How to write a business plan tö start your own business in 2017

Watch how to write a business plan

7 Risks Every Entrepreneur Must Take

Risk-taking is almost synonymous with entrepreneurship. To start and support your own business, you’ll have to put your career, personal finances and even your mental health at stake. 

For most, the prospect of making your own decisions and being in charge of your own destiny is worth it. But if you’re going to be successful as an entrepreneur, you have to be prepared for the risks and challenges that come with it.

The following are seven risks that every entrepreneur must take, from ideation to ongoing development:

1. Abandoning the steady paycheck.

Before you venture into the world of business ownership, you’ll first have to say goodbye to your current job, and in some cases, your career. Some people have the luxury of a backup plan -- an option to resume your career in case things don’t go well in your independent business.

But for most starting entrepreneurs, the choice is a risky plunge. There’s no guarantee of your personal income, especially in the first few months and years of your company’s existence, and you’ll probably be too busy to secure or sustain an alternative line of income.

2. Sacrificing personal capital.

Some entrepreneurs are able to start their ventures relying solely on external funding. That usually means a collection of angel investor contributions, government grants and loans, and results from crowdfunding campaigns. But many entrepreneurs also have to dive into their own bank accounts and personal savings to get things started.

You may not need to completely liquidate your nest egg, but you will have to front at least some personal money -- and that means abandoning, or at least diminishing, your safety net.

3. Relying on cash flow.

Even if you have a line of credit, securing a regular cash flow is difficult and stressful. You can position yourself for a profitable year, but still struggle with the day-to-day necessities if your revenue doesn’t match or exceed your costs in a timely manner.

Bills can add up quickly, and if you don’t have enough revenue to support your outgoing cash flow, you could run short of money for paychecks or be forced to dip into emergency funds. Be prepared to address it daily, or at least weekly.

4. Estimating popular interest.

No matter how much research you do or how many tests you complete, you’ll never be able to estimate popular interest in your business with perfect accuracy. People are somewhat unpredictable, which could put a giant hole in your otherwise sound plans.

Even when all the data appears to be in your favor, there’s a chance you’re overestimating the interest in your company, and if your projections are off, your entire financial model could implode.

5. Trusting a key employee.

When you first start a business, you won’t have a full team of employees working for you. Instead, you’ll probably have a small, tight-knit group of people working tirelessly together in an effort to get things up and running. You’ll have to put an overwhelming amount of trust in them, especially if they have special skills that are hard to find and are willing to start work at a lower salary than the industry standard.

For example, if you hire a single, experienced lead developer to work on your product over the course of a few months, you’ll need to have absolute trust in their ability to get the job done on time. Otherwise, your timeline (and your product) could be fatally compromised.

6. Betting on a crucial deadline.

Startups are, by nature, forced into strict timelines for their product launches and milestone goals. Their finances are fragile, and their investors are eager to start seeing the wheels turning. As a result, most entrepreneurs are forced to make multiple goals contingent on a handful of deadlines, and those deadlines become absolutely critical.

Be prepared to stay up at night worrying about your ability to hit those deadlines, and coming up with contingencies if you cannot.

7. Donating personal time (and health).

Entrepreneurship takes a toll on the average person. You’ll spend countless hours doing work to make your company successful, and your remaining hours worrying about what you have or have not done thus far. You will lose sleep, you will miss out on personal time, and you will experience much more stress than usual.

The rewards of entrepreneurship often outweigh these personal risks, but you have to be prepared to live this type of lifestyle.

Risks shouldn’t steer you away from pursuing entrepreneurship. Instead, see them for what they are: necessary obstacles on a greater path. There’s no way to avoid the risks you’ll face as an entrepreneur, but by recognizing them, you can prepare for and mitigate them.

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How to start the year right

Listen to SPI and the insights of influencers on How to start the new year right

How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar for a Year

Want to deliver quality social media content for the next year?

Interested in planning your social posts in advance?

A content calendar helps you deliver the right message to your audience at the right time.

In this article, you’ll discover how to plan a year’s worth of social media posts and content.

#1: Create a Spreadsheet

The first step in creating a content calendar is to set everything up in a spreadsheet. You can do this with Excel or Google Sheets.

On the top line of the sheet, fill in the days of the week.

Add the days of the week to the top row of your content calendar.

