Start Your Own Business, Be Your Own Boss

We talk about what type of work you might want to do, dispel some common myths, and help you use your passions to pick a small business you want to focus on.

Hone in on what type of business you should have by condensing your knowledge, skills, and strengths into a great list. Then, rate the list to narrow down your possibilities even further.

In this exercise you will create your list of business ideas from your skills, knowledge, and strengths list.

In this exercise you will rate the items in your Sandwich Menu for how likely they are to make money and how much you would like doing that work.

In this exercise you will pick one of the ideas to work with for the rest of the course.

Now that you know what your focus will be, we talk about how to make a list of potential specific products and services for you to sell.

In this exercise you will create your list of products and services.

We talk about some general pricing guidelines, and outline some business terms and concepts that may be useful to you.

Use a Product Revenue Spreadsheet to model your costs for each product or service. We walk you through how to make one.

In this exercise you will create a product revenue spreadsheet for one or more of your products.

Let's make a budget! It will help you plan and determine how profitable your business can and will be.

In this exercise you will create a budget for your planned business.

We'll explain the importance of keeping a list of clients and customers, and help you build a client book.

In this exercise you will start a client book.

How much should you save? How high can your profits be? After this point you should be done with the modeling and feeling good about how your numbers look.

Where is this all going? What is your end goal? What are you doing this all for?

We discuss general foundational ideas about companies, and cover the first type of business, a sole proprietorship.

This lecture covers Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) in all of their spendor and glory.

We cover how corporations work, and why you might want one.

We tackle the benefits of S-Corporation taxation, and briefly talk about other forms of business entities that exist.

We cover the main business managment concepts that are important in making sure your business runs smoothly and efficiently.

In this lecture you will learn about the web decisions that you need to make about having an online presence.

In this lecture you will learn about the choices you have for productivity software and what software you should consider.

In this lecture you will learn about intellectual property and how to protect what you create through patents, trademarks, and copyright.

In this section you learn about how to write a legally strong and practical contract for the work you are going to do with customers.

In this lecture you will learn some tips and techniques to use if you have to negotiate contracts and master service agreements with large corporations.

In this lecture you will learn about what kind of business insurance you may need, and when to go get help from experts.

In this lecture you will learn what to do if a client isn't paying you.

This lecture introduces marketing and sales for the small business, and shows you how to create target audience personas to guide your marketing decisions.

In this exercise you create target audience personas for your business idea.

This lecture contains the details of how you go about deciding how to market to each of your target audience segments.

In this exercise you will match your products and services to your target audience personas.

In this exercise you will decide on a migration plan for each persona and product from free to small purchase to core product or service.

In this lecture you will learn how to put your marketing ideas into a plan over time, and also get tips for selling.

In this exercise you will create your marketing plan.

In this lecture you will learn about some typical growing pains that small businesses encounter, and how to make sure you get through them successfully.

Worrying about what you will do if things don't work out saps your time and energy. In this lecture you will learn about what to do if things aren't going well, but if you follow all the other guidelines in the course you won't need this one!

You made it!