One Coach

Small-business owners face many challenges and decisions, in marketing, sales, management and other areas. Even if you excel in all of these, your hard work may be for naught if you should encounter legal difficulties. 

If you are faced with  penalties, liabilities and lawsuits, your personal and business assets may be in jeopardy.  The issues identified here are generally not “fun” to deal with.  But it is better to deal with them now, rather than face potentially door-closing consequences later.

Here are some legal issues that all small-business owners should be aware of. We’ll introduce more legal topics and explore these in more depth in subsequent posts. 

Forming an entity.  Even solo entrepreneurs with no employees, working out of their home, should consider forming an entity.  Why?  Creating a business entity is like creating another person – one that you control, and that is responsible for all of the financial and decision-making aspects of your business.  If you do everything through your entity (contracts, leases, bank accounts, etc.), and observe proper formalities, your personal assets will be greatly protected from liabilities caused by the business.  (All businesses create some liability, though it can range from great to small.)  Your home, your personal bank accounts – those are personal assets that could be seized by a creditor if you do not pay the business bill, or make a bad hiring decision, or for mistakes made by employees.  

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This post is the sixth in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath. See the first post in this series here.

As your own boss, it can be difficult maintaining discipline when you set up your business. It’s a case of not growing too big for your shoes. Those of you transferring over from corporate environments are especially vulnerable to this.

You may be used to a beautiful office in a downtown space with plush furniture and a polished administrative assistant. If you’re a personal financial planner, then that type of environment makes sense. Otherwise, you’re starting too rich. It just doesn’t make sense for a start-up budget.

A great way to pull back on the reigns with this is by sticking to a cash-flow program – stay away from relying on credit. Put your ego aside for revenue, otherwise you simply won’t have enough money to do business – revenue before costs, income before outcome.

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This post is the fifth in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth. See the first post in this series here.

You must spend time on developing your business strategy. Otherwise, you’ll be blindly charging ahead. You need to think about all the “if, then,” “what about this,” and “what about that” scenarios. And once you’ve developed your plans and master goals, you need to continually tweak and optimize them.

The challenge for small-business owners is finding the time to simply think and strategize about their business – too much motion without actual forward progress. You absolutely must set aside some solid time on a regular basis to generate and finesse your strategy – turn your cell phone off, ignore your overflowing e-mail inbox, go into the office early before your client demands start flooding in.

And if you can, get some extra minds in on the brainstorm session – two minds are better than one. Spend time working on your business instead of in it.

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This post is the fourth in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth. See the first post in this series here.

As a business owner, you should have some type of business model in place. This model is usually determined by your specific unit of business (your product or service). Sometimes, you can make a huge difference in your industry by changing your unit of business.

Take for example the cement company Cemix. They came to the conclusion that just providing ready-mix concrete wasn’t good enough. They decided that people cared more about the timely delivery of the concrete mix. So they built a business model around the delivery instead of the actual product. This is also an example of changing the operating rules of your industry by altering the buyer/supplier relationship.  

A story that illustrates this mode of thinking is the Blue Mountain Arts company. They took a popular print business and expanded into a free online greeting-card business. The owner then looked to change his business model through monetizing it by pairing it with the flower industry.

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