My blogging friend and mentor Adrienne Smith often writes about developing relationship with fellow bloggers.

Building relationship is very important to be successful. It is important that you build relationship with as many people as possible. However in practice it is very hard to build relationship with a huge number of people .Due to the limited time, it is best to build relationship that work out for both the sides.

All relationship start the same way, be it business or personal. We start with a hello and then add a few niceties. Later on we discuss about our thoughts on a particular subject. Then we visit the person’s place (offline or online) and a friendship is formed.

Sometimes these relationships work out extremely well and sometimes they don’t. In case of personal relationships, people move closer and often result in partners living together for the rest of the life. While in professional relationship, they move into formation of alliances and partnerships. Out of a number of new “acquaintances”, you will probably make one or two lifetime friends.

The relationships that I have had with my blogger friends started with a comment on their blog and then reciprocation from them or vice versa. We managed to find common areas where we could help each other. Meeting them online and talking to them brought us closer even though we physically miles apart.

Its very hard to figure out what works for one in business. Businesses rise and go bust all the time in the world. The same is with relationships. You can build relationships with a lot of people. However with a few you will always find a higher level of comfort or connect. You need to strengthen those relationships.

The most important point in a relationship is building genuine trust. My blogging friends trust me with sometimes solving their technical issues and share access details with me. I feel honored because of that. If we are not honest with each other, relationships can come crumbling down like a pack of cards.

Even online relationships take their time. People usually take more time to feel easy with someone online than offline. It is important that if you are building relationship for any reason ( personal or business) , be honest and genuine. Also be patient because it provides great rewards in the long run.

Entrepreneurship is often considered synonymous to unlocking a great idea and then making money off it. Unfortunately this definition also mean that a lot of people who are good at certain skills but do not get that “brilliant idea” stay away from becoming an entrepreneur.

To me this is a wrong reading of the concept. Entrepreneurship is  about getting an idea and then bringing it to the execution. However it is not really necessary that one get an outlandish ideas and then only he or she becomes successful.

A market consists of sellers and buyers. Sometimes buyers have an upper hand , sometime sellers. The market is always imperfect and even the smartest brain cannot predict who will win in the long run. An expert’s guess is same as that of commoner.

Trends often give you a great peek into future. Trends go up high before they become stable. The non serious players riding those trends are weeded out. An entrepreneur can utilize trends to his or her own advantage by exploiting opportunities where they occur. It really does not need great ideas to do that. Taking an existing market and slicing it in such a way that one gets a good slice of the imperfection that exists in the market is a good start.

That means if market is playing for premier goods, then entrepreneur can exploit the commodity part of it. If the market is growing yet small, entrepreneur can create products to quickly exploit the growth. If the market needs professionalism while all it gets is a tardy service, entrepreneur can bring in professionalism.

It really does not need great ideas to do that. All it needs is a careful analysis, breaking up markets into logical segments and then determining what works the best. You may or may not be successful but entrepreneurship is more about trying and losing till you get the winning streak. And knowing and figuring out what works is a long term process.

An interesting story about people who try things offline and then buy online has been published here. It seems that offline stores bear the brunt of staff costs, when staff help customers make choices about buying. Many times , the supposed buyer just walks off after testing the product and later buys the same thing from an online store, often at a discount. The retail stores are then left with lesser sales and higher costs.

Their frustration at this behaviour of buyer seems justified. The online stores do not have costs of hiring sales staff and paying for them. The offline stores is then angry with both buyers and online stores for taking away the revenues.

How would you as a small business owner cope with such a change? Is it good to blame buyers for what they are doing? When you open a shop, it means that you want people to visit it.

There are all kinds of shoppers that you will get including

• People who decide fast
• People who decide slow
• People who will try at your shop and buy at another store or online

Can anyone tell which kind of customers they are, when they walk in? Probably only a very skilled salesman can. It is practically impossible to get in the head of a buyer.  A lot of bargain customers will check out tens of shops before they decide to buy something. This process has been going on since probably the word “competition” entered business terminology. Now it is just easier to follow when one has a computer and an internet connection.

