Ingredients Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

5 Ingredients of Successful Entrepreneurship

Read the quintessential qualities required to become a consistently successful and growing entrepreneur.

No business can grow without the growth of the entrepreneur who runs it. It is the entrepreneur who becomes the central line of the growth of the business. If the owner isn’t upgrading himself or herself, their business isn’t going anywhere. That’s a given! Here I share with you the basic fundamentals that an entrepreneur must focus on at any given point of time irrespective of the stage or the scale.

Ideas

Entrepreneurship is developed, it is a skill. There are no born entrepreneurs, they build themselves. Entrepreneurship lies dormant in all of us. We all have that inherent desire and wish to do that one dream business or project one summer day. The fact is if we ask all the people we know to write down their dream business on a piece of paper you will get a huge pool of resourceful Business ideas to work on. The tragedy is very limited people can visualize it as a profitable venture. No business is a bad idea. Every business is a growth business. Successful entrepreneurship is about taking a crazy idea to its logical plan and then utilizing the available resources to commercialize the idea into a long term profitable venture. An entrepreneur must always have ideas at the drop of a hat to solve problems, address demands or to innovate new products. Working on creative thinking is imperative to be a continuous resource provider of ideas. The key is in continuous creation of new, better and different ideas without falling in love with the old ones. Creation is possible only when the entrepreneur is continuously learning.

Plan

Once the idea is in place, the next step would be to create a clearly written down execution plan with step by step precision of what is to be done to make the idea convert into a business venture. Writing down the magic questions and their answers is the key. Magic questions include the what, where, when, how, who and why. A plan is nothing but a detailed execution methodology shared and supported by all the members concerned in a venture. Most entrepreneurs fall short of penning down their ideas simply because of lack of will or laziness. It is said that when you write your plans down, they help you remain motivated and on track when you are most knocked down in business. A plan consists of series of short, medium and long term goals. A goal is nothing but a dream with a deadline. Having a well thought of PLAN A and a contingency PLAN B are crucial in any entrepreneurial voyage.

Risk

This is what separates the men from the boys. Starting a venture requires the rare quality to challenge our comfort zones. Doing things that make us uncomfortable and destroying the status quo remains the fundamental essential quality of successful entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is doing things that are contrary to everything that has to do with the words security and comfort. It’s about choosing the short term pains to actualize and materialize the long term gains. Risk taking involves an emotional and mental decision first which translates into a financial or logical decision later to do something that has the probability to fail as much as to succeed. Risk taking becomes easy when the entrepreneur develops the ability to remain confident about the strengths and talent especially in times of crises.

Time

Entrepreneurship is about being ahead of time by planning your priorities. Entrepreneurs wear multiple hats and hence it is imperative that they wisely choose to do the most crucial and important activities in their business which only they have the expertise of doing. Entrepreneur’s must focus only on key success driving activities in their business and delegate the rest to people who are better at doing those things than the entrepreneur. Initially entrepreneurship takes a toll on the personal time and space of the individual, however, at later stages, the individual develops the habit of ignoring personal time and this leads to an unbalanced life. Spending quality time on crucial revenue generating and business growth related activities coupled with taking time out for family, fitness and hobbies is mandatory for a successful entrepreneurial life. Developing the discipline to follow learnable routines and at the same time having the flexibility to adjust as per changing demands is very important sign in entrepreneurship.

Team

Can you imagine the pyramids in Egypt built with a single rock? Can nations be built by the effort of a single person alone? Difficult to imagine, isn’t it? The sum of the parts makes the whole and the whole is incomplete without its parts. You cannot build a fantastic business unless you have fantastic people working with you. It’s easier to attract and nurture talent when you have a strong vision and purpose for your business. Business building and entrepreneurship thrives on collective efforts of like minded people moving together towards a common goal. Entrepreneurs tend to be self involved to the extent of not sharing their ideas, frustrations and dreams with others. Their initial experience of solitude makes them closed emotionally and as business grows the entrepreneur doesn’t realize the benefits of sharing. Leadership is about helping others bring out their strengths towards the achievement of a strong purpose. Entrepreneurs must learn to instill other people’s confidence and other people’s capabilities. It is only when you build a team, can you build a great business.

The above ingredients, if mixed passionately with solid persistence can help anyone build a fantastic entrepreneurial venture. Here’s wishing you all the best for your Businesses journey.

Marketing Strategy Plan: Key Ingredients Of A SWOT Analysis

In every marketing strategy plan, the first step in determining your current position in the market is through a comprehensive SWOT analysis. This helps you identify and improve your Strengths and Weakness while focusing on the external Opportunities and Threats that may positively or negatively affect your company.

