Prosper Newsletter: January 2008 > Entrepreneurship

You understand that the following information is educational in nature and is not intended to be legal, accounting, or tax advice. You are responsible for your own financial decisions and should consult your own legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making your financial decisions.

Taking the First Step

If you are like others, you are looking to make big changes and improvements in the coming year. You may want to take major steps in your life, perhaps making the leap from your regular job to working your business full time. Taking that first leap of faith into your own business can be a scary prospect. Whether you plan to rely on your new entrepreneurship venture, as supplemental income or primary income, make sure you know all the risks and how to maximize your results.

Entrepreneurship is simply the process of starting a new business or organization. The first step is usually to find a product or service that is lacking in the market, or improve an existing product or service already in the market. Finding something that is missing in the current market can sometimes be very difficult, or it may be obvious. Look at your interests, your abilities, your talents, and your aspirations and see if any of these can be adapted to fill a need in the market. Once you find your niche, the hard part begins.

Before you start any type of entrepreneurial venture, make sure to do your research. Understand how the trends of the current market are flowing, as well as the necessary steps to marketing your business through the Internet or other means. The more information you arm yourself with, the better your chances for success. The sad truth is that most new businesses fail within one year of opening. The more education you have about the process of marketing, advertising, listing your business on the Internet, and the day-to-day functions of your entrepreneurial venture, the better. This is definitely something to consider before taking the plunge from a regular job.

If you are planning to use your business for supplemental income, don't be afraid to start slow. Check out the availability of Internet listings for your website, and start attaching your company name to many of the major search engines. Create a simple, efficient, and memorable website that accurately and aesthetically displays your products or services to their best advantage. Begin the process of attracting customers online and through other means of marketing, such as word-of-mouth advertising, customer referrals, and other standard advertising practices.

Anything that you can do to attract traffic to your site increases the chances of gaining customers. The Internet has opened up a completely new world for entrepreneurship. Take advantage of the many services and benefits offered online, which can help your fledgling company succeed. Many people who start businesses on the side, or to simply gain supplemental income, eventually turn their businesses into their primary source of income. Taking the next leap from supplemental business to primary income can be a huge step, but it can ultimately prove to be one of the most financially beneficial decisions you can make for yourself and for your company. If you are facing this prospect, as you outline your New Year's resolutions, do your research—then take the plunge!

New Year's Business Resolutions

Every year millions of people make New Year's Resolutions fully intending on maintaining, measuring, evaluating, and keeping them. Likewise, millions of those same people never end up seeing those resolutions through to the end. One of the inherent problems in setting goals is that the idea of a goal for many people is often scary, nebulous, and intangible. A goal is too often something that is just as easy to break as it is to make.

Here is a list of seven things to make your New Year's Resolutions better than years past:

• Don't set goals, make promises—goals are as easy to break as they are to make, but people hate breaking promises.
• Make your promise public—shout it from the rooftops. It is a lot easier to go back on your word to yourself. You can rationalize the daylights out of pretty much anything. Is it somewhat more difficult to rationalize broken promises to a big group of people you admire and respect.
• Make short-term goals—many times people set goals that really do take the whole year to achieve. They get bogged down by the idea of needing the entire 365 days to get the job done, OR get lulled into a state of procrastination that they have a full 365 days to achieve their goals.
• Make goals you can actually achieve and affect—many business owners make extremely lofty "pie in the sky" goals that take a lifetime to achieve, and rely on all the stars aligning perfectly. In many cases the achievement of their goals relies on people and things outside of their control.
• Publish your goals—many diatribes have been written on the power of written goals.
• Inform your success team—make sure you tell the important stake holders on your team. It could be the marketing director, sales manager, HR director, or admin staff. Everyone needs to be on the same page on what the business has committed to achieve in 2008.
• Make sure that your quarterly goals reflect your New Year's Resolutions—most companies will review their financial health at least on a quarterly basis. A real review can only take place when there are benchmarks that you set and some orientation point to reference performance from. Use your quarterly goals as a marker to review performance of these New Year's Resolutions.

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