Although being self employed and owning a business provides one with several financial and personal freedom, but these paybacks only kick in when the business you are running gets conventional and established. Starting your own business requires lot more than what one has always thought or heard of — to just get your business off the ground, you will find yourself probably spending more time than you had ever imagined or spent on anything else. This phase of the start-up business is very critical for it takes an entrepreneur through an assessment of his acumen and well positioned endurance. As we think that quitting a 9-5 life and starting own business is a relaxation, let me bring to the knowledge of all that it’s not uncommon for the new business owners to undergo compounded hardships while working to build a successful business.

Before you run out and decide to be your own boss, there are 5 questions to be answered for yourself. Although it would be tempting for one to lie to all these question, but it’s essential that you be brutally honest with yourself.

1.  Are You Self Motivated?
Starting your business means you act as your own boss and there is no one above you getting the things done on the right time. In such a case to do well as a small business owner it is necessary to be self driven to succeed. When so many people wish not to have a boss, there is a reason that most people do have one – it is just because they need someone in order to get work done. You may have a wonderful business concept, but that doesn’t ensure you of possessing the special mix of leadership, drive, persuasiveness and keen intuition needed to turn an idea to a lucrative business.

In order to be an entrepreneur of a successful business it takes years filled with setbacks, hardship and little reward. A startup has to face a lot of discouragements from repeated rejections from clients to potential customers not returning calls and obviously various business sours. There’s no other way striving over these problems until you become your own inspiration or a self motivated personality.

2.  Are you backed with strong communication skills and can get along with people well?

In most of the job, an employee has only to interact with a group of people. Hence it makes easy to work as one may adapt himself, over a period of time, to the specific personality. Conversely, an entrepreneur, who is a link between all the functions of a business, has to constantly work with groups of people that may see things differently than him/ her. From the company point of view the owner got to have a personality that facilitates him to get along with his co-workers well.

Having a view of a structural business from the perspective of its goal (i.e., revenue earning), nearly everything relies on selling capability of the entrepreneur.  It requires strong interpersonal skill to make people feel as strongly as you do towards your vision. When it comes to sell your idea to the investors, sell your mission and vision to your team members and ultimately selling your product/ service to the consumers; proper communicating tools play a deciding role. Therefore, it is necessary that you get along people easily to embrace infinite business prosperity.

There are 3 more questions yet to come, until then wait for my next post soon

With this though, I (as a web designer,) decided to optimize the size of all graphics that I use to build my webpages. For doing so, I came across many ways to do it and many tools which help you do it. I am listing the 6 excellent tools to do so.

Non-techie people can also use it while mailing/uploading photos taken from Digital Camera – which are generally huge in size!

Yahoo Smush.it

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/

Radical Image Optimization Tool

RIOT is free program designed to efficiently optimize images for the Web

http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/

PNGOUT

PNGOUT is a tool which can optimize PNG files created by other programs.

http://www.advsys.net/ken/util/pngout.htm

Online Image Optimizer- GIF, JPG, and PNG

Image Optimizer lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site.

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/

PNGGauntlet

PNGGauntlet is a .NET program that uses Ken Silverman’s PNGOUT to optimize PNG files.
http://brh.numbera.com/software/pnggauntlet/

SuperPNG

SuperPNG is a free Adobe Photoshop plug-in for using PNG (“ping”) files.

http://www.fnordware.com/superpng/

I hope that you find the above tools useful. Even if you don’t, Adobe Photoshop has “Save for Web” for you – stay with it!

Fundamentally, both of these formats compress an image to make it web worthy. Any file with a .jpeg or.gif extension is recognized as an image file by a browser. Only when a site loads quickly into a browser we tend to declare it good in spite of the best functionalities operating otherwise. Agreed? Therefore, it is necessary that the file size of the web page remains small.

Here are stated few points that one needs to know about JPEG & GIF: (a subtle reminder for those tech people who know it )

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)

• JPEG uses a glossy compression scheme. This signifies that some data will be lost during the process of compression. The quality is inversely affected as more and more compression is done.
• When compared to GIF; browser takes a longer time to display JPEG file.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)

• Image is compressed using LZW compression scheme through GIF. Confused? Even I was when I first came across it. It means that the quality of the image does not degrade when it is compressed.
• GIF89a format incorporates transparency. Isn’t it great? Especially when graphic has to be blended in with the background.
• GIF allows simple animation except the more advanced Flash movies.

When to use what:

One of the worst mistakes that anyone can make is to choose the wrong format for a particular type of image since each of the formats (viz., JPEG & GIF) has its own particular advantage over the other.

