WEALTH CREATION BY BECOMING A LANDLORD

Wealth Creation is a skill that many people attempt to master. Many people attempt to create wealth through real estate investing, but fail to do so because they lack the knowledge needed to become successful.


A very simple wealth creation strategy that you can use to become wealthy is to become a landlord. Becoming a landlord is the classic wealth creation model of real estate investing. Let's assume that you acquire ten properties worth $100,000 each and after renting them out consistently for ten years, they are now worth $180,000 each. Not taking into account the income that you received from these properties over the last 10 years, you would have increased your wealth by $800,000 just off of the appreciation alone. That is why becoming a landlord is a powerful wealth creation strategy.


The concept is simple in theory, but takes good management skills in order to be successful long term. If you can purchase numerous houses, rent them out consistently, and manage them well, then you will be well on your way to creating wealth and financial freedom for yourself. Unfortunately, the reality is that the beginning years can be tough on beginning landlords because generally the expenses on your rental properties will be high and the income will be marginal. Over the years as the income increases the profit generated from these properties can be significant.


Management is really the key to a landlord's success and wealth creation. If you plan to follow this business model and hold these rental properties for the long term, then you must know how to effectively manage these properties, or you must hire a property manager who can properly manage them.


The image of being a landlord strikes fear into the hearts of many aspiring real estate investors. All they can picture are the late night calls from tenants claiming that the toilet is broken. However, this is rarely the case, and for the savvy landlord who hires a property management firm, this is never a concern. The reality is that a well managed property can provide you with a large passive income. You might start off investing in single family houses, but eventually you will want to upgrade to apartment investments in order to maximize your returns. If you are committed to taking the plunge as a landlord, and acquire good properties and manage them will, you can look forward to creating wealth that most people only dream about.


The goal of wealth creation is truly up to you. Study your market and the rental rates in your area and try to find a good property manager. These simple steps will put you on the right path to wealth creation by becoming a landlord. Hopefully, that this article has been of help to you. If you have questions, please feel free to leave a comment in the section below.


By: Perry Pearson, ArticleBase

5 STEPS TO GET YOUR BUSINESS STARTED

1. Start now: Better than daydreaming and wishfully thinking of becoming your own boss, is committing yourself and taking concrete steps to research your options and test the waters. You can begin by viewing magazines and newspapers for concepts and seeing what other people are doing.


2. Passion : What are you passionate about? Figure it out, and start from there. Sit down, relax, and make a list of hobbies, interests, and skills that you really enjoy. Do you make the best furit cake your colleagues has ever tasted? Now, you have a business you can start.


3. Ask family, friends and colleagues for ideas: What businesses can they see you in? A friend may recognize your knowledge of fashion as a service people will happily pay for.


4. Research : Start by making some research on online - to get ideas on how others are trying to make a living doing things that interest you.


5. Look for inspiration everywhere: While you're in the supermarket, at the mall, strolling through a flea market, and in the library. Check out books, trade associations and journals where you can learn about trends, suppliers, colleagues, and competitors.


By: Unigroupx,WhyDOWork 

THE ART OF BOOTSTRAPPING

By: TimoStevens (2009)

“Doing More with Less”

Bootstrapping is the art of learning to do more with less. During the prelaunch phase of your business, raising capital may be difficult. Thus, bootstrapping becomes an alternative for your capital formation strategies.

An entrepreneur who operates from a mindset of bootstrap management understands that all resources are scare and that cash must be cherished. To him or her, “cash is king!”

Most entrepreneurs in today’s world have started successful businesses on a wing and a prayer and one special ingredient: an understanding of the art of bootstrapping. These entrepreneurs have all learned how to survive on a shoestring budget – by being creative and aggressive and by monitoring their cash flow carefully.

Take for instance, your business like most startups, needs $200,000 for growth and expansion (or survival). Instead of focusing on how and where the money can be raised, the bootstrap entrepreneur will ask, “what can I actually do with the money, and are there other means to obtain these resources?”

Although bootstrapping involves a risk for the entrepreneur, the absence of any stakeholder gives him or her more freedom to develop his business. Many successful businesses including Dell Computers were founded this way!

Source: Raising Capital, Andrew J. Sherman

FOUR Ms OF STARTUP SUCCESS

Excerpted By: TimoStevens (2009)

According to William Graylin (Founder & CEO of Way Systems Inc), the following elements are essential to the success of your new business:

1) Market Sauce – if you don’t have competitors, you probably don’t have a market.

2) Magic Sauce – you’ve got to have a strong, unique advantage that separates you from your competitors.

3) Money Model – many startup founders forget how important a good revenue model is to investors.

4) Management Team – you can make adjustments to the above 3, but without rock-solid people, you won’t get anywhere.