Next, add a line for each week of the year to separate your content by weeks. The left half of your calendar will look something like this:

Add a row for each week of your content calendar.

Fill out your calendar for the entire year. After you add the days and weeks, you may want to apply color so you can more easily distinguish the sections.

#2: Add Events and Holidays

The next step is to do a Google search to find out what events are happening in your industry so you can add them to your calendar.

If you work in fashion, for example, look up the major events that happen throughout the entire year, such as the tradeshow Magic or Fashion Week.

If you work in healthcare, identify all of the awareness days, weeks, and months. In healthcare, there are dozens of these lists available.

Search for industry events you can incorporate into your content calendar.

In your empty calendar template, enter the events into the particular days, weeks, or months when they’ll happen. This way, you can plan your content according to when those events occur.

Your content calendar will begin to look like this:

Add events and holidays to your content calendar.

Next, add national holidays like the Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year’s Day, and so forth. You can see Thanksgiving is mentioned on line 333 in the image above.

Think outside the box, too. Do your business or social pages have a tie-in with other industries? For example, in healthcare, voice treatments can relate to music, and orthopedics can relate to sports. Find other events that are going on, such as the World Series or the beginning of basketball season, and add them to your calendar.

#3: Identify Content Themes

Now you’re ready to start brainstorming content themes. Take into consideration what your audience wants to see, how you can educate or entertain them, and what products and services you want to promote.

Also identify what your business’s internal priorities are. If you’re a fashion line, your primary priority is to sell clothing. If you’re a musician, your primary goal is to sell albums or book shows. Start thinking about how you can incorporate your business priorities into your content.

Once you’ve compiled a list of themes, assign two themes to each day of the week on your content calendar. I recommend a 60/40 or 80/20 split between educating and entertaining, and promoting your business, products, and services. You don’t want to promote your offerings all of the time or people will lose interest and stop visiting your page. Here’s what the themes might look like on your content calendar.

Note themes for each day of the week on your content calendar.

#4: Generate Topics for Each Theme

Once you have your themes in place, you need to generate topics for them.

It’s important that you produce the types of content that your target audience is looking for. To find out what people are interested in, use a tool like BuzzSumo to research the content that other people are sharing.

For example, suppose your Monday theme is food. If you search for “food” in the paid version of BuzzSumo, you can see a list of the most shared headlines in the timeframe of your choosing.

BuzzSumo can help you find out what type of content your audience is interested in.

Use these insights to inform the headlines and introductions for your content. Remember to put your own spin on the content you create; don’t plagiarize.

Now tie your topics into your calendar of events. If you’re in healthcare and basketball season is starting, your topics might relate to common injuries that basketball players face. If you’re in the fashion industry and Fashion Week is coming up, start showcasing your new inventory and do previews of what’s in store during that event.

When you add topics to your content calendar, break down your primary topic and secondary topic on a weekly basis.

Add topics to your content calendar.

Sticking to a theme for the week helps you break your calendar into bite-sized chunks. For the topic “food,” for example, you can showcase foods that help improve skin health.

You want to tie your content into a theme that your audience can relate to, as opposed to randomly generating content that may not be appropriate for the season. For example, an article about how much water you need to drink is probably more interesting to people in summer months than during the winter.

#5: Detail Individual Posts

Do your social media accounts focus on images? Video? Writing? Figure out how to incorporate all of your main content types into your calendar.

If articles drive your account, for example, have some ready to go, Monday through Friday, that relate to both your primary and secondary themes.

Quote cards are an easy way to cover your main weekly topic of focus. In healthcare, for example, you could cover health facts or share health tips. A tool like Canva makes it easy to create quote cards and images.

Quote cards are a great way to cover your main topics each week.

Now start filling your calendar with the content you want to create. Eventually, it will look something like this.

Plan out your content to publish throughout the calendar year.

It doesn’t really matter if you post once a day or 10 times a day. What matters is to make sure you can maintain the volume of content for your calendar. If you work at a large company and have a lot of resources dedicated to content creation, publish as much as you can. If you work at a small company or by yourself, try to publish at least two pieces of content each day.

Be sure to maintain consistency in the volume of content you publish.

Conclusion

Doing an entire year of content planning up front allows you to focus on creating and delivering quality content every week. Try to stay a few weeks ahead in your content creation because it’s easy to fall behind when you’re posting something new every day.

