Empowrd App Promotes Civic Engagement | Geekz Watch
November 30, 2016
Interested in a Transportation Business? Here’s Some Tips
November 30, 2016
If you’ve got the entrepreneurial spirit, you know that you have to follow your own path. You can’t show up for work everyday, working for somebody else. You’ve got your own passions and drives and you’ll stop at nothing to turn yourself into a success.
For many entrepreneurs, it’s not so much about being one’s own boss that’s the reason they do what they do. It’s just that they’re dreamers, and they’re unwilling to accept an answer of “no” when they think of something new and amazing that could be achieved. To their mind, if there isn’t a way of solving a problem right now, it’s their job to find one.
So how do entrepreneurs turn their passions into amazing businesses? Let’s take a look.
Write A Business Plan
Julie Bombacino is a mom from the Chicago area. She is the brains behind the business, Real Food Blends, a company that makes shelf-stable but healthy foods. She saw that there was a need to disrupt the food market after her son fell ill after being fed processed food. All the cheapest food in the supermarket is designed to be able to be kept on supermarket shelves for weeks, if not months at a time. By having a long use-by date, the food is much cheaper for the superstores to process, and means that they don’t have to worry so much about waste. Customers get a lower price, and businesses offer a more efficient product.
But, as Bombacino noticed, the cost to human health is enormous. Processed foods contain lots of salts, sugar, and preservatives. These ingredients are included in processed food to make it last a long time and still taste good once it is opened, but they are harmful to the human body in just about every way. She saw an opportunity here. Was it always necessary for processed food to be such a drag on health? Or could you make healthy meals that were also shelf stable, to avoid some of the negative ramifications of processed food?
Everybody told Bombacino that her plan to provide the world with healthy, shelf stable foods was impossible. But she was a woman on a mission. The first thing she did was to write a business plan. How exactly would her venture unfold, and did the finances of shelf-stable foods really add up? Her business plan allowed her to work through and critique her own thought processes. During the writing, she found herself thinking of all sorts of new things, like the fact that she had to do market research and how she would actually produce the food itself. It turned out that only one of her investors read the plan, showing that it really was a way for her to formalize her thinking.
Create An Advisory Board
Turning your passion into a business that actually functions is a mammoth undertaking. People with passions often know an enormous amount about the passions themselves, but they don’t always know much about how to market them to a wider audience. Bombacino is a case in point. She was passionate about good food and healthy eating, but she didn’t know much about how the food industry worked or what products people would be willing to buy. As a result, she decided to gather up as many experts as she could to help guide her in her creation of her new business. She looked for experts on food, nutrition, and operations and then she held meetings with these people in which she fired ideas off and waited to see what they would say in response. She was then able to use the information that these people gave her to find more people in her thriving, local business community. As a result of her efforts, her investors felt more confident in Bombacino’s capacity to navigate the food market and get a return on their investments.
Buy A Franchise
One of the options for people wanting to get into the food business is to start a franchise. Currently, there are dozens of chains that operate franchises all over the country. As this site http://www.incomestore.com buying franchises points out, franchise owners don’t actually own the business itself. Rather, they get to access the businesses’ brand, supply chain, and processes without having to work it all out themselves. This is, of course, a way in which Bombacino could have made her life a lot easier. Instead of having to build up her enterprise from scratch, she could have simply purchased a franchise with a similar company doing a similar thing to her passion. If it was healthy food she was interested in, there are plenty of choices of chains out there to start a franchise, like Freshii.
Hire Professionals
Finding her way through the business world was ultimately a lot harder than Bombacino intended. She soon realized that she needed the help of lots of professionals, each with their own expertise outside her business. She found herself regularly going back and forth with her attorney and her accountant. As a result, she saw the benefit in paying these people to be able to access them, as and when she needed them. According to Bombacino, the last thing that she wanted was to have to start over again every time she needed a piece of advice.
Piggyback On Other People’s Brand Equity
Franchising is one way to piggyback on the brand success of others, but it should be noted that it is not the only way. For instance, if you’re just starting up a business, it can be difficult to cement your business as a quality outfit by going it solo. As a result, it often pays to collaborate with another brand, using their good name to bolster your own appeal. This is exactly what Bombacino ended up doing with her food business. After few months, she managed to land some pretty big distribution deals with some well-known companies in the industry. From here, she was able to use their marketing clout and recognized names to boost the appeal of her own brand according to http://www.inc.com/.
