Small bussines And Entrepreneurialism Is The First Step Toward Success

Financial Success First Starts with a Decision, Not Action. Before you can attempt to achieve success, regardless of the nature of your business, you must first resolve it within your mind, within your spirit, and within your will that you will achieve success.

Your defining decision is not should you become an entrepreneur. Rather, your defining decision must be are you willing to pay the price to become a successful entrepreneur. Honestly ask yourself, are you wholeheartedly committed to and willing to make the necessary sacrifices to be successful?

Do you have a long-term perspective? Are you willing to sacrifice the necessary time, money, and effort in the short-term in order to achieve long-term prosperity? Do you have the patience necessary to research, establish, build, nurture, and cultivate a successful business?

By your very definition, an entrepreneur, it is guaranteed that you will face challenges, distractions, risk, obstacles, and at many times, uncertainty. But your success as an entrepreneur cannot be achieved if your thoughts and your level of commitment is anything less than firm and resolute.

As an entrepreneur, your strongest asset is your mind. It is your mental resolve, your mental stability and flexibility, your creativity, and your sound and decisive decision making that will ensure your success long-term. Regardless of how much money you make, your strongest asset remains your mind. If you were to lose everything a sound mind could always create new wealth.

There is No Substitute for Preparation. The Great General McArthur once said “There is no substitute for victory.” As a proud graduate of the Military Academy I wholeheartedly agree with the General. But as a proud and motivated entrepreneur I also believe that there is no substitute for preparation.

Little greatness has ever been achieved by coincidence. Rather, greatness is always the result of calculated and consistent action. Your success, your greatness, and your accomplishments will be the direct result of your preparations. Why? Because what you do today directly influences what happens to you tomorrow.

But how do you prepare to be an entrepreneur? What do you prepare for and where do you start? First and foremost you need to prepare YOU. Before you can plan to pursue any business venture or prosperous opportunity you must first ensure that YOU are prepared.

Think of your hands when they’re full – holding onto something. When your fists are full and tightly clasped you’re unable to accept holding anything else? Your hands are preoccupied.

The same is true when it comes to preparing YOU. When you’re not prepared you’re unable to accept success. You’re unable to accept prosperity. You’re unable to accept blessings of success. How can you have high expectations of success if you’re not prepared to achieve success? The answer is you can’t. Like your hands, YOU must be open and prepared, willing to accept and receive success.

Start by preparing YOU mentally, physically, financially, and educationally. Build personal patterns and habits that will encourage your success. If there are things that you don’t know – learn them! Educate yourself and find experienced people that can help you.

Next, prepare your environment and your surroundings for success. Eliminate inefficiency, clutter, disorganization, and distractions. Success doesn’t follow disorganization. Rather, success is led by organized and focused efficiency.

Surround yourself with positive influences and avoid negative people. You can’t soar with the eagles if you remain clucking with the chickens. Unfortunately, negative people can include friends, family, and close associates. Regardless of who they are, how long you’ve known them, or what the relationship, you can’t afford to fall prey to the negative energy, poor attitude, or inefficient habits from others.

The following phrase is very succinct yet powerful. “Plan your work then work your plan.” These short seven words are a simple philosophy that you should use as you approach the development of YOU and your business.

Have an Expectancy of Success. A fear of failure cannot be an option. Rather, it is absolutely essential that you have realistic and strong expectations of success.

As Sam Walton once said, “High expectations are the key to everything.”

Does having high expectations and a strong will mean that you are impervious to failure? No. Chances are very good that you will experience some form of failure along your entrepreneurial journey.

Does it mean that you won’t make mistakes? No. Regardless if you’re a new or experienced entrepreneur mistakes, oversights, and miscalculations are always a possibility. But, it’s how you interpret, react to, learn from and overcome failure and errors that will test your commitment and further shape your character and resolve.

