12 tips for business success

What's important to the success of small-business owners and entrepreneurs? Knowledge, skill and talent.

However, many competitors have the same traits you do. The key to beating the competition and achieving success is mental, reflected in one's attitude, totally controlled by the individual and requires no cash. This holds true in most human endeavors besides business — in sports, the arts and politics.
How many times have we seen the underdog team or player win over the more talented opponent? The difference is often attitude.

These 12 attitude attributes can put you in the right mindset for achieving entrepreneurial success.


1. Have passion for your business
Work should be fun. Your passion will help you overcome difficult moments and persuade people to work for you and want to do business with you. Passion can't be taught. When it wanes, as it surely will in difficult times, take some quiet time. Whether it be an hour or a week, take inventory of all the reasons you started the business and why you like being your own boss. That should renew your passion.


2. Set an example of trustworthiness
People have confidence in trustworthy individuals and want to work for them in a culture of integrity. The same is true for customers.


3. Be flexible, except with core values
It's a given that your plans and strategies will change as time goes on. This flexibility for rapid change is an inherent advantage of small over large business. However, no matter the pressure for immediate profits, do not compromise on core values.


4. Don't let fear of failure hold you back
Failure is an opportunity to learn. All things being equal, venture capitalists would rather invest money in an individual who tried and failed founding a company than in someone who never tried.


5. Make timely decisions

It's okay to use your intuition. Planning and thought are good. But procrastination leads to missed opportunity.


6. The major company asset is you
Take care of yourself. Your health is more valuable than the most expensive machinery or computer software for the company. You don't have to choose between your family or your company, play or work. Maintain your health for balance and energy, which will, in turn, enhance your mental outlook.


7. Keep your ego under control
Don't take profits and spend them on expensive toys to impress others. Build a war chest for unexpected needs or opportunities. This also means hearing out new ideas and suggestions no matter how crazy they sound.


8. Believe

You need to believe in yourself, in your company, and that you will be successful. This confidence is contagious with your employees, customers, stakeholders, suppliers and everyone you deal with.


9. Encourage and accept criticism graciously. Admit your mistakes.
You need to constantly work on convincing your employees that it's OK — even necessary —to state their honest opinions even it if conflicts with the boss's opinion. Just stating it once or putting it in a mission statement won't cut it for most people.


10. Maintain a strong work ethic
Your employees will follow your lead. It will also help you beat your competition by outworking them, particularly when your product or service is very similar.


11. Rebound quickly from setbacks
There surely will be plenty of ups and downs as you build the business. Learn from the setbacks and move on. You can't change the past.


12. Periodically get out of your comfort zone to pursue something important
Many times you will feel uncomfortable in implementing a needed change in technology, people, mission, competing, etc. For the company and you to grow personally, you sometimes have to step out of your comfort zone.
Many organizational and leadership shortcomings can be overcome or mitigated with the good attitudes described above. All can be learned except passion, which comes from within. Take time out of your hectic schedule to periodically reflect on these attributes. You may be inspired to act.

Copyright © 2011 www.RioTunes.blogspot.com

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Stock Investor Tips - Stock Business Survival Tips

Would I invest in stocks? Will it be worth investing in stocks? Will I profit from Stock investment? How much my Stocks would cost after a certain period? These are the basic questions every investor wonder to get answers. As a Stock Market Investor, it's important to keep a realistic view of the stock market. Regardless of the real problems, common myths about the stock market often arise. Here we go over these myths in order to bust them.

Investing in stocks is just like gambling:

This reasoning causes many people to shy away from the stock market. To understand why investing in stocks is inherently different from gambling, we need to review what it means to buy stocks. A share of common stock is ownership in a company. It entitles the holder to a claim on assets as well as a fraction of the profits that the company generates.
Too often, investors think of shares as simply a trading vehicle, and they forget that stock represents the ownership of a company.

In the stock market, investors are constantly trying to assess the profit that will be left over for shareholders. This is why stock prices fluctuate. The outlook for business conditions is always changing, and so are the future earnings of a company.

Assessing the value of a company isn't an easy practice. There are so many variables involved that the short-term price movements appear to be random (academics call this the Random Walk Theory); however, over the long term, a company is only worth the present value of the profits it will make. In the short term a company can survive without profits because of the expectations of future earnings, but no company can fool investors forever - eventually a company's stock price can be expected to show the true value of the firm.

Gambling, on the contrary, is a zero-sum game. It merely takes money from a loser and gives it to a winner. No value is ever created. By investing, we increase the overall wealth of an economy. As companies compete, they increase productivity and develop products that can make our lives better. Don't confuse investing and creating wealth with gambling's zero-sum game.

The stock market is an exclusive club in which only brokers and rich people make money:

Many market advisors claim to be able to call the markets' every turn. The fact is that almost every study done on this topic has proven that these claims are false. Most market prognosticators are notoriously inaccurate; furthermore, the advent of the internet has made the market much more open to the public than ever before. All the data and research tools previously available only to brokerages are now there for individuals to use.

Actually, individuals have an advantage over institutional investors because individuals can afford to be long-term oriented. The big money managers are under extreme pressure to get high returns every quarter. Their performance is often so scrutinized that they can't invest in opportunities that take some time to develop. Individuals have the ability to look beyond temporary downturns in favor of a long-term outlook.

Fallen angels will all go back up, eventually:

Whatever the reason for this myth's appeal, nothing is more destructive to amateur investors than thinking that a stock trading near a 52-week low is a good buy. Think of this in terms of the old Wall Street adage, "Those who try to catch a falling knife only get hurt."

Suppose you are looking at two stocks:

XYZ made an all time high last year around $50 but has since fallen to $10 per share.
ABC is a smaller company but has recently gone from $5 to $10 per share.

Which stock would you buy? Believe it or not, all things being equal, a majority of investors choose the stock that has fallen from $50 because they believe that it will eventually make it back up to those levels again. Thinking this way is a cardinal sin in investing! Price is only one part of the investing equation (which is different from trading, which uses technical analysis). The goal is to buy good companies at a reasonable price. Buying companies solely because their market price has fallen will get you nowhere. Make sure you don't confuse this practice with value investing, which is buying high-quality companies that are undervalued by the market.

Below is a chart of Nortel's decline. Imagine how much money you would have lost had you bought Nortel just because it kept on hitting new lows!

Stocks that go up must come down:

The laws of physics do not apply in the stock market. There is no gravitational force that pulls stocks back to even. Over ten years ago, Berkshire Hathaway's stock price went from $6,000 to $10,000 per share in a little more than a year. Had you thought that this stock was going to return to its lower initial position, you would have missed out on the subsequent rise to $70,000 per share over the following six years.

Having just a little knowledge, because it is better than none, is enough to invest in the stock market:

Knowing something is generally better than nothing, but it is crucial in the stock market that individual investors have a clear understanding of what they are doing with their money. It's those investors who really do their homework that succeed.

Don't fret, if you don't have the time to fully understand what to do with your money, then having an advisor is not a bad thing. The cost of investing in something that you do not fully understand far outweighs the cost of using an investment advisor.

Forgive us for ending with more investing clichés, but there is another old adage that is very much worth repeating: "What's obvious is obviously wrong." This means that knowing a little bit will only have you following the crowd like a lemming. Like anything worth anything, successful investing takes hard work and effort. A partially informed investor is about as effective as a partially informed surgeon; he or she will only hurt themselves and those around them.

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