5 Keys Of Building A Business Without Money

Many want to start a business but don’t have any money or capital . Many have sound ideas, but feel they need a lengthy business plan and a large amount of cash to get started. The reality is, most successful entrepreneurs end up bootstrapping their business. If you are passionate about what you are doing, there are always ways to get things done with limited resources. Here are five keys successful entrepreneurs use to build thriving companies.

1. BUILD A BRAIN TRUST OF FREE ADVISORS

Nicole DeBoom was a professional triathlete for 11 years. She knew a lot about women’s sports clothing, but very little about the apparel industry. Her solution was to find a group of advisors who could teach her what she needed to know and introduce her to other contacts. Nicole explains: “When I started out I had coffee meetings ten times a week. I just started picking people’s brains.” The end result: Nicole found the resources she needed, launched her company, and has now sold over $25 million in women’s running skirts. Her advisors have been a huge key to her success. 

2. FIND AN ENTHUSIASTIC ANGEL INVESTOR

One of the goals of building your brain trust is to find potential partners who want to get involved in your company. Jeff Wester is a great example. Jeff wanted to build an old-fashion Black Smith shop in Sisters, Oregon. He found a wealthy mentor who had built a blacksmith shop earlier in his career. He gave Jeff a piece of ground and funded his new shop. He then created a promissory note so Jeff could pay him back over time, which he was able to do.

 3. FIND SOMETHING TO SELL TO GET INTO THE GAME

Allen Lim spent his early career in the cycling industry. He created several all-natural hydration drinks that some of the top cyclists in the country loved. He wanted to turn his hobby into a business but had not money. He found an old used funnel cake cart and converted it into a burrito kitchen. He sold burritos at running and cycling events around the country to pay the costs of marketing his new products. With the revenue from burrito sales, his total cost to launch his new products nationwide was $800. Today, Skratch Labs is a major supplier of healthy products to both professional and amateur athletes.

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SOURCE : ENTREPRENEUR 

United State Wholesale Inventory Rise By 0.1%

WASHINGTON –  - U.S. wholesale inventories in September rose slightly less than previously reported, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday.

Inventories edged up 0.1 percent during the month, the department said. 

The department's monthly advance economic indicators report published last month had estimated that wholesale inventories rose 0.2 percent in September, as did economists polled by Reuters.

The component of wholesale inventories that goes into the calculation of GDP - wholesale stocks excluding autos - increased 0.4 percent in September. 

Inventory investment added 0.61 percentage point to economic growth in the third quarter after having dragged heavily on growth in the April-June period. 

Sales at wholesalers rose 0.2 percent in September.

At September's sales pace it would take wholesalers 1.33 months to clear shelves, unchanged from August.

 SOURCE : FOX BUSINESS

steps to reinventing yourself after a major failure

Hitting rock bottom - as energetic, smart and business-savvy entrepreneurial - types, this dreadful phrase is simply not in our vocabularies.

But it happens - even to the best of us who think we are completely prepared for this roller coaster ride in the pursuit of success.

And if you don't want to commit career suicide by going back to that nine-to-five job that made you jump into entrepreneurship in the first place - you must navigate through the tough times.

So, how do you do that? Where do you turn when you're awash in the confusion, anxiety, self-doubt and worry of "rock bottom?"

1. Let yourself be vulnerable

Life isn't always sunshine and roses. We hit walls. Sometimes we lose. We struggle. Too often as entrepreneurs, we hide those struggles. The problem is, if you don't let yourself be real and vulnerable when you're struggling, then it will actually hold you back from progressing through the tough time.  When you're in a tough spot, don't be afraid to ask for help. Sharing the struggle is the bravest thing you can do. Being vulnerable isn't a sign of weakness - it's a sign of strength.

2. Develop a vision

It's difficult to know if you're progressing when you don't know where you're going. In "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," Stephen Covey talks about beginning with the end in mind. Know where you want to end up at the beginning of the trip - it's your guiding north star

Advice from a trusted and sincere or perhaps experienced colleagues to help get a super clear vision and direction isn't a bad idea.

Vision is critical. If you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there?

3. Create an action plan

Vision is knowing where you're going. Action is how you'll get there. You've heard "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail." While that's true, there's an important distinction to be made - your plan must be based on "action" instead of based on "results."

4. Persist

It's no surprise that things don't always go the way you planned. Persistence is a decision to keep moving towards the vision no matter the hiccups along the way. It's not just doing what it takes - it's doing whatever it takes. It's falling down and getting up again anyway.

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SOURCE: Business Insider

Customer Service Secrets Of The Hospitality Industry That You Should Borrow Today

Here are three of these customer service secrets you can can borrow from the hospitality industry and put to work at your own business, starting today.

1. Great customer service depends on empowering your employees, according Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company President and COO Herve Humler, who contributed the foreword for The Heart of Hospitality.

Great hotels and restaurants empower their frontline employees to proactively fix customer problems without waiting on management approval. This employee empowerment—the permission to be creative, and even spend money, on behalf of customers, is a master stroke in hospitality. A standout example here is The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, where even hourly employees have permission to spend up to $2,000 per guest to solve any problem or dissatisfaction that may arise, “without needing to ask permission, without needing to involve management or worry that they’re going too far,” as President and COO Herve Humler puts it.

(If discretionary spending of up to $2,000 per employee per guest sounds impossible—or even insane!—in your context, then look to the more modest example of Wyndham Hotels, which permits compensation up to the value of one free night by frontline employees without management approval. The amount of money involved isn’t the point; the instant, non-defensive, no-need-for-approval empowerment is.)

