Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Tracking your time

Thank you all for attending and for continuing to work on your business plans. Kudos to Juan for turning in a draft of the budget for his business plan, to Magdalena for furthering her catering experience by organizing this event, and to others for sharing treats and camaraderie.

We were honored by the excellent, practical and openhearted advice given by Veronica LaCrue, our speaker. One of her key points is the importance of tracking how you spend your time so that you will know how many hours you have to devote to growing your business, and so you will be able to answer questions from a potential investor about what you do and what results you produce. You need to know what the categories are on which you spend time, e.g., management, training, sales, performing a service, etc., and to think about whether you should reduce the time in one area and increase it in another. She also advised that an entrepreneur needs to know this information regarding employees; there are many uses for this information, such as making sure your resources are being spent properly, understanding where an employee needs more training, and being able to estimate and bill a job correctly.

One of Veronica's earliest jobs was as a telemarketer, where she learned from experience that success is to a large extent a numbers game. If you want more sales, you must make more calls, even though it may be hard to do. She and others in business understand that, for example, if you need more clients and make 50 calls, perhaps you will have a chance to talk with 25 of them. perhaps 7 or 8 will be interested in what you have to say and 2-3 of these will give you an appointment and possibly even a sale. You have to avoid getting discouraged and just go on to the next call.

One of her best abilities is recognizing her own skills and building upon them. Despite lacking a formal higher education when she first started her business, she had learned that she was good at telemarketing and knew what it took to become a success in that business. So she contacted small businesses and offered to help them set up telemarketing programs. She parlayed a relatively low-wage position into the role of a highly paid marketing and management consultant. To do this required confidence and determination, as well as constant evolution of her business to meet the changing needs of the marketplace.

We are grateful that Veronica included our class in the time she volunteers to help the community.

During the class, we also did a role play in which everyone acted as if we were friends and potential investors as Efrain presented a case to the rest of us as to why giving him money would be wise. Knowing the market, which competitors are successful and which are not (and why), deciding whether to focus on improving service to existing customers or to risk buying expensive new equipment to move into a new area, and budgeting for immediate and future needs were some of the important topics discussed.

We have only three classes left and we have speakers scheduled between 8 and 9 pm for each. Please make the best use of your time by contacting your mentors or me between classes, and bring written elements of your business plans to discuss with your classmates.

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