Larkland Morley’s Professional Blog

Ran into this great blog post yesterday about the steps you should take in launching your small business or product. The post is saying that you should approach potential customers first before you get too committed to building the product. The whole philosophy here is that you should let the customer guide you in the process instead of coming up with this great idea, build the product then no one wants it. Sometime you end up building something totally different after checking out the market place.

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

Traditional thinking would have us think that having a job working for someone is the basic essential of life itself. As we have seen in the last few years this model is changing rapidly especially in North America. Don’t get me wrong, you can work for someone and enjoy life to the fullest but there are ways to approach that scenario to make it more fulfilling too.

There are several ways to have a business. One way is to invest such as buying stock or a little more active such as participate in the strategy and significant part of the funding. The other option is to actively run a business and this can have different models to consider. Case in point is that you could be the Chairman making major strategy decisions while getting others to execute or it could be the case where you are a one man show.

In the investor type business approach, you could keep your regular job for the fun of it or you could now do some other activities while your investment continues to grow with the company.

I am planning to provide as much research as I can on the business building side of things and I have developed a new blog to cover most of this called the Business Start-up Guide Blog.

It could be much easier to start a business than you may think. For example if you are a technical professional, you could incorporate a company for $220 or more then seek technical contracts in the company name (lots of tax advantages). As things grow you could get others to help under contract while you look at more long term strategies. I will cover some of these scenarios in the blog.

One of the most sticky point is financing. I have a cool idea of how to get very good financing for your business through your company. Can’t wait to share that and I am testing it out as we speak.

Until next time…