Category: Entrepreneurship

Being your own boss comes with a lot of benefits, and if you have the drive to be an entrepreneur, it can be the perfect way to make a living. For many, however, the hardest part about starting a business is knowing how to start. If you want to be your own boss and you can stay motivated through easy and tough times, entrepreneurship may be just the right thing for you. Here are some tips that can help you lay the foundation for a successful company.

Make an Outstanding Website

These days, every business needs a website. Not only that, but it’s also important to have a site that stands out among all the others. Your website will be the first impression that many people have of your company, and it should be eye-catching, cleanly designed, and easy to use. For instance, your site should have an attractive color scheme, good fonts, images and descriptions of your products/services, and content (e.g., blogs, articles, videos, etc.) that provides advice and/or information related to your industry. Moreover, it’s important to choose a good hosting plan so that your site functions well for users.

Bring in a JavaScript Developer

One way to guarantee that your website will stand out is to hire a qualified JavaScript developer who can make your site more dynamic overall and showcase the products you want to sell the most. JavaScript is mobile-friendly, which means your company’s site will look and work great on computers, tablets, and smartphones alike. If you want a website that comes with a high ROI and meets the needs of your company and your customers, hiring the right developer can be invaluable. When you’re searching for the right JavaScript candidate, Upwork notes that they should be knowledgeable in each of these areas:

• JavaScript
• CSS
• HTML
• Horizon
• js
• js
• ECMAScript

Explore Your Tech Options

Another part of becoming an entrepreneur is learning to take advantage of all the technology available that can help your business succeed. Social media is paramount in promoting your brand, broadening your customer reach, and building customer relationships. However, there is more tech out there that can make your business operations safer and more efficient.

• Security software
• Cloud storage
• Managed service providers
• Collaboration apps
• Point-of-sale systems (POS)
• Expense automation

Set Up an Office

When you start your own business, you want to make sure you have a comfortable place to work. There are many benefits that come with working from home. For instance, it’s generally the most convenient and least expensive option, and it provides the most flexibility. Even if you have a small home and can’t dedicate an entire room as your office, you can usually find ways to create a comfortable workspace with what you have. The important thing is that your workspace inspires creativity and allows you to be productive.

It’s important to note that working from home also has its drawbacks. For instance, if you find it difficult to get started on time each day or you struggle to stay focused amid obligations at home, you may need to consider investing in an office space away from home.

In order to make the most of your leap into entrepreneurship, you need a good foundation to build upon. Create a website that stands out among the competition and puts your company in the best light, and hire a JavaScript developer to put your site over the top. Also, look into all the tech options offered to small businesses today, and make sure you have a comfortable workspace that encourages inspiration and productivity. Once you apply these tips, you’ll be ready to get into the logistics and build the business you envision.

There are few greater accomplishments than starting your own business and being in control of your own career and finances. However, entrepreneurs that encounter less than desirable circumstances in their venture can end up under crushing debt and be forced to go out of business — or worse, to attempt to survive bankruptcy. Luckily, by understanding exactly what causes entrepreneurs to experience financial discord, you may be able to prevent the same fate from happening to you. 

Excessive Spending 

One of the most important steps you can take as a new business owner is to manage your budget and avoid overspending early on. Always keep in mind that your supply should match the demand. If you are just starting out, aim for products that won’t cost you a lot upfront. Keep these rules of thumb in mind: Everything you buy should have a purpose, and only purchase what you can pay for promptly. You should also make sure not to overspend on designing a website, logo, or storefront. While it may be tempting to invest in making sure your business appears put-together with strong, consistent branding, a sensible, well-managed budget is more important than a physical location that screams “luxury.” 

High Interest Rates on Loans 

Loans and credit cards are often avenues into undesirable financial situations, especially when it comes to budgeting for small businesses. If you decide to use business credit cards or loans to help your endeavor get off the ground, then make sure you read all the fine print and have a plan ready to start paying it back as soon as possible. Borrowed money will not wait for you to start making money to accrue interest: it will do so as soon as it hits your account.

Lack of Organization 

Success is built on goals and hard work. When you decide to start a company, that hard work entails organizing every aspect of your life. You need to track and record everything and compare costs for every purchase and investment. Doing your homework and making a plan can save you valuable time and money.

Relying on the Business Before It’s Ready 

If you are a new entrepreneur, never rely on your business for income from day one. It can take months or even a couple of years for your new venture to start earning enough profit to support its own costs, let alone yours. Far too often, people will quit their day jobs and use all the money earned through their business to pay for basic living expenses and their lifestyle. Then, after a few months, they realize they can’t make payments on their loans or purchase new product stock. Within a couple of months, their business has died off and they are left with mountains of debt without any way to pay for it.

Starting a Business with No Savings 

One of the biggest mistakes is spending money you don’t have. If you can’t support yourself with your current job, then there is a good chance that it is not the right time for you to start a business. Doing so will only put you in substantially more debt and cause you to crash before you can even take off.

