The TecBlast Blog

It’s easy to lose sight of what needs to be communicated to prospective investors when writing the various sections of a business plan. Successful business owners/entrepreneurs use each section of their business plan to work up interest, to present arguments and, most important, to build trust and confidence.

How To Earn The Trust Of Skeptical Investors…

Usually some sort of upfront investment precedes starting or expanding a business, whether it be time, energy or cash. If you plan to raise cash from investors, you must get prospective investors comfortable with putting their money into your hands.

To start you must understand that investors simply want to select the best investments, period. This means choosing businesses that earn a high enough rate of return on investment to offset the risk of the investment. That said, deciding what is a good opportunity is an investor’s number one challenge.

That’s why investors thrive on information. Good information - good decisions, bad information - bad decisions. But, investors are often asked to invest funds with little reliable information. This, combined with the difficulty of deciphering the information they do get about various investment alternatives, leaves them fearful of getting into an awful deal and skeptical of the deals being presented.

To get comfortable with an investment, prospective investors want to see results and evidence. They want to be educated about the investment opportunity and the investment options available to them. But, they won’t accept this education at face value; they want to see the evidence that supports it. Even for niche businesses.

Investors use this education to expand their research and use the evidence they gather to develop their expectations. In the end, investors merely want the opportunity that they select to match the expectations they have developed.

When investors object to an investment the objection is usually of the “Educate me…” type. Tell me your story, show me your numbers, and then prove it. Prospective investors want information that they can validate, options and risks that they can see, and to be educated about your specific business. They want to hear why you and your team are the ones that can produce the projected results.

If your business plan “educates” prospective investors on these issues, you’ll win their trust. When that happens, its time to…

Build Investor Confidence - Show Why Customers Will Award Their Business To You Rather Than Other Service Providers…

Investors invest money in businesses based on expected cash flows. To create cash flow, you must first win business. That’s why it is important for your business plan to show investors why customers will award their business to you at a price that allows investors to earn an acceptable return on their investment.

When potential investors begin evaluating a service business plan, they are likely to be skeptical of your ability to consistently win business. In their minds your prospects need someone to do something for them. Something that your customers either don’t know how to do, don’t want to do, or don’t have to do.

Service provider business plans must convince potential investors of two things. First, that the customer’s pain of not having this “something” done or the pleasure of having this “something” done is so great that it compels the prospect to act. Second, that the customer is willing to pay to have this “something” done.

Potential investors in service type businesses expect that your customers are feeling confused about which service provider is the best at providing the solution you offer. They may also perceive your market as saturated with so much information…some of it true and some of it not so true…that customers are finding it difficult to decipher the information they have about each solution.

As a result, investors in service type businesses often picture skeptical customers with fresh memories of negative service experiences. Moreover, they suspect that your potential customer’s biggest fear is getting awful service.

To overcome this, your business plan must show investors how you plan to successfully educate prospects about your solution and convince them that you can deliver the expected results. It must present the evidence you’ll use to convince customers that you will do the job right, do it right the first time, and won’t fix what doesn’t need to be fixed. It has to explain how you will educate the prospect about the service and the options available to them in a way that they will understand and trust.

Your plan must convince investors that you can win over prospective customers who are likely recovering from a negative experience in your market space…customers who have been promised the ultimate solution only to be disappointed. It must provide details about how the principles and techniques chosen to market your service enable customers to view you as honest. It has to help investors see how the chosen delivery method for your service ensures customer satisfaction.

The business plan must also convince investors that customers can verify the service results you promise and that prospects can easily compare the results to other alternatives. This proves to investors that prospects can determine the superiority of your service and it shows them how you differentiate your services from other service providers.

Points For Service Providers To Address In A Business Plan

In summary, if you’re a service provider trying to attract investors, these are the points you must address in your business plan:

• How and why prospects will pay you to do something for them rather than your competitors.
• How and why they will have less hassles and it will be easier for them to do business with you rather than your competitors.
• How and why customers will trust doing business with you rather than your competition.

