I am currently working on a business plan for my tiny start-up (haven’t launched yet). At first, the business plan was only for me as a planning/goal guide, but now I have a couple of people interested in viewing it. I am updating it and cleaning it up, but I need more guidance as to what a small eCommerce should emphasize.

Carla Rose

Owner, Green and Chic

the best approach is to write your plan based on the target audience. If you want something that’s a little more generic, you basically need to put together a plan that shows that you:
-have thought out your model
-have metrics, milestones or some other decision points for mitigating risk
(ie: you have a way of knowing when you’re successful or when to throw in the towel and recover what’s left of their money)
-understand your market
-have considered your competition
-know what money you need and when
-have a plan for reimbursing your investors.

Basically, you need to convince your audience that you know what you’re doing and you aren’t going to flush their money down the toilet.

If you haven’t got much experience with Business Plans, I would recommend using a tool like Business Plan Pro (http://www.paloalto.com/) to walk you through the process (at least the first time). It’s an investment that you won’t regret

Last week AT&T announced that the Internet will run out of bandwidth by 2010. Do you think people will care more about the “death of the internet” or Global Warming?

Here is the full article: http://www.news.com/2100-1034_3-6237715.html

Do you think there will come a day when there will be mandatory “internet bandwidth rationing” like water rationing when there is a drought?

Or do you think a quasi government agency will step in a institute some kind of bandwidth regulations?

Or could providers start charging by the kilobyte of bandwidth used?

Why is AT&T the only provider out there saying that the sky is falling? They have apparently committed to investing over $19 Billion into upgrading the infrastructure. The article states it will require approx $130Billion so where’s the rest coming from?

Is the mostly a US based problem or a WorldWide problem? I can’t see how it really affects people with little to no internet access to but entire Corporations here in the US have built on the Internet as it’s sole source of customer contact; how will companies like Amazon, YouTube, Etrade, Linkedin Etc continue to run if they loose internet access or it slows down so much it’s like working on a 28K modem again? I doubt their users will put up with increasing wait times for pages to load.

Why isn’t there a huge cry from the Web Development community for better video compression standards, smaller graphic files, more efficient site development to decrease bandwidth needed to use/browse a site etc?

Besides laying a whole bunch of fiber in the ground what other technologies can be utilized that could help offset this issue?

A lot of questions I know but I don’t see this getting a whole lot of media attention so either they have their head in the sand or it’s getting buried by other “more newsworthy stories.

These are mostly retorical questions and I’m just hoping to act as a conduit to open up the topic for a discussion. And I think it’s a pretty important topic. Esp for those of us that make their living on the internet.

Jeff Weidner
jeffweidnerlinkedin@gmail.com
I never IDK!

Jeff Weidner 20,000+

Talent Sourcing Mgr at Comcast

We don’t yet know how much of the actual bandwidth usage is a result of normal fluctations in the environment or natural cycles. So we should just convene a council of scientific minds to study the problem and make policy recommendations. <ahem>

In both cases, the majority of people aren’t going to pay attention until they’re personally impacted by the problem. Fortunately for the Internet, large corporations will feel the problem long before it trickles down and they’ll drive the mitigation. In addition, there will be good money to be made from the “power users” who pay a premium for an improved infrastructure (especially if they notice their Halo lag times going up or their massive bittorrent downloads slowing to a crawl)

Now if we could just find a way to make global environmental remediation something that people would be willing to pay for.

How do you know if it is time to close your unsuccessful startup?

Robert Yang (robert.yang2006@gmail.com)

HR Manager-Staffing and Recruiting at Evonik Degussa GmbH

The easiest way is to have clear criteria at the beginning of your project/business/initiative. Think of it as a pre-nup for when your assumptions start cheating on you 🙂

It’s almost impossible to be objective once you’ve sunk any significant time or money into the business. It’s easy to get into the “Gambler’s Fallacy” of believing that just one more investment is all it will take to solve all of the problems of the business and make it big. It’s a very dangerous situation to be in and one to avoid at all costs.

As soon as possible, stop what you’re doing and sit down with your accountant and legal counsel and set some clear exit criteria for your business (both for a successful exit to take your profits and run, and an unsuccessful exit to cut your losses). Then STICK TO YOUR CRITERIA!!! No “Oh…just one more year” waffling or “I can be successful if I just mortgage my wife and kids” or even “I’m doing so well, I should squeeze another year of profits out of this”. Be objective and treat a business like a business. It’s not your child. It’s not your pet. It’s not a comment on your value as a person. It’s a financial transaction.