Get Informed

The best thing you can do is study up: do as much research as possible into the process of becoming an entrepreneur. You have the internet at your disposal and millions of people who have records of success that can help. Study up today so you can be successful tomorrow.

Author Bio: Katie Tejada is a writer, editor, and former HR professional. She often covers the latest developments in HR, business communication, recruiting, real estate, law, finance, and investing, but also enjoys writing about events, decorating trends, and travel.

When the question of development outsourcing arises, one of the main things to consider is the dilemma of choosing between a dedicated team and freelancers. Below we will analyze the pros and cons of each option.

Dedicated Team and Freelancers: Which One to Choose?

To better understand which option to choose in your particular case, we suggest comparing the dedicated team and freelancers based on several fundamentally important criteria.

Project format and complexity

In the beginning, we suggest determining how large-scale and complex the project is going to be. For example, if you need a small website or you are looking for contractors to perform a specific task (e.g., a designer), it makes sense to find a freelancer for this purpose. In this way you will save money, and you will be able to dictate your terms on deadlines, rates, and other requirements.

It’s quite another thing if your project is a large-scale one and requires a thorough approach, engaging a whole team of diverse specialists at once. In this case, looking for freelancers to perform individual subtasks would be a hard task, as would be getting them all synchronized with the workflow. It is for this reason that it makes sense to find a dedicated team, which, either under your centralized management or under the control of your own project manager, will create a ready-to-release product within the stipulated time frame. The team will probably insist on certain conditions, but in this situation, trusting experienced specialists will be 100% justified.

The ability to control the process

Consider whether you are ready to devote your time to coordination of the work of the specialists. As a rule, dedicated teams do not need guidance, since they already have their own, local leaders. As for freelancers, you have to distribute the tasks and check the progress on your own. Therefore, if you do not have a lot of time to spare, you should probably opt for a dedicated team.

Focus on long-term cooperation

A dedicated team is a reliable structure that can support your product for many years. On the other hand, this factor may not be fundamentally important for you, for example, if we are talking about a website created on the basis of a ready-made CMS. In this case, finding a new developer who has experience with a specific engine will be easy for you.

Budget

Dedicated teams, as a rule, charge a lot. The reasons for this are simple: firstly, they regularly invest in raising their qualifications, and, secondly, their rates should cover the rent for the office and related expenses. This is also the main reason why owners of low-budget projects turn to freelancers.

Project deadlines

Turning to a freelancer, you ought to understand that they are likely to be engaged in a couple more tasks from other customers simultaneously with yours. With a dedicated team, you will never come across this situation, so you can insist on the shortest possible deadlines for the project.

The need to engage certified professionals

Obtaining certification is usually a paid procedure for a developer. Freelancers rarely care to pay for a certificate, but it is a necessary procedure for specialists from dedicated teams, who are officially employed by a particular IT company that finances the certification or require the one for employees’ promotion. Therefore, if your project requires the utmost skill from the developers, consider a dedicated team.

The presence of staff developers

Finally, think about who will be checking the work. If your staff includes employees with the necessary level of qualification, then you can safely cooperate with freelancers. But if your understanding of software development is at the level of a regular user, then it is better to trust professionals whose company will be responsible for the quality of the project.

Conclusion

Let’s sum up. Cooperation with dedicated development team is considered more reliable and indispensable for large-scale and/or scalable projects. If you need to build something simple (for example, a one-page site), it will be much easier, faster and cheaper to turn to freelancers.

Millennials face a huge number of challenges in their lives. Rising rent and home costs are preventing millennials from becoming homeowner; the Gig Economy, while flexible, provides no benefits for a large portion of working millennials; and seemingly endless debt from college loans is constantly looming. Despite all of this, millennials are one of the most entrepreneurial generations that the world has ever seen, even though they face many challenges in that regard as well.

Education Can Make a Difference

While many millennials are starting to reconsider the importance of a college degree due to the debt involved in obtaining one, having a degree actually gives young entrepreneurs a huge leg up in the business world. Though the degree itself is useful, another invaluable aspect of attending college for entrepreneurs is the networking that you can do while attending college or university. The old adage, “it’s who you know” is still relevant and applicable today, and the connections you make during college can help to make entering the business world a much easier prospect.

 

One of the most obvious degree paths for the aspiring entrepreneur is to go for a Masters of Business Administration. An MBA helps with an entrepreneurial career by teaching financial literacy, how to operate efficiently, and gives young entrepreneurs the interpersonal skills they will need when they are the boss of a team of employees. College is a great opportunity for a millennial to develop the necessary business skills to become successful, and though the debt might pile up, if a millennial goes in with a driven purpose they will most likely be able to pay the loans off when their business becomes successful.

