Developing Self-Discipline For Starting Your Own Business

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The American dream

Over 50% of all Americans dream of starting their own business someday, but only 3% ever do, in their lifetime. In our free market economy, where it's extremely easy to start and build your own business, and where there have never been more opportunities in all of the history of the world; humanity than there is today, why so few people realize their dreams in entrepreneurship and building business?

I have studied the subject of Entrepreneurship, Business and Management for many years. I have started and built from scratch several successful multi-million dollar businesses. I have read literally hundreds of books and thousands of articles over the years and have obtained a master's degree in commerce and administration on the subject. I have worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and business people in organizations large and small across the country and around the world. I have trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, managers and executives on topics ranging from sales and marketing to strategic planning and finance.

Even today, with all of this experience, I really don't consider myself an expert. However, I am a bit more knowledgeable than the average person and have very specific ideas on what you can do to start and build a successful business.

You can't get rich

First of all, why would you want to start a business in the first place? Most people think that the reason you start your own business is because you can make a lot of money and get rich in retirement. It's a great idea, but it's not the real reason people take the risks of entrepreneurship.

The main reason, above all others, is the personal freedom afforded by owning your own business. There is a little joke that says when you start your own business you only have to work half days; and you decide which 12 hour period you prefer.

In my work with entrepreneurs over the years, I have found that while they don't necessarily get rich, they do become happier, more confident, and more self-sufficient. Very few entrepreneurs would ever go back to paid employment. Even if they don't make a huge amount of money, they love the freedom so much that they can't imagine handing their fate over to someone else.

You can do it too

Someone once said that you can only be a bestselling author if you can't not write. You can only be a successful entrepreneur under the same conditions. You can only be successful in starting and building your own business if you can't. The starting point for success as a freelance businessman is a burning desire for independence, freedom and opportunity. It is the desire to be your own boss and not to be controlled or dictated by someone else.

But back to the first question. Why are so few people starting their own businesses? And the main reasons are fear and ignorance. Fear and ignorance are and always have been the greatest enemies of human success.

Don't be ignorant

Fear throws even the smallest risks out of proportion and paralyzes the person, preventing them from making that giant leap of faith in the uncertainty of entrepreneurial activity. And fear feeds on ignorance. The less you know about anything important or risky, the higher your fear level and the less likely you are to take action.

The good news is that when you start reducing your ignorance, your levels of fear and hesitation decrease at the same rate. When you become fully informed of what you want to do, you will end up with a lot more confidence and courage than you fear and doubt. And from there, you can start to make real progress.

Three types of business

Over one million men and women start their own businesses every year in America. More people are launching more businesses, selling more products and services today than at any time in the history of mankind. Remember that there are three types of businesses you can start. They are corporations, a sole proprietorship and a partnership. Only companies are registered and registration amounts to more than 850,000 per year. The number of sole proprietorships is in the hundreds of thousands. Nobody really knows., You can start one just by deciding to, right now listening to this tape, without even recording it, The number of partnerships also runs into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions each. year.

Because hundreds of thousands of men and women start various business organizations every year, that means you can too. Maybe one or two of these people are smarter or better than you, but you can be sure that hundreds of thousands of them have a lot more issues and obstacles in their life you could never dream of. In other words, there is no reason for you to be afraid to start your own business.

The key is to make your business low risk at the start with a high possibility of success later on. And that is what you will learn here.

You are the president

By the way, you are already the president of your own company, whether you know it or not. You are the president of an entrepreneurial company with only one employee, yourself. Your business has only one product to sell in the market, your personal services. You are therefore the head of your own personal services company. And if you give your business your name, you don't even need to register it to protect the name. You can go out and print business cards with your name, John Jones Enterprises or John Jones and Associates, and your title, "John Jones – President" along with your home phone number and address. The next time you date someone and they ask you what you are doing, you can tell them that you are the president of your own business. When they say they thought you worked for this or that company, you can respond by saying, "Yes, I work there. They are my best clients right now."

As the president of your own business, you decide how much you earn. Maybe not in the short term, but in the long term, by the things you do or don't do, you determine your own income. If you want to make more money, go to the nearest mirror and negotiate with your "boss". Your raise will become effective when you do.

Two categories of business owners

You've heard that most businesses fail in the first couple of years. But that's not entirely correct. If you divide businesses into two categories, those created by people with deep knowledge and experience and those created by people with no knowledge or experience at all, you get two completely different failure rates.

