If you own a business or want to build one, it’s important that you build a system for your business. Don’t just run your business as it is, by using whatever technical skills you have, but try build a system around your business.
Why? Because by building a system, your business will be independent of you. It will take time to build the system and even more time to make it run smoothly, but once it does you are free to pursue other interests in your life. You are no longer required to always be present for your business to run.
Just think about it. If you don’t have a system for your business, then your business is actually just a job. It’s something that you can’t leave. Even worse, you might need to always be there which means that it’s even worse than normal job since you can’t take a leave. That’s why it’s essential that you build a system around your business.
To do that, the book The E-Myth Revisited has a lot of great tips. In essence, you need to organize your business around functions instead of around personalities. Do this from day one even if the only person in your business is you. When you think this way from the beginning, it will be easier to recruit and empower new people since you just place them inside the system you’ve built.
The difficult part is building the system. You need to put a lot of thoughts here. In this perspective, the main product of your business is the system rather than the commodity that your customer consumes. This is a different paradigm that what most business owners have and it does take a lot of effort on your part. But it will pay off big time.
In the time of the world crisis, maybe the worst impact is felt on the economic crisis. So many people have to change the way they live as well as to adapt to the world situation that may be unfortunate for them and the whole family. The way outs that are often done by those people is often becoming the greater problem for them in the future since they are not able to manage and plan the way out well, the future problem that may be considered as the simple thing at the first time. The lack of skill of management of wealth makes it is a huge problem for those done the management by themselves, not by the help of finance advisor. The help of finance advisor to do the wealth preservation also is another burden since it is not that cheap.
Yet it is now not that difficult to seek for help. The service of a finance advisor that is used to be directly on their offices is not replaced by the service that is available online. Though it is online, the service is not to be underestimated since the service is not less better than the direct service that we can get if we employ a finance advisor. It is since they are the experienced professional in the business as well as in the problem of wealth preservation. They will be able to give the best service to help people to plan their financial life as well as to do the wealth preservation. The objectives of some people or even companies will be able to be managed for a long or short period of time. To acquire the objectives, then some online trustable wealth preservation companies will be able to help to understand the pros and cons of each decision that they make. The decision is thus to be employed in order to implement a solid goal.
Some people feel that the global crisis makes them have to do some activities that may never be done before, even in their entire life. In the past, they might do the spending and shopping activities as their wish. They need not to think about the money they spend as well as the opportunity for them to use the money for other need that may be a lot more beneficial for some other important thing. It is involving the use of the credit cards that may become a huge burden for them in the future life. It is since the use of credit card is not felt as a big expense every time they purchase some items. But the bill will come and be prepared to be shock. Thus, so many people are now realizing the mistake that they made in the past, and they now start to do some consideration by doing household budgeting.
But still there are some important things that should be realized by those people who “feel” that they conduct the “correct” household budgeting. All they do is keeping track of the expenses that they do in the whole month. All the expenses or we can say where the money goes is done carefully and in detail so that the person can see what expense that is need to be cut or which one is the useless one. But is this the proper household budgeting that should be done by each person or each family? Some financial experts consider it as a waste of time. It is since they think what is the use of knowing the expense if you have already lose the money? For example, if you have already bought a plasma TV and later found that there is no use of buying such item while you can spend it to the more useful one such as education tuition and many more. Thus, a household budgeting should be done before you spend your money, not after you realize that you have spent too much.
While it’s not always the case, most likely you will need to find an investor for your startup. You have an idea, but it needs money to make the idea comes true. And since you just start, you might not have your own money to put into your startup. That’s why you need to find investors who are willing to put money into your startup in exchange of a portion of the ownership.
Sometimes you will find potential investors at unexpected times. That’s why you need to always be prepared to introduce yourself and your business. Moreover, you need to do it in the limited time available. You might have just a couple minutes to explain your business and because of that you need to prepare an elevator pitch.
The purpose of an elevator pitch is to rise interest of your business so that you can make further contact with the potential investor. The important thing here is to build interest. You don’t have time to explain your business in detail so don’t do that. You just need to make the investor interested enough to keep communicating with you. You can explain the details later when you already secure an open channel of communication with her.
So learn to explain your business in a concise way. Make sure to include all the points that make your business different from your competitors. Make sure to explain that there is demand for your product and that the demand will grow. Explain how your idea can solve your customers’ problems.
After preparing a pitch, practice it with your friends and ask for their feedbacks. Keep revising your pitch until you and your friends are satisfied with it. Now you are ready when those opportunities come.
Nobody wants to fail, though someone can learn a lot through failure. To minimze the chance of failure in your business, you need to prepare a business plan. A business plan won’t just help you get fund from investors, but also prepares you to manage your business successfully.
The reason is that preparing a business plan pushes you to think more about your business before taking action. It pushes to look at different aspects of your business so that you can anticipate potential problems that might arise. It also helps you prepare your business to face the competition and thrive.
For that reason, you need to prepare your business plan seriously. Don’t just make it for the sake of having a business plan. Instead, look at it as a thinking process that will prepare you for every aspect of your business. I’d even say that the thinking process is more important than the business plan itself. Why? Because the business plan – the document – could be irrelevant if situation changes. But the thinking process trains you to have a prepared mind that will be useful in any situation. Even if you meet new problems along the way, you will already know how to think about it to make the right decisions.
If you have partners, make sure to get them involved in preparing the business plan. Not only do you need to learn how to think, but also you need to learn how to think collectively. It’s a very useful skill for you to have.
When you want to start your own business, one of the most important factors you should pay attention to is finding the right partners. Don’t be so focused on the financial side of your business that you forget about the people side.
