Tag: capital

Mind Your Own Business!

Posted on by Jane Parmel

The concept of minding your own business implies that while you are grinding away at your day job you need to invest and work towards your future financial independence. Pretty soon you’ll be able to walk away from your day job and mind your own business full-time.  The best way to do this is through the acquisition of real estate.

Let’s take a quick look at where you are losing all your money: taxes. Taxes have existed since 1913 in the U.S. (earlier in England). While the original intention was to only tax the wealthiest of the population, obviously over the years that has trickled down to the masses, including those in poverty over the years.

Keep in mind that the more money you make, the more taxes you pay. The wealthy know a way to get around this is to form a corporation. Corporations offer tax benefits and protect you from lawsuits. If you want to learn more about this, contact me or your attorney for additional information.

We’ve all heard the golden rule of “Pay Yourself First”, but many of us don’t do that. Until you learn and put this rule into practice, you don’t have a chance of building any real wealth and getting out of the rat race. Adhering to this rule forces you to generate more income to pay your expenses.

There are some key areas of finance you should be familiar with and taking courses is one of the best ways to accomplish this. Here are the basics you need to know:

Accounting

It pays to know how to read financial statements. When acquiring businesses or assets, you need to quickly identify the financial standing of the company you are acquiring.

Many adults do not know how to read or balance a balance sheet. This is an extremely beneficial skill to have and will pay off in the long run for you and your business.

Investment Strategy

This skill will sharpen over time with experience. Reach out to investors and observe how they play the game.

Market Behavior

Know the laws of Supply and Demand. No business owner can succeed without understanding these basic principles of the market. Bill Gates identified a gap for people. Always be searching for opportunities. Look at what sells and who buys.

Law

Do everything you can to grow your business within legal boundaries. Know your corporate, state, and accounting laws.

Once you are familiar with these areas of finances you will be in a good position to use them to help build wealth. The rich practically invent money. You have to know where to find a great deal. Let’s continue with real estate. Look for houses in trouble or find the court in your area that handles foreclosed, police impounded, or other real estate situations. You can either renovate and sell or rent for residual income.

Essentially there are two main types of investors:

  1. Those who buy pre-packaged investments;
  2. Those who create their own investments.

You can guess which ones are the most successful. To be one of these people you need to know what to look for and how to respond. You must:

  1. Find a good deal other people have overlooked;
  2. Raise the capital required for the transaction;
  3. Put together a high-performing team to execute the plan.

There is risk involved in every acquisition. The goal is not to avoid the risk, but to respond appropriately to the risk with confidence and a steady hand.

If you need help identifying potential money-makers, where to get the capital you need and how to put together a smart team, please contact me today for guidance.

Add Some Compost…

Posted on by Jane Parmel

In the last post, we talked about the first three of the 7 specific areas you need to consider in your franchise prototype process. Here are all seven again:

  • Primary Aim
  • Strategic Objectives
  • Organizational Strategy
  • Management Strategy
  • People Strategy
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Systems Strategy

These 7 areas will fine-tune your plan for the ultimate level of success. Today we are going to cover the last four.

Think of constructing your business model like planting a tree. At first, it’s so small and weak you wonder if it will even make it through the night. But you keep watering, fertilizing, and nurturing it. Your ideas will grow the trunk and each of these strategies will extend out as the branches of your now strong tree. Finding the perfect support staff, employees, vendors/suppliers and other relationships will make your tree flourish with leaves and flowers.

Management Strategy

The way you structure your management team is not only essential to your growth, but the happiness of your employees and, ultimately, your customers/clients. This strategy is results-oriented and doesn’t depend on the people, but on the actual system that’s in place.

A management strategy is, in short, a set of standards that include goals, rules, a mission statement, and other concrete things that tell your employees how to act, your management how to grow your business, and your customers/clients what to expect.

These should all be in perfect alignment with your business goals.

Employee Appreciation

You need to put together a people strategy that shows your employees how you feel about their job performance and dedication to your business. They also need to understand “why” they are doing specific tasks. This helps them to personally connect to their job which in turn leads to better production and a happier workplace.

There are a number of strategies you can use to keep it interested at “the office”:

  • Performance Incentive Programs
  • Contests that reward high performance
  • Employee of the Month
  • Performance/Holiday Bonuses

These are just a few of the ideas you can use. One of the best ways to appreciate your employees is by calling a meeting and asking them how they would like to be rewarded. Think about it for a while and put the best strategy into play. Keep it fresh and change up the strategy you use from time to time to keep your employees guessing. Once they get used to the prize, it’s time for a whole new approach.

You need to build a community within your company. There needs to be support, appreciation, and respect. The more “at home” an employee feels, the better they will perform and the higher their level of loyalty.

Marketing Strategy

Marketing is, of course, essential to the success of any business, but it also must work cohesively with the other strategies you’re using. There are two major pillars of a successful marketing strategy: The demographic and psychographic profiles of your customers.

The psychographic tells you what your customers are the most likely to buy and the demographic tells you who they are, which can help you learn why they buy specific items. Without this information, it simply doesn’t matter how good your business prototype is.

Systems Strategy

There are three types of systems in every business:

  • Hard Systems
  • Soft Systems
  • Information Systems

Hard systems refer to inanimate system or systems that have no “life”. Soft systems are those that could be living. Information systems which are, of course, everything else, including customer data, product information, financial…anything with data and numbers.

The most important of all three systems is the soft system because it includes the sales systems your business uses. In your sales system, the two keys to success are structure and substance. Structure is what you sell and substance is how you sell it.

All three systems are essential to the success of your business and while they all have their own very specific roles, they all must work together to get the job done. This also goes for your entire business development program.

I want to take a moment to recap the ideas we went over through the business development lessons.

An entrepreneurial myth, or e-myth, is an assumption that anyone can succeed at business with:

  • Desire
  • Some capital
  • Projected a targeted profit

There are essentially three key roles that need to be filled to set your business up for success:

  • The Technician
  • The Manager
  • The Entrepreneur

The four different stages of a business life cycle are:

  • Infancy
  • Adolescence
  • Growing Pains
  • Maturity

There are three main areas of business development:

  • Innovation
  • Quantification
  • Orchestration

We can help you work through all of these areas and give your business a jumpstart that puts you ahead of your competition right from the start. Use our FREE test drive and work with one of our coaches, plus gain access to a wealth of tools and resources.