Survive, Strive, Thrive

Life comes in phases – baby to young adult to senior citizen. Business displays the same phases.

Survivors are people whose attitude of minimum effort allows them to just survive; they choose to do as little as possible to get through life. You will find these people on the welfare roles. An upscale version of this appears in the cute kid who expects life to hand them everything they want with zero effort on their part. You know the female who seeks a sugar daddy or plays the “I’m cute so give to me” attitude. Guys are not exempt either even though there are less in the “I am handsome and full of muscles so give me’ category. America has unfortunately encouraged an entitlement society.

Survivors take from society rather than contributing to its growth.

Our ancestors were hard working industrious people. They were strivers. Prospectors who mined for gold endured extreme weather, shortages of food, and rudimentary shelter. Early settlers in the West endured dust storms, insect devastation of crops, Indian attacks, as well as the most basic of living conditions. Our ancestors who crossed the ocean in steerage compartments were directed past the machinery, down deep stairways into the enclosed cramped quarters of the lower decks; they lived or died in the absolute minimal accommodations. Today these pioneers are the single mothers who scrape by to care for their children by working two jobs. The strivers are the people, young and middle age, who attend night school or study at the library to advance their knowledge and value in the workplace. The strivers are the ones who sacrifice the weekend party to learn and grow and provide a better future for themselves and their families.

The strivers are the ambitious determined citizens who will not settle for just getting through life; they are committed to improving themselves. Strivers contribute to society. Our nation was founded by strivers. If we are to emerge from our current economic dilemma, it will be due to the strivers. Entrepreneurs are strivers. Entrepreneurs contribute to the improvement of conditions for the entire society.

As an entrepreneur’s mentor, there is a responsibility to encourage strivers. Entrepreneurs work closely with coaches and their entrepreneur’s mentors to constantly tweak and improve their performance. Entrepreneurs constantly strive for improvement. Our nation was founded by and for entrepreneurs. Our forefathers did not risk their lives and all of their worldly possessions to beget a nation of survivors and folks who expected a hand out.

The quarrel is not with those who genuinely need and deserve assistance; the verbal “kick in the pants” is directed at the capable but lazy. Entitlement mentality people frequently have the ability but not the motivation to get off the couch and earn their way forward. America doffs its hat in respect to the strivers, the entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur’s mentor becomes an honor and a valuable use of time in extending wisdom to assist others in moving forward.

Thrivers have arrived. Thrivers epitomize the result of striving and accomplishing. Thrivers earned their success through concentrated focused goal oriented efforts. Look throughout history at the successful leaders in every aspect of society. Every one of them endured challenges, setbacks, and adversity; each one of them persevered through the speed bumps of life. The thrivers are the strivers who remained steadfast to their goals until they arrived. Thrivers earned their reward. Most thrivers were entrepreneurs. Whether they chose a career in business, one of the performing arts, education or science, they dedicated themselves to their future.

Question yourself if you have chosen to be a survivor and draw from society rather than contribute to it.

Be proud of yourself for being an entrepreneur and a striver. Celebrate your success as a thriver. America grew to be the greatest nation through the efforts of the strivers, the entrepreneurs. Be proud to be a striver and a thriver.

For more inspiration and guidance on how you can be a striver and thriver, an entrepreneur, join me at http://www.Elaine4Success.com.

28 years experience as a successful entrepreneur, post-graduate degrees in Communication and Alternate Dispute Resolution, and a proven track record as a teacher, coach and mentor, revealed the success formula. Network marketing achievements for the last 4 years. Executive Committee, Ethics Committee, Certified Consultant Seminar Program, Leadership Support Team, Leadership Award Synergy Saturday, Empower Magazine, Millionaire Mastermind Group and selected as Consultant of the Month by Network Marketing Magazine in July 2007.

Elaine Love, Owner
Results For Life LLC
Certified Master M3 Consultant
303-284-0514
resultsforlife@gmail.com

http://www.Elaine4Success.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elaine_Love

Starting A Part-Time Internet Business

Starting a part-time internet business is an excellent way to test the waters and find out if you have what it takes to run a business without risking too much. If you are thinking of starting a business, I would strongly urge you to take the part-time route first. Many successful full-time businesses began this way, and have made their owners a lot of money, and continue to do so.

The transition from part-time business to full-time is not that great. Once you have established yourself in your chosen market you will have all the systems in place to make that step up. Even if you decide to remain part-time, you will have an excellent source of income, which will insulate you from the insecurities of your full-time job.

