You + Four Things = THE PERFECT TEAM

Your business’ startup phase is the most challenging part. So far, you have been serving your goals, and we have clarified that there is much more to business than what we’d know – knowledge comes from research. Your research turns to plan. You have the idea, strategies and plans. In the business plan, you should have identified “characters” that matter to the business. Different “channels” are working together to stabilize your business. Make sure you’d know all strengths, weaknesses surrounding the plan, and their effect on the business.

Regardless how smart you are, and your abilities to conduct all kind of research, you don’t fully comprehend your business until execution of the plan. This is where you get a new perspective. Executing generates experience and adaption as experience enriches. Plan execution depends on your identity, because you are the source of everything. If you’d ask most people “who are you?” They will probably use their professions or something they love to do to define themselves. These answers are correct, but they can be weak when it comes to business. Professional business consultants always say, “Do what you do best, and outsource the rest!”

You don’t really fully comprehend your plan, until you’d acknowledge the plan’s weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses go hand-in-hand! If you don’t know your weaknesses, it is most likely that you are ignoring them! For example, I am really good at executing objectives, and meeting people’s need. But only if they come to me. For me to go to them is challenging, because it feels like I’m bugging them. I see objectives, and only use problems to approach people, and refuse to see people as objectives. This is my strength, which also automatically identify my weaknesses! Knowing them means I’d know where to improve. The questions become, “how do my strongest sides apply to the plan?” “What other things are important to the plan?”

It is essential that the business has strategic focus! This normally means focusing on cash, things that are critical to you and your business. Critical things must never be chosen by anyone else! The focus should also be on customers. The second is operational excellence, which means having a 99,9% error/defect-free operational, delivering on time and correcting mistakes. The third is constant improvement, which means making things better, faster, cheaper and improving the overall efficiency. The fourth is customer centric, which means loving your customers, and listening to them. Love your customers more than you’d love your product! These four things are also essential for choosing the team.

They are needed in practice, and your plan has directly or indirectly approach them. You and these four things is a process that means going through the trickiest part of a business – communication. I am not talking about talking to different people. The trickiest thing that I am talking about is, how do you project your “business identity” to the masses in a way that keeps the business intact, while appealing to as many people as possible?

When you focus on your ambition as discussed in the previous blog, “Serve Only Your Ambition”, it becomes possible to see areas to improve. Your plan is in the middle, and you have begun to execute, which also means your business’ experience is better. First time you approach people, you are going to face challenges, and find areas to improve.

It is important to have the ability to channel all challenges, and turn them to something useful. Out of these four things, which one can you do best? Where do you need improvements? You need to know the characters required to do these four things. Then you need to know the characters you have! And finally, which ones are missing? You will ultimately look for the missing ones in your team. Together, you will accomplish the four things that matter to your business on a consistent basis!

For you to successfully do something, different characters play a respective role in doing it. For you to talk to 100 people for example, you need your social, understanding, persuasive and optimistic characters – excluding characters like aggressive, cynic, and pessimistic. The included and excluded characters show to the people you talk to, as you interact with them.

In conclusion, you need to use your strength in combination to characters required for keeping the business intact. Subtract your strength from the required characters. Find those missing characters in other people, and viola, you have your perfect team!

Only Serve Your Ambition

The infamous statement saying ”if you want to win a war, serve nothing but your ambition” also greatly applies to business. This topic is extensively researched, and it does not stop me from discussing it. There is a difference between knowing and understanding. Knowing is acknowledging that you only serve your ambition. Understanding on the other hand means what it means to solely serve that ambition. To be honest, it is one thing I never mastered. But, I know how important it is in business!

When doing something at the same magnitude as a business, and you only serve your ambition, things will definitely be in the way. What is on the way could be within you. It could be a little voice in your head telling you, “You are going to fail.”  The voice could also tell you that you don’t deserve to achieve your ambitious goal. The bad news is that during goals progress, we traditionally face challenges, and the greater the challenges, the more we start listening to the voice telling us that we will fail! That little voice is powerful during the startup, or any other big goals, because when we cannot progress in our goal, then that voice is right – is it not?

