Are You Ready to Start a Business? 5 Burning Questions You Need to Ask Yourself

Building a business this year has become more important than ever because everything will be starting up one, eventually.

The Kauffman Foundation acknowledges the slow growth of startups in the U.S., but believes that the long-term health of entrepreneurship will rise in 2016.

Wendy Guillies, President and CEO of Kauffman, points out the lowered barriers of entrepreneurship due to technological advancements, which result to more affordable server storage and better access to software.

Lowered costs will only encourage people with entrepreneurial spirits to building a business. However, cost is just one of the many obstacles that entrepreneurs and startups will have to overcome to truly call themselves business owners.

Below are other factors that you need to consider with your startup.

1. Are You Ready Psychologically?

The Change School co-founder Grace Clapham said in a Business News Daily article that people become entrepreneurs so they can escape their nine-to-five jobs and have more time for themselves. These are effects of successful entrepreneurship, which is only possible through hard work.

Running a business demands a lot of your time and attention, which runs in contrary to the belief that entrepreneurs have lots of free time on their hands.

The grind of entrepreneurship can also take a toll on their psyche. Even if you as entrepreneur feel prepared with the work that comes in building a business, you have to consider that 80 percent fail within the first 18 months.

Are you truly convinced that being an entrepreneur with a 1/5 chance of success is your true calling in life?

You need to consider all factors involved in the start up of a business, from the failures you will have to experience and overcome, down to spending more hours working on your business than doing other things.

If you are still on the fence about whether or not to start a business, the aforementioned Change School offers retreats to individuals who are planning to make a transition in their lives. The retreats will help them find answers to their questions and determine if they are ready to take a big step.

2. Is You Idea Worth a Lick?

What makes a business idea great?

Facebook was far from being an original concept but it has outlived most of its competitors to become the most popular online social networking platform.

A great business idea does not necessarily have to be unique, either, although it helps in putting your business at a very favorable position for being one of a kind.

A great business idea, therefore, is something that lots of people will spend their money on.

Even ridiculous business ideas end up doing pretty well because it fills a certain demand in the market. Even if others find your business idea “stupid,” as long as there are potential customers whom you can tap into, then your idea is worth turning into a business.

You may want to refine your idea from a business standpoint and determine its feasibility in the long run to determine if this is a business that you want to run with.

3. Have You Done Your Homework?

Great business ideas never fully materialize without a plan backing them.

You must find a way to communicate how useful or groundbreaking your business is to your audience in the market. Considering that new competitors continue to saturate the market, you need to establish a unique selling point to help distinguish your business above the rest. Not to mention, you must cover all your bases by identifying possible problems that your startup will soon face and come up with solutions for each.

There are many other factors that you must answer to when starting a business, which is why you need to develop a business plan. A solid business plan can go a long way in helping you acquire funding (more on that later), determine an exit strategy, and mitigate legal problems.

Preparing a business strategy is also of utmost importance because you need to clearly state the steps your business will take in order to achieve your goals.

By laying down your plan and strategy, you have a clear idea on how to proceed with your business.

4. Do You Have Other Sources of Funding?

Building a business nowadays has become relatively affordable with tools and software that help automate operational tasks. But these are just part of the many other things that will comprise your startup costs. Employee salaries, infrastructure maintenance, and other services can pile up if you do not plan for them properly.

Estimating their costs within a 12-month window will help, but what if your business incurs unforeseen financial problems that you cannot get out of, despite your earnings?

Looking for investors or people who will provide your business with financial relief while starting up your business is an excellent way to overcome these unforeseen financial problems. Your business plan, which provides investors with an idea on how clear and scalable your business model is, should help you acquire investors early on. In the long run, however, you want to ensure the safety of your business by looking for more funds.

Funding services like Credit Suite allow you access to hundreds and thousand of dollars, whether you are just starting your business or already have an established one. You can acquire funding without collateral or cash flow requirements, which makes it ideal for startups still building up a client base.

5. Where Will Your Operations Work?

Running a business involves  figuring out how you and your partners will be running it.

The trend among startups nowadays is to hire a remote or virtual workforce to lower operational costs. More importantly, remote workers point to increased productivity. Because they are dealing with less stress from traveling from home to office and back for hours everyday, virtual employees get to focus on producing the output instead.

On the downside, some startups benefit from having employees clocking in and out of a brick-and-mortar office. They get to track and measure the performance of each employee as they work within a collaborative environment. Also, office workers get to build a tight-knit relationship with the business that is lacking with home-based workers.