Don’t underestimate the power of a part-time business to build you wealth and create an extra income independent of your full-time job.  There’s many advantages of starting a part-time business. The purpose of this article is to point them out to you and encourage you to take the step into business and create some wealth for you and your family. Here’s just a few of the advantages of a part-time business.

Low Investment

The first advantage of a part-time internet business is the low cost of starting one. You will already have the main equipment necessary like a computer and printer. You can start a part-time internet business for a few hundred pounds. Compare this to the pre-internet days when starting a business involved a major outlay of money and time. A few years ago, I started a part-time business selling second hand computers. This involved me giving my weekends up and traveling round the country to computer markets. I had to load my car up with computers, drive for a few hours, unload them all and stand there all-day. Usually to reload them all back into my car and return home with nothing to show for it.

I had to invest money into the computers, which meant I had a lot of money tied up. There was also the cost of getting onto the markets and the traveling expense. It was a huge investment of time, energy and money. I stopped doing it after a while because it just wasn’t worth it. I started my internet ecommerce business with a hundred pounds and reinvested all the profits to build it up. I now make more money in a week sitting in front of my computer than I made all the time I was selling computers.

Few Expenses

The expenses of a part-time business are low. Apart from a computer, a printer and a good internet connection you’ll need stationery and a log design. And packing materials if you are going to open an online shop. All of which you can buy cheaply. Once your business starts to build up momentum it will become self-financing, paying its own way.

Gain Experience

Experience cannot be bought or taught, it has to be learned. You can read all the reports and books available on trading but until you step into the market, with your own business you cannot build experience. The experience you will get from launching your own part-time business is a real live university course in business. Every move you make will have a consequence. The market will respond to everything you do or fail to do. A year of running your own business will provide you with more real life knowledge than ten years of studying business from someone who may never have run one. With experience, comes confidence and if you do decide to take your business full-time you will be equipped to do so.

Test Your Ideas

You may think you’ve got a great idea, your wife may agree, your mother may be all for it but the only way to test it is to take it to the market. You can use the market to test your ideas out and fine-tune them on a part-time basis. If the market doesn’t like the idea it’s a simple matter of dropping it without having wasted too much of your time and money. A part-time internet business offers you the opportunity to do this.

Extra Money

We can all do with some extra money and a part-time business is a good way to generate an extra income that isn’t dependent on your job. Even an extra hundred a month is a welcome addition to a budget. You can reinvest this in your business and watch it grow into a money-generating machine. Once your business becomes established and starts to grow it will create money giving you a surplus to spend or invest.

Learn New Things

No matter what your business knowledge is, starting a business will increase it. You will have to learn new skills on the fly. Marketing, SEO, stock management, budgeting and bookkeeping to name just a few of the skills you will need to master to succeed.

Test Yourself

Do you have what it takes? Can you remain cool under pressure? Can you continue to think logically when your plans aren’t working? Can you remain positive and continue to formulate plans when nothing seems to be working? Can you rally yourself to charge forward when you’ve taken a battering in the market? You’ll find the answers to all this and more about yourself if you plunge yourself into the market with an idea or some products. You will fail in some things, it’s unavoidable, we all have and we all do, it’s how experience is gained. Each failure will bring you back stronger and wiser than before.

When you triumph though the failures will, all dissolve. When you make a plan and drive it to completion against the forces that are against you, you will experience a great sense of personal achievement, a boost in your self-confidence and your self-esteem will reach new levels.

All these things can be achieved by starting a part-time internet business for little cost. If it’s something you’ve being thinking about, then stop thinking and act. You’re better and more capable than you think you are; you’re braver than you think you are, you know more than you think you do, you are already programmed with everything you need to succeed. All you have to do is take the first step.

9 Reasons To Start A Small Business

Learn How To Deal With People

Learn to deal with people. I’m not just talking about people you like; that’s easy.  I’m talking about dealing with certain customers who enjoy being difficult. This is excellent practice for learning the skill of not taking things too seriously. How to remain logical and professional in the most trying of circumstances, whether it’s dealing with suppliers or customers, you’re bound to have your patience severely tested at some point. Can you cope? Can you remain professional under pressure? You’ll never know if you are not pressure tested.

