Even if your product has a long and happy run in the marketplace, it’s likely to reach the end of its run eventually, and leave you with a significant inventory on hand. Welcome to your first closeout! Think of this as an entrepreneurial rite of passage: If you’re in the game long enough, you’re almost [...] Read more »
Interpreting the Numbers for Better Decision Making
Entrepreneurs do not love risk and express this dislike by devoting energy and brain power in determining risk and then deciding whether to proceed or not. Before they would abort, the smart Entrepreneurs would first look to minimize or eliminate the risk by Partnering, Sharing, Mitigating, Testing, etc. Analyzing the numbers can be a vital [...] Read more »
Profits
Your ultimate goal is to make your product yield a profit. Obvious, right? So much so that it’s not worth mentioning? Well, yes and no. I’m always surprised to discover how many entrepreneurs take their eyes off this ball, elementary as it is. So I’ll go ahead and restate the obvious: The sustainability of your [...] Read more »
Solve Your Sales Problem
Small businesses, particularly in their early stages, have two big problems. Selling is a learnable skill, and you don’t need a sales gene to be good at it. 1) Access to customers. The business owners are new to their industry, probably inexperienced, and have not developed the savvy to secure appointments with important potential customers. [...] Read more »
Managing Your Inventory
For those who sell products, one of the key challenges in responding to a flow of reorders is keeping a large enough inventory on hand—but not too large. The constant dilemma you face is that you know your customer is grading you on your ability to ship reorders, but you also know that too much [...] Read more »
Product Knockoffs—One Idea to Combat
If your product is very successful and if you have no legal way of protecting it—which is true, in most cases—then why not knock yourself off before someone else does? Put yourself in the knockoff artist’s shoes. How would he or she copy your product? In most cases, they will look to make it [...] Read more »