When you think of an entrepreneurial success story, you think of one person.

In reality, almost every successful entrepreneur has a team behind them. The entrepreneur gets all the credit because they pulled the team together – similar to how coaches get credit for championships.

If you want to build a business, it’ll be impossible to do by yourself. Today, Alex Papa from BusinessOpportunitiesExpo.com is going to give you four tips for building your first team.

Get to Know Yourself

In order to create a winning team you must have a clear understanding of your skills. You must have a good knowledge of what you lack and therefore need. Your team of business advisors should be there to provide the expertise you don’t have.

They should not be made of people who think exactly the same way as you do. You reap the rewards of differing opinions when you draw together a strong and effective team.

Build a Core Team

“You also have to understand that you can’t do it all by yourself. Business is a team project. It may seem like eMillions was just me, but I actually had a transcriptionist, a mentor, a graphic designer, and a copywriter.”
Stanley Tang

A team provides a pool of diverse talents that’s essential to the development of your business. Ideally, your first team should include experts in business management, finance, marketing and law.

For example, a small catering business will need to solidify business relations with an attorney who specializes in the food business, an accountant who knows all about your tax obligations, and an advertising expert who will know how to promote your business in the best possible light.

Establish Your Team Early

No matter what type of business you have, you’ll want to establish your team well in advance of your first deal, sale or agreement with a client. Trying to gather a team in the midst of a deal will lead to choosing poor team members. You may choose an expert who is too expensive, or choose an individual whose personality does not “mesh” with the spirit of your company.

If you run a small car dealership and fail to establish accords with a bank manager, you will be unable to provide fair and honest loan agreements to your customers. You’ll lose customers and those customers will tell their friends not to do business with you.

Attend Local Networking Events

Choosing team members takes time but it doesn’t always take money.

An excellent, free resource is other business people who’ve traveled the same path. Every city has a club, a business association or similar group of community business-people. This is a goldmine for young entrepreneurs who are willing to take advice.

The best part, mentors in your community understand the local issues. They are already connected to the “big” players in your area and many of them love giving free advice and talking over a cup of coffee.

Your business team is there to help you grow and succeed in business. Trying to go it alone is prideful and that leads to failure. Your team is your business, build it wisely.

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Making someone happy is important to any relationship, especially in business. But the little things that make people happy are often overlooked. And, typically, these are the things that people remember the most. Here are three things you can do in less than five minutes to make your customers super happy!

1. Attach candy to their invoice.

Everyone loves candy! Alright, not everyone, but most people do. Next time you send a paper invoice to your customers, staple candy to it. I recommend a Jolly Rancher or a 25 cent pack of gum. Tootsie Rolls are also good, but chocolate melts.

If you don’t use paper invoices, find another creative way to give them sugar. Maybe leave a fresh baked cookie on their doorstep with a note so they know it’s from you.

When you’re asking someone to pay you, you should remind them why they’re paying you. It’s because you do the little things that make them happy.

2. Give them a friendly call.

The next time you have a few moments, give one of your customers a call. And call them for no other reason but to let them know how much you appreciate their business.

When they first answer the phone, ask:

• how they’re doing,
• whether or not they had a good day,
• if they have plans for the weekend.

People love to talk about themselves, their experiences and their plans. By randomly giving them a call, you will be the person who lets them do just that.

It’ll be a pleasant reminder that you care about them as your customer and as a person.

3. Send them a thank you card.

Nothing says ‘thank you’ more effectively and less expensively than a hand-written thank you card. Next time you have five minutes and 44 cents to spare, write a short, appreciative note and mail it to them.

More than likely, your customers receive a great deal of bills and direct mail. Meaning, your thank you card will stick out like a rose amongst weeds.

Brief Recap

Think about the simple things that make you happy. More than likely, these are the same things that will make your customers happy. And when you come up with a clever idea, make sure you act on it.

If you enjoyed this post and/or found it useful, you should get JuniorBiz by Email.

