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Sunday, November 26, 2006

Business

Small Business is the toughest industry to break into. If you were a betting man, you would never in a million years want to go into a small business when the odds for success in small business are so bad, that 70% of all small business fail in the first year. Let me be blunt, if you want to succeed in small business, only listen to those people who have built a small business in an industry they no nothing about and succeeded. These are the people who seriously know how to build a small business.
I just happen to be one of those people - I am not a business coach - I offer no consulting on small business, just let me share with you my secret to building 4 small businesses from a three thousand dollar credit card.
The first secret when building a small business is this, have the end in mind. When I first started in small business, I was like most business people, I was a technician (bit more than that, but this is how the E-myth would describe me) in the IT industry with the belief I could build a better computer training company than those around me. One thing I can tell you about this industry, stay out of it. It is tough and there is no money in it, well that’s not quite true, but there are far easier businesses to make serious money. In fact I married my wife and I decided I wanted to experiment on whether all business was as hard as the training industry or was it just computer training.


My wife and I, after much coaxing agreed to setup a car cleaning and detailing business, we new nothing about the business and were simply doing it as an experiment. Two years on, we have a successful thriving business and we are about to Franchise and expand the business to over 10 cities in Australia.
The key to building a successful small business is to have the end in mind and to know when you are going to exit the business. Most people when they start a small business simply believe they are going to have a business to make money, come home and do it better than their boss. If you are going to go into business for this reason, quit now, because your life is doomed.
There is more to business than simply doing the technical work and this is what most new small business operators do not realize. When you are first thinking about starting a small business, imagine how it will look when you are finished. For example, what image will you have, what logo's will you have, what marketing material will you be using, where will you be operating from, how many stores will you have, how many people will be working for you, what sort of profit will you be making and more so, how will you know that the business is complete