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Top 2012 Apps for Entrepreneurs

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Technology: Your 24-7 ally in business success

If you’re just staring out and working hard to develop your small business, you probably already spend a lot of your day glued to your iPhone, BlackBerry smart phone, Samsung Galaxy, or Android phone. So using technology as a partner in business isn’t foreign to you. That’s great news because there are thousands of apps on the smart phone market that can help make the life of an entrepreneur even more convenient. Business owners need to be connected at all times. A deal can go down in the middle of the night or a problem can occur when you’re in another country, so your smart phone is really a lifeline to your businesses prosperity.

The following 5 apps for entrepreneurs are, in my opinion as a business owner, irreplaceable. I use them frequently throughout the day to make business deals, keep track of important projects, touch base with my clients, and even to get paid.

1. Start Up Checklist (for iPhone & iPad)

When I decided to quit my day job for a large corporate and start my own home-based business it’s an understatement to admit that I was scared. I needed a tool to help me set up my small business, a checklist of sorts that would guide me through the necessary things that I needed to get in order. That’s when I found the Start Up Checklist app! This app is a start up entrepreneur’s best friend and business ally. It features an easy to follow 36-step checklist for new business owners so they don’t forget about things like filing out certain tax forms, registering a business name, and etc. With Start Up Checklist, you will find every government resource, grant, and professional tip you’ll need to strike out on your own. Plus, Start Up Checklist also donates 10% of all proceeds made from this app in support of small business loans around the world!

2. TimeMaster + Billing (for iPhone & iPad)

Another app that I rely on multiple times throughout the day, TimeMaster + Billing keeps me connected with my clients and gives both of us an overview of projects before, during, and after they are complete. This app is virtually a central time-tracker t at opens a secure, two-way communication portal between you and your client. This means clients can add inspirational photos, notes, instructions, emails from their team, and you can send draft copy, proofs, track your hours, and keep a running tally on the client’s budget so you don’t go over. TimeMaster even automatically generates an invoice for you at the end of the project.

3. Bento (for iPhone & iPad)

I don’t care if you’re a newbie entrepreneur or a business novice with chains all over the globe, Bento is a unique task management database app that tracks your internal projects. So where task master gave the client a view, Bento keeps the work for internal eyes only—so you can add client notes, import pictures and video, brainstorm, forecast accounting costs, and communicate with your team securely and privately without the client seeing a thing. Plus, Bento allows business owners to customize projects by fields such as task, project name, individual name, price, time, approaching due date, and etc. And if a project is due soon, Bento will send automatic reminders so Jim in writing gets the copy done and handed over to Sharon in design.

4. Square (Free – for Android)

Stuck in a client’s corporate jet to Madrid without your debit machine? Well Square is the smart phone app you need! Never get caught without a cash register again. This app virtually converts your Android phone into a payment accepting cash register using a dongle (or electronic key)—so you can instantly scan clients’ credit cards, transfer cash from one business account to another, or pay vendors from absolutely anywhere.

5. MightyMeeting (Free – for Android)

The MightyMeeting app keeps you looking client-ready—even when you’re not! The hero of all presentations, MightyMeeting lets you upload and store your multimedia and slide presentations, proofs, project files and marketing videos, and all speaker notes so you can access them anytime a meeting unexpectedly pops up. As long as you have access to Wi-Fi, 3G or a 4G wireless connection, you are presentation-ready!

This is a guest post submitted by Melaine Gray of GoingCellular hope you enjoy it!

Author Bio: Melanie Gray is a writer for GoingCellular, a popular site that provides cell phone news, commentary, and reviews of popular providers.

Tags:iPad business app, iPhone business app
Posted in Entrepreneur, small business | 3 Comments »

Your Business Mission

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

What is the Mission of your Business?

A Successful entrepreneur won’t have the same answer as you are having in your heart right now. Too many small business owners assume that the mission or goal of their business is to make money. If you set your eyes on making money, be rest assured that your business won’t last for long.

