There’s no greater feeling than that of a new business idea. Your lighbulb just went off, your juices are flowing and you’re thinking “I’m gonna be rich!”. After a day or two goes by, reality sets in and you think “I know this idea is great but how am I going to make it work?”. In many cases, you’ll talk to friends, family and even colleagues to get their opinion on the idea. Some will tell you that it’s great! Some may tell you that it’s terrible. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you will have a passion and conviction to keep the idea going as long as possible.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, others must agree that your idea has value to them or another group of people. You see, people only pay for 2 types of experiences, pleasure or pain. Pleasure is a no brainer because people want to enjoy what life has to offer. An example of pleasure may be dinner and a movie, a nightclub or even a concert. It really depends on the person. Pain is not as easy to understand. People don’t pay to have pain, they pay to have it removed. For example, a common pain that homeowners have is their toilet or septic system being clogged or not working correctly. The entrepreneurs who benefit from this type of problem are plumbers.

When things get tough, the economy is down and the stock market isn’t producing as well, people pay less for pleasure and more to remove pain. Here is how you can launch a business around removing pain.

Solve a Problem

Fortunately (and unfortunately), life is filled with inconveniences, challenges and problems. What’s even better is that everyday people are short on time, stressed out and want relief from most problems they face. This is why it’s great to be an entrepreneur, if you have a keen eye, opportunities can be plentiful.

The best way to find problems are twofold:

1. Keep a diary/list of all the problems you have daily.
2. Consistently talk to people to see what problems they are having.

Listen to the Market

If you find that people are interested in having the problem solved, move forward. When attempting to solve a problem for the first time, be very careful about your solution and make sure that it’s in alignment with your market.

When building a product, adopt the strategy of building a Minimum Viable Product. This is an initial product that has minimal functionality and solves the core problem only.

At this stage, it’s very important to only build critical features because you don’t really know what the market wants yet.

Adapt to Their Feedback

After you’ve created the product, you’ll want to let some people try it and give you their feedback. It is vital that you are open to the feedback of the market, regardless of how hard it may hurt. Ultimately, you’ll need to make something they are happy with in order to sell to them. This may even include going back to the drawing board or making small but effective changes.

Persist Through Tough Times

Validating a business idea is extremely tough. It’s not easy for anyone, regardless of how they make it look. Just remember that your goal is pure, you’re trying to make the quality of life better for others so they can enjoy more of what they want to do in life.

We’re very happy to announce that Startup Expert is back and better than ever!

We’ve completely revamped our services to better enable our entrepreneurs to build great companies. For those of you who’ve been with us a while, you can attest to the continuous development process we’ve put our product through to ensure the best quality. We initially started as a traditional coaching company doing one to one coaching with clients. Over time and as demand grew, we had to determine how to continuously provide the highest levels of support to startups at a fraction of the cost. Just as we advise our customers, we were faced with growing pains and tough decisions to make on where to go with our product next.

I am happy to say that our new system is significantly more useful to a new entrepreneur than our previous system was. Here’s what we added/updated that didn’t exist before:

• LaunchPad – Our 12 step entrepreneur development program that turns your business idea into a profitable company. We noticed that new entrepreneurs didn’t know the exact steps to take in order to make their business idea come to life. We developed a linear, proven system just for that.

• Business Advisory Team – New service giving an on demand, network of business experts to new entrepreneurs. We talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs in 2011 alone and realized that it was very hard for them to find trustworthy advisory team members. We created a nationally recognized team that truly cares about every entrepreneur they interact with.

• Strategy Consulting – Our 3 pronged approach to helping startups overcome their challenges in real time. In the last 2 years of working with entrepreneurs one on one, we’ve been able to identify patterns where they stop making progress. We saw that in many cases, one small challenge could cost a new entrepreneur of 3-4 months of downtime. To us, this simply wasn’t acceptable and we created an unlimited email support, shared phone support and dedicated phone support system to decrease downtime for entrepreneurs.

• Research Assistance – Our newly created research service enabling entrepreneurs to turn over their research efforts to us, saving time and energy. Over 2011, we monitored our paying customers and realized that they were spending 20-30 hours researching various topics monthly. While this sounds great, this research delayed tangible business progress and threw off some entrepreneurs by as much as 6 months. We decided to invest into our services to take the load off of new entrepreneurs because their time is precious and resources are limited. They offload the research to our team and they can go back to doing what they do best, building their company.

Have you ever lost a prospective client because they didn’t feel comfortable with your company? I have and I would argue that most entrepreneurs have at some point. Unfortunately, this happens everyday to new businesses around the world and especially in the United States. By nature, humans are risk averse and that directly correlates into their buying behavior. In more developed countries like the United States, consumers are so spoiled by the juggernaut companies with billions of dollars at their disposal that perfect product presentations becomes the standard. While this is great for any economy, it makes it harder for small businesses to compete. The question is how can you make your company look like a fortune 500 without the budget?

