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.