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[S934]Starting My Own Business

by Joe Lee, Joe

Thinking of starting your own business? You are not the only one who wants to start a business but lack the knowledge. If you have been an employee all your life, starting a business can be very different. It may seem so cool to own your own business, but there are business tasks to take care. Here you get to learn some of the critical stuff about starting a business.

Distribution channel

You decided on your business. You decided on your products. The question is how do you get your products to your customers? Many business owners fall into this trap; they sensed a good product, but they have no idea how to distribute it.

There are number of ways to distribute a product. Wholesale, retail, direct sales, online sales are some examples of distribution.

Costing of the product is different in each channel. For example in wholesale, selling price of the product is low; you make money by selling in quantity. Then in direct sales, you got to factor the commission for your salespeople.

Choose a method, work out the costing. This is the bare minimum that you must know. There is a lot more in depth study when you move into any one of them.

Target market

Knowing your target market can save you tons of money. Your must understand that you can't possibly sell to everyone. There will be some who loves you, some who doesn't care and some who hates you. Your job is to find out who loves you and take good care of them. To expand, you also got to find those who doesn't care and convert them. You can't do anything about those who hates you.

Knowing you marketing allows you to focus your marketing on those who will give the best response. In any business, pin point your target market, you want to focus your effort on the most responsive group.

Marketing medium

Any businesses will require a certain amount of marketing. If you start a business, you would want to have exposure to your business. So how do you expose your company? What are the types of marketing medium would you want to leverage on?

TV advertising, newspaper advertisement, direct mailer, fliers in letterbox or magazine advertisement is one of the medium that you may want to consider. Of course there are more than what had been mentioned.

You must consider carefully with the kind of medium for your business. Not all business is effective using TV advertisement. Consider them carefully to save your marketing dollar.

Yourself

How well do you know yourself? What are you good at? What are your weaknesses? Like I said earlier, running a business is very different from working for others. When working for others you mainly take care of your job scope, while running a business, you take care of many other scopes.

If you are hiring as an IT engineer, you do only IT stuff in the company. If you start an IT company, then you take care of manpower, sales and marketing, operation etc. It requires a different set of skills and character.

Understanding your strengths and weaknesses can effectively help you in allocating tasks. If you are weak in accounting, you hire or outsource this area to someone else, so you can focus on sales. You wouldn't want to spend your time doing tasks that you are not good with, in the end waste too much time on those tasks.

How do you begin? From the very first moment you have to decide where you want to end up and you have to visualize the end result and begin to analyze the cost before you proceed. What is your goal? Is it just to have a business? What kind of business will you have? Will you sell something or deliver service? Is it your own invention or someone else's product? Will this be part time or full time? From an office? Storefront? Home? Or door to door?

Before you begin to spend your last dollar you need to visualize, as much you can, the steps you will need to take to get you where you would like to be. Doing this will help you understand what you want and what you don't want and where you really need to spend your money.

Some of the questions that you will ask yourself are; What am I selling? Who is my most likely customer? How will my customer find me? How will I get my product to my customer? Which method of selling will it entail? Post card and direct mail? Stores? Wholesale? Face to face contact? Phone sales? Flyer delivery? Push Cart? What do you feel most comfortable with? What is the part of the business that you most like to do? If you are a chef and you are too shy to talk to your customers and just prefer to work your magic in the kitchen, then you will need to hire someone who a) likes people, b) genuinely likes selling and c) may even have a professional background in selling. At the very least it should be your partner or your friend who has a gift of the gab and is thrilled with your product. Once again determine how much it will cost you, before you begin.

If you write a business plan most of these questions will be answered. This is a good thing to do because it keeps your goals and your plan immediately in front of you, and it show your target spending goals and earning goals. If you find yourself slightly off course or far off course, reflecting back on your business plan can bring you back on track and keep you organized and pushing forward towards your goals. It also helps you to make adjustment if your original idea was bluey!

You should know that most small business owners out of necessity have to wear many hats. They have to manage the books, create the product, talk the talk, create the promotional and marketing material, create new avenues of selling and product distribution, and close the store, or lock up the push-cart at the end of the day.

You also have to do some homework to find out if there is a similar product being marketed and how is that product being marketed and at what cost? They would be your direct competition. But just because they are competition doesn't mean that you can't also succeed with your product or services. The exact opposite is most often true. If there are a few out there selling or marketing similar services, it usually means that yours will also sell. If someone doesn't like one place they can move down the block to the next person or business that is selling the same. If you are in the right place at the right time, and your price is right, that could be you. That is one of the keys to succeed in business.

The other is consistency. If you begin to develop a customer base, they have to be able to find you consistently; and you have to be able to deliver consistently what you promise, and you need to stay in touch with them on a consistent basis.

If you have the push-cart first on Second Ave and then on Tenth and then back on Lemoine, your customer will give up trying to find you to buy the sandwich or tostada from you. Day in and day out you have to be at that designated spot, and you have to be there in the rain, in the snow, in the hot sun and with ample product. If you get your product from some other source, you have to have a reliable distributor, if not you have to find one who is reliable and who takes your account or business as seriously as you do even if you are only placing relatively small orders. If you are consistent at delivering, and keeping in touch with your customers, and consistent at ordering pretty soon you will be placing larger and more frequent orders. copyright 2006 Yoga Kat

Article Source : Your God Is Too Small

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Both Joe Lee & Katheryn Hoban are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Joe Lee has sinced written about articles on various topics from Home Businesses, Small Business and Start Online Business. . Joe Lee's top article generates over 8100 views. to your Favourites.

Katheryn Hoban has sinced written about articles on various topics from self improvement and motivation, Alternative Medicine and Culture and Society. Yoga Kat teaches children's yoga ages 3-6, 7-12yrs and Adults in NJ. The Author of the book DAUGHTER BELOVED and created a children's affirmation CD and an adult affirmation CD. Available for speaking and reached at yogakat@verizon.net or 201 970-9340-. Katheryn Hoban's top article generates over 60500 views. to your Favourites.