When you address these points in a business plan with verifiable evidence to back them, potential investors will have to conclude that they would be foolish to invest in any other service provider but you.

Mike Elia is a chief financial officer and an advisor to venture capitalists and leverage buyout specialists. His business plan ebook “Business Plan Secrets Revealed” shows how to make your business the most appealing investment choice to venture capitalists, bankers, and other business investors. For his free business plan guide click here.

Writing a business plan for your Solo Entrepreneur business doesn’t have to be a daunting project. If you can answer 10 straightforward questions about your business, you can be ready to go.

The key to success is to answer all of the questions in enough depth that if a friend asked you to invest in this business, you’d say yes. Most importantly, make sure you record your business plan somehow…whether you write it by hand, type it into your computer, or put it on stickie notes on your wall. Keep it someplace handy where you can refer to it when you are making important business decisions. And, make sure you review it monthly–or, even better, weekly–and update it at least annually.

1. Your Dreams: What do you want your business to provide for you? (think time, money, freedom, who you work with) Be specific–how much money, how many hours, when do you want to “retire”.
   
   
   
2. Customers: Who are your customers and what do they want/need?
   
   
   
3. Your Products and Services: What products/services will you provide to meet customer’s needs?
   
   
   
4. Markets: Where are your customers and what do you know about them as a group? “Where” might be geographic, it might be what kind of places they hang out, or where they go to find products or services like yours. What is their age, income, gender, hobbies, family structure, etc.
   
   
   
5. Your Style: How will you reach customers and what will you say? Your methods of reaching customers needs to match with where your customers are–and with a message that they can relate to.
   
   
   
6. Competitors: Where else are your customers likely to get this need met? Find out all you can about how your competitors price, market, and provide service.
   
   
   
7. Your Uniqueness: How will your product/service meet customer’s needs differently than your competitors? Consider how your personal uniqueness impacts that.
   
   
   
8. Your Abilities: Of the skills necessary to run your business, what do you do well, and what do you need help with?
   
   
   
9. External Resources: What people/technology/services will support you in the skills you need help with?
   
   
   
10. Fulfilling your Dreams: How will your business provide the kind of working environment you desire, both in how much time you spend, how you perform your work, and how much money you make? Here’s where the rubber meets the road–make sure you can show how you will sell X amount of product or service at Y price, cover your expenses, and reach the goals you set in 1. above.

Once you can answer all these questions, have it reviewed by some trusted, experienced professionals who will give you objective feedback. Consider a business coach, as one such resource.

Copyright 2004, Terri Zwierzynski

Terri Zwierzynski is dedicated to the success of lifestyle-inspired Solo Entrepreneurs. She is the CEI (Conductor of Extraordinary Ideas) at http://www.Solo-E.com and the author of 136 Ways To Market Your Small or Solo Business. Terri is an MBA honors graduate from UNC-Chapel Hill, and has been working with solo entrepreneurs since 2001. You can reach Terri at http://www.TerriZ.com

Find more articles like this at http://www.Solo-E.com, the lifestyle-inspired online learning and connection community. Visit now to receive a free copy of our special report, The Four Secrets of Solo Entrepreneur Success, plus a complimentary 30-day membership.

I enjoyed the Martha Stewart apprentice show (not sure why “America”
didn’t like it). Even the frustrating parts of the show caught my
attention, in an inquisitive, “here’s something to learn” kind of way.

Week after week, Martha’s apprentice nominees started a new project
by gathering with their team to come up with ideas of how to
implement their new task. Each team wanted to come up with something
that was better than the other team so that they would be declared the winner.

And week after week, I observed mismanaged brainstorming and evaluating,
resulting in frustrated team members and lukewarm ideas.

What did they keep doing wrong?

One week, team member Leslie from the (constantly) winning team came
over to the losing team to lead them as their project manager. It took
this team too long to perform the tasks of brainstorming and evaluating.
During the brainstorming session, they kept evaluating. When they finally
got to the evaluating part of the task in order to choose one idea, they
kept brainstorming new ideas! Getting to the point of choosing one idea
took them 6 hours, when it should have taken about 2 hours.

