Selling stuff online at a moment is a pain in the backside - you have to deal with building your online shop, getting the products, packaging them, shipping them, dealing with payment options, technical support… But does it really have to be?
Well, thank to a service that was recently launched in the US, all these problems are now a thing of the past. Zlio isn’t just the world’s most innovative e-commerce service ever launched - it’s also pure genius! It allows you to create your own internet store, even if you have nothing to sell! All you need to do is to go to their website, create a store (takes less than three minutes) and fill it with products from their directory (which gives you a choice of over three million products, from most of the internet’s top merchants). You don’t need to know anything about programming or making websites unless you want to – all that garbage is dealt with by them (and they make your shop look really pretty as well).
Once your shop’s up and running, all you need to do is advertise it round (family, friends, your blog…) Zlio even provides all kinds of tools to help you do that. And then, when people log on and buy anything from it, you get a commission from the supplier. But best of all, you don’t even need to worry about handling the product yourself – it’s shipped straight from the merchant to your customer. All you ever need to handle is the cash!
So next time someone asks you where you got that incredible book/watch/shoe/couch/computer/remote controlled helicopter/etc… make sure you’re be able to send them to your ZlioShop and to get your cut on the way! With over 100 000 people who have already created stores with us (some of whom now make over $750 a month!) and over 2.5 million unique visitors a month, you just can’t go wrong!
For a lot of businesses, especially new ones, success is a matter of survival more than anything else and in order to survive it’s important to remember this one principal. Cash is King!
Without a ready stockpile of cash, the ability to meet ongoing operating expenses will become problematic. The reality of why so many small businesses have not survived the recent recession is because they did not have access to cash when their income suddenly nosedived.
First of all what is cashflow? It’s important to not confuse cashflow with profits. Profit will support the growth of your business, contribute to the value of your business and pay back long term debt. Cash is what you need to pay those everyday expenses such as suppliers and employees. As an example; if your customers pay you 30 days after purchasing, then you will not receive that useable cash until the following month, yet that sale will still register as profit.
In order to control your cashflow you need to take to do the following.
- Make sure your accounts are up to date. This should be a daily task.
- To boost cashflow you can raise prices and increase sales.
- Sell off surplus assets and equipment.
- Get rid of slow moving stock by discounting.
- Make sure you invoice your customers as soon as possible.
- Follow up on invoices as soon as they are due. Some business’s will not pay unless they are chased, so it’s perfectly acceptable to start calling your customers the day they are due to remind them.
- Keep a close eye on your debtors. If you have debtors regularly falling behind in their payments change the way you bill them, by insisting on payment up front or stop dealing with them until their accounts are cleared. Remember you are effectively loaning other business’s your cash interest free.
- Make sure your customers understand your payment terms by making it a central part of the supply contract.
- Cash cheques as soon as you receive them.
There are other effective methods to get customers to pay on time or even better, early. Offer a prompt payment discount, perhaps for payment within seven days or payment at time of purchase. This might just be a short term fix to get cashflow moving, but it’s a common tool for business’s to use and a quite attractive way for your supplier’s to save money, especially if you point out on their monthly statements how much they could have saved had they used the facility.
Probably the easiest, and most neglected, way of solving cashflow problems, is to review the cash that is leaving your business. Keeping an eye on costs, especially during difficult times, can be an extremely effective way of keeping the bank account under control.
- If times are difficult, the easiest and perhaps least painful cost (from the business’s point of view) that can be targeted is your own drawings or salary. You might not like the idea much, but remember; short term pain for long term gain.
- Review your employee expenses. Reducing employees is never an easy step, however during difficult times it is a necessity that cannot be avoided. Start by reducing the number of hours you have them working or maybe look at linking performance more closely to pay.
- Try and negotiate better terms with your own suppliers.
Remember that most businesses that do fail, fail because they do not have the cash to meet their financial commitments, and not necessarily because they are unprofitable. Keep a healthy cash reserve aside for rainy days and above all, make sure you maintain a good relationship with your bank, because it will be they that you turn to as a last resort.
MLM and PYRAMID SCHEMES
Pyramid schemes are illegal in most countries; unfortunately it can be quite difficult to tell the difference between an illegal pyramid scheme and a genuine MLM scheme. However the main difference is, an MLM scheme is designed to sell product and a pyramid scheme is designed to recruit new members.
The questions you need to ask to determine the legitimacy of the scheme should be;
1. Is there a large amount of upfront money required? A legitimate MLM business should not require large start up costs.
2. Will the company buy back unsold inventory? You might not get back what you paid, but you should get back at least 75%.
3. What sort of emphasis is placed upon the market you will be selling to? If there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis on customers then chances are their main business is recruitment.
4. Is there a lot of emphasis placed on recruitment? Are incentives or commissions offered to recruit new members? Does the plan suggest you will make more money through recruitment rather than selling?
This is an extract from a larger online article that can be found at http://www.bbbcubed.com
Running your own business can be one of the most satisfying things you will ever achieve. It can also be one of the most stressful activities to undertake.
