What’s in a Name?

Your name is one of the most important assets your business has — it’s how your customers identify you. Knowing your name is the first step to trusting you and recommending you to others. But what can you do if you’re afraid that someone else might start using your name, or simply start another company with a similar enough name to confuse people?

The answer is that you can register a trademark. A trademark is a word or logo that distinguishes one thing from another, and you have the right to register any names or logos your business uses, in order to stop other people from using them. Coca-Cola, for example, is a trademark of the Coca-Cola Company — if I start selling my own drink and calling it ‘Coca-Cola’, or even something like ‘Cocoa-Cooler’, then they have grounds to sue me.

Making Your Mark.

You can trademark both your business’ name as well as the names of any products you sell. The only condition is that they can’t be too similar to names that someone has already trademarked, and you can’t usually trademark words that are in common use.

It costs a few hundred dollars to register a trademark, and you can do it through the patent office. It can be a waste of money to trademark too many words, so you should only bother with it if you think one of your names could be threatened by competitors.

Once you get your trademark, it’s yours — you can do whatever you want with it, including giving others permission to use it or selling it to them. Remember, though, that your trademark usually only applies in the country where you registered it — you will not usually be protected from competition where foreign businesses are using your trademark. Also, your right to use the trademark will only last for a set number of years (usually a decade from the date of registration). After this time, you will have to pay again to renew it.

Don’t Copy Me.

Copyrights are similar to trademarks in terms of the kind of protection they offer, but different in how they work. In almost all countries, ownership of copyright is automatic, and costs nothing. The moment you write (or draw, or record) something, you own the copyright on it, and can take action against anyone who makes a copy of it without your permission. This article you’re reading right now, for example, has the automatic copyright. If you decided to copy it without permission and put it on your own website, then that would be illegal. Not that you would do such a thing, of course.

It is possible to own the copyright on almost anything that exists but isn’t physical: music, graphics, writing, computer programs, and so on. It does not, however, cover physical things (that’s patents), nor does it cover names (that’s trademarks).

A copyright lasts longer than a trademark: typically it lasts until you die, and then a set number of years after that, depending on your country and the kind of thing that was copyrighted. After the end of this time, the work becomes ‘public domain’, free for anyone to use.

Of course, copyright is a right, not something that you absolutely must go along with. If you want to give people permission to freely use and redistribute something you’ve made, then you have the legal right to do this. You can even give up your copyright on a piece of work altogether, simply by writing on it that you no longer want to own the copyright.

Since you’re in business, though, the chances are that you’ll want more protection for your materials, not less. Look into registering your copyright at the patent office, as doing this will give you an even stronger case if you ever need to use it.

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Outsource More.

A typical problem when your business starts to grow is that you find yourself spending a lot of time on all the small administrative tasks your growth creates, leaving you with less time to do all the extra work you’re getting.

The answer is to start outsourcing those small, time-consuming tasks, like bookkeeping, invoicing and the rest. Outsourcing lets you concentrate on what you’re best at while getting the other things done by professionals. They’ll have a system in place that lets them do what you’re taking hours over in a matter of minutes — after all, it’s what they do. Don’t forget, though, that you need to hold outsourced work to the same standard of quality you hold your own to, since your customers won’t be making the distinction.

Create a Growth Plan.

Remember that business plan you made when you started it all? Well, growing your business isn’t that different to starting a new one: you still need to plan ahead, and know what you’re doing. Take out your existing business plan and look at what needs to be brought up to date, what still stands, and what needs to be added.

The most important thing to keep in mind when you turn your business plan into a growth plan is this: don’t forget your core focus. Tempting as it can be to diversify into all sorts of areas as a way to grow, you don’t have experience in these areas — try to do more of what you know, and keep new things to a minimum.

Financing Your Growth.

While running your business, you might have become frustrated with how much more you could do if you just had a little money to invest. Equity finance is a popular way to raise money to invest in a business. It involves you selling a small share of your company to someone who is interested in investing. They don’t have to have any involvement in the running of the business, necessarily — the only real condition is that you agree to give them a percentage of your profits equal to the percentage of your business that you sold them, known as a dividend.

But Don’t Grow Too Fast.

One thing that can be fatal for home businesses is trying to grow too fast. Some people have a tendency to let success go to their head, and will borrow tons of money to expand their business at an amazing rate, only to have a breakdown when they realise that they just can’t manage a business that large.

Have You Considered Raising Prices?

