This will be a collection of things I’ve stumbled on during my time as a business owner (or just in the business world in general). First off, all of my experience is with small business and the service industry, and the only way I see that changing is if my business really takes off. So far, owning a business has been one of the most unstable, stressful, and aggravating occupations I’ve had…but it has by far been the most fun. There really is nothing better than working for yourself. It takes a lot of drive and you really have to love what you’re doing. If you don’t love it, you aren’t going to be able to do it day after day, week after week, year after year. I guess that’s the first tip:

• Love what you do. If you don’t love what you do, what’s the point? You aren’t really getting anything out of working for yourself, and I can tell you now that for all the stress and work it takes to get a business going and keep it going, it’s just not worth it if you don’t get to do what you love for at least a small portion of the day. Find something you’re knowledgeable and passionate about, and the money and success will follow.
• Consider working with a partner. Owning a business is hard work. Sometimes more than one person can handle. In my experience, it’s been a lot easier having a partner than if I had to deal with everything on my own…someone who you trust and who shares your passion for what you do and for success. You can take a sick day and he/she will work in your stead, you can swap meetings with clients/customers, take vacations while the other one works, etc. You have to split the profits, but can make it up by doing almost twice the work anyway, and you get a lot more freedom.
• Be smart about your time. Since you’re just starting out and don’t have much (if any) capital, it makes sense to try and do everything (bookkeeping, equipment repairs, etc) yourself, right? Absolutely wrong…it almost always makes more sense to hire a professional. You make money by doing what you’re good at. You don’t make money doing time-consuming tasks that you aren’t trained for. Hiring a professional to help you out may seem like a waste of money, but you save money in the long run. They’re great at what they do, you’re great at what you do…so use the time you would have spent floundering with what they’re good at to do what you’re good at, and you can pay them and have leftovers. Need a contract? Hire a lawyer. Doing taxes? Hire an accountant. Being smart about your time is really important, especially when considering your personal sanity.
• “No” can be a great answer. Speaking of personal sanity, let’s talk about the most important word you can possibly have in your vocabulary. “No.” This word will save you. Trust me. You can’t really use this word when you work for someone else, so enjoy it. Try it now…say “no” out loud. Didn’t that feel great? What the hell am I talking about? You don’t have to do everything everyone needs (read: wants) all the time, and you certainly don’t have to do it when they need it. I’m not talking about when you and a client set a deadline and you decide you just don’t want to do it…that’s called laziness or poor planning. But if you find yourself inundated with work and a client out of the blue decides they need that huge project they’ve been mulling over in their head done THIS WEEK, “no” is a very appropriate response. “No” can also be used in other contexts.

  For instance, someone comes to you with a project that doesn’t make sense or it just sucks. Or the project is the best idea ever, but you get a strange vibe from the person pitching it. You don’t necessarily have to use the word “no” in this case, but the general concept is there: money != happiness. Just because a project seems great at first doesn’t mean it won’t drag you into a fiery pit of everlasting hell later on. Listen to your intuition, and know when to turn something or someone down.

  On a side note, the more you exclusively work on better projects with better clients, the better projects and clients you’ll attract. This isn’t a business technique as much as it is the way of the universe.

• Communication is essential. Want to know a great way to piss someone off? Go way over budget on their project, then send them a bill at the end of the month. That’s a recipe for the swift end of a business relationship. Are you going to be 2 weeks late on a deadline? Tell your client ahead of time. Are you way over budget? Let your client know what happened and why! The sooner you tell them, the more appreciative they’ll be. Honesty, transparency, and proactive communication are the foundation of any relationship, but also translate well to business relationships.

  Also, be honest and verbose with your estimates. Sure, a prospective client may go with someone else with lower numbers on paper, but when they find out the other company more or less lied just to dupe them into getting their business, they won’t be happy. Also think of it this way: your numbers are the way they are for a good reason. If the client doesn’t want to pay your fair rate for a project, do you really need that penny-pinching tightwad arguing about every invoice with you anyway? Remember: the better the projects and clients you work with, the better the projects and clients you’ll get.

