Archive for the 'business' Category

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Starting your own business day 6 summary (14/04/09)

Published on April 21, 2009 in business. 0 Comments Tags: .

This class was the second day of financing. The emphasis was on balance sheets, double entry and how to charge for your product or service.

The most interesting part was actually trying to cost your product or service. The things that you need to factor in when calculating your workable hours are: holidays, travel, sick leave, meetings etc. These things coupled with the costs of labour, rent, insurance, rates, tax and other fees leaves you thinking that you need to charge as much as the market can bare without loosing out to the competition, just to break even is a fine balance to say the least.

There were some other interesting observations from the examples that we did. In the current climate it is really worth investigating if you should rent or buy the equipment that you need for your business.

It is obvious from a business perspective to function well involves having as much cash as possible…. this is very cliche but “Cash is King”, it is better to have a much longer credit time with any of your debtors whilst getting the money owed to you in as soon as you can, your bank balance will always look healthy, not to mention that you will have money should you need it.

Seems simple from the outset, in reality is it not that straightforward.

Starting your own business day 5 summary (7/04/09)

Published on April 16, 2009 in business. 0 Comments Tags: .

This class was entirely based on legal issues surrounding setting up your own business. There are various types of businesses that a person can setup and various differences between them, the main ones are : Sole Trader, Partnership & Company.

It is evident from the outset that setting up some parts of your business will require the services of a solicitor. It is always good to have a friend or family member here to save yourself some money.

The lecturer gave some excellent examples of partnerships that turned out to be costly, most notably The Smiths law suit, to be honest I never envisaged legal matters to be interesting but I was pleasantly surprised.

Patents, trademarks, & copyrights were discussed in detail. It appears that patents are time consuming to acquire and unless you have a really unique novel ideal you really need to consider if it is worth pursuing a patent.

There are many other things that people would need to consider: Premises, Rental, Employing people, contracts and terms of payments with consumers and customers (yes don’t forget these are different), this leaves me with lots of reading material and forms to go through.

Starting your own business day 4 summary (31/03/09)

Published on April 16, 2009 in business. 0 Comments Tags: .

Our second day of marketing, this is where we really got down to the nuts and bolts of what we should do to market our business. This included primary and secondary marketing, investigation and research i.e. competitors, competitive advantage, why would someone choose us over our competitors, what bodies are useful for starting up a business, not necessarily marketing: Ibec, Isme.

Some really good tips on questionnaires and examples of them out there: Google doc, Survey Monkey. These are usually a requirement for information to ultimately go into a business plan.

It was really impressed upon us is that referral’s are the best way to generate business. At long last I finally got to use some of the business cards - everyone seemed to like the simplicity of them.

Really liked some of the idea’s presented in this day of marketing, I am not going to give away too much, also the one to one session with the lecturer helped generate contacts, leads & angles that people would never have looked at.

One thing really clear from the session is that everyone is working lots of hours to get his/her business off the ground, but the question was posed:

Are we managing our time efficiently??

We should be setting smart goals, this seems trivial from the outset, but when it comes to actual time estimation… most people couldn’t give an accurate answer.

Starting your own business day 3 summary (24/03/09)

Published on March 29, 2009 in business. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Marketing, this was the class I was waiting for. For me this is the bread and butter of how to kick start & sell your business. We started out by looking at our products / services and seeing what makes us stand our from our competitors. The exercises were tough and although we all have great idea’s that sound fantastic in our own minds and to the immediate audience, it was time to cut to the chase:

Do people need it?

Due to the climate that we are in, it is not enough anymore to suggest that the people that want your product / service will make your business sustainable, want may or may not pay the bills, the people that need it will.

One thing more evident recently is that the service quality in general is on the increase, as people need the business. An important thing to note aswell is that you don’t have to have a ground breaking idea, you can always take an existing idea and put your own unique twist on it and do it better than the existing project. Do I hear you mentioning Apple Ipod?

Online marketing was impressed upon us as the key to successful promotion. Promoting yourself on Twitter, Bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogging, create your own website & other web based mediums gets yourself and your business well known. This is where I felt that the course lacked some detail.

How should you promote yourself on these mediums? Create a Facebook application? Launch a campaign in Bebo? Affiliate yourself with certain groups in LinkedIn? None of these were explained. If even to say that you should start a blog about your business would be putting people on the right track.

It was suggested that everyone look to Damien Mulley who is recogised as one of them most knowledgeable online marketers in Ireland . If I was to recommend anyone that I feel has the key to promoting themselves online and selling their service it would be Niall Harbison.

A couple of questions were posed about google ad words and increasing your hits in google and basically getting your business to the mecca of the top ranking site for certain keywords etc sadly the lecturer struggled a little with these questions…

There were more exercises to take home with us and hopefully the second talk on marketing will be more detailed.

Start your own Business day 2

Published on March 12, 2009 in business. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Starting your own business day 2 summary (10/03/09):

I guess I should have started this post on day 1, I will summarize it below. I decided to do the follow course on advice of a friend of mine because it is a similar course to what he has done.

It is a FETAC accredited course. In a nutshell we are going to cover how to setup and run your own business, everything from the business plan & marketing to sales etc.

Personally, I am hoping to gain an insight into how you would setup a business and make it sustainable, also meet entrepreneurs and mainly figure out how to market and sell your product / service. In my limited experience, software engineers can build anything, but when it comes to selling and marketing…..

We started with book keeping. The majority of the people of the room, myself included felt we were in accounting 101 and this is where we needed to be, i.e. how to keep your basic books and what should go into what ledger etc. To say that I don’t find accounting exciting is an understatement, but put simply i do see the benefit that if you are going to start a business you need to see how much everything will cost and what you are going to make out of it….. simple maths.

There were loads of examples to try out and lots of clerical errors, I can also easily see why you would hire an accountant.

We proceeded with looking into VAT and how complex it is and that basically whatever service / product you are selling VAT can be very different, i.e. Fruit and plain scones are different.

On a final note we used the revenue on line system (ros) to see how easy it was to file your vat.

Next time,I will have to bring a calculator & pencil, Iphone calculator just doesn’t cut it here.

Starting your own business day 1 summary (03/03/09):

The location of the course is in the National College of Ireland IFSC Dublin. Currently, there are lots of road works going on here so I decided not to drive and rely on public transport and some walking. GPS (Google Maps with triangulation), on the Iphone, is perfect for this kind of thing for people that have the Iphone and haven’t used this application before I highly recommend it.

I found out there were a lot of curious people like me, some people that are well on their way to setting up their own business, some that were taking the course as a precaution in the current environment.

Any of the ideas I heard were all good and can be easily sold, sorry but I am not going to mention any of them as I am sworn to secrecy on them. In four hours:

  • We got to meet everyone, brainstorm their idea’s.
  • Get an insight into how to be creative.
  • Look at some excellent new idea’s and products / projects.
  • Try to figure out what goes into a business plan.

There are lots of handouts and very little time to take a breadth. I was very impressed with how well it was organised, it was a lot to take in.

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