Written on December 23rd, 2009 by no shouts
Increase Small Business Profits Through Business Review And Planning
Small business owners are frequently totally involved in every business activity on a day to day basis. Such close hands on involvement has major advantages although not taking time out to focus on the factors affecting business profitability both as a whole and in detail can result in the profit performance being lower than is achievable.
An essential first step to improving profitability is to step back from the day to day business and analyse the activities and financial accounts from a third party perspective. (more…)
Written on October 17th, 2008 by no shouts
Working for Yourself – Do You Really Need Employees?
Many would-be entrepreneurs, when faced with the reality of escaping the rat race and going it alone in a solo enterprise, raise a multitude of questions regarding their employees. They worry about how many staff they will need, the best time in the company’s life to start looking for extra hands, how to manage payroll, taxation, benefits and staff illness. Before you know it the budding small business owner has wound himself up to the point of inertia and decides to stay put, trapped in the shackles of office life.
However, good news is never far away. Here’s some for you: you can start a business and make a success of it without ever having to take on a single employee. Back in 2006, an article by Jim Hopkins in USA Today talked about the rise of the microbusiness, which at the time, numbered 20 million in the US alone. That’s 20 million people making it in business without the headache of employing anyone else. How do they manage it? Here are a few ideas to get you thinking like a solopreneur.
Strategic partnerships
Bringing in a partner is a resource often overlooked by the first-time entrepreneur. Take the example of a Bob the Baker who makes the most wonderful cakes in the world. Bob knows his cakes would be a hit all over the country and needs to work out how to sell effectively on line. So, he teams up with a Winston the Webmaster who also happens to know how to use the internet to market very effectively. This partnership works quite simply because two people, who each need the skill the other possesses, have come together to produce an income. Bob cannot sell the cakes without the skills of Winston and vice versa. Any employees? Not necessary. It’s a straight partnership, the income split is worked out according to workload (or however else they choose to work it out). Is it not better to have half a successful business than own a failure in its entirety?
Outsourcing
The baking business is booming now, Bob is busy making all those lovely cakes and Winston equally so updating the website and promoting them. Orders are pouring in from all over with as many as 20 emails a day. Is it now time to take on an office administrator to deal with this? What about someone to help bake the cakes? How about someone who can upload pictures onto the website and manage simple order fulfilment? That makes three new employees, right? Wrong. All of these jobs can be outsourced or, in other words, contracted out. A VA (virtual assistant) can take on the job of taking in and responding to the emails, another baking firm could be contracted to make the fillings for the cakes, yet another VA could be used to manage parts of the website.
Franchising/licensing
The business has grown phenomenally in its first year and the cakes are amazingly popular. There are now no fewer than 6 contractors involved, all looking after various aspects of the day to day running of the company and still nobody is employed. Bob and Winston, however, are feeling the burn and would like to take a little more of a back seat. But how do they start doing less without having to take on staff to manage the business? Sell licences for people to take on an identikit business of their own, running it in exactly the same way as they do. By creating a licence or a franchise for the business the owners not only create substantially higher revenues from their original idea but do so by stepping out of the business to manage the franchise operation, still without employing anyone!
It sounds so simple, does it not? Business really can be as simple as this with some thought and planning. Obviously there is hard work, talent and determination involved in getting through each of the steps but the end product really is achievable without the need to wade through the red tape associated with taking on permanent staff. Any more excuses to not go for it?
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Want to learn more about escaping the rat race at a normal pace?
Go to http://www.RatRaceEscapeArtist.com
