Tag Archives: owning a business

Entrepreneurship, Owning a Business

Dan’s Business Playground Nuggets

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1. Abundance is all around us.

2. Ask and listen and the answers will appear.

3. Be courteous – say please and thank you.

4. Believe in people and they will continually amaze you.

5. Family and friends are gifts from God – love them openly.

6. Give and you will receive.

7. Paddle with the current, when possible.

8. When you must paddle against the current, do it with purpose.

9. Keep your eyes on the prize, not your demise.

10. Listen to your customers and they will tell you what they want.

11. Problems are always accompanied by solutions.

12. Rent seekers will find you and cling to you – be vigilant and frugal.

13. Scrimp and save your money daily, your savings will save you one day.

14. Serve customers well and they will pay you and tell their friends and return for more.

15. Taking action is more energizing than stressing about problems.

16. The more money is at stake, the more energy surrounds it.

17. Work hard and you will be rewarded.

18. Under promise and over deliver.

19. When things go badly in business, you the owner will always be blamed.

20. When things go well in business, you will sometimes get the credit.

21. Maintain physical, mental, emotional and spiritual fitness and balance.

22. Most people will be friendly, but not all.

23. Loyalty is more precious and rare than money.

24. Time is more precious than money.

25. Surprisingly large projects can be completed over and above your regular workday.

26. When you get tired, problems will appear to be larger.

27. When you get tired, allow yourself to rest.

Self-Employment, Starting a Business

Nine Reasons To Charge More Than Your Old Boss Paid You

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By Dan Boudreau

Congratulations! For anyone with the slightest trickle of entrepreneurial blood flowing through their veins, it’s a glorious day when the boss offers to pay you as a contractor rather than as an employee. As an employee, you worked hard to gain your employer’s trust, earned your stripes, and got the contract.

Then comes the agonizing chat about how much to charge. This is when budding contractors need to sharpen their pencils. When it comes to business expenses, the boss will have a clearer view. Unless he is willing to share financial details, most employees will be ill prepared when it comes to figuring out how much to charge for their services, and most tend to bid too low.

Here are nine expenses that need to be covered in your hourly rate, if you’re going to survive the transition from employee to contractor.

  1. Employer Payroll Burden. This amalgamation of costs is often referred to as Mandatory Employee Related Costs (MERC’s). It includes the employer’s portion of employment insurance, pension, holiday pay and any other employee benefits.
  2. Insurance. You’ll need liability insurance and, as a contractor, you’ll be responsible for paying premiums for your own Worker’s Compensation coverage, as well as providing mandatory insurance for all workers under your employ. To learn about WCB costs, go to www.worksafebc.com and lookup rates and classifications.
  3. Rent and Utilities. Your business will have to have a home, and for many budding contractors that will be somewhere at your personal residence.
  4. Bookkeeping and Accounting. As a small business owner you’ll need to keep accurate records and complete year-end financials for tax purposes. Equally important, you’ll need to know, as owner, where you’re at financially at all times throughout the year.
  5. Legal. You’ll want a lawyer’s help in developing your agreement with your former employer, and there will be other legal purchases, such as licenses and permits.
  6. Marketing, Advertising, Sales. Even though your first contract fell into your lap through the good relations you’ve built with a current employer, you’ll soon be buying business cards and learning how to get the word out about your services.
  7. Tools and Equipment. As a contractor, you may need to supply tools and equipment that previously were provided by your employer. You’ll need to factor in the purchase cost, as well as the cost of repairing, maintaining and replacing equipment.
  8. Office Expenses. In today’s work environment, it’s difficult to imagine a business without a telephone, internet access, some sort of mobile, and a computer-fax-printer. There will also be a desk, chairs and something to store files and documents in.
  9. Bank Charges and Interest. A business needs its own bank account, independent of your personal account. If you borrow funds for business purposes, you’ll be paying interest on those funds until they’re repaid.

The Canada Revenue Agency is the final authority when it comes to deciding whether you’re an employee or a contractor. To locate tests that help to determine whether or not you’re an employee or a contractor, do an internet search using the keywords “employee vs. employer.”

As a contractor, if you’re charging anything less than double what the employer paid you as an employee, you’re probably not charging enough to cover your costs. Your appetite for contracting is more likely to grow if you start out with a healthy pricing strategy.

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Business Growth, Entrepreneurship

Defragging Your Business Will Help Your Bottom Line

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defrag_computer-001When my computer gets sluggish, I defrag the hard drive to make it more efficient. Defragging is a process that cleans up your hard drive. It does this by tidying up stray bits of information to leave more free space, which enables the computer to operate more efficiently. Businesses need to be defragged on a regular basis too.

Tough economic times demand the very best from business owners. For the most part, it’s easier for businesses to thrive in a robust economy. But when a downturn hits, the claws come out. Continuous innovation and persistent defragging are the secret to not having your business bounced out of the gene pool. On a larger scale it seems like the economy gets bloated from time to time and does its own defrag. In a very Darwinian way, many small businesses get cuffed into place or trounced out of existence along the way.

As owners, we’re defragging different parts of our business at any given time. You know those processes in your business that just break down, fall apart or become redundant over time? They get slower and slower, more noticeable, then downright annoying; that’s usually when we’re motivated to defrag.

For a small business there are always things begging to work more efficiently. Here are a number of areas of you might consider for potential defragging:

  1. Business Concept – your vision, corporate mission, which products and services to offer, and short-term business goals
  2. Marketing – market area, customers, competition, how you sell your products and services, advertising and promotion, and pricing
  3. Operations – computer hardware and software, how you manage your people, policies on safety, banking procedures, invoicing, trade accounts, your telephone service, insurance, and staff training
  4. Financial – sales forecast, costing, operating expenses, asset management, how you collect your receivables, and how you manage your payables

If the items listed above look suspiciously like the parts of a business plan… they are. Improvements to any of the above areas can make the difference between smooth sailing or crashing in a ball of flames.

In times of plenty, we tend to over indulge and get bloated. This is as true for businesses as it is for people. When the economy gets crazy and none of the old rules seem to work, it’s time to trim the bloat and get back to basics.

The sun always shines after a storm. There are positive economic times and an abundance of opportunities just around the next corner. The lean, efficient entrepreneurs will survive to do business on those bright days.

Entrepreneurship, Self-Employment, Starting a Business

Entrepreneurs Can Be Unreasonable

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entrepreneurs_unreasonableAnyone 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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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