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Small Business in the 21 st Century In order to succeed in starting a small business in the 21 st century an entrepreneur should be aware of the requirements of time. There are many considerations that an entrepreneur must decide such as: type of business, legal structure, permits and licenses, market planning, business plan, location, organization management planning, business telephone line, mission statement, and a business checking account. The first decision that the entrepreneur must make is what type of business he / she wants to start. The decision should be based on the amount of knowledge and skill that they have in the field that they are considering.
The better that they know the industry, the stronger there likelihood they will have a successful business, and the better base they will have for the rest of the decisions that will have to be made in the time to come. The next important decision in the business planning process is the legal structure of the company. The three legal structures are Sole-proprietorship, Partnership and a Corporation. Each one of these legal structures has its advantages and disadvantages.
The different aspects that each legal structure differs are: management control, capital, liability, income taxes, business continuity, and government regulations. The understanding of these different issues is crucial to the decision of which structure is the best one for the entrepreneurs business. Promoting is the art of selling can be accomplished in a number of different ways, such as advertising, brochures, direct mailings, and personal contacts. Your decision on the best way to promote your construction company will depend on the type of contract you are competing for and your market.
In the construction business competing for the jobs in your market area is done with bids. The two different types of contracts are public bids, or negotiated bids. For public competitive bids pricing is the primary marketing emphasis, and for negotiated bids contacts are most important. Getting to know other contractors in the area is very important for your business. The relationships developed will enhance opportunities for networking which allows small firms to increase their capabilities by pooling knowledge and other resources together.
It also allows one to specialize, and limit the size and scope of the business investments required. Promotion and advertising will play a vital role in the success of a small business in the 21 st century. Utilizing the media, one should try and get as much coverage of his product as possible. The consumer has to be well informed and aware about your product for him to be interested in purchasing your product. One of the best forms of advertising is posting posters on the bus or other public transportation vehicles, so that the thousands of people that use the public transportation system everyday will come to know about a product or a service a small business offers. Organized sales service and customer care are fundamental for a successful business.
If a customer is not satisfied with the treatment he received during the transaction between him and your business. He is most likely not going to consider purchasing form you in the future, or even mentioning about your product or service to his colleagues. Therefore one should be well organized and use courtesy while dealing with a customer. A good business plan that is updated periodically makes the most powerful financing proposal a small business can have.
A good business plan will play the most important role in the 21 st century than ever before. A logically arranged and reasonably complete business plan is essential for operating and growing a business in well controlled way. A good plan serves your needs for business analysis, provides a financial forecast based on your rational assumptions about the future. Budgeting guidelines, including a working capital budget and a break-even analysis, help determine the amount and kinds of financing most appropriate for your business. A good plan also helps you present your needs to financing sources. Useful and persuasive information about your business is what lenders and investors need to make swift, accurate and helpful decisions.
To summarize there are three key reasons that a begging business owner should go though the trouble of writing a business plan. The first one is the process of putting a business plan together, including the thought you put in before beginning to write it. This forces you to take an objective, critical, unemotional look at your business project in its entirety. Also your finished business plan is good operating tool which, if used properly will help you manage your business and work effectively towards its success. Furthermore the completed business plan communicates your ideas to others and provides the basis for your financing proposal.
As you can see a well thought out business plan can be a very useful tool for small company. Location of a business used to be a key to help a business to make money. However, in the 21 st century with the rapid development of communication technologies location will not play such a vital role as it did in the 20 th century. In a world brimming with the pressures of economic stabilization and financial gratification, companies must adopt the methodologies of e-commerce in order to attract growth and prosperity. E-commerce is the best field to start a successful and profitable small business in the new millennium. E-commerce involves implementing regular business operations into a telecommunications network.
The most common form of conducting business online is through web pages. Companies create these web pages (usually with the help of such design companies as Net Dynamics) which allow customers to order goods and services from the convenience of their own home. Most new sites also allow secure financial transactions to be made. E-commerce is also used in the form of EDI or Electronic Data Interchange. This form of online business acts as a messaging system which automates and speeds the exchange of information between two linked companies. This format is usually found in the user-supplier community and automatically informs the other party of needed supplies, arrival dates and payment information.
The use of e-commerce technology presents many opportunities to companies, regardless of size, to expand and profit in the global marketplace; therefore, a small business owner should possess concrete knowledge in modern technologies. Through e-commerce, auctioning giant eBay, which started out with monthly revenue of $ 1, 000, has experienced an explosion of growth after its shares took off from $ 18 to $ 47. This e-commerce success is also reflected by the popularity of retail giant Amazon. com, which ranks among the worlds most visited sites. This site allows consumers to choose a book they like, enter their credit card number and receive it a few days later. The popularity of both Amazon.
com and eBay stretches past North American markets and represent household names all over the world. Even though the success of large corporations attains to the global opportunities presented by e-commerce, small businesses also reflect this fact. Take into account the scenario of British model solider manufacturer Len Taylor and his company Trophy Miniatures. Taylor experienced many sleepless nights during which he would answer phone calls from US customers (when it was evening over there). However after Taylor decided to embrace e-commerce, his business took off.