Like they say, the first impression is always the most important. In my experience, there are 6 things you must have to look like a credible business.

1. Get a 1-800 #

Access is one of the most important factors prospects use to determine if they are going to buy. They want to know that if they have a question, you (your company) will be there to answer. An easy way to ease the concerns of a prospect is to purchase a 1-800 #. Back in the day this used to be expensive but with modern technology, you can get a number for only $2/month.

Don’t believe me? Check this out – http://www.kall8.com

2. Open A Virtual Office

A virtual office is a service that allows your company to rent a prime business address in your area, without the lease. In addition, some virtual office services allow you to use more services like receptionists, meeting rooms and they’ll forward your mail to your real address, normally first class.

Open a virtual office – http://virtualoffices.regus.com

3. Incorporate Your Business

This is probably something you’ve already heard but I’m telling you for a different reason. One thing I’ve noticed about more savvy consumers is they ask questions to see if you know what you’re doing, even outside of your service offering. One question, that I’ve been getting lately is “Are you incorporated? LLC, S-Corp, Partnership?”. If you even hesitate with this question it can be a deal breaker. Incorporating early forces you to understand the different types of corporate entities and discuss (from a high level) to your prospect why you chose that type and that you are officially registered by your secretary of state’s office.

Georgia Secretary of State – http://www.sos.ga.gov/corporations/

4. Develop A Quality Website

I think this is a given but I still see small businesses damaging their brand by having a crappy website or not having one at all. A website is meant to be the virtual extension of your offline business and consumers are using their impression of your site to decide if they will do business with you. The most important thing with your website should do is be able to effectively communicate your core offering in less than 10 seconds. A strategy used to do this is called the “billboard strategy”, simply it’s a graphic layout of your website’s homepage that includes a billboard like graphic when the consumer first lands on the page.

5. Create Business Cards

Business cards are one of the least expensive items on this list but arguably the most important. People really gauge just how serious your company is based on you having business cards or not. Even though I know that not having business cards doesn’t necessarily mean that a person may not be professional, I still question the seriousness of the person subconsciously. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on cards but make sure they contain the following:

Like most others, I use VistaPrint for my cards.

6. Testimonials, Testimonials, Testimonials

Like I said before, consumers are risk averse and want to do business with proven companies. A lot of small business owners think that “proven” means years of past client history. Proven just means that you’ve done the work for clients in the past and they were satisfied. Also, one important note is that a client doesn’t always have to be someone who has paid for your services. It can be someone that you offered the services to for free and then they gave you a testimonial about their appreciation for your work. The paying clients that you engage after getting these testimonials don’t have to know that you weren’t paid for the work and normally they never ask unless you tell them

This is how to look like a Fortune 500 for a fraction of the price.

As entrepreneurs, we have big dreams of what our startup companies could be. The nature of growing our businesses requires feedback from partners, investors, contractors and most importantly our customers. I’ve talked with other entrepreneurs about the feedback they received from the various types of people in or related to their companies. A common occurrence in all of the entrepreneurs’ company vision was describing their selves as the future market leader in their space. One entrepreneur is starting a low cost multi-product store similar to the Target stores. The other is in year 3 of his software company that is experiencing ridiculous compound annual growth and his largest competitor is Microsoft.

As many people are skeptics about anything new, the question is always “What is your plan to take over the market?”. To a degree, most entrepreneurs follow a similar model to the current market leader with a variation here and there. Even though, this is a smart way to plan the growth of a successful business, critics will respond by saying your competitor is the “Exception and not the rule”. Most entrepreneurs have heard this argument at some point in their career but no one ever tells us how to become the exception and not the rule.

Since every business is successful because of the person or people with the vision, it is extremely important to understand how you or your team can be the exception everyone refers to.

Bill Gates – Founder of the Microsoft Corporation

Everyone knows Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. What most don’t know is the work he put in before anyone knew who he was. Back in 1969, at the ripe age of 13, Gates was doing real time programming in the 8th grade at his middle school. Later on, he found out that the University of Washington hospital had a mainframe computer that was available between 2-6 am every weekday. He would set his alarm to 1:30 am, sneak out of his parents house and walk 2 miles in the dark to program until 6 am. Remember, this is 1969 where the computers were still as big as some of our houses today and homes didn’t have them yet.

