Franchising is not for everyone

Having your own business is the American dream and, increasingly, international interest in owning a business has been building as well. There are many questions that must be answered before you consider owning a franchise or starting any business at all. Franchising is not for everyone! The first question to ask yourself is: "Do I really have the right mindset that is required to work for myself"? The reason this question is first is because without the attitude, drive, and ability to focus on long term goals, you will not be happy owning your own business whether it be a franchise or anything else. This is not a "get rid of the boss" and live happily ever after situation. It will require many hours hard work, much dedication, always tough decisions and, most likely, many times where you must put the business first over your own needs. If you do not have the stomach or the drive to do this, then continue getting a regular paycheck and forget a business of your own or consider looking for more easy money making ideas here: sites-plus/cb/easymoneymakingideas. html You will find your customers to be much more demanding than any boss could ever be! Along with this introspection, is the question: "How have I worked own my own in previous situations?" Is this a new or untried product or service, Do I enjoy the experience of working for myself? The second question to ask yourself is: "Have I researched the market or field regarding the area I plan to purchase a franchise"? This must be very extensive as you want to have a good mix of the business fit being right or correct for you and a market that will support your decision. After you have researched your desires and needs and attitudes, the next step is to address your financing issues. What amount can you comfortably afford to put down on a franchise? What will the operating expenses be? Within this thought process there are many pitfalls including employee salary, benefits, replacement training, recruiting ads, possible temporary help, government regulations for employment, accounting fees, local licensing fees, and many more costs that will need to be addressed within a start-up package plan. You will want to check the Internet for lists and types of franchise licensors that are willing to take on new franchisees. Check the business publications such as Inc. magazine, Franchise Today or Entrepreneur to see what franchises are up and coming or those that are solid and gaining ground. Once you have narrowed down the field you want to be in it is time to talk to the franchisor that grants the license. The first thing to remember with a franchisor is that they are there to sell you a franchise. Even the best franchisor out there will attempt to market their product and downplay other franchises. What you want to realize here is that their goal and game is to have successful franchisees but that does not prevent them from possibly making a wrong fit with you. You are your best advocate. Keep your head and do not let their enthusiasm become overwhelming to you. The best thing you can do for yourself after you have selected a franchisor, is to have a business attorney of your choice go over all the papers, suggest items that might need some changing to benefit you more, and general advice on whether this licensing agreement is standard in the industry. You want to avoid being locked into a franchise that offers their licensees little resources should a problem occur. The conclusion is franchising can be a wonderful method of jumping into being into business for yourself but not by yourself. The licensor can offer many resources it might be hard to afford by yourself. They are a good source of encouragement and hand-holding when you are starting out and things seem overwhelming. Being in business for yourself can be exhilarating and franchising can be your ticket if researched thoroughly and properly.

Gas ain t gitin no cheaper

The Tennessee Mountain Man watches in horror as crude oil prices keep slipping in and out of record highs on it's way to over $100.00 a barrel. Irrespective of where the crude oil prices go the political powers want you and I to pay a minimum of $5.00 a gallon for regular grade unleaded fuel, and they will not stop until they accomplish their goals. They really want us walking and/or riding non-powered bikes (for our own health don't you understand) while they cruise around in their SUV's and private air planes powered by monstrous twin jet engines lest they loose speaking fees. Don't they know or care that fuel costs translate directly to customer costs for almost every consumable in the world? The more it cost you to get to dacomputerman shop or the computer man to get to you, the higher the cost of computer repair period! When online computer repair trucks used to run all week on $10.00 worth of gasoline and now remote computer helpdesk 1 must spend over $10.00 per day on fuel; customers and computer man's techs both are spending waaaay too much just to get from one point to another before any computer repair or data recovery is even started. Of course, there are things that help keep fuel cost down such as keeping your automobile properly tuned and your tires properly inflated while driving responsibly. But, alas, they only help so much. Granted (for now at least) fuel cost less in the U. S. than some other corners of the world, but when computer man first spent two bits for a gallon of gas on top of Sand Mountain in Jackson County, Alabama, today's greedy bastards just burn his #@*&! Sorry but the Tennessee Mountain Man is just an old college educated idiot who can't help but believe that we could be doing a lot better. In the internet age when remote computer repair is available and outsourced it services are 50 percent more efficient than an in house helpdesk physicists must be able to do better...a lot better. We have engineers that have improved everything else, but fuel efficiency eludes them! P-L-E-A-S-E !!!!! Here are a few options, da computerman has found. I am going to save the best for last so don't bug out on me now. 1. Automobiles are built more cheaply with less costly parts than ever before. Then they are sold at outrageous profit margins because they are so efficient.?! Tennessee Computer Man has not looked forward to the new car models arriving in the showroom since 1968, about ten years before losing interest in the Cumberland Valley Shows arriving at the county fairgrounds. 2. There are semi-electric cars and hybrid SUVs that keep us coming back for unfulfilled promises. I don't know about anyone else, but for da computerman the thought of having to buy a car rates right up there with the thought of going to the dentist. 3. Rip offs by unscrupulous businessmen has brought us pills and powders which do little if anything to help with fuel cost, but they sure can lighten a wallet over and over again.. 4. There is the MLM 4-E Corporation, Ethos Fuel Re-formulator 3-in-1 Product which claims: Save fuel & oil Reduce engine wear Reduce emissions With Ethos Fuel Re-formulator you will Save fuel, Save Oil, and Save on Wear and Tear to your engine! Make it run smoother, cleaner and with more power with our custom ester blend that is completely non-toxic. Cost: of course, you can order it as low as $100.00 a gallon....makes gasoline sound cheap to ye old computerman's remote helpdesk! 5. The Motley Fool says there is only way to reduce costs, and we refuse to take it. NOTE: Did you know that you can convert your car in minutes to a water-running car? You can do it yourself, and you can do it for under $100.00! But that is like the folk who are always seeking instant riches on the internet. Some people promise to sell you the formula and they make good money talking around it when they could just give it away. Why? It requires work! It cannot be done in two hours a day let alone the half hour they promote and people are simply too lazy to perform the steps required to achieve their goals. Instant oat meal, instant grits, instant coffee, and instant everything else has left a generation too spoiled to succeed. For instance what if I told you, "you can have your Blog indexed on the major internet search engines within two days, but you have to do some things"? Or, what if I told you, "your car will run primarily on water, but you have to make some changes which most anyone can do him or herself with parts available at wally world"? Both statements are true by the way. 6. What if we weaned ourselves and our vehicles from foreign oil and still traveled cheaper...much cheaper...when and how and where and in what we pleased? Impossible? Not at all!!! Stop burning gas and start burning water. Don't pull the plug, at least check it out. How much are you paying for gas? What if you could cut that in at least half with a one time cost of about $100.00USD? How much would that save you each week? How long would it take you to recover that $100.00 investment? Would that help you with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Holidays and their intrinsic expenses which are now at your door? tmm

