business idea | Business Plan Oasis

personal_business_lives When it comes to owning a business, newbies often make the mistake of combining their business and personal affairs. As a business owner, it’s healthy to separate yourself from your business and treat your business as a separate entity.

A little investment of energy early on can bring huge dividends later in the life of your business. For example, set up a business bank account, rather than mixing your business and personal expenses – your accountant and bookkeeper will both be thankful. You will also enjoy the benefits: less confusion and lower accounting and bookkeeping costs, particularly when your friendly neighbourhood tax auditor comes knocking.

New owners have a tendency to dovetail their personal and business lives, usually in an effort to save a few dollars. I have done this in the past and it only leads to difficulty. Any savings quickly evaporated when it came to sorting out the mess later.

Think of your new business as a separate entity, like having a baby, building a house, or hatching an egg.

Here are some ways to separate your business from your personal life.

Separate your personal time from your business time.
Coach your customers to contact you during your business hours.
Train your friends to contact you during personal hours.
Consider yourself to be an employee of your business and pay yourself a wage.
Open a business bank account, pay business expenses from that account and pay your personal expenses with your wages.
Establish separate telephone and fax numbers for the business.
Create a separate Internet and email presence for the business.
If you’re home-based, create a separate space for the business and if possible, have a separate entrance for customers.
Even if your business is a proprietorship for which the tax authorities view you and your business as the same entity, set-up your business with its own bookkeeping and accounting systems.

There are some great payoffs for separating your personal and business affairs. You will:

√ Know your personal and business expenses

√ Be more effective at calculating costs and setting prices

√ Find it easier to deal with auditors

√ Lower your bookkeeping and accounting costs

√ Be better prepared if you decide to sell the business or bring in a partner

√ Have more peace of mind

With much to gain and little to lose, I urge you to consider your business to be a separate entity from yourself.

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entrepreneurs_unreasonable Anyone starting a business will encounter speed bumps along the way. There are always plenty of reasons not to start a business, but entrepreneurs push past the obstacles, get the business plan done, and do it anyway. That’s because they defy the restraints of rationality and instead choose to be “unreasonable.”

Here are a few of the challenges that life might toss into the path of a fledgling business.

Bad Economy. No matter how tough the economy gets, people still need to eat, drink and live; which means there are always opportunities to serve. If you believe in the old adage of “buy-low-sell-high” the depths of an economic dip should be the best time to start a business. When the economy gets ugly, entrepreneurs get unreasonable.
Lack of money. It’s hard to stay enthusiastic about starting a business while struggling to pay for food, shelter and clothing. Yet owning a successful business is the best way to get beyond basic survival worries. If poverty is holding you back, perhaps you just need to get unreasonable, start your business plan and get your business going anyway.
Raising a family. The first few years of child-rearing will seriously reduce the amount of time and energy available for building a business. Recently I visited an amazing home-based retail store, owned by a mother of two pre-school children. The mother built the business while managing two pregnancies and raising two infants. That’s just plain unreasonable, yet she did it anyway.
Divorce. There’s nothing quite like a prolonged marital breakup to throw a kink into a business plan. It’ll drain your time and nuke your bank account. Yet, entrepreneurs will usually find ways to redirect some energy toward starting a business.
Burnout. This is the most deceptive roadblock of all, because it quietly erodes our ability to reason. Like slowly boiled frogs, we are unaware of the problem until it’s too late and we’re cooked. If life and work are wearing you to a frazzle, you may have to get unreasonable to make the needed changes to your environment.
Self-limiting beliefs. Do you hold yourself back with limiting or negative thoughts? Something within the entrepreneur enables her to keep her eyes on the prize, and to focus on the business no matter what obstacles block the path. Absolutely unreasonable.
Good Economy. When faced with the perceived uncertainty of owning a business, a lot of rational people will toss the business plan and opt instead for a job – which creates the illusion of security… until it comes to an end. Yet some businesses are best started when the economy is booming. Or is that just unreasonable?

If you wait for government to solve your problems, or for the economic stars to line up perfectly, or to win the lottery, or for life to remove all barriers from your path – you likely never will start that dream business.

Businesses thrive not because entrepreneurs have perfect lives, but because they choose to build their enterprises while wading chest deep in the river of life.

You can start your business today wherever you are, with whatever you have, right now. It might be a matter of choosing to be unreasonable and simply getting on with your plan.

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