This is an article that will answer the hot question from people – whether to start a business that you love or start a business on something that is profitable. If you confuse with this decision, I also suggest a proper way to solve the confusion in this article.

One of the hot question that most people ask when they want to start their own business is whether they should start something around what they love or something that is hot, trendy and profitable. Yes, I also think that this is a very important question to ask before you start any business. Your decision is going to be your main business theme in future.

Let’s discuss the pros and cons of each decision so you will have a clear idea on the options that you have.

Do What You Love, and the Money Will Follow You

In recent years, there are a lot of experts suggest that we should start a business around something that we love. Their advice will be “Do What You Love and the money will follow you”. This is a quite a interesting and attractive idea to start a business and it is no doubt that the book “Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow”, by Marsha Sinetar can be such as hot seller.

There are a few benefits to follow this advice:

• It may sound easier for you. I believe no people will complain if they are given a task that they love to do. I also believe that people will spend all their time on something that they love. I even believe that people will be happy if they spend time on their hobby every day and make money from it. So if you start your part time business around what you love, the chances that you will success are higher. You can spend most of your time on it without feeling any boring and weariness.

• You are the expert. If you are passionate on something, you can easily become an expert on it. Since you have spent so much time on it, your know-how, experiences and skills are higher than others. Well, people like to deal with those people they think is expert. So this is the way your part time business can grow.

Now, don’t you think it is great to start a part time business on your hobby? But please wait a minute and read on.

Yes, it may sound great that you can make money from your hobby. However, there is a myth on this – There are no guaranteed that you will succeed on this. This is because its risks!

Some of the risks are:

· The market is not big. You start a business around your passion. You passionate about it but not everyone in this world. So your market may be very niche until it is hard for you to really make money from it.

· Competition. If your hobby is too general, then chances that someone already start their business on it. If there are hundred thousands of people doing it, then the chances your business can survive will be low.

· The unexpected factors. Maybe you underestimate the cost to start your business around your hobby, or maybe you overestimate its potential, or it takes more energy and efforts to succeed. All this unexpected factors may ruin your business.

While pursuing your passion sounds great to everyone, however, there are more you have to think and plan. Maybe because of this, I found there are another group of business owners start their business in a totally different way.

Follow the Trend, the Money will Follow You Too

Generally, for this idea, you go out and find a trend which is hot or going to hot soon. Then you start building a part time business around it and make tremendous of money from it. There are many examples who have built their success using this simple theory: Jeff Bezos(Amazon), Ebay(Pierre Omidya), Michael Dell(DELL) and many others.

Some of the advantages to start a part time business are:

• It is Hot.  You are starting a business on something that is hot and highly demanded by market. That’s mean your business can grow like a fire and spread out faster than you can imagine.
• Less Effort. Sometime you don’t really have to push your business that hard as you can leverage the trend and it will push your business to the next level.
• The potential of growing. I found that many businesses that start on this way can grow to a level that is hardly achieved if you start your business with the first idea.

Of course, there are also some disadvantages too:

• It is not easy to find the hot trend. What I mean is it is not easy to find a trend that can be remained for a long time. For example, Olympic Game is a hot trend but it is a short term trend and it is hard for you to start a stable long term business on it.
• You have to be fast. Trend is just like a current and sometimes you have to act fast to capture it. But in some cases, it is hard for us if we are new to everything about business.
• Competition. Just like your hobby, some trend maybe too general until the competition is quite high.

Well, my first impression about this business starting advice is it doesn’t sound easy at all. I just think that it is quite confusing for a newbie to start business by finding a trend. So what can we do?

What I have chosen – Combine Both Advices

I knew and understand that I can start a part time business in 2 ways. I also confuse for quite some time to make my decision. I have to decide how to start my online part time business. I really don’t know what to choose. So in order to overcome this confusion, I made my decision that I can combine the 2 advices together!

First, I start a business around my passion and something that I love. This will ensure I can spend most of my time on the business (doing something I like) and learn how to run or build a business. After that, I will keep searching the trend. As my experience increased, I can start finding the trend in my business field and analysis it. Once I find the correct trend, then I will start another business according to the trend. The skill of market research is important here and we can learn it from our first passionate business.

My theory is quite simple and is easy to understand and follow. If you have any new ideas, you can share it here with us.

This is an article that talks about my personal business experience on pricing strategy for business. I will discuss the reasons why and how you should sell high in your business instead of sell low to win the price war.

