Home Based Business Opportunity Success

Secrets to Building a Successful Business

Ways to stay competitive when you go it alone. Bruce judson's book Go It Alone discusses three key points: A business can be started with minimal capital, does not need employees, has unlimited revenue potential.

In order to be successful you must read books written by successful people, or duplicate a successful formula. Many public speakers will tell you that their is no need to re-invent the wheel. Just repeat and duplicate the same formula, idea, strategy or presentation that has already proven to be successful.

In the first chapter of Bruce Judson's book Go It Alone, he states that there is an emergence of the go-it-alone entrepreneur. Businesses run by these entrepreneurs are characterized by three defining criteria:

• The business is started with a minimal investment, and the founder or founders retain full ownership and control of the enterprise.
• The business is run entirely by a small number of people, generally from one to six.
• The founder does not set out to create a small business. They are working from the premise that the business has unlimited revenue potential.

When a business starts with a minimal investment, the enterprise must focus on generating cash from the outset. This suggests that the business is able to swiftly develop a paying customer base. Unlike many start-ips, go it alone businesses don't have a gestation period where dedicated, full-time employees spend months developing plans and products.

In The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less, Richard Koch persuasively argues that most of us only make good use of 20 percent of our time. The remaining 80 percent is typically spent on activities that make little difference to our overall success.

Similarly, in Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donal Clifton studied and found the real tradegy in life is not that each of us doesn't have enough strengths, its that we fail to use the ones we have.

Go it alone entrepreneurs have figured out how to structure their businesses as systems that allow them to spend far more of their time on the meaningful, productive activities that take advantage of their greatest strengths.

The best way to describe this systematic approach is extreme outsourcing (not referring to the practice of offshoring) It simply means that a specific function is handled not by the entrepreneurs business but by a separate business.

In Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work by John Maxell discusses research that has demonstrated that simply having too many tasks, even if you have the time to do them all, is a distraction that can radically decrease your effectiveness.

To create a working system that allows you to focus, you must create free time by limiting the sheer volume of different things to be done. Farm out absolutely everything except the core functions.

Resources Book List

Continue to increase your knowledge in order to maintain a competitive edge. Here are some books to add to your library:

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
• Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work & Life by David Allen
• Multiple Streams of Income: How to Generate a Lifetime of Unlimited Wealth by Robert G. Allen
• Multiple Streams of Internet Income: How Ordinary People Make Extraordinary Money Online By Robert G. Allen
• Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning by Ram Charan
• Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start-and Run-Your Own Successful Business By Fred DeLuca with John P. Hayes
• Out of the box : Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services by John Hagel III
• NetMarketing by Bruce Judson
• The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life by Thomas W. Malone
• Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself by Daniel Pink
• Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead in a Time of Turbulence by Peter Schwartz

Go-It-Alone is not simply being a free agent or freelancer. These businesses provide more stability than freelance work and more personal rewards than franchising. These entrepreneurs are building a substantial asset. They have control of their own destiny. In difficult economic times, free agents and freelancers are typically in the extraordinarily frustrating position of waiting for the phone to ring. In contrast, go-it-alone entrepreneurs always have a focus for their energies and an asset that will provide them with an income stream.

Freelancers, Free Agents and Small-business owners

Typically work on a hourly or daily rate, or they charge by the job. In all these cases they depend entirely on what they can produce as individuals, and their earnings are tied to the clock. They have not established a business system that allows them to magnify or leverage their skills. As a consequence, their earnings are inherently limited.

In contrast Go it alone businesses don't suffer from this income constraint. Keystone is the effective application of leverage and extreme outsourcing. These individuals have figured out a way to focus their efforts around their individual skills-around what they do best and outsourced all other business functions to people who can provide them better or more cost effectively.