If your assumptions change or the market shifts, it’s OK to sit down and reset the criteria. But you need to do everything possible to stay objective. Mistakes, failures and bankruptcies are part of the death spiral that comes from losing that objectivity.

A few years ago, my wife and I bought an established business. We saw a lot of potential and opportunities to streamline it. We set some aggressive growth and profitability goals when we bought it and at the end of the first year, we were quite a bit below target. We were doing well, but the growth just wasn’t there. Since we missed our targets, we reluctantly sold the business for a modest profit. Over the next 3 years, the market that we had been in continued to erode. Had we stayed in the business, we would have lost our shirts. The lower growth and profit were just warning signs that the business wasn’t going to pan out the way that we expected. It was tempting to stay in and “play one more hand”, but we remained objective and managed to come out slightly ahead.

In days when ROI and meeting deadlines are the most important, what do you think should be the best practice – out-of-the-box for deliverying and do it on time with the best quality?

Yoav Aviv

Projects Management Professional | TopLinked.com | MyLink500.com | LION | 8200+

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what methodology or tools you use. The most important things are to set clear baselines for your requirements, implement a solid change management process to prevent or mitigate scope creep and make it very clear (through very visible executive support and empowerment) that changes to deliverables will automatically trigger a renegotiation of schedule, budget or resources. In addition, having a clearly defined set of *business* measurements that will be used to assess the success of the specific project will go a long way towards helping you “sanity check” any project changes, prioritize issues and generally keep the project on track. (If you can get support for it, full end-to-end requirements traceability has a huge impact on project success.)

With that said, I believe that a lot of organizations have lost sight of the fact that ROI, schedule and budget are just performance indicators. The true measurement of project success is whether the project deliverables meet the customer requirements. It doesn’t matter one whit if a project delivers on-time and on-budget if it fails to deliver any business value. By all means use the standard measures as indicators of relative project health, but remember that they’re just indicators and not the goals themselves. Remember “why” you’re doing a project and work with your customers to make sure that their needs are continuing to be addressed.

Finally, don’t be afraid to kill a project if it’s not going to deliver the anticipated business value. I’ve seen some PMOs that consistently deliver on-time and on-budget, but often sacrifice key deliverables or quality and ultimately deliver a project that has no (or negative) net business value.

At this point in my career, I have heard and used just about every pitch when trying to recruit people or clients. What are some of the most memorable calls you have received from a recruiter? What is the best (or funniest, most effective) pitch you received from a recruiting calling you?

Hal Moore

Executive Recruiter/Asst. Market Lead – Bolton Consulting at The Bolton Group [Toplinked 8000+]

The best “pitch” is any recruiter that actually takes the time to look at my resume and tell me specifically why they thought that I’d be a good fit for the position. The vast majority of recuriters these days just swing blind and hope to hit something. On an average week, I get half a dozen recruiters reaching out to me with oppportunities. Maybe once a month I get one that’s actually a decent match.

The funniest call that I had was a recruiter that called me up and in a very strong chinese accent opened with a “You want job? I have super good job for you. You send resume and I give to manager. Very much pay with super good match.” I thought that it was a telemarketing pitch or someone playing a joke on me. But he was just so high-energy that I had to play along and see what he had to say. The real kicker was that after about 10-15 minutes of him saying “You send resume…send resume now…I send to manager”, it turned out that the job he was trying to fit me to was a job posting that I had had just put out to bid. (guess he didn’t notice the similarity in names between the hiring manager and the name on the resume 🙂

As a new or small business owner what consulting services (aside from marketing) would be most helpful to you.

Michael Laffey

Innovative and experienced attorney, entrepreneur and business consultant

In general, I would say Business Process consulting and the type of operational and strategic planning assistance that you’d get from an incubator. Most new businesses miss a lot of opportunities and efficiencies because they simply don’t recognize them. It’s not until they start hitting walls that they recognize a need to take a good hard look at what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and why.

Unfortunately, most new and small businesses wouldn’t see a need for it, so you’d have to aggressively market the services. Surprisingly, a lot of large corporations have the same issues, but they’re less obvious because the issues are “just the way we do things” and the companies succeed in spite of them. (no pain=no need to change)

I’ve always thought that it would be fun to pull together a group of experts and innovators and have them do “business makeovers” like they do with homes on those reality TV shows. Anyone have a link to Mark Burnett? 🙂

Need to know how to get credit for a quote…

Thanks to all who answer in advance.

I’d like to establish myself as the author of a few quotes I’ve concocted over the years. How do I go about?

Thanks.