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Can anyone be an entrepreneur? Absolutely. Can anyone be a successful entrepreneur? Probably not. Successful entrepreneurs are a rare breed. Not everyone meets the requirements. In general, there are four characteristics an entrepreneur must possess in order to be successful.

Take Dorsey, Brin and Page, for example.

Passion for the Business

First and foremost is passion. Do you think Jack Dorsey is passionate about 140 character messages? I do. Do you think Sergey Brin and Larry Page are passionate about indexing and organizing? Probably.

Maybe those three aren’t passionate about those things, specifically, but I know they are all passionate about helping people. Twitter makes it efficient for people to communicate. Google makes it easy for people to find information.

A lot of hard work goes into making a business successful. If you don’t enjoy that work, if you aren’t passionately in love with that work, you’re not going to finish it.

“As we go forward, I hope we’re going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work.” – Sergey Brin

Product and Customer Focus

“If you build it, he will come.” This timeless quote from the Field of Dreams no longer holds true in today’s marketplace. You can’t just make something cool and expect people to buy it.

Google was created to solve a problem. It’s hard for consumers to find good information, and Google designs its services to help alleviate this problem.

As an entrepreneur, you have to figure out what people need and want. Then proceed to create a product that satisfies those needs and desires. People pay for solutions.

“We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.” – Larry Page

Tenacity Despite Failure

Four out of five new businesses will fail. In other words, the average entrepreneur isn’t successful until their fifth try. Entrepreneurs must be stubborn and stupid to not give up, right? Wrong, sometimes.

As evident by the all-to-present “fail whale,” Twitter can attest to this characteristic. I’m not going to stop using Twitter just because it won’t load every time I want it to. But it would be nice to see the big blue/white whale less often.

Jack Dorsey and crew are working on this, but it’s easier said than done. If they haven’t given up yet, I’m confident they’ll find a way to make Twitter successful and profitable.

As an entrepreneur, you’ll undoubtedly run into setbacks. These setbacks will only become failures if you lack the tenacity to push through.

“Ideally, we’d like to sustain it (Twitter) through revenue. But we might need to take more money.” – Jack Dorsey

Execution Intelligence

How many business ideas have you had? How many businesses have resulted from those ideas? Execution intelligence is the ability to fashion a solid idea into a viable business. This is where most entrepreneurs get stuck.

Sergey and Larry had a brilliant idea, but the execution behind bringing their idea to market was even better. They had an idea, created a beta, rose over $1 million in funding, monetized their business, and bought the Googleplex for $319 million. All within 10 years.

Of course there were other pivotal/fortunate steps along the way, but Sergey and Larry did a world-class job of executing a business.

Passion, focus and tenacity are all vital characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. But if you don’t have the business intelligence to back it up, you can forget about being successful. This is where JuniorBiz comes in!

“If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on.” – Larry Page

Other Common Entrepreneurial Traits

Here are a few more characteristics of successful entrepreneurs:

• Achievement motivated
• Alert to opportunities
• Creative
• Decisive
• Energetic
• Innovative
• Lengthy attention span
• Moderate risk taker
• Networker
• Optimistic
• Persuasive
• Promoter
• Resource assembler/leverager
• Self-confident
• Self-starter
• Strong work ethic
• Tolerant of ambiguity
• Visionary

Source: Barringer, B. R., & Ireland, R. D. (2008). Entrepreneurship: Successfully Launching New Ventures. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc.

In case you don’t know, Jack Dorsey is the creator of Twitter, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the founders of Google.

Are you one of the six types of dumb entrepreneurs? And how many of the 23 hats of entrepreneurship do you wear? Whatever your reason, make sure you want to be an entrepreneur for the right reasons.

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A blog is a place where you can express your opinions and share your knowledge, but it is also a great way to showcase your skills. From what I’ve found, it’s fairly common for start-up bloggers to receive requests for freelance work because of their blog.

However, prior to performing freelance work, it’s essential to set up a contract with your client. Here I have described how to create that contract.