The 1 secret to money making success

I'm about to share with you the common thread that ties together all successful entrepreneurs. This single trait launched the businesses of Microsoft, Intel, Hershey, JP Morgan, Amazon, Nike and so many others. It's not anything you'll be taught in Business School, it has nothing to do with accounting, and it doesn't even have anything to do with what you're selling or how you're selling it. I'll sum it up in two words: GET STARTED! That's it! It's laughable at first, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. It's the missing "million dollar" idea, hiding in plain sight. We hear variations of this all the time: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Think back to your first writing classes in school. How were we taught to write a paper? First we start with a basic outline - that's our money-making idea, whatever it may be. Next, we make a rough draft - that's right, we start working on something that we know for a fact will be imperfect. Finally, we use our rough-draft as a basis to begin revisions, eventually ending up with a final draft, the "perfect" version. Planning for tomorrow is a sound business strategy. It's good to spend time thinking about the future, and how to handle the challenges it will bring. But, if we want to succeed, we must create the future by taking action today. We can't possibly predict everything that might happen once we start doing business. Microsoft started out selling programming software. After a few years, an opportunity presented itself to sell a computer Operating System to IBM, and they took it. The result was MS-DOS (which they didn't even create themselves, they bought it from someone else when they saw how much money they could make!), followed by Windows; quite possibly one of the most lucrative products ever. If Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft, had sat on the sidelines of the growing computer industry thinking "programming software is an OK idea, but it's not perfect, there really isn't a big enough market for it...we need something better", would they be where they are today? Would IBM have given them that golden opportunity? Not likely. Did Michelangelo's sculpture of David emerge from a single tap of a chisel upon a block of marble? No, it took Michelangelo over 3 years of effort to release his masterpiece from the stone, one tiny chip of marble at a time. It probably wasn't very pretty after only 1 month, or even a year. But years of careful improvement resulted in a classic work of art. I hope I've made my point. Do something. Do anything! If you do something, and the result isn't what you wanted, what's the worst that could happen? You either have something to improve upon, or you have a very good idea of an approach that doesn't work (think of it as addition by subtraction...the process of elimination). Either way, you're one step closer to success than you were before you started. Go for it! Give it a shot! Your financial success is waiting for you, go and get it! Get Started Today! Good Luck! Jeff