Businesses started by people who have done what I'm going to tell you about in this session have a success rate of over 90%. Businesses started by inexperienced people who haven't done their homework have a failure rate of over 90%. And even if your business initially fails, it is only by failing in business that you will eventually learn how to be very successful. As Nike's Phil Knight once said, "You just have to make it last time."

On David Susskind's show many years ago, they interviewed four young entrepreneurs, each of whom was a self-made millionaire at the age of 30. David asked them to calculate how many startups they had been involved with before they found the company that made them over a million dollars. The average was 17 companies per person! But they hadn't failed while their businesses failed. They had gotten smarter and smarter over time until they were finally so knowledgeable and experienced that the very next business opportunity put them on top. And it can happen to you too.

Special disciplines

To start and grow your own successful business, you need special disciplines; disciplines that are practiced by all successful entrepreneurs and independent millionaires. You can either learn and practice these disciplines early in your entrepreneurial career, or you can learn and practice them later. Sooner or later, you need to acquire knowledge and skills in each of these seven areas if you want to build a successful business. And the longer it takes for you to master these seven areas, the longer it will take and the more it will cost you, before you eventually reach your financial and business goals.

The first discipline is the discipline of market analysis. This is where most entrepreneurs fail. They start with a great idea and often don't want to tell anyone about it; lest someone steal their idea. So, they half-launch themselves into the market with a product or service that hasn't been well thought out and they're amazed when that fails.

The point is, people are far too busy to steal your idea. 99 out of 100 new business ideas fail anyway. People who run their own businesses are far too busy to have even a minute of time to 'steal' your idea, whatever it is.

Ask people for opinion

In fact, if you have an idea for a product or service in a particular industry, you should go to someone who is already in that industry and ask their opinion. If you are really smart, you will get in touch with as many people as possible in this industry and expose your whole idea and ask for their candid comments.

What you are looking for is "negative thinking". A negative thinker is someone who will point out the shortcomings and flaws in your plan. If you can't fix the holes or fix the flaws in your business creation plan, this is probably a great indicator that your business will not be successful.

Beware of "positive thinkers"

The most dangerous people you can talk to are “positive thinkers”. These are people who will tell you that your business idea is wonderful and that you should "go for it!" They will tell you that now is a great time to start a business and that you will have great success. They are often your friends and relatives. But don't get carried away. The only advice that is useful to you is from people who are fully informed and experienced in the field in which you want to start a business. Someone else may be well-meaning, but their advice isn't worth much.

If you had a stomach ache, you wouldn't ask your coworker if you should have surgery or whether or not he thinks you have cancer. This is not the right person to talk to. For something as important as this you need a specialist.

The discipline of market analysis requires that you thoroughly examine every detail of your market segment before spending your time and money bringing your product or service to it.

The law of three

Every new business starts with an idea to serve customers with a faster, newer, or better product or service in one way or another. In fact, there is a law of three that applies to starting a new business. Whatever you offer, it should be tripled from anything you currently offer to the same customers.

It must be a little faster, a little cheaper and a little more efficient. It must have at least three advantages that competing products do not offer. If it only has one or two, you will likely fail in the long run.

Market analysis means that you find out if there is an actual market for your product or service. Is the market big? Where is the market concentrated? Is the market concentrated enough that you can effectively reach it through advertising and sales? Who are your competitors in the market? Why are your potential customers buying from your competition today?

Give people a reason to buy

And here is the most important question: "Why should someone leave their current supplier of a similar product or service and buy from you?" The inability to pose and answer this question accurately has resulted in the downfall of many small businesses. You don't know how hard it is to get a customer to switch from a known supplier to an unknown supplier.

When I started one of my businesses, I thought people would buy from me because it was me! I thought because I was so positive and enthusiastic and convinced of the value and quality of my product, customers would find my enthusiasm contagious and buy and use it in large quantities. I found out that clients weren't interested in the change at all. I had to appeal to customers over and over again before I could even get them to test my new product.

Eventually I had to give my product away for free and give guarantees before people even tested it. Once I gave away free products with absolute satisfaction guarantees, and people tested and used my product, I finally started selling it. And I started selling it just in time to avoid going completely bankrupt.

What incentives will you need to give your potential customers to make them abandon what they are doing to buy from you? How would you describe your product or service in such a way that customers are willing to ditch the 'devil they know' for the devil they don't know?

