Jumpstart Your Business

It is bad enough that the big banks are screwing small businesses by totally ignoring their need for capital. Must the SBA aid in the screw job by providing irrelevant and outdated training materials to those wanting to hone their small business skills.

photo credit: ShashiBellamkonda

Yesterday. I was looking for a marketing text to pass along to a client and decided to go up on the SBA website to see what they were referencing. I went to www.sba.gov and in the search box typed in “marketing documents” and it returned the following page:
http://search.sba.gov/gcse/searchresults.html?cx=012149749304426494285%3Avl4bn0plkpq&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=marketing+documents&sa.x=30&sa.y=5#1060
where I chose to review the following three documents on page 1 of the extensive listing:

Obituary to Small Business

Small Business lived a long life but died in the United States from heart failure, on the brink of the 2010 economic recovery. No one really knows how old she was, since her birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

photo credit: dsb nola

As small businesses try to follow the move to eliminate incandescent bulbs, we decided to take a look at how different business types would go about changing bulbs.

photo credit: CarbonNYC

1. How many venture capitalists does it take to change a light bulb?
None. They can’t see enough return on investment to be interested.

Every small business, whether established for a while or just starting up, should have a small business support network. This should be at a minimum an informal group of friends or acquaintances who are there to provide both moral and subject matter support or the group can be more formal in the shape of an Advisory Board to give you advice and counsel whether for a fee or better yet pro bono.

The members of this team should consist of the following:
Your attorney
Your insurance broker

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There are many important times when you as a small business owner needs access to all kinds of information. It starts with the need to get census and demographic information to help understand your marketplace and continues with all of the business information you need to run your company effectively.

Fast up Front Small Business Blog has compiled a list of 38 free sites and I have added one of my own – Economics and Statistics Administration. For the full list please go to Top 38 Free Government Business Resources.

Let’s forget for a moment all the sleepless nights you’ve spent thinking about all the reasons for going into business for yourself:

* Not wanting the 9-5 routine anymore and having more time to spend with the family
* Hating being bossed around and wanting to make your own decisions
* Wanting to make ‘beaucoup bucks’ and take vacations whenever you want

Got your attention didn’t we?

Now, you could write a book on going rogue and rake in the money like Ms. Palin does but first you have to run for VPOTUS and we know that is not in the cards. So, if you are like the rest of us mortals, here are twenty questions to ask yourself to see whether you have what it takes to go rogue as an entrepreneur:

Just take a look at the war between Macmillan and Amazon and you’ll realize that Macmillan is behaving just like the newspaper industry and not wanting to recognize that paper books and paper book publishers are on their way out. Amazon.com is right to not want to gouge customers with a price of $14.99 for an e-book that is costing the paper book publisher a mere fraction of the amount it did for printing and distributing the classical hard or soft cover book.

Regardless of the type of product or service you are trying to sell in your small business, there are 3 very important factors that you have to be on top of. These key critical success factors needed to be handled in the order that they are listed here:

1. Identify and thoroughly analyze your target market or your favorite client or customer. You need to understand the way they think, the pain they are suffering, the reason they buy from you and the language they use when they refer to your product.