Job stimulus plan
Ali Brown knows what the many unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers are going through.
The one-time office manager — whose worst nightmare is being too broke to dine with friends — is saying to take matters into your own hands.
Brown, a business consultant who built up her Ali International into one of Inc. magazine’s fastest-growing firms, hopes 2011 is the year of the small business person.
Don’t wait for the government or a corporation to make you wealthy, come up with your own personal stimulus plan by beginning a small business, Brown says.
“Starting a business is one of the best ways to increase your income for 2011,” Brown says.
Brown says the time is right to start a business, one that can provide corporations with services they need to outsource because of cutbacks.
Times were tough when she started out as an independent businesswoman some 12 years ago. She was with a Manhattan copywriting agency, but decided one day to go out on her own.
“I was working in a tiny company and was doing everything from talking to clients to servicing accounts, to getting coffee for people to fixing the fax machine. That was when I realized that I had the skills to do it on my own,” says Brown, who now has a Los Angeles-based business with eight employees. Brown was and is part of a trend.
Small businesses, which are defined as independent entities with fewer than 500 employees, generated 67 percent of the new jobs over the past 17 years, according to the US Small Business Administration. Today, small businesses employ about half of all private-sector workers, SBA adds.
However, the struggle for a new business’s success can be daunting. For example, at the beginning of her entrepreneurial career, Brown found that running a business was anything but fun and games.
About to go out with her friends, she found herself with less than $20 in her bank account. And her credit cards were maxed out.
“I will never forget that. I had to call them and cancel,” she said.
Nevertheless, Brown never wanted to go back to working for others. And then Brown started to do well once she learned how to find clients.
How?
“I asked around and found some networking groups, got on my feet, and attended all the meetings I could to tell people about my services. I printed brochures I created on my crappy little printer and handed them out,” she said.
Business came in from AdWeek magazine, Times Digital and Dun & Bradstreet, among others. With her own business established, Brown now offers would-be entrepreneurs her services.
How can others follow the same path? Generally, Brown says a formal business plan isn’t needed.
What’s needed is a model in which you understand where business will come from and how much clients will spend to get that work.
Brown gives her clients several rules for succeeding in small business,
* Stick to What You Know.
“Don’t get into an industry you know nothing about.” When times are tough it will difficult to stay with a business in which you have no interest.
* Research Your Small Business Options: There’s so much that can be found on the Internet, Brown notes, that one can understand a business and a market before one enters a field. “Do the best research you can. Talk to people,” Brown says, “who might be your prospective clients.”
* Consider Your Passions
What you know or what you enjoy might be exactly how you start a small business, Brown says. “You’d be surprised at what you can actually make money at. One of my clients, Karen in the UK, has created a whole business around raw food. She loved raw food. She started selling recipes online, and then started teaching classes and then training people how to teach classes about raw food. Last time I checked, her business was generating $500,000 a year.”
* Jump into the Pool.
Don’t talk about it. Start the business and start looking for clients.
“If you wait for the business to come to you, you’re going to fail. If you hustle a bit, you can at least get above water while you figure out what you’re doing,” she says. But no matter how quickly a business catches on, starting a small business is a daunting proposition. Indeed, SBA estimates that 552,000 small businesses were created last year. But 660,000 also died, says the SBA.
And according to the government, the trend of more small business deaths than births has been going on since 2008.