Seven Rules For Starting a Business in 2009

Every year the number of people starting up their own businesses increases.

The three main demographics for start-ups are

* Baby Boomers past their sell buy date in big corporates but with skills their erstwhile employers still need
* Moms (or Dads) who'd rather spend time home with the kids and still work
* Tech Grads who'd rather "compute" than "commute"

This is all part of a general direction toward "hollow" corporations where senior execs and accountants outsource everything they can. They can reduce fixed costs, overhead, and be more agile in resourcing projects.

There's some good news for the Solopreneurs as well. Avoiding the daily commute, getting off the corporate tread mill, keeping more of what they make, taking a vacation or a day on the golf course once in a while.

But going solo isn't totally a bed of roses. Most of the support structures we rely on when working in a corporation are suddenly missing.

* In the past we looked after Strategy, or Tactics, or Execution, or Administration. Now we have to worry about all of these, and it's our nut we lose when it goes wrong.

* Few of us are properly trained as pure managers - keeping all those plates spinning isn't as easy when one guy has to do everything, all at the same time. Things don't get handled by organizational structures any more. In small businesses everybody does a bit of everything.

* IT support suddenly isn't there - all that complicated stuff we took for granted now takes up our customer time (or more often our "me" time.

* We're suddenly not part of the "networks" we used to rely on - we're outsiders.

* We don't have others bringing in the revenue - whether we like it or not, or are good at it or not, we end up "selling".

We can make our lives easier if we can change our thinking - from corporate executive, part of a team, going along to get along, to being connected to the rest of the world.

The world is full of people like us, with the same interests, challenges and needs for support.

There are thousands of new businesses providing services to the Solopreneurs, adding value and reducing costs.

The Internet is moving at the speed of light. If we have an insoluble problem today, we'll wait a bit, somebody will solve it for us, on the Internet.

If we can harness what's happening on the Internet, and exploit it to our business advantage, we'll replace the corporate structure benefits we miss and expand our networks and opportunities in the process.

Here's a set of basics anybody going solo might want to consider:

1. Ditch the Desktop.
* There's nothing more limiting than all that desktop, office productivity software. It's expensive, complicated, but worst of all, it stops us being "connected". Only be being permanently connected can be take full advantage of what's happening out there.

2. Look for Services - not Solutions.
* Solopreneurs don't need accounting systems or order processing, or even typical project management and CRM tools. They do need services to help them with these needs, but they're all available on the Internet for free, or close to it.

3. Look for Value Add
* Every service should add value to the basic requirement. For example we all need billing software. If we choose a billing service that hooks up to merchant processing and or PayPal we don't need to keep accounts receivables records. If we choose a planning or management system we should find one with "best practice built in". We can forget the training course, and just use the software.

4. Forget the Marketing Site - get a Blog.
* Nobody's interested in words we pay a copywriter for. They want to know what we think. Blogs are free, hosted, configurable and allow us to create our own persona. With a blog we don't need sales pitches and presentations - we invite people to visit our blog where they get our best stuff, every time.

5. Get "Connected" with Social Media.
* Set up profiles with Linked In, Facebook, Community and special interest sites. Join in forums and contribute. Ask questions and answer other people's. Replace the corporate network with your own, international, group of like minded souls.

* Get into Twitter - microblogging is the fastest way to find out about anything.
6. Get into "Video".
* If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million - even if it's just a video of our slide presentation.

7. Publish what you know about in blogs and articles.
* This is your credibility, and it's permanent so worth doing well.

Some of the services the start-up might want to consider are the ones we use every day in our business. Here's the list:

* Front Office Box for managing relationships, plans and schedules (it's ours so we would)
* Google Aps for Email, Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations and web sites (we do our accounting in the spreadsheets)
* Wordpress and Blogger for blogs
* Twitter for microblogging
* You Tube and Screencast for video
* Jing for screen capture and video
* Skype for phones
* Cashboard for billing
* PayPal for merchant services
* Ning for our own user group forum