Geekpad Business

“You know how when we go fishing you use a lure and I use worms?” I asked him. “Yes,” he replied still visibly confused. “Well, what do I catch and what do you catch?” I asked with some sarcasm. “You catch a lot more fish than I do that’s for sure – but mine are bigger!” he said with a level of confidence reserved only for things he is passionate about – fishing being one of them. I knew he understood immediately. A fisherman always does – perhaps it’s all that time they have to contemplate the meaning of life as they wait for “the big one” to strike. Make no mistake about it – if you want to land a big one, you need the right bait. My husband understood the analogy right away because he knows when I fish with worms I catch all kinds of different fish, but most of them are small and I use a lot of bait.

I’ve always loved fishing with worms and even raised night crawlers when I was a teenager. I never really saw the merits of using a lure and certainly never thought a fish would be interested in a … Read the rest

• Find your Niche – There are dozens of online stores selling varieties of personalized gifts. This makes it important to make sure that yours come with a personal touch to make them stand out. To find your niche, decide who your potential clientele will be, their occupation, interests and hobbies and then choose practical gifts that will be fun to spruce up to make them as unique as possible. You can decide to do bags, calendars, photo frames, toys or even playing cards among many others.
• Lay out a plan – A business plan is important to guide you all through. Start by getting familiar with the latest industry trends and knowing your competitors. When you know what your competitors are offering, you find it easier to choose a slightly different path to make your business special in a way. You also will need to check pricing, marketing concepts and sales strategies. This is also the stage at which you will need to come up with a business name and logo and register the same for the business.
• Set the business – This is choosing where your business will be located. It should be a location that serves current needs

… Read the rest

Let’s crank it a little tighter – do YOU? The human mind is a marvelous thing. You think about your business, you dream about where you’d like to take it. You daily grapple with problems and improvements in your own mind. You’ve taken a lot of time to consider these issues, probably both at work and later at home. But is thinking about it enough? Many business owners are convinced they can achieve “freesults” – good results just by thinking about it. It doesn’t work that way.

Having considered it in your mind doesn’t guarantee:

• That you’ve actually re-aimed the business
• That you’ve implemented the change that addresses a challenge
• That you’ve actually dealt with an employee problem
• That you’ve brought about that change in managing your own life
  OR
• That your employees know anything about what you’ve been considering!

There are ways to tell if this is happening in your business.

• Have you ever asked an employee why something wasn’t done, and gotten a blank look in return? Have you followed that by pointing out that they should KNOW it needs to be done, only to get another ‘deer in the headlights’ look?
• Do your employees frequently seem frustrated

… Read the rest

Well let me give you the rundown of some of the points they touched on in the article. First off if you remember the post I wrote about the SBA on micro loans and the later one on free help with your business plans. Mostly that is what the SBA does according to the article. They hire retired professionals who volunteer their time and services to entrepreneurs starting out in the business world and offer loans that are guaranteed up to a certain percentage. Now where everything gets fuzzy is how they are suppose to be a substitute for new or start up businesses who can not receive traditional financing from a bank (Due to credit or lack of experience), but they got rid of the LowDoc loan that most start up businesses applied for and were approved. Main reason for the termination of the loan is because they say they were losing too much money with the program (Not profiting maybe?). The lowdoc loan was pretty much a fast application (Low Documents) to get money to fund your business, which was backed by the SBA up to a certain percent to make the bank feel safer with the transaction. … Read the rest

There are numerous, legitimate opportunities in the market that can be filled by an enthusiastic entrepreneur. Network marketing, for one, can be very lucrative and can become a great way of making your living. There are so many opportunities offered online for starting a business. Once you have made the decision to start working on your own and start a home based business you are on the road to freedom. The hardest part in starting a home business is taking the plunge. Once you do, you will experience freedom from the office routine and peak hour traffic and will ultimately have financial freedom as well.
There are many options you can choose from to make money from home, but choose wisely. Make sure that you will enjoy doing what ever you choose and then you will not lose your focus. Studies show that if you enjoy what you are doing, you will devout more time to it and do a better job than if you are doing something that you don’t enjoy. So many people are making an online business their new venture and are making a lot of money. Like any conventional business you will have to put a … Read the rest

What I told him in our first session shocked him; it was basically this:

“You don’t have a business, you have a job.”

This is the trap that so many business owners fall into – they mistakenly believe that because they are the “owner,” somehow they truly own the business. WRONG!

Merely owning and running a business does not you mean that you’re a business owner in the truest sense; it simply means you are employed by a business entity that you own.

A true business is a system that runs entirely on its own without you physically being there on a day-to-day basis.

A true test of whether or not you own a business is to ask yourself, “If I took 6 months off, would it still be around?”

If the answer is no, then you don’t have a business; you are simply self-employed!

This is a very important principle to understand before you start any business, as it will make the difference between small profits or large ones.

In essence, to create business is to build a system that operates automatically without your day-to-day input.

Instead it operates by you leveraging the resources available to you: your systems, … Read the rest

Fear of failure

The vast majority of people who opt into a website never even read the emails that are sent to them to teach them how to market online. And this is probably due to skepticism.

A little skepticism about jumping into a new opportunity is healthy. However, beware of choosing to be so skeptical that it holds you back from success. Skepticism is the same as fear. And fear is “False Events Appearing Real”. If you are so skeptical that you never try, then your likelihood of becoming successful is a big fat zero!

Fear of success

Fear of success? Yes, there is such a thing as this, too. People by and large are afraid of change. They tend to cling to whatever it is they know, which is their “comfort zone”. Oddly enough, even staying with an abusive spouse is considered a “comfort zone” for some… and staying in an abusive job is also a comfort zone, even though it is far from comfortable. If this is you, be aware of it, recognize it, and try to move on.

Fear of quitting job due to long-time loyalty

People who hate their jobs have it easy to move … Read the rest