In business, there are a lot of decisions that we have to make. Each decision will affect your business directly. So we must learn how to make a good decision so our business can grow faster and bigger. Besides that you also must learn how to overcome your wrong decision without letting it destroys your business. Well, we only human and we will make mistakes in anything. So we have no choice but learn how to overcome our mistakes.

Today I want to discuss one of the big decisions that you must make in business – Selling High or Selling low in your business. In other words, you must decide your pricing strategy. This is a very important decision because it will affect your business profit, marketing strategy and business model. In a nutshell, it will affect your business! 

The Pros and Cons of Selling Low 

Selling low means you sell your products or services at a low price. You will sell as low as possible to attract or maintain your sales volume. Well, since you are selling low, your profit margin is low and you have to maintain your sales volume in order to survive. In business, especially businesses that involve products, price war may happen. So if your business involves in this price war, you have to keep the price as low as possible to win it. Customers usually compare your products with other competitors and make their buying decision. Since price has some influences on people’s buying decision, so if you sell low, you may boost your sales volume immediately.

The Advantages of Selling Low for your business: 

• Because you sell low, your sales volume are usually higher compare to those sell higher than you
• Since your sales volume is high, it is easy for you to collect a big list of customer databases.
• Sometime, it is easy to sell low compare to sell high where your customer will only care about the price instead of other requirement.

The Disadvantages of Selling Low for your business: 

• Like what I said, your margin is low. So in order to survive or cover your business expenses, you must maintain your sales volume.
• In order to sell at the lowest price, you may have to purchase your inventory in volume to get a better price. So you can drop down your cost and sell lower.
• Since you are selling low, sometime it is hard for you to provide extra service to your customers as your margin is low.
   

The Pros and Cons of Selling High

Selling high, on the other hands, means you sell your products or services at a price that is high to your customers. The biggest advantage you do so is you will get a high profit from what you are selling. This will be a great cash flow for your business. The disadvantage is some customers may complain “expensive” in front of you and eventually you will lose your customers. Besides that, you will also lose in the price war.  

The Advantages of Selling High for your business:

• Since you are selling high and this will help you to have a high profit margin for your business
• You will collect and filter up a group of customers that are willing to pay more for your services or products.
• You will stand out of the price war. 

The Disadvantages of Selling Low for your business:

• If you are selling high, your sales volume will be low.
• In order to sell high, you must learn how to provide values to your customers and make them willing to pay more. This is one of the challenges of business.

The reasons why I choose to sell high 

For your information, I’m running a computer products sales and service business in day time. This is my offline business and also the only business that my mentor left for me. For your information, in my country, computer related business is a very competitive business. Because of the competition, most of my competitors will choose to sell low for their business. They sell the computer gadgets and charge their service at a very low price so that they can win in the competition. 

However, I think differently and choose the different path to sell high. Maybe I was influenced by my mentor that selling high is the way to run a business. However there are some certain points that I agree and below are some of the reasons why I do that:

1. Who can last longer? From what I saw, those who sell low cannot last very long in their business. Most of them will have to close down due to the low margin to afford the business. However, on the other hand, company like mine who sell high can last longer. 

2. Profit Margin. Selling high means I have a higher margin profit. So through this margin profit I can give a better service and quality to my customers. So I can provide more values to my customers and they are happy with my service.

3. Which one can make 1 million faster? Well I think you know the answer for this question.

4. My targeted customers. I’m actually targeting at a totally different market for my business. The market that I target is customers that are willing to spend money to get special service, save their time and help them to solve problems. I understand that computer is important in our life. So I will provide the best and the fastest service to them to save their time and reduce the down time of their computers. I know there are some customers who are willing to pay more to save their time as their time is valuable.

However, in order to sell high, I have to do extra works. First I must provide good service. Second, I must learn how to provide more and more value to my customers so that they can pay the money happily. This is one of the challenges that I’m having now – building value for customers. 

Which one to choose? 

Above are just some of my opinions and ideas on making the decision to sell high or sell low. I believe selling high is good for my business so I choose to do that. Basically there are no right or wrong in this decision. If you want to sell low, then you must change your business strategy to sell low. For example, you must learn how to increase and maintain your sales volume. Then only you can make the profits. There are a few competitors I saw in my area are doing quite well with selling low. So the most important things are your business mission, strategy and market you are targeting at.

