Category: Entrepreneurship

Success shouldn’t be a problem; unfortunately, for some businesses, it is. That’s because many companies struggle to deal with rapid expansion and growth. Indeed, having too many customers, leads, and orders to fill can present as many issues as having too few. And while experiencing an excess of capital potential is certainly preferable to the alternative, it can still cause small business owners headaches, and –– in the worst scenarios –– actually set companies back. Fortunately, you can mitigate against growing pains and put you and your staff in the perfect position to handle more clients, customers, and orders by following these five simple steps.

Analyze Everything

A good rule of thumb for business owners: hope for the best, but plan for the worst. If you take time to consider every possibility, you’ll never be caught off guard –– regardless of the outcome. It’s never a bad thing to be optimistic about your business’s prospects. After all, if you plan accordingly you will achieve your goals!

Make Good Hires

Easier said than done admittedly, but recruiting hungry and resourceful professionals to your company will greatly aid you in your ability to grow and expand. Furthermore, promoting from within is a fantastic way to boost morale and reward exceptional employees for their good work. Plus, it’ll likely prove smoother than trying to hire outside managers and leaders in the midst of a significant transition.

Get Help

Whether you need extra capital to take on a bigger project than what you usually deal with, or you need to outsource some of your transportation services to a 3PL company, don’t be afraid to look outside your business for solutions. The best entrepreneurs recognize lucrative opportunities and will invest in their own potential. Some would call it “betting on yourself.” But it’s probably better to think of it as giving yourself every advantage you need to succeed.

Don’t Compromise

It may be tempting to start cutting corners in the face of heavy workloads, but resist the urge to water down your product in any way. Remember that quality service is vital to customer retention, so if you want to perpetuate your success, don’t dilute your process.

Plot Your Growth Carefully

The best way to deal with rapid expansion is to avoid it. Few companies skyrocket in popularity overnight and maintain their course for any length of time. Rather, nine times out of ten, the responsible model for growth revolves around sensible scalability. Biting off more than you can chew can leave you with impossible responsibilities and undo your good work. So adopt a more measured approach when it comes to business expansion if at all possible.

Entrepreneurs are always looking ahead toward the future. However, sometimes the road to success is neither smooth nor straight. On the contrary, it’s confusing and chaotic. If you’re currently struggling to survive, then here’s a look at some multi-millionaires — and a few billionaires — who are enjoying success today, but at one point in their history hit financial rock bottom and filed for bankruptcy:

• Francis Ford Coppola

Unlike the Godfather Don Corleone, Francis Ford Coppola made his creditors an offer that they could and did refuse — and as such, in 1992 the famous director was forced (for the second time) to file for bankruptcy. However, this setback didn’t end his career. After emerging from bankruptcy he returned to doing what he does best, and in 2003 produced the Oscar-winning movie “Lost in Translation.”

• Donald Trump

Love him or hate him — or maybe both — the fact remains that Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy not once, not twice, but six (yes six) times. The first time was back in 1991, in the aftermath of the ill-fated Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The most recent was in 2009 in the wake of the Great Recession.

• Kim Basinger

If you’re a fan of the original Batman movie or you think that L.A. Confidential was one of the best noir flicks that ever came out of Hollywood, then you may be surprised to learn that one of the stars of both movies — Kim Basinger — wasn’t seen as all that lovely by her creditors back in 1993. She pulled out of the film Boxing Helena — and was sued by the production company for breach of contract.

• Cyndi Lauper

Colorful Cyndi Lauper is best-known for her 1983 chart topper “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” However, two years earlier in 1981 she was known for being deep in debt and filing for bankruptcy. Fast forward about 37 years, and Ms. Lauper is worth an estimated $30 million. She can have a lot of fun with that kind of cash.

• Walt Disney

Walt Disney is the legendary creator behind some of the history’s most beloved animated films. However, decades before the Seven Dwarfs were whistling while they worked and Pinocchio was being advised to wish upon a star, Walt was waltzing into bankruptcy court. That was 1920. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Bottom Line

If your entrepreneurial roadmap is forcing you to take an unexpected — and certainly unwelcome — detour through bankruptcy country, then don’t panic. Contact a qualified and experienced bankruptcy attorney (such as the Law Office of Charles Huber), and get the advice you need to move forward. Like the people above, you may look back on this event as a small setback on your road to big success!

Article Contributed by Haley Kieser

Innovation and creativity are the heart-and-soul of successful entrepreneurship. In today’s hyper-information marketplace, success and overcoming competitors is often about developing creative, thoughtful or out-of-the-box solutions to a problem. For example, ride share services like Lyft and Uber go against everything we were taught as children, but they’re among the most creative and groundbreaking solutions to an ancient dilemma: how to get from point A to point B.

It’s easy to find what the “best practices” are for any given industry. But what do you do when those methods and ideas fall short of your goal? You can plummet to the ground and watch your business or idea fail. Or, you can foster creativity and try something new. Even if that new idea fails, you still tried to explore what possible solutions arise and that might lead to a new insight.