4 KEY LESSONS IN ENTREPRENEURIAL FINANCE

As part of entrepreneurship development, it is important to understand how to raise capital. Most aspiring entreprenuers often ask this question: What’s the most important thing I need to know about raising money?  For entrepreneurs, the following four lessons are especially important:


1. For most entrepreneurs, seeking outside financing isn’t worth your time. 
Only a small fraction of new businesses obtain money from someone who is not a founder of the business.  Therefore, unless your business has a lot of hard assets that can be used as collateral for a loan, or one of a handful of startups that has the super-high growth potential and exit plan to attract accredited angel investors and venture capitalists, seeking outside money is unlikely to be fruitful.  You are better off developing a less capital-intensive business model and financing the startup yourself than you are spending your time trying to raise money.


2. Your personal credit and personal collateral matter a great deal when financing a startup. 
Data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Small Business Finances shows that the owners of one quarter of corporations less than five years old, and nearly half of sole proprietorships that age, personally guarantee the debts of their businesses.  Given that only a minority of businesses borrows externally at all, this means that most of the capital that entrepreneurs borrow is personally borrowed or personally guaranteed.


With personal debt, the lender’s decision depends less on the potential of the business than on the entrepreneur’s credit and collateral.  If you don’t have great personal credit and you have few assets to pledge against a loan, you will have a hard time borrowing to finance your new business, no matter how great your business idea is.  So if you want to start a business, be careful about your personal credit.


3. You are more likely to get a loan than an equity investment from an outsider. 
Because venture capital and angel investments are sexier than bank loans and trade credit, the former gets the lion’s share of attention in books and articles about entrepreneurial finance.  However, most of the companies that get outside financing obtain debt, not equity.


Only a tiny percentage of startups are financed by selling equity to accredited angels or venture capitalists.  The statistics show that around 1 percent of companies get their financing from these two sources combined.  Other informal investors – like friends, family and unaccredited angels – add a few percentage points to the share of businesses that get outside equity, but research shows that these sources are actually more likely to lend money than to take an equity stake.  Therefore, unless your business is the type that angels and venture capitalists look for, you shouldn’t waste your time seeking equity investors.


4. Tapping trade creditors is where your odds of obtaining financing for the business itself are highest. 
According to analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Small Business Finance, next to having a checking account, trade credit is the most common financial tool used by small businesses.  Because trade credit is offered by suppliers to help you buy their products, even the newest businesses can obtain it.


In short, unless you have a rare, super-high-growth business with plans to exit through an initial public offering or acquisition within five to seven years, your best bet is to minimize your capital needs and finance your start-up with your own money, money that you borrow personally, and trade credit.


Source: Scott Shane, Small Business Trends

10 TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURIAL EFFECTIVENESS

1. Network selectively.  
Take the time to build a profile of your ideal customers, and target your networking activities to reach them.  Speak to those who are already predisposed to want what you offer.


2. Buy the best chair you can find.  
You’ll probably use your chair more than any other piece of business equipment, including your computer, so don’t settle for a crappy one.  Consider a chair with padded arms and a high back (to the top of your head) for maximum comfort.


3. Build positive relationships.
Understand that relationships are more important than contracts.  Business deals are relationships between people.  The signed piece of paper is important, but it’s merely the result of the relationship, not the cause.  


4. Think for yourself.  
Withdraw from groupthink and popular beliefs, do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns.  When you’re just starting out, people will tell you you’re wrong.  After you've blown past them, they’ll tell you you’re crazy.  A few years after that, they’ll (privately) ask you to mentor them.


5. Fail your way forward.  
Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim.  Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating.  If you’re afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job.  Failure’s lessons are essential to success.


6. Become so organized it disgusts people.  
You’ll never achieve perfection, but you’ll be far better off than your peers who spend two weeks every year looking for things they misplaced.  If you aren’t chronically well-organized, punctual, and dependable, rest assured you’re competing with someone who is.


7. Embrace opportunities with limited downside, unlimited upside.  
The best deals are those where your risk of loss is predictable and fixed if things go wrong, while your potential gains are enormous if things go right.


8. Develop strong character traits.  
Entrepreneurship is as much about character building as it is about business building. The height of your success is determined by your character more than your conditions.  Face your fears to develop courage.  Push yourself to build self-discipline.  Identify and develop other character attributes you’ll need to succeed.  


9. Optimize your personal energy flow.  
Conduct 30-day trials to test various diet, exercise, sleep, and caffeine consumption patterns.  Adopt the routines that give you the best concentration and focus.  Dump your excess fat at the gym instead of slogging it to the office every day.


10. Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable.  
Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit. If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail.  If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it.  


Source: Steve Pavlina, stevepavlina.com

THE FIVE KEYS TO BUILDING A GREAT COMPANY

1. Leadership. 
First of all, you need good leadership. Great leaders raise the aspirations of their followers; they make people more confident, energetic and enthusiastic. Such leaders make people embrace the adage: a plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility. 


People, who are motivated by great leaders, dream big, make sacrifices and achieve miracles. It is not sufficient just to have great leaders. You need a mechanism to identify, train, empower and mentor successive generations of leaders. Such leadership training and mentoring has to become the responsibility of the current generation of leaders.


