Monday, February 23, 2015

Love your customer

I have learned a lot during this week, it has been a real blessing to have the chance to learn about Bud Brigham and how important values are in your life, He wanted to have his own business and in that he consider himself his own enemy but he says what helped him to achieve those objective were the values. He mentions that besides the difficulties he faced during his life, later on what help him to overcome in life are his values. He invites others to establish a life on values.. How important customers are in a business and the many ways there are to keep them closer to your business. It is so important to create products and services to satisfy the needs they have but treat them respectfully will actually do more. It is a great opportunity to help the customer by preparing products that will satisfy their needs. I also found very instructive all the lesson about customers. I learned to be more creative and more motivated to work better in any business to satisfy better the needs of the customer. It is smarter to take care of one customer than to pay money in advertisement. And advertisement may bring customers but one happy customer will bring another customer for free. Referral is the best way to get more customers, to make that possible a collaborator needs to be happy too. I am working with something else, besides my soda selling until everything gets better with my health and my wife health. But I did not stop selling. I am selling them but with smaller volume, my goal is to generate enough capital or another business for the winter. Summer and this semester are about to end. In spite of the difficulties my $100 business have to help me to gather capital for another business. I keep working

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Building your brand

It has been a challenging two weeks and it has not finished yet, the task may seem overwhelming but there is hope soon it will be done. But in spite of all the challenges the family is going through, I feel blessed for all the things I am learning, It was very important to study about marketing. The material I studied was very useful. I now have a better picture on what should be my main purpose and how to market my services to customers. I have no business yet but the services I am offering will be promoted in a better way now. I will soon put into practice the knowledge acquired. The video about "increasing your likability was very instructional, I had the chance to remember and refresh important principles that will reinforce my relationship with my actual customers and future ones. The importance of knowing your market and the uniqueness of my product how to optimize it to satisfy the actual need of my customers or the markets that I have not seen yet.I would try to find the way to put this principle into practice "bundling products" I will find the way to offer that on teaching. The Acton Hero part was very motivating. It is becoming one of my favorite part of the course to learn about the challenges and triumph of many different entrepreneurs and the example the leave after conquering their goals. In this case Mr. Romano helped me to focus more on creating a product or optimize the one I have to satisfy the current needs. The activity that helped me a lot to focus on what I want to do with my product was the "elevator Pitch" I may need to make it better but It actually helped me to find a north on where I want to go or where to begin to focus on what group and what exactly I want to sell

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Funding your business

Yesterday with my wife and my brother in law we went to the hospital to get blood from my brother in law that my wife will need for her surgery. Thanks to the government we will not pay for the surgery but it really took time to get her into a bed. Hopefully now she will be operated on Monday or Tuesday. This week I learned about the importance of leaving a modest life and as much as I can how to avoid debts. Elder Wirthlin’s “Earthly Debts, Heavenly Debts” speech was very inspiring and gave me the strength on keep working on the way I am working on my $100 challenge. I am not borrowing money to make the $20 I need for the challenge I basically made it selling my sodas. One thing that is helping us to cover our needs is the fact that we are as much as we can reinvest all the incomes we generate and spend always within the margin of profits we set up to be used on everyday expenses That is why the article we read in "Start up on a shoestring" seemed like our own story and I found strength and hope on what I am doing. I like what I learned from Desh Deshpande and ken solo. To learn to be optimistic and willing to change things around are actually two good attributes to learn while in entrepreneurial endeavors. Four stage in the budgeting process:1, setting goals, 2 Evaluating and choosing options 3, identifying budget impact 4, coordinating departmental budget. Budgeting is more than what I thought it was. I learned different kind of budgeting and I learned how to forecast possible scenarios and requirements of a company to budget for those requirements. Budgeting can turn into a powerful tool to measure a business.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

My $ 100 Challenge and my business plan

How my $100 challenge is going. Actually my business of selling soda is changing a lot. Today with my wife agreed to divide responsibilities. So she is now taking care of the books. In that way we focus on determine how many sodas we sell per day and by the end of the day we check how much is the capital, how much the real profits. What happened as a result we knew how much we were allowed to use in the house, how much we were allowed to capitalize and how much is possible to save to reinvest in the other businesses, like paying the fee for the website and promoting the English lessons which is actually the other business that obviously when running makes more money that selling sodas individually. We are in the Learning process. I am not sure about my business plan. I need more time to study and review the material and see what else can be improved. I really enjoyed the reading about Heather case and I was really impressed about the way she wrote her business plan, I want to learn to do that. I did the assignment of HMM but I want to recheck it again and write my business plan under those suggestions. It has been a challenging week. But I have to keep going.