This is an article that about how important of selling skill is to keep you survive in today’s society. If you want to make more money and have a more successful life, then you can’t miss this article. But wait a minute, the selling skill that I’m talking about is different……

I read the book rich dad poor dad in year 1998. At that time, I was 15 years old and I was in the process of making decision whether I should go to college or university for further study. In the book, Robert Kiyosaki always emphasize that the selling skill is very important and he had spend 1 year of time being salesman in Xerox to learn this skill. This is a very important living skill that everybody should learn.

From time to time, I will hear from my mentor that everything in life is sales. Yes, selling is not only applied in business but in our life. For example, you sell yourself to the boss when you go for a job interview. If you go for a date, you sell yourself to that person. If you are a teacher, you get paid because you are selling knowledge to the students. So everyone is using the selling skill in daily basic without really knowing about it.

What is Selling Skill?

When people come to words of “sell”, they will directly imagine a salesman trying to sell a product to people. Yes, in most cases, selling is a very important activity for a salesman or business. This is why there is a “sales” in the words of salesman and “sales and marketing” in the world of business.

However, in fact, selling skill is more than that.

For me, selling is a way of communication. It is about how you pass your ideas, express yourself, or pass the message to others properly. Of course, for some people, they use this skill to make money by passing the right messages to their customers about their products and make their customers pay for it. This is why it is very important in business world. But this doesn’t mean that this skill is not important for you if you are not a business owner or salesman.

Selling Skill, why it is so important?

Ok, let me discuss this how important selling skill is in 2 categories – business and real life.

Selling skill is very important in the business world. If you want to start a business, you must sell your business plan to banker so that they can give you the business loan. Then you must sell your products or services to customers so that they spend money on your business. Here selling is simply a skill that let you pass your ideas and vision properly to others and make them help you in business.

Selling is an activity that will bring money to your business. This is why a smart business owner will hire more salesmen than officers. This is because salesmen are someone who brings money to business.

There is another statement that I always hear is “There are no successful or rich people who don’t know how to sell”. I was told that if I want to be success, financial free, retire rich or have a profitable business, then I must learn how to master this skill. Today, I can tell you from my own experience that, if you want to make more money, you must learn this skill!

Selling skill is also important in our daily life. Just like what I said just now, selling means communication. From my experience, a person who good in selling or communication has more advantage than those do not. If you look at those leaders in a company, most of them are good in communication. At least they must learn how to sell their potential to others in order to get this position. This means that if you want to success in the corporate ladder , then learn how to sell and communicate is a must for you.

Let me give you another example. Don’t you agree that those people who good in communication have more friends? Because of this, he/she has more chances to get a lover! This is what I found from my experience. It is a human instinct that we love to stay with someone who is good in communication.

How to learn this skill?

After reading the book, rich dad poor dad, I know that it is very important for me to learn this skill for my life. So I decided to spend most of my time to learn this.

However the first question is how to learn this?

The Answer is very simple : STOP THINKING AND TAKE ACTION!

Selling skill or communication skill is same with other kind of skill. You need both practical and theoretical information to master it. You need theory to know how to sell and take action to gain practical experience on this. Eventually you will find your own way to sell to the top!

So in starting, I bought a few books to read. Then I join my mentor’s company and help him in his business. According to him, I have no choice but have to take action and learn it. The more people I meet, the more people I deal, the more I talk and present, the better my communication skill is. The good news is this skill can be learnt and not a kind of innateness. In addition, it is nothing about how smart you are. It is about EQ (Emotional Quotient) and not IQ (Intelligent Quotient).

After 5 years of working, today, I found that my communication skill is improved! Not only I can sense this but my family, friends also can feel this. This is what I gain from hard works and I can tell you loudly that you can learn this if you want to.

I’m not saying that you must learn this skill like me, go out and work as a salesman. Instead what I suggest is you can follow the 5 steps below to learn this:

1. Buy some books and read
2. Just find a friend and sell what you learn and know.
3. Try your best to negotiate the best price every time you buy something
4. Be active and sociable – always be the first one who talk in a group!
5. Volunteer yourself to participate in any function especially presentation for your company

Conclusion: No More What If

“I want to do this but I am scared to take the first step.”

Did you have any similar sentence come to your mind before? Think back to your first date, your first stage performance or your first interview. Can you remember how nervous and uncertain you can feel? Those feeling often come with a new activity or something new. Everyone will feel this just because it is new.