2. Great customer service depends on hiring for customer-friendly traits, according to Top Chef Judge & Restaurateur Tom Colicchio.

In a customer-focused field like the hospitality industry, it’s essential to hire the right people: employees with the necessary traits–empathy, warmth, and conscientiousness, to name a few–that equip them to serve customers successfully, day in and day out.

Trait-based hiring means considering more than the technical skills and training that an applicant brings to the table. While technical skills can (almost) always be taught, personality traits are generally set in stone, and without these personality traits, hospitality becomes very difficult to provide.

Tom Colicchio, the celebrity restaurateur and Top Chef judge, thinks of this as a sort of dinner party divide: “We’re looking to find people who naturally enjoy this work. The best way I can describe the people we want is like this: There are some people who throw great dinner parties because they really want to take care of their guests, and there are other people who are lousy at it because everything is a chore—everything is a problem. We’re looking for that natural host, the person who is always looking to make people happy and who doesn’t find it to be a chore.”

That's the point

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SOURCE: Forbes

Things you Should never do as a startup

1. Don't spend all your money on ads early

It's so alluring. You have a day where your product becomes real. You have a marketing team, and they're excited about that day. You're excited about that day. Everyone is excited about that day.

Your customers don't care about the day. Let's be honest: You'll launch with something that's at least 99 iterations from a conversion machine. Don't spend money marketing it. You will end up having to defend your awful cost per acquisition in venture capital pitch court months later.

2. Don't do service for equity models

You meet a strapping VC/angel investor with a pocketful of cash. He will sell you on the fit of his expertise and what that means for the market opportunity that lies ahead. It seems great.

Maybe, if you're like most startups, this individual is the first "yes" you've heard in a while.

It was from someone who also took a pretty big chunk of equity at an insane premium, for "services." It could make you feel like an idiot.

3. Don't forget to spend lots of time with customers

Your customers are everything. If they're happy, they'll reward you with business.

Figure out what makes them happy. Use services like inspectlet to creep their on-site experience. Focus test them. Offer them gift cards to interview them one by one.

They have all your answers.

4. Don't focus on a single growth channel

It's very, very easy to get hyper-focused on a specific channel at the expense of other opportunities. If you follow e-commerce, you know how this story goes.

You realize you're profitable on Facebook. You spend hundreds of hours testing and honing in on a great return for that channel. You focus your team on that channel. Everyone gets excited about unit economics that are about as stable as Kim Kardashian's hair.

Suddenly, one day, it just stops working. Facebook changes the math, or a competitor comes in and raises the ad unit equilibrium price (especially common in the Google pay per click game), and next thing you know, you just lost your damn growth engine. Don't do that.

5. Don't spend money on scale in advance

"If you build it, they will come."

Not true.

Startups who have founders who are from the Silicon Valley cognoscenti or are just rich kids of instagram can occasionally raise large amounts of money with a pitch deck and a dream.

These companies burn fast out front of growth prior to having an established brand. The issue becomes one where balance sheet value and traction or income statement value are at odds. It can create a tough environment to raise additional money.

I have never had this problem.

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SOURCE: INC

OPEC DEAL = OIL JUMPS

Oil prices jumped Wednesday after reports that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries had agreed to slash production at a conference in Algeria.

OPEC-member countries agreed to slash production by about 740,000 barrels per day to 32.5 million at the Algiers meeting, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing anonymous sources.

Allowable production figures by country will be determined at OPEC's official meeting in November, according to the news agency.

The efforts to build a consensus have been exemplary, and I very much hope that the constructive, accommodating and encouraging nature of our recent talks carries on today," says Mohammed Bin Saleh Al-Sada, Qatar's ministry of energy and industry and president of the OPEC Conference, in his prepared remarks.

The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the U.S. benchmark, soared 4.45% to settle at $46.66 in trading in New York on Wednesday.

It's not all good news for energy companies. OPEC's actions come after the market for crude oil has remained depressed for a longer-than-expected period.

"Back in June, the prospects suggested that the market would re-balance by the end of this year or in the first half of 2017," Al-Sada said. "However, there are now serious questions being asked regarding this time frame, with many agencies and analysts pushing the re-balancing further into the future."

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SOURCE : Usatoday

4 Things That Affects Your Key Productivity Hours

There is only a certain amount of time during the day to finish tasks but no matter what we do, it seems that time is never enough. Sometimes at the end of the day, we accomplish nothing and feel unproductive. But maybe, the reason for it is not the time. It is because we are using our time inefficiently.

Avoid These Time Wasters at Work

Social Media

Social media can kill your productivity at work, unless you are responsible running your company’s social media accounts. Social media is very useful if you want to network, connect with old friends or follow the recent trends but if you don’t have a purpose and just want some gossip about the people you know, then social media is a big time waster. If you want to look at your personal social media accounts, do it on your coffee or lunch break or on your commute with public transportation.

Emails

The email message that is popping up on your computer screen can create urgency for many to check their inboxes constantly. Checking your emails frequently can make you waste your time, since you need to refocus on the task that you have been working on. Unless you are truly waiting for an important email, you should schedule specific times to check your emails such as in the morning, after lunch and in the afternoon. The same holds for your smart phone messages and voicemail as well.

Multitasking

Interesting but yes, multitasking kills productivity. Let’s look at the situation with an example. If you are working on your emails at the same time you are working on your real work, then it will take you more time to complete both of them compared to working on them one-by-one. As a result, you will waste your time. The reason of this is that multi-tasking divides your attention between tasks and since each task gets less attention, you need more time to finish them. Work on one task at a time and move on to the next one when you are done.

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SOURCE: Small Business Trend