Sean Combs – CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment

Also known as “Diddy” is one of the wealthiest hip-hop businessman in the game. What’s not mentioned often is that while Sean was a Student at Howard, he used to commute from Washington D.C. to New York by train (1-2 hour ride) everyday after classes to intern at Uptown Records. He risked his degree from Howard University and dropped out to work fulltime at Uptown. He was laid off in 1992 from Uptown and instead of getting another job, he created Bad Boy Entertainment which has a corporate net worth today of $400 million dollars.

Sergey Brin – Co Founder of the Google Corporation

One piece of the Internet’s most successful tag team, Sergey Brin is a multi-billionaire and someone I look up to. I was reading the “Google Story” and there was a pivotal point in Google’s success which Sergey had a lot to do with. Google struggled for a couple years with the search algorithm they created out of Stanford University. They had a great idea but were missing one thing, direct access to all of the pages on the Internet. To most, that would be an insurmountable task but not to Sergey. He said “ Give me a week and I’ll download all of the pages on Internet to my computer”, needless to say everyone laughed at him saying that he would never be able to do that. A week later, he came back with every single page on the Internet at his disposal, from that point Google had captured the last missing piece to their model and were able to grow into a multi-billion dollar company today.

The Beatles – Legendary Rock Band

The Beatles are arguably the best rock band ever assembled. The untold story of how they became so great is still a mystery to most. Before coming to the States, The Beatles were a local band out of Liverpool, England. One day a club owner from Hamburg, Germany heard them play and invited them to play the cover at his club there. What the Beatles didn’t know before arrival was that is was an exotic strip club. Stuck in Hamburg for a couple months, they played 7 days a week, 8 hours straight for months on end. It was said that they played together 1200 times before anyone in the United States ever knew who they were.

So how do you become the exception and not the rule? It seems to come down to 4 things:

• Love – For what you do.

• Vision - For your life and business.

• Dedication – To developing your skill.

• Risk - The ability to look at risk as an opportunity to be great versus an opportunity to fail.

There you have it. How will you position yourself to be the exception and not the rule in your business?

Partnership is one of the most beautiful things about entrepreneurship. Like marriage, you are supposed to work together as one unit, offset each others weaknesses and step in when the other is unable. Unfortunately, no business runs perfectly forever and when times become hard the partners need to make uncomfortable decisions about carrying the business through or dissolving it.

Conflicts

There are a couple different things that yield partner disagreements and conflicts. The most common is company goals. Company goals vary widely and can be anything from human resources, financial planning to company expansion. Many partners have different styles of management, communication and levels of commitment to the business. If these are not aligned, conflict can arise almost instantly. Another popular disagreement partners sometimes have is that of the exit strategy. An exit strategy is the act of transferring ownership of a company over to another entity through a merger, acquisition, IPO or even dissolution. Many partners disagree because one may want to sell the company to cash out and the other may want to hold on to the company and expand it.

Death is an area that no one ever wants to talk about but it is just as important and creates as much confusion for partners. When a partner dies, they leave their ownership of the company behind. Unless there is proper planning, even in death the ownership belongs to the individual or the successor. The problem is most business don’t have succession planning documents in place which freezes the surviving partner from making any other decisions. In some cases the company has to be dissolved or the partner has to deal with the successor. In most cases, the successor doesn’t have a working knowledge of the business, and is probably a relative of the deceased partner. All the successor knows is they want (financially) what has been transferred to them. Inherently, this is a major problem for any partner.

What You Can Do

So how do you split up ownership unequally with someone you are starting a new business with? Well first you have to determine what each partner brings to the table. From there, determine who adds more value to the business, now and into the future. Use some of these factors to determine who gets majority and minority ownership:

• Whose idea was it first?
• Who is investing the most time to the venture?
• Who is investing the most capital into the venture?
• Who has the most connections to help the business realize it’s goals?

Once you’ve determined whose going to get more or less of the pie, it’s time to get specific. There are a couple of different structures you can use:

60/40 (Most Common)

Don’t pay attention to the numbers exactly, it’s really a figurative way of saying someone should have more and the other less. You could just as easily have 51/49 or even 80/20. The point here is that someone has the deciding vote in a conflict.

49/49/2 (Less Common)

This structure requires three people. It allows for 3 partners to have equal ownership while the other has minimal ownership. This allows conflicts to be resolved easily because the majority will always rule. This is used in cases where the minimal owner may be important to the business but not providing as much value or dedication to the company as the other two.

Partnership Isn’t All Bad

Like I said before, partnership is a beautiful thing when done with diligence and future planning. The excitement of starting a business can be joyfully overwhelming at periods which makes us entrepreneurs want to get everyone involved. Remember that when you are getting someone involved, make sure it’s less about the excitement you’re experiencing and more about their values and what they bring to the table.