Deciding What You Want From a Business
See whether you relate to any of the most common reasons people give for starting up in business:
- Being able to make your own decisions
- Having a business to leave to your children
- Creating employment for the family
- Being able to capitalize on specialist skills
- Earning your own money when you want
- Having flexible working hours
- Wanting to take a calculated risk
- Reducing stress and worry
- Having the satisfaction of creating something truly your own
- Being your own boss
- Working without having to rely on other people
Gaining personal satisfaction (or, entrepreneurs just want to have fun)
No one particularly enjoys being told what to do and where and when to do it. Working for someone else’s organization brings all those disadvantages. When you work for yourself, the only person to blame if your job is boring, repetitive or takes up time that you should perhaps spend with family and friends is yourself.
Another source of personal satisfaction comes from the ability to ‘do things my way’. Employees are constantly puzzled and often irritated by the decisions their bosses impose on them. All too often managers in big firms say that they’d never spend their own money in the way the powers that be encourage or instruct them to do. Managers and subordinates alike feel constrained by company policy, which seems to set out arbitrary standards for dealing with customers and employees in the same way.
Making money
Apart from winning the lottery, starting your own business is the only possible way to achieve full financial independence. But it isn’t risk free. In truth, most people who work for themselves don’t become mega rich. However, many do and many more become far wealthier than they would probably have become working for someone else. You can also earn money working at your own pace when you want to and even help your family to make some money too.
Saving the planet
Not everyone has making money as their sole aim when setting up in business. According to the government’s figures, around 20,000 ‘social entrepreneurs’ run businesses aiming to achieve sustainable social change and trade with a social or environmental purpose. They contribute almost £25 billion to the national economy and assist local communities by creating jobs, providing ethical products and services using sustainable resources and reinvesting a share of the profits back into society.
Exploring Different Types of Business
At one level all businesses are the same – they sell something to people who want to buy from them, while trying to make an honest buck along the way. At another level many very different types of business and ways of doing business exist, even within what superficially can appear to be very similar fields.Please visit here for information about Contact Lenses
Selling to other businesses
Business-to-business (B2B) enterprises, such as those selling market research, database management, corporate clothing, management consultancy, telemarketing or graphic design, involve one businessperson selling to another. The attractions are that you’re dealing with other people who have a definite need and usually buy in relative large quantities and at regular intervals. For example, an individual may buy envelopes in packs of a dozen a few times a year, but a business buys scores, perhaps even thousands, and puts in an order every month. Corporate customers are harder to win, but are often worth more when you have them. And unlike private individuals, businesses like to forge relationships that endure over time.
Opening all hours
Conventional shops, restaurants and the like have long opening hours and have to meet the expectations of increasingly savvy consumers, whose access to the Internet has made them aware of competitive prices as well as high specifications and standards of service. The upside of any form of retailing is that you’re almost invariably paid up front. But just because you get the cash in your hand doesn’t mean that you don’t have to meet exacting standards. Customers are protected in their dealings in a myriad of ways and if you fall short of their legal entitlement you can end up with a bigger bill than a simple cash refund.
Making products
One of the attractions of manufacturing is that you have a greater degree of control over the quality, cost and specification of the end product than a retailer or wholesaler might. But with those advantages come some hefty penalties. Factories, equipment, stocks of raw materials and employees are costly overheads. You have to incur these expenses well before you’re certain of any orders – an unlikely way into business for someone without previous manufacturing experience and a deep wallet.
Lastly Comment
After you have an idea of some of the businesses you may want to start, you can rank those businesses according to how closely they match what you want from starting a business. You may also want to partner with a Global PEO to schedule the HR tasks when you decide to take your business abroad.Go through the standards you want your business to meet and assign a weight between 1 and 5 to each, on a range from not important at all to absolutely must have. Next, list your possible business opportunities and measure them against the graded criteria.