You can be guaranteed not everything you set out to achieve will work, and not everything you meticulously plan will pan out the way it was supposed to. There will be nights when you lay awake worrying, or thinking about what needs to be done. There is little you can do to avoid those times, but you can minimize the effect that stress will have on you, your employees and your family.
The first thing you need to learn to do is to identify what is causing the stressful situation and accept it, rather than explaining it away by blaming someone else or trivializing the issue. It might be helpful to write down the occurrences in your diary or journal, that way you can also document what you did to deal with the stress.
Think about how you deal with stress and be aware of the damage that some coping mechanisms have on you and other people, such as drinking, sleeping patterns, withdrawal from family and friends, procrastination and particularly those angry outbursts. If that’s how you typically handle your stress then it’s time to look for some new methods.
Avoid stress. Easily said than done, but some situations are avoidable. It might be a particular person that causes it; maybe you can spend less time around that person. Reduce your to do list, by reviewing what’s important and dropping off things that you don’t need to do. If you have employee’s then DELEGATE! One of the more important things we can do in business is learning how to say no. You will be amazed at how the stress level drops when we start saying no to people.
If you can’t avoid the stress then avoid the situation that causes the stress. Communicate your feelings with those around you. Compromise, look for the middle ground. Assert yourself, tell people that you are too busy to have the conversation and most important, manage your time better. Plan ahead as far in advance as you can and then try to focus on the task in hand rather than what’s on that list.
Another method to minimize that stress is to change yourself. Look at the situation that’s causing the stress from a more positive point of view; look at the benefits you will get from dealing with the problem. Don’t forget the big picture; is this really going to matter in a month or a year? Try not to be a perfectionist. The standards we set for ourselves are sometimes unachievable, so be realistic, remember you are not a superhero.
You should also learn to accept that there are things and people in our life that we simply cannot change. You cannot control the world; that’s that superhero thing again. Sometimes we just have to let the situation roll off our backs. Again easier said than done, but if you can achieve that particular skill, life will get a whole lot easier to deal with.
Ensure that you take time out for relaxation and fun! As a business owner it’s very easy to get caught up in the moment, and before you know it a week has gone by, you haven’t seen your family; you are tired, grumpy and intolerant. It happens to everyone, but is so easily avoided by penciling in time throughout the week to relax; it will put what you are doing into perspective and remind you that there is more to life than work.
Lastly and most importantly, talk to someone about your stress. It might be your partner, a colleague, your accountant even your bank manager. If you need to, talk to your GP or get counseling, if the stress seems impossible to deal with.
We want you to grow old and successful not young and washed out!
Ever get to the end of a day and felt completely frustrated that you got nothing achieved of note?
It’s a problem that everyone will experience at some point, either in our daily lives or in our business life. For small business owners in particular, this can be an easy trap to fall into. We tend to get so caught up putting out fires or rushing off on a tangent that sometimes we overlook the important stuff that we need to get done.
Here’s how to avoid it.
The first and last fifteen minutes of everyday are the most important. You need to schedule this time for yourself and no one else. If you don’t use a day planner, PDA, or diary then start, go out and buy one right now. A simple daily diary is the easiest to use if you want to stay away from electronic gadgets, and usually the easiest thing to grab and open up also. If you do use a diary and find it too cumbersome to carry around, get a smaller notebook and transfer your daily events to it. However, I tend to find that smaller diaries or notebooks can get misplaced easily.
The order of business is simple. At the start of everyday, over a coffee or whatever gets the heart started, grab your diary, or whatever you might be using and starting writing. List all of the tasks that you need to do for the day. Don’t worry too much about the order you write these tasks in, because once you are done you are going to rank their importance from 1 (being critical) to 3 (nice to do, but not really important). You can spread your ranking from 1 to 100 if you want, but my suggestion is to keep it simple and use just 3 rankings.
Depending on what sort of business you run, you may or may not have employees. If you do you will want to delegate some of these tasks out, so if that’s the case you should write who is doing this job for you next to the appropriate item. Of course it goes without saying that you need to tell your employee’s what is expected and it’s also a very good idea to teach them these same planning and organizing methods.
Throughout the course of your day you will be completing various tasks and checking them off of your list, no doubt you will also be adding to your list as things come up. It’s vital that when you do add items, you don’t rush off on a tangent and try to complete them immediately. Add them, rank them, delegate them and then focus on those priorities, the number 1’s.
Now let us move on to the end of the day. It’s time to sit down with your diary and a nice cold beer, wine or other beverage and analyze how we went for the day. You might find you have more unticked items than what you started with, you might find you have none; either way is fine as long we have been completing our tasks in order of importance.
Now here’s the fun part. Open up tomorrow’s page and transfer all of today’s unfinished tasks. You might find that many of those tasks that were important this morning are not important now, some you may not want to transfer at all. Write the appropriate entries down; rank them, delegate them, close your book and go do something fun! Tomorrow when you start again, a lot of your day’s planning will be already done…congratulations.
If we do it in a disciplined manner, planning and organizing does not need to take a lot of time, but the time we save will be immeasurable.