But once you take the first step and action, then everything will become easier for you. Just break the barrier and you will get used with it. The best cure for fear is action! 

PS: Now you understand why people choose steady instead of improvement.

This is an article that I write to answer a 19 years old boy’s question in richdad forum. He was asking :

I am looking for anyone to point me in the correct direction, my goal is to be financially independent by 25. I just recently joined this forum, I have done some research on recommended books and such, but just do not know what to do. I have no need for inspirational or motivational materials, I have plenty of that. I need a starting point, somewhere to begin my work.

I am thinking high-risk stocks, but do not know much about the stock market. Some friends and I were talking about real estate, but do no know much about that either. I am willing to learn anything. Any books that will go more in depth with these sort of things (i.e. termonology, etc.)? Any other ideas where I could begin?

This is the most common question that a lot of people ask when they want to make a plan to achieve financial freedom. So below is my answer for this question.

The First Step in your plan is ……

I will recommend you to plan anything that you can make excessive cash as your first step in financial freedom planning. At this moment, what I can see is business has the potential to let you make excessive cash, especially the online business. Of course, if you don’t like to start any business, you can do anything that you can to generate excessive cash.

But if you want to retire earlier, just like this 19 years old boy who wants to retire at 25. Then starting a business is must for you because of its potential. It can really make you retire and financial free quickly if you do everything properly. Of course, starting a business is not easy but I can tell you that it is worth to put some hard works into it. What you are doing right now is invest for your future. Furthermore, you don’t have to quite your day job to start your own business, for example, to make money online through blogging, all you have to do is sit down at your spare time and write some articles for your blog. This is the true way to achieve financial freedom – leverage on your spare time.

The Power of Excessive cash

So here are the reasons that why you should start with excessive cash:

1. Reduce the investment risks. People always afraid of taking risks when comes to investing. This is because they are worry of losing money. If you are investing using their limited cash or money, losing money is a big risk because it might affect your life and personal finance or even their retirement. But the story will be different if they invest with excessive cash. First you have excessive cash and you can invest in less risk because losing money will not affect you directly. Second you usually have a way to generate excessive cash, so you can always generate back the money if you loss it in investment. By reducing the risks, you will invest differently compare to others and hence you can achieve financial freedom faster.

1. Able to afford more and variety of investing options. Investing just like a strategy game where you must plan and use your strategy to make money. So each investment has its own options for you to invest. But some time you need to pay extra or use more money to use difference kind of options. So with excessive cash, you choose whatever you want. At the same time, you also can invest in different kind of investment to diversify your investment portfolio. Don’t put all your eggs in one nest, this is what most investment experts will tell you.

1. Afford some big deals which sometime are less risk! Yes, I found this from my customers who are rich. According to them, in some cases, your investment will not risky if you can put a certain amount of money in it. This is what we always call big deal investment. Some of them even can bring higher return and less risky compare to those small deals investment. I also found this theory when I was learning to trade in Forex last few years. In Forex, the more money you invest inside, the lower risks you have to carry. Now you know why those riches can invest not as worry as others.

How to Generate Excessive Cash?

3 ways I will recommend you to do for generating the excessive cash:

1. Mange and save your money. This is the most basic and conventional way to let you have excessive cash for investing.
2. Start your part time business. If you have a day job, I would recommend you to start a part time business which will allow you to build your business empire while still holding your day job. You can check my post 20 Ideas to start a part time business for more information.
3. Start your own online business. This is what I’m doing right now. I want to make money from internet and generate excessive cash for my financial freedom plan. If you want to make money from internet or start an online business, I will recommend you to start blogging. You can download this free ebook for more information. I can tell you that this is the best way I ever found to get started in online business.

Conclusion

Above are just my opinions and thoughts for the 19 years old boy’s question. My recommended path is start generating excessive cash, invest the cash and transform them into passive income, then finally achieve financial freedom. There isn’t just one correct path. Each person has their own path to achieve financial freedom. The most important thing is your passion. If you are not passionate about and love what you are doing, then you may hardly stay focus on it and succeed. The theory is same with business. You must understand your passion and then start a business around it. Then you can stay focus and succeed from it easily.

Do you have any advices for the same question? Why not share it here….