Last week I met with a client who had learned about my web development projects by talking to a member of my Board of Advisors for JuniorBiz. I met with the client and he recruited me to develop a website for him over the course of the next couple weeks. In the interest of confidentiality I am not going to release his name or any other descriptions about the job other than it is related to web development.

After creating a contract for the job, I decided that a template for contracts would be a very useful tool to help guide young entrepreneurs through the sticky process of ensuring that a business deal is fair and clear for both parties. The resulting contract template is below.

What is a Contract and Why is it Important?

A contract is a legally binding agreement between two or more parties with a detailed description of tasks/products and deadlines one party will fulfill in exchange for a specific compensation. Contracts are important for a number of reasons:

1. They establish the legal guidelines for the job. Meaning, legal action can be taken if either side fails to uphold their end of the agreement.
2. They provide both parties with clear and precise expectations of the individual obligations.
3. They effectively create a project charter with the tasks you need to complete and when you need to complete them by.

Components of a Contract

When writing your contract it’s important to include several aspects of the job. Another thing to consider when forming a contract is to keep the wording as simple and straightforward as possible. The components of a formal contract are:

1. A detailed description the type of work to be done.
2. A specific price and payment arrangement.
3. A clearly worded plan that describe individual tasks and deliverables.
4. A schedule with dates and deadlines.
5. An agreement as to who owns the rights to what you are creating (i.e. the website files).
6. Terms to get out of the contract.
7. Dated signatures from all parties.

A Sample Contract and Template

After determining everything that needed to go into a contract, I created it from scratch. This was a lot of work and took me almost three hours. So I am going to post a PDF file that you can use as a template for your contracts and save you a lot of time.

DISCLAIMER: Use this template at your own discretion. I am merely providing suggestions for what you should include in your contract and how it should be formatted. If you want to ensure the legalities of your contract, please pursue legal counsel.

Here is the contract template:

Sample Contract

(It will open in a new window so you can keeping reading while referring to the contract.)

I’d be more than happy to send you this file as a word document if you want to create your own contract. Simply leave your name and contact info in the comments section below and I should get it to you in, at most, a couple days. Thanks!

Closing Remarks

All start-up companies can benefit from having a blog. Scratch that, all companies can benefit from having a blog. Originally, I didn’t consider freelance work (i.e. web development) as a source of revenue for my business. I’m still in the very early stages of development and engaging in freelance jobs is a great way to monetize a new business, especially a web-based business like JuniorBiz, LLC.

The client I mentioned in this post has told me that if I do a good job, he would be happy to refer me to other people in need of web development and other services. Other people will likely do the same.

You will have a contract between you and your client, but you should always try and go above and beyond the obligations of the contract to encourage your client to speak highly of your services.

Remember to leave your contact info below if you would like me to send you the contract template as a word document. Also, if you found this post helpful, you should Get JuniorBiz by Email. Thanks for reading.

P.S. Let me know what you think of my contract template and if I should add anything.

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Over the last 33 days I have personally met and discussed JuniorBiz with 34 new people. I have had more than one interaction with 12 of those 34, and 2 of them bought my book.

As a new entrepreneur, there are few things more important than networking and spreading the word about your business in your local community.

This post details how to find people to network with and how to talk to those people. This is the first part in a two part series. The second article will focus on networking online as a young entrepreneur.

How to Find People

As a young entrepreneur, your peers are more likely to have expertise on MTV and video games than how to start a business. So how do you find adults with the knowledge and resources that you need to help your business grow?

Keep in mind that networking is more art than science, so there is no perfect formula or process for you to follow. The method that I have sketched out below has been proven to work in my experience, but there is no limit to the number of ways you can network successfully.

Step 1: Determine who can help

The first thing you should figure out is the type of person you can benefit from talking to. For example, if you own a babysitting business, you’re going to want to talk to parents, other babysitters or maybe other entrepreneurs.

Step 2: Research networking events

Once you determine who you want to talk to, you have to find places and events where these people gather. From my experiences, the easiest way to do this is to use Meetup.com.

