Urgency Flow

Resources such as time and money are in tight supply for most start ups and existing small businesses. These constraints often mean the difference between expanding into new markets or struggling to survive. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Small business is a community of like minded business owners. One of the best means to expand your business is to partner up with similar or complementary businesses.

Business partnerships and joint ventures offer a means for businesses to pool resources and grow business. Additional benefits including the exposure to larger shared customer base, decreased marketing costs and the possibility to utilize the talents of others.

This article was originally published on sbinformation.about.com

I’ve said many times that what really matters in business planning is the planning, not just the plan. This time around I’d like to go into more detail about that moment of truth when you’re working your plan, time has passed, but the plan is out of synch with reality. What do you do then?

Just asking this question means you’re already on the right track. You can’t get to this point without having done several things right: Read more

This article was originally written by Tim Berry and published on entrepreneur.com

Thinking outside the box is more than just a business cliché. It means approaching problems in new, innovative ways; conceptualizing problems differently; and understanding your position in relation to any particular situation in a way you’d never thought of before. Ironically, its a cliché that means to think of clichéd situations in ways that aren’t clichéd.

We’re told to “think outside the box” all the time, but how exactly do we do that? How do we develop the ability to confront problems in ways other than the ways we normally confront problems? How do we cultivate the ability to look at things differently from the way we typically look at things?

Thinking outside the box starts well before we’re “boxed in” – that is, well before we confront a unique situation and start forcing it into a familiar “box” that we already know how to deal with. Or at least think we know how to deal with.

Here are 11 ways to beef up your out-of-the-box thinking skills. Make an effort to push your thinking up to and beyond its limit every now and again – the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation that “everybody knows” how to solve. Read more

This article was originally published on lifehack.org and written by Dustin Wax

Earlier this month we wrote about Cool Business Idea and ten teen entrepreneurs, now it’s time for another list. The list of totally stupid online ideas. Ideas that created millionaires. From offering an Alaska or North Pole address for sending Christmas cards to selling Antenna Balls, and from  fake wishbones to an online dating community for HIV positive persons. All of these ideas have one thing in common, they started online and turned out to be a huge business opportunity. The full list, created by nichegeek.com is available here.

Before you dedicate your life to crafting a business plan the length of a book, read these two paragraphs from the 1/9/07 edition of the Wall Street Journal in an article called “Enterprise: Do Start-ups Really Need Formal Business Plans

A study recently released by Babson College analyzed 116 businesses started by alumni who graduated between 1985 and 2003. Comparing success measures such as annual revenue, employee numbers and net income, the study found no statistical difference in success between those businesses started with formal written plans and those without them… Read more

This article was originally written by Guy Kawasaki and appeared on his blog: http://blog.guykawasaki.com

Feeling shorthanded these days? Wondering if your business is truly meeting your customers’ needs? If you answered yes to either of those questions, have you asked all your customers to help you?

Increasingly, companies big and small are doing just that. It’s called crowd-sourcing — enlisting the help of a large group of people to do company work or shape the company agenda, rather than delegating tasks to an employee or two, or perhaps an ad agency. The term was coined byWired magazine writer Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.

This blog was originally written by Carol Tice on September 24, 2009 and published on blog.entrepeneur.com

Tim Ferris, a lifestyle designer and full-time risktaker wrote an interesting blog about Bill Gates. He says ‘Growing up as I did, with an early interest in business, it was almost impossible not to envy people like Gates, and even measure myself against them.’ But this is not another Bill Gates romance. This article is about the truth behind Bill Gates. He is not, as is stated in  many books and articles, a poor school drop-out who made it to richman’s world. It was his family’s money and position that provided cover for his youthful computing hijinks and helped assure that he would have the best education available. As for the famous Harvard dropout story, he didn’t really. Rather, he took a formal “leave of absence,” a kind of emotional umbilical cord that kept him tied to Harvard long after he had vacated the campus, just in case things didn’t work out. And of course Gates is still one of the most succesfull businessman, something Ferris also stated. But the underlying thought witch can be extracted from this article might be that succesfull entrepreneurship does not come with romanced story’s about school drop-outs, but just from basic organisations who take the risk of a business opportunity. UrgencyFlow can help you finding these opportunities and taking the risks. Not only taking them, we’ll beat them for you aswell.