Tag Archives: Business

Market Analysis

Fundamentals of a MMA School Business Plan

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If you are planning on opening your own martial arts school or MMA training facility making sure you have done thorough planning is essential to your success, just as in any other business. Often even more important as many of those who choose to open their own schools may have strong martial arts backgrounds but limited business experience. One of the best ways to get some real world business experience in this industry is to become an instructor for a school or MMA training center first. This will give you great insight and first hand knowledge of how others operate their businesses as well as what works and what doesn’t.

There is so much more to building a successful school and business than just being a great fighter or teacher. You could hire professionals to handle all the areas you are not experienced in, but as a new start up you will probably be limited on capital and expendable funds. The worst thing you can do is get a month into business and realize you hadn’t planned for many of the expenses or overestimated the amount of revenues you can realistically make. If you don’t have a college degree or experience running your own business it may be wise to take a couple of short courses on business management or entrepreneurship. Failing to plan is planning to fail, so make sure you dedicate sufficient time and resources to doing it right the first time. You can either draft a plan yourself, or these days it is pretty inexpensive to have someone do it for you, which gives you the added benefit of a third party unbiased opinion who can help keep your expectations realistic.

The foundation of any business plan is market research. Again doing this yourself can give you more great ideas and insights for your new company or you can outsource it. The SBA (Small Business Association) and their website have a wealth of information as well as offering small business loans. According to the SBA the essential elements of a business plan include:

  • Executive Summary
  • Market Analysis
  • Company Description
  • Organization & Management
  • Service or Product Line
  • Funding Request
  • Financials

Certainly this is a great time to get into the MMA or Self-Defense business for you, so do it right and Good Luck!

General Investing

Keep The Costs Down For Your Work At Home Business

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If you currently have a work at home business, you understand more than anyone, the importance of making a profit.  After all, when you run your own business, you are the only one that is going to be making the decisions.  One bad decision can throw your budget out the door.  The following is information that will help you to keep the costs down for your work at home business.   Expenses
The first thing you should do is make a list of all the expenses for your work at home business.  This list should include daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly expenses.  These are your operating costs.  Items in your list may include such things as ink for your printer, subscriptions, Internet costs, and any taxes you may incur.    When your list is done, you will now need to evaluate it to see where you can cut out the items you really don’t need.  For example, if you subscribed to a monthly website service, you must decide if this is something you really need for your business.  If you don’t, get rid of it.  If your work at home business relies on the information you receive, you may find it to be a necessary expense.     Supplies
When you order supplies for your work at home business, you will want to begin shopping around.  While the office supply store just down the street from you may be convenient, you may find you can save money by purchasing your supplies online.  If you have the room to store them, you will also want to order your supplies in bulk.  Ordering in bulk can save a work at home business hundreds of dollars each year.   Internet Provider
Many who own a work at home business often find themselves choosing a dial-up service because it is cheaper.  While the cost is lower, you may find that such a slow service prevents you from getting a lot of work done.  Investing your money in a speedier service can result in getting more work done, which will allow you to increase your profits.    Office Furniture
While everyone would like to have their work at home business space to be top-notch and trendy, you will find office furniture to be very expensive.  Until your work at home business is bringing in high profits, you should be able to make do with used furniture or even create your own.  If you and someone you know is handy with tools, you may find that designing your own furniture is cheaper and you can actually design what will work best for your work at home business.    When it comes to your work at home business, you must make sure you are keeping your operating costs to a minimum.  Unfortunately, there are times that a work at home business won’t bring in as much income as you would like.   Be prepared for those times and prevent your work at home business from spending too much on unnecessary items.
 

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Market Analysis

Market Fluctuations- Business For Sale Australia

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Everybody in Business Market is aware that certainly 2009 was not a good year to sell for most owners who wanted to exit their businesses. In fact, closed business-for-sale transactions in the United States declined by 28 percent in 2009, as per a recent report.

The good news, is that 2010 shows strong potential for being a much better year for the business-for-sale market. Indeed, the latter part of 2009 demonstrated clear signs of recovery that began mid-year. There are two driving forces behind the improving market. First is an increased demand for small businesses due to high unemployment rates, with unemployed individuals opting to give entrepreneurship a try rather than seeking a return to a traditional corporate job. Second is the return of capital to the market, which gives potential buyers the ability to finance the purchase of a small business.

Additionally, businesses that require smaller levels of capital investment, including select service businesses and Restaurants for sale in Australia, are helping to lead the evolving recovery in the business-for-sale marketplace. Business owners and buyersin these two sectors are seeing an opportunity to transact that wasn’t there six months ago. What the Future Holds:-Overall, 2010 is shaping up to be a much more productive year for small business transactions and we can anticipate slow but consistent recovery throughout the year.

Throughout the recession, small-business owners have focused on running their businesses and staying a float. Exit planning and considering the worth of their business were of little concern and the number of businesses for sale declined significantly. As the economy continues to improve the owners are finding a good market with desirable prices to sell their business. Remember, preparing your business for sale takes time and a listed business will typically take five to twelve months to sell. If you want to sell within the next two years, you need to start the process now.

