Prospects – This comes in two stages. The first step is researching the market to determine what is the real demand like for the product and service. You will need this information to get things going in the first place. The next step is to actually reach your prospect and this is the bread and butter of the business for starts. This is where you advertise, use referrals and focus your business to grow its contact base. The important thing here is to know your ideal customer and where to find them.

Conversion – Once you get people to look at what you have to offer, you need them to take action in giving you money for products or services. In this case, you need to make the offer compelling relative to the market place, competition and value offered. The next step in the conversion process is to ensure repeat sales with existing customers.

Bear in mind also for conversion is the support aspects of things, now with the Internet if you have lousy support in place, new and existing customers will find out and your business is toast. It therefore means, you need to have good support as part of your business process.

All of these can be measured and tracked to see where your business is heading and how to optimize each process along the way. In terms of conversion, there is always the benefit to up-sell to previous buyers to improve your profitability long term.

Despite how complex and challenging the business world may seem, it always come down to these two factors of getting prospects and converting them to buyers regardless of the business type.

If you want to give the appearance of working for yourself, the simplest thing to do is incorporate a business, call yourself President/CEO then look for work as a contractor doing the same work as a full time employee. While you could probably get a better salary with this, it will be very difficult to ensure you will always get work. The frustration here is that when you get work, you would probably get several offers. However, when that contract is over, you run the risk of waiting for awhile before more work is available.

A few simple twist to the contracting model above. Focus on being a consultant that focuses on solving specific project problems. You can charge a lot more this way and you could take on multiple projects at the same time. Another twist is to get full time contracts but get other specialist to place on contract under your company. This way, you will get some income when you are not working directly. Long term you could convert the company into a consulting firm if things are in high demand.

Now, lets get into the mechanics of real business, still assuming its around your professional area.

Lets use the example of a good software developer for this case. The assumption here is that you know how to develop code for some type of products and you would prefer to do this on your own.

1. Try to think about what you want to accomplish for your life and how the business will help you achieve it. Then think about how you want the business to be. How big and what type of revenue ideas you have in mind. This process is important to set context of where you want to go long term.

2. You need to find a market problem to solve. Actually, anyone can write software if they really want to do this. Thus its not your ability to write software that will make money. Its solving real problems for businesses or consumers. This means you need to brainstorm on what problem you want to solve. This could be as simple as training other programmers or implement some patentable technology that you develop.

3. Do market research on the problem and existing solutions. Also look into how you would deliver your solution. Actually, a good way to do market research is to speak directly with potential customers to validate the idea.  Get as much data from established sources as possible before you move forward to build the solution.

4. Plan out your business implementation path. Now with some market validation, you need to plan how the business will look for delivering the production. This business will be in phases, so you want to focus in on what exactly is required at each stage. This is where you need to step out from just being a specialist and look at the big picture of each business function and when you need them. Most experts will say you need marketing and sales right upfront. All of this can be captured in a business plan. You also need this plan now, so in case things are really successful, you have plan to deal with that right away.

5. Focus on selling the solution. Most engineers and specialist hate sales but no business can survive without selling, so you need to focus on getting people interested in your product and gauge the interest. This could save you time down the road from building something people don’t want. Even if its a software product, you could start a website or information sessions around what the solution intention is. Get people to sign up and share ideas with them.

6. Hire the needed talent. You need to acknowledge again that you can’t do everything in a real business, so you will need to get help. This could be outsourced partners or part time employees initially but at least get help in some ways.  If you can find partners that will share the load that can be useful depending on how you want to pursue the ownership part of things. If you are planning to spend over a $1M in this early stage you may want to consider a CEO or someone that can take care of operational issues. Definitely, hire sales and marketing in some ways early.

7. Build and Deliver the product. Now its time to build the solution and get it to your customers. You will be good at this from experience, so now you want try to be more of an architect in your approach as oppose to just being a developer. yes, you will do lots of the work but you need to look at the big picture in getting this done. Work with your sales team to get the product to market as soon as its ready.

8. Grow the business.  This is the stage where you have your own product and its selling based on your early work to test the market out. At this stage, you really want to consider how organize you are to deal with customers and growing. Customer Support will be critical at this stage as well as all the other simple issues with running a business.

I will have more on this topic soon. A good book to read on the stages of business growth is “Ready Fire Aim” get it here – Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to 00 Million in No Time Flat (Agora Series)

In the world of internet marketing, this is actually easier process as you can look at keywords, setup test pages or even design a quick survey and put it on pay per click or other platforms. If your product is B2B then you may not get much help from the Internet, you will need to find businesses that could be customers and ask them how they think a specific problem could be solved or present your idea and ask for feedback.

