When Carlos-Ameen Jureidini-Cully started selling refurbished sunglasses in 2008, he knew he couldn't swing the high rent or multi-year commitment that a shop in New York City would entail. Instead, he sold his products at street fairs and festivals, making the rounds at as many as 40 events a year.
But hoping to have a fixed retail space, he finally found a way to make it happen last year: setting up shop inside a large, refurbished steel shipping container. For $1,400 a month including utilities, Jureidini-Cully now occupies a 160-square-foot space in the Dekalb Market, a Brooklyn, N.Y., complex of 60 retailers housed in shipping containers. The rent is affordable, and the one-year lease means he doesn't have to make a long-term commitment.

 

Since opening his shop, 66 Blak Birds, he has been able to raise prices for his sunglasses by at least $40 a pair. "In the street people are only willing to spend so much," he says. "Being in a retail space allows me to control how my product is presented. It enables me to charge a premium."
Retail spaces in refurbished shipping containers are becoming increasingly popular as designers find ways to reuse the vacant large containers that carried imports to the U.S. on cargo ships. This bricks-and-mortar alternative appeals to small businesses that aren't yet able to afford a more expensive, traditional retail space.

But affordability is not the only benefit. Shipping container stores clustered together like the ones in Dekalb Market draw more interest from consumers than a stand-alone shop would, says Eldon Scott, president of Urban Space, the New York City-based market developer that created the market. "Just the launching of Dekalb Market [in July 2011] has started a ripple of interest," he says. "People seem to find the space interesting." He is working on another larger market made of shipping containers that is scheduled to open in Manhattan's meatpacking district in the next few years.

Robert Humble, principal at HyBrid Architecture, a Seattle-based firm that has designed a number of shipping container projects, is working on a new market in Seattle where small merchants will be housed in containers beside ones run by larger retailers like Target. "There's a certain built-in marketing cachet that [container stores] have that other businesses don't," Humble says.
Some small merchants are buying shipping containers rather than renting. The building process requires complicated permit approval given the relative newness of this type of structure, but as owners of the containers, entrepreneurs can transport their shops wherever they like.

When Kirk Lance shut down the two Mexican restaurants he owned and operated at strip malls in Wyoming, he lost the $200,000 he had invested in designing their interiors. He promised himself that he would not open another restaurant unless he owned every square inch of the space. A year later, while driving down Interstate 5 in Portland, Ore., he noticed a lot filled with hundreds of empty shipping containers and knew what he needed to do. "They are a resource that's sitting there waiting to be tapped into," he says.

For $3,000, Lance bought one of these containers and spent $125,000 refurbishing it with insulation, framing, heating, plumbing, electricity and air conditioning. Because of permit complications, the process took four years, but in 2009, he opened the newly transformed 8-by-40 foot steel container as Aprisa Mexican Cuisine. The restaurant's popularity motivated Lance to franchise the business, with plans to open the first three Aprisa franchises—also housed in shipping containers—in Phoenix this year.

Portability is one of the most appealing features of shipping container shops. Eileen Hassi, owner of San Francisco-based Ritual Coffee Roasters, already operated three coffee bars in traditional retail spaces, but she liked the idea of a coffee bar that she could put on a truck and move to a new location whenever she felt ready for a change. In 2011, she opened a fourth coffee bar alongside a handful of other retailers housed in shipping containers on a vacant piece of land slated for a housing development. The coffee bar's mobility means that when it comes time to vacate the space, Hassi won't lose her shop. "I can just take my building somewhere else and hook it up to water and power," she says.

San Francisco's mild weather is conducive to container stores, but the winter months can be challenging in other areas. Although the containers can be insulated to resist the cold, it's an expensive process. That's one reason the Dekalb Market in Brooklyn closes down each winter.
When the market reopened this year, Jureidini-Cully was not only back at 66 Blak Birds, but he also launched a chicken wings eatery called Dekalb Wings in a nearby container. The low-risk rental seemed like the perfect chance to test out a new business idea. "I figured I might as well go after it," he says. "It was a great opportunity to see if we had something the market wanted and fine-tune it."

