Our 2nd birthday month-long celebration brings another fun contest for you!! Here’s your chance to win some great business-related prizes. We want to hear your best ever Startup Business advice...either something someone told you or something you’ve learned as an entrepreneur. Contest will end Wednesday at 5pm and the best comment of the bunch will be determined by a couple of our fabulous Fairy Godmothers (sorry-no Startup Princess Fairy Godmothers may enter this week’s contest). Here’s what the winner will receive:
The Soccer Mom Myth: Today’s Female Consumer–Who She Really Is, What She Really Buys; book sponsored by Fairy Godmother Holly Buchanan and Michele Miller $19.95 value
1 set of Giggle Goal cards (30 pack) sponsored by Fairy Godmother Laura West of the Center for Joyful Business $9.95 value
1 Sparkplug U “Helping Everyone Create Flexible Work at Home Jobs Without the Fluff” course sponsored by Fairy Godmother Wendy Piersall, $39.95 value
Startup Princess 2007 Conference 2 disc, 6 hour DVD set, featuring 14 Fairy Godmothers’ breakout sessions and keynotes to inspire and help you with marketing, distribution, bootstrapping, and more! $35 value
Winner must be a US or Canadian resident
KNOW your target market. Be as specific as possible. Try to get inside their minds and think like they do. Find out where they hang out online. Join forums and groups where you’ll have the chance to interact with them. There’s more to social networking than joining Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and if you look at it as more “social” and less “networking”, it will just come naturally.
NEVER, EVER give up on your passion. So many times – especially right in the beginning stages, it’s easy to question yourself and if you have what it takes to make your dream become a reality. It’s easy to doubt yourself, to fear failure, to feel too tired to keep going. But if what you are going for is your PURPOSE in life – you need to push through those “down” times and just push forward and be patient. All good things take time.
Find a mentor. Finding a mentor and really working with her has helped me learn the nuts and blots of photography and how she started her business. While I didn’t learn the step-by-step details on business development or business management, I’ve learned some of the steps she has taken to get her business where it is today. This helped me take a hard look at myself early on and decide if I really wanted to start my own business. And I did!
Visualize what success looks like to you. I’m a huge fan of visualizing where you want to be, because then you can break down the steps it takes to get there. Covey called it “Begin with the end in mind.” I call it more than goals, more than wishes, I call it taking time to meditate on where you really want to be a year from now, 10 years from now…etc. What does it look like? How much money will you have made? What associations will you have made? What mentors do you need to get to that successful place? Visualization has done more for my personal success and professional success than anything else. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s hard to get there. AND if you don’t know you WANT to get there it’s hard to drive yourself to get to nowhere in particular.
READ!! Learn from others that have created their own business. Let their knowledge guide you. You can avoid many mistakes this way. Others that have started their own business have made the mistakes already and can give you some great advice! If it is your passion to create your own business then find others that have businesses similar to yours. Contact them and ask what is the one piece of advice that they could give you. Before you know it, you will have new friends and mentors to assist and guide you.
“It IS a real business.”
For a while, I was just thinking my boutique wedding planning firm was just small potatoes because I was new to the industry. . .and I treated it like a hobby. Now I spend more time working on the business than in the business and I am flourishing. Exhausted–but excited. For that person to tell me that was the push that I needed and I always remember it.