Oh, the joys of working at home. What is better than the 60 second commute to your home office, but have you taken time to consider the drawbacks. While a home office may be very convenient, they can be highly inefficient. There is no better place to get distracted then at home.

At home you have children, laundry that needs to be done, the television, pets, and a home phone that likes to ring.  All of these distractions are time sucks. They simply suck away valuable time. If they are taking away time, then it’s safe to assume that they are taking away profits from your business, and I don’t think that losing money was what you had in mind when choosing to work at home. Unless you have rock solid discipline, it’s easy for your work day to turn into a day filled with endless errands which means little to no business work gets done.

If you choose to work from home, you must keep yourself in a routine in order to get the best results. Set your alarm for a set time each day, go workout, get dressed, get the kids ready and off to school (if you have them), and then get to work.

If you cannot maintain the day-to-day disciplines of running a business, then you must seek an outside office for the sake of staying in business. The thought of having to spend additional money alone may help you stay disciplined. If you can’t make it work at home, then you will be forced to cut into your profits and spend money on leasing an outside office which also comes with added utilities (internet, electric, phone, water) that will be needed at the business location. And if you can’s make a home office work and you can’t afford an outside office, the it’s back to the J-O-B and nobody wants that.

Some may mistakingly think that the quality of their product or service is the most important aspect of their business, but they are dead wrong. There are a lot of average products or services out there in the market place that make a whole lot of money due to effective marketing and sales. It is selling that is more important. Either the business owner does it or they must hire salespeople that can do it for them.

For the small business, sales is a time consuming process that involves reaching out to prospective customers, meeting with them, explaining your product or services’ benefits, answering follow up questions, and asking for the order. You cannot afford to become complacent when it comes to your business cash flow. Without it, the doors close permanently. It simply is not enough to sit at ease in your office or store front waiting for customers to magically appear.  You must pursue them relentlessly with taste and tactfulness.

The customer already expects a quality service or product from you so you are wasting your time if you are putting quality ahead of sales. Just because you build a better mouse trap does not mean that people will buy it. How can they buy something that they have not heard of? It is not enough to have a website, some brochures, nice business cards, and a fancy office. You must actively promote and sell your business nonstop.  This means making cold calls, calling old customers, placing targeted ads, creating radio spots, running adwords campaigns, and the list goes on. As a small business owner, you must continually, without deviation, pursue the potential customer  through referrals, introductions and appointments. Always keep in mind that quality is not job #1. It is Sales that are the #1 job in the company.

In order for your business to do well, there are a few things that you must consider first. Most small businesses fail in the first 5 years. You must refuse to be one of them.  Here are a few things you must do to avoid becoming just another statistic:

1. You must understand how and why your business meets the needs of your customers. If you are not meeting a need, you do not have a business.

2. Calculate your break even point. Know your bottom line and what it takes every month to keep you in business.

3. Research your market before the big launch. You have to know who your clients are, how you are going to reach them and more importantly, how you are going to retain them and make them a lifelong customer. This is often referred to in the marketing world as customer demographics. It is also important to know the size of your market which includes the number of potential customers that could use your products or services.

4. Estimate your start up costs. Calculate everything that you will need to open the doors. These expenses can include equipment, subcontractors, employees, insurance, filing fees, licenses, software, machinery, tools, rent, furniture, advertising, business cards, permits, equipment,  and leases to name a few.

5. Pick a great Business name.

6. Know where your business will be located. Some options include leasing your own  space, purchasing a business condo, working in a home office, or renting at a local business center that hosts many small businesses while offering common areas such as restrooms, break room, and meeting rooms.

7. Make sure that you and your staff understand the unique selling points of each of your products or services.

8. Be willing to be your company’s biggest fan and constant salesman or saleswoman.

In our last post, we talked about the importance of being innovative, but this does not come without the risk of being ridiculed or looking a little different to peers. Howard Schwartz, CEO of Starbucks could have simply given into popular opinion or “type A” personalities with his coffee bar idea, but thankfully he didn’t. That brings us to our next point which is cashing in on the “NOs” of the corporate world. In the corporate world, the bigger the wheel, the slower it turns, if at all.

Companies are full of ideas, especially large ones. They promote themselves as being innovative, but often fail to innovate. I worked for a pretty large nonprofit one time, after I had suffered some health issues and had to close down my own small business. Ideas got shot down fairly quickly there, and it did not take me long to stop mentioning any of them again. It was simply a waste of time. The company was as old as dirt and things were not going to change any time soon or not at all. Coming from my small business background where there was no red tape wrapped around innovation, this was hard to take to say the least. I left on my 1 year anniversary there and what a happy day it was. If you find yourself working in the corporate world, don’t let your dreams and ideas die there.

In fact, the corporate world is a great place to look for a “No” that can be turned into a “Yes.” Corporations as a whole run from risk and potential failure. No manager wants to risk acting on something that sounds different in these economic times and even if they did, they know it would get voted down. In the 1970s, a large importer and distributor in the United States thought that importing bottled water was a very bad business decision. After all, who would pay for water that they could just get at home or who would drink water with bubbles in it? I am sure that they are not the only company that felt this way. Now, all grocery stores, convenience stores and even vending machines stock water by such companies as Perrier, Evian, Pellegrino, Dasani, and Zepyrhills. I guess the idea worked after all. Wouldn’t you say?

So, if you find yourself working in a big corporation, keep your ears opened while you are talking by the company water cooler because you just might hear the next million dollar idea.

Time has moved on and small business has too. Since the dawn of time, man has worked on ways to simply make life better in every way possible. By nature, he is an innovator and a creator. When it comes to business, he is no different. Companies justify their business by the ideas and innovations that they bring to the market place. If they don’t, they will simply cease to exist.

While I was growing up, I was a big fan of stores like K-Mart and Murphy Mart, a local competitor to K-Mart. My parents and family liked taking advantage of those Blue Light Specials that offered various items at discount prices that K-Mart ran. For those not familiar with K-Mart’s Blue Light Specials, let me give you a quick explanation. During your shopping adventure in your local K-Mart, you would hear an overhead announcement that would tell you about a great in-store special that they were about to run for a limited time. The way that you would find the special was to find the flashing Blue Light. Now, the Blue Light was not hard to find because it was atop a large cart and the Blue Light flashed nonstop, and it did create quite a thrill for bargain shoppers. These Blue Light Specials could occur at any given moment. So, you can see why shopping at K-Mart was such an adventure. K-Mart sure did know their market or did they?

Along came Walmart (notice the resemblance in the name), and they absolutely crushed K-Mart and any store like them in a fairly short amount of time. Walmart played the marketing game quite differently than K-Mart. They went after the vendors and manufacturers and negotiated down all the prices that they would pay for items. By doing this, who needed Blue Light Specials when, the entire Walmart store was always on special? In other words, everything at Walmart was cheaper than K-mart and you did not need to wait for a special sale or event to get a great deal. Not only did they offer great deals, but at a Super Walmart, they offered groceries in addition to all the department store items in just one convenient location. That was convenience at a whole new level and the typical busy American absolutely loved it.

Certainly, purchasing groceries and department store items was not a new concept, but Walmart changed how both department stores and grocery stores did business. With the marketing approach that Walmart took, they completely differentiated themselves from all other stores. By doing this, they created a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company. Now, you may not be out to create a multi-billion dollar company, but if you want to make a very good living with your thriving business, you must continue to stay innovative. Dare to do things differently and refuse to do business the same way everybody does in your industry. It will make you money now and will help extend the life of your small business. Remember, K-Mart was innovative sometime ago but where are they today? Continue to do business differently!