Regardless of how often or intense your challenges, you must remain optimistic and committed with high expectations of success. High expectations and a positive outlook is what allows you to view mistakes and challenges as lessons learned rather than allowing them to hamper and adversely affect your success.

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When the economy has an extended down cycle, like what we have experienced for past couple of years, the value of many small businesses tends to drop. At one time I worked for a very large conglomerate that would acquire as many as 100 new businesses a year. In fact a big part of my job was to constantly be looking for and evaluating small businesses that had some synergy with the existing companies we already owned. Buying another company is not something that is limited to huge corporations. You might be surprised to learn that many of your small competitors and even small businesses that serve markets adjacent to yours are looking to bail out during difficult times. It may not take as much money as you think to grow your business rapidly.

I will offer a few guidelines you should consider before you go on a buying spree.

1. Don’t consider acquisitions, unless your existing business is stable. Integrating another business into yours will take a lot of time and effort and your existing business should be able to keep going without your care and feeding for a while.
2. Look for businesses that are direct competitors or serve the same or directly adjacent markets to where you already are. If you don’t already understand the products or services your target sells, don’t buy it thinking you will learn about their business after you own it.
3. Don’t just look for bargain basement companies that are in trouble. The process of integrating and succeeding with an acquisition is much easier if the acquisition is not already on life support. There are people called turn-around specialists that make a living out of buying and “turning around” struggling businesses. The changes are, you don’t have all the skill sets a team of turn-around specialists has.
4. Do include your “team” in the process. If you have some good people working with you, or even a team of trusted outside advisors, use them for their expertise. Also depending on the size of your acquisition, you might pick up some great “new” team members.

Finally there are some significant tax advantages to selling a small business right now. If you own stock in a “Qualified Small Business” or Qualified Small Business Stock, 50% of the gain from selling that stock is excludible from calculating taxes and the maximum rate of tax is limited to 28%. There may be some motivated small business sellers looking to make a deal as the terms of QSBS exclusions will start changing after 2010 until it is completely phased out in 2014.

“Business is bad.”

I hear this all the time. Funny thing, though. I hear it in both Good Times and Bad Times. I hear it during economic recessions and financial booms.

If you listen long enough to CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, you’ll hear that business is always stinkaroo.

I sat in Starbucks for half an hour this morning. Here’s what I overheard:

“Matt moved back home. The kid’s business went belly-up, but you know how bad things are right now.”
“I’m cutting back my staff and shortening my hours because, well, business is just bad everywhere.”
“I can’t compete. Business is bad, and people are strictly price-shopping now.”

At the risk of being a spoilsport…

I think “business is bad” is usually just an excuse.

Larry Winget, everybody’s favorite maverick business writer, is even more hardnosed about this than I am.

“Business is never really bad,” he says. “People are just bad at being in business.”

There are three unfortunate traits I commonly see among failing new business owners. If you plan to start your own venture, make sure you don’t share them.

1) They’re unprepared for the entrepreneurial lifestyle.

No experience.
No willingness to learn.
No discipline.
Unrealistic expectations.

I’ll never forget the guy who told me, “I’m gonna quit my job and open my own shop. I want to free up more time to travel with my wife and kids.”

2) They’re undercapitalized for the type of business they’ve launched.

They make their first effort a high-inventory, high-overhead operation.

There are hundreds of businesses that can literally be bootstrapped together for a few bucks and built into six-figure companies and even seven-figure empires.

3) They throw their money at low-priority stuff, not high-priority stuff.

They spend big bucks on elaborate stationery and business card combinations, expensive telephone systems, computer networking programs, and web-design packages — while they slash their marketing budget.

Tip: Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. Great looking letterhead ain’t.

As I mentioned before, I spend quite a lot of time in coffeehouses. And I pretty much built a business out of doing just that. I talk about it at http://www.wallyconger.com.

Make sure you grab a FREE copy of my book Fire-Up Your Cash Flow Over a Donut and Coffee! while you’re there.

From Wally Conger – “Smashing Wage Slavery One Job at a Time!”