Businesses are practically packaged solution to people’s need. Businesses are meant to satisfy the need of individuals or organization. If that is the case, then making money cannot be the mission of a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur that aims at making money will only survive until an entrepreneur that aims at satisfying the need of customer comes around to dislodge him.

Customer Satisfaction Should Be Your Mission

Successful entrepreneurs often encourage their staff to aim for two things. First, attract customers. That is the whole essence of internet marketing and all the gimmicks internet marketers parade online. Everyone is trying to get the attention of customers. The competition for customers attention is very keen. Even though you have the capacity to satisfy the need of a market better than your competitor, your inability to attract the customer will make it impossible for you to prove that you are better!

The second goal is to satisfy the customer. Whatever you do, aim at satisfying your customers. A satisfied customer will safe you thousands of dollar in advertisement. His or her recommendation may earn you better return than you can ever get on paid advertisements. Also, a satisfied customer repeated patronage pays huge dividend which cannot be easily quantified. Instead of attempting to subtly grab a few hundreds of dollar from a prospect work at making the prospect a satisfied customer and watch him spend thousands of dollars in repeated sales while recommending your business to his friends.

Quality Customer Support Service Holds The Key!

Irrespective of how good a product or service is, poor customer support service will run the business down. People love to be treated with love, care and respect. Every human being is craving for attention. You will agree with me that everyone, including yours sincerely will love to be treated as Royalty. When this fails, customer support service should come to the rescue.

To err is human, so it is not out of place for a business to fail in its bid to satisfy customers. However, whenever such failure occurs, customer support service personnel should spring into action to ensure that the mistake is remedied. Customer support service must ensure that the dissatisfied customer does not leave the business because of such failure. Everything should be done to redress and win back the customer’s confidence.

This is one area that small business owners in Nigeria need to look into. It has been discovered that too many big enterprises dump inexperience and ill-motivated personnel in their customer support service departments. Such personnel when attending to dissatisfied customers are often rude and abusive. Some even act as if they are doing such customers a favor. Instead of treating the customers as royalty, they actually demands subtly that the aggrieved customer be grateful that they are spending their precious time attending to such trivial complains. This is a golden opportunity for small business owners to tap into.

Give The Customer Royal Treatment and Watch Your Business Grow!

Since the market is already full of lots of aggrieved customers, take advantage of this! Build a first class Customer Support Service Department for your business. Ensure that the department is staffed with the best behaved, smooth talking, diplomatic, courteous staff you have. Explain to the personnel that they are the last hope of the company in retaining any aggrieved customer. So, their attitude should be such that a customer having come in contact with them will find it difficult to leave.

Get Feedback About Your Customer Service Department

If you really want to stay and grow in business. You need to get direct feedback from your customer on what your customer support service personnel are doing. You need to know if they are striving to keep customers for you or doing otherwise. Too many businesses have lost valuable customers because an aggrieved customer was not well attended to. Getting feedback from customer is not so difficult. You only need to be creative and you will be surprised that customers are willing to comment on how your staff treat them.

Reward Good Support Staff and Fire Bad Support Staff

It is your business, so be bold enough to reward good support staff and fire without hesitation any support staff that is killing your business. It is foolish to allow an arrogant and uncultured support staff to continue in your employment. Any staff that does not accept the fact that it takes the income from satisfied customer to keep the business running must be fired. Customers pay for satisfaction and it is the responsibility of any business that takes a customers money to provide such satisfaction or refund the money taken. As such, it is compulsory that every staff understand and agree to treat every customer like royalty.

This post was provoked by a recent experience I had with a business organization. Having failed in keeping their promise, their support service staff are acting as if they are doing me a great favor listening to my complain. If I were to have my way, I will recommend that the entire customer support service department of that business be overhauled, because their response to customers sucks!

Your business mission is to attract customers and satisfy them. Never forget that if you truly want to be a successful entrepreneur.

Do you have a story to tell about customer support service? Do you have a tip to share that will empower a small business owner? Please do so in a comment. Cheers 😉

Tags:Customer Care, Customer Support, Nigerian Entrepreneurs, small business, small business opportunity
Posted in Entrepreneur, Nigerian, small business, Tips & Tricks | 20 Comments »

Is Bulk SMS Business In Nigeria Crashing?