Know The Thrill Of Taking Risks

Unless you’re a seasoned gambler or on active military service, only in running your own business can you experience the thrill of taking risks. Even those overpaid business leaders cannot know the fear and excitement of the independent small business owner who has everything riding on a decision he or she has taken about pursuing a strategy. For the overpaid business executive, deep down, he doesn’t really care if he makes a bad decision, after all, it’s not his company and he still gets paid if it all goes wrong. Someone else will pay for his bad decision. Usually employees who are made redundant. Look at the banks. The people who made all the bad decisions still got their millions. It was the employees who had to pay the price. In your own business, if you’ve made a wrong call, you will pay. When you put together a strategy, invest time and money in it and need it to work, you’re on a rollercoaster ride and you feel every turn and twist.

Learn To Overcome Fear

There’s no getting away from it, if you run your own business you are going to be confronted with challenges that will test your character. You will have to do things you may find uncomfortable, step out of your comfort zone on a daily basis. It may just be negotiating a new price with a supplier. If you’re easy going, you will have to learn to put some steel into your character, so you can deal with suppliers who will want to sell you things at a high price. As a small business owner you will have to take on roles you may not be familiar or comfortable with, like sales. Every day the small business owner has to exercise fear and continue to function professionally.

Challenges You To Excel

Learn to be your best, to extract every bit of mental and physical stamina from yourself, to continue going when you are exhausted. To continue thinking when all options seem closed, to keep looking for solutions when others would have walked away saying there is none. Running your own business will present you with unique challenges daily. Can you deal with them? How do you respond under pressure? Can you remain calm and in control or do you fall apart?  Don’t know? Start a small business and you’ll soon find out.

Get A Mission

If you’re drifting through life, following the same routine every day, year after year, starting a business gives you a chance to launch yourself into a mission.  We need a mission. Life’s not just about filling our time with pointless leisure pursuits all the time. Or working so we can afford to buy another trinket that will offer us no lasting satisfaction. We humans need to be doing, to be planning and testing ourselves. That’s when we’re happiest, pursuing goals and dealing with all the problems that entails. We need a cause greater than ourselves to pursue. Get a business, get a mission.

Open Up Your Creativity

We’re all capable of being creative, most people though never touch on their creative powers. If you start a business, you will unleash them. You’ll have to if you want your business to survive and prosper. Being in charge of your own business will allow you to express your creativity, whether in marketing strategies, or business organization, no small business can thrive without a creative driving force behind it.

Make A Million

Well maybe not, but there’s no denying that it could happen. You should certainly aim for the million but if you only make 250.000 it’s 250.000 you wouldn’t have made if you’d never started. Anything you make is a bonus and will add to your wealth. Starting your own business is your own wealth creating system. The alternative is to trust a banker to look after your money. We won’t go there.

Experience Variety

If you work in a job, doing the same thing every day then starting a business will give you plenty of variety, from doing accounts to working out a marketing plan, from dealing with suppliers to organizing processes. It’s a daily adventure that will require you learning many new things.

Build Your Character

There’s no doubt that running your own business is a character forming experience. Apart from taking part in combat, there’s no other area of life where you can test yourself so thoroughly. And win or lose you will definitely grow from the experience and come out of the other end a better and more rounded person.

Reasons To Start A Part-Time Internet Business

• Extra Income

We can all do with some extra income, however much it is. I was listening to a recently retired man in his early sixties complaining that he only had so much to live on every week and the good days had gone. He’s still stuck in the old mindset that once you retire you have to rely on your monthly pension and that’s it, finished. This is wrong. So wrong in today’s internet dominated world. It’s not difficult to earn an income over the net; even a small income will add value, even if it pays for a holiday ever year.

• Independence

Having an income generated by your own efforts from a small business will insulate you from the ups and down of the markets. Many retired people who depended on the interest their savings earned to fund their retirement, have found themselves in trouble as interest rates have plummeted. Insulate yourself from the effects of corrupt bankers and politicians by setting up your own wealth creating business.

• Unlimited Potential

You may not become a millionaire from starting your own business, but then again you just might. The point is the potential is there. You are in control, you can jack it up or down depending on how much time you want to put in it. With an internet business the cost base is low so you don’t have to put the hours in to cover costs like you would have to with a brick and mortar business.

• Low Start-up Costs

It’s never been easier or cheaper to start a business thanks to the internet. Before the internet, in the dark old days, if you wanted to start a trading business, you either had to find a shop or get into a market. Either way you had to lay out a reasonable amount of money before you even got started. You had to find money for rent, fixtures, rates, tax and then stock. It could cost you thousands before you even opened. Today, you can open an online shop for very little cost. You don’t even have to carry much stock if you do your sourcing right. If after a few months you decide it’s not for you, it’s a simple matter to close it down.

