Small Business News Feeds -
|
Why You Should Start a Small Business. Everyone has a different reason for wanting to quit the rat-race and setup business from home. You're smarter than your boss, you hate commuting, you want to make money from your hobby, etc etc. For every reason you can find to take the step towards business ownership, you'll find an opposing reason that appears to make some sense. People will advise you never to leave the security of a well-paying job and a growing retirement plan. You'll never succeed turning a hobby into a business. Your boss is paid more than you because he/she IS smarter than you...and on it goes. We don't necessarily say that everyone is suited to run their own business, but we do know that unless you give it a try you will never know if it's for you. The ramifications of having an ambition such as business ownership, yet never having the courage to attempt to turn your ambition into reality, are that you'll spend your old age wondering what might have been. We may only be here for the one run (depending on your religious beliefs), so you simply must try to turn your ambitions into reality, and the longer you leave it the harder it will become. What can I gain from running a small business?There are many potential reward to business ownership, but the real reward will be a very personal thing and will vary from person to person. For me, I enjoy the challenge of brainstorming new projects and ideas, then turning them into reality. With our supplement business we receive hundreds of positive comments each year, endorsement from people who have tried our products and felt the benefits. That is certainly a motivation for me. In other ways, I appreciate the flexibility of schedule that business ownership brings me. I can take time out when I need to and catch-up after hours if needed. Money is a strong motivation for many people too. But initially you can't expect too much. You'll hopefully be making money but turning it around and putting it back into your business. The less dependant you are on money that the business makes for your own personal bills, the faster your business will grow. Many people see the "work from home" aspect as particularly appealing. Let me say that from my own experience that isn't completely positive. You need an extra level of motivation to work from home. You need the discipline to be able to separate your home functions and duties from those of your business. You'll need clear demarkation of business/home routines and responsibilities. I remember working with a home-based salesperson some years ago, who didn't have the kind of discipline that I've described. Fortunately he recognized that weakness in himself before it became a serious negative in his ability to run his business. His solution? - he converted a shed at the end of his property into an office. Each morning he's rise and dress for work in a suit and tie, then walk down the garden pathway to his office! Again citing my own experience, I worked from home for around the first 3 years of business ownership. The happiest day of my new life was signing a lease on a small office and retail space, some 20 minute drive from the home. Working with your spouse - again this becomes a very personal thing. If you are at a stage with your finances where you can both quit a job and start a business together, it can be very rewarding. It can also place an immense strain on your personal relationship, in fact it almost certainly will. Only you and your partner know if you have the ability to overcome the stresses that working together will bring.
you need to be on the lookout for anyone that has a vested interest in a particular product or service that they're pushing, because obviously you'll be receiving biased opinion and advice. At Hitmine we're not here to try and sell you anything. As such, there really is no agenda, other than to try and help your business succeed. But how did we get to be where we are today? - In 1998 we started our first Internet business, much like you are today. We scoured the web for ideas, spent countless hours (and money) looking at "schemes" to make money online. Very soon it was obvious that we would need a website from which to launch a product or service, so we set about the task of designing our own. Our first site had limited success, it was a local business directory website, offering listings to other local businesses. We provided premium services by creating basic webpages for our customers and our website design services grew from there. It wasn't long before we realized that the biggest challenge for any web business wasn't building a website, but promoting it. We were continually asked by our customers to help get more people to their websites, and we had the same challenge with our own website. At this point, the year is still only 1999, pre Google and pre "Pay Per Click" advertising. Directories, FFA boards and Banner advertising were the only real options for promoting a website along with whatever fell by chance from organic search engine results. So we began to look more closely at what we could do proactively to improve our search engine rankings on websites like AltaVista, Excite and Yahoo (Google was still a twinkle in someone's eye). We found a couple of small companies who were newly formed and starting to offer "Search Engine Optimization" services. So we researched this subject extensively and soon offered search ranking services alongside our web design. We were one of the pioneers of search engine marketing services, only two or three competitors with which to share the market. The promotion services took off, and we started to move our focus away from design and onto search engine marketing. During 1999 we entered into a partnership agreement with the manufacturer of a range of vitamin supplements. We built and promoted their website, added eCommerce functionality and setup and managed their Affiliate program. The Internet side of this business was a great success, but poor management and a lack of new-product development saw them fold during the latter part of 2000. At this point we had a number of clients in our search engine promotion division who were doing extremely well as a result of our marketing and promotion services. It made sense for us to develop our own product lines. Following the collapse of the vitamin supplement company with whom we had worked for extensively without any financial reward, we decided to extend our business by offering a true product. We researched the market, applied the knowldege from our partnership venture and introduced a small range of niche supplements to the market in early 2001. To date we have sold almost $10M in products from a very small and streamlined two-person operation. We have continued with our successful design and promotion services and expanded our product lines to include fine art and jewelry and currently operate 3 retail locations in the US. We have agents and dsitributors for our products in 14 countries and have sold into over 45 countries around the globe, though the US is still our biggest market by far. Without doubt we've turned just about every stone to look for opportunities and outlets for our products and services. We still continue to expand, and are currently selling smaller assets to finance the growth and development of our primary business interests. If we could start over today, with the benefit of having all the experience of the past 10 years, I think we could possible have reached the same place we are at now in much less time. Hopefully we can show you the road to success and give you a map that will direct you via the shortest route possible. Finally, there are no "get rich quick" schemes for the masses. There are maybe 0.0000005% of people who stumble upon something that makes money with little effort, the rest of us have to work for it. People have asked over the years, how much money did you have to start with? The answer is simple, it was less than $5000 and that money was also needed to pay bills and rent. We were able to go from a standing start to making some money in little over a week. We've never borrowed a penny, our business is and always has been completely debt-free. When we started our vitamin supplement business we took our first order online within four days of registering our domain name, and did a little under $125,000 is sales in the first 12 months. It is possible if you are committed to and believe in what you are doing.
|