Jean-Pierre

Jean-Pierre Khoueiri

SEO Director

Publish. Write an article, letter to the editor or book and include the quote(s). You could also try submitting them to something like Reader’s Digest for publication. Many magazines and journals accept submissions of quotes as filler. Note that online publication doesn’t generally have the same weight that paper does. Even then, I’m not sure that you’d have any *practical* ability to stop others from using the quotes without attribution.

I’ve done a lot of training, given numerous presentations, posted on BBSs, forums, etc and published a lot of internal white papers over the years and later found a my quotes embedded in analyst white papers, books, training, etc. (and often attributed to “anonymous” or others). The most annoying part is that the ones that *are* attributed to me are generally quite useless from a career perspective.

At this point, I just take pride in seeing that what I said had enough value to be stolen. 🙂

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001)

Are their vendor certifications that add value to the profile of an executive level? What are they? I am keen on certifications that can be pursued irrespective of location and are custom paced like oracle and microsoft certifications.

Ayanansha Acharya

IT BUSINESS ANALYST

Executive MBAs, formal training in SOX, HIPAA, CobiT, COSO, ITIL, PMP, PgMP, etc. A good foundation in financial controls, governance, compliance and managing across the IT/Business divide will go far with a lot of organizations these days. Even if you won’t be working directly in an IT role, every aspect of business is touched by IT and will benefit from the expertise that you’d bring to the table.

Think in terms of differentiation. If you have the identical qualifications to your peers, you need to step it up with something that they *don’t* have. If they’re all IT people, look at a CPA or financial cert. If you’re all Finance, look at IT Governance or ITIL. If you’re all JDs, consider a CISA or CISSP to complement your role. It needs to be relevant to your targetted position, but you want to avoid wasting your time on a commodity cert that doesn’t stand out from your competition.

ISACA has a new certification that they’re rolling out called the CGEIT (Certified in the Governance of Enterprise Information Technology). I don’t know if it’s going to go anywhere and it will likely be a few years before the HR people take notice. But it’s probably worth looking into. I suspect that it will be a hot cert for a few years after it rolls out.

What you might want to consider is talking with your HR department about what certs are showing up in thier job postings. Talk with your C-levels to see what certifications that they consider valuable (if any). Also, look at job postings for the positions that you’d want to pursue in 2-3 years and see what certs they list. All of these should give you some good direction.

Good luck!

Based on your experience, what is the best business to start within 12 months and why?

If you could suggest a business to start soon, highly profitable, in a growing market, but with little need of capital, what would be your best guess? What would be the strategic assets needed for success?

Guido Sullam

Business expert

Wow. That’s a pretty open question. A lot would depend on the amount of capital that you have available (“little” is a relative term), your network, your tolerance for risk, your own personal expertise and interest and what you consider to be “a business” (are you trying to build an empire or personal wealth?)

For example; If you’re a skilled technology or business professional with a good network of peers and potential customers, You might want to consider starting a consulting company. The startup costs are minimal, potential profits are high and your knowledge and expertise would be the key assets. It would primarily be a case of marketing your services and lining up customers. (don’t forget that you could also partner with someone who has that network and would be willing to work it for you.)

Franchises are a mixed blessing. You’ll need to do your due diligence to understand the business and the market that you intent to enter. More responsible franchisors will insist that you do this by default. But the less professional ones will just take your cheque and let you deal with it.

MLMs are an easy way to some quick money if you have the hustle and a decent network. However, you’ll burn at least some of your contacts. I would avoid these. I only mention them before someone else does. I know some people that swear by MLMs, but they’ve always rubbed me the wrong way.

Direct services business are hot right now and a good investment. Daycare, medical, store-front retail, food services, cleaning, entertainment, etc.

Real Estate may be a good investment in the longer term, but requires access to capital and a certain amount of expertise to pick the right deals. It’s a buyer’s market right now with a lot of good deals. But there are no gaurantees that there won’t be an additional drop before the rebound. So you would need enough capital to be able to keep your investments afloat.
There are a lot of opportunities for commercial development as well. But, again, you’d need the expertise and network to leverage those oppoprtunities. Don’t ignore the ability to leverage a small amount of capital to control a relatively large investment.

My recommendation to you would be to make a list of your skills, hobbies, interests and assets and then start brainstorming where they might be a good fit. You may find that something jumps out at you.

Once you have a list of potential opportunities, assess the risk, reward, “fun level” and document all of the things that could possibly go wrong and how your would deal with them.

If your interest is simply in the financial transaction, you might want to consider brokering deals for other entrepreneurs or groups. Your profile indicates that you may have the expertise to do this. A bit of focused research and a LOT of networking could provide you with that “low capital/high profit” opportunity.