starting a business without or with little capital

With the skyrocketing level of youth unemployment world over, self-employment is the in-thing. In most cases the few available job openings require three or five years experience as the minimum requirement, which fresh graduates don’t have. Entrepreneurship is the way forward for young people who find themselves in this situation.  

Many youth keep asking: “How can I start a business without money?”. Some entrepreneurs who have started with little or no capital can confirm that it is possible, and if anything, the entrepreneur isn’t under pressure as those who obtain loans to start-up businesses.  

Below are some useful tips that can get you started with little capital outlay. 

Reduce start up costs. Instead of the normal “business start-up” process which includes registering your business, renting office space etc. These processes can be done later when you are already earning from your business. This is what is referred to as bootstrapping. 

  

Do things yourself. As a start up, be ready to do all the things yourself. This enables you to avoid costs you would otherwise have to incur paying others to do the tasks for you. Doing things yourself of course means you will take longer to accomplish the tasks, but the joy is that you will have cut down expenditure. Learn how to make your own financial statements in Microsoft Excel instead of hiring a CPA to do it for you.   

Start small. Starting small not only helps a cash-strapped entrepreneur to get started, but also familiarizes the entrepreneur  with what works and what doesn’t before investing full-scale in the business. 

Starting a service business. If you have some special skills, service business or consultancy is easy to start. Armed with your skills, you are good to go. A skilled writer, or a computer tutor does not need much capital to start. One just needs to market his services through websites, social media sites, and other forums.  

Chose a field you like. If you want to be successful in a business venture, chose a business that entails what you like doing. For instance, if you like adventures then the Tours and Travel business is the thing for you. If you like writing, then copy editing or writing for magazines is the thing for you. Choosing an a activity you like gives you the passion and the dedication to strive for excellence, which in this case is  synonymous with business growth.    

Always keep learning. Be prepared to always learn something new in your line of business every now and then. Read available books and magazines on business and entrepreneurship. Watch entrepreneurship videos on YouTube. (This is literally like attending a free semester at a business school).  

Lookout for free services. In order to cut on operational costs, some free services can get you started without spending a buck. As you plan to buy a website domain name and hosting, you can set up a free blog at www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com.  

Social Networking. Join online groups with similar interest as yours, and any other group from where you can get potential clients. Attend social events in your communities and use the opportunity to make word of mouth advertisement about your produces or services. Always make it a point to exchange business cards. Include your business or services in your e-mail signature. These are cheap ways you can advertise your services.

These are time tested strategies that worked for many people. There is a chance it may work for you too.

How to avoid scams and get rich slowly

Money is certainly something that everybody needs. No wonder even some religious people who have taken the vow of poverty still find the temptation to amass more money irresistible.

Getting rich isn’t certainly something that can be achieved over night. With minor exceptions, most of the world’s billionaires earned their billions over decades of tireless handwork.

Billionaire Warren Buffett, who is one of the richest people on the planet took years to build his wealth portfolio which now stands at about $45 billion. He began his journey way back in 1956 when he started an investment firm in which he invested just slightly over $10,000. It took him half a century to get where he is now. In fact he began selling pens

Here are some strategies on how to get reach steadily;

Start savings and investing early. It is not surprising that Buffet started trading in stock at the age of 11. At high school he also ran a pinball business. That is the origin of the current wealth he has. Lets be honest, are you a better investor than warren Buffet.
The exception to the rule has been Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and lately Mark Zuckerberg, whose start up of facebook quickly elevated him to become a billionaire in less than a decade. But even the now 28 year old Zuckerberg was already programming computers at the age of 12 and when he joined Harvard he was already working on his “killer app”.  He is now worth some $14 billion. But the rest of you who are not as prolific programmers should scale down your ambitions to achievable heights.

Do not give up. If you are on the path of making money then giving up should feature in your vocabulary.  There are moments when you are confronted with the harsh reality, in that  instead of making money for the last quarter, or even the last year, you actually lost money. A lot of investors persevered through similar situations. Macro-economic variables such as inflation and recessions have had similar impacts on the income of the current billionaires, but the fact that there net worth is dramatically on the rise implies they were able to recover from the economic shocks.

Warren Buffett's first investment was three shares of Cities Service Preferred which he bought at $38 per share. The stock soon dropped to $27. Buffett didn’t give up.  He held on until the shares went back up to $40 and ended up selling for a small profit. Still, he confesses he made a bad decision. He should have held on longer, as Cities Service eventually bubbled up to nearly $200 a share.

Cut costs. Ironically, it is these petty expenditures that are the most damaging. Small and easy to ignore expenditures such as a cup of coffee, a pack of cigarette or a bottle of water.  At the end of the day the cost of these seemingly cheap habitual items bundles up. But even then, to a wealthy banker for instance, even if these costs aggregates to just $20, that’s already $100 a week, or nearly $5000 a year. Adjusted for inflation, giving up these “luxuries” would save about $155,000 over 35 years. That is how the seemingly small bucks spent here and there could yield if saved.    

There are no clear shortcuts to wealth. With all of this craziness in the stock and financial markets, you can bet on it that there will be always be scams intermittently popping up left and right. The less money you have, the more likely someone will come at you with any array of similar schemes. The schemes will guarantee returns that are too good to be true.  Ignore them. Always remember this: If a deal is a great deal, they aren’t going to share it with you. The second thing to remember is that if the person selling the deal was so smart, they would be rich beyond rich rather than trolling the streets looking to turn you into a sucker. There are no shortcuts.