Small Business Idea

There is always a market for selling truly new and remarkable products. Here are 3 criteria for making this strategy work:

1. The product must be reasonably new (the marketplace isn’t saturated yet)
2. The product must actually be remarkable (this provides repeat sales; consumptable products are best for this)
3. You have a simple, low-risk profit model (no complicated pyramid schemes, no huge upfront-costs, and no other wacky ‘business necessities’)

When these elements all line up, there’s a potentially great win-win-win opportunity.

For giving an example of a great new product (and for sharing a decent small business idea…) consider this: selling silver sol from your home.

Although this specific example may become less juicy over time, selling silver sol from home is currently a great opportunity for small-scale entrepreneurs. It will also serve as a great example for recognizing the trends of spotting other good small business opportunities.

Step 1: Find a great product

• Try to find something you feel good about selling; something that will improve the life of your customer. This will make client relations way smoother than selling junk.
• Try to find something you can reasonably expect to sell to people you already know (neighbors, acquaintances, etc.)
• Try to find something people are already concerned about. (Trying to create a need for a product is way harder than just selling something that people are already concerned about.)
• Try to find something that doesn’t already have a saturated market.

Example: Silver sol makes people healthy.  Almost everyone is concerned about their health.  Plus, many people haven’t even heard of silver sol yet (let alone know where to buy it; yet folks are still dying of MRSA, malaria, and all sorts of other things this stuff kills…)

Step 2: Gather product information / sales collateral

Often, emerging products already have marketing materials available. They do this to make it easy for others to sell their product. Ideally, you should have to do almost no work in creating sales material.

Example: Silver sol already has several fact-filled resources and videos available. With videos like these, making sales is as easy as showing your customers a website and offering a price that beats the website (which is easy to do, considering the cost advantages of buying in bulk.)

Step 3: Figure out the financial model

If you can’t make money, what’s the point of doing business? Look for low-risk opportunities where you won’t end up with a garage filled with product and no way to sell it. Also, beware of complicated commission schemes and multi-level profit-sharing systems. These systems can work, but they often leave small business owners scratching their heads wondering what happened. Preferably, there should be a simple gap between what you can charge and what you pay for supplies. If there’s a bonus for selling increased volume (you can reduce your costs, thus increasing your margins), that’s good news for you. It also makes accounting easier, which leaves more time for concentrating on real business growth.

Example: Silver sol can be ordered in increments as low as 10 bottles per sale, but can be purchased in larger quantities with decreased cost (as far as I can tell, Guardian is the top source for this…) If a bottle retails for $25 but you can get it for under $18, that leaves $7 in your pocket each time a customer comes back for another bottle, which in the case of silver sol may be every week or two. Do the math for what happens when you raise the price or get 100+ customers

Step 4: Start selling!

If you’ve made good decisions in steps 1-3, this part of the process shouldn’t be very difficult. A great new product should almost sell itself. However, if you’ve taken a shortcut and are trying to sell something that doesn’t work, something that people don’t need, or something where the market is already saturated, you’re going to need a ton of perseverance or luck to make sales grow.

Once these 4 steps have run their course and the product is no longer enough of a niche to effectively market to new customers, it may be time to find a new remarkable product and then let it dominate your business for the next few years. The chances are good that you can simply keep your existing clients from the first business (if the product is consumptable, it works, and it makes people happy), which means that you can soon graduate to running 2 small businesses instead of 1!

Good luck selling your new and remarkable product!

Caffeine can be an A+ tool in the entrepreneur’s toolbox. Used at the right times for the right reasons, it can make you smarter, faster, and richer. However, used at the wrong times and for the wrong reasons, caffeine is likely to make you bankrupt, confused, and probably a little dehydrated

Caffeine vs. Uncertainty

One of the entrepreneur’s central questions is, “What am I going to do to make a lot of money?” Or, on a daily basis, “What am I going to do today to tweak my existing small business to make a lot more money?” In both cases, the entrepreneur is faced with uncertainty, unsure of how to best proceed through the mysteries, pitfalls, and opportunities in a future they cannot clearly see.

Uncertainty, for those who do not know, is a reddish-brownish blob that looks like this:

Uncertainty’s prime characteristics are:

• Its mystery (you don’t know what it is)
• Its elusive scope (you don’t know how little you know about it)
• Its inevitability (like it or not, every decision you make confronts uncertainty; it is 100% unavoidable for all entrepreneurs)
• Its dangers (there are always plenty of ways to muck up)
• Its promise and allure (somewhere within it, great fortune may await you)

Now, if only you could filter through that uncertainty a little more quickly…

Caffeine: The Uncertainty Annihilator?

Caffeine has the great characteristic of allowing your mind to operate differently than normal. Not better and not worse. But definitely different.

Although medical professionals may offer more complicated explanations, caffeine basically allows you to think faster, with greater agility, and with greater confidence than normal. Unfortunately, losing perspective, jumbling priorities, forgetting your purpose, making rash decisions, and displaying inept judgment are all common side effects.

