Are you prepared?

Like other parts in the Midwest, southern Indiana where I live has recently experienced a tremendous amount of flooding. Several properties that we own are completely flooded. We also lost power for several days, which meant that we did not have access to the Internet and could not operate our business as normal. Multiple roads were flooded, which meant that we could not always go where we needed to go. We are still without phone service.

The question I pose today is the following: As a business owner, are you prepared for the unexpected? What happens if your physical business building or any of your other properties are flooded? What if your computer system gets zapped by lightening? Do you have a backup? What if your business burns to the ground? What if you or a key employee dies?  What if the area you live in is hit by a hurricane? What if there is another terrorist attack? These are all viable circumstances out of your control that could dramatically affect your business. 

Although you cannot control many of these external circumstances, you can control how are able to respond to them. For instance, you can purchase insurance. You can backup your data regularly and/or utilize web storage to have continuous access. You can document all the job duties and tasks so that it is easier to replace key employees if need be. You can have an succession plan. You can have a plan for what to do should your business need to be evacuated. You can be flexible and think creatively how to respond.

How else might you prepare for the unexpected?

You are never too young to be an entrepreneur!

I grew up in family-owned business. When I was younger, I also babysat, mowed lawns for extra money, sold cards, had a lemonade stand (well, once, it didn't go over that well) and probably did a few other "business ventures" that don't come to mind right now. Yet, I don't think that I was ever actually exposed to the concept of 'entrepreneurship' until college.

Today, there are not only a growing number of college entrepreneurship programs, but many targeted to schools and youth. Here are just a few:

 

 

 

If you are under the age of 18 and/or interact with anyone within this age group, no matter how young, there are many advantages of helping expose the entrepreneurial side in them. First, you are enabling them to build valuable skills (money handling, sales, people skills, etc.) that could be used later on in life. You are also teaching them how to be self-sufficient. Let's face it, not everyone is made for the corporate world. Last, you can help build confidence and give them something positive to focus on.

I used to work with an organization called The Institute for Entrepreneurship, where I helped administer a grant fund for kids/teachers and helped with their annual youth entrepreneurship conference. It was a simply amazing and inspiring experience -- you might be amazed at the potential in our young people.

2008 Mother of Invention

Whirlpool knows moms are identifying challenges and coming up with creative solutions every day. To recognize this motherly ingenuity, the 2008 Whirlpool® Brand Mother of Invention Grant will provide winning moms with the necessary business resources to help bring their ideas to life.

The deadline is July 31st and grants range from $5-20K. Good luck!

Foreclosures

In the media today, we are hearing more about concerns with the economy and the increased number of foreclosures. Now, this can be pretty depressing. However, if you start to think entrepreneurially, you can see that there are two sides to everything. And, yes, in a down market such as ours today, many opportunities still exist. It just depends on how you look at it.

My husband and I own a real estate business, Renewing Properties, that specializes in acquiring foreclosure properties and then selling them on a lease-to-own program. And, to let you in on a little secret, the business is thriving in today's economy! Why? Well, there are many more foreclosure deals to find. And, secondly, there are many more potential home buyers that are facing difficulty in obtaining a traditional mortgage and/or prefer a lease-to-own program as it helps them build up equity.

Can you think of any other opportunities that exist because of the state of the economy? What about staffing services that can help corporations outsource or help employees for plants that are shutting down? What about entrepreneurial training and consulting services as many individuals may in turn consider starting their own business if they lose their job? What about check-to-cash businesses? Discount retail outlets (as Americans start to become more price conscious again)? Bus services and/or technological services that enables communication without having to drive somewhere (and thus saving gas)?

Just start thinking --- and I assure you that the ideas will start to flow!

Selling Options

Have you ever noticed that sales people are among the most highest paid within many organizations? The reason is fairly simple: selling is crucial AND difficult to master. As a new business, one of the first decisions you need to make is your selling strategy and which route(s) make most sense to pursue.

SmallBusiness.com outlines the following different options:

Direct Sales: involving face-to-face contact

• retail or consumer
• door-to-door or traveling salesman
• party plan

Industrial/Professional Sales: selling from one business to another

• business-to-business

Indirect: human-mediated but with indirect contact

• telemarketing or telesales
• mail-order

Electronic

• web B2B, B2C
• EDI

Agency-based

• consignment
• multi-level marketing
• sales agents (real estate, manufacturing)

When you are developing your sales strategy, it is helpful to see what avenues your competitors are taking. However, it sometimes can give you a competitive edge to go against the norm. A good example is Cabi, a custom-designed clothing line for women formed in 2001. Instead of selling the traditional way via retail stores, Cabi sells exclusively through home-based consultants (i.e. the Tupperware way) and appears to be very successful thus far!

Commercializing your new product

Coming up with a new idea is an essential part of the entrepreneurial process, but that idea alone will not turn you into a successful entrepreneur. Sometimes I even think that coming up with the idea is the easy part, and that turning an idea into a business is really the hard part. VentureNet Iowa is a new organization that is dedicated to helping Iowans in the commercialization process. Their model below is a great representation of the many key questions that need to be asked throughout this process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my experience, I have found that individuals tend to have specialized knowledge in different aspects of this model. For instance, you might have an inventor or an engineer that is great at coming up with ideas, but they might not have that much knowledge of the marketability or how to write a business plan, or vice versa. The answer it to know where your strengths lie and then surround yourself by people that can help you. This is valid for both independent entrepreneurs as well as corporate entrepreneurs. Before pursuing my Ph.D., I worked for Brady Corporation and at the time they were spending a significant amount of time and effort to create teams across the product/market/business arenas as they knew it would enhance their ability to better commercialize products successfully.

Many thanks to my former student and respected colleague, Cris Grunewald, for passing this model along.

Six Degrees of Separation & Facebook

A while back, I discussed the importance of networking and how we are all closely connected to the resources we need to start a business - it is just a matter of finding out who knows who and utilizing those connections.

I recently received an invitation from a friend to participate in the Six Degrees of Separation experiment being conducted by Steve Jackson on Facebook. The theory suggests that everyone is separated by only six other people. In order to see how many people were within reaching distance of his network, Steve Jackson originally invited his friends to this Facebook group, and then asked his friends to invite their friends, and so on. When I joined, the group had expanded to a whopping 4,693,230 members!  As concluded by Steve:

Have I managed to contact every single person on Facebook? I like to think so, but unfortunately I have no way of knowing that for sure. The fact is that more than four million of you took the time to join, and that is nothing short of a miracle. As progress marches on, the world gets smaller. That’s inevitable. Whether we’re separated by six degrees or ten degrees or one degree isn’t important. What is important is the idea that we are connected.

Yes, I agree, that the idea that we are all connected is most important. And, given online social networking tools such as Facebook - just think about the possibilities of being better able to discover and exploit those networks!