The most successful businesspeople are focused on a clear business plan practically around the clock. In order to perform at this level, they tend to make sacrifices that average performers might not find acceptable. Sacrificing for your business means you may inadvertently get less sleep than your weaker competitors, or less family and social time, or all three.
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Logic suggests that without sacrifice, your business would ultimately weaken, and your more aggressive competitors would continuously increase their market share at your expense. Depending on your attitude and life goals, you must decide if this type of effort is worthwhile.

Our purpose for this chapter is to explain some of the options for entrepreneurs in the early phases of corporate planning. Among other things, we will enlighten you on your best bets for starting a business, offer suggestions in creating a successful business plan, discuss the power in properly naming your company and brands, and review some of the documentation that will be necessary for you to succeed. Read More: Make Millions Make Change

From Day One, it's important to document what works best for you and your company. As mentioned previously, we call this a set of "Best Practices." This book is our tool for documenting our own Best Practices; we encourage you to adopt as many as you see fit while adding whatever else you develop or discover independently.
There is no set limit to your Best Practices' arsenal; it is a fluid document that should be continually evolving. Old ideas should be thrown out now and again while new ones are readily added. Some ideas can simply be added to your normal business flow, yet there may be times when you are so overworked that some emerging and innovative ideas cannot be as easily implemented.

After preparing extensive documentation about the Best Practices that drive your industry and your company, you should then create Standard Operating Procedures. This will explain how to do all tasks in an organized manner. Read more: Make Millions Make Change

The modern world is an immense place, and business people are constantly underestimating the size of global markets and the value of each share. Many worldwide markets are growing faster than United States' markets; therefore, your share of one of these markets has greater growth potential than a share of an equally valuable American market today. So working internationally could give you better long-term opportunities, if you choose well.

But despite great international opportunities, don't underestimate the limitless and fantastic opportunities throughout portions of the U.S., or anywhere online.

Ever-evolving globalization makes world commerce much easier. Business people in all countries can readily communicate with U.S. market players and vice-versa via telephones, Internet, FedEx, translators, jet planes, and so on. If your competitors don't know how to go global and you do, then you will win.

With globalization, you can easily have your German employees engineer products for your Canadian market while using a Florida distribution center, Indian call center, and Swiss bank. Read more: Make Millions Make Change

Early on, you could choose to have a relatively hectic lifestyle in order to earn more money and equity, and to save up for a more relaxed work-life down the road. Younger, single people might decide to endure more risk and higher work-related stress.

While you must earn enough to pay for your family's home, food, clothing, education, and healthcare, most additional purchases are discretionary. It is up to you if you really want to compete at the highest levels and acquire more discretionary income, or if you would be content with having a "good job" and the corresponding relaxed lifestyle. Regardless of the path you choose, only you can surmise which balance is most appropriate for your own family's needs.

We believe that it's more profitable to compress as much labor as possible into a shortened timeline to create the maximum efficiency and to overwhelm your market. Working more may not necessarily be better for you personally, but it is more profitable than a slower evolving business. For us, the main point in maximizing one's discretionary income is to apply this leverage to charitable works and to spend more retirement time with your family on the beach.

In this chapter, we will go over the ins and outs of taking business risks, negotiating and closing deals, and managing your cash flow. Read More: Make Millions Make Change

Next to the cold hard numbers that represent your profitability, or lack thereof, the most important factors in any business are the people. Aligning yourself with the most favorable partners, hiring the right employees, retaining the best contractors, and maintaining all of those relationships simultaneously to the best of your ability are all crucial to your overall success.

Learning when it is time to let any less-than-effective, risky, or difficult stakeholders go is equally important. Your goal is to have the right number of the right people who are properly incentivized and organized at each point of your corporate ascent. In this chapter, we will share our insights into how to best deal with those in your corporate neighborhood.

Pick Partners
You have to decide who you want your business partners to be, if anyone.

Some say, "don't do business with friends or family," which makes sense because all the stress in business could harm personal relationships. Conversely, who else can you trust with money and important decisions if not your family or friends? There is no right answer to this dilemma. Whether or not family and friends, the best bet is to have partners with a great track record and preferably deep pockets, and/or extensive skills to bring to the table.

If you want to avoid having family and friends as business associates, then you need to be part of a network where you can get exposure to other potential partners. You may discover prospective partners when doing the informal personal network building that is necessary for your marketing and other business purposes.

There are many ways to expose yourself, so you can meet the right types of people to try to partner with for your new business: join associations, online interest groups, leads groups, Chambers of Commerce, country clubs, gyms in affluent areas, online special interest groups, and so on.

If possible, partners should have many personal references, and you should feel a sense of compatibility and trust for one another. The longer you've known someone, the more qualified you will be to consider them for a partnership.

If you can finance your small company without partners, then you can keep all the profits for yourself, as long as you can handle all the risk yourself. If you have the confidence required to succeed, then the risk is lower than it would be otherwise.

Also, take into consideration whether you'd prefer to own half of a business or a whole business half the size. Realistically, you want to own more than 51% of any company that you operate because owning more than half of a business leaves you with final control over the decisions.

Of course, you still need to have the self-confidence and capability that we mentioned in the first chapter, or you are better off working for someone else. In that case, your bosses are likely to dictate how much, if any, stock you will get. They will avoid letting you get to 51%, to say the least. Read More: Make Millions Make Change

One of the keys to success-in any type of business-is a top quality sales and marketing operation. Let's review some critical concepts below.

Contact Management
When you start a new business, maintaining your contacts is one of the first things you absolutely must do thoroughly, correctly, and perpetually-and is probably one of the easiest and least expensive projects ahead of you relative to the value it will bring. Thankfully, the days of awkward and overpriced contact management software have come to an end.

It is surprising to see that a large portion of the business community takes no interest in proper contact management since technology has made it easy to keep your information in systems such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Act, or Goldmine.

Systems like these can store all of your contact names, addresses, phone and fax numbers while integrating the data with your business calendar, phone services, PDA, Word documents, fax software, email, web links, and web data.

As a side note, we are big dislikers of Outlook for several reasons, including that it is by far the most virus prone software in existence.
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