On another episode, Sarah, as the project manager, decided that her
team members would start out by brainstorming silently.
WHAT?

What in the world is brainstorming silently? I’ll tell you
what it is: It’s nothing!

The basic idea of brainstorming is that everyone gets to hear everyone
else’s ideas, and that ideas generate more ideas! In other words,
when people hear other peoples’ ideas, it gets their thoughts going, and
more ideas appear. So, even bad ideas generate good ideas!

And that leads me to the problem I’ve seen from Martha’s apprentice candidates
over and over. It is the same problem repeated in millions of businesses
worldwide. While they’re brainstorming ideas, they’re evaluating ideas;
and when they’re evaluating ideas, they’re brainstorming even more ideas.

No wonder it takes too long to get through this process!

Here is a very simple solution to this chaotic problem:

• The brainstorming phase is for idea generation only!
• When you are brainstorming, there is no evaluation of ideas allowed.
• During brainstorming, there is no development of ideas allowed.
• Schedule a set amount of time for brainstorming.
• Appoint someone as the “scribe” who writes all ideas on either a flip chart or a white board.
• Even bad ideas get put on the list (because “even bad ideas generate good ideas” ).
• Once the brainstorming session is over, the evaluation stage begins.
• During evaluation, there is no more brainstorming.
• Schedule a set amount of time for evaluation.
• First, weed out the ideas that are bad, goofy, distasteful, and just won’t work (according to the group).
• Try to whittle the list down to the two best ideas (without developing the ideas yet).
• Once you have your two best ideas, spend a set amount of time brainstorming (yes, again!) how each of these two main ideas could be developed (and, again, only ideas and more ideas at this time).
• Evaluate one of the main ideas (and all of the development ideas you just thought of that go along with it).
• Evaluate the second main idea (and all of its development ideas).
• Decide between the two which you are going to implement!

If teams would focus on this method for brainstorming and evaluation,
they would come up with better ideas and better ways to implement those ideas.
Also, they would no longer feel that this process is a heavy, mind-numbing burden.
Rather, they would feel that this process is fun, invigorating, and challenging
(in the good way!).

Read on to my article titled “How to Brainstorm with a Large Team” (also available
at EzineArticles.com) to find out how to do brainstorming with a large team.
Even if you have a team of less than 20 people, the additional ideas will help
you to use each individual team member’s talents and skills to generate the
best ideas possible.

© 2006 Borgeson Consulting, Inc.

Glory Borgeson is a business coach and consultant, and the president of
Borgeson Consulting, Inc. She works with two groups of people:
small business owners (with 500 employees or less) to help them increase
their Entrepreneurial IQ, which leads to increased profit and
decreased stress; and with executives in the
“honeymoon phase” of a new position (typically the first two years)
to coach them to success. Top athletes have a coach; why not you?

Click here for Borgeson Consulting, Inc.

This article was originally published in The Business Express, Borgeson’s
free monthly ezine. You may subscribe by clicking here:
Ezine

Depending on how you use it, email can either be a great communication tool that saves you time and keeps you from being interrupted; or the world’s greatest timewaster. The fact you’re reading this means you already understand the power of e-mail to communicate ideas, educate, and build skills that will benefit your business. But if you find yourself constantly stopping what you’re doing to read the e-mail that just came through, or writing to friends when you know you’re meant to be working, you could do with trying out our three top e-mail time management tips for today.

1. SCHEDULE TIME FOR E-MAIL

Many people work with their e-mail program running in the background the entire time they’re on their PC, which means they get immediate notification when an e-mail comes it. Unfortunately, no matter how good your intentions and how strong your willpower, once you get that notification, it’s hard to ignore. You want to check and see what the message that came through was - after all, it might be important!