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Are you an online seller, who is helplessly watching your sales decrease?
Maybe you did everything right when you started selling online, but sales have never taken off like you expected?
I often compare online selling to a chemical formula – to get that perfect potion, you need all sorts of ingredients, mixed together in exact amounts. It can be a tricky, exhausting business to try and try to get that formula right, yet never see the payoff you dream of and deserve.
But it is possible! Our guide is designed to help you to break down your business processes, and identify areas where you need to improve, then look for new ways to increase your sales, for example marketing, expanding, and developing customer loyalty.

George Madtha “I am impressed by the step-by step procedure of your e-book. I found easy to understand and set my goal, plan with vision & mission to organize my current small business. I have gone through various books but your guide is sweet &simple with filtered information.”

By following our own advice, our two businesses have each just had their best three years so far.

Want to grow your online business? The 31 days guide helps you to get that magic formula right

One month from now, those sleepless nights, frustrated checking of your sales figures, and hours wasted searching for the answer to your problems might be a thing of the past – you could finally be able to enjoy what owning an online business is all about.
Whether you sell on a website such as eBay or Amazon, or use your own website, 31Days2…Breathe Life Into Your Online Business helps you to break down your entire selling process, and review everything you do to find the areas you can change to improve.
Not only are there 31 lessons which cover everything which makes an online business successful, but 43 actions you can take immediately to improve your sales before you’ve even finished the guide.

What’s included in the guide

• Take the chance to decrease all of your costs.
• Review your business model as we help you to understand the only sellers online shoppers are interested in.
• Learn how the best sellers get themselves noticed by online shoppers.
• Use statistics to measure performance – and spot your weaknesses.
• Improve, write down, and take time to implement your marketing plan.
• Improve your selling through: brand, loyalty, and removing barriers to sales.
• Get growing through: diversifying, specialising, and investing right.

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If you don’t already have How to disclose idea on the internet, or using offline methods, begin testing various types of ads.

You should already have your own website or blog, with enough content and with the intention of doing business.

Maybe you should already have begun to build an e-mail list, ready to receive numerous prospects and customers.

And maybe already has its own products or affiliate systems to sell, but noted that still lack something very important.

You realized that you don’t yet know how to publicize your work on the internet, or in the offline market.

We all know that the more publicity you do, more people will access your blog, site or affiliate system.

And the more people accessing your Web sites, the more chances you have to get in touch with them to maintain a relationship.

Keeping in touch with a greater number of potential customers you can discover what are the people who are in need of your products and services.

And you’ll also have the chance to show the advantages of these people to do business with you.

But knowing how to disclose on the internet, or in the offline market, can be a little difficult for whoever is still starting.

Usually promote sites, blogs on the internet tends to give a lot of work, especially if you don’t have enough money to invest in paid advertising.

Then you How to disclose needs to learn their job by testing two or three different marketing strategies, during some period of time.

Publish a certain amount of ads within each mode of dissemination that you choose to test.

Suppose you started testing three types of dissemination strategy:
Free classified ads on the internet (online strategy).Small classified advertisements in the newspapers of his city (offline strategy).Advertisements in newspapers of subdivision (offline strategy).
Test your advertising campaign for some time, as for example, a week or fortnight.
Compare the amount spent in each of the campaigns, with the financial return obtained by each of them.

If you are using strategies How to disclose free, through classified ads free internet, you won’t be spending money.

So in this case, consider the value of the corresponding labour while being required to publish their ads.

When splitting the value obtained in sales by amount invested in advertising campaign, you will be able to compare the three strategies.

If some method is very inefficient, you can abandon it and replace it with another, which will be tested again.

On the other hand, if some dissemination strategy to become profitable, then you can already use it on a large scale, in order to increase the quantity of products sold.