As the article says, when you have good feedback, then getting funding is way easier as now you have lots of interest out there in the market place. Take a simple example, you run a survey online for a product that would sell for $1400.00 and you get up to 20,000 responses with an affirmative interest in this product, do you think it would be hard to get someone to help you pull this off?

The issue in this article is not that you should not do a business plan as that is important to write down what needs to be done. Instead the writer is saying that you should look at how to increase your success factor closer to 100% by knowing what you need to be doing from your potential customers.

You can read the full article here at Business Model versus Business Plan

Coaching, life or business is an interesting field and can apply to any specific area of specialty. It could be an Engineer who would like to be a Manager or Someone that wants to achieve a certain level of wealth or even to lose weight. The coach is basically not necessarily the expert in the profession but that person will help an individual to set goals and actions to achieve them. The coach would also follow up on milestones and ensure that the individual stays on track or recommend recovery options.

Now, lets look at how this could work for you.  Here are the points I recommend to decide on this.

1. Interest – Do you like working with people and help them to succeed at whatever? do you have an area in life that you are passionate about? Then life coaching could be good for you in that context.

2. Research – Do some research on what life coaching really is. I am sure there are both books and lots of blogs and websites about this. Try to understand whats going on in the industry for your education.

3. Certification – Once you have an idea that you really want to do this, the best option is to pick a Certification program. My personal approach is to put them into a comparative spreadsheet then make a decision based on your comfort level. As mentioned earlier, there are several for less than US$1000.00 out there that looks rather reputable. This will also help with your marketing as well.

4. Business Setup – Once you complete the course and exam or even during that process, you could form a business entity to manage this overall business. You can look at several options such as LLC, C-Corp, S-Corp or a Non-Profit Structure. I personally believe once you start to deal with the public its good to formalize a business entity for many reasons. This should cost no more than $500 in most states with the required elements.

5. Marketing – Most of the certification programs do offer help in this arena and in fact some of them have memberships so you can ask for advice along the way. The best approach is to start with friends and you can even do it for free in order to build your reputation. Make out time per week to meet potential clients and other related activities. You would also need to have a pricing structure depending on how you plan to offer the service. For example you could do one-on-one approach or use group options. With the Internet, you could offer your service anywhere and have sessions online with free tools like Skype and others.

Overall, I think life coaching is a good low cost business venture to look at for anyone at any level. You could be seen as someones personal assistant at the low end or at the high end being the expert in the profession of choice to really help others to reach the top of their potential.

Some keys I can share to help with this off the top of my head.

1. Market research – this is a critical piece to see if there will be a demand for the service or product that you have in mind. Also look at the competition in terms of whats being offered in that market. If its a physical business; which location would suit you better?

2. Value Creation – How will your business add value to customers, employees and owners/investors? This is important piece of delivering something that will take you to the next level.

3. Cashflow Projection – Even without too much details, the key to success is to generate cash as fast as possible. You could get millions in orders but how much of that is cash in the bank to at least pay the bills soonest?

4. Execution Strategy – This is a critical piece before you get into details of operations and tactics. What are the strategies you will use to succeed long term. As we speak, lots of large companies are failing as they don’t have strategy in place to guide them for the long term.

Those are a good start for now, we will look into more details as I dig more into a useful and effective business plan approach.

I decided to check a few of those government funded groups to provide new business help and what I realize is that most times what they throw at you is the textbook. This is very much the case in terms of financing. They basically say go and talk to the bank. No creativity at all.

First of all even if you can get a good loan from the bank personally, its a not a good idea long term to do this. In general, its best to form a corporation and get business funding through that corporation.

Now to get to the point about Corporations and funding, one simple approach is to purchase an existing company.  Now, I am sure your question is; where should I get money to purchase a company since my goal in the first place is to get funding?

The company you will purchase will not have an established business as such but would have a developed credit profile generated by the existing owners. These companies are called Shelf Corporations.  The pricing could be based on the age and other factors like how much funding you can get right off the bat.

I am sure the nagging question. Whats the cost like for something like this? The price range from what I have seen is about $10K to $20K and that gets you a company with about $200K to $500K in funding which is most times a line of credit. Now you could get those numbers with personal credit but this is just the start for these guys, one group I know, provides a Shelf Corporation that gets you about $2M in funding within a 2 year period with not much additional cost. They also help you develop a business plan geared towards funding sources.

In the end, your focus would be generating the maximum $20K to purchase the corporation and then its smooth sailing from there. You may not have to use the money but with funding you have credibility to raise other funds to put your business in Top Gear.

I am thinking of people that lost their jobs recently in this economy, you could use this to fund a franchise business, services, software development or any business type that fits your fancy.

Check out this little write up I did on the topic – Business Funding Guide.

If you want more direct details on sources, let me know.