If you’ve got more business than you can handle, that’s not expansion — it’s overtrading. You might be doing more work than you need to, when you could just raise your prices. Try out a few different levels, and you’ll find the one that gets you a manageable amount of business. It’s a simple question of supply and demand: you should be earning the same as you were before or more, but doing less work.

Remember that growing your business doesn’t necessarily have to mean getting more customers. You can expand your business financially just by selling more to your existing customers, or providing extra ‘premium’ services on top of the ones you already provide.

Could You Franchise?

This obviously won’t apply to every kind of business, but if you’ve found a successful formula, you could consider franchising it. Franchising is especially common in the food business, where risk-averse people starting new businesses often want to do something that’s tried and tested. You can, effectively, sell your business plan, marketing materials and the experience you’ve gained in business so far to these people.

Even though you should wait a while before you actually do it, it’s worth at least considering whether this could be an option for your business, and starting to standardise everything and get it down to a formula and assets that could be sold on.

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All Alone…

Picture the scene. You get up for another day of work. Your husband or wife has already left, since they have to get up earlier to commute to their job. Your children are at school. All the neighbours are at work. Your house feels deserted, and your neighbourhood feels like a ghost town.

It’s all too easy to become enormously demotivated in this situation, and to begin to feel like your work is pointless. Worse, when you get stuck or something bad happens, you have no-one to turn to — at work, you were all in it together, but now it’s just you, out on your own.

Even if you don’t feel like it’s affecting you, the lack of human interaction could be causing you quite a few problems. Ask yourself honestly if you’ve been more irritable than usual recently, found yourself lacking in energy, or felt upset or sad without being able to figure out the reason why. If you have, then it could be related to home-worker loneliness.

The Power of the Web.

Since you’ve presumably got a computer and Internet access on your office computer, you might find it worthwhile to get on a search engine and find a few forums for your industry, especially ones dedicated to people who run home businesses. You might think what you do is too obscure, but it’s a big web out there.

Finding friends on web forums can be good for replacing the lost interaction with co-workers. More than that, it can offer you a good outlet for your frustrations and problems — many of the people you’re talking to will have been through the same thing themselves, and will be more than happy to sympathise with you and offer advice.

There’s only one thing to be careful of, though: don’t let chatting about everything and nothing on the web interrupt your work. Give yourself a certain amount of time each day to talk to your newfound ‘colleagues’, and don’t go over it. You don’t want to be sitting there pressing ‘Refresh’ on a long discussion when you should be getting some work done, do you?

Get to Know Your Clients.

Here’s a good way to turn your loneliness into an advantage: make your clients your friends! The customers that will be the most loyal to you are the ones that trust you and know you, and going to meet with them sometimes as a friend can be rewarding on both a personal and a business level.

Associations, Groups and Societies.

If you look, you might be surprised at how many things there are out there that you could join. Perhaps your area has a Homeworkers’ Society, or an association for your industry that holds regular meetings? Go along, and you could find some new friends, as well as some good business contacts. Two or three groups should be enough.

Go to a Coffee Place Sometimes.

You’ve seen those people who seem to be doing work in Starbucks, right? Well, they’ve figured out something valuable — being at home alone all day sends you crazy, and it’s nice to get away sometimes and have some coffee while you work. Over time, you’ll even become a regular, and people there will start getting to know you.

Use Your Breaks to Contact People.

Most people have a list a mile long of friends and family that they’ve been meaning to get in touch with for ages, but never seem to have the chance. A great thing to do can be to make a big list of all these people, and then phone or email one of them each week, in one of your breaks. Not only does this fight loneliness, but it’s also a plain fun and nice thing to do.

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One of the most popular ways to advertise is to use Google Adwords. Google Adwords is a great way for a small business with a limited budget to find buyers that are searching or interested in specific product. You can create an ad and in less than 15 minutes, your ad can be showed to prospective buyers that are interested. If a prospective buyer clicks on your ad, they will be sent directly to your web site. You only pay a fee for each click you receive. The fee is an amount that you bid on and you can easily budget your advertising project.

If you have no budget what so ever, you might want to look into a banner ad swap. Banner ad swapping services are a great way to get your product or service known throughout the internet by swapping your banner with others. You show other products banners and your banner ad partners will show their visitors yours.

You can also go to forums and blogs and advertise your product in threads. Many forums have special areas that advertise products based on the topic. You can easily find many forums and blogs to get the word out. So if you are starting a business, look into the above ways that you can advertise your small business.