The more you listen to them, the less are your chances to success. Unfortunately, these little voices inside our heads play a great role in achieving everything greater than normal goals. Normal goals could be getting a job, raising 20 thousand dollars, and so on. This does not mean that normal goals are not challenging. In a perfect world the statement “life is what you make it” will be completely true without any additional effort.

Considering the amount of time and effort you have put into the business, and strength you’d put into combining all the pieces into a business, you’d be getting every customer you speaks with, don’t you think? After all, you have made tons of effort into knowing whom these customers are, and you have clearly identified them, and still not everyone wants what you are selling – welcome to reality! This is where you need to put additional effort into achieving your goals.

In a previous blog, “Turn Your Desire into Ambition”, the ambitious goal says: “I want to help 20 People in first week of business”, which was according to the SMART-Method. The goal might not sound ambitious, but it stick to the reality, and determines the minimum goal I want to achieve during the first week of business. If I speaks to the first 5 people, and they are not purchasing what I am selling. When you’d first interact with customers, it is important that you agree that you will make mistakes!

Most innovative companies in the world have made different mistakes in the past! That did not stop them from moving forward – why wouldn’t you or I make mistakes in business? Learn from your mistakes, and then forget about it! This is the first challenge. It requires staying focus! The first action is to neglect all the negativities that surround the goals, and solely focus on the goal. Don’t count the numbers of people saying no, but the number of those whom purchase the product or service. This is where you let go of everything else, and focus solely on your ambition and goals.

It is critical that you completely forget about anything that negatively affect the goals. For you to fully serve nothing more than your ambition, you must not let anything within you dominate your goals. Let your goal dominate everything else. Back to the goal: helping 20 people. Having 20 customers do not mean that I will talk to 20 people, and those 20 people will be customers. You could talk to 100 people, before you’d get the 20 that’d become your customers. This means that I keep going after achieving that goal.

In conclusion, the main point of serving nothing more than your ambition is about not thinking of all the ones that say no. For you to do this, you must provide a goal as specific as possible! Learn from mistakes and forget about them, and then keep talking to people and making sales until you’d achieve the goal. 

Turn Your Desire Into Ambition

You’d have a desire and everything you need to get your business out in the field. Keep your entire business under a small roof, and watch it like a hawk, which requires consistent scaling of the business. Everything you need and want is in the same place. It is time to take these things to the real world. Congratulations, you now have a baby! When I say baby, I mean you now have a business. All part of a new born baby is traditionally fragile, the same thing applies to your business. All the troubles you have been going through all these while is preparing to pay off, and provides you with a “baby”.

You’d have everything you need, and something driving you, and probably thinking “now what”. Now is the time to turn what you want to an ambitious goal! These goals should have been identified in your business plan! This is the time to turn what you want to a goal, which means for example deciding how many people your message would have reached at a specific timeframe. This turns motivation to an ambition. Unfortunately, there is a different between ambition and ambition. An ambition that involves me selling my house to complete the startup phase would be insane, don’t you think?

The kind of ambition that I am talking about is the one that directly matters to what you want. When what you want is the driving power, and you determine how many people this solution should have reached within a specific amount of time, then you get a boost on the motivation. This is where you take everything you’d got to take you to the real business world. The best one is for example saying the number of people you would like to help within a specific period of time.

This is where the famous SMART-method is extremely useful. Let’s use the same reason provided in a previous blog, “Success Now Depends On You Answering A Question”:

“After going through rough time, I know how tough it is to move forward during rough period in our lives, I can relate to people in the same situation. I want to be a role model, and help people move from rough period of their lives to glory.”

Part of the motivation says, I want to be a role model, and help people to move forward in rough period of their lives, which indicates that what you are selling is already working for you. It means they can see the benefit of what you are selling on you.  Now, it is time to let that motivation drives, while ambitiously determining a goal.

When you’d turn your desire to ambition, start small. An example of a goal: I want to help 20 people in first week of business. Does that sounds like something achievable, according to SMART-method? If you have done your homework as suggested in “Success Need Details”, I expect you to know your market, and how to approach it. If you have identified yourself, and acknowledge how you want to look like to the world, you must look, smell, sound and feels like you are. These four senses are crucial in business. For example, if you enter a library, you’d be looking at books, smell books, feel books and sound of useful knowledge. Same thing applies to a business. Who you are, and your appearances must correspond with one another, because they play crucial roles in your business.

