What a bunch of bull. I was watching a show about a very famous entrepreneur and the show made it seem as if this entrepreneur built the business himself. Complete bulls%$t, building a successful business requires many skills and nobody is good at everything.

When I read books about successful entrepreneurs, the one thing that strikes me is how successful they have been at building a team. Here’s an example from my own business life. I have built or helped build and sold 4 businesses. Now mind you many entrepreneurs have never built one business, I’ve built or helped build three. I also have been able to do something that many small business owners haven’t been able to do and that is selling my business.

My greatest success, the one that was the most financially lucrative came as a result of building a great company and a great team. On the other hand, my biggest failure and my most financially disastrous failure came when I didn’t build a team and tried to do everything myself.

So, Start A Business Backwards Strategy 15 is simple, find great people, sell them on your vision, make sure they are financially rewarded based on their effort and create a great team.

Dedicated to your Success

To describe what Start A Business Backwards means I must first talk about words. You see, for me words have meanings and in order to understand the words you have to understand the meanings clearly. I also believe that words are things (they create things for sure) and that the more specific you are with your words the closer you get to your goal. So first lets get some definitions.

What is a business? The word business derives from the word “bisy-ness” Middle English (14th century) and the word means “a usually commercial or mercantile activity engaged in as a means of livelihood”. So a business is an entity that create profits. In order for a business to be a business it needs customers or clients, so lets define both of those words. The word customer means “one that purchases a commodity or service” and word client means “one that is under the protection of another”.

These definitions are important to our next post where will define the goal of a business and how a business with customers differs from a business with clients.

Almost every business blog I read has a post about the recession, despite the fact it is already a year old. So while I titled this article “Sales…..Recession”, these are really tips designed to keep you from experiencing a personal recession. I believe with proper planning you can avoid a recession in your business and thrive in tough times if you incorporate and automate these tips. So here we go

1. Design an automated strategy for asking for referrals. Now this is a system that needs to be automatic, most business owners don’t ask for referrals and don’t follow up on them when they get them because they don’t have a system. I’ve designed an automated system to ask customers for referrals when we complete a project. Basically, I use a survey to ask about our service and then I ASK for the multiple referrals. The referrals are automatically emailed to me and assigned to my to-do list. I do a bit more but thats the start, the key is an automated system.
2. Keep the funnel full of leads. This strategy allows you to run your business like a water faucet. When you need more money, you turn up the lead faucet and when you are at capacity you turn the faucet off. I have a ton of ways to keep the funnel full including newsletters, sales letters, postcards (notice they aren’t all internet based) and more and I use everyone. Again, the system needs to be automated, so it works without you having to think about it.

Thats a start, check back soon and I’ll post more. If you implement just these tips, your business will survive.

Dedicated to your success

This post is about value and how to build value in your business that can be transfered. What do I mean by transfered, basically I mean value that can be easily valued and sold. Thats right this post it about what you need to think about when you start your business that will make it attractive to sell at some point in the future.

You may ask, “Why should I think about selling my business when I start it?” Thats a great question and the answer is simple, becaus eyour life will change. You may decide after building a business for years that you no longer enjoy the process (this happened to me), your health may decline, you may want a change, life changes and when your life changes your goals change as well. Being able to sell (or transfer) your business is a valuable option.

How do you build transferable value or value that demonstrates your business value. You think about it from the beginning. Transferable value (saleable value) is built and tracked consciously and if you start the process at the beginning then every step builds evidence of transferable value.

and I will reveal on January 29, 2008 at 8pm. the exact steps that would have helped my friend add a successful leg to his business. This Teleseminar will reveal the secrets that I’ve discovered to practically guarantee business success so register today for the Start-A-Business-Backwards Teleseminar Click here to register for the call and How to Build A Business You Can Sell.

Dedicated to your success

Black Genius Network – Coming up on Monday… Black Genius Network with David Bullock http://aweber.com/b/100jp

Retweeting @davidbullock: : Economic Stimulus Package Small Business : Change Your Investment Strategy – Invest in your brand and ideas.

Many people wonder what I mean when I say you are not your business. What I mean is that is that if you created a business either an LLC or corporation that business is a legally separate entity, meaning that in the eyes of the law that business has its own set of rights and privileges.

That’s only part of what I mean when I say you are not your business. I also mean that it’s important that you understand the purpose of your business. Your business the goal of your business should be to create income and wealth for you and your family. That should be the primary goal. So what I say you are not your business what I mean is your business should be able to ride you both wealth and income with out your every day in and day out involvement. If you have to work in your business every day you don’t own a business you own a job.

This is an important idea. Many business owners spend the bulk of their time working in their business they are their business in other words their business could not function without them being they are physically or emotionally everyday.

When I think of business I think of a business that can create income without me being there every day and in fact my ideal business creates income and wealth without me being there many days. So that’s what I mean when I say you’re not your business a true business can operate without owners, for example Microsoft works without Bill Gates team air every day, there are people that work at Microsoft they have a set of business goals to obtain and they go about obtaining those goals with a Bill Gates is there not.

So, the goal in your business is to remove yourself from the business from the very start.Create systems that help you monitor, and run your business, hire people with specific responsibilities, measure the results and focus on the important part of being a business owner and that is marketing and strategic growth.

Dedicated to your success 

Retweeting @wilreynolds: Anyone can share with me a very seo friendly wordress themes? Would be greatly appreciated.

What is your most important business asset? When I asked that question many business owners they give me a long list of stuff they own a like inventory, furniture, Â buildings and more.

If they don’t think of hard assets they  think of soft assets like the most important asset in my business is my employees, or the most important asset in my business is the service I provide. While all of those items are assets they’re not the most important asset in your business.

This is a fundamental Start A Business Backwards strategy and lesson, the most important asset in any business is a list of customers that have bought your products or services.  the list of people that bought from you is your most important asset.

Thin about it, these people thought enough about your product or service to pay you. You built their trust and confidence in your business to the point where they paid you for your product. They are your lifeblood. So my question is how do you treat them. Are you a quickly or are you dating.

No Business is Immune to Bad Launch Decisions. My friend owns a very successful 20 years old design studio. The business has been very successful and my friend has done very well. A few months ago my friend decided to launch a new service and this is a classic case study of how not to launch a new product or service.

My friend had been reading about how technology was helping business find new customers and grow business and how the Internet was providing tremendous growth, my friend decide he wanted in on the action. My friend has always regretted not getting in on the first Internet boom (he forgot about the bust) so when he read about Web 2.0 and how the Internet was booming again so he decided to launch a new division to his existing business based solely on what he read in the news.

My friend launched his new service without doing any of the important work that could have made his new service an instant hit. Instead after more than 6 months the new service is STILL STRUGGLING to find its place in the market and he is still trying to find his place in the market. DO YOUR HOMEWORK