But what if you’re simply not a creative person and your mind is hard and robotic? How can you foster these industry-leading ideas and make yourself, your company or project flourish? Fostering creativity is all about finding the necessary change to be made in your current processes.

Here are five ways entrepreneurs can boost their creative juices and discover new solutions.

1. Surround Yourself with Diversity

Creative thoughts are often molded by looking at a problem with a different mindset. The best way to create a new mindset is literally with a new mind. After all, as the idiom goes, two heads are better than one. Lone creative geniuses are largely a myth and truly great ideas often come from teams. To be creative, surround yourself with people who share your values and motivations but have differing skills, talents and backgrounds. This might mean exploring online forums, visiting local Meetup groups, or even working in a shared office space.

2. Use Time Wisely

Deadlines are both ripe with benefits and fraught with drawbacks. Setting a deadline itself makes you block out extraneous distractions and focus solely on the task at hand. But, you’re more closed off to ideas and solutions that you might find helpful. The rule of thumb is to avoid shirking deadlines in the name of creativity.

After all, completing a task is often a better outcome than trying to achieve perfection and never hitting the goal. So, reduce your stress levels and give yourself more time to think about problems, research the facts and come up with creative solutions. Keep your deadline and give yourself a healthy margin to meet it.

3. Embrace Failure

Truly great moments of inspiration and creativity don’t happen with an “aha” moment, but a “that’s funny” reaction to an unforeseen problem. Failure, in appropriate doses, is a good thing. It allows you to analyze what you’re trying and discover how and why that attempt failed. Creativity is grown in an environment where failure is encouraged. Reward yourself when you fail at a task or a new idea.

If you’re uncomfortable with failing, don’t worry, you can teach yourself to both embrace it, while having fun. Consider looking for local deals to try new tasks or activities you’ve never done before. For example, take a pottery class or learn how to swing dance. You likely won’t be good at them right off the bat, but by doing something fun and interactive you can teach yourself to fail in a stress-free environment.

4. Travel to New Places

Seeing new places, experiencing new cultures and trying new activities are among the best opportunities to get your creative juices flowing. Travel broadens your breadth of knowledge and empowers you to solve problems in new and unfamiliar situations.

If you have the money and the desire, consider taking a sabbatical year to backpack around Europe or Southeast Asia to show yourself new ways of approaching life and its problems. Simply by experiencing these different mindsets, it allows you to find new ways to tackle your own issues.

If budget or time is an issue, traveling to a neighboring state or city you’ve never been to before can also open new waves of creativity.

5. Leave Your Comfort Zone

Creativity, by its very nature, forces us to consider new opportunities and leave our comfort zone. If what was comfortable and natural to us worked, we wouldn’t need a creative solution. But the more comfortable you become with discomfort, the easier it is to enter those moments of clarity where trying something new presents a new solution.

These leaps and bounds away from your comfort levels don’t have to be very big. The new event simply must be different enough to make your mind consider new possibilities and jog a tangential link between what you’re doing and the problem at hand.

 

New research by an online services marketplace has found that the gender pay gap is virtually non-existent among self employed and freelance workers in the UK. The research found that women bidding for freelance and self-employed opportunities and jobs in sectors such as tutoring, photography and personal training earned virtually the same as men and in some cases more throughout the site.

The study, commissioned by Bidvine.com, an online local services marketplace where users can post jobs and ask local service professionals to bid for the work found that within their top five industry categories there was little to no gender pay gap between average rates of pay over the last 12 months. The study polled 150 men and 150 women from each of the top five sectors on the website, asking participants to provide their average hourly wages over the last 12 months, the results are below:

• Personal training (Male – £36 per hour / Female – £33 per hour)
• Wedding photography (Male – £650 per wedding / Female – £680 per wedding)
• Cleaners (Male – £11 per hour / Female – £12 per hour)
• Plumbers (Male – £73 per hour / Female – £70 per hour)
• Music teachers (Male – £28 per hour / Female – £28 per hour)
• Gardeners (Male – £21 per hour / Female – £19 per hour)
• Language teachers (Male – £25 per hour / Female – £28 per hour)
• Electricians (Male – £70 per hour / Female – £68 per hour)
• Singing teachers (Male – £30 per hour / Female – £35 per hour)

Although the results of the Bidvine study show that the gender pay gap is narrowing among the self employed and freelance workers, the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics puts the average gender pay gap at 14.1% across all sectors and age groups, a figure which has stayed the same since 2014. Co-founder of Bidvine.com Russ Morgan talked about the research saying:

“It’s great to see that, at least among the skilled professionals on our site, the gender pay gap is virtually extinct. The explosion of freelance and self-employed workers has seen a shift in how people value the work they do, and what their customers see as value for money for a job well-done.

Because Bidvine connects customers with professionals that can meet their exact needs, perhaps gender has become less of an issue.

We’re looking forward to the next 12 months, and hopefully, a significant change to the ONS figures this time next year.”