The response from retailers is to sue and make the competitors bend to will and to achieve parity with respect to prices. But there are following assumptions in this thought process

• Everyone is looking for a bargain
• Online retailers are responsible for lost customer sales
• Everyone is buying online

And you know all these assumptions can be questioned. Not everyone is looking for a bargain. A lot of them want the cool comfort environment of a shop with helpful sales people around. Some customers are driven by higher social status and seek exclusivity. Some of them hate online shopping.

It is all about kind of crowd your store attracts. If your store is attracting bargain hunters, be aware that you cannot stop them from looking elsewhere. They will do that online, offline or anywhere else. They will travel many miles just to get that right price. It is just impossible to stop them and restricting their choices would make them more angry against their businesses. Bargaining has been in existence from time immemorial and it is not going to go away because of social etiquettes. Since, there is no option to bargain price in stores these days, a bargain hunter keeps looking for bargain at many places.

The major problem that store faces is the cost of sales people. A lot of people get the free ride and there are cost to hire sales people. When I launched my eBook which took me four months to write, I gave it in exchange for email. To my surprise , people used fake email ids to download the eBook. I had to mention on the page of the download that free fake ids reduce chance of interactions and it is not a great thing to do. After that fake ids disappeared.

The point is that no matter what you do , free riding will exist. There are a few ways one can reduce it .

• Raising awareness about the cost and time spent to help customers.
• Sell more high margin products
• Use technology to understand customer behaviour. Institute rewards program
• Consider going online.
• Change the way business is done. Attract repeat paying clients more. Move out of commodity business. Get into exclusivity.

Suing competition or charging buyers for service/advice is not a great idea because that way you may be turning off the buyers who are willing to buy but have not made up their mind. One needs to be innovative to keep free loaders at bay while attracting genuine buyers.

Image courtesy of YaiSirichai / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Companies are like a group of people lead by a person who is often called as CEO of the company. In a small business, the owner often does most of the work, right from a lower level employee to the highest level executive.

In other words, a small business owner is the lifeline of his or her business. Unless one employs thousands of employees, he or she is a small business owner. She thus is the reason that business exists. It is often the case that small business owner would like customer to know her business by  business name rather than her own name.

As noble as it sounds, in my opinion it is not the best strategy. In case of small business, personal relations and credibility are far more important than the business name. Of course building a great brand is necessary but till the time the business reaches such a stage, business owner name sounds more credible.

Customers of small business owners would like to reach out directly to the business owner in case they face any issue rather than waiting on a phone line. They would like to speak to someone important. It is not possible to do this in large business. The personal touch is missing over there.

A small business’s success is completely dependent on how much familiar their customers are with the business owner. It is in the interest of business owner too to put herself above her organization, at least till the time business grows so much that ultimately the brand becomes bigger than the person itself.

Till that time you are above your business.

A majority of colleges at least in my country are built on principle of preparing people for jobs. Nothing wrong with that. However it often becomes the corner stone of why one would join a college. The college courses are often old, unchanged and uninspiring. They are meant to provide students as much knowledge as possible in shortest amount of time.

The real world unfortunately demands something different. It demands skills that are unique and that are contemporary. The skills provided by colleges are often from few years back. Since the whole world is witnessing unprecedented slowdown, jobs that repetitive in nature are either disappearing fast or that there is huge competition for the limited numbers. The reducing number of jobs and increasing number of graduates indicates a crisis. Some kind of jobs will disappear leaving people holding those skills redundant.

The best way out of such a quagmire is by encouraging entrepreneurship. Starting small and building up business is a long term thing. Colleges need to impart training in entrepreneurship right from the start. That means the curriculum needs to be overhauled and the emphasis needs to be on generating ideas and bringing them to reality.

This raises a question that if everyone becomes an entrepreneur how difficult it would be get employees for the workforce. The answer is that not everyone who gets skills will become entrepreneurs or start a business. Most of them will probably want to work for someone else rather than on their own. However a few who start their own ventures would create jobs that employs many. There will be failures but each failure will teach far more lessons than just reading textbooks. The entrepreneurship culture will bring venture capitalists and others interested to incubate the ventures.