Will people really read your small business web site

You may have spent quite a bit of time designing your web site and writing the copy for it, or you may have spent quite a bit of money and had it all done by a professional designer and copywriter. But there are about 4 billion websites on the internet. That’s a lot of competition for your site, so how do you get people to actually read your copy? There have been several interesting studies about website reading patterns and usability. They’re referenced at the bottom of this article. Website users generally leave a site that takes longer than 7 seconds to load, and the average visit length is just over 1 minute. So assuming your site loads in less than 7 seconds, you have on average, one minute to convince your visitor to stay. And how do you get them to stay? The answer is simple: content, content, content. But it takes an average of 5 to 7 visits in order to get people to buy your product or service, so how do you get them to come back? By changing your content on a regular basis. Delete text, add text. Add whole pages from time to time, and consider splitting long pages into two. According to research, content in and of itself is not enough. There are several factors to consider when building a superior web site. Several studies tell us how to improve any web site. How Viewers Read Web Sites Would it surprise you to know that most web site users won’t really read your web site? That’s what Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes found in a 1997 study. What they found is that 79% will scan your web site, and only 16% read it word for word. Their recommendations are to use scannable text by using: • Highlighted words • Meaningful sub-headings • Bulleted lists • One idea per paragraph • Inverted pyramid style • Half the word count of conventional writing Let’s look at what the W3school says too. Their article “Web Site Design” confirms that users scan rather than read, leaving in a few seconds if they don’t feel they’ve found what they’re looking for. The W3school suggests using short sentences and paragraphs, and breaking up excess information into different pages. Let’s talk for a moment about the inverted pyramid style because that’s probably the only term you may not have heard before. Remember the papers you used to have to write in high school or for university? Typical they start with an introduction, then move to background information and discussion, then to findings and finally to a conclusion and recommendations. All that means you have to read a lot of information before you reach a conclusion and recommendations What Nielsen and Morkes are suggesting is to invert the pyramid. You could write your web site as a variation of the inverted pyramid by writing a summary first, and adding detail after the summary. Most people don’t scroll, but writing your web site inverted pyramid style just might convince them to. How Writing Style Affects Readability Nielsen and Morkes measured the effect of different styles of writing on five versions of the same website. A site with promotional copywriting was the control version, and each of the other four sites used one of the following versions and had the following improvement in per cent according to their test readers: • Concise version with about half the word count as the control: 58% • Scannable layout with the same text as the control but easily scanned: 47% • Objective language using neutral rather than subjective, boastful or exaggerated language: 27% • Combined version using all three: 124% Tracking Their Eye Movements In 2003 and 2004 Eyetrack completed a study called Eyetrack III. Their study was for news-type sites, but what they found will also help us structure our small business web site. The study found their users followed our left-to-right Western Culture, first noticing the top left of the page, hover there for a bit, and then moving downward in a z-like pattern to examine the rest of the page, and finally moving back up the page to the upper right. The study found that the eye pauses and reads the first few words of a dominant headline first, especially when that headline is in the upper left and sometimes the upper right. Readers will usually stop reading at five headlines regardless of the number used, but an unusual keyword will often get people to pause. Curiously, they also found that smaller type encourages reading while larger type encourages scanning. Are You Credible? Nielsen and Morkes found that web site users look for credibility in various ways, and suggest credibility is increased by high-quality graphics, good writing and using outbound links. The internet was originally intended for information, and it remains that way to this day. Over the years, several people have tried experimenting with website copywriting. What they consistently found was that users did not want to see “hard sell” types of copywriting. Nielsen and Morkes confirmed that theory in their article as well. They found that web site users want to get straight facts and that credibility suffers when users feel claims are exaggerated. An interesting study on web site credibility is “How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?” by B. J. Fogg Ph. D, Cathy Soohoo, David Danielson for Consumer Webwatch.. They studied 10 sites in each of 10 categories, with almost 2700 participants evaluating the websites. They showed the results of 18 comments on credibility. These are the top 10: • Design look: 46.1% • Information design/structure—organization and ease of navigation: 28.5% • Information focus—breadth and depth: 25.1% • Company motive—admirable motive vs strictly commercial: 15.5% • Information usefulness: 14.8% • Information accuracy: 14.3% • Name recognition and reputation: 14.1% • Advertising—dislike of pop ups, positive use of advertising: 13.8% • Information bias—commented on positively and negatively: 11.6% • Writing tone—straightforward friendly tone boosts credibility: 9% What Does All This Mean for You? Content may be king, but design has a strong influence on credibility. Your design should be professional, organized, consistent, and easy to navigate. Pages should load within seven seconds or you might lose visitors, so use a small number of quality, optimized graphics, and keep your page content down to two, or at the most three MS Word pages. Your reader’s eye first stops at the top left quadrant, so that’s a good spot for your logo and company name. And, a headline in the top left quadrant is very important to keeping your reader on your page for longer than a minute, so consider a headline just under your logo. Consider that the first three words of your opening headline are the most important, and straightforward headlines are better than cute, ambiguous ones. As to the content itself, are you really a good writer? If you’re not, you might want to hire a professional to write your web pages for you. If you are, use a concise, scannable, and objective writing style to maximize your web site readability. Aim for a straightforward and friendly tone and write useful, accurate information with both breadth and depth. When you’re finished, put it aside for a day or two, and then edit what you wrote. Dot all the i’s and cross all those t’s. Check spelling and punctuation. And then take another good look at what you’ve written and remove any “hard sell”. It has its uses, but it just doesn’t seem to work on the net. Works cited in this article: “How Users Read on the Web” by Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes, 1997, useit/alertbox/9719a. html “The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes” Steve Outing and Laura Ruel, 2003 and 2004 poynterextra. org/eyetrack2004/main. htm “How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?” by B. J. Fogg Ph. D, Cathy Soohoo, David Danielson for Consumer Webwatch. consumerwebwatch. org/dynamic/web-credibility-reports-evaluate-abstract. cfm “Web Site Design” W3Schools w3schools/site/site_design. asp