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Happy Holidays to all!

A Fresh Look at Getting into Business

Stumbled with an interesting post entitled "Finding Your Business Idea". It was written by an author, motivational speaker, entrepreneur and webmaster of http://www.financialfreedominspiration.com

The author said . . .

What has loving yourself got to do with finding your business idea? It’s got lots. By loving and nurturing yourself, you begin to find yourself likable, and good-to-knowable. It is like meeting a stranger in a party and getting on like house on fire. In the space of three hours, you can find out what the person does for a living, his likes and dislikes, maybe his dreams and hopes etc.

When you get to like you, you sure would like to get to know you. In the process of knowing you, your dreams and aspirations will come out. This forms the raw material of your business idea. And if you get to love you, you find it much easier to believe in you.

He then added . . .

Every God given skill, developed to expert level or excellence commands resources. You will be in high demand, worldwide. You will not look for money, money will look for you. The best footballer does not look for clubs to play, clubs look for them. The best actors don’t look for directors, directors look for them. The best writers don’t look for publishers, publishers look for them. The best engineers/accountants, you name it don’t look for jobs, jobs look for them. The best newspapers and magazines don’t look for advertisers, advertisers look for them. Need I say more?

Discover your God given skills/talents and abilities and develop it to expert level. If you can do that, you are in business. Be the best, and you will have the world at your feet. Find your niche, and excel.

Wow! Can't help but share it. This is really looking at how to be successful at a different fresh angle. Great!

Business Plan Help

Words of Wisdom
from Joey Concepcion:

"To all aspiring entrepreneurs, I wish you all the best as you consider starting something great. Again, do not be afraid to fail. Start small. Get the feel of it, like driving your first car."

5 minutes

source:adamq123
Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile.
Gary Ryan Blair
Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.
Mason Cooley
Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.
Milan Kundera
An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.
Dean Kamen

Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneur

Characteristics of an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs have many of the same character traits as leaders, similar to the early great man theories of leadership; however trait-based theories of entrepreneurship are increasingly being called into question. Entrepreneurs are often contrasted with managers and administrators who are said to be more methodical and less prone to risk-taking. Such person-centric models of entrepreneurship have shown to be of questionable validity, not least as many real-life entrepreneurs operate in teams rather than as single individuals. Still, a vast literature studying the entrepreneurial personality found that certain traits seem to be associated with entrepreneurs:

• David McClelland - primarily motivated by an overwhelming need for achievement and strong urge to build.
• Collins and Moore - tough, pragmatic people driven by the need of independence and achievement. They seldom are willing to submit to authority.
• Bird - mercurial ( that is, prone to insights, brainstorms, ingeniousness and resourcefulness), cunning, creative.
• Cooper, Woo, & Dunkelberg - argue that entrepreneurs exhibit extreme optimism in their decision-making processes.
• Busenitz and Barney - prone to overconfidence and over generalizations.
• Cole - found there are four types of entrepreneur: the innovator, the calculating inventor, the over-optimistic promoter, and the organization builder. The types are not related to personality but to the kind of opportunity the entrepreneur faces.
• Zhao & Seibert - meta-analysis (a statistical synthesis of previous research) showed that compared to managers, entrepreneurs score higher on Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience and lower on Neuroticism and Agreeableness. No difference was found for Extraversion.
• John Howkins - focused specifically on creative entrepreneurship. He found that entrepreneurs in the creative industries needed a specific set of traits including the ability to prioritize ideas over data, to be nomadic and to learn endlessly.
• The entrepreneur has an enthusiastic vision, the driving force of an enterprise.
• The entrepreneur's vision is usually supported by an interlocked collection of specific ideas not available to the marketplace The overall blueprint to realize the vision is clear, however, details may be incomplete, flexible, and evolving.
• The entrepreneur promotes the vision with enthusiastic passion.
• With persistence and determination, the entrepreneur develops strategies to change the vision into reality.
• The entrepreneur takes the initial responsibility to cause a vision to become a success.
• Entrepreneurs take prudent risks. They assess costs, market/customer needs and persuade others to join and help.
• An entrepreneur is usually a positive thinker and a decision maker.
• An entrepreneur is usually a positive listener and observer for solving problem or bringing new idea to the society.
• An entrepreneur has inspiration, motivation and sensibility.

Entrepreneurship Defined

Entrepreneurship is the practice of starting new organizations or revitalizing mature organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities. Entrepreneurship is often a difficult undertaking, as a vast majority of new businesses fail. Entrepreneurial activities are substantially different depending on the type of organization that is being started. Entrepreneurship ranges in scale from solo projects (even involving the entrepreneur only part-time) to major undertakings creating many job opportunities. Many "high value" entrepreneurial ventures seek venture capital or angel funding in order to raise capital to build the business. Angel investors generally seek returns of 20-30% and more extensive involvement in the business. Many kinds of organizations now exist to support would-be entrepreneurs, including specialized government agencies, business incubators, science parks, and some NGOs. Lately, there emerged more holisitc conceptualizations of entrepreneurship as a specific mindset resulting in entrepreneurial initiatives e.g. in the form of social entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, or knowledge entrepreneurship.