General Business

Business Writing and Grammar Software

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Just by simply reading the words business writing, it really makes us to think that this kind of writing must be in a formal and professional style. If you are a beginner and if you don’t know how to create a business letter of any form of business writings, then here are some points that you need not to forget in order to create make your business writing a successful one.

Generally, business letter are the most common form of business writing since it is very useful in delivering messages and negotiating business plans towards the concern people or business organization. It is very important in your professional or business career. Therefore you should learn the correct and proper way to write business writings. You don’t have to worry a lot since this is not that hard to learn.

Business letters are not the only form of business writings. Newsletters, memos, proposals, reports, power point, presentations, press releases, marketing brochures, copywriting, technical writing, web copy, blogging, resumes and job applications are also a part of it. It should be formal and properly formatted since your reputation is as stake. It may comprise different styles in writing but the writer needs to write concisely and clearly. Grammar are properly observed especially your spellings and punctuations. You also need to choose the right words in your business writing.

Organize your writings well and observe how your ideas are being jotted down accordingly. Although you need to use your skills in writing and your ability to present your ideas, you need also to study and research the things that you might include in your business writing. Writing has long been an important aspect of business. After all, most any project, proposal or agreement finds themselves in a written form one way or another.

Whether you’re a business owner or a professional dealing with businesses, getting your writing skills at a competent level is of equal importance. Despite voice communication technology (e.g. cell phones, VoIP) being at an all-time high, it’s amazing how much of our communication is still done in written form, from short IMs to casual emails to formal letters.

As such, the value of grammar software for organizations cannot be stressed enough. The last thing you need is to encourage potential miscommunication as a result of poor writing abilities.

Even more crucial, however, is your software’s ability to encourage a form of writing that is well-suited to businesses. After all, forms of English which may be considered acceptable elsewhere may not exactly prove a perfect fit for business-specific purposes.

What To Look For

When considering a language software to use throughout your organization, always consider the specific functionalities it offers directly targeted towards professional uses. From providing templates to facilitating proper writing style, evaluate it as much for what it offers to business writers, as much as for the art of writing in general. Many forms of business writing, after all, adhere to a strict format and structure, if you want it to fulfill the expectations of recipients and other professionals you correspond with.

General Business

It’s the business, stupid: bringing strategy tools into the practice of law

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Law schools do not generally teach anything about business, as opposed to business law. As a result, lawyers learn about business legal forms and contracts, but nothing about the non-legal imperatives of running a business like corporate finance, marketing, or corporate strategy. Furthermore, as members of an inherently conservative profession many lawyers resist engaging in any topic that goes beyond the four corners of their legal brief (“I only give legal advice”).

This is highly problematic for business, because every legal problem comes within a business context, and lawyers who are not willing or able to understand that context cannot give good advice; Brandeis J.’s dictum is as applicable with respect to business knowledge as it is with respect to economics, and there remains a significant knowledge gap between the practice of law and the practice of business.

In some cases lawyers address this knowledge gap by specializing not only in a particular field of law but also in a particular industry, and in this way they develop industry expertise in substitution of more general business knowledge. At the same time the scale of the knowledge gap can be masked by the natural hubris of the legal profession—lawyers who are at the pinnacle of every information and decision making-tree they are associated with can suffer from the illusion of knowing more, not less, than their clients.

A great deal has been written about alternatives to lawyers billing by the hour, or lawyers working from home instead of at a desk in a big law firm, but in my view these topics are relatively trivial. A much more significant topic is bringing business financial and strategy tools into the practice of law in order to develop a multi-disciplinary approach to the delivery of legal services.

In a litigation context for example the focus of lawyers should not be on winning their client’s case but on solving the underlying business problems—the disputes which were the reason clients came to them in the first place. One very simple example of this would be to compare the cost of litigation with the cost of buying the other side’s company—if the two numbers bear some similarity then a rare opportunity for a litigator to participate in value creation instead of value destruction may exist.

Business clients want to know how much their case will cost, how long it will take, what the risks are, and the probable result. These four basis elements—cost, risk, time, and reward, are the foundation of the financial analysis of any business proposal, and there is no reason why lawyers cannot make reasoned and reasonably reliable assessments of these elements in any given legal context—the law is no more uncertain than many projects undertaken by business, and in many cases is substantially more certain.

Once we have attached numbers, or a range of numbers, to the four elements then we can financially model them the same way we can model any other business proposal. We can start with a simple spreadsheet comparing cost to risk-discounted reward, or add time to give a net present value calculation (which will show how high the reward would have to be to justify the risk over time, all other things being equal). Nor does it stop there—we can go on to decision tree modeling to assess the value of certain choices and options, and use sensitivity analysis or tornado diagrams to identify the assumptions in the model around which most of the risk in the model revolves; this in turn allows us to go back and further assess the assumptions.

I am aware of no lawyers anywhere in the world who consistently adopt this multi-disciplinary approach in their practices. Discovering such lawyers, and developing a framework with readers to put some flesh on the bones of this theoretical multi-disciplinary approach, is a key objective of this Journal.

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