Accounting Systems

Last week, I posted a video that talked about finding the business in your business and today I wanted to give a perfect example of finding the business in your business.

Last weekend a friend of mine wanted to give her son a “life memory” for her son’s 13th birthday and her son is a budding pianist so the idea was to give him a recording session at a recording studio with some of his friends.

Discover how the record studio owner may lose $52k if he doesn’t atch this Drive By University Video.

This is another tip from my speech at the Wilmington Investors Network, last Wednesday once again thanks to Lou Anzalone & Jim Davies for inviting me. In this tip I talk about finding the business in your business. Now the important thing to remember is you have to have your business doing ok now but this is a growth strategy. Every business has a business that can be created in it, doesn’t matter what type. If you own a store selling baby clothes, you can add furniture (if your smart you will JV with a baby furniture store). Every business has a listed of customers that trust it and those customers can be leveraged. So here is my tip 3 Find the business in your business

I recently spoke to a group of real estate investors and business owners in WIlmington, DE. The group is a mastermind group called Wilmington Investors Network, headed by Lou Anzalone and Jim Davies.

Lou and Jim asked me to come and talk about how to survive and thrive in a recession and I gave 9 TIps for Surviving and Thriving in a Recession. My business partner and friend Victor Milbourne taped the entire speech. The entire speech is to long to post in one video, so we’ve cut it into pieces and will post them periodically. The important thing to remember is that you can survive and thrive in this recession by being clear about your goals and this 1st video is about goals and clarity. In a recession ceing clear having clarity alwasy trumps or beats persuasion. So enjoy this video, tip 1 entitles Clarity Trumps Persuasion

One of my biggest lesson is that business is a team sport and the successful entreprenuers primary role is to recruit and movitvation a great team. In this video I talk about the importance of having a team as a real estate investor to a group of business owners and investors.

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

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

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

I messed up, thats what happened. Here is a lesson in blog maintenance. A few weeks ago in my infinite wisdom I decided to oupgrade the site to a newer version of Wordpress. After the upgrade I wasn’t able to login. What a pain (the problem was caused by me). Anyhow, since I was in a hurry, I re-installed Wordpress (complete new installation) and that killed the link to the old database. Long story short, since I gave the new database a new name (so I have the old posts) all of the content is in the old database and I have to transfer it to the new one.

Here are the lessons;

1. Backup, Backup, Backup – install a Wordpress backup plugin and use it regularly. Otherwise you could lose all of your data
2. Do change the way stuff was done in the past. Normally I do all of my upgrades using the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin, this last time I didn’t and that hurt.
3. Search to see if there are issues with an upgrade BEFORE you upgrade. Didn’t do that and in hind sight there was an issue. Had I searched for problems first I could have put off doing the upgrade.

Thats it for now, but boy what a lesson. Even an experienced web guy has issues sometimes mostly by taking stuff for granted. Learn from my mistakes