A business, after all, is run by people so the quality of the people you work with should be a top priority. Even the best business plan won’t help you a bit if the people can’t execute it. You need to have the best people on your team. In fact, many potential investors will decide whether or not to invest in your startup based on the quality of the people in your team.
So spend enough time to find the right partners. Don’t be in hurry in this phase. You want to make sure that you get the right people because it will affect you in the long term.
Now that we’ve seen the importance of choosing the right partners, how should we choose them?
One thing you should find in your partners is complementary skills. Don’t find someone who has the knowledge and skills as you. If you do that, you won’t be stronger as a team because you don’t broaden your range of knowledge and skills. Instead, find someone who can complement you. Look at your weaknesses and find someone who can cover it. On the other hand, make sure that your strengths can cover his weaknesses. This way your team will be much stronger because the people in it complement each other.
The next thing you need to find is, of course, the ability to work in a team. If someone has the best skills in the world but can’t work in a team, then don’t choose him. You need to synergize with each other as a team. Find a team player, not a solo player.
There are many factors that you need to pay attention to when it comes to investing. One of them is building a balanced portfolio. This is important because it reduces the risks of your investment.
If your portfolio isn’t balanced, you might get big gains in good times but also big loses in bad times. While getting big gains is nice, we really need to avoid big loses because they can wipe out whatever profit you’ve made.
The way to do that is by making sure that your portfolio is balanced. You need to ensure that your portfolio consists of different investment classes. For example, don’t invest all your money in stocks. You also need to invest in other types of investment like obligations. This way when the value of stocks goes down, you still have your obligations as cushion to prevent big loses.
Diversification is the name of the game here. You need to diversify from the time you start investing. One easy to way to achieve it is by investing in mutual fund. Just think about it. If you invest in individual stocks, the value of your portfolio depends a lot on the value of those individual stocks, which are very volatile. On the other hand, by investing in mutual fund, you indirectly invest in many different individual stocks. This way your portfolio won’t be too affected if one individual stock falls in value.
One thing to remember is you need to rebalance your portfolio from time to time. Just because you have a balanced portfolio at the beginning doesn’t necessarily mean that your portfolio will always remain balanced. One investment class may grow faster the the others which makes it has higher proportion in the portfolio. When such a thing happen, you need to add more fund to the other types of investment to maintain the balance.
There are many ways for you to learn finance. You can read financial books or take financial courses. But these days, thanks to the Internet, there are a lot of other ways to learn finance that are cheap and have high quality.
One of them is by listening to podcasts. Podcasts are audio programs that you can download automatically using tools like iTunes. You don’t need to download the episodes manually. Instead, your software will do it for you whenever there is a new episode available.
One podcast I’d like to highlight is Planet Money. This is a good financial podcast because it covers the popular events from financial perspective. For instance, these days the podcast covers health reform in several episodes. Since it covers familiar events, it will be easier for you to learn the financial principles behind them. In addition, it’s also well delivered which makes it fun to listen to.
You can try it yourself for several episodes. If it doesn’t meet your preferences, you can always unsubscribe it from within your software. On the other hand, if you find it useful you stay subscribed to it to keep learning from the new episodes.
If you want to, you can also explore other financial podcasts. All you need to do is browsing a podcast directory. There you will find a lot of podcasts that cover multiple financial topics. You can try them and subscribe to the ones you like.
Learning economics is a good way to deepen your understanding of the business and finance world. Why? Because economics explains how people behave in order to fulfill their needs. That, in essence, is what you do in business and finance. Either directly or indirectly, you fulfill someone’s needs. Because of that, understanding economics can help you make better decisions in business and finance.
Fortunately, there are many good resources you can use to learn economics. If you are new to this subject, the Wikipedia entry on economics is a good start. You will find a lot of links there that cover subtopics of economics is greater details. The nice thing about learning from Wikipedia is you get an overall coverage of the topic. It allows you to see many different parts of economics and how they relate to each other. You can then decide to dig deeper into the parts that are interesting to you.
The next step you can do is going to places like iTunes U that offers free courses online. That’s the magic of the Internet age: you don’t need to physically attend a course and pay hefty tuition fee. Instead, you can enjoy the course at the comfort of your home without paying a dime. So take advantage of this great opportunity. At iTunes U you will find courses from many universities so you can choose the one that meets your style and preferences.
You don’t have to be an economist, of course. But you can use your understanding of the subject to help you make better decisions. Eventually, that will lead you to a path of higher profitability.
That’s the question I want to look at today: is the market rational? If you learned economics, you will learn that many economists say that the answer is yes. In fact, a whole bunch of economic theories are built on the assumption that the market rational.
A rational market is a market in which the market participants make decisions in a rational way. For example, they will buy things when prices are low and sell them when the prices go up. Another example is people will go to the provider that has the lowest price for a particular product or service. In this market, market prices sum up all the information people need to know about something.
However, in recent years there are stronger and stronger opinions that say that the market is not always rational. In fact, it’s quite often behave irrationally. That’s especially clear if you look at the causes of the recent financial crisis. In hindsight, there are a lot of irrational things that caused the crisis.
Considering this, behavioral economics (which includes behavioral finance) becomes increasingly popular these days. Behavioral economics approaches economics based on the fact that people often make irrational decisions. The market isn’t completely efficient since there are many psychological factors that influence the decisions of the participants. If you want to make accurate decisions, you need to take into account these psychological factors and not just the rational factors. This way you can avoid many potential mistakes and increase your chance to achieve your goals.