You Are Still Not Ready

If you have been following NEW Writing Services’ blog since the beginning, I expect your reaction to be something like: Excuse me? Did you just say, I’m still not ready? I have the idea, the market knowledge, details, resources and a business plan. You are becoming more of a problem than a solution! Everything you are thinking is true, but someone once said, “When you do something you love, you never work a day in your life.” In a previous blog, “Success Now depends on you answering a Question”, I made it clear that you really need to know why you are turning your idea and skills into a business.

Now, it is time for you to validate that reason. It is about not starting when you NEED, but when you WANT. When you need money is a bad time to start, so is when you need something else. The only time you are ready is when you feel that your reason is actually a reality! Nobody is going to tell you when that is, except yourself. Don’t life to yourself about this! Your might regret it! You will know this within you, and I will recommend that you do it when you are true about why you are doing it. If you start a business when you need something, you are doom to fail. I still stand by my statement, “you are still not ready for your business”.

When you want to actually help people with the situation that your targeted group is in, then you are ready to start using your business plan to begin the process. In the “success now depends on you answering a question”, I provide an example of a legitimate reason:

“After going through rough time, I know how tough it is to move forward during rough period in our lives, I can relate to people in the same situation. I want to be a role model, and help people move from rough period of their lives to glory.”

The only time I’m ready to start the business is when it is factual that the reason is the only thing driving.  It is when this reason drives the will to run it, not when I need something.  Do you think you are ready?The only time I am ready is when I am driven by my motivation, nothing else!

Your Success Now Need Resources

In the previous blog “Success Needs Planning”, it becomes clear that you will discover things you need for your business plan to become a tangibly matured theory for you to take to the field. The most important thing is to remember to differentiate NEED from WANT! It is possible that you will see something attractive that will make your business looks good. For example if your business needs warehouse, it does not mean that you should go and lease one right away. It would seems attractive that renting a warehouse is more useful than using your house. Everyone will recommend that you use your house should be a warehouse in the beginning, because the produced quantity in the beginning should be low.

But, the questions becomes, do you really needs it? What you want is less important than what you need. A highly intelligent man once said, “If you want to be successful, then learn to manage.” In this case, I will say, “If you want to be successful, force yourself to manage” In the beginning the most challenging thing is impulse, which makes it close to impossible to separate your personal finance from business finance. One of the best ways to keep control of financial resource is to open a bank account without a card. Mixing the corporate finance with personal is what makes it close to impossible to keep track of business and its progress.

This neutralize the possibilities of impulsively buying something when you are out with friends, and make it easier to keep track of the business finance. Your resource should be acknowledged and listed, so you can keep an eye on them. Example of list: office, warehouse, computer, phone, printers, and so much on. Need: Computer? I could use my laptop. Phone? There is ip-telephone with SIP account that I could use. Warehouse? My house has an extra room, so I don’t need warehouse yet. Printers? Don’t I have a printer at home? Product production? Can I turn my garage/kitchen to a production source? Company registration? Who said my company has to be registered from the beginning?

As you can see, when it comes to resource, the most important thing is, focus solely on what you need, not what you want. You probably can go around the listed resources, if you can think creatively and find something else that can provide you with the same thing that your business benefits from that resource. Do you have everything you need to start the business?

Success Needs Planning

A legit business plan is the window that stands between your business and customers. Think of it as writing a business plan for your targeted demography. It is for your customers, because it would really help you provide the very best in your business plan. Just as your products belong to the customers, so do the business plan! The main point of a business plan is much more than the traditional what to do – how to do it – and resources requires to do it. It tells your story, and why it will attract other people. Before you start your business plan, you need to do a little more homework. You first need to identify your corporation, unfortunately, it is arguable that this is mostly skipped, because it is unknown or other reasons.

