Brilliant Business Ideas – Avoid Opportunity Greed
Published June 20, 2011 | 
How to Avoid Opportunity Greed
The “great battle” that faces entrepreneurs each day is to filter through many potentially great ideas and then to decide 
which ones are worthy of pursuit.
I have seen businesses fail regularly from ‘opportunity greediness.’ Understand that when you as an entrepreneur decide to do even one too many ideas you overextend yourself and the whole thing collapses, sometimes slowly… sometimes quickly, but the whole thing collapses.
If you haven’t experienced this as an entrepreneur yet, what happens as an entrepreneur is that you gain a group of friends who are always quick to toss around their ideas and without fail strongly suggest that you get involved with them, but your best answer should more often than not be no. Never forget that you have to remain clearly focused with your own idea.
Whenever you are presented with additional opportunities or challenged with a decision that could have an enormous game-changing impact. You should always ask yourself if the projected results and conclusions are aligned with your core values, beliefs and way of thinking. If the answer is “yes they are,” then you will have made certain that you are not straying from your true course, remaining clear and focused on the achievement of your established objectives and goals. 
If they aren’t, you may most certainly be setting up conditions for conflict and ultimate failure.
I have found it can also help create greater understanding within yourself to honestly evaluate why you tend to react certain ways whenever an opportunity presents itself to you. If you take the time to investigate and reach a clear understanding of your initial reaction, which is usually an emotionally-driven knee-jerk response, you then are completely able to allow yourself to pause, take a step back, and honestly evaluate the situation in an objective manner.
Finally, by doing these things, you will gain more clarity, and make more enlightened choices that will be in keeping with you intention of being the most successful entrepreneur at whatever you choose to do.
Brilliant Business Ideas – Check Your Passion
Published June 6, 2011 | Always Check Your Passion’s Enthusiasm
Many, many entrepreneurs start businesses that they unconditionally believe in. Realizing that starting their specific business isn’t surefire way to make a lot of money, they recognize and understand that their goal is not to do it just for the money.
To their core they believe in both themselves and each of the people on their team. They share passions for doing what they do. You can carry out your market research that you would find in any Business 101 course, but ultimately at the finish line you need to check your passion and enthusiasm.
Always make sure to regularly ask the critical question, “Do I believe in this? Do I have passion for what I’m doing? Does my team share the same passion?”
You have to find YOUR niche, but more importantly YOU have to believe in the business and endeavors, and in reality determine if you have the passion to actually see it through. YOU have to get up every morning to operate the business. If true passion doesn’t exist, when hard times hit the weak will always fold without question.
You must understand clearly that when you choose to open a business or franchise simply on the predicate that someone you know is doing well at it, you increase the likelihood that you will meet with failure. It’s the same as if you enter a line of business because your brother-in-law made a lot of money in the same business last year, then your odds of living an unsatisfied life is greatly increased. 
And when you select a college major based solely on satisfying your parents, you increase the risk of becoming bored instead of ENERGIZED by your classes.
You need to understand too that starting a business is loaded with both hurdles and setbacks (sounds like life). But if you’re following the inner voice of your passion, the very thoughts that won’t leave you alone, any failure you experience is never final.
I know many entrepreneurs who eventually have the great satisfaction of seeing their ideas become successful realities, but only after facing and overcoming many hurdles and setbacks. 
The energy of their inner-passions would not let them quit, but rather kept them going and strong in the belief they would reach and accomplish the dreams of their passions.
Remember to pay close attention to what you really love doing. Don’t ever let your passions die. Embrace them, revel in them, and wisely use the strongest passions to stand apart from the crowd of entrepreneurs and their businesses in the local, national, and global markets. Always follow your heart and not the crowd.
Brilliant Business Ideas – Business Ideas
Published June 2, 2011 | Business Ideas
There is one thing that almost everyone in the world has in common with each other, that we all have a few good ideas and maybe even a dream or two we’d love to test out because we just know it would be the greatest idea since sliced bread. Of course, the really good ones are real gems of innovation and creativity like Google or the iPhone. And then there are the amazingly not so good ones like the “Segway” which even though start out good or even great, and eventually take a short nosedive off a high cliff, or in reality never make it past the “Have I got a great idea for you!” phase.
Let’s just say you think you actually have a great innovative idea that may be worth turning into a company. After you have a chance to get it started, it might even generate some revenue and decent positive cash flow. 
The question becomes “How do you decide if that idea is worth pursuing?”
Understand that most creative minds and entrepreneurial-types constantly have several business ideas filtering through their mind at any given time. The key is they are able to filter these results and limit pursuit to those ideas that have the greatest probabilities of being most successful.
As the filtering goes it may be a good idea to cancel an idea if there is no valid target market, if there is no feasible revenue stream, enormous barriers to entry, no way to compete on the same level with any competition you may have, or if you enter the market too late in the game to ever have a chance to catch up and be profitable.
