Starting a Business. Things to do?
- Thread starter joycenmat
- Start date
I am presenting a proposal to a large car company. They will then say yes or no and that money will more than enough cover excess costs. Start up costs with minimal ongping costs except for site upgrades. No products just services and advertising will pay.
I network now..ALl the time i am a walking networker and it pays dividends.
Stamina.. (Watch this space) Not only do i hold records for Long distance running i am mentally tough and driven .. i was born driven According to my parents.
And so far they are "nearly" always right.
I network now..ALl the time i am a walking networker and it pays dividends.
Stamina.. (Watch this space) Not only do i hold records for Long distance running i am mentally tough and driven .. i was born driven According to my parents.
And so far they are "nearly" always right. 
well - i have penciled out today to write up position descriptions and accountabilities for every one of my 15 positions in my company.
strangely enough, every position box has my name in it - gosh i'm going to be busy. but it does mean that as the company expands and i need to employ others to do various aspects of the work, everything is already setup for them to move straight in, know what is expected of them and what they need to do.
oh - i've also got to start writing my systems as to how everything is "done" from answering the phone to dispatching the product, from how employees are expected to dress to how sales orders are received ... busy couple of days!
this means that any tom, dick or jane can come in and do any job they are employed to do - in a manner that the customer expects it to be done.
then on the weekend we start to move house ....
strangely enough, every position box has my name in it - gosh i'm going to be busy. but it does mean that as the company expands and i need to employ others to do various aspects of the work, everything is already setup for them to move straight in, know what is expected of them and what they need to do.
oh - i've also got to start writing my systems as to how everything is "done" from answering the phone to dispatching the product, from how employees are expected to dress to how sales orders are received ... busy couple of days!
this means that any tom, dick or jane can come in and do any job they are employed to do - in a manner that the customer expects it to be done.
then on the weekend we start to move house ....
God Damn Lizzie, the suspense is killing me! Looking forward to when I finally find out what this product is!!
I've got this bit of string... how long is it?
twice as long as half it's length.
Hey Lizzie.... if you are going to be doing all 15 jobs for a while, I reckon you will not have time to get dressed.
But that is okay because as the boss, you also manage how your employees (all of them right now being YOU
) are expected to dress, and I reckon you can stay in your pajamas if it is okay with the boss .Can I be in charge of the Brisbane office?
I'm just using PHP so its platform independant - but I need a dedicated host. Right now I'm running on virtual hosting (has several websites on it and is probably going to reach capacity soon) on FreeBSD for $30 a month. Some of the software in the deal is useful for our other project even though we have a full-price copy of visual studio here and it is expensive enough they throw in a bunch of other software too. But that's interesting, now I have to go have a very thorough poke around that website
Can I be in charge of the Brisbane office?
haha - very funny. actually i have a very high standard dress code! (although i do wear ugg boots in the office on cold days).
to idea of having all the positions, roles and systems in place is so that down the track - when i employ people to do the various jobs - they can just slot right into the system without having to invent it as i go along.
also means if the time comes to sell, because it's all systems and positions it makes the company much more desirable.
funnily enough - it is good systems and company organisation that sells rather than the product (just picture any big name fast food outlet) - although the product does have to be something that consumers believe they desire.
just think geoff with his subway, or marc (bayview) with his tyre business, or nathan with his reno's, or rumpled with her online business ... without systems on "how to" and organisation of a heirarcy none of them would work for long.
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I only started this one in May lol ... long way to go! The other stuff we do online is much more ordinary and haphazard.
Oh, and we had a closer look at the websitespark thing. We qualify for it and the other half is drooling over the concept of 'free visual studio 2010'. And one of the 'hosting partners' has a bare bones $29 a month plan which is the cheapest hosting I think I have EVER seen
Its only discounted from $39 which is still bloody cheap, I looked a few months ago and couldn't find much under $200. The same host has plans that scale right up to $900 a month, and that's what we want - a single host with scaling plans so we don't need to change hosts all the time.
I gotta finish this thing and write a business plan and stuff. Lets see ...
1. Write software
2. Stick on internet
3. Profit!
Will that do?
Oh, and we had a closer look at the websitespark thing. We qualify for it and the other half is drooling over the concept of 'free visual studio 2010'. And one of the 'hosting partners' has a bare bones $29 a month plan which is the cheapest hosting I think I have EVER seen
Its only discounted from $39 which is still bloody cheap, I looked a few months ago and couldn't find much under $200. The same host has plans that scale right up to $900 a month, and that's what we want - a single host with scaling plans so we don't need to change hosts all the time.
I gotta finish this thing and write a business plan and stuff. Lets see ...
1. Write software
2. Stick on internet
3. Profit!
Will that do?
If your business plan has graphs it must be bigger than my business plan in the post above yours
Interesting to read about people discussing the cheapest and nastiest for web hosting. I have quite a successful website, not accounting related, which generates aver 1,000,000 unique visitors per month, and if you are planning on growth then getting your server requirements right from the beginnning are critical. We learnt the hard way and had to move from a cloud environment to a dedicated hosting environment very quickly as traffic was increasing by about 10,000 visitors a week at one point and the load on the server was incredible. Make sure you plan for growth. Server costs for us are about $3k per month so not cheap but necessary for the site. Once you get decent traffic though and can employ direct advertising agents who work on commission then you can earn some decent cash. if you only plan on having around 1,000 uniques a month then fine maybe you will get away with $20 per month hosting but that will not generate decent income and with such low traffic numbers advertisers will not be interested in direct deals. Particularly when selling deals to overseas clients the uniques are critical for decent dollars. Good luck with the internet ventures it is an interesting space to be in.
