What To Do If Your Entrepreneurship Fails The First Time

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Making your way as an entrepreneur is never going to be easy. Sure, you might have a “head for business”, and that makes the process more manageable without a doubt, but without putting in a lot of hard work the chances of sustained success will inevitably be limited. This is important to remember, because the path to business success is littered with companies and individuals who had good ideas and vision but when frustrated at an early stage failed to drive forwards in the way they would have hoped to. It is easy to become discouraged, especially when there is money in the equation, but the people who find real success are the ones who realize that problem solving is an indispensable part of business.

One of the major problems that arises in business is a slow start. You have an idea and find a way to put it into action. You have good contacts and feel you have advertised well, but for one reason or another there is not the take-up on your offers that you would have hoped for. This is a situation that can arise for any number of reasons. You need two things to overcome this problem, and they are very different things. Firstly you need to be able to analyse well. There will be a reason things didn’t go as hoped. Did you think through your advertising campaign? Have you priced your service too high? Was there some slippage between what you promised and what you could deliver? These are just three reasons, and it may be that you find another reason.

The second thing you need is the tenacity to avoid getting discouraged. A business going wrong can be one of the most painful things to happen to a person, after divorce, bereavement and serious injury. It can be hard to separate the business from your personal identity, so if you feel that people do not like the business, you might extrapolate from that a personal slight against you. In actual fact, there is every reason why things might have failed in spite of you rather than because of you. Be forensic in looking for reasons why things went wrong, positive in applying a solution and honest in sticking to it.

Think about other things that didn’t quite take off at the first attempt but which are managing perfectly well now. Think about businesses and people who even went bankrupt once or more before they pulled things around, like Walt Disney and Henry Ford. That is the level of tenacity you need. No-one’s saying you should push things until you go bankrupt, but if you can rally yourself when things don’t begin encouragingly, you can be successful. In fact, it may be that it is what makes you successful. Every time you solve a problem, you learn something – something which is almost certain to be useful later on in your life. For this reason you need to roll with the punches from time to time. Combine wisdom with perseverance, and you will succeed.
First Published: Aug 8, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

Do You Know Your Debt To Income Ratio?

Debt/Equity

Your debt to income ratio shows your financial health and lenders use this ratio to evaluate your creditworthiness. This ratio tells lenders what percentage of your monthly income can be used for your loan payments (or mortgage payments).

As it sounds, your debt to income ratio compares your debt to income. This is a monthly figure. To calculate debt to income ratio, take your monthly debt payments (minimum payments) and divide it by your gross monthly income.

Example: Monthly debt payments include:

•  Credit card payments, loan payments, car payments etc.

• Don’t forget to add investment income

• Commission

• Rental income etc

Let me give you an example. Let’s say your gross (before taxes) monthly income is $1000

And your monthly payment is $100. Your debt to income ratio is $100 divided by $1000 = 10%.

Tips: When you add monthly mortgage payment to above to above calculation, it becomes the back end debt ratio. If you remove monthly mortgage payment, it becomes the front end debt ratio. Front end debt ratio tells lenders how much monthly mortgage payment you can afford. To qualify for a mortgage, you would require something like 25% to 28% front end debt ratio. With a mortgage, back end ratio should not go beyond 45%. So you can see that in general the lower your debt to income ratio, the better you are healthy financially.

First Published: Oct 17, 2007 ADawnJournal.com

How Web Entrepreneurs Make Money Online By Striking The Iron While It's Hot

Strike While The Iron Is Hot

The definition of an entrepreneur is someone who will take a risk to make a profit. Although the image that the description conjures up might give the impression that to be an entrepreneur you need to be somewhat shady, this is not necessarily so. In fact, shady characters tend to become shady so as to avoid the risk created by their initiatives, letting someone else take the fall for their misplaced bet, as it were. An entrepreneur spots the opportunity to make an honest buck and goes for it. If they fail, at least they go down swinging, while if they succeed they have done so on their own terms.

In a majority of cases, then, entrepreneurs become so by striking while the iron is hot. They recognise a trend or a demand and look at how they can supply that demand, how they can tap into that trend. Because so much money is on the Internet these days, a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit of our time is directed there too. A web entrepreneur recognizes that much of the money on the Internet comes from advertising, so to make money on the Internet it is useful to find a way of harnessing that advertising. This is something that takes a bit of knowledge of website building, but not necessarily a great deal of such knowledge. It is all about how to manipulate a situation to your advantage. It relies on the creation of a blog, or a website, that people will want to visit, and the placement of appropriate ad content on the pages of that site.