• Fit The Business to your Lifestyle

The internet allows you to fit your business into your lifestyle. Unlike a brick and mortar shop where you have standard opening hours to honour. With an internet business you are in full control. When you go on holiday there’s no worrying about who’s going to run the shop in your absence. Just close it down for a week or two. It’s a simple matter of clicking a few boxes.

• Reach Out To A Global Market

The internet provides you with a global market to sell to. All those potential customers that you can reach. Admittedly you will have to learn the skills and techniques required to reach them, but that’s all part of the fun.

• If you’re retiring a small business will help to keep you engaged. There’s plenty of evidence to show that staying in the game and using your mind increases your longevity and boosts your health. A part-time internet business will still leave you plenty of time to do the things you love.

It’s great fun. Launching campaigns and following them through, setting goals and seeing them come to fruition is a great feeling. Building something, watching a vision turn into a reality is an amazing thing and will boost your confidence.

Dropshipping

If you’ve been surfing the net looking for suppliers then you are sure to have bumped into companies offering a drop shipping service. They can make it sound so good that you almost want to sign up there and then. It seems like all you have to do is sign up with them and you’re on your way to becoming rich with very little effort. Unfortunately, the truth, as always, is not so simple. Let’s look at drop shipping.

If you haven’t come across drop shipping, it simply means you sell stock held by someone else. You sign up with them and they will allow you to view their website looking at their stock. You decide to sell some of their stock, say for example by putting it on EBay or through your own website. When a customer buys the item, you pay the company for it and they ship it to the customer. The difference between what the customer pays you and what you pay the drop shipper is your profit. Less the costs, you incurred in the sale. Basically, you the retailer, choose not to carry your own stock.

It sounds too good to be true and it usually is. There are a number of things you need to be aware of if you’re thinking of adopting the drop shipping route. I tried it for a while and decided it wasn’t for me. One of the major problems with this business model is you have no control over the process. This is something that I found out pretty quick. Here’s a quick checklist of what you need to be aware of:

Delivery Times

This is one of the things that got me into trouble. A few items I’d listed on eBay from a dropshipper sold. I contacted the drop shipper with the order and was shocked when they told me the products would be delivered within three weeks. Now when you order something from a website or an auction site you don’t want to be waiting three weeks for the delivery. And neither did my customers. I was soon receiving emails complaining that they had not received their goods.

And here is one of the main problems of drop shipping; you have no control over the order process. A three week delivery time is unacceptable. The dropshipper is sheltered from the customer’s anger by you. The customer has bought from you so he will complain to you. You, however, have no control. Nothing you can do can increase the speed of delivery. My own experience with this particular drop shipper was bad. I stopped trading with them when I grew tired of taking customer abuse.

Price

The closer you are to the manufacturer of a product the cheaper you can get it. The wholesaler buys from the manufacturer in bulk. The wholesaler puts his profit onto the goods and sells them to retailers. You buy from the wholesaler and sell to the public after adding your profit. If you’re dealing with a drop shipper, they will add their profit before offering it to you so your profit potential will be reduced. If you’re looking into drop shipping then make sure you are able to make a decent profit on the product. If the margin is too low it could end up costing you money. You will have selling costs to cover. Also, don’t forget to take into account how much they are charging for postage and packing. Sometimes this can be expensive and will put buyers off.

Availability of Products.

How large a stock base does the drop shipper have? You need to know this. Does the dropshipper have a system in place that allows you to keep a check on their stock levels? You will need to monitor this daily. A quick look around the drop shipping forums will turn up lots of people complaining about goods customers have ordered which the drop shipper does not have in stock. Remember if you are selling on eBay, things like this can destroy your feedback and thus your credibility. You have no control over stock. Other people will also be selling the same stock so you need to know what the dropshipper has in stock at any given time.

Charges

There are many disreputable drop shippers out there. Many of them are guys running a business from their bedroom. All they are doing is buying stock wholesale, adding a profit and dropshipping it. These people are unlikely to have much stock. When I used the dropshipper, it was obvious that they didn’t carry some stock. When they told me an item would be shipped in three weeks, I knew they were ordering it because they didn’t have it in stock. Why else would it take three weeks to ship a package?

Many dropshippers charge for their service. This is another cost you have to bear in mind. Many people use dropshipping as a business model and they use it successfully. All I’m saying is that if you are thinking of going down this route be aware of the problems. Make sure you go with a proven dropshipper. Personally, I prefer to buy direct from a wholesaler and have full control over the whole process. If I’m going to be abused, I want to be abused for my own mistakes not someone else’s.

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