GIF files support a maximum of 256 colors. This makes it practical for almost all graphics except photographic images. The GIF format is excellent at compressing images with no gradations and relatively lesser colors in it. While GIF’s may win out with the non-dithering and fewer color images, JPEG with its support for 16.7 million colors is king for dithered continuous tone images (Example:  Photographs). Hopefully, by now you must have determined the difference between JPEG and GIF usage.

NOTE: While using JPEG format, be sure to save the original file because once you lower the quality of an image and save it, the extra data cannot be regained.

Technology is at our disposal and the smartest web graphics can be obtained by complete knowledge and selective usage of the prior. So get going to harness tech understanding for spectacular results

How to get the most out of your time?
From my last month’s experience I will recommend you to leverage and audit your time. NO, it definitely doesn’t mean spending more time to manage time!

The first step in doing so is to keep a log of duration spent on performing various activities in a day. This one-week ‘Time Management Assessment’ will give you a snapshot of how you have been actually spending your time. Keeping track of your hours for a week is not difficult I guess (it is only when a systematic method of doing it is not followed). After a week time I promise results will be surprising.

I will lead you into a systematic way to feed your time record for next 7 days. Rather than covering all your activities, you could conduct an audit of the tasks that are most important for you. To record time spent at work, make a chart — list the days of the week down the rows and across the top column pen down the major categories that you spend time on. You can also review your personal time as well to get the complete picture. At the end of the day and at the end of the week, add the total hour spent on each category. After a week of such practice, ask yourself — Is this how you want to spend your time? Are you apparently busy? Or, do you have no time to complete your unfinished work?

Keeping a time log does nothing other than helping you figure out how you have been ‘using or wasting’ your time. Even though till now you must have been complaining every alternative person in your life about shortage of time and pending works, but after such an assessment I assure you had known the solutions them.

Time Management is very important and it makes every moment of your life count! Are you still not managing your precious time?

Just few days back when I pondered upon this issue to draw away the conclusion to the ever existing question of my mind, was when I jotted down these “5 Golden Do’s” that should be embraced by any business process to flourish.

Once you reckon this out, you can convert the ultimate challenge into the ultimate opportunity.

Growth being the foremost focus

The focus should always be on “growth”. At times, one may sacrifice profit in the business, but at no cost should the “growth focus” be lost. Losing one customer is most sorrowful and bad for the organization, since developing new and fresh customers is 5 times costlier. Expansion is the keyword that all the entrepreneurs should have in their mind as a long term goal of the business if he/she want it to survive in this evolving competitive market structure.

Think differently but rationally

Imaginations and dreams have no limits. It is said that entrepreneurs are those who dream dreams and are crazy enough to try to make them come true. They have to create like God, command like a king, and work like a slave. This capability of turning dreams to reality could only be the outcome of fruitful thinking. They must also be aware that the speed of thoughts is much higher than the speed of light. That is more important. This not only just requires one to think creative but also aspires him/her is to innovate and concurrently plan out the implementation of such thoughts to action.

Have a flexible outlook

Another aspect is commitment to learning. Learning here is more than training or education. An open attitude, curiosity and, last but not the least, taking the initiative is the part of learning. It is the willingness to look at the problems from different angles that matters the most. As long as an entrepreneur is ready to look at the difficult situation from various perspectives of his knowledge for an answer, till then he is sure to land up finding the most appropriate solution to it. This attitude of commitment to learning ultimately pools in to his experience and acumen which is useful for business to overcome any setbacks in the real battleground.

Maintaining the dynamism of the business

The time of earning money by cheating the customers intelligently has gone forever. The whole community is becoming dynamic and so called ‘technologic’. With the ingress of IT, there is now a race between “bytes” and “molecules”. Both of them want to convert to money where the new economy sectors like IT is creating visible wealth and high paying employment. Hence such IT start-ups are forming a significant part of the growth in an economy. Keeping this in mind, the economic paradigm of the business has to be in accordance with the prevailing technology. Businessmen or entrepreneurs should very well know that the key to survival is understanding that business must embrace new technologies and processes constantly.

Adopt distinctive positioning and marketing strategies

Once the goal & mission and technology choices are fixed, the entrepreneur has to succeed by effective market research and control. A very good sense of timing and game plan for decision making is a must. Supreme level of marketing strategy has to be adopted after assessing the market situation. Competition is the fact of life, fact of business. Not only do the number of competitors increase day by day, but the nature of competition undergoes rapid changes. Thus pricing and positioning is to be fixed by doing economic assessment. In such a strategy formulation, one has to develop a core benefit proposition by offering value addition.

The points that I mentioned above are not published in any book of management or business, but they are what I personally draw from my limited knowledge of the past. Although these golden 5 do’s are not any standard form of making a business successful and flourishing, yet I believe that however large or small a business is it has to stick to these basics always.