Thinking about starting your own business? Get some Free Expert Advice from the folks at Changing Course

If you’re like many people the current economy may have cost you your job – or has you concerned about the stability of your current workplace.  You’d love to start your own business but you are not sure if this is the right time.

Our colleagues over at ChangingCourse.com are offering a free 60-minute telephone seminar this Sunday on why this is the perfect time to start your own business and i wanted to tell you folks about it.

Here is their invitation describing the event:

Here’s why this is THE perfect Time to Start Your Own Business

Have you ever thought of simply putting out your shingle and starting your own business? Yet maybe your plans came to a screeching halt because of what’s going on in the economy. Well what if I told you now was THE perfect time to start your own business, would you believe me? Well, here’s the deal, it’s true, now is really the perfect time to start your business.

Did you know that some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies today were started in a down economy? This is just one of the many things you will discover when you sign up for Valerie Young’s call this Sunday, April 5 at 7pm. You’ll hear Valerie interview Tom Kennedy (a former consulting client of hers who took the ideas he got from our brainstorming session and ran with them) as well as two graduates of her Outside the Job Box Career Expert Training, Cheryl Young and Sherrie Porterfield – each with very different personalities, perspectives, and approaches!

All three of these individuals offer a unique perspective on why now is the perfect time to start your own home-based business. Read more

IRS Tax Extension Application

IRS Tax Extension Application.

I hate to feed anyone’s procrastination habit, because sometimes i get it bad (did someone say boomshine?), but the link above will take you to an IRS approved provider website that will file an income tax deadline extension for you FREE of charge if you do it before April 20th. The vast majority of extension requests are accepted and they postpone your tax filing deadline for 6 months, until October 15th.

Taxextension.com is basically an automated, online way to file a Form 4868. As far as i’m concerned, the ability to efile tax forms goes firmly in the ‘computers make my life better category’. The jury is still out on Boomshine…

Growing Your Business in Difficult Economic Times

Cut costs, improve productivity, and actually GROW your business while your competition is operating in survival mode.

Whether you view the current situation in the global marketplace as a depression, a recession, or simply an economic crisis; no one can argue that there aren’t several important indicators of a worldwide economic downturn.

These include high oil prices, which contribute to both high food prices and a declining dollar value; a sub-prime mortgage crisis; increasing unemployment; the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers; a substantial credit shortage leading to the bankruptcy of several large and well established investment banks and an intervention totalling HUNDREDS of BILLIONS that has yet to slow plunging stock values or stabilize a faltering real estate market.

Each and every one of us has begun to feel the effects – in our neighborhoods, at the grocery store, in the job market…

What does all of this mean for your business? Should you let employees go? Put a freeze on hiring? Cut back on marketing? Backburner plans to explore new markets?

Trimming fat from your business is smart in lean times; but there is a danger of entering a downward spiral which leads to going out of business. When revenues are low you cut back on marketing – which brings less clients, which in turn decreases revenue further – leading to more cutbacks. A few cycles of this and you’ll be out of business.

It is only natural to revisit your overall business strategy when market conditions change, but it is important to recognize that slow economical conditions may offer a significant opportunity to improve your business model. Read more

Starting or Growing a Virtual Assistant Business

We got a comment on one of our Podcasts from a visitor named Collette Schultz. Her question about the Virtual Assistant industry is one we get pretty frequently, so I thought I’d include my reply here as a post.

Collette Schultz on October 26th, 2008 11:21 pm

As a new virtual assistant subcontractor I’m getting into researching the VA industry through podcasts. I listened to this one last week and am bound to hear more. What I find most frustrating is knowing where to start. Do you offer a beginners series to help getting started?

While we have never blogged or done a segment specifically on Virtual Assisting, I do not believe it differs greatly from other types of internet based businesses: that is to say that it relies mostly on abilities and training, networking, and marketing.

There are several places people can obtain training to become a virtual assistant or, as in Collette’s case, improve their existing skill base; some of them offer certification:

Certification Programs

• AssistU
• International Virtual Assistants Association (IVAA)
• VA Certification
• Certified Virtual Professional (Thanks to Collette for this resource!)

Our Jumpstart Kit is also intended to improve people’s fundamental skills with virtual teamwork and remote work technology. Also, Phil wrote a book called Lose Your Commute about finding legitimate work-from-home opportunities in general and it contains a lot of insights and resources. Read more

Dropping Outlook for Webmail (an update on my adventures in cloud computing)

It was almost a year ago when I posted about my 60 day experiment to stop using Outlook as my primary email program and contact manager and instead moved to a web-based email system. Several people commented on that posting and I felt it was time for an update.

Let me say that after having moved my email onto the web I have been much happier and accessing my email is much more flexible. In fact, that move has prompted me to move  other services I need, such as my calendar and to do list, to the cloud.

So let me briefly review what is no longer an experiment, but is now the new way I am working.  First off, as for email, although I started by using Yahoo Mail Plus – after about 4 months I decided to give Google Apps and Gmail a try.  There were a number of things I liked about Yahoo but there were some things that made me crazy too – such as often losing a message while writing it for no reason (the screen would just go blank), plus a big problem: the Yahoo Calendar. This is where Yahoo lost me as a user and Google won. Read more

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