In reality, unless you’re expecting a specific message from someone that you’ll to need to act on immediately, few e-mails are important enough to sit on the edge of your chair waiting for. When you’re trying to focus on something else, stopping to read e-mail that’s just come in is simply a distraction. And you don’t just lose the time it takes to read the e-mail - every time you stop, you lose your flow in your work, and lose more time getting back into it again when you’re finished with the e-mail.

Instead of always keeping your e-mail running in the background, consider scheduling an hour each morning, and another hour in the afternoon to check e-mail, organise it (see below), and respond to the most urgent ones. Then schedule time two or three times a
week to respond to the non-urgent ones as well - otherwise you’ll find you never quite manage to get around to them.

2. ORGANISE YOUR E-MAILS BEFORE YOU START RESPONDING TO THEM

The usual way to respond to e-mails is ‘as they come in’, but this can be a time management death trap. Unless you take time to get an overview of what’s there - what’s important and what isn’t, what’s urgent and what isn’t - you’ll be likely to miss dealing with important, time-critical e-mails, in favour of actioning things that could easily have waited.

Before you think about responding to anything, get an overview of what’s come in and separate it into three groups: e-mail that can be deleted without reading (spam, business opportunities or products you’re not interested in); those that just need to be read (e.g. newsletters, announcements, articles, course instalments), and those that actually need responding to.

Start by deleting everything you don’t have to read. Then, for the e-mails that only require reading, set up subfolders to organise them. The idea is to make them easy to find them later, when you’ve scheduled time to deal with non-urgent e-mail. Different people will work better with different filing systems, so choose something that fits the way you work.

Finally, glance through all of the e-mail that’s left - the messages that are going to require you to respond, and make a note of what needs responding to by when. Order it in terms of how quickly you’ll need to respond (this morning? today? two days?), and what the consequences are if you don’t manage it. Usually, e-mails from customers, prospects or team members will take ultimate precedence - but only you can know what the order of priority is from there. The key thing is to know what’s there, and respond in a deliberate order, rather than just working your way through it and hoping you get everything done.

3. HAVE A REGULAR “UNSUBSCRIPTION” FEST

E-zines can be great sources of free information, tips and tricks. With so many publishers offering you valuable information, it’s easy to end up subscribing to more newsletters than you have time to read. Once a month (or more often, if you need to), look at all the e-zines you’ve subscribed to and see whether there are any that just
don’t seem to be offering more value than the time it takes your to read them any more.

If you find any, politely unsubscribe from them. You may, especially if you’ve been a subscriber for any length of time, want to include a short e-mail to the publisher, letting them know why you’re unsubscribing. Most of them will really appreciate this, but it’s not necessary unless you want to. Generally, publishers understand (better than anyone else usually) the volumes of e-mail the average person online deals with, and they’d far prefer you unsubscribe to their newsletter once it’s no longer useful, rather than that you stay subscribed without having time to read it.

However, be aware that any *good* newsletter will have an unsubscribe link or e-mail address to contact, and clear instructions on how to use it. Please use this, rather than taking the easy way out and reporting the sender as spam. You may not realise it, but this causes huge problems for the publisher, who’s only trying to provide a service for you. Do you really want to create legal problems and possibly shut the publisher down just because you didn’t make use of the unsubscribe link they’ve provided?

So there you have it - three simple tips for getting on top of your e-mail. Organise your time, organise your e-mail, and organise your e-zine subscriptions. Put them into practice and see how much time you can free up for yourself!

Tanja Gardner is a Counsellor with the Internet’s #1 Personal Development site, Success University (http://optimumlife.succcessuniversity.com). For more articles like this, visit her blog at http://online-work-from-home.blogspot.com/ or subscribe to her FREE newsletter at mailto:optimumbus@aweber.com with “subscribe” in the subject header.

Being in control of your time is important if you are a hard worker, with a family, and have other needs and requirements to meet. When you are not in control of your time, you success is at risk. To be a successful individual in life, you should not feel frustrated or stress. Nor should you have doubts, fears, or a feeling of no direction or motivation. This type of situation often leads to stress, which is proven to be one of the direct causes of lack of time management and control. Procrastination is often the leading cause that stumps slackers from becoming successful.