 

Becoming a successful young entrepreneur isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, like Richard Branson and Michael Dell, were initially met with skepticism when they were first presenting their ideas. While young millennials will run into their fair share of hardships on the path to success, having an appropriate college degree under their belt allows them to be taken just a bit more seriously when they are first starting out.

Maintaining Values and Passion

Millennials tend to eschew the traditional method of climbing the corporate ladder to success. Instead, millennials are an entrepreneurial generation that values independence, flexibility, and to work for or run a company that they are passionate about. While their parent’s generation was perfectly content working the same 9-to-5 job day in and day out until they received their gold watch at retirement, millennials are disillusioned with that process and desire to work towards a goal that makes a larger impact in the world.

 

Businesses that give back to their communities are especially attractive to millennials, so when they are starting up their own businesses, they tend to take corporate social responsibility seriously. However, fledgling companies generally don’t have the capital or manpower to make huge differences, and this can lead to burnout for a lot of young entrepreneurs. Keeping the passion alive for the causes they believe in can be difficult when they are faced with all of the challenges posed by starting up their own company.

 

One of the reasons millennials are so into starting up businesses of their own is that many companies fail to properly manage the millennial workspace. Millennials want empathy and open communication where they work, and far too often businesses are already too set in their ways to accomodate for a new style of management. Because of this, many millennials find themselves bouncing around from job to job, or becoming entrepreneurs themselves in the hopes of creating a business that they would like to work at.

Mountains of Debt

Probably the biggest reason that millennials have a difficult time becoming entrepreneurs is also the most obvious: A severe lack of personal savings due to debt acquired while obtaining their degree, coupled with low wages and steadily rising housing costs keeps many millennials living from paycheck to paycheck. Many don’t expect that they’ll ever be able to retire, let alone raise enough capital to start up their own business.

 

The rise of the gig economy has definitely provided millennials with the ability to set their own schedules and not be tied down anywhere. However, there can be downsides. Gig workers do not qualify for benefits from employers, so they are paying for all of their insurance and medical costs. Additionally, the gig economy doesn’t provide the financial stability required to start up a business, as gig workers only get work as it comes and things can dry up quickly.

 

Despite the huge amounts of debt many millennials are burdened with, it hasn’t stopped them from exercising their entrepreneurial spirit. They seem to find a way to get the funding and time to develop businesses that they are passionate about that also fill a need in the market. Even though the deck is stacked against them, millennials make the best out of a bad situation and try their best to come out ahead.

 

At the end of the day, millennials, Gen X, baby boomers and Gen Y are all after the same thing. No matter their age or standing, people crave success and want to make it happen, whatever it takes. Unfortunately, millennials have had it a bit harder than the previous generations, but that isn’t holding them back.

It’s a huge jump, but one that can ultimately reap you umpteen rewards (many of which are not financial).

However, taking this jump towards self-employment is one that a lot of people just struggle to get to grips with. Suddenly, the comfort of a standard 9-5 job is stripped away, and they are left with countless unknowns.

Well, before you even consider to take this leap you should take a long, hard look at your finances. With that, let’s take a look at some of the financial issues you should be raising yourself before pressing ahead.

Do you have enough savings to fall back on?

First and foremost, you need to make sure you are in a strong enough financial position to move forward with your dreams. Let’s not forget that this is going to be the period where your regular pay check goes out of the window, and you effectively enter the unknown.

Ultimately, there will be months where you might not have any income. It is for this reason that you need to put together something of a nest egg; you need sufficient money to fall back on in case you struggle to turn a sufficient profit in the initial months.

This might mean boosting your income through a second job, or even something like trading. In relation to the latter, technology has unquestionably made this a lot easier over recent times, with the likes of the Meta Trader 4 demo account meaning that you stand a much bigger chance of turning a profit and ultimately increasing the size of your savings ahead of your self-employment move.

Have you cut out all unnecessary expenses?

This next point is quite self-explanatory; after all, nobody needs unnecessary expenses.

However, this suddenly becomes a lot more urgent as you move into the world of self-employment. After all, as we have already alluded to, this is a period of the unknown. You don’t quite know what expense or even income is around the corner, so you need to cut back wherever possible.

Take a look at your finances and scale back, just to give yourself a bit of breathing space and alleviate some pressure.

What is your mortgage situation?

This next question is quite interesting. Now that you are self-employed, your borrowing situation becomes much different. Quite often, lending providers will require three years’ worth of accounts before considering lending you money, and obviously this is a stumbling block.

Ultimately, if you are thinking of remortgaging or getting another mortgage in the near future, this is something to be aware of. It might mean that you are handed a much higher interest rate than you may have been expecting.

Have you looked at possible help from the government?

Finally, it doesn’t have to all be bad. One of the wonders about starting your own business is that you can tap into a whole host of different grants. Many of these directly target start-up businesses, so sift through them and see if you can get some extra help along the way.