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Featured Business Articles

Common Question: Is this business viable?
Starting any small business is, for lack of a better term, a challenge. You can't just jump into it without plenty of thought and research. Running your business is a never-ending roller coaster of good days and bad; ups and downs; rewards and failures; ...

Home Based Business Success
Building a successful home business IS possible, if the recipe for success contains the right ingredients! With so many opportunities available for the home business entrepreneur, it's hard to decide where to start. It takes a few key ingredients to be ...

Relationship Marketing and Your Home Based Business
Many entrepreneurs just starting out say that their one biggest fear is selling their business to others. In today's relationship marketing focus, much has been said about building the relationship that the sales side of this style of marketing has become ...




3 Essential Tools for Starting and Maintaining a Small Business
 
We believe that there are 3 factors that drive the success of small businesses.

1) Acquiring start-up capital

2) Finding customers

3) Accounting for, budgeting and controlling sales and expenses

The following resources will help your small business achieve these success factors.

Acquiring Start-Up Capital

An adequate supply of capital is essential as many profitable businesses fail because they don't have enough cash to pay their employees and suppliers. But what is an adequate supply of capital? The only way to tell is by doing a significant amount of research on your potential market and formally documenting this in a business plan. I'm sure you know that a business plan is a very important document that is crucial to convincing your banker to lend you money.

There are two ways to obtain a business plan.


1) Do it yourself by amending a business plan template, or

2) Hire a professional to do it for you.


Obviously obtain 1) will be a great deal cheaper.

Our research led to a website that has over 60 high quality and free business plan templates. We also found a directory that you can use to easily find a business plan writer in your city – where ever you live in the world.

Finding Customers

Finding customers is a difficult and expensive task for service business owners such as accountants, lawyers and plumbers. We believe that a cost effective marketing strategy for service business owners is to simply give all their personal contacts a few business cards.

Our research led to a few websites that have pre-designed business card templates. We felt that the diversity and quality of these designs was outstanding. In addition, we found that you can obtain a significant saving by finding a printing service on the Internet. We found that you could get 2,000 full color business cards for as little as US $150.

Accounting For, Budgeting and Controlling Revenue and Expenses

Accurate accounting is very important for small business owners. It's essential that you have timely access to information that could make or break your business. If stocks are running low – you need to know about it. If a large proportion of your debtors haven't paid – you need to know about it. If you do not react to these situations quickly you may have a situation where you don't have enough money to pay your employees – or worse still someone is stealing cash out the till.

Our research led to a website that compares and reviews top accounting software for small businesses. The cheapest software cost US $89.99 and the most expensive software cost US $1,499. It was interesting to note that the top 3 ranked websites were not the most expensive and cost between US $250 - US $300.


Hopefully you now have an idea of some of the tools that you can use to grow and maintain your small business. If you would like to benefit from our research please visit our website. We do not charge for this research and offer the content freely on our website.

About the Author
Best Quality Small Business Resources

Ryan Hough is the webmaster of best quality small business resources.com, who's aim is to help you save time and money by finding reviews and case studies that will enable you to choose the best resources at the right price.




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