2 strategies to start your small business while working another job
There are thousands of wannabe-entrepreneurs sitting at desks right now who want to dump their jobs. What they need is a strategy so they can start their small business while working their full-time job. This is the ultimate – and in many cases, the most difficult – way to bootstrap your new business. But, arguably there is an extra measure of security in sticking with your job because if your business fails, you’re probably no worse off than before you decided to try your hand at founding a business. I’ve seen two basic strategies be successful for people who want to start their small business while working full time. The first of these is to launch your business with a partner. The partnership of split responsibilities Potential partners will get an idea for a business. Often these individuals are colleagues at the same company. They notice a niche that their current employer isn’t exploiting, or they get a good idea related to their work experience. In this strategy, one partner maintains a full-time job, while the other works full-time starting the business. The working partner would be more likely to contribute the upfront money required to get the business going and the other partner would be investing his or her time in exchange for equity. Pro: Business can get started quickly. Con: Partners must be completely trustworthy and competent. Starting a side business while employed The other path to walk if you’re set on running a business while working full time is to get a side hustle going. These are small businesses you can do on weekends and/or in the evening. We probably all know someone who sells jewelry, kitchen wares, vitamin supplements, or something else on a part-time basis. While these can grow into a full-time small business, if they are built on a multi-level marketing plan, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to convince others to sell the products. You need a business idea that can be scaled up through proven strategies, and those strategies would be to add locations, employees, or machines. I pulled together a long list of home-based businesses. It continues to be one of the most popular pages on my website. If you’re looking for an idea, go down this list and at each entry ask yourself, “How would I scale this business?” Find one that is scalable and overlaps with your interests or experience. Let me give you one example: Vending machines. You can find used vending machines for sale on Craig’s List. Find locations for them, agreeing to split the proceeds with the owner of the location. Continue to add to your vending machine empire with bigger, more sophisticated machines. Eventually, this can turn into a full-time business. Pro: Little startup capital required. Con: Burnout due to working two jobs. Before I end this, let me add one more dimension to the discussion. Maintaining your full-time job could be working at your current small business. In other words, you can use these strategies to start your second business venture. That might force you to delegate better at your original business. Think about...
read moreWhat happens when anger, mismanagement cloud the ‘friendly skies’
With the recent viral video of a paying passenger being dragged down the aisle and off the plane, I think United Airlines has a lot of work ahead of itself if it ever wants to ask people to “Fly the friendly skies” again. Here’s the video behind the furor: It’s an operational, personnel, and public relations crisis for United, but for other businesses it can be instructional. How does an incident with one passenger turn into an event that captures the attention of the world and drives United’s stock price down several percentage points? Operational dysfunction For generations, wise moms have been telling their children that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Counting the number of people lined up and ready to go through the gate and comparing it to the number of available seats is not rocket science. Further, once the airline scans a passenger’s boarding pass and allows the passenger to get onto the plane, I think it is only common sense and courtesy to conclude that the airline has committed to allowing that passenger to travel on that plane to his or her destination. In this case, United Airlines apparently had employees who needed to get on the flight in order to make it to their next assignments. This makes the situation an even worse blemish on United Airline’s reputation. United Airlines should be able to have its personnel in position for work assignments without passengers having to pay the price. If you ran a restaurant and were short wait staff one evening, would you force customers to start waiting tables? I’m relatively confident that United Airlines could have rounded up staff to substitute for the delayed crew or put its employees on another airline. But even if they couldn’t and the situation caused a flight delay, at least the passengers on that flight could be given a more timely warning. Social media Finally, this incident again puts the focus on the power of social media. Let me go back to my last point, because it highlights the dilemma. I said that in this case, delaying all of the passengers on a future flight would be better than delaying a few passengers on the first flight. Isn’t it better to inconvenience the fewest number of customers when you’re in what is essentially a no-win situation? That is, of course, a judgment call, but you need to consider the time element and the social media aspects of the situation: When customers are given time to adjust to problems, it generally diffuses their anger. When customers are given no time to adjust to problems, it intensifies their anger. (United Airlines said the passenger was “belligerent.” That could be true, but if it is, it’s because of United’s mismanagement. We all have our breaking points.) When the anger of customers is intensified, it makes the situation ripe for becoming a social media event. For better or for worse, social media is the great equalizer between a global corporation like United Airlines and the passenger in seat 24B. United Airlines has stood behind its employees, and in many ways I agree with that. Unless some employees were acting counter to United Airline policy and training, it wasn’t their fault. The fault lies with leadership. These kinds...