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

Bulk SMS entered the Nigerian market with a big bang. It became the newest make money online song and I wrote about it in my post Bulk SMS Reseller In Nigeria. As competition in the market for bulk sms intensified, I was greatly amused and I wrote another article pointing out that using price as basis for competition is not a healthy thing. You can read the article, Bulk SMS Reseller Price War. As at today, it seems the story has changed. It seems the Bulk SMS market in Nigeria is collapsing. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Bulk Sms

I am not a Bulk SMS reseller. But I’m a heavy user of bulk SMS. I subscribed to one of the most reliable bulk SMS reseller and I have been enjoying their service until recently when I noticed that my sent messages were not getting delivered. I thought it was just a hitch in their system, so I went online and chatted with one of their representative.

Well, I was treated to a very good customer service and I thought that the situation will be rectified. Unfortunately, a week after, the same situation is still persisting. Over 60 percent of the messages I sent doesn’t get delivered and that was really embarrassing.

I was actually thinking of switching to another reseller because I was loosing money. Every time a message sent is not delivered, I loose the money spent on sending the message while at the same time I suffer the embarrassment of intended recipient of such message calling that they never got the message. That is not good for an entrepreneur like me. So I made up my mind to switch to another reseller. But the question on my mind was, which of the myriad of bulk sms reseller parading themselves as the best solution provider in the market should I subscribe to?

Should I join the bandwagon and become a bulk sms reseller myself? After giving it a thought, I decided that I’m not ready for sms reseller business. I already have my hand full for now. I believe in giving my best in whatever I lay my hands on. Since I don’t have the time to commit to the business of reselling sms, then there is no point going into it for now. My good name is my greatest asset. So the option left is to subscribe to another bulk sms reseller.

Well, while searching for the best provider to subscribe to, I discovered that I’m not the only one complaining about undelivered messages. Some of my friends are complaining also. And funny enough, we subscribed to different bulk sms resellers. So that showed me that it wasn’t only my provider that was having hitches with their services, many more in the bulk sms business are experiencing the same.

Now, someone suggested that GSM operators in Nigeria are responsible for the undelivered messages! How true is that? Whenever, I send messages from my phone using the GSM operators (I have 3lines, MTN, Glo and Etisalat) the messages get delivered. However, when I send bulk SMS to the same operators some get delivered, while some don’t get delivered. A friend suggested that the GSM operators are sabotaging the business of bulk sms reseller. That sound ridiculous to me. But could it be true? There are too many questions and little comforting answers.

What has been your experience as a user of Bulk SMS in the past one month? Do you have answer to the questions raised above? Kindly say in a comment. You might save a business by doing so. Thanks for reading. Cheers.

Tags:bulk SMS, Entrepreneur, Nigerian, Online Business
Posted in Entrepreneur, Nigerian, small business | 64 Comments »

Making Money While Making The World A Better Place

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Every entrepreneur is out to make money, but deep down inside, every entrepreneur wants to leave an indelible mark in history as one that made the world a better place. How do you realize the goal of affecting the world by giving to charity while pursuing the goal of acquiring wealth. This is a dilemma to too many entrepreneurs.

If you talk to an entrepreneur and mention charity you would expect them to hiss like a snake and curl up into a ball, or is that just the entrepreneurs I talk to? Either way people rarely expect business and charity to mix well, one is about making money and the other is about giving it away.

Give A Car To Charity

But sometimes you can find the perfect angle. A way to make money while also making the world a better place. That may sound impractical, but a little bit of creativity makes it feasible.

Giveacar is a company that specializes in letting you donate your car to charity. Most people with an old car they don’t want any more tend to just get rid of it at any old price just to be rid of it. Giveacar takes the responsibility off the customer’s hands by finding the best price for the car and giving the proceeds to the charity of their choice.