As your audience grows more familiar with your content and your business, they’ll start expecting to see posts at certain times. Keep to your schedule and post your content at the same time each day. You can use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to do this, and as an added bonus, they’ll post on multiple platforms for you.

What do you think? Do you use some of these tactics to create your social media content calendar? What tips can you offer? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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5 Predictions to Guide Your Marketing Plan in 2017

There’s never been a better time to be a trep. That's because the ability to sell and create brand awareness never has been more robust. At the same time, this is the worst time for entrepreneurial marketers to sell products and services. Consumers are more fickle-minded and more distracted than ever before. Brands and marketers alike face the bigger challenge of capturing the consumer's attention without breaking the marketing budget.

Here are five predictions to keep in mind as you prepare and finalize your marketing plan for the coming year.

1. Consumers will prefer convenient online transactions.

Millennials will buy through Instagram shops or Amazon. Boomers will continue to buy from the comfort of their homes, relying on television and newspapers. Shoppers are shoppers, and they'll still come out to stores.

In 2017, maximize product sales and fend off the competition by being more than a Google advertiser or an Amazon seller. Cater to the way consumers want to buy, recommends Charlie Fusco -- CEO and creative visionary of Synergixx, a marketing and media agency. "2017 will be about making customers feel comfortable about your purchasing your product/service, however they prefer. Start reworking your marketing channels now.”

2. TV isn't going away.

You’ve heard people say, “Everything is going online. In a year, no one will order anything on television or in a store: It all will be an app on your phone." That's simply not true. Millennials are changing buying behavior and that necessarily influences how we market. But millennials alone aren't powerful enough to break old habits.

Consider that Baby Boomers and older generations have been watching TV for 50 years and listening to radio even longer. They trust these media, and they've created habits around each. These consumers seek the credibility of a celebrity testimonial.  A fancy new app, Facebook livestream or Instagram post isn't going to nudge their comfort levels. Google any product name. You’ll find 10 or 20 products, each offering a better deal and a better price. Which brand or company do you trust? Credibility is how a brand thrives.

In 2017, look to use TV as a credibility driver for direct sales, online traffic and retail engagement. “A client will come to Synergixx and they may already have a product in stores, on television or on Amazon," Fusco says. "We step in and come up with marketing strategies and advertising campaigns that allow them to generate more customers for less money. How do we accomplish this? TV infomercials, personal endorsements, national talk radio hosts, Facebook and video ads. Our business is built around adding customers to the bottom line. We analyze a client’s budget, and from there we create and deliver."

3. You won't be able to afford crunching numbers only at year's end. 

Be adamant about knowing your business' numbers. Marketers very often are so excited about selling the product they forget about the important costs and metrics that determine success.

Do you know and understand the impact of your media costs, your customer acquisition costs, the customers repurchase rate and the lifetime customer value (LCV) against your cost of goods?

I recommend entrepreneurs understand these number sets or give good estimates against their values before committing to any sales channel or marketing budget. Break down those numbers, and the math will reveal how you can get into marketing channels you never thought you could afford.

4. The focus will be on lifetime customer value, not attracting new clients. 

There's that phrase again: lifetime customer value (LCV). Every prospect has an LCV that represents how much money he or she will spend with your business. LCV is the backbone of any product-driven business. Somewhere, people are wanting and willing to make a purchase. It doesn't matter whether you're a lawyer or a pitch wizard selling steak knives on TV for $19.95 apiece.

Be sure you ask these critical questions:

• What is your customer's LCV?
• Do you know where that number stops? It is in your direct database, in retail or online?
• When do you give up on that customer?
• How can you increase LCV?

It's cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. Don’t "gamble in Vegas,” as the saying goes. You can't establish a budget on Day One without knowing how much money that customer is going to generate for you 18 months from now. Work your LCV into your cash-flow models. Then determine the most profitable advertising channels based on LCV, not Day-One revenue.

5. Influencers will keep their status.

If you're launching a new product or service, think about where a buying community exists. Who are the major influencers? If you're selling to moms, for example, identify a few established Facebook or Instagram communities and seek to partner with their largest contributing voice. Financial products or aging products should be in communities centered around personalities from political-news radio channels. Don’t pay for tweets. Cut through the clutter by attaching your product to celebrities and voices that speak to controlled communities.

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