Dodo Loves Marketing

Running a business from home is going to mean a lot of hard work — more than you ever dreamed. As a one-man or one- woman outfit, you’re going to be responsible for absolutely everything to do with the smooth running of your day to day affairs. To tell the truth, it’s going to be anything but smooth.

Big business runs on teamwork — someone creates an idea, another tests and develops it, others manufacture it, market it and a host of extras package it, deliver it, invoice it and collect payment on it. And when something goes wrong, they all blame each other. ..more

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Now that you have the start of your brand new business at your fingertips, let’s take a look at you and your attitude to being in business.

Let’s make it professional. Don’t fool yourself with the idea that working from home will be easy. While you won’t have to join the morning rush-hour traffic to work, you also won’t have the benefit of the discipline that a 9-to-5 office day and a bevy of co-workers imposes on the rest of us. ..more

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Once you have decided that starting your own business suits your abilities and is what you really want to do, then you need to consider what sort of business you are going to run. In fact you may have thought initially of the business you wanted to start and then considered if it was the right step for you. The basis of your business is a business idea – one that is likely to be viable and, when put into practice, will give you a good quality of life in more than just financial terms. ..more

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The business plan will have at least two functions:

• It will help clarify in your own mind exactly what you intend to achieve with your business.
• It will show potential investors that you have thoroughly researched and prepared everything for starting a business— that you have a serious proposal worth consideration. ..more

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Do you have any talents which can be exploited profitably? If you can answer ‘yes’ to any of the following questions, you need look no further to see what to base your business on.

1. Can you write readable, interesting, factual or fiction material?
2. Can you take and process photographs of a high quality?
3. Can you sing, without fear, alone in front of a large audience, well enough to earn applause? ..more

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The Internet

Although it is still relatively new in the craft world, another option for mail order selling is having a website through which you can sell over the Internet.

It is not without teething problems, particularly when it comes to money transactions. A craft business owner suggests using your website to display your products with price lists and colour charts. But to do the actual orders via email or fax. ..more

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Jewellery making can be practised at different levels, involving varying degrees of skill, more or less sophisticated equipment, and materials ranging from pebbles and shells found on the beach to alloys and precious metals like gold and silver. ..more

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Duration of the interview

How long a given interview lasts is, of course, very largely determined by inherent factors. The time devoted to an interview should be sufficient to ..more

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Test your range

No large manufacturer of consumer goods ever invests in a product without testing it first. You must do the same. Show it around. Compare it to products already available. Get feedback from people whose opinions you trust. ..more

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Just to whet your appetite here are a few of the vast number of craft choices and possibilities: ..more

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Supplying raw materials vary, from providing very specific products for a niche market or product to providing a wider range of supplies.

Ways of operating this business are:

• from home, particularly if you’re teaching
• a mail order business
• a retail shop.

Research the market well and imaginatively — and take the opportunity to be inventive. Look at what is being produced and then look at the component parts that make up that article. ..more

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Focus on trivial issues

Sometimes the owner becomes so engrossed in tiny details or an irrelevant issue, that important issues are ignored or glossed-over. For example, the owner may spend days reading through computer magazines simply to choose a personal computer. The problem often occurs when the business is experiencing some kind of difficulty and the owner finds it uncomfortable to think about the difficult problems and resorts to solving a few easy ones. It is a way of escaping from troubling concerns while at the same time feeling that useful work is being done. ..more

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After taking out an estimate of the value of the property, how many years‘ purchase of the pre-tax profits does the balance of the price represent? Many small businesses sell on around one to one-and-a half years‘ purchase of the profits, though the figure tends to be higher in the south of England.

If you are paying £54,000 for a business which is earning pre-tax profits of £18,000, you are buying it on three years‘ purchase. This is equivalent to a return on your money of 33¹/₃ per cent before tax. If it costs you 17 per cent to borrow the money, a 33¹/₃ per cent return is as low as it is sensible to accept. Businesses often sell at, say, one-anda-half years‘ purchase, a return of 66²/₃ per cent, but because this ignores your salary it is not a true return. ..more

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The plan that you use must be:

• clear and specific in its content
• easily understood by all who use or see it
• capable of accepting changes at both a detailed and broad level, and
• capable of being used to monitor what’s actually happening.

The simplest forms of the project plan that will do this for you are:

The Gantt chart, and The Critical Path network. ..more

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Even when they have selected for talent, some managers are hamstrung by their fundamental mistrust of people. This mistrust might be a product of some deep-seated insecurity, or it might be couched as a rational conclusion—”I think the human race is basically driven by selfishness, and therefore most people will cut corners if they think they can get away with it.” But whatever its source, their mistrust means that these managers are extremely reluctant to let each employee find his or her own route to performance. ..more

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The purchase incidence of toys, games, and dolls has been up and down since 2000, ranging from 45 percent in 2000 to 54 percent in 2001 and 50 percent in 2003. While children represent the core user market for toys, more adults are buying toys, not just for kids, but for their own playtime. Toys are popular adult collectibles, and more toy companies are recognizing that adults, just like their kids, want to play with toys. ..more

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Each year, buoyed by the hope that leaders are made, not born, tens of thousands of budding executives traipse off to leadership development courses. Here they discover the many different traits and competencies that constitute the model leader. They receive feedback from their peers and direct reports, feedback that reveals the peaks and valleys of their unique leadership profile. Finally, after all the learning and reflection is complete, the hard work begins. Each willing participant is asked to craft a plan to fill in those valleys, so that he can reshape himself into the model leader, smooth and well-rounded. ..more

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Everyone talks about convergence, while just the opposite is happening.

Whenever a new medium hits town, the cry goes up, “Convergence, convergence. What is this new medium going to converge with?”

When television hit town, there were stories everywhere about the convergence of TV with magazines and newspapers. You weren’t going to get your magazines in the mail anymore. When you wanted an issue, you would hit the button on your TV set and the issue would be printed out in your living room. (We don’t make these things up. We just report the facts.) ..more

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About one-fifth of households reported buying a figurine or sculpture in 2007, about the same as in 2003. A popular gift item for collectors, figurines often carry a greeting or social expression that makes them perfectly suited to gifting or as a remembrance. Figurines have been popular collectibles in the past, with lines such as Precious Moments and Hummel passed from generation to generation. But today, figurine collectibles are looked upon with disdain by many as something that one’s grandmother liked, but not something for me. ..more

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Great managers have to survive in a hostile world. Most companies do not value excellence in every role. They do not provide alternative career paths for their employees. And they do not give their managers the leeway to design graded levels of achievement or broadbanded pay plans. If you find yourself living in this restricted world, what can you do? ..more

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