You should be aware of and avoid common pitfalls including starting a business or trying out a business idea just because your friends like the idea. Keep in mind that your friends are your friends, and most likely biased in your favor no matter what, and ready to support you. But keep in mind that also when it comes time for them to dig deep in their pockets, make the purchase and put their money where their mouth is, they just may not like the idea as much as they originally did.
Great Web Entrepreneurs – You have Several Business Ideas
Published May 24, 2011 | Which One do You Go After?
These kinds of meetings are typically a lot of fun for everyone…and because they normally require extended time to cover everything, my voice endurance is tested near the end. Why, you may wonder? Because I tend to get excited making sure I cover all possibilities when answering question after question, especially about different types of businesses. Don’t get me wrong, because my voice can handle several similar meetings each day…which we are seeing more days like that in the current global economic realities.
The point being, I answered one really interesting question last week more than once and I wanted to share it with you. The question was, “I have more than 10 different business ideas; how do I decide which one to go after?”
First of all, this is an issue common to both new entrepreneurs who are still figuring out which of their business ideas to launch, and for entrepreneurs already in business who are trying to figure out which new idea presents the best of potential promising opportunities to go after.
So, while in the meeting I gave the criteria that entrepreneurs should be looking at when answering this question. Here are my top three favorite criteria:
First and foremost, which idea do YOU have the most passion for? To achieve success as an entrepreneur, you’re going to have to work hard, probably harder than you’ve ever worked before. 
The fact is that you’re going to enjoy the hard work the most, and reach the highest-level of success, but only if you go after the ideas that you are most passionate about.
Second, which idea presents the greatest leverage of strengths and skill-sets of both you and your team? Most sports fans will agree that Michael Jordan was without a doubt perhaps the greatest basketball player to ever play the game. But the lesson is that when he made a serious attempt at playing baseball, he was average at his best, and the main point to always remember and take to heart is that you will be the most successful when you do what you are naturally best and most gifted at. So, identify both your strengths and the strengths of your team members, and determine just which idea will best leverage all those strengths.
Third, which idea presents opportunities to achieve traction the fastest and without requiring outside capital? The next obvious question about capital is “Why?” You must clearly understand that raising capital is very hard work and in reality takes time, time that you could wisely use to grow your business. Likewise, it’s even a greater challenge to raise money when you don’t have the traction needed to prove that your business is going to be a success, that you have customer traction (i.e., customers have vote with their money and their valuable time to buy your products or services etc.).
You should generally always pursue the ideas that permit you to quickly achieve traction without any outside funding. This allows you to quickly enjoy some success, and leverage your position to more easily raise funding if needed later.
Finally, once you decide which the best idea is, you have to FORGET THE OTHERS. To truly enjoy the most success, you need to clearly focus on just one opportunity at a time. Remember, the idea is not nearly as important as the execution of the idea. Be sure to focus all of your efforts on precision execution of the idea you have chosen. Understand that once you and your team is able to successfully execute, and get to an exit event (i.e., cash out for millions), you will have plenty of opportunities to launch your many other new ideas.
Great Web Entrepreneurs! A Web Presence
Published May 19, 2011 | A Web Presence – Online Alternatives
For little or no cost, you could put your start-up on a third-party site. Here are some options:
- Business directories: Yelp.com, Manta.com, YellowPages.com
- Blog-hosting sites: WordPress.com, Tumblr.com, Blogger.com
- Marketplaces: Etsy.com, eBay.com, Overstock.com
- Content-hosting sites: Flavors.me, Weebly.com, Carbonmade.com, OtherPeoplesPixels.com
- Social-media sites: Facebook.com, Twitter.com, LinkedIn.com
Consumers also can find “3 Kids Bake House” at Manta.com, a directory made up of 65 million small businesses world-wide and networking site specifically for entrepreneurs. Manta offers a basic company listing for free including a short description, logo, your contact information and several links to external sites such as social-media profiles or even news coverage. Manta.com does charge for its special features including premium placement in its search results.
Many entrepreneurs haven’t had a website for several months and their business continues to grow, and there are just as many that despite not spending any money on advertising, expects to become profitable this summer.
For example, there are businesses that sell knitting and crochet supplies through Etsy.com, an online marketplace for both handmade and vintage goods that enjoys a sizeable market with more than eight million members. Etsy does charge vendors an extremely reasonable 20 cents to list an item for sale for four months, plus a 3.5% transaction fee on the final sale price.
Many entrepreneurs share the same experience by attempting to teach themselves how to build a website. But the task many times proves too challenging and unknowingly eats up valuable time that would be better spent on active marketing and building up inventories.
After learning from their experiences many plan on having a website as soon as they have both the time and money to set one up and keep it maintained. Until they do, the easiest and fastest way to keep their businesses growing is to use available websites already available that bring a extremely large market to their business with extensive traffic.
Some entrepreneurs are able to afford a company website early on through friends or relatives that are skilled in Web design. Even simple sites with limited pages can be quite effective with contact information and samples of products and services for sale.
It shows people the entrepreneurs can do the type of work or sell the products they are looking for, and by doing so their businesses can quickly become profitable.