Doing this corporate identity, you will not only find out “who” your business is, but also the messages it send to others. Know your business identity, and use the identity to approach the people. This is the perfect tool to build your business plan. The corporate identity goes beyond your product, it focus on identifying its benefits. When planning, the approach is critical to what we provide in the end. When you write a business plan for yourself, you focus on things that attract and drives you. You need to look from a perspective that focus on finding out why someone else will be interested in investing in your business.

When you focus on writing for other people, it is necessary for you to start looking at your business from critical perspectives. For you to force yourself into providing the very best of a business plan, you need to stop looking at it from your perspective. In a complex manner, a business plan is a lot like writing a resume. They just have different layout. Before you choose appropriate content for the resume, you’d know who you are, and why you are right for the job. In business plan on the other hand, you focus more on “who” your business is, and why people should see it as an authority in its field. Use corporate identity to establish your company as an expert in its field.

One of the reasons most people fail in business is unfortunately the business plan. We gathered details for this plan. Considering the amount of time people invest into developing their best strategies, which lead to providing the best plan, it is a true loss.  In all sort of plans, the first one is the best, and when we need to change it, then it weakens the plan!

Your business plan has to be two: one for your customers and the other for your investors. When writing for investors, think of the things that would interest them. They are more interested in the ROI and how that ROI would be achieved.

Success Now Depends on You Answering a Question!

When I said come back to you – I mean seeking answer within you. We have explained how important it is to gather details, and understand them in our previous blogs, “Success Need Details” and “Understanding is Essential to your Success” Now that you’d know everything, you need to ask yourself this question. The question is critical to your success. You’d have all the information you need, and fully understand what the business entails, you need to seek something within yourself – WHY? This is extremely important, because it drives you.  The answer to this question is critical to the things you do. The answer to why should not have anything taken from the details you gathered!

You can use results on your reports, but the answer cannot be found anywhere else, except within you. If you take the answer to this question from any other sources than within you, then you are lying to yourself.  I am sorry for the insult, but business is not about holding your hands, and tell you everything will be fine.  If you want us to hold your hands, please quit your entrepreneurial spirit, and get a job (SORRY)!  Almost anybody – if not everybody – can tell you how to do things.

In your business, you can choose people to work for you, consult business specialists, search how to do things on search engines, and many other ways to find how to do things. There are too much information on how to do things. But, the most useful question that is extremely critical to everything you do – and drives you for years to come – is not HOW, but WHY? The only thing you can never find anywhere – not in any books or any other information source – is WHY? It makes you unique. When you are looking for the answer, acknowledge the information within you.

Most people will asks the why right from the beginning. But, it will only leads to seeking answers in blindness. As we discussed in, “Understanding is Essential to your Success”, it is important that you’d understand the obtained details. Asking this question now helps provide a stronger answer, because you now know what you are getting into. After going through all research you made, and fully understand it. You’d have all the answers to the questions that are related to your business going forward in the start-up phase. You’d know everything that the business entails, and other details within the business.

You’d fully understand the information that surrounds things that you are getting into, and you must ask yourself why you are doing it. As explained in a previous blog, “Success Begins in Mind”, we clarified how critical it is to belief in your idea. Now, it is about finding out why you are turning this idea into a business. After you know everything, it is critical that you find out why you are doing it. NEW Writing Services is ready to write everything to keep your business stable. We can write about everything related to a business – but we cannot tell you WHY! That is something you have to find within you!

The why should relate to prospects. If your why is “I want to make a lot of money”, “This branch is booming, and has tons of ROI”, or “I want to proof to myself that I can run a business”, then please do yourself a favor, and let go of everything! Just quit everything right now – safe your money and time – and gets a job within those areas.  None of these reasons are genuine enough. An example of a strong why that would matters to your business is:

“After personally going through rough time, I know how tough it is to move forward during rough period in our lives, I can relate to people in the same situation. I want to be a role model, and help people move from rough period of their lives to glory.”

This example allows the possibilities of relating to the prospects. It indicates that the business owner have been where they were, and know how it feels.

As far as you are concern, do you think this example valid? Is your reason enough to run a business?

If you provides a why, you have a key element to your business plan. The next thing will be making the business plans – you will need at least two business plans. We will cover this in our next blog!