The study course should emphasize on practical learning rather than rote. For students it means learning only what they want and getting a specialization. Add business knowledge such as soft skills, selling skills and others to it. Thus it becomes a potent weapon to combat the lack of jobs. It will rather create  new jobs that will bring prosperity to everyone.

Difficult times call for change in mind-set and it can only come when everyone responds to challenges in the correct manner and when they break the old habits.

If you play guitar for fun , you would feel that sometimes you just want to throw it away. Initially when you pick up the guitar, all you want to do is learn a few songs that you have been listening to all your life. You probably want to make an impression on people how good you are. Once you learn a few songs, you hit something  called as rut or plateau. The more you learn the more plateaus you get. The plateaus become smaller and they come in higher frequency now.

I remember the worst part in playing guitar was to stretch my fingers so that they could cover six to seven frets. Initially it looked impossible but slowly with time , I was able to accomplish it.

At points like these many musicians just give up. However it is exactly the point where actually the artist inside you has started to develop. Letting go at that time is the worst thing you can do.

Challenging yourself is the hardest thing to do. Yes, one can be pushed by others to do things but the challenge often needs to come from inside. As an entrepreneur , life is a challenge almost everyday. Sometimes the challenges prove to be very difficult and sometime they are like walk in the park.

The entrepreneur knows that he or she has no choice but to tackle these challenges head on. Not doing so means lost opportunities. These challenges make him or her learn new things which can be applied later on in an another problem. You cannot be an entrepreneur if you are so scared of problems and you want to run away the moment you see them. If you do not have courage, develop it or if you don’t have skills then learn them .

The best way is to continuously learn from the challenges and incorporate them. That means you will need to climb tough mountains. As you get better at them, you will see that mountains will now appear at a higher frequency. The challenges will not be about difficulty but also about frequency. If you then look back you will see that you have come a long way. You are at a place where others can only dream of being at.

How would you feel then ?

Once I played an April fools prank on my Facebook friends. I told them that I had won a high worth contract because of my blog. I have many blogger friends and no one even took the bait. As a result the prank fell flat.

The reason for pessimism was obvious. Not many bloggers make money from blogging. And then there are those who blindly follow what other successful bloggers are doing. Most of them end up nowhere. Thus, many of them quit soon.

It is important to have ambition and it is important to see them through. Often the motivation of young bloggers is to make enough money that helps them become independent and that they do not need to ask money from their parents.

However noble is the aim, making money as the sole criteria for your success is bound to lead to failure. A family I know is going to start their own business. They are already dreaming about the riches. Nothing wrong with that but rarely people become rich and famous in a few years.  Most often, the rich had to work for years before they got somewhere. The famous had to continually build their image before they became famous. True entrepreneurs always struggle and they are aware of it.

There will be other voices too, telling that it is indeed possible to become rich if we employ right methods. Yes we can but I cannot imagine if everyone becomes rich then how will we define rich and poor. If some method has made someone rich, it cannot work for everyone. Property prices often rise when economy is doing great. But they fall like dead ducks when things go bad. In that case people who did not sell at right time are the biggest losers. It has got nothing to do with intelligence or prophecy. It is just plain luck that someone has got it right and others did not. More : read Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb.

Entrepreneurship is more about discovery than the fixed step. If you wish to start a factory , you would take steps 1 , 2 , 3 etc. If you wish to make profit out of it, you will have to be innovative. So you need to take steps 1,4,2,3 or in any other order. You cannot pre-decide the order of steps. You will learn as you go and something might click.

Entrepreneurship is about trying the solutions that work to enhance your impact. Constrained by money you can only think very small even though you might have a larger potential. Create great stuff consistently and surely money and fame are going to come your way. Create your own path. Learn from others but don’t do a slave like copy.

Surrounding yourself with Yes man is the worst thing a leader could do. The glorification starts when the group that he or she is in becomes an echo chamber. A leader is then surrounded by people who agree to whatever he or she say. Such a leader risks getting the wrong advice.

When one is not so famous, there is a lot of crowd at the bottom of the rung. As they start to rise in the career or business, they attract people who are willing to follow every word they say. Thus every quote is exaggerated, every tweet is retweeted a thousand time. People like being flattered . But often the flattery is a form of deceit. The unrestricted flattery often make leaders assume that the things they are doing are completely right.

