Virtually every owner or manager will agree that operating a small business requires lots of hard work on the part of both managers and employees. It’s what is commonly known as “sweat equity”. Or in other words, hard work is required to bring the results desired.

Hard work alone is not enough. Additionally, the business owner must be prepared to make a commitment to building and growing the business. That translates to being on the job every day.

Unfortunately, some owners, such as those who purchase a franchise, assume that their on-the-job commitment is not necessary if they hire a manager to run the business. Sometimes that works. More often it doesn’t work so well. Nevertheless, operating a small business requires hard work by the owners and managers.

There are three fundamental steps in the process of the hard work that are not complicated, but necessary for success.

Getting work comes first. Whatever the business does, it must first promote and sell its products and services to the markets served. The business cannot depend on chance. To illustrate, if the business has the cure for the common cold, it must tell the market and provide a way for potential customers to contact the business to purchase the remedy. To get work or sell products and services, the business must make the market it serves aware of its presence and skills as well as how to contact the business. Fortunately, there are many affordable advertising and promotion options for small businesses that will contact potential customers who are likely to buy the products and services available for purchase.

Fulfilling and delivering customer orders is the second step. Whether designing, building, assembling or delivering products or services, small businesses do of good job of getting the work done. What they do not do so well sometimes is fulfilling the order or getting the project done on time.

There may be nothing more irritating or displeasing to a customer than a supplier or vendor who does not fulfill an order or complete a project on time. This happens far too often with small businesses. While it is desirable to get something done the right way even though it may take more time than originally planned, small business owners and managers must strive to meet deadlines or finish projects before the deadline if they want to be successful.

Paying bills and getting paid for the Work performed and delivered is the third step of the process.

Small businesses tend to pay bills to vendors and suppliers before the due date because they think the thought doing so will assure a good credit status with the vendor or supplier if the bill is paid before due. Paying the bill when due is good enough.

On the other hand, they will allow their customers to pay bills beyond the due date.

At the end of the fiscal year, most small businesses will complain that while sales were good, there was little cash in the company checking account. When asked why this is the case, Accountants and Consultants will reply that the cash shortage is in Inventory or Accounts Receivable. Usually the latter is the major contributor to cash shortfalls.

Small businesses do not do a good job of getting paid in a timely manner. It does not have to be that way and it should not be that way. In fact, it is very easy to assure timely payments when a consistent and uniform Accounts Receivable Collection Procedures Program is in place.

Accounts Receivable systems are a valuable asset to small businesses. The consistent application of Accounts Receivable collection activities will reduce costs which in turn improves margins and operation profits.

In closing, a professional Accounts Receivable Collection is not the dreaded last minute phone call to the customer that nobody wants to do. On the contrary, the process begins at the Point of Sale when buyer and seller agree to payment terms required and continues on professional and uniform communication between the buyer and the seller.

Whatever home based business you might be in, it really doesn’t matter. The question that you must ask yourself as you read this, is how seriously are you taking your business? Recently I heard that if you had a 9-5 job, you would do anything it took to go to work. You wouldn’t think twice about going to that JOB, right? Of course. You have to go to work no matter what. Sometimes you even go to work when you are not feeling so well. Yes, when you are self-employed you have the leisure of taking off whenever you want, but for the most part when you are actively building your business, you absolutely do what you have to do, no matter what. Take a moment right now and think about your current situation. It may be like many new entrepreneurs right now around the world. You may be struggling right now to get your business going. That’s ok. Every business builder starts out that way. You most likely have heard this before: your business, must be taken seriously and must not be treated as a hobby. A hobby is something that you enjoy doing, for fun. A business is something that you love to do for the purpose of increasing your knowledge, the knowledge of others and obviously growing your finances. The home based business that you are in right now, must be taken seriously and you must not treat it as a hobby. Did I say that already? It needs to be repeated I believe. You’ve already taken the time to think about your current situation, and now you need to look at the future of your business. If you are indeed a new home based business owner, you need a mentor or a coach or someone that can help you in the things that will help you continue to grow your business.You might be thinking that most of the people that grow to have a successful business, are those who are single and have nothing else to do. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. The many business owners that are successful and help others to be successful are those who have one of the busiest lives.There are other people that work around those excuses and prioritize around those”excuses” and make things happen. What should you do to be successful?
Take your business seriously.
Treat your business like a business not like a hobby.
Never stop learning. Education is important.
Taking your business seriously means, to take the time in needs to grow your business, whatever that may mean. Reading books and taking advice from other successful people in the home based business world is an example of taking your business seriously. Never stop learning no matter how far up the business ladder you go. Once you have “arrived” you most likely will start to fail. No one is exempt from “falling”.Treat your business like a business not like a hobby. Many people that enjoy their business, often make the mistake of treating it like a hobby. If you have fallen into this trap, it might look something like this:”You enjoy the home based business that you are in, but you rarely spend time on growing the business. You spend lots of time looking at things that you could do, instead of actually doing what it takes to grow your customer base or business partner base.Never stop learning. Education is important. There are many views on this point, but I will share what has helped me, and hopefully it will help you. You probably agree with me that there are so many “gurus” that offer there knowledge and advice for a hefty price. There are many books and video presentations and e-books that are in fact very beneficial to growing your business. The warning that I would give is, don’t buy everything that you see or here. As a rule of thumb, if there is free advice that you can receive from the “expert”, then do that. Be aware that not all free advice is good, but keep an eye out for things that you can use and be sure to apply them right away.Take your business seriously by putting the effort into it that you would if you were in a 9-5 job. Who knows, you might still be in a 9-5 still and are slowly working your way to the self-employed life. That’s ok, and that is the safest way to go. Work your business diligently and only do what matters.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.