Plan, plan, plan

The second discipline you need to get really good at is the discipline of planning. This means, at the bare minimum, that you need to take the time to prepare a comprehensive business plan before you start operations. Most entrepreneurs fail to do this, for various reasons. And that's the reason most entrepreneurs go bankrupt.

The purpose of a business plan is not to serve as a roadmap or a specific guide for the future. The point of creating a business plan is that preparing the plan requires you to think through every critical issue that you are going to deal with in the future.

The best and smartest business people are the ones who have already given a lot of thought to the various things that could happen and the various things they might have to do, if those things happened. The least successful businessmen are the ones who haven't thought about it at all.

When preparing a business plan, you are bound to sit down and carefully analyze and justify every penny in it, first for yourself and then for anyone else. from whom you are trying to fundraise.

Three parts of a business plan

A business plan consists of three main parts. The first part is the top row. This is the amount of your product that you intend to sell on a monthly basis, projected over 12-18 months. Your ability to accurately project your sales is a key measure of your intelligence and business ability. Once you have conservatively estimated your likely sales, you should halve that number to get the number that turns out to be closer to reality once you start trading.

Remember, the great rule of entrepreneurship is that everything costs twice as much and takes three times as long. I shared this idea with thousands of entrepreneurs who then told me they were going to violate this principle and prove it to be too conservative. They came back broken, like survivors of a battle, tails between their legs, ultimately admitting that the twice, three times rule was extremely realistic.

The middle line of your business plan includes all the expenses you can imagine incurring in order to reach your bottom line. You must deduct the total cost of the goods or services that you plan to sell. You have to deduct expenses such as rent, telephone, utilities, printing, stationery, stamps, photocopiers, fax and Federal Express, personnel costs, furniture costs and all other detailed costs you can imagine. These are called the 'costs of doing business'.

Once you've added up all the costs, you take the total and add another 20% as a fudge factor to get a more realistic estimate of your final costs. Your ability to budget and project your sales and costs accurately is the true measure of your business acumen. Do not leave anything to chance. Go over every detail over and over again.

When I prepare trading statements, I will go through and estimate each number. I will then do a full assessment, with documents, research, estimates and concrete proposals to justify each number in the business plan.

For example, if someone tells you, how did you estimate these postage costs? You should be able to tell that you have estimated a number of letters of a certain weight coming out daily over a period of one month, two months, three months and 12 months to come up with a cost of 39; average postage of the amount that is part of your business plan. Never let yourself be fooled.

The bottom line

The bottom line is the amount of profit or loss you expect to experience on a monthly basis. You then accumulate this amount at the bottom of the page in order to know how far ahead or behind you are on a monthly basis according to your projections.

You should probably expect to lose money for the first three, six, or nine months. The minimum rule is that you must have six months of operating expenses before starting your new business. You have to assume that you won't make a single sale for six months. It may be safe, but it's way better than the alternative of getting broke and devastated because you haven't planned well enough.

The discipline of money

The third discipline that you need to start your own business is that of money. As I just mentioned, you need a full six months of running costs at the bank before you go into business. If you are considering starting a second income business, you can usually start with a small capital investment and use “equity” instead of actual financial capital. There are many people who have become extremely successful in life from a low base and growing based on the cash flow and profit from selling a product or service.

There are a huge number of successful multilevel marketing businesses across the country and around the world. If you are starting a multilevel marketing business, your first consideration should be an extremely low initial cash investment in inventory and sales equipment. After that, all of your expenses should be on products that you have already sold at a markup of the price you buy them at.

Many tiered marketing companies allow you to get started as an independent wholesale distributor for as little as sixty dollars. In a case like this, you are investing your time and energy rather than your money, and you keep your full-time job while you put yourself firmly under your feet.

If you need money to start your own business, know that 99% of all startup money is called 'love money'. This is money people give you because they love you, or money you give yourself by taking out a second mortgage on your house, selling whatever you have what you don't need and even borrowing money with your credit cards.

Don't rely on banks

Banks just don't lend money to start new businesses. The failure rate is too high. Banks are not about taking risks. Banks strive to make good, strong loans that they know will be repaid in a timely manner. Banks then make the margin between what they can borrow money for and what they can lend it to you.

Banks usually need three, four, or five times the collateral to lend you money. This means that no matter who you are or your background, a bank will want proof that you have five dollars in liquid assets that they can seize and sell for every dollar you wish to borrow from them. They will review your business plan and listen carefully to your business ideas. But they won't lend you money.

