Wealth Business

Archive for February, 2009

When different people are using the phrase ‘small business’, do they refer to a common set of definitions? Like, how many employees are listed in the payroll? Or, the number of years it’s operative? A literature review of 23 papers, which have been published from 1958 to 2002, tries to shed light on this issue. The review revealed an inconsistency regarding both characterization and definition of small business. The variety of definition used in these papers unable to set an agreeable format for small business definition. Mayer and Goldstein (1961) define small business as an employer of less then 200 employees. Potts (1977) set the barrier on 20 employees in addition to a minimum eight years that the business is operative. Robinson (1982) define firm as small if the number of employees is less then 50, the annual sales is under three million dollars and it’s operate as sole ownership. Covin and Slevin (1989) define small business according to number of employees – more then five or less then 500, as well as a minimum of five years that the business is operative. Rue and Ibrahim (1998) define small firm as an employer of more then 15 employees. Perry (2001) set an upper limit of 500 employees as a sole identifier for business to be regard as small. The review clarify that the ambiguity is stable over time. The lack of uniform definition in the sixtieth continued throughout the decades into the millennium. The industries targeted by the different scholars do have one common base; the focus was on industries with low to average economic growth such as manufacturing, trade (retail, wholesale) and service.

Scholars have addressed the problematicalness regarding the inconsistency of small business definition for quite time, Golde (1964) which examine small manufacturing employers with less then 500 employees, argue that it’s an arbitrarily definition which can adequately feet non manufacturing firms. Welsh and White (1981) claims that small business tend to group in certain industries, such as – wholesalers, retailers, service and manufacturing. Peterson et al., (1986) note that the most common definition is the one that used by the Small Business Administration (SBA), in part, that definition state that small business can be define as one if both its ownership and operation conducted independently, and it’s not dominant at the industry which is operate in. D’amboise and Muldowney (1988) write about the complexity of small business definition, which can be a result of the variety and different types of firms this phrase try to encompass. Pickle and Abrahamson (1990) address the question, what is a small business? There answer is that some will regard small business as such if it’s employ certain number of employees, others will claim that small business is one that limits his operation to local market, and part will classify business as small according to it’s nature (e.g., local pharmacy, clothing store, jewelry store).

Acquiring new customers using your product Acquiring new representatives to promote your product Now the only way to get these two things done is to talk to as many people as you can about what it is you have. There are a few ways to do this with the first being everyone’s favorite “Friends & Family” approach.

It should be no surprise that the lifeblood of ANY MLM or home based business is having plenty of leads to talk to. It’s also no secret that you make money in Network Marketing by doing two things.

Acquiring new customers using your product Acquiring new representatives to promote your product Now the only way to get these two things done is to talk to as many people as you can about what it is you have. There are a few ways to do this with the first being everyone’s favorite “Friends & Family” approach.

But what happens when you work through that list of everyone you know and you’re not a millionaire yet? What happens if you’ve been down that road in the past and it didn’t work out so well? Some of you might even be at the point where your friends and family avoid you like the plague so they don’t get pitched on yet ANOTHER opportunity!

Whatever the situation, the only logical answer short of closing up shop is that you need to find a way to expose your home business or MLM to more people, otherwise known as acquiring leads.

There are two ways to get leads, you can buy generic home based business leads or you can generate your own.

Before we start talking about how to generate your own targeted leads, let’s go ahead and talk about the first option which is buying generic home business leads. This seems to be where most network marketers focus their time, money and energy.

The first thing that you must know about ANY home business lead that you purchase is that no matter how many buzzwords are used in describing that lead. No matter how fresh it is or how good that lead sounds it’s still someone that you don’t know, that doesn’t know you, doesn’t know anything about your business there is no guarantee that they are going to pick up the phone or give you a second of their time to discuss joining your home business.

90% of purchased leads are produced by people filling out generic online forms about making more money from home and you don’t know the circumstances about why they filled out these online forms.

Were they looking for a Job instead of a home business opportunity? Were they trying to win a free Xbox? Where they drunk behind the computer at 3:00 am?

You just don’t know!

There are really no way cut corners on prospecting the leads that you purchase. Oftentimes you are competing with several other people who are contacting the same leads and the only way to make these types of leads pan out for you is to buy large quantities and sort through them to see who has an interest. So here is my suggestion for network marketers using these types of leads:

#1 – Keep your costs down when you buy “cold” leads. I don’t suggest spending more than 30 cents a lead! Most MLM lead companies online sell leads for $1 to $5 apiece… Stay away from these high priced leads and use a service like BigTimemlmLeads.com where you can get surveyed leads for as little as 14 cents apiece.

#2 – Start to put together a strategy to generate you own home business leads and phase out the cold contact leads over time.

Okay, now for the really fun stuff and the best strategy for building your home business. How do you as a home business owner go out and start generating your own targeted mlm / home business leads?

The first thing you must understand about the process of generating your own home business leads is that it takes time and it’s not something that happens overnight. You have many hoops that you have to jump through in order to get yourself set up with everything you’re going to need.

The goal of generating your own leads is to leverage your time and efforts by being able to cut corners on the “sorting” process as well as position yourself highly with your leads. This means that when you do actually talk to them on the phone they already have an understanding of who you are and what your opportunity and/or product is all about.

This makes your job promoting your home business much easier and leaves your prospects much more responsive to what you want them to do.

So know that we know WHY we want to generate our own positioned leads… It’s now time to look into the step by step process of doing so.

If you are toying with the idea of selling your business you have a few decisions to make. Firstly are you going to advertise it everywhere or are you going to try and get a private sale without letting the world know that you want to exchange owners. They both have their advantages over each other and should both be considered in order to give you the best results. Firstly if you decide to let everyone know that you are looking to sell your company the word will get round much faster so that there is a much bigger chance that you will find the buyer much quicker. However, there are certain disadvantages that you may foresee if you globally let everyone know that your New South Wales business is for sale. One of these could be the fact that people would avoid using you because many people give up with their companies as they are selling them. This mainly depends on what type of business you are running, if you are doing something such as web hosting then people may look elsewhere because they cannot afford to have any downtime or lack in customer services while the transfer is taking place. More times than not this wouldn’t happen but not many people would like to take the risk as it could make them lose money.

If you feel this could potentially happen if you were to let your customers know that you plan on selling your company you could go for the private sale route. This is keeping it quite so that people won’t even know that the business has changed hands, thousands of companies are doing this every year and no one can tell the difference because it still operates in exactly the same way as it did before. The major disadvantage of this method is that it can take a lot longer to actually find a potential buyer because you cannot broadly advertise the fact that your New South Wales business is for sale in the normal places people advertise businesses for sale. Don’t get me wrong, there are still many different places that you can advertise it for sale so this method could be better for you, it jut requires more research but the you still would go about it the same way in the fact of giving the required information to potential buyers. If you can, you should get all your revenue figures beforehand because everyone would want to see proof of these before they invest any money in the company.

If you feel overwhelmed finding people and talking to them then there are methods which you can use to make it easier and more comfortable for yourself, professional advice can be found in many places. These will help you keep everything quiet and recommend the best places to advertise the fact that you are willing to sell up. Another hard task they can help you with is the asking price of your company, they will be able to look through the information and come up with an unbiased figure that is both fair to yourself and the buyer.

Make sure you consider advertising your company on the internet as well as locally, this will give you a better chance of finding genuine buyers which will no doubt speed the whole process up. It could also mean that you get more money than expected if you have people desperately trying to buy your business. Don’t be afraid of letting people know the reason for selling and don’t try to come up with false reasons as this may show and would deter many people from buying from you.