Meetup.com is a database of groups of people who regularly gather to talk about their shared interests. To find a meetup:

1. Go to http://Meetup.com.
2. Click “Find a Meetup Group” at the top left.
3. You can browse by city or topic. I recommend browsing by topic.
4. Input a topic, how far you’re willing to travel, your country and zip code. Press “search.” When considering a topic, think of all the things that are relevant to your business. If you’re a babysitter, you can search “babysitting,” “childcare,” “moms,” “parents” or “entrepreneurs.”
5. Search through the resulting Meetup Groups until you find one you would be interested in attending.
6. Then look around that group and see what they are all about. If you think meeting those people could somehow help your business, request to join the group, fill out the info, and RSVP for the next Meetup.

Step 3: Go to the Meetup

Now that you’re registered and RSVP’ed, you’re pretty much obligated to go. I recommend bringing a friend, parent, or acquaintance along because it can be a little intimidating to go to one of these meetings for the first time by yourself.

Step 4: Introduce yourself to the founder

The first person you want to meet when you arrive at the Meetup is the founder or head honcho of the group. You should know what he/she looks like and it should be easy to pick them out of the crowd. This person knows the majority of the people there and can introduce you to the other members.

When you first approach the founder/head honcho, here is your introduction:

“Hi, my name is (i.e. Oprah Winfrey) and I am a young entrepreneur who is trying to meet people who can give me advice about my business. I have had my (i.e. babysitting) business for (i.e. 5) weeks/months/years now and I’m trying to take it to the next level. Do you have any advice for me or can you introduce me to someone who might be able to help?”

At this point the head honcho will likely be impressed and will want to do whatever he/she can to help, including introducing you to other people.

Step 5: Talk to other people

If you have gotten this far, I commend you. The next section will detail how you should talk to these people.

How to Talk to People

To this day, simply introducing myself and talking to new people is something I struggle with. My palms get sweaty and I wonder if people notice when I shake their hands. So don’t worry if you’re slightly intimidated by this. The more you do it, the easier it will be.

Step 1: The handshake

Almost everyone says that a firm handshake is really important when you meet someone for the first time. Personally, I think firm handshakes are a sign that you’re trying to establish yourself as the dominant individual out of the two handshakers.

I have much more respect for someone who pleasantly and calmly shakes my hand. I’m not saying you should approach them with a limp-wrist, but focus on making eye contact more than squeezing their hand.

Step 2: The first words

A simple introduction: “Hi my name is Oprah Winfrey and I’m a young entrepreneur.” No matter who you are talking to, this will take them by surprise and they will likely respond with, “Really? What type of business do you have?” Then you tell them…

Step 3: The other words

The most important thing to remember when you are talking to these people is to simply be yourself. Don’t try and act like a hot-shot young entrepreneur. Yet, don’t downplay yourself either.

When discussing your business be confident, but not arrogant. Recognize that you’re the one asking for help and let this circumstance humble you. The person you’re talking to will be much more likely to help if they find you likeable.

It may sound challenging to tightrope walk the fine lines between confidence and arrogance, kindness and brown-nosing – and it is – but the rewards for successful networking are more than worth the effort.

Even if just one person out of every 100 you talk to is willing to help, then that’s more help than you had before. Plus, 100 more people are at least aware of your business.

Closing Remarks

If you decide to wuss out on this whole offline networking thing, you should remember that a lot of people your age don’t have the ambition to get off the couch, let alone start their own business. Be proud of your business and bring it up in everyday conversation.

Keep in mind, networking doesn’t have to be and intimidating process: every person you talk to about your business is another person who might be able to help you in the future.

If you have any success stories regarding offline networking, please share them in the comments area below. Also, if you found this post helpful, you should Get JuniorBiz by Email. Thanks for reading.

Now that you know how to network offline…

Discover these tried-and-true online networking tips:
How to Network as a Young Entrepreneur: Online >>

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