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Did You Make a Profit or a Loss?

The first, and most important, question to answer is this: what does your balance sheet look like? You need to honestly add up all the numbers — don’t be tempted to add on money that you think you’re a few days from getting, or take away bad purchases that proved useful in your personal life, for example. Hopefully you kept electronic records, so this shouldn’t be too much trouble.

Once you know how you did, you need to look at how to do better. If you made a loss (as almost everyone does in their first year), what can you do about it? Where did the money go? If you made a profit then, well, congratulations! But you still need to think about how much of your profit to re-invest in the business, and how you can increase your profits next year. Remember that money makes money: once you’re making a profit, wise investment can make it grow exponentially.

How Many Customers Did You Get?

Now, take a look at your customer database. What’s the total number of people who dealt with you this year? How many is that per day, and how much did each one spend? Once you have this information, you can work out how much customers were paying you overall weekly, daily or even hourly. If it seems like a lot more than you saw, you need to ask yourself if you spent too much of their money on expenses. If it seems like hardly anything, then you’re in trouble. Sorry to be blunt, but either you need to consider raising your prices, or you’re just not doing enough marketing or working hard enough.

How Many Came Back?

Of course, a more important metric than the total number of customers you had last year is how many of them came back more than once. Work out what percentage of your business that was repeat business — note that this means you count someone twice if they bought from you three times overall, three times if they bought from you four, and so on.

An easy way to do this is to simply take your number that says how many times a customer has dealt with you, subtract one from all of them, and then add it up. Once you know the raw amount of repeat business, you need to divide it by your total number of customers and then multiply by 100. This gives you a percentage. If your repeat business is lower than 20% or so of your total business, this is cause for concern. Are you doing enough to stay in touch with your existing customers?

What Did Customer Complaints Say?

I hope you kept hold of every customer complaint you got, even if you fixed it at the time. You need to take a good look over what you did right, what you did wrong and what you messed up. I know you dealt with things as they came up, but looking back over everything can help you to see the big picture. It’s all too easy to miss quite simple patterns when you’re in the thick of it day-to-day, and looking at the complaints can reveal a trend that you weren’t expecting.

What Have You Learned?

It can be useful to write yourself out a list of lessons at the end of the year, even if it’s things like ‘quarter-page magazine ads are just as effective as half-page ones’ or ‘make lunch later in the day so you eat it faster’. Your accumulated knowledge is valuable: you’ve paid for it in cash and in sweat, so make sure you don’t forget it. See if you can come up with a list of positive things to do next year to make your business even better!

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Selling on auction sites is very simple. Usually you can be up and running in just a few minutes. One of the toughest parts of selling on auction sites is coming up with an initial product to sell. Many people usually start out selling items that they own that they don’t use anymore, or start selling products that they know a lot about such as hobby related merchandise. However one of the best ways to find products to sell on auction sites is to visit auction sites and see what sells for yourself.

Auction sites give each visitor the power to see what items sell, how much they sell for, how many people are selling them and what percentage of items listed sell. Armed with this information you can literally pick out great products to sell. There is very little guess work involved.

If you would like to sell more than a few items a day, look into automating your auction site sales. There are plenty of products for automating the items that you sell on auction sites. Automated services such as listing programs, payment processors and shipping programs can help you streamline your business and can help you save time and energy when listing, receiving payment for your items and shipping them out. If you are looking for a great home business opportunity, look into selling on auction sites.

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Where to Look.

It might be tempting to just use a search engine and go by the results that turns up, but you have to remember that plenty of business still takes place outside the Internet. You should also make sure that you pay attention to more traditional methods of advertising, such as the yellow pages, or your local newspaper. It’s worth cutting out and keeping any ads you find, as they can be good to refer to when it’s time to start your own marketing.

Do What They Do, But Differently.

Notice that I said ‘differently’, not necessarily ‘better’. Don’t assume that you’ll be able to improve on established businesses if you’re doing the exact same thing as they are – they have years of experience, after all. What you’re trying to do is distinguish yourself in the marketplace, so that people who are looking for something specific in your chosen industry will come to you.

There are a number of tried-and-true ways of altering existing products to make them succeed in the market.

