All posts by Dan Boudreau

Dan Boudreau has devoted the last 20 years to coaching and mentoring regular folks into the captivating world of business. He authors and facilitates lively, transformative workshops on the topics of entrepreneurship, business planning, and training for trainers. He has inspired thousands of entrepreneurs to become successful business owners and leaders. Launching into his first venture in 1980 with barely enough knowledge to fill the back of a beer cap, he has embraced (and survived) the wide spectrum of business ownership, from single owner home-based enterprises to ventures employing more than 300 workers. Dan's top mission essentials are: laughing, loving, and learning. Armed with the business planning process as a teaching tool, Dan empowers ordinary women and men to create the financial stability and lifestyle they dream of. He is most proud of being acknowledged and appreciated by peers and friends for his ability to bring entrepreneurial ideas to fruition with a nod towards his warm, engaging personable style. In 2006, Dan compiled his knowledge (and bruises) into his first book, Business Plan or BUST! In writing this book, he combined his practical experience as a business owner with his expertise as a lender for an economic development agency, and tossed in his unique brand of wit. The end result: A refreshing perspective and practical style that makes the time-worn topic of business planning easy, fast and fun! When Dan takes those occasional days off from navigating the business world you might find him stuffed into a floating toothpaste tube sometimes referred to as a kayak (rarely right side up), or perhaps coaxing disturbing sounds from his guitar. His ultimate relaxation always involves fresh air, clean water and beaches—from botched attempts to outsmart fish in the rivers of northern British Columbia to flopping around in the waves or practicing applied inertia on just about any tropical sandy beach…
Starting a Business

Get Into A Business You Love

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happy-workersGet into a business you love. At the end of each day, you will have invested another 24 precious hours of your life doing whatever it is your business demands of you, and if you’re work life isn’t jammed full of activities you enjoy, you’ll be wondering why the heck you did it in the first place.

Here are a few of the common motivating factors that get people starting businesses, and how they can be ultimately wrong.

  • Doing it for the glory. There’s a certain amount of celebrity appeal to owning a business. Yet most entrepreneurs go quietly about their work, attracting the occasional snippet in press or recognition for a job well done. On the flip side, the effortless notoriety that accompanies a bankruptcy when things go sour, will not only eradicate any glory gained, but give you a black eye to carry forward for a long, long time. Glory may come in bits and dribbles, but your sure to have fun daily when love what you do.
  • Doing it for the money. There’s a widespread misconception that owning a business is a fast-track to riches. Although business is a likely vehicle for building wealth, the early days are often littered with expensive setbacks and lessons. The wondrous overnight successes we love to hear about are usually the result of a lot of grunt work, misfires and raw perseverance.
  • Doing it for the lifestyle. Too many entrepreneurs jump into business to pursue lifestyle dreams, only to find they are mired in long grueling work days, anchored to a mountain of stress, and not netting enough money to have coffee at Starbucks. Lifestyle is a beautiful reason to get into business, but you really have to show the business who’s the boss and do a lot of things right in order to get to where you can take advantage of any lifestyle perks.
  • Doing it to get on easy street. The uninitiated will look longingly at business owners and imagine they live lives of leisure, hardly working at all. That’s a nice image to nurture, but just doesn’t conform to the view from my home office. Getting to bask in the sun takes careful planning, and most business owners end up working double time before and after the breaks they take. Still, easy street is a valid reason to go into business and does get easier when things go right.
  • Doing it to retire early. As many baby boomers are learning, there are a lot of speed bumps on the path to retirement, and generally they delay business owners in the same ways they do everyone else. Bad investments, unstable economy, dishonest fund managers, all nature of shysters prying and poking at your nest egg. Careful planning, frugality, a sharp pencil, diligence, and a long trail of happy customers will lead a business owner to a comfortable retirement; it’s achievable but it’s rarely quick.

When you go into business, you’re inviting an elephant with all its excrementitious trappings into your living room. If you’re going to live with a colossal beast, it had best be one that you enjoy.