The preferred charity is a matter of your choice. Irrespective of the charity you choose, an additional benefit is that you can have the peace of mind that you are contributing to a cleaner environment by allowing Giveacar to handle the proper recycling of your old car or van. It is on record that every year on average, just over 2 million cars and vans reach the end of their useful lives, and the average new car requires the energy equivalent of 1540 gallons of petrol to manufacture.

This is why Giveacar will either sell your car on to a dealership that will fix it up and get it back on the road for as long as possible, or have it drained of any hazardous fluids and stripped for parts and materials in a safe and environmentally friendly manner.

Whether you choose a charity for the environment, the poor, the blind or the sick, you make the world a greener place by putting your car to use somewhere instead of adding it to the heap at the junk yard.

It’s hard to argue with a company that makes money by supporting hundreds of charities across the UK through taking old cars and recycling them to save the environment. In the film Wall Street, Michael Douglas made that speech about how greed was good.

It’s businesses like Giveacar that show us that greed is not good, it just shows lack of creativity. There is a joy that you derive when you lend a helping hand to the needy. Giveacar can help you do just that. You can get more information by visiting their website at Giveacar. Cheers.

I sure look forward to when a successful entrepreneur will implement this concept in my country. It is actually possible to make money while making the world a better place. You only need a bit of creativity to merge the two goals together.

Note: This post is not a paid review, it was born out of my chat with Daniel of Giveacar who visited this site. This piece is my idea of spreading the knowledge that entrepreneur is not just about making money, what you actually do with what you have determines how successful you really are! Feel free to drop your thought in a comment.

Tags:charity, donate, Entrepreneur, GiveACar, make money
Posted in Entrepreneur, Financial Intelligence, small business | 13 Comments »

New Minimum Wage For Nigerian Workers

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Should Government Workers Celebrate The New Minimum Wage?

Government workers in Nigeria are getting excited about the newly approved minimum wage of 18,000naira. Does this really call for jubilation? I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but I personally feel that what Nigerian workers need is not a new statutory minimum wage. They will be better off if the government focus her attention on arresting the factors responsible for eroding the purchasing power of the workers income. If the present attitude of our leaders in maintaining the social infrastructures continues, the newly approved statutory minimum wage will have less than the purchasing power of the old 7,500naira minimum wage.

It is not the volume, but the value!

I personally feel that everyone would have been better off, if government has concentrated on improving the supply of electricity and repairing the roads. Those two factors alone cost an average worker thousands of naira per month. so much fund is wasted from each workers income as they struggle to provide energy using petrol generator. The cost of transportation is also high because commercial vehicle owners pay heavily for maintenance of their vechicle due to bad roads and poor road networks.

Will The State Government Pay?

The state governments are already crying foul over the federal government action. They claim they can’t afford to pay the new minimum wage. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to us, knowing fully well that some are owing their workers more than one month salary (at the old minimum wage rate). How on earth do we think such states will be able to pay their workers the new minimum wage which is more than 100percent increase on the old rate.

Will The Private Sector Pay The New Minimum Wage?

The private sector will now have to contend with disgruntled workers who will be expecting automatic increase in their salary because of the pronouncement of the Federal government. Unfortunately, many workers in private organisation will be dissappointed. Such automatic increase in salary is not realistic. Presently, a lot of private firm are having challenges with running their operations on diesel driven generator, because there is a hike in the price of diesel. Unlike before when a litre of disel sold for 110naira, now it goes for as much as 140naira per liter. That is a sudden increase in overhead expenditure.

Just two months into the new year and there are already many challenges for the Nigerian Entrepreneur to combat with. Unfortunately, our leaders are too pre-occupy with the April election to bother about the state of the economy. They are not helping matters in any way as their reckless spending is putting pressure on the economy. The warning from the Central Bank of Nigeria on the need for the executive to cut down on recurrent spending seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Nigerian entrepreneurs need to re-strategize in order to cope with the unforeseen result of these government policies. Every wise entrepreneur need to watch his/her overhead expenditure this year. It is obvious that there are challenges ahead. What is your opinion about the new minimum wage?

Tags:Nigerian, small business, Wage
Posted in Nigerian, small business | 23 Comments »

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