Suppose you’re using offline methods, how to disseminate e.g. with classified ads in major newspapers from his town.

If this type of advertising are generating a good profit on sales, compared to the amount invested in the ads, then just increase the disclosure.

You just need to spread various ads equal to those in other newspapers, including in different cities of their own, if your product can be sent to other locations.

On the other hand, if you’re wondering how to disseminate best, but no announcement has generated enough sales, then consider the following assumptions:
You ran a very small amount of ads-consider publishing more ads and test again.The ads are not good-continue comparing the same ads, but with minor changes between them (Split Test, or A/B testing).You did not wait for a proper time to have the return of the chosen strategy-try to inform yourself about the average time of return of each campaign assumed.
In the case of marketing articles, promote using blogs and SEO, organic searches, and even internet classified ads, the return is often time-consuming.
But if you choose to pay in internet strategies or even advertisements in newspapers, magazines, radio or TV, the return is usually much faster.

Now that you already know how to disclose the basis of tests, put into practice to try and figure out what is the strategy that will sell their products and services.

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There are plenty of resources out there with advices about what you are supposed to do if you want to start a business.
They say: “I just want to share with you issues I dealt with starting out €” and consequences of some I still have to deal with today. This is written with a Metro Manila, Philippines setting in mind but should be easily replicated elsewhere.”
Here are the 7 tasks in the article (with my comments of course)

• Unleash the Entrepreneur within

While they give plenty of external resources on this one, I think it’s missing a point. Money! The only reason entrepreneurs want to start a business is to make money. Of course, money can have different names like work for yourself, being your own boss, pride and recognition, or whatever reason an entrepreneur might have, but the real framework for anything you would like to accomplish is making money.

• Save at least 3 months worth of living expenses…

Even if they are talking about web start-ups which might require little or no initial investment, planing to earn a living from the newly started business in 3 months might be fullish. Unless there are some special conditions which allow you to get customers, deliver and cash money in very short sales cycle, chances are that it will take about a year to get the financial security you need (and that if you are lucky). But yes, you should save money, make a budget and be prepared to say what they say: “I used to buy nice clothes or shoes at least once a month or whenever I eye a sale; since starting our company, I’d buy a nice dress every quarter or so — and no new shoes!”

• Find 1 or 2 partners

I have started the same, with 2 partners. And while I know it was the only way I could start a company at that time, you should think very well about picking up your partners. Most likely is not very important who your partners are if things don’t work, but it makes all the difference in the world if it works and there are money to burn. Once again, an impressive list of external resources on this subject on the blog.

• Register your company

Interesting to see what it takes to start a business in Philippines.

• Have a common conducive workplace

Basically the workplace should be a good enough environment to start a business and to sustain whatever you are doing. Of course I agree with that, but chances are that you might need a year or so to be able to rent a nice place to work. Usually if you start small, an office at home is quite ok, especially if you start an online business like they did.

• Raise funds from your own pocket and from family and friends

Unless you are in USA, is quite hard to find investors ready to burn money for just an idea. Everywhere else, be prepared to have a 7 figures turnover to get the investors attention. Once again, relevant articles are linked on the paragraph there.

• Focus your efforts

While they have a funny explanation about focusing on the business “I gave up my car and comfortable living at my parents’ to stay in a cheap condo so I can be near our office.”, most likely one of the early days issues is that because you have bills to pay, you can’t say no to customers or business lines that simply aren’t good enough to make you grow. You know that for this customer you will work more than you should, you know that on the long run, doing X or Y is going to slow you down, but you are simply too hungry not to take the job!
I would add an extra step:

• Make a business plan!

While some will not agree with this one, is absolutely fundamental to see what it takes to pay the bills. What are your expenses, how you are going to cover them and how long till you break even.
Oh, and good luck to the people behind the blog and their venture!

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What does a ‘personal injury’ mean?
While the phrase ‘personal injury’ appears a great deal in the media these days, some people may still be unsure of exactly what the term means.