In order to avoid being trampled by your own business, it’s important to know what you want to get from it, how you want it to behave, and to take control early onto ensure it meets your needs and gets you where you want to be.

Dan Boudreau is Author of Business Plan or Bust! and RiskBuster Start or Grow Any Small Business, workshop facilitator, and creator of the Online Business Planner’s RoadMap.

Ready to research your competitors and write your business plan? Register now for the Business Planning Online Workshop.

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Entrepreneurship, Starting a Business

Advice for Young Entrepreneurs

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Dear Young Entrepreneur,

Do you have a dream of owning your own business?

In my role as facilitator, I help women and men into self-employment. For the most part they are 30-something and older, and I often wonder how we might encourage more young people to get interested in business.

There are many reasons why young people would opt for a job over the uncertain world of entrepreneurship. Jobs can offer a steady paycheque and security, while business is risky and anything but a slam dunk. If you’re new on the job market and thinking about starting a business, here are a few points to consider.

  1. Risk your own money to get started, even if you’re fortunate enough to have loving grandparents willing to invest in your venture. Don’t rush into debt. Debt can drain the profit from a business. It tends to up a lot of the energy you could instead be using to serve customers.
  2. Start small and learn all you can while your business is tiny. The inexpensive lessons learned during the early stages will serve you well once your enterprise starts to grow.
  3. Learn how to manage money with the smaller amounts that filter through your life while you’re young. Good personal financial habits will be an advantage as you learn to manage your business.
  4. Save 10% of all the cash that flows through your bank account. Start as soon as you read this. Even a small amount of saving will improve a negative financial situation, almost immediately.
  5. Before jumping into a partnership, get to know the person or people you are teaming up with. A great partnership can serve you well, a bad one is sure to bring the business down. Have an exit plan going in.
  6. Be cautious about deals that look too good to be true. These tend to have a flavour of “get rich quick without breaking a sweat.” If a deal looks too good to be true, there’s a good chance it’s false.
  7. A business is a lot of hard work, if anything it’s a “get rich slow” plan. There are many reasons, beyond profit, to start a business—making a difference, pride in providing a great service in your community, lifestyle, and recognition for a job well done.
  8. Most of what you need to know to run a business, you probably learned in school— treat others fairly, say please and thank you, and smile—all essential business skills.
  9. If you’re risking any more than pocket change, write a business plan. It will help you learn about your venture and the industry around it. Be a learner.

It’s the start of 2012 and there are more business opportunities than ever before. A number of trends make this an ideal time to begin dabbling in the world of business. Demographics tell us that a large percentage of our aging workforce will soon be retiring, which will open up career and business opportunities right across the marketplace. Over the past decade, technology and the Internet have propelled us into the information age. These demographic and technological changes create an ongoing flow of new business opportunities for those with the vision to recognize them and the urge to take action.

Related Articles:

Myths About Owning Your Own Business

Riding a SnowBoard is Like Running a Business

Reality Check – A Pre-Business Physical for Business Planner’s

Business Growth, Starting a Business, Writing a Business Plan

5 Ways to Use Your Business Plan

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It takes guts to defy chaos and predict the future of your business, and yet that’s precisely what an entrepreneur does when writing a business plan. Considering it’s a written roadmap that can be used at any point in the future to measure whether the business succeeded or failed, most people will put it off as long as they can. Of course, most people don’t own businesses either. But those who develop business plans quickly come to realize an abundance of benefits.

The most important reason to do a business plan is to gain understanding about, and create a blueprint for starting or growing a business. Once the plan is done it can easily be adapted to communicate with different audiences.

Here are 5 different ways to reconfigure your business plan, from longest to shortest.

1. The Complete Business Plan. Your full business plan will include an executive summary, the narrative and financial components, and a number of supporting documents. By adding well-crafted, personalized cover letters for each contact, you will be able to use your business plan to communicate with potential partners, grant fund managers, bankers and other debt financing agencies.

