This week’s top stories include small business advice covering the following four topics:
How to Create a Home-Based Business Without a Product or Service
Experiential Learning Creates Skill — The Power of Active Practice
One Negotiation Expert Shares the 4 Body Language Cues Every Entrepreneur Should Recognize
Every Entrepreneur Comes To This Fork In The Road—Here’s How To Decide Your Path
Each week we scour all the top business-related magazines and newspapers for articles with the best advice for the small business owner, so you do not have to.
How to Create a Home-Based Business Without a Product or Service
Choosing the right model is a keystone moment in starting an online business. Such an imagined enterprise can sell goods or services, or a combination of both. A good example of a goods (or product-based) business is an e-commerce store that sells clothing or accessories — tangible products that need to be produced and shipped to a customer. Examples of a service-oriented model might be coaching, consulting, digital marketing or a professional service firm that offers specialized business, legal, tax or medical services — provided value that is intangible in nature and generally involves the transfer of knowledge or expertise.
Service-oriented businesses can be further categorized into “low-ticket” or “high-ticket”. The former are those in which services are sale-valued at $2,000 or less, the latter those that sell for over $2,000. Starting a high-ticket service-oriented business generally involves a slightly steeper learning curve since the service being rendered involves a transfer of specialized knowledge, talents, skills or insights. An entrepreneur who starts one either has a professional designation and/or possesses advice and insights gained through experience.
An alternative path to creating a high-ticket service-oriented business without getting a professional designation or investing time and money to gain experience in a specific industry is to embrace a commission or referral-based model, which is straightforward: a commission is earned when you broker a deal between a service provider and their customer.
Knowledge doesn’t automatically make us better. We get results, make progress and acquire skills through practice.
If your goal is to acquire a new skill or make real progress in any area of your life, don’t just aim to gain knowledge — no matter how valuable it is.
Aim to practice, apply what you learn or do something with that knowledge.
Learning something new does not necessarily transform or improve you if you don’t get past the knowledge acquisition phase. You lose what you don’t use, apply or practice. But you gain a lot by doing something with it.
Whether you’re meeting someone for the first time via Zoom or hosting a new client meeting, body language and communication are critical for effective communication. There are several ways entrepreneurs can level up their nonverbal communication. From facial expressions to body movements, there are plenty of nonverbal cues to pay attention to in others and yourself. Just how important are non-verbal cues? Very. According to Albert Mehrabian, nonverbal cues make up 93% of communication, more than half (55%) through body language and 38% by tone of voice. A mere 7% of meaning is communicated through spoken word.
Given how important these are, here are four cues and tips you should be aware of…
Related Post: Negotiations Primer – What every small business owner need to know
Every Entrepreneur Comes To This Fork In The Road—Here’s How To Decide Your Path
Every entrepreneur comes to this fork in the road.
Most new business owners are overwhelmed by their focus on profit, competition, and survival—the first years of grinding it out don’t leave room for much else. But as they begin to taste success, entrepreneurs are also driving toward an inevitable fork in the road: to lead a small business or get rich in a bigger one.
Harvard Business School professor and author Noam Wasserman calls this “the founder’s dilemma.” Entrepreneurs can be rich, accepting investors and outside expertise to expand the company beyond the founder’s capabilities, or they can be king, staying in control of the business but ultimately hitting a ceiling on growth. Being rich and king rarely go hand in hand—the Bezoses, Musks, and Gates of the world are outliers. In fact, Wasserman found that four out of five entrepreneurs are forced to step down as CEOs well before going public.
To overcome the founder’s dilemma and turn it into an opportunity, entrepreneurs have to be transparent about their “why,” focus on what they’re good at, and trust in their team. Here’s how.