Ok, that’s about all I have in me for now. Maybe I’ll do a followup later, but hopefully these tips can help anyone new to business, or maybe give someone who’s been doing it for a long time a little perspective. A lot of this stuff I apply not only to my business life, but life in general, with great success on both ends. Keep in mind this is mainly geared towards the service industry, and being only 23 I’m not the most knowledgeable person in the world, but hopefully the things I’ve found so far are universal.

I’ve never formally written about NearlyFreeSpeech.net until now, even though I’ve always had good things to say. Even after some extended downtime I’m excited to say I’m still on the bandwagon. The reason is their transparency. I’ve worked with many hosts before, and none are as honest or transparent. Even the Rackspace Cloud gave glossed over responses to their problems. A few of my NFS sites went down just about all of yesterday because of a server failure. I logged into the control panel (proprietary, but I actually prefer it over cPanel or hsphere) and looked at the sticky support note left for all customers.

I half-expected to see “teh service is dwn!! were trying to fix it! sry lol!” as with most hosts. Instead, there was page after page of updates with details and explanation. After this, I was able to rest easy, because I had a good idea of how long it would take to get everything back up. Whenever it didn’t go as planned, they’d post another update.

I cannot stress how awesome this was. Yes, they made my downtime awesome by treating me and the other customers as if we were techs in the server room. I didn’t really care about my sites being down, because I knew they were working really hard on it and probably wouldn’t go to bed until it was fixed.

This brings up another point though: transparency makes your customers wet. I know it’s been discussed time after time, but it really is true. People don’t like “Our apologies, our service went down,” as much as they like “Our service went down from 6:30-8:30 UTC today when lightning struck main Big-IP load-balancer, and our failover didn’t switch the backup on.”

What’s a Big-IP? What’s “failover?” It doesn’t matter…treating your customers as equals and letting them decide if information is relevant or not will make them wet.

In my three years experience with NFS, this is the first downtime I’ve experienced. Their support was amazing enough to update every customer with detailed information about the problems they were experiencing and how they were fixing it. I cannot recommend them more. For larger sites that require custom services running, you’re out of luck. For blogs, informational sites, paypal-driven shopping carts (no SSL, yet), etc this is the best shared host I’ve dealt with, ever. They’re dirt cheap, and the only host I know of who won’t disable your site without a court order or copyright violation.

With the economy getting increasingly depressed, and the country feeling more anxious and desperate every day, there remains only one thing between our current state and complete chaos.

Donuts. Be they round, square, creme-filled or just little spheres covered in sugar, they hold together the very fabric of our society. Not only is this common knowledge, it has been scientifically proven by many recent studies.

The U.S. government, knowing the importance of donuts, passed a bill today that would help a local shopkeeper in Brownsville, Kentucky stay in business. The bill passed by congress details a $14 trillion bail-out package for the shop in exchange for 2% equity in the company.

“I couldn’t be happier,” proclaimed Rick Thomson, shop owner, enjoying his new beach house in Hawaii. “I’m finally starting to realize how important the government is. It’s good to finally see our tax dollars at work.” Rick had been running his shop “The Donut Gutter” for over 5 years before the financial crisis hit. When bankruptcy looked like the only option, he petitioned congress for help.

“Well, we got his letter and immediately made it a first national priority,” said Congressman Piotto. “People think small businesses are a dime a dozen, but they are actually more important than big businesses! This is because of the trickle-up theory of economics. Just think how many other local businesses Mr. Thomas will now stimulate. And because the government owns 2% of his company, we made a lot of money! 2% of 14 trillion is $280 billion. It’s a win-win.” Piotto is also first-advisor to the national treasurer.

Since Rick’s business was bailed-out, over 200,000 other companies from around the country