Why a Successful Entrepreneur’s Business Progress Never Stops
Published June 17, 2009 | 
“Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.”–Thomas J. Watson
Successful entrepreneurs share a trait that is one of the secrets to their success, and many of you reading this might already know the secret that frequently separates highly successful businesses from less successful ones, and that is the simple fact that no matter how successfully developed the business becomes, how much profit the business makes, how many customers or clients it serves, and how well respected the business is, it will always seek to improve the business operations, processes, market strategies, technology, and services in order to continue growing as it looks beyond the horizon and develops its next mission.
A successful business should never be finished or complete as it continues down the path of improvement in order to reach new goals and objectives it has set for itself, even as new goals and objectives have been developed and stand ready to replace the most recently attained ones, and successful entrepreneurs that understand, have the drive to look for innovation to meet new opportunities they have identified in the market, a process that repeats itself over and over throughout the long and successful life of the business. Once again, successful entrepreneurs understand that progress is necessary and must continue for a business to attain success as measured by goals and objectives as part of greater missions that fulfill the vision of the entrepreneurs.
When we look at progress and what it means as part of the business environment, it is the continued advancement toward a better and more complete business condition through an enhanced development, and this makes perfect sense, as it seems that successful businesses are always in the progressive mode of continued advancement and enhanced development of the business to meet the goals it has established to be successful, and without this there would be no success, or success would be short-lived at the very least.
If you as an entrepreneur operate a business and have been doing it for any length of time, you most likely know more today about who you are, what you do, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, the likes of the customers and clients you serve, how you serve them, and improvements that need to be made, then you did when you first started. Hopefully, you have been able to take what you’ve learned and apply it to your business by changing what doesn’t work and improving processes, enhancing what works and improving processes and procedures that are incomplete, and repeating the progress over and over, as this is one of the secrets to entrepreneurial success.
If you are able to see and understand this as you grow in your business, and you become wiser and realize everything is always progressing, everything is always changing, and you and your business must be part of the progress and change, then it becomes easy to see that successful businesses are always in progress and it becomes clear, that how could they not be?
So in the end you have to ask yourself the real question of whether your business is in progress, and whether you as the entrepreneur understand the secret and honor it in your entrepreneurial endeavors. Do you have a plan for making changes and adjustments as you learn they are needed, and if not, why not? And if not, it is time to develop a “strategic plan” that includes how your business will continue to progress and grow in order to meet the mission, and objectives and goals that you establish is part of the plan.
Estimating Market Size
Published May 3, 2009 | 
When launching a business into the marketplace is not a good idea to assume that just because you show up the market gets bigger, since most of your business will come at the expense or loss of market share from the competition, or from their slice of the pie, and the real question is, of course, just how big is the pie? Remember, and market segmentation, any market niche worth considering must be measurable and substantial enough to be profitable, and to test this criteria you must estimate the size of your chosen market segment, also, most formal business plans require you to provide some estimation of the size of market you are targeting as most investors will want some answer to this important question.
Another reason to estimate the size of your market is to test for market saturation and market saturation occurs when there are too many competitors competing for the same market segment, and one way to measure this is to do a peer comparison of like markets and see how many establishments per how many customers there are and to make a correlation to your market.
A good place to begin is with the economic census produced by the US Census Bureau, but before you start, however, you will need to determine the geographic scope of your market including your market’s geographic boundary, and next you would need to know your business NAICS code, and with that information in hand, you are ready to go to the economic census online.
Another way you can estimate the size of your market is to use population figures of your targeted market multiplied by the average expenditure or amounts for the market, and this information is also available at the US Census Bureau’s website.
Another important factor that should be considered when developing your market size and share analysis is the underlying population required to support your business and generally this calculation is also based upon statewide data, and you can approximate this by dividing the population by the number of establishments which will equal the average number of people per business. When you compare the number of potential customers per establishment in your local area to the state average you will be able to tell if there are enough consumers to support your business.
Another method of evaluating your potential and the market is to calculate a breakeven analysis to determine what percentage of the market’s population you would have to capture in order to succeed.
Calculating the size of a business or industrial marketplace is a little trickier, and the best way to approach this problem is by using the Business Expenditure Survey report from the Census Bureau to find what you’re customer spend on your kind of product and services, and using this survey you need to find the business market your business is targeting and the closest respective expenses.
It is important to realize that there is a significant amount of information you can find on the Internet specific to your industry and location that can give you a very close approximation for the size of their market and the average revenue of the industry in your specific state, along with average expenses that you can use to determine benchmark information for comparison purposes when projecting your target market size and its potential revenue.