In my opinion, business plans are bunk. No one sticks to them and no one can tell what the future holds. Success is more about the person than the plan.
They are useful for getting finance tho, thats about it.
Regrdaing setting up your business. Dont worry too much about all the set up stuff. Just go for it, get out there and start making money. Once you can prove its a good model and you can sign up customers then do all the necessary stuff.
A business is about making money, everything else is secondary. Ive known too many people who have all their ducks lined up (great bus plan, stationary, accounts, etc etc but arent making much money. But they can say they own a business. LOL
Its putting the cart before the horse imo.
They are useful for getting finance tho, thats about it.
Regrdaing setting up your business. Dont worry too much about all the set up stuff. Just go for it, get out there and start making money. Once you can prove its a good model and you can sign up customers then do all the necessary stuff.
A business is about making money, everything else is secondary. Ive known too many people who have all their ducks lined up (great bus plan, stationary, accounts, etc etc but arent making much money. But they can say they own a business. LOL
Its putting the cart before the horse imo.
Agree with evand.
Alot of people are all theory and no practice.
When it comes time to actually do what is required, they can't make it work.
Some people seem are able to be sucessful in multiple fields, more about attitude I believe.
Whereas some people never seem to be able to make anything work if nobody is holding their hand and guiding them, don't want to take full responsibility for their actions and decisions.
Maybe a plan and systems can make a good business great, but may not be able to make a terrible business great.
Alot of people are all theory and no practice.
When it comes time to actually do what is required, they can't make it work.
Some people seem are able to be sucessful in multiple fields, more about attitude I believe.
Whereas some people never seem to be able to make anything work if nobody is holding their hand and guiding them, don't want to take full responsibility for their actions and decisions.
Maybe a plan and systems can make a good business great, but may not be able to make a terrible business great.
Do you mean cloud or virtual shared? Most starter websites are on $5 a month virtual shared hosting. Cloud hosting is very new.
We're looking at the absolute low end cloud or virtual server (not shared hosting), and they start at about $50 and quickly shoot into $100s. I'm only looking at hosts that also sell much larger hosting packages as well as cheapies so I don't need to change hosts on the fly, the bulk of the cheaper hosts do those $5 a month deals and maybe a smattering of virtual servers and that's about it.
My idea isn't about visitors per month - I'd only expect a few 100 initialy to 10s of 1000s of users TOTAL let alone per month, but if each of those users has a site that has traffic in the order of 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 page views a day, multiply that out and I'm needing to serve millions of requests a day for them. Without excessive latency.
Fully expecting to be paying $1000s a month (which is why I've been advised to take 30% brokerage cut, I guess) if this takes off but no way in hell I'm launching something brand new straight onto a $500 a month or higher plan if I can put it on a $50 one and just email the host to bump me up if it does well.
But I've certainly had other people tell me $50 is crazy expensive for a hosting package and point me at the $5 a month plans so I've thought about it, honest
RumpledElf
Initially was on a medium sized cloud environment but shared with a number of sites which is quite common for clouds. Dedicated server hosting is indeed much more expensive.
Advertising deals are quite complex and depending on your service offering and user base profile then different deals can be cut with different companies. Advertising companies that specialise in this generally charge a commission of between 20-30%. If just a website then yes easier to move across but if you have a database at the back end then this becomes more complex. Also need to ensure that as the site becomes more popular the hosting company is responsive and can get back to you quickly. There are some great service providers and some appalling ones. Also want to ensure they are geared up if you ever get a denial of service (DOS) attack against your site. Downtime can mean a loss of users and this leads to a loss of revenue.
People telling you $50 a month is expensive would indicate to me they have only had experience with low traffic sites. Agreed 10,000 unique visitors is very tiny. 100,000 pagesviews per day is very small so would warrant a cheaper hosting solution.
Initially was on a medium sized cloud environment but shared with a number of sites which is quite common for clouds. Dedicated server hosting is indeed much more expensive.
Advertising deals are quite complex and depending on your service offering and user base profile then different deals can be cut with different companies. Advertising companies that specialise in this generally charge a commission of between 20-30%. If just a website then yes easier to move across but if you have a database at the back end then this becomes more complex. Also need to ensure that as the site becomes more popular the hosting company is responsive and can get back to you quickly. There are some great service providers and some appalling ones. Also want to ensure they are geared up if you ever get a denial of service (DOS) attack against your site. Downtime can mean a loss of users and this leads to a loss of revenue.
People telling you $50 a month is expensive would indicate to me they have only had experience with low traffic sites. Agreed 10,000 unique visitors is very tiny. 100,000 pagesviews per day is very small so would warrant a cheaper hosting solution.
Agree with Evan, never had a business plan myself and I seem to do alright. Having said that, I'm only small time - I could fill out one of those position hierarchy diagrams, but it won't really change things other than look pretty and feel like I'm doing something constructive for a bit before it goes into the filing cabinet.