With the evolution of e-commerce come countless opportunities for job placement- ranging from delivering packaged goods to maintaining e-commerce sites. These career prospects will also demand a higher standard of education and as, Cisco Systems has demonstrated through its Cisco Certification Programs, mobilizes a generation equipped with a wide array of technical skills. The increased use of e-commerce also triggers an improvement in technology in particular those relating to security and speed. As small businesses grow they as well as their customers will demand a higher level of security and speed, thus prompting technology developers to create more sophisticated equipment to meet these demands. The augmentation of e-commerce, with its capacity to create jobs and improve technology, is able to bring forth-strong economic growth of global markets. With a higher concentration of e-commerce users, countries will experience higher levels of foreign trade.
As a result of these increased trade levels, economic growth will flourish. This growth will also cause increased competition and promote economic diversity. The global opportunities of e-commerce are truly momentous. E-commerce has the ability to destroy the barriers posed by a global landscape and create a harmonized electronic community. It has the potential to create millions of small businesses worldwide. The future of small business and the key to success for small businesses will depend on Who gives the biggest value to consumers.
If businesses offer customers value they will get the repeat business and loyalty they need. This means convenience. Consumers want new ways of managing their lives. They are busy people. Many customers now want to do their business online.
In reality the Internet is a territory which should be viewed from two perspectives: technology and business, as both an end point and a starting point for business managers. This is the beginning of the early stages of an entirely new style of business and competition. Although the Internet, and its business applications, is still in its infancy, small business managers should strive to integrate the Internet into their organizations infrastructure. The fast paced and unrelenting revolution in information and communication technologies has made this new competitive resource known. Information is the new raw material and that material is applied to products, services, companies and entire businesses. The Internet provides a number of opportunities which may be exploited by those willing to focus, in a systematic way, on what the Internet can allow their small business to do.
To offer advantages which each and every consumer can recognize as such and to be considered as a partner capable of supplying always and in every way the best possible solution are the two conditions which have to be respected in order to attain the ultimate end of complete customer satisfaction. Every small business has to be guided by the client himself. These basic rules are also valid in e-business. Even a company which already operates using web technologies for its business must try to offer tangible advantages in order to prove that it can offer them in the future to all its customers.
In e-business, the small business is guided by the e-customer, who is not just any customer but a special client with his own individual characteristics, needs, expectations and evaluation criteria, often different from those of a customer in the real world. An e-customer is, first of all, a web surfer with his own peculiarities. Presumably he is technologically competent and more curious than the average person. He is not easily satisfied but continues to search for what he wants. He trusts other web surfers more than he trusts the companies.
He chats with people he happens to meet through the web. He communicates on subjects which he knows and, above all, carries out conversations with those who have the same interests he has. Presumably he is a pioneer. As the web cancels out the geographical component of transactions, if he knows English, the e-customer knows no frontiers and is a true citizen of the world. He is, above all, a virtual individual. The community of web surfers has no home, they do not need a physical seat, nor do they need to physically meet each other.
E-customers look on the web for solutions to their problems; they learn from the experience of other surfers and, in the end, they make their actual purchases. The most important thing is not how much time the e-customer spends on line but rather how he spends that time. In fact what differentiates e-customers is their interest and their level of experience on the web. Analyzing e-customers thus means defining a business model tailored to their needs, in other words to get to know each electronic client better. As on-line relations assume major importance, it is essential for the small companys web site not to be a mere catalogue (through the window the shopkeeper cannot learn anything about potential clients) but to serve as a means to listen to the customer because only in this way can the company get to know him better. Therefore, in order for a small business to succeed in the global marketplace in the 21 st century the business owner should have good education in the field of marketing.
Good knowledge of computer science is also very beneficial. However, there are many people worldwide who have such kind of knowledge; therefore, I believe that the biggest asset in starting a small business in the 21 st century is an idea. An idea will be everything in the new millennium. If you have an idea and you know how to implement it be sure that your small business will grow and prosper.
Bibliography: Debelak, Don. Bringing your product to market. New York: Wiley, 1997. Gielgun, Ron E. 222 ways to promote your small business on a budget. Brooklyn, NY: Actium Publishing, 2000. Pinson, Linda.
Keeping the books: basic recordkeeping and accounting for the successful small business. Chicago: Dearborn Trade, 2001. Scheme T. , Deschoolmeester D. Strategic and operational planning behavior and the survival and growth rate of business start-ups: management training matters.
Proceedings of the 18 th Annual Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference, 1998 Deschoolmeester D. , Van Hee J. SMEs and the Internet: On the strategic drivers influencing the use of the Internet in SMEs. Paper presented at the 13 th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference, Bled, Slovenia, 2001. Award, J. Business know-how: An operational guide for home-based and micro-sized businesses with limited budgets.
Holbrook, MA: Adams Media, 2000. Kahrs, K. , & Kahrs, P. R. (Eds. ). Business plans handbook (Vols. 5 - 6). Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1999. web
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Research essay sample on Small Business In The 21st Century