This information can help you determine whether it is feasible or not to pursue the business project based on both assumptions and market information and all of this information should be included in detail as part of your business plan.
Housing Prices Continue Downword
Published March 31, 2009 |
A question that continues to be asked by millions globally is where and when the “recession” will hit bottom, and the answers are as many as the number of people asking the questions, and either no one wants to be completely honest in their response, due to their private agendas, or for fear of causing panic, but the truth is that there exists natural laws of the market that will determine where the bottom is. Now when the bottom will be hit is a different story, because when there are huge manipulations like the ones currently being engaged by the U.S. and other governments, they only serve to delay the natural flow of events that affect the market.
The market naturally seeks the “real value” of assets over time and for the past approximately 20 years there have been a lot of shenanigans played by the financial market through financial instruments created to be as it turns out, “pseudo-assets” with high risk and potentially no “real value”, except on paper, but as these instruments or “pseudo-assets” were turned over multiple times by players throughout the global finance market, the “asset value” continued to rise, especially in the housing market.
And guess what? When the players including members of the U.S. Congress decided it was a good thing to allow consumers to buy houses without jobs, equity injection, and no proven sources of income, the market really heated up with the real estate “flippers” flipping houses, condominiums, and any other property they could get their hands on left and right. The resulting phenomenal rise in housing prices amazed everyone by zooming into uncharted territory never seen before in locations throughout the world, but especially in the United States, and it seemed like a perfect world for everyone.
However, as with all “house of cards” the weak cards that represented the property owners in over their heads because their real income wasn’t enough to make scheduled mortgage payments, started to fall, slowly at first, and then like a snowball rolling downhill, faster and faster, and it continues to grow even today. Asset values are currently falling at an alarming rate, as the market seeks the natural level of “real value” determined by multiple market factors including supply, demand and other factors.
The level of “asset value” for housing in the U.S. is still about double where it will most likely settle once all factors are considered, and all the measures taken by governments will only extend the time it takes for the market to settle out, and the cost to tax payers will be extreme. Remember, it took a very long time to build the “house of cards”, and for this “perfect storm” of circumstances to develop. So it will take a long time for the market to settle out and right itself, and as long as the players that created the “house of cards” are still in power, manipulating and pulling strings for their handlers and special interest groups, the market will remain troubled and continue to negatively impact the economy.
Finally, what is even more ominous is the fact that commercial real estate has yet to feel the full impact of the market finding the natural level of “asset value” for the commercial sector.
Selecting Your Target Markets
Published March 22, 2009 |
The division of a market into different homogenous groups of consumers is known as market segmentation, and rather than offer the same marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion) to vastly different customers, market segmentation makes it possible for firms to tailor the marketing mix for specific target markets, thus better satisfying customer needs, while not all elements of the marketing mix are necessarily changed from one segment to the next. For example, in some cases only the promotional campaigns would differ.
Most small businesses cannot afford to market to the general mass-market customer, as resources are just too limited. Instead, it must focus its efforts, communications, and resources on those segments of the market that offer the most promise for the business and that have been neglected by larger competitors, and then niche strategy aims at making its successful practitioners immune to competition and unlikely to be challenged. Successful practitioners of market segmenting take the cash and let the credit go, as they wallow in their anonymity.
A market segment should be measurable, accessible by communication and distribution channels, and these methods can be done by mailings, telephone calls, and personal interactions to name a few.
Data is gathered in the observational approach by watching people in either a natural or artificial setting, and the survey approach is best suited for those who are looking to gather descriptive information, and the experimental approach involves selecting two groups, giving them different treatments, and then measuring the effects.
With mail questionnaires you can collect a fairly large amount of information at a low cost, and telephone interviewing cost more than mail questionnaires that can provide more information quickly. Individual interviewing is another way of gathering information, and this type of interviewing may require an incentive to get people to participate, and gathering a group of people together to discuss certain topics with a trained interviewer is known as group interviewing.
When developing a questionnaire you must keep in mind to take your time to make sure that it is carefully developed and tested, carefully choose your wording of each question, the sequence of the questions is always important, and make sure that all the questions included in the survey are necessary.
Interpreting data can easily become overwhelming if you are not careful, so make sure that you report only major findings, and do not use too many statistical analyses just for the sake of using a. Put your findings into simple terms so that even someone not familiar with the survey will be able to understand.