you must know.
• You must be certain about your start-up costs and incomes. You can find grants, subsidies and loans for starting some specific businesses.
• It is a very good practice to start a home based business which interest you, and which enjoys you. Or make your hobby or interest your business.
• Keep it flexible. Unlike traditional business rules, which should be rigid, home based businesses need flexibility. There should be flexibility in time management, production, marketing, sales, all.
• Keep your customers happy. That is the single most important success mantra.

May be this is the question that one businessman least expect. Unfortunately most (we think more than 80 percent) business blogs or company blogs fail to achieve their goals, or to achieve at least a part of those. There are many things which contribute to this much failure of blogs. You never need a blog when,

• It is not based on a theme or idea.
• You don’t have time to publish posts, which can be anything interesting or informative.
• You don’t know how to market it among your customers and other web users.
• You lack ideas for new posts, and going to republish same post (idea) repeatedly.
• Your only goal is to build links to your site; submitting links to web directories and articles to article directories is a much more preferable and fair option.
• Your only goal is to enter some reciprocal linking practices, and/or AdSense income.
• You are going to publish 10 posts for one day and no post for other 6 days.
• You are going to copy paste content (posts) from other websites and blogs.
• Your blogging software is too complicated to handle and the content is not reachable for search engines.

Networking is regarded as one of the most basic type of customer service strategy. Face-to-face and/or real-time contact to potential and existing customers is proved effective for any type of businesses and industries. Building networks or customer communities is considered as a standard modern day marketing and CRM strategy. Here are some tips for better business networking.

• Reach out: Your first aim must be finding new markets, new niches and new peoples.
• Tell every one about you: Remember it is you who has to start a conversation and it is your need to make the other thoroughly understand you.
• Be casual and polite: Never make your (possible) customer feel that they are pressured to listen you or they are pressured to buy any thing from you.
• Listen to what they are saying: Every prospect has doubts and difficulties, clear doubts and win their hearts.
• Don’t stay if there is no opportunity. You have to use your resources carefully and intelligently. Never stay in a network, where peoples don’t hear you.
• Utilize your network to cut down costs, finding better resources and raw materials and for servicing your customers more freely.
• Keep the relationships warm.
• Widen your network, add more persons to it, provide more services and products, offer better benefits.

Consistency is one of the most demanded business success factors and is also one of the most forgotten. Consistency is the key to long-term business survival and growth and is the basic requirement of most other success determining factors. For consistent sales and profit, there should be

• Consistency in dedication
• Consistency in work load
• Consistency in time management
• Consistency in business administration
• Consistency in marketing
• Consistency in customer contacting
• Consistency in customer service
• Consistency in production
• Consistency in income and in expenditure

While moving up and down at regular, scheduled, intervals may work for some (seasonal/part-time) businesses, it won’t favor most businesses. Usually in business, every thing (cycles) should be repeated in regular intervals with some minute favorable changes. Consistency in changes is one other factor that most ignore.

One very good example of how consistency helps business is newsletters. If you are sending newsletters at regular timings (say weekly), you are making your customers and prospects believe that you are alive and ready to serve them. If you fail to deliver newsletter for 3 or 4 weeks, then you are making them believe that you are dead (first week as doubt, second week as an assumption, third week as confirmation) and to look others for their demand.

Most sales and marketing campaign requires quality presentations to customers, partners or even to company employees. But not all businesses, especially small business, are not so keen about their presentation materials and products, and make many silly mistakes, which can cost them too much. Here are some of those popular business presentation mistakes.

• Grammar and Spelling errors: This is most common, many people simply trust various software for this purpose. But software systems fail often.
• Poor word selection, language or vocal: Also very common. Sounds must be clear, words must form sentences, and speeches must be humanly, with ups and downs.
• Conflicting styles: Too must styles in one presentation, too much graphics in one frame or no style at all. Remember every thing has an upper limit and lower limit; and the simple the better to understand.
• Too much charts, diagrams and tables: Every presentation becomes authenticated, if it is supplied in with some great statistics. Too much statistics that much boring the show.
• Lack of entertainment: This mistake often happens in lengthy presentations, were companies fail to incorporate some thing to the presentation, which keeps the audience alive.
• Too much information: You can’t present all things from the big bang in one or two hours. Know your time limits, audience expectations and your resources.