Understanding is Essential to Your Success

As we discuss in the previous blog “Success Needs Details”, it is important that you do research on all topics that matters to your success. Every details you have obtained are materials that would be used in this phase. Before you can use it, you must first understand it. These details must be extremely objective. The only thing you focus on is facts. I hate to say this, but everything we’ve been going through so far are what I’d like to call pre-preparation. It is like “preparing for planning a war.” When striving after understanding, it is important to use the acquired details as materials. We have all the information we need.

Now that we have gathered all the facts we need, we have to figure it out. As an entrepreneur, you must understand how things work. How things work has to be in the details. If it does not, then go back to gathering details, and conduct research on the things missing. Your understanding of the whole details make it possible for you to move on to the next phase in your path to success. Keep in mind that when we discuss understanding, then it is critical that you understand all your materials in a specific way. You have to specifically use the details you have to apprehend things.

One critical point is to make sure that you find what is actually happening in the market. Another thing is to strive after specific details. This is where you’d aim to find out what information are relevant to your product/services, and build an independent understanding of all the details you have! It is where we focus on going through everything we’ve got, and try to get the picture of it. There are a lot of questions you need to ask. When you seek to identify the details, make sure that you’d have tons of questions in your mind.

If you don’t ask the details those questions, it is almost impossible to figure it out. Keep looking for answers in the details, and don’t stop until you are satisfied with the answers, when you strive after comprehending details. It is even possible that you detect necessity of conducting new analysis, before you get answers and analyze the obtained details. Every information you have gathered for the business should be studied, thoroughly and comprehensively. This is the comprehension that focus on finding useful details, and take-in those details in a way that matters to what you want to do. Try to understand that when you try to grasp the details, you must also ask a question – what are the things I need to worry about? The answer should be in the details. Every business worry about things, which is why they’d have risk managements, and research and development departments.

When you go through the “understanding phase”, you should be extremely specific. This is something that PhD holders do very well. They can specifically focus on either a topic, or getting their point across within a period of time/specific amount of words/pages. You don’t need to have PhD to run a business though. But you would have to operate like a PhD, if you want to be successful. It is not about having a PhD certificate. It is about understanding all the details you have acquired through your research.

Success Needs Details

It is true that success do begins in mind, and a famous statement is “if you do not have money in mind, you don’t have it in hand”. When you have success in mind, then you might establish a new “product/service”, after failing to find something you need. Then, you will be distinguishing building objectives to planning the execution of those objectives. Don’t let yourself to be controlled by time. The next step is having objective details. This is where you really need to do your research, and make sure that the details are objective.

I was 18 years old, when I first wrote a business plan, and too much of the details were based on how I want the business to go. There was no research. The only thing I focused on was making sure that the business work. Of cause, I knew how business work, but no capital or information than the ones I could find related to the business. I made some research, saw huge amount of market size, and thought, “I would love to have a piece of this pie”, and I was dead wrong.

The only pie I got, was less than a fraction of a percent, and it was not even enough to cover the losses. The business did not fail, because it was saved by a company, who covered the expenses, in exchange for me working for them for a year. After that, I went back to school and graduated in MBA. This allow me to use my experience to strengthen your success. Everything I compose is based on helping you enhance your success, and information is the key.

It is critical that you acknowledge how to get all the necessary details. Obtaining objective details should be done in a suitable way. The details must neither be directed by your idea nor how you want your business to go. When getting the details, it is critical to remember that you are not selling anything yet, and you are not running a business yet. The detail has to be objective.

There are different options for obtaining required details. One option is a team member obtaining those details for the team. You could ask someone else to do research and analysis. It can also be a professional business writer. Just make sure that the author has objective result of all details. The person must know the idea, and know how to obtain the details. A primary detail is market analysis. The market analysis has to be objective.

These following details are essential to your business:

Ø  Competition research

Ø  Market research

Ø  Business model research

Ø  Revenue research (how much it might cost to run the business)

Ø  Investors’ research (who might be interested in investing in the business)

Ø  Rules and Regulations for your business

Ø  Product’s research

Ø  Social research (socializing with key people for your business)

Ø  + More…

GOLDEN RULE: Ensure that the topics of your research are extremely specific!