However, other factors can contribute to why someone is not managing their time appropriately. In my last article I spoke about goals, but I think it is just as important to inform the audience how being in control of their time, makes all the difference in the world, even with individuality. Our individuality requires us to feel good, have a good self-esteem, and quality level of self-confidence. When we are not in control, we loose control. The fact is, the government and law already takes a measure of our control out of our hands, so control is a struggle we have to obtain that suits our individuality. Managing time means we need to set goals that we can achieve and work hard to achieve those goals.

Time management also means that we have to cut the procrastination and get our body and minds motivated to clean up our act. We can start by organizing our home and office, and then work toward a list that will direct us where we are headed each day. The rule of thumb is “Don’t put off, what you can do today.”

After our priorities are in order, the rest will work smoothly. All of us have the capacity to achieve and be successful. All of us have the ability to take control of our lives, and stop doubting our abilities to be successful. The ability lies within our minds, and when we take charge of our brains, (Mind over matter), we have the ability to go to any level of achievement we desire. Now before you fire up those barrels, make sure you got your priorities in order, since this is a part of the key to managing time and taking control of your life.

Negative energy is a charge that sends out negative results, so you might want to take a few notes on how to think positive if you are a pessimistic. I wanted to bring this point out, which we will talk more about later in a different article, but it is the root of all evil in its own way. Positive thinkers often look forward to success, while negative thinkers are often reluctant to take hold of a good thing, and that includes their own control. This is a problem since time management is often difficult for these types of thinkers. In conclusion we can see time management includes being in control!

For more great free resources on how to manage your time visit Gabae Time Management.

Also for more informative articles on time management visit Gabae Time Management Articles.

“If people have a basic understanding of right from wrong, possess a strong desire to better themselves and persist in there cause, they can break the chain of any negative environment.”
Dave Pelzer

Let’s examine the world of difficult people in an organization. As the leader, you think you are in control. However, you interact daily with difficult people. You want to be nice, but you know these people are only “Hell Raisers.” They stir up problems and create a negative attitude in the organization.

Is conflict good or bad? I wouldn’t conclude that conflict was good or bad. It depends on the person’s perspective. If you are the target for this conflict, it’s probably not
good (at least in the short-term). Organizational conflict is natural, however. You can find conflict anywhere…well, even in a religious institution. The Apostle Paul had to chastise the Corinth church for its division. Organ and Bateman, organizational behavior gurus, give three causes for organizational conflict which are: a) need for joint decision-making, b) goal differences, and c) differences in perceptions.

That’s a great question. Jesus Christ is the head, and the church is the body. The body parts are interdependent. We don’t always agree. Christians should expect conflict. God rewards His people after these tests. James 1:12 reads, “Blessed is a man who endures trials, because when he passes the test he will receive the crown of life…” I accept the conflict (good or bad). William James was quoted as saying, “Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.” As a leader, maintain a positive attitude but remember congenitally belligerents love to fight. Miller argues however that congenitally belligerent people must be stopped and not take over the organization. I’ve seen people make personal threats. Let me state this group is small but noisy. God causes us to love each other. My pastor is long-suffering about the matter. It’s a difficult situation for most leaders, however. Have you given up the fight with difficult people? Gain courage and save your organization today!

References
Miller, C. (1995). The Empowered Leader. United States of America: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Organ, D. & Bateman, T. (1991). Organizational Behavior. Homewood, IL and Boston, MA: Irwin.

Daryl D. Green has published over 100 articles in the field of decision-making (personal and organizational), leadership, and organizational behavior. Mr. Green is also the author of two acclaimed books, Awakening the Talents Within and My Cup Runneth Over. He is a columnist, lecturer, professor, and management consultant. Mr. Green has a BS in engineering and a MA in organizational management. Currently, he is pursuing a doctoral degree in strategic leadership. For more information, please email Mr. Green at pmla@att.net or visit his website at http://www.darylgreen.org.