Flattery with intention to deceive often is done so as to gain something from the leader. Politics is full of it and unfortunately corporations are also not immune to it either. There is a difference between genuine appreciation ( which may happen without asking ) and flattery ( which is often given freely).

Yes it does feel great when one is praised for their success at something. However,  with every round of success, the leader’s ego gets a little bit higher. Praise from media pour in. People talk about them. Thus they may become overconfident.

On the flip side, people who provide valid criticism are looked upon with suspicion.

I have seen a number of corporate leaders, managers who enjoy the glory that comes with handling bigger teams or projects. Their competence would have got them the position they are at now. But their lack of ability to separate good from the bad works against them. They become arrogant. They alienate the well wishers. They think others are incompetent. This is the start of downfall or if not downfall then that of stagnation.

If you are in position where you have followers and make considerable impact on people or business around you, it is a good idea to stay humble. Keep yourself at arm distance from “yes men” because they only increase your ego. Also remember the fact that these “Yes men” will desert you when you face any trouble.

It often happens that a different runs of a TV series is launched on two different channels. One channel breaks the serial into many parts, inserts many ads and then launches it. Another TV channel put in a 20 second break, almost good enough to get popcorn and be back in time.

As it happens it is the second TV channel, I stick to more. They run their episodes back to back on Saturday and with small breaks, it is often very convenient to watch them one after the other. Since the actual size of the serial is only 30 minutes, the rest of 30 minutes are used to show snippets of other programs (or ads) from the same channel. Thus, I spend more time on this channel.

The problem with advertising

People hate to be interrupted. As it life is very stressful. It is really bad when the channel breaks a story just before climax to show you the ads. I am quite sure that most of us either walk away and come back later or switch to other channels on break. Neither the advertiser nor the channel gains much in terms of audience. Unless the ad is very interesting, it often ends up people ignoring them.

Do you have enough money?

If your venture is well funded, it is really hard to come up with a plan that will conserve money. Things are often wasted when they are available in abundance. If you have your hands on $1 million jackpot money from somewhere, the first thing is to blow it up on mass advertising. That is what one very promising start-up does here. The moment they get money, their ads start popping up. People remember who they are and probably it boosts their sales for the time ad is running. The moment money dries, the ads too vanish, indicating that something is not really right.

You cannot outrun ad spend by biggies

For example, you( an entrepreneur) have a product that is in direct competition with giants in the industry, can you ever outspend them? No. The only way to compete is to go simple, connect more with people and build your brand slowly. Until you get to a critical mass, do not even bother about going mass advertising way.

There are plenty of other things that need your money

Money is finite for an entrepreneur. Spending on advertising may bring short term boost but it will never bring long lasting success which can only come with better products, good customer relationship and happier employees. All of them cost money.

First build a business with solid ground; you can hire advertising agencies anytime later.

<p>Image courtesy of Billboard] / <a href=”http://www.freedigitalphotos.net” target=”_blank”>FreeDigitalPhotos.net</a></p>

One of my friends was in dilemma. He wanted to get into a related field. He needed to learn new skills and to do things better. He planned an investment of about $3000, on buying a really high tech computer.

The problem was, that he was not sure , if the investment was worth it. Another question in his mind was, if he could recover this investment in time. So he asked me about what he should do?

I asked him the following questions.

1. Can he afford it without breaking his bank? He said yes
2. Will he enjoy the work that he is going to do ? Again yes
3. In the long term, will the cost matter in terms of skill gained and money made? No

The point was simple; if you love doing something , there is absolutely no dilemma about spending on it. If you are passionate about something, you will learn to use the equipment in no time and it would add to your proficiency levels .

Now, about money. If money could be quantified into enjoyment we get from creating things, we would be billionaires each. If you can afford it, there is no need to wait to do things you have been dreaming of. I have spend a lot of money on learning guitar. Do I play like a pro ? Maybe. Can I perform in concerts? No way . Am I loving what I am doing? Yes. Nothing can take that joy away from me.

Even if you don’t make a dime on that investment, you could still make money teaching people who could :). So there is no dilemma in my opinion.

Image courtesy of bplanet / FreeDigitalPhotos.net