1. Strengths

In a SWOT analysis, Strengths are considered part of the internal factors favorable to your marketing strategy plan. This basically covers areas regarding your competencies, assets, income generation, and other intangibles like customer support and positive public image and reputation, good admin – employees relationship, and camaraderie in the work place. When you define your strengths, it must reflect the present situation and have a clear plan on how you will be able to maintain and nurture it so these factors will always be the driving force of your company.

2. Weaknesses

Weaknesses can be derived both from internal and external factors. These are usually the areas in your operation that may have a negative impact on your marketing strategy plan. The purpose of creating a list of your weaknesses is so you can adjust your strategies to include improvements in these areas. Among the common weaknesses of companies are where your operation is losing money, lack of experience, skills, and or resources among others. Weaknesses can also account for a bad reputation, significant decline in the levels of trust among consumers, or simply due to the absence of any strength.

3. Opportunities

Opportunities are basically external factors that offer potential benefits for your business. When creating a marketing strategy plan, having a good grasp of the opportunities is highly beneficial. This enables you to take advantage of various factors that may have positive effects on your endeavors such as the current economic condition, cultural climate, market volume, economic demand, etc. When you know your opportunities, you can also see the actual needs of your target market that are not being met. In essence, these opportunities are actually your future strengths and must be prioritized.

4. Threats

Although threats are usually viewed as an external condition that may impede your marketing strategy plans, they can also be viewed internally. Threats can be an unstable economic condition, cultural differences, unfriendly social conditions, significant changes in political stability, new industry regulations and legislation, and the current position of your competitor. Internally, threats are often found in the workplace such as the unstable admin – employee relationship and other related conditions. As opposed to Opportunities, Threats in essence are your company’s future weaknesses and must be addressed as soon as possible.

With the help of a SWOT analysis, you can analyze your business internally against your various resources, financial standing, support, etc. When you look at various external factors, you can examine various areas of the economy, political stability, industrial regulations, demographic, social, competitions, and technology that may have a direct impact on your business.

Ingredients For Work at Home Mom Success

Have you ever wondered why you aren’t doing as well at your work at home business as you originally envisioned you would? Have you ever wondered just what does it take? After 4 years in business as a work at home Mom I would love to share the ingredients I sifted together to answer your questions.

All too often Moms want all the answers handed to them all at once and fall prey to one experts advice. What is an expert anyway? My dictionary says skills and knowledge derived from training or experience. It does not say someone who knows everything, who will lead you into success for free and will never unintentionally lead you astray. The truth of the matter is, there is just to much information for anyone person to have it all and while experience aids us in making decisions concerning our business, just when you think you’ve learned all there is to know about a subject, things change. The same products weren’t sold in 1950 as they were in 1960 or will they be today. Times change, fashions change, technology changes, therefore business changes. I didn’t get my web sites to the top of the Google search engines from any one Internet “expert’s” advice. I got to the top of the search engines by using one piece of advice from many different Internet “experts”.

The #1 ingredient to work at home Mom success is research, research, and research some more!

All too often Moms think once they have their business all set up, the orders will start flowing in, their pockets will start filling up and it’s all smooth sailing from then on. Not true. When I had my 1st beautiful web site full of beautiful products, I soon realized my web site was no where to be found in the Google search engines and I wasn’t getting orders because of it. I knew I had to be listed on the 1st page of the Google search engine to get customers. I did research, I made changes, I monitored the results and the I did the same time and time again. Did every change I made work? No. Did some? Yes. Now both of my web site are on the 1st page of the Google search engine. I will continue to monitor my status and make changes if necessary.

The #2 ingredient to work at home Mom success is trial and error, trial and error, continuous trial and error!

All too often Moms believe they will work less hours with their own business than when going out of the home to work. Not true. Your own business requires more hours. Hours to learn, hours to apply what you learned, hours to actually provide your product or service, hours for accounting, the list goes on and on. However, there certainly are advantages of working from home. Being at home with small children or home when your children return from school, working the hours and days you prefer not your employers, no travel time, traffic, save money on gas, uniforms or expensive office clothes and more. Personally, I find having lunch at home with my 3 year old much more enjoyable then sitting in a business lunch room with an hours old sandwich!

The #3 ingredient to work at home Mom success is work, work harder and then work some more!

All too often Moms give up because they are not an overnight success. National statistics say it takes a new businesses 3-5 years to become profitable and most businesses close up shop before they have even worked at it for a full year.

The #4 ingredient to work at home Mom success is don’t give up!

Put it all together and what do we have, research, hard work, trial and error and don’t give up! I truly believe that God wants us to succeed. He simply asks us to plant the seeds of our business, harvest the grain that is available to our business, prepare the flour for our business, mix the dough in our business and bake the foundation of our business before we get to savor the bread of our business which is our success!