The most important thing is that the site is something that will carry traffic through it. This relies on it being on a relevant topic. The more “of its time” the topic is, the better – if it can be arranged around the time of a major sporting event, for example, you will be able to bring people in on the basis of that event, and when they click through your advertisements they will earn you money – particularly if they make a purchase as a result of that click. This may sound cynical – cashing in on an event in which you may not have an interest, but the key point is that the medium will reward a good website. The more people who stick around to read your site, the more clicks you will get and the more sales you will generate. Consequently, you will make more money if you write a better website.

If you know something about your subject, it will help. There are countless people who have tried to start websites to cash in on an event, thinking that it was guaranteed money – but aficionados of a topic will be quite discriminating in terms of sites, and if it insults their intelligence they will give yours a miss. You may discover that you have a talent for what you are doing. If that turns out to be the case, so much the better, as there is certainly money to be made from it

First Published: July 19, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

New Airline Foreign Ownership & International Tourism

Canada Introduces New Airline Foreign Ownership Rule

The Canada Transportation Act will go through a few amendments and one of them includes foreign ownership limits for airlines. This amendment will increase the foreign ownership limit of airlines to 49 percent (from 24 percent). This change will open up more competition in the Canadian skies and is definitely good news for travellers, both foreign and Canadians.

Airlines Will Not Be Allowed to Bump Passengers In Canada

Another change is coming to the industry under a new passenger Bill of Rights in the wake of United Airlines bumping off a passenger and causing serious injury. Passengers who have purchased tickets cannot be barred or bumped from planes just because airlines oversold tickets. Those who are agreeing to be bumped off voluntarily will have minimum levels of compensation.

Some other proposed changes under these new acts will be to create clear standards of treatment and compensation, such as lost or damaged luggage, delays while siting on the tarmac, voluntarily giving up a seat, etc. These new legislations are expected to take place in 2018.

International Tourism Increases in Canada

Canada’s fifteen-year tourism slump since 9/11 seems to be coming to an end. A recently published report by RBC Economics Research reveals that more tourists are coming to Canada and one in five tourists are coming from other countries than America.

The falling loonie is making visits to Canada more attractive from foreign countries. For example, tourists from China and South Korea were up 23 percent last year. Also, tourists from Mexico and the UK increased sharply, especially from the UK—which stayed at an eight year high last year.

Mega sites like the New York Times and Lonely Planet both currently have Canada on their list of top places to visit for 2017.

CI Financial's Unsolicited, Hostile Bid

CI Financial announced yesterday an unsolicited hostile offer to acquire all of DundeeWealth Inc for $20.25 per Dundee share. This offer follows the news last week that Dundee Wealth had reached a deal with Scotia Bank to sell Dundee Bank for $260 million and 18% of Dundee Wealth for $348 million (27.3 million shares at $12.76 each). Scotia’s offer represents a 5% premium to Dundee’s share while CI’s offer represents a 52% premium.

Not all CI’s bids were successful in the past. Let’s look at both successful and unsuccessful bids.

Successful Bids

CI bought the followings in the past:

1999 - BPI Financial Corporation

2002 - Spectrum Investment Management Limited

Clarica Diversico Ltd.

2003 - Assante Corporation

Synergy Asset Management Inc.

Skylon Capital Corp.

2004 - IQON Financial Management Inc.

Synera Financial Services Inc.

2007 - Rockwater Capital Corporation

Unsuccessful Bids

2000 - Mackenzie Financial Corporation

2005 - Clarington Corp.

Amvescap PLC(AIM/TRIMARK)

The major shareholder of Dundee Wealth is Dundee Corporation. Dundee Corporation owns 55% of the outstanding shares. Ned Goodman and his family created and still operate and control Dundee. It is unlikely that they would give up full control of Dundee Wealth (to CI) but they seem to be comfortable giving up 18% control to Scotia. I will be surprised if this bid turns out to be a successful bid for CI. Whether this bid becomes successful or not, one thing readers can be assured of is that this will not be the last bid attempted by CI Financial as CI has a history of making hostile (and friendly) bids for financial companies.

First Published: Sep 26, 2007