read more3 ways to beat small business owner isolation
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…” Harry Nilsson wrote that lyric and Three Dog Night had a major hit with it in 1969. I think it’s a lyric that speaks strongly to many small business owners. When so much depends on your performance as the owner of your business, it’s easy to start feeling isolated. You may one day discover that you no longer enjoy what you do and not even know exactly why. You may just sense that you’re overworked, but that’s only the first domino that falls when you’re suffering from small business owner isolation. You’ll have your head down so much that it’s impossible to see when opportunity is coming your way. You’ll start to cut corners or hurry processes in ways that lower quality. This will even lead to having to redo work and that kills productivity. Like a chronic illness, the symptoms will start to compound and as the isolation gets “baked into” your standard way of doing business, it will be more difficult to see a solution. Here are three ways for small business owners to whip isolation, be more productive, and ultimately achieve far greater success. 1. Establish an advisory board. Although this step should be taken before you open your doors, it’s never too late. You don’t want too many people on this board; you’ll never get clear advice. Three individuals with good business knowledge and skills would be about right. They don’t all have to be in your industry. People who can benefit your local network would be good, and also consider people who are strong in areas where you may feel you lack expertise. 2. Get a mentor or coach. Your advisory board will meet on a quarterly basis, more or less. Contact with your mentor will be more frequent and probably focus in different areas. A good mentor will not only give you business insights, he or she will give you insights into your personal leadership style and challenge you to grow and improve. To make a sports analogy, your mentor is the field coach while the advisory board members are the executives in the offices. 3. Consider a partner and/or learn to delegate. Sometimes it’s best to have a partner who brings strengths to your team that you lack. Often today tech gurus will partner up with marketing experts to create a winning organization. If you don’t feel a partnership is best, then just learn to delegate. Bring people on board who can fill out your team. Stock prices have recently experienced a dramatic bull market. However, if you didn’t have money invested in it, you gained nothing. Think about your time as your “investment.” If you can’t invest it in growth activities, you’ll never enjoy a “return on your time.” Delegating frees you up to make those investments of your time. You can’t enjoy a return on anything you never invest. If you follow these strategies to beat owner isolation, you’ll find it much easier to build a company that is better able to run on its own and not demand every hour of your day just to keep the doors...
read moreThis week in small business: A mega-dose of social media marketing advice…
At the end of the day, I think many of the winners will be those who best understand and utilize social media marketing. This week, we found a lot of excellent advice on that topic across the Internet. Leadership, management, and productivity If for nothing else, you need to check out the cool Rube Goldberg inspired graphic that accompanies Phyllis Korkki’s NY Times article on how to make the most of your workday. (Her insights are great too!) A high IQ alone is no guarantee of success in a career that involves interacting with others (which is almost every job), says Tarun Mittal in her piece on why emotional intelligence is crucial for career success. Did you know that Modern Farmer magazine has a woman editor? That would be Sarah Gray Miller, who is profiled in this piece by Laura Emily Dunn. Do you hate or love the open office layout concept? Well, if that’s your work environment, you’ll benefit from Jasmyne Moody’s six ways to keep productivity high. Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop. – Unknown Marketing and sales Vinny Piazza gives good introductions to both email marketing and social media marketing in his Forbes article, “Simple Solutions To Common Marketing Challenges.” Along those lines, Jessica Davis suggest four critical questions small businesses should be asking about their social media content strategies. Even though we’re already into the fourth month of the year, Dan Hinckley’s “Five Marketing Tips For Small Businesses In 2017” is a good read. Jaime Netzer details three times social media can support marketing initiatives – make sure you aren’t missing any of these…especially the third one on her list. Is your website performer like it should? Check it against Sandi Leyva’s article outlining five tips to get the highest ROI from your website. You’ll find some good insights in Heather Lloyd-Martin’s piece on how to put together a killer content marketing team. If you want to know what it takes to achieve outstanding success in Internet marketing, you might want to check out R.L. Adams’ profile that tells the tale of David Sharpe, who went from construction worker to eight-figure earner. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Melissa Thompson tells the story of entrepreneur Jeff Pedersen and how he founded Cariloha and found success through creating a new market for comfort products made from bamboo. Jen Hacker tagged along with the co-founder of Richer Poorer and a group of six entrepreneurs to capture their adventures and the lessons they learned from one another along the way to pull together this Entrepreneur article. Focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear. – Anthony Robbins Politics, government, and the economy Being able to anticipate the future and keep up with today’s trends is required for major success. Jared Meyer’s “The Economy Is Changing And So Is The American Dream” is an excellent...
read moreSteps to market your business online for free
The bane of big tech businesses can be the boom for small businesses. If you follow business news, virtually everyday there’s an article about a tech company struggling to find a way to “monetize” its business. This happens because many online companies give away their service – or at least a good chunk of their service – for free. That’s bad news for them, but good news for you. Let’s take a quick survey of some ways you can market your business online for free. Get a website It’s fascinating to me that you can still get a website for free. Just about all of the major DIY website builders have a free plan. The focus in this article is on DIY ecommerce sites – which aren’t free – but the services I mention generally offer some level of free site. The companies that heavily advertise, such as Wix, Websitebuilder, and Weebly, have free plans. Even if you have a website, using one of these DIY sites to re-build it could be a good idea. Take a hard look at your current site. If it’s outdated, spend the energy to bring it up-to-date. Use Facebook as your website Some businesses can get by without a stand-alone website and just use their Facebook business page. There’s one important strategy to implement here, though. Get your own domain name – make it match the name of your business as much as possible – and then make the DNS (domain name server) send traffic to your Facebook page. Whoever you used to buy your domain name should be able to help you point your traffic to your Facebook page. Here’s how this would work for you: Someone searches for your business on Google You website URL comes up such as mybusiness.com, The person clicks on your URL and gets sent to your Facebook page. Use a free blogging service Google offers free blogs via Blogger, and WordPress.com also lets you start a blog for free. A simple blog is a good way to market your business online for free, especially in its early days. And if you’re still in the planning stages, you can use a blog to build interest and excitement about your project. Open social media accounts You can create free social media accounts for your business. Do all the main platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Periscope. It’s true that you may end up not using all of them, but you certainly want to get ownership of your handle before anyone else grabs it. Next steps Once you have a free website, free Facebook page, or free blog, you’ve created a web presence. The next step in your quest to market your business online for free is to get people to see or experience your web presence and follow your social media accounts. Let me suggest that the first step in driving traffic to your website and acquiring social media followers is to make complete use of your personal and professional list of contacts. (You’ll find some good hacks to do this in this article.) Send one or more emails to everyone in your address book. If you’re on LinkedIn – and you should be – send a copy of this email to all of your connections. Be sure...
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