2. Vision. 
You have to create a grand, noble vision which elevates the energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem of everyone in the company while ensuring that everybody sees a benefit in following the vision.


3. Benchmarking.  
Your company has to benchmark itself on a global scale in every area including sales, production, human resources, R&D and finance. It creates an open and confident environment where first-raters recruit first-raters.


4. Measuring To Improve. 
A great company continuously measures and improves the following attributes: meritocracy, fairness, justice, openness, speed, imagination and excellence in execution.


5. Shared Values. 
A great company practices an enduring value system, and follows the finest system of corporate governance.


Source: Narayana Murthy

THE FOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGIES

1. Being "the Fastest and the Mostest" – the "greatest gamble", aiming from the beginning at permanent  leadership.


2. "Hitting Them Where They Ain't" – either by "creative imitation"; or by "entrepreneurial judo", a Japanese concept that enables newcomers to catapult themselves into a leadership position against entrenched, established companies


3. Finding and occupying a specialized "ecological niche" – obtaining a practical monopoly in a small area


4. Changing the economic characteristics of the product, a market, or an industry – by creating utility, or pricing, or adaptation to the customer's social and economic reality, or delivering what represents true value to the customer.


Source: Managing for Results, Peter Drucker

7 SOURCES OF ENTREPRENEURIAL OPPORTUNITIES

Internal


1. The unexpected – the unexpected success, the unexpected failure, the unexpected outside event
2. The incongruity – between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be or as it "ought to be"
3. Innovation based on process need; any inadequacy in a business process that is taken for granted
4. Changes in industry structure or market structure that catch everyone unawares


External


5. Demographic changes caused by things like wars, migrations, medical developments
6. Changes in perception and fashion brought about by changes in the economy
7. Changes in awareness caused by new knowledge


Source: Managing for Results, Peter Drucker

ROBERT'S RULES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

You believe in yourself. You have ideas and dreams. Use these convictions to create a rewarding and fulfilling business life, where you are the boss. During the agonies and ecstasies of starting my own company, I learned these "rules of entrepreneurship" the hard way... on the job! Perhaps it can help those of you who are just beginning, to start on the right track and to avoid the road blocks along the way.


You probably need a break from the complexity of starting a business. Here is some fundamental business advice — simple, straight forward and easy to implement;


1. Find a need — be ahead of your time.
Find a niche where the Giants won't bother to go.


2. Identify your market and learn all about it.
You have to know everything about your business at the start.


3. Prepare a business plan... yes you have to.
No bank will take you seriously without a plan for profits.


4. Have adequate financing to start and to stay.
Success does not happen overnight, so be sure you're financially fit.


5. Pay for the best professional advice.
Lawyers, accountants, insurers do work on an as needed, fee basis.


6. Keep your overhead low and your standards high.
Work from home or at a low cost, convenient location.


7. Establish a clearly defined distribution network.
Whatever your product or service, how will you present and sell it?


8. Be creative — your new idea does count.
Depend on marketing strategies rather than costly advertising to grow.


9. Seek and hire the most qualified people.
From the first employee, look for someone who knows more than you.


10. Know your competition and work to win.
Be persistent, focused and flexible... anything can happen.


11. Learn from the success and failure of others.
Read, watch trends, and observe what is "hot" in your industry.


12. Use technology as a tool for building your business.
From computers to telecommunications to the Web-use them all.


13. Don't be sensitive and don't take it personally.
Be prepared for rejection, but never give up your dream.


14. Never underestimate the power of passion.
You will need to take risks and believe when no one else does.


Starting a business requires discipline and discipline requires rules. You may want to follow my "rules of entrepreneurship" or create your own set of rules. But you must clearly identify your goals and live by them. Use them as a road map to your success. Good luck!


Source: Flori Roberts, Score.com

5 TIPS TO JUMP START A BUSINESS

Create a brand. 
Spend a little money to create a professional logo, business card and stationery. Present a professional image.


Ramp up Online. 
Make creating a Web site a top priority. A Web site is today’s calling card. You really shouldn’t do without one. Give people a place to go to learn about your business.


Make Your First Sale. 
This is key. Get that first sale even if it’s friends or family at a discounted rate. This counts as getting started, so go for it.


Promote Testimonials. 
Get testimonials from your first sales. Start building credibility for your business from day one.


Build Buzz. 
Be creative. Look for a special promotion, big event, email campaign or something out of the norm for your business to get people talking about you, your product or service.


Source: Christine Banning, Score.com

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE BUSINESS PLANNING

  * Clearly define your business idea and be able to succinctly articulate it. Know your mission.

  * Examine your motives. Make sure that you have a passion for owning a business and for this particular business.

  * Be willing to commit to the hours, discipline, continuous learning and the frustrations of owning your own business.

  * Conduct a competitive analysis in your market, including products, prices, promotions, advertising, distribution, quality, service, and be aware of the outside influences that affect your business.

  * Seek help from other small businesses, vendors, professionals, government agencies, employees, trade associations and trade shows. Be alert, and ask questions.

Source: Score.com