Both types of operations have their pros and cons, so find out which type works best for your business. As a compromise, you can set up a brick-and-mortar office and hire remote freelancers to do some of your work so you get to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Wrapping It Up

Answering these five questions will help you gain a better understanding of how you can build, develop, and sustain your business this year and beyond.

There will be more questions that will befuddle you along the way, but the ones listed above should help cover the bases of your business and leave no doubt in your mind that you are ready for entrepreneurial success.

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Warning: These Real Estate Marketing Strategies Are So Effective, They're Addictive

Is it just me, or is there an abnormally high demand for real estate online marketers nowadays?

I mean, I have always known that there is a strong demand for them since at one point, the total real estate ad spending reached about $27 billion.

Just lately though, I’ve been getting quite a lot of inquiries from prospective clients in that field, to the point where the number of inquiries I was getting became quite overwhelming.

Some were looking to hire me, while others were just asking for marketing tips that they could use for their real estate business. Either way, it was getting exceedingly challenging for me to keep up with all the inquiries, especially when they were asking for marketing tips.

It’s because of this dilemma that I thought of writing this online marketing guide for real estate agents. Instead of answering all the inquiries one at a time, everyone can just read this guide.

If you’re looking for real estate Internet marketing strategies that you can use for your business, or for your clients, then this guide will surely be of help to you.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Run a Referral Program Through Your Email List

Referrals are such a powerful tool for real estate agents, that it can often times spell the difference between them succeeding in this career, or them looking for another.

In fact, after having spoken with countless real estate agents, one of the things I’ve learned is how they get the majority of their business through referrals.

So here’s what you can do.

You can run an email marketing campaign where your clients will reach out to their existing or previous clients, then ask them for referrals. By the way, remind your clients to offer an incentive of some sort.

Remind them that their network might also be busy so they need to make it worth their network’s time to refer them to their connections.

*Note: as you can probably imagine, you can only use this strategy if you’ve been keeping track of your connection’s contact details, especially their email address. That is why it is a must for you to capture/store their email addresses.

2. Amass Reviews on Websites Where Your Prospects Hangout

According to an article published at Searchengineland, “88 percent of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (vs. 79 percent in 2013).”

At this point, you should have already realized how effective a marketing tool online reviews are for your real estate clients. Through reviews, you can convey to your audience how credible your client is, and how his expertise in the industry is top notch.

The thing with online reviews is that they somewhat work as a referral of some sort by the people whom your clients have transacted with to those who have yet to do business with them. It can help cement your client’s status as a trustworthy person to deal with.

This of course, is a critical element that can help influence your client’s prospective customers to pull the trigger, and reach for their wallets.

3. Use Video Marketing

What makes videos such a powerful tool for real estate agents is it allows their viewers, their prospective buyers, to really capture the experience.

A professionally crafted video can paint a mental picture in their audience’s minds as to just how amazing it would be if they were the ones living the property being featured.

Giving their audience even just a hint of that experience can easily rouse their audience to call and inquire about the property.

4. Have a Professionally Crafted Website. One That’s Easy to Navigate

If your client doesn’t have a professionally crafted website for their business, they’ll be missing out on a lot of leads or referrals.

Not only are websites effective in bolstering your client’s image as someone that’s authoritative in the industry, but it can also be of good use to them when it comes to marketing, and building strategic relationships with other like-minded individuals, among others.

To help you create an amazing website for your client, one that can truly help in advancing their business, you can consider these points:

• It needs to be intuitive, and user friendly.
• The property’s details (like address, price, features, etc…) should be easily available.
• Your client’s contact details should be highly visible.
• The website needs to have high quality images of the properties.
• It needs to have a blog.

While there are certainly other things that you can include in your client’s website like certifications and a professionally crafted “About Us” page among others, the points that I shared above should be a good starting point for you.

The way this real estate company created their website is a good example. Not only does their website have the basic (yet critical) points that we discussed, they have a powerful search engine that allows their prospective customers to get highly targeted search results.

*Important note: Remember that there is more to a website than just making sure that it looks good. More than its aesthetics, it needs to be highly optimized for conversion.

Sprinkling your call-to-action buttons on the different areas of your website where you’ve provided much value to your audience is without a doubt one of the best conversion optimization tips that you can implement on your client’s website.