How Entrepreneurship Came About

The understanding of entrepreneurship owes much to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. In Schumpeter (1950), an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship forces "creative destruction" across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products and business models. In this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. Despite Schumpeter's early 20th-century contributions, the traditional microeconomic theory of economics has had little room for entrepreneurs in its theoretical frameworks (instead assuming that resources would find each other through a price system.)

Uncertainties of Entrepreneurship

For Frank H. Knight (1921) and Peter Drucker (1970), entrepreneurship is about taking risk. The behavior of the entrepreneur reflects a kind of person willing to put his or her career and financial security on the line and take risks in the name of an idea, spending much time as well as capital on an uncertain venture. Knight classified three types of uncertainty:

• Risk, which is measurable statistically (such as the probability of drawing a red-colored ball from a jar containing 5 red balls and 5 white balls).
• Ambiguity, which is hard to measure statistically (such as the probability of drawing a red ball from a jar containing 5 red balls but with an unknown number of white balls).
• True Uncertainty or Knightian Uncertainty, which is impossible to estimate or predict statistically (such as the probability of drawing a red ball from a jar whose number of red balls is unknown as well as the number of other colored balls).

The acts of entrepreneurship is often associated with true uncertainty, particularly when it involves bringing something really novel to the world, whose market never exists. Before the Internet, nobody knew the market for Internet-related businesses such as Amazon, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, etc. Only after the Internet emerged did people begin to see opportunities and market in that technology. However, even if a market already exists, such as the market for cola drinks (which has been created by Coca Cola), there is no guarantee that a market exists for a particular new player in the cola category. The question is, whether a market exists and if it exists for you.

The New Type of Entrepreneurship

The place of the disharmony-creating and idiosyncratic entrepreneur in traditional economic theory (which describes many efficiency-based ratios assuming uniform outputs) presents theoretic quandaries. William Baumol has added greatly to this area of economic theory and was recently honored for it at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Economic Association.

Entrepreneurship is widely regarded as an integral player in the business culture of American life, and particularly as an engine for job creation and economic growth. Robert Sobel published The Entrepreneurs: Explorations Within the American Business Tradition in 1974. Zoltan Acs and David B. Audrestch have produced an edited volume surveying Entrepreneurship as an academic field of research in the Handbook of Entrepreneurship Research: An Interdisciplinary Survey and Introduction.

In 2009, a new type of entrepreneurship emerged known as LILO entrepreneurship. LILO stands for "a little in, a lot out". This type of entrepreneurship does not use business plans; opting for an immediate try-out at minimal expense instead. LILO enterprises are set up with a minimum of start-up capital and are designed to operate at very low cost. Some of the companies set up via LILO entrepreneurship are no more costly than a hobby.

Advantages of Entrepreneurship

Every successful entrepreneur brings about benefits not only for himself/ herself but for the municipality, region or country as a whole. The benefits that can be derived from entrepreneurial activities are as follows:

• Opportunity for more financial gain
• Self-employment, more influence on business direction, offering improved job satisfaction and flexibility of the work force
• Employment for others, even in better jobs
• Development of more industries, especially in rural areas or regions disadvantaged by economic changes, (for example due to globalization effects)
• Encouragement of the processing of local materials into finished goods for domestic consumption as well as for export
• Income generation for increased economic growth
• Healthy competition to encourage introduction of higher quality products
• Availability of more goods and services
• Development of new markets
• Promotion of the use of modern technology in small-scale manufacturing to enhance higher productivity
• Encouragement of more researches/studies and development of modern machines and equipment for domestic consumption
• Development of entrepreneurial qualities and attitudes among potential entrepreneurs to bring about significant changes in the rural areas
• Freedom from the dependency on other jobs offered
  
• Ability to achieve greater accomplishments
• Reduction of the informal economy
• May bring about reduction in emigration of talent due to a better domestic entrepreneurship climate
• Better product pricing due to competition between entrepreneurs
  
• Management of resources directed to responding to consumer needs

Promotion of Entrepreneurship

Given the potential to support economic growth through entrepreneurship, it is the goal of the government of many countries to develop a culture of entrepreneurial thinking. This can be done in a number of ways: by integrating entrepreneurship into education systems, legislating to encourage risk-taking and national campaigns. An example of the latter is the United Kingdom's Enterprise Week, which was launched in 2004.

Outside of the political world, research has been conducted on the presence of entrepreneurial theories in doctoral economics programs. Dan Johansson, fellow at the Ratio Institute in Sweden, finds such content to be sparse. He fears this will dilute doctoral programs and fail to train young economists to analyze problems in a relevant way.

Many of these initiatives have been brought together under the umbrella of the Global Entrepreneurship Week, a worldwide celebration and promotion of youth entrepreneurship, which started in 2008.

Source: Wikipedia