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How Not To Be A Small Business Failure Statistic

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There were about 146,000 business startups a year, and an average of 12,000 business bankruptcies per year from 1994 to 2004 in Canada. A 2004 Statistics Canada study on small business failure rates Key Small Business Statistics January 2005: How Long Do Small Businesses Survive? found that the first few years were critical. While almost three quarters of small business startups survive the first year, less than one third of micro companies (less than five employees) were in business after five years.

These statistics by themselves may be of little value to you directly. We know how many small businesses survive and for how long, but its far more important to know why some survive and others do not. There are a lot of studies on small business failure. Searching reasons for small business failure with quotations on Google will give you almost 700 results (about 38 million without!). Why small businesses fail will give you almost a thousand.

The 1997 study by Statistics Canada Failing Concerns: Business Bankruptcies in Canada found major internal factors of small business failure was management deficiency, financial management problems and poor marketing.

The Small Business Administration study Financial Difficulties of Small Businesses and Reasons for Their Failure in 1998 found several causes of small business bankruptcy: outside business conditions (38.5%), financing (28%), inside business conditions (27.1%), taxes (20%), disputes (18.8%), personal calamities and other (32.9%).

There is a wealth of information on this subject, but what are the common factors? There are four basic areas:

External factors

External factors include new competition, your major client moving out of town, poor weather if youre a seasonal business, or economic downturns. Theyre often largely out of our control, and may be unique to your particular company, but there are often ways to mitigate them. For example, if you have a seasonal business, such as a landscaping company (at least up here in the cold north its seasonal) you could buy a bobcat to provide income during your off-season with snow removal. The bottom line is, have a contingency plan for external factors that could have a negative impact on your small business success.

Lack of management

Big companies have the luxury of being able to hire several people to get all the jobs done that need to be done, but chances are youre going to have to do it all yourself, at least for awhile. That means youre not only going to have to develop your product or service, youre also going to have to make financial, accounting, legal, marketing, human resources, and purchasing decisions.

You may do some of these tasks very well, but its unlikely that you do all these tasks well, and even if you do, you might want to contact a lawyer and an accountant at the very least. And, research, research, and research some more, and when youre done researching, find an expert or two bounce ideas off and give you solid advice.

Lack of planning

Small businesses often fail because of lack of planning. Let me make a bold statement: the single-most vital part of your business success is your business plan. Why? Simply put, your business plan specifically and concretely lists your goals for the next few years. It spells out, step by step, how youre going to meet those goals, and gives you something to measure your performance against at the end of your business year. Finally, a complete business plan helps you get financing and includes a marketing plan.

I have one more thing to say about business plans. It does very little good to write a business plan, put it in a drawer and never look at it again. That same 1997 Statistics Canada study we talked about earlier found that successful small business owners refer to and revise their business plans often.

Lack of marketing

Most small businesses seem to think it takes a lot of money to market their product or service effectively. Thats simply not true. There are many ways to market inexpensively. You could use direct mail marketing which is as cheap as a stamp, or email marketing, which costs nothing. The point is, you need to get your product or service out there somehow. You may have the best product or service out there, something completely unique from anything else, but what good does that do if nobody knows about it?

So there you have itmy thoughts on the main reasons why small businesses fail, and how you can avoid becoming a small business failure statistic by developing a contingency plan, consulting with experts, and developing and using a business and marketing plan.

If you are thinking of starting a small business, trust me, Im not trying to discourage you. I sincerely believe being in business for yourself may possibly be the most rewarding career there is, but a little knowledge can go a long way towards arming you against small business failure.

Virtual Tour Can Increase Sales Of Business

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People in Kelowna, Vernon and Penticton can enjoy virtual shopping experience from home. There are certain sites that showcase virtual tour on hotels, restaurants, wineries and sports venues to its US and Canadian clients. Through this tour, customers will know more about the product with the help of a click. Nowadays, most of the people are so busy in their work that they do not have time to visit a shop for shopping. Most of the people want to know in advance, whether their product is sold in a particular shop. They dont want to waste time searching their product from shop to shop. So if a shop owner showcases their product through virtual tour, people will know whether their required product is available in that shop and order it online or just go that particular shop and buy that product.

Virtual tour can increase sales of clients business. For example, before visiting a restaurant many people would want to know more about the place, type of food served and its ambience in advance. After a deal is made, business people generally throw a party to their clients. Business people get confused as to where should they give a party as they do not know much about the restaurant and its ambience. One best thing that they can do is to take a virtual tour of the restaurant. Through this they will know more about the place within a short period of time.