5. Blog About Your Audience’s Problems/Frustrations/Questions

Countless surveys and statistics show how effective a marketing tool blogging is. If you blog about the right topics, then you’ll surely get the traction that you need.

I’d like to emphasize the phrase, “about the right topics”, however. The thing is, some business owners tend to write about the things that they like, even though the topic isn’t necessarily something that their audience would find interesting.

That’s a big mistake.

You need to consider your audience first when thinking about the topics that you will blog about. If you’re blogging mainly for your self satisfaction, then you might be better off doing that in a personal blog, or your diary.

However, if your reason for blogging is to get more leads and customers, then you need to think about your audience first.

One of the best ways to make sure that your topic is something that your audience will find interesting, is to write about the struggles and the problems that they are facing.

You can probably put two and two together as to why blogging about your audience's problems will almost ascertain that they will love reading about your blog post.

Since they are struggling with the same problem themselves, they will surely want to read your blog to figure out what the solution is.

What’s Next?

Have you been helping real estate agents with marketing their businesses? If you answered, yes, then please take the time to share the marketing tips that you implemented that brought you real results.

I look forward to reading your ideas.

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Then wanted to resign Business? Previously Read These Tips

Ever think to stop so employees and build a business that dream? Yes Working alone, a lot of plans, savings and other things is not impossible if it could be financial plan early on.

Reporting from mybanktracker.com page, here are some things you can do to plan finances for pursuing your dreams:

1. Pay Debt

Before making swerved, if you have consumer debt, such as credit card payments, car and others should make a priority to pay off existing debt.

Consumer debt is the kind of risky debt, a prime example is credit card debt with high interest rates, because it is not supported by any asset to offset the debt.

Make it a priority to pay off consumer debt as much as possible, will offer a better chance of success in your career path, because even if you have high-interest debt, but it is not a burden for the time being and will not tie up your financial condition in the future.

2. Calculate How Much Money You Need Saved

After paying off all debt, go to the next goal which is to determine precisely how much money you need to save.

When the plan to determine the business dreams, make a list of all monthly expenses, including all the necessities such as clothing, food and more. Make a goal of saving such as pension and investment.

Find the minimum amount for your life if you do not receive a salary. Then multiply this number for the next 3-6 months. It will help you calculate how much money should be saved to make a career transition from employee to successful business.

3. Separate Between Business and Personal Finance

Finance plays a big role for business planning. Set up a separate bank account between work and private life. Use personal accounts for domestic transactions, while fees related to work and business use through the work account. Separating the account needs to be done to help keep your finances organized.

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Wind Power Will be Developed In Kampung Bungin, Bekasi

Through Community Service Program Based Windmill, Lecturer and Student, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Indonesia (UI) to develop the Regional Ecotourism in Kampung Bungin, Muara Gembong, Bekasi.

"The choice of Kampung Bungin as devotion area is to improve local energy independence, improve the people's economy and opening the eyes of various circles to save the environment around the coast," says Professor of Mechanical Engineering FT UI Prof.Dr.Adi Surjosatyo.

Prof. Adi said that the wind potential in Kampung Bungin has a speed between 1-10m / s, this condition is very potential to meet the needs of wind turbines that will generate electricity. Changes in wind direction at the time of the east monsoon and monsoon west at a speed that is not much different from the conditions of the wind blowing from the morning starting at 09:00 until the evening at 24.00.

"The system of wind power plant designed by FTUI Wind Turbine Design Team is a system with a capacity of 500 watts," says Prof. Adi.

He said the Wind Turbine Tower has been designed with a height of 9 meters and is divided into 6 Baian (height of 1.5 meters for each part). This condition is intended to facilitate the mobilization of the design of a solid foundation.

The system is designed to produce electrical energy with a capacity of 500 watts at a speed of 3 m / s (cut-in speed) and will stop generating electricity at a speed of 12 m / s. The generator used is the type of Permanent Magnet Generator (PMG) 500 watt 24VAC 3-Phase.

The design team is a collaboration turbine Wind Turbine Design Team FTUI (Wind Energy Team UI) with the Lantern Wind Nusantara (LAN).

He further said that the system Maintenance and Operations will involve citizens who are trained to operate and maintain, includes training operation and checking of electricity, maintenance of components (towers, foundations, turbines, generators, electrical systems) and measurement of the speed and direction of the wind, so it is expected that residents were able operate and maintain independently.

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