Be an outstanding salesperson

The fourth discipline you need is the discipline of selling. You need to be an absolutely outstanding salesperson for your product or service before you open your doors or you shouldn't bother to open your doors at all.

The point is, all successful businesses are started and built by someone who has a remarkable ability to sell the product in a competitive market. The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that someone else is going to sell for you.

The second biggest mistake you can make is thinking that advertising or direct mail will sell your product or service for you. The only way you're going to sell your product or service is to go out and come face to face with critical, skeptical, and cautious customers who can buy it if you can convince them of its value. Don't waste a dime on advertising when you start. It is one of the fastest ways to go bankrupt ASAP.

Listen to all the audio programs on sale that you can get. Read sales books written by people in your same industry. Attend seminars and sales training courses, then see as many customers as possible, all day, every day until you start generating sales that exceed your operating costs . The discipline of selling is the heart of your business and how you manage this discipline will determine your success or failure.

The discipline of management is something you learn as your business begins to grow. There are thousands of books and hundreds of college degrees on management, including entrepreneurial management. Your ability to plan, organize, staff, delegate, supervise, measure and report is absolutely essential to being a good manager. Fortunately, you can learn these skills through study and practice. And always remember that your weakest management skills will determine the limit of your success in your business. Whenever you encounter any problem of any kind, resolve to learn what you need to learn to become highly proficient in this area.

e Secrets of the negotiation of power

The sixth discipline is the discipline of negotiation. There might not be a better program to teach you how to negotiate than the secrets of power negotiation from Roger Dawson.

You learn to negotiate by first studying the negotiation process, and then practicing negotiation at every opportunity. You negotiate better prices for your products and services when you buy. You negotiate higher prices and faster payments for your products and services when you sell. You negotiate extended payment terms with your suppliers. You negotiate better loan terms and better interest rates from your bankers.

When it comes to money and negotiation, the rule is that you preserve cash at all costs. You never buy when you can rent and never rent when you can rent. You never rent when you can borrow, and you never get anything new if you can get it second hand. Negotiating and protecting your cash flow is the most important thing you can do in a small business. If you run out of money, you are dead. Money is in a small business like blood and oxygen are in the brain. You have to fight, scramble, negotiate, and do all you can to make sure you always have cash reserves.

Every business creation has been said to be a race against time. It's a race to find a way to generate cash beyond your costs before your money runs out completely. You stay in business as long as you bring in enough money to pay for your mistakes until you finally generate excess cash.

Become resilient

The final discipline is the discipline of resilience. It's the ability to bounce back from the inevitable setbacks and disappointments that you will experience virtually every day when starting and growing your own business.

One of the marks of the top entrepreneur is that he always looks ahead and considers the worst thing that can happen in any area of ​​business. This is also the mark of the top chef.

I call this 'crisis anticipation'. There are many books and articles on this subject. It means you're constantly scanning the horizon and wondering, "What's the worst thing that can happen?" In your sales; with your staff; with your money; and with your business? And then you think about it and decide what you would do if that happened.

And finally, once you have determined the worst possible outcome and decided what you would do, you focus all of your energies to make sure that the worst possible thing does not happen, under any circumstance. You become resilient to the extent that you have thought about what might happen and are prepared for any eventuality.

Sometimes a little setback can feel almost overwhelming if you've allowed yourself to strain and burn yourself out. You become resilient to the extent that you get plenty of rest when you start and build your own business. As Vince Lombardi said, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all."

You develop resilience by resolving to persist in the face of all difficulties, no matter what. Be clear on your goals, but be flexible on the means to achieve those goals. If one thing doesn't work, try something else. Be prepared to be flexible and adaptable to a changing market.

Remember, as they say in the military, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. No business plan survives the first contact with the market. Be prepared to cut, change, and try something else. You just have to make a decision up front, that whatever happens, you will keep going.

Right now you have the ability to start and build a successful business. Des millions de personnes l'ont fait dans le passé, et des millions de personnes supplémentaires le feront à l'avenir. Ces personnes ne sont ni plus intelligentes ni meilleures que vous. Ils ont simplement appris ce dont ils avaient besoin pour apprendre et l'ont ensuite pratiqué, encore et encore jusqu'à ce que cela devienne une seconde nature. Et vous aussi. Et lorsque vous apprenez comment démarrer et bâtir une entreprise prospère au sein de notre système économique, votre avenir sera illimité.


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