Nowadays you can find there are various websites that offer virtual tour on real estate. Buyers find it difficult to have a look at each house. It is very tiring and waste of time. With the help of this tour, buyers will be able to analyze the house properly and find out whether it is their dream house or not. In virtual tour, you will know exactly as to how the house looks like. How the balcony, bedrooms, bathroom or kitchen does look like.

Nowadays, even retail stores are providing online virtual shopping experience to their customers with the help of 3-D graphic images of products and services. Virtual shopping can be enjoyed for broad range of goods and services such as fashion accessories, travel kits, home decoration items etc. Some major benefits of virtual tour are they are comfortable, convenient and customers can view their goods and services from one place without moving from one store to another. Customers can take their own time for shopping without waiting in mall lines. In addition, you dont have to look for parking space while shopping online.

Virtual shopping ensures product quality, excellent pricing, online credit or debit card payment, quick delivery, time saving and easy retail shopping experience.

Starting A Soap Business – Tips For A Fast Start

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Does starting a soap business sound like living it up to you? Natural soap certainly does sell well and you really can turn a soap making hobby into a money builder very fast in comparison to many other home scale small business ideas. Here’s the thing, it costs so little to get going that many folks give soap marketing a try. Here are a few real world tips for starting and running a soap making and marketing venture.

Do you really want a business of any sort? Often turning a hobby into a business ruins the hobby and never makes any money either. Do you really want to deal with all that goes into interacting with people and selling? Then there’s volume production to consider. How would you like to move from making dozens of bars of soap to tens of thousands of bars? It may turn into a lot of work. Even making hundreds of soap bars in a fairly short time frame is much like real work.

Licenses and other obstacles need not be a complete stop. Sometimes that’s the first thing business writers want to talk about. Get real… There are very few regulations about making soap. Now cosmetics, like lotions, are a completely different matter. Soap is not highly regulated, so that’s a real plus. Now licenses are something you should look into, but be realistic. To start, you’re probably just working at the hobby level. Don’t let the need for licenses stop you from getting started. Get what you need, but don’t be paralyzed into inaction.

The product is key and here’s why. Here’s the deal. There are plenty of people making soap. Why should anybody buy yours? Can you answer that easily? What you need is a product that truly is different, something that’s unique to you. That’s fairly easy to do with soap if you know how… and you can learn.

Marketing can be relatively easy if you get started a particular way. Making soap is one thing. Selling is quite another. Your plan should include a way to get people to try the product, hopefully a way to get lots of people to try it. There are ways, you know. Then the easy part is following up with customers to get repeat sales. Even though that’s easy, most soap makers don’t do it… probably because they don’t know how.

Can you make money selling soap? Possibly… That’s because there is a good potential profit in a bar of soap. The material cost is quite a bit less than the price a bar of soap brings. But you have to buy materials wisely, plus you have to move a lot of soap in a hurry. Both of those can be done, if you know what you’re doing.

Regular Photography Business Is Dying. Birthing Of 3d Photography Business!

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Of course I understand that the sentence “Regular photography business is dying” in this article title is too strong. The most talented photographers will be in business forever. I used it just to grab your attention to the problem that regular photography business got recently after starting a digital era.
Nowadays photo companies like Canon, Nikon and others are making simple to operate yet more and more advanced photo cameras and lenses, adding more new and useful features to the cameras, improving quality, sensitivity, noise reduction while at the same time cutting the price. Now everybody can buy a Digital SLR photo camera, read a photography book and take pretty good quality photos. Now we have more very affordable ink jet photo printers available in the market that can produce decent prints. There are many powerful photo editing programs for improving the images and making nice looking collages. The entire process of making nice pictures today is not difficult compared to the same process 10 years ago and much less expensive. That is good for the consumer but has put a great pressure on the professional photography business. Today anyone can buy computer, DSLR camera, ink jet photo printer and call themselves a professional photographer.
Today many people prefer to invite a friend to take their wedding photographs rather than use a professional wedding photographer. Those that do use a professional are expecting lower expenses as there are many standard photographers to choose from.Now many people prefer to make the photos by themselves without going to professional photographers and photo studios. That is why we can say that regular photography business is under huge pressure.
Over the years digital photography has become common place and technology has simplified and improved the resulting pictures to the point where even large companies in the photo processing industry are closing down outlets. Those that remain are trying to regain business by offering large format prints or prints on canvas, things the general public cannot produce. Many large stores which do not offer those services do not have photo departments anymore where previously they had big profitable photo departments.
But there is a new way for photo business, the business that is not easy to repeat by everybody and with very attractive product for customers! I am talking about 3D photography business.
3D Photography Business
There are several ways for taking 3D pictures and for most of them the viewer needs some special glasses for seeing 3D effect. That is not convenient for customers and not good for business. However there is one technology that does not need any kind of glasses. That is 3D lenticular technology.
3D lenticular technology is the most suitable for customers because people can hold the picture in the hands and see 3D, without crazy “crossing eyes” or having the special glasses. 3D lenticular pictures have the regular colors like regular photos; they can be in any sizes from small wallet size to big size for putting on a wall, they look like the regular photos just more alive because of the depth. That is why regular people prefer 3D lenticular images compare to other types of 3D pictures.
One of the main problems of making 3D lenticular images is a difficulty of taking the pictures and a very long and labour-consuming process of creating the pictures. For example,even couple years ago we spent at least 2-3 hours before getting an image, because almost all stages of process of creating 3D picture were manual.Of course, it is not acceptable for business because the price of each picture was very high. But luckily now, with modern 3D lenticular technology we can receive 3D lenticular picture in just 10 minutes and even less and most of this time is spending on printing because almost all steps of lenticular technology are automated now, for example, process could be so automated that period of time between triggering 3D camera and starting printing could be as low as 40 seconds. This In-Depth Image System was developed for covering all technology steps in process of producing of 3D lenticular pictures from taking the frames to creating 3D image. This system is easy to operate, for example, we can teach the people how to work with In-Depth Image System and produce 3D lenticular images during 3-4 hours and people do not have to be the experts in photography or in computer.
In-Depth Image System can be successfully used in many different photo market niches. There are:

Portrait photography;

School and graduation photography;

Event photography;

Pets photography;

Advertisement photography and so on.

In-Depth Image System could be used for establishing of 3D photo business because:

In-Depth Image System produces High Quality 3D Lenticular pictures in different sizes;

This system is simple to operate;

In-Depth Image technology of producing 3D lenticular images is easy and rapid;

There is no necessity to have very experienced staff;

The prices on 3D pictures are very competitive with the prices that ask regular photo studios for regular flat pictures;

It is almost impossible to repeat this process by customers themselves, so you will be the only expert in making 3D lenticular pictures in your area;

It is profitable.

Please, look at the real sample picture that were made by In-Depth Image System below. Unfortunately that is impossible to show the depth on that picture because computer monitor can show the flat images only. That is why I created animation GIF file from the frames taken by our system. Originally we shot 12 – 18 frames, so 3D lenticular pictures are much smoother and without any rough jumping like on animation pictures.

Good Business Habits

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Let me tell you straight, you cannot be a successful business person if you don’t have good business habits. Below I have listed a few habits that you should be doing if you wanted to be a successful business person!

1.) Are you committed to every business you have?

Opening a business is easy but maintaining its operation will take a lot of you time. Will you be available in creating marketing plans and promotional materials? Business without marketing plans is suicide. Once you start a business, put every attention to it. Don’t let your employees manage it. Take note of this, you are the only person who has vision for its success so its only you who can make it
grow.

2.) Are you continuously searching for opportunities?

Business people don’t just stick on 1 or 2 business. A business person always searches for more business opportunities. They are not mediocre. They don’t want stable business but rather a growing one. Always search for new ideas to pursue.. A business person has a vision for numerous income streams for profits!

3.) Do you think positive about you business?

A business person don’t pursue a business to which he/she doesn’t feel positive about. Once you start a business, don’t fill your mind with any negative thoughts. Problems may come your way but it will always have a solution. Business people don’t think of failures, always success behind every problem.

4.) Do you share the business vision?

You can’t survive on your own. You may be skillful at some point but it can’t make you very successful. A business person shares a business vision, to someone else, to a possible business partner. If a single business person can earn $1000 a month, then 2 person can earn $2000 a month. Simple logic but its reality. You can earn more as long as you share same vision with someone else.

5.) Do you delegate tasks?

Normally, every business person only thinks of opportunities and its corresponding marketing campaigns. It will not be healthy if the business person will also do the action of implementation. He will be dead meat if he/she will put every burden unto their shoulders. In fact, employees purpose is to put every plan into action, right?

6.) Do you create a good public image?

People are very sympathetic. They support the business whom they like the owner. Whether you like it or not,if people like your attitude and way of doing business, they will support you. But if you look like a bad boy or a person who looks down and criticizes people, believe me, you will loose every customer you’ve got!

Start creating a good public image. Help support the community where you belong. Extend some help to those in need. Don’t act as if what’s the only thing important to you is your profits and earnings. Make the public see that you care.