Personal injury refers to an injury affecting the victim either in body or mind, but in legal terms there are all manner of compensation claims that come under the heading of personal injury, including injuries at work, in the home, in a road traffic accident, or as a result of medical negligence such as some brain injury compensation claims. Furthermore, the actual personal injury or illness sustained in such a case can range from minor conditions to potentially life-threatening and even fatal ones.

What should you do if you have suffered one?
If you have suffered a personal injury the course of action you are advised to take is dependent on whether you believe another party to be responsible for it. If this is the case, the first action you may feel it suitable to take would be to make a complaint against either the individual person, or the organisation, that you consider to be responsible.
Should the response you receive to such a complaint fail to satisfy you, you may wish to proceed with a compensation claim against them – although this is most advisable in more serious cases. If you do decide to seek financial compensation this could be for physical or emotional trauma, loss of earnings due to injuries received, or to recoup medical expenses for treatment.

 If you intend to pursue a compensation claim, it is best to seek professional legal guidance from a company with lawyers trained in this area of the law, as personal injury liability can be a complicated matter to prove at a tribunal. You should also seek to secure as much information pertaining to your accident and subsequent treatment as you can, as this will help your case.

8:28 AM / 0 comments Read More

Good news! You have a plethora of choices on how you can turn your passion or hobby into a business. Bad news, you have a plethora of choices on how you can turn your passion or hobby into a business.
Let’s first focus on the good news with your particular question. First, do you have a plan to make this business run? If not, you will need to figure out a few things:

1. Who wants what I make? How much will they pay for it?
This is basically you asking your friends if they’re willing to pay X amount for what you make. Then go to someone you don’t know and offer it to them for that price and see what kind of reaction you get. You can also go to Survey Monkey and create a quick survey for your friends online to answer whether they would pay a certain amount for a certain kind of product or service. This will help with your pricing model.
Related: Businesses You Can Start At Home

2. Am in the right place and time to be offering this? (In other words, will I have to market a lot or a little?)
Marketing depends on what you’re willing to invest. Once you have made this decision, you will need to track it to see what kind of return you get from advertising on Facebook or online with Google. You may wish to take some time to research these options as they are not just a "plug-and-play" type of deal. It takes some expertise to know how to make online marketing work. There’s a site called Etsy, however, that allows you to have your own online store and do marketing through them and share right to your social media sites. Don’t forget to tweet your special deals here and there. (But not too often or it gets viewed as spammy. Give some content on the art of crochet about 60% / 40% of the time).

3. Am I willing to make this a full-time business? And can it truly support my lifestyle?
If it’s really a hobby, then just use Etsy and slowly build it through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And don’t forget to do some short videos that you can put on YouTube. There’s a strategy behind that too that’s not very hard to learn. There are a ton of people offering courses on it online -- just make sure you have a webcam or a flip cam and share some of your real-time experiences. You'll be surprised at how many pay attention to it.
Bottom line: If you’re taking your hobby into the world of e-commerce then it should be fairly simple since you are doing the work. If you want to make it a full-fledged business, you’re probably talking about licensing your designs, which is a whole other ball of wax. I’d say start with the above and work your way into something that is comfortable for you.

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There will always be a reason why now isn't the right time to start your own business. And there will always be a reason it is.
 
Have a look at the infographic (below) from the startup organization Funders and Founders that challenges many of the excuses life presents. You just started school? Well, says Anna Vital, the organization's founder, just going to school alone won’t do anything for you, you have got to get out there and "do." Vital recommends you get your business idea rolling while you are in school. Just got married and too busy settling down to launch a business? Vital says you have just got yourself a perfect co-founder.

Fear of the unknown is the biggest obstacle for many want-to-be-entrepreneurs. But everyone struggles with some degree of fear. Many people are far better off when they do exactly what they are the most afraid of.

8:27 AM / 0 comments Read More