2. The Investors Business Plan. Right up front, investors will want to know your pitch; what problem your business solves, what value you place on your business, how much money you need, and what are you are offering in return. They will also need to know whether you are seeking debt or equity financing, the expected return on the investment, how you plan to deal with the risks, and what your exit strategy is. Most importantly, investors will want to know all about you, the owner.

3. The Employees Business Plan. The scope of the business plan you present for employees will be guided by your philosophy on how much employees should know about the inner workings of your business. For example, you might use the narrative portion of the business plan plus the sales forecast, but exclude the historical and current financials and supporting documentation. The main benefit of sharing relevant parts of your business plan with employees is to have all members of your team on the same page.

4. The Business Plan Brief. Also known as an executive summary, this 1 to 2 page version can be used to introduce your business to various audiences. It can be added to presentations and proposals, or hung on the office wall to serve as visible reminder of the corporate direction. The brief can include things like the business vision, the mission statement, the strategic and marketing goals, sales, and profit targets. It provides most of the content needed to build a business website or to design flyers, brochures, prospectuses and other marketing materials.

5. The Elevator Pitch. An elevator pitch is a brief introduction to your business. The term is often used in the context of an entrepreneur pitching a business idea to someone during the time it takes for an average elevator ride. It might be as long as thirty seconds or 100 words.

Those who do step up and develop a business plan will usually discover that it’s not quite as formidable as it seems at first. Business planning can be a lot of fun, and whatever else can be said, it’s a remarkable confidence builder and an amazing learning experience for those who go for it.

Entrepreneurship, Owning a Business, Self-Employment

Cheaper Prices Don’t Build Goodwill

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By Dan Boudreau

You’ll never build goodwill by under-charging your customers. Those new to business are prone to undervaluing their products and services. This is one of the great pitfalls when starting a new business.

Whether from insecurity or just not knowing the costs, new business owners tend to want to shower their customers in great value by charging less than the other guys. Aside from the fact that undercutting is a sure recipe for going broke, it invariably leads to problems down the road when you want to increase your prices.

  • Once customers are used to your low prices, it’s difficult to train them to pay more, and you are sure to lose a few when you increase your rates.
  • Customers who have received your goods at lower prices tend to think you’re cheating them when you start to charge more.
  • When you do begin to push your prices upward, you are bound to lose a few of the old customers who were just along for the free ride.

If you underrate your goods, your customers are almost certain to downgrade them too. A well intentioned deal might be perceived as worth a bit less, but you don’t want the customer thinking your services are completely worthless.

As a new business owner, one of the first pricing decisions you’ll make is to decide whether you really want to compete on price. If your strategy is to compete mainly on price, keep in mind that a large competitor will almost always crush a smaller business like a bug. Deeper pockets always prevail when price wars occur.

Here are a few suggestions for anyone tangling with the issue of pricing.

  1. Decide whether you want to be the cheapest, the fastest, or the best. Pick any two; trying to be all three is a sure recipe for going broke.
  2. When you’re setting your prices or rates, learn how much your competitors are charging and then position your prices where you want them to be. You don’t have to charge a lot less than the other guys to be perceived as giving a better deal.
  3. When it comes to providing a service, you will need to determine a value for your time. If you’re transitioning from a role as an employee to become self-employed, it’s important to remember that your hourly charge-out rate now needs to be much higher to help cover the cost of operating your business.
  4. Instead of simply attempting to undercut your competitors, find ways to provide more value to your customers; sometimes it makes more sense to compete by offering higher quality, or better service.
  5. If you’re already in business and your prices are too low, it may be time to begin to ratchet them up a bit. Be prepared to lose customers who refuse to adjust. In some cases, you may feel a shameless sense of relief as the more tenacious hagglers head off to buy from your competition.

When all is said and done, business owners need to pay the bills and earn a living. If your prices are too low to achieve these two goals, it may be time to increase your prices or consider winding down the business.

Related Articles and Resources:

Deadly Overhead Costs to Consider When Setting Your Prices

Small Business Goodwill is in the Eye of the Beholder

Free Business Planning Tools and Resources

66  Worksheets to help you write your business plan