Money at Step 3:                                  Overview - orientation

Savings, Family-Friends-and-Fools, Retained Earnings, (Banks)

The goal within Step 2 was to make your first sale. Now it is to sell. 
If your product or service simply takes off, you will be able to add another source for money-- your retained earnings. 

Once you make that sale, how much are you going to reserve (retention ratio)?  How much are you going to spend for more raw materials, travel, sales/marketing, take as income, or reduce debt?  And, how much will you give away? Pushing money back into the business, taking nothing (and very little for many years) is the story of many small business owners.

The First Sale:  Analyze it. Even if it is from a friend or a family member, look at your margins.  Is the price competitive with the market?  How can you make your processes more efficient and create a little more margin? 

What was the unique selling proposition? Are there ten more people or businesses that you can identify with the same demographics?  Can you call them today and make another sale?

What was the resistance to the second sale?

How are you coming on that business plan? Once you have that business plan, visit around with your key advisers, even your suppliers and others whom you trust. 

Banks.  Once you have received some postivie feedback on your business plan, walk it into a few of your local banks and tell them you will soon be shopping for a line of credit.  Leave the bank president a copy of your business plan "Draft Version."   If you have savings and own a home, some of these bankers will extend that line of credit immediately. 

Spend some time with the Workshop Online - the Case Studies. 

Each of these people today are multi-millionaires.

»  Albert Black was 10 years pushing everything back into his business.
»  Bob Orenstein was 16 years before taking any money out.
»  Bill Tobin started when he was eleven years old.
»  Marc Katz says, "Starting a business is not for wimps."

Once you have something that looks like positive cash flow, you can begin looking for debt-based capital through the banks and other financial institutions.

Always check the information about money in the step before and  next step.

Go to The Online Workshop - Case Studies

Learning through other peoples stories - Metaphors and analogies

To learn something new, we must compare it to things that we know.  But, to really know something, we need to ask questions.  That takes us inside  those examples and we explore all the dimensions and relations around that new concept, insight, or information.  As much as possible, we explore how this new information fits in with our own history of relations.

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