Since the first day I run my business, I know that it is very important to learn the negotiation skill for our businesses. In fact, in our life if you are good in negotiation skill, you tend to get a lot of good deals and benefits from people. At least you can get what you think is reasonable and fair when dealing with others. 

So what is Negotiation Skill?

To keep this simple, negotiation is a way of communication between you and others in order to find a line that both of you agree. Negotiation always happens in business and it is very important for you to learn the negotiation skill for both your business and your job. In business, you have to negotiate with 2 main parties – your customers and your suppliers.

Sales Negotiation - Sometimes customers will negotiate with you and you have to learn how to reply and negotiate with them so that you can get the profit you want. The most important thing is to make your customers happy to pay for your products and services and come back in future. Yes, if you good in negotiation, you will make your customers happy with your business and become a repeated customers in future.

Purchase Negotiation - On the other hand, you have to negotiate with your suppliers or manufacturers. In this condition, you are a customer to them. You have to negotiate with them so you can get a better deal and lower costs from them and hence increase the profit margin for your business.

Tips on Business Negotiation

Don’t worry, business negotiation can be learnt by gaining experience.

When I start my business, I really feel overwhelmed and always make mistakes in business such as making a bad deal, make my customers angry and so on. This is because I am weak in negotiation and communication with my customers. However, I keep doing and today, I learnt the most basic skill of negotiation and my business starts running smoothly.

The conclusion that I get is actually this business negotiation skill can be learnt from our life. All you have to do is be patient and learn from the mistakes you made along the way.

So today, I want to share with you some of the 9 tips that I learn in last few years that help me a lot in business negotiation. I wish my 8 tips can help you too.

1. Be confidence about your business. In earlier years, I always fail in negotiation because I’m lack of confidence and doubts about my business and my products or services. Customers can feel this and use this point to attack me. So I start learning about the Strength and Weakness of my products or services. The more I learn the more confidence I have. Now I can speak loudly that my services are the best and my customers trust me because of my confident level.

2. Learn about the market and do something that is different. Customer tends to do their research when they want to pay money for something. Every one of us wants to get something that worth the price and be treated specially. So I usually do some research and understand my market. Then I just slightly modify my services and do something different from my competitors. Now my customers always come back to me because we are different compare to others. How I know this? My customers are telling me!

3. Prepare the reasons “why”. Business negotiation just like a war and you must well prepared in order to win the negotiation. So you must prepare the reasons or “why” that will help you to defend your price, business or services. From my experience, price negotiation happens very often in business. So you must get ready the reasons and why a customer should pay more for your services and products.

4. Prepare your Up selling plans. It is good to have plan B to support you. If you really fail in defending your offers, especially in price negotiation, you can always use your plan B – up selling other products or services to your customers. This not only can push up your profit margin but also help you to increase your sales volume.

5. Understand your customer. Spend some time and learn the negotiation pattern of your customers. This will be a great weapon for you to deal with customers with different kind of characters.

6. Build Rapport with customers. People tend to trust their friends and do business with their friends. So if you can build rapport with your customers and make friends with them, a lot of meaningless negotiation will be avoided and in most cases you can win in the negotiation easily too. This is the method that I am using in my business and it really helps me a lot. Of course, you must really make friends with your customers and really care about them and not just make friends because of business. They can feel this.

7. Learn how to say “NO”. In the earlier years, I always fail in negotiation because I don’t dare to say “NO” to my customers. However, I found that in certain conditions, I must say no and reject my customers. Sometimes they are demanding a lot and over the limit. If this really happens, I have no choice but have to say no to defend my business. Something I found is if you can say “no” in proper way, you actually comprise your customers.

8. Learn how to let go. Try not to view negotiation as a contest that must be won every time. This will indirectly give a lot of stress on you and create more difficulty down the road. So if you really can’t win in 1 negotiation, just let it go and focus on the next one. Learn from the failure and win more in future.

9. Choose your customers! 80/20 rules. There are a lot of people with different kind of characters. Because of this, I understand that my business will not 100% help and make everyone in this world happy. So choose your customers. In most cases, 20% of your customers support your 80% of business sales. So spend time to spot these 20% customers and focus on them rather than dealing with those customers that spend most of their time in complains and negotiation.
   

Above is what I learn and use in my business. I hope the tips can help you in your business too. If you have anything that is better than my tips, please share it here. 

Do you have any tips on negotiation? Why not share it here with me and others. We will appreciate this.