The Price-Quality Line. You may find other businesses that only offer a very high-quality service, and accordingly charge a premium price – or you might find ones that only offer heavily-discounted rubbish. Consider taking their products to the opposite end of the market. If you can offer a product of only slightly worse quality at half the price, then people will jump at it – and, likewise, there are always people willing to pay the most to get the best.

Provide a Service. It is perfectly possible to sell products of the exact same physical quality while providing a better service – to the customer, quality and service are almost the same thing. There are companies out there who can sell computer software that their customers could get almost for free, simply because the customers like to have the support services that they get with their purchase.

Likewise, if service is all you do, then it should be pretty simple to provide a more attentive and personal service than your competitors. ‘One-on-one business’ gives you a great opportunity to become friendly with your customers, and that’s often worth its weight in gold to them.

Make it Simpler. Many businesses offer great products, but they’re pitching them to very technical customers. If you’re an expert in your field, you will very often find that you can build a great business simply by selling the same thing as your competitors, but going to some trouble to explain and market it to a wider section of the public. Anytime you start using some new technology, the chances are that someone along the way had to work out how to make it simpler. Few new technologies or inventions come pre-packaged for consumer use.

Change the Design. Make it smaller, or change the colour, or make it easier to open and fix. There are all sorts of ways to subtly redesign a product and give it all sorts of bells and whistles that customers will really appreciate. You might even be able to buy products, modify them, and then sell them on.

Build Alliances.

Despite what the word might lead you to think, you don’t always have to be competitive with your competitors. You might find that they have extra work sometimes that they wouldn’t mind sending over to you, or you might find that they’re willing to give you advice on starting up (if not for free, then perhaps for nothing more than the cost of a few drinks!). Of course, you shouldn’t go giving away all your secrets or giving them any other advantage, but that doesn’t mean that you should keep away. Pay special attention to any problems that they say they’ve had, or anything they do that seems to sell especially well.

Believe it or not, your competitors can be your best allies in this home business game, especially if they’re home businesses themselves – over time, your competitors might even become your friends.

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There is plenty of work at home business opportunities, but just like any other business, you have to do your research and pick out a business opportunity that is legitimate and can be profitable.

There is tons of work at home business opportunities; unfortunately there are a lot of scams. You have probably seen ads to make hundreds of dollars a day to send out envelopes or earn hundreds of dollars to fill out a few surveys. While some people may earn money doing these tasks, the vast majority throw their money out the window. When choosing a work at home business, use common sense and don’t try to chase the easy money.

Two great ways to work at home are to sell on auction sites such as Ebay or find an employer that is willing to hire you to work on your own flexible schedule from home. Believe it or not there are tons of employers that would love to hire your services either to do work on the computer, make sales calls or other service from the comfort of your own home. You can be your own boss by being a freelancer and making your own schedule or be a contract worker. The choice is yours.

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No matter how easy it seems to start a home business, expect it to be much more difficult to get off the ground. Most people think that starting a home business is a way to make easy money. Starting a home business takes lots of work and commitment. If you don’t have the time or will, you might as well find a decent part time job.

Starting a home business usually begins with a good idea. Find a product to sell or a service that people can use. Many home businesses are a result of an under served market or a new idea which is useful for many people. It is important to talk to your friends and family and analyze your idea or service over and over again in order to make sure that you are not wasting your time and you can get your business off the ground and hopefully down the road make a profit.

Starting a home business also requires some type of capital. Even the smallest business usually requires a small reserve of capital whether it is a couple hundred dollars or a couple of thousand dollars in order to get your business off the ground or buy inventory. If you are looking to start a home business, put some careful thought into it, work hard and hopefully it will succeed.

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Home offices were once uncommon, today; millions of people have created their home office in order to work at their small business or to finish work from the office on the weekends or evenings. Most people that create a home office usually put in a desk, comfortable chair and computer. However, you shouldn’t stop there.

If you are creating a home office, make sure it is a comfortable and quiet place in your home. Don’t put it downstairs in an unfinished basement with no heat or in the kid’s playroom where it can be noisy.

Creating a home office should be practical, make sure you put in the necessary equipment such as a computer, broadband internet, fax, printer etc. Try not to overload it with other accessories that will only keep your mind off business such as a TV, game system or stereo. Your goal is to work. If you want to do something else, choose another room.

Office furniture is very affordable these days. You can find office furniture for less than $100 for a huge desk or for about $300 for an entire home office center. A comfortable chair is also important and make sure that it can be adjusted so you can be comfortable when you type on the computer or look into the monitor for extended periods of time.

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