In sum, while caffeine may make you a quicker thinker, it also makes you more susceptible to distraction and working on the wrong problems. By analogy, while you might be able to run twice as far, you’re more likely to run in the wrong direction.

When trying to make good business decisions in the face of uncertainty, caffeine can be your best friend or worst enemy.

Caffeine: Recipe for Impaired Thinking

A normal person dealing with the unknown is like this yellow dot within a blob. Their knowledge and command of the business opportunities still hidden within the blob of uncertainty are very low:

A thinker exploring the unknown without caffeine enjoys good judgement, good ability to maintain original priorities, and good ability to avoid distraction. After 5 hours of brainstorming ideas, a non-caffeinated thinker’s knowledge may look like this:

This thinker has made steady progress, but has been unable to do any truly remarkable thinking.

In contrast, a thinker exploring the unknown with caffeine benefits from the ability to make tremendous conceptual leaps, connect disparate details, and conceive a “master plan” in just a minute or two. After 5 hours (or possibly just 5 minutes) of brainstorming ideas, a caffeinated thinker’s knowledge can look like this:

However, several hours later, this caffeinated thinker will return to normal, look at their notes from the last 5 hours, and realize that their knowledge actually only looks like this:

That’s because they remembered to take out the garbage, found a lost item in the back yard, listened to a good radio program, wrote a hefty email about US foreign policy, checked their web stats 4 times, thought about 2 other aspects of the project, wondered about 5 other things, and spent 15 minutes actually working on the original problem.

This can be disheartening, but need not be. Managed properly, a caffeinated super turbo boost can be applied without going nowhere.

Tactics for the Profitable Use of Caffeine

1 - Before drinking caffeine, decide what you need to think about. Write it down, write it on your hand, write it on your screensaver, and write it on the wall. However you do it, write down the 2 or 3 specific questions that need genius-level caffeinated input so that you’ll stay on focused on the right tasks while jacked up.

With a well prepared and documented agenda, a 5 hour caffeine-fueled brainstorming session might look like this:

2 – Never brainstorm and spend money in the same session. If you end up brainstorming in caffeinated circles, think you’ve got the greatest idea in the universe, and immediately start spending money to make your dream a reality, you’re probably just wasting money on what will later emerge as a half-baked business plan. Always put a buffer between thinking up a “million dollar idea” and actually beginning to build it. Unless you think spending money on one of these sounds like a good idea…

3 – Go easy on the caffeine amounts. Use moderation at all times. For me, two cups of coffee is as much as I’ll drink on one of my caffeinated stints. Any more than that I lose all ability to act with intelligence. Plus, I’ll feel sick, probably won’t sleep well, and will be exhausted the following day.

My personal favourite sources of caffeine are plain dripped coffee (dark roasts have less caffeine per sip, but often taste better), green tea, a fine Darjeeling black tea, and bitter chocolate. I find that soft drinks, “energy drinks”, and other mild stimulants all cause more mental fuzziness or nausea than they’re worth. Go ahead and make your own decisions about what you choose to ingest, but personally, the four items listed above are my only endorsed “performance enhancing” drugs

4 – Power up your non-caffeinated mind with jumping jacks. This is no joke. If you’re uncaffeinated, feeling dull, and have a big pile of caffeine-free intellectual work to do, spend 2 minutes in a different room and do 100 jumping jacks. Count them all out loud. Or, if that doesn’t work, do 250. You’ll instantly increase your intelligence and ability to focus by at least 20%.

5 – Alternate bouts of caffeinated and non-caffeinated work. Over a week or two, spend time in alternating caffeinated mental states while working on the same project. Use the bouts of superior judgment (caffeine-free) to strategically temper and focus your periods of superior mental speed. Alternately, use a dose of superior mental agility (bring on the coffee!) to generate ideas, applying more sober and methodical reflection and synthesis later on. Over several days, this approach can lead to an exploration of your area of uncertainty that looks more like this:

With the blob of uncertainty (the one which stands between you and making more $$$’s) mapped out as thoroughly as the blob above, you are now in a pretty good position to make informed decisions about what to do next.

Good Thinking = Good Choices = More Money

Deciding whether or not one of your “bright ideas” is the right one to develop may be the most important decision you make in the next 6, 12, or 24 months. Similarly, deciding what to do each day to grow an existing business is essential to success. Getting these decisions right, aided by the elimination of as much uncertainty as possible (with maximum speed, balance, and thoroughness), is a key component to successful entrepreneurship.

And it lets you justify the odd cup of mmmmmmm delicious coffee along the way

Note: For those over-caffeinators amongst you (probably most of you), try working in non-caffeinated mode more often to improve your overall mix. It might take a week or two at first to fully emerge from the cycle of being over-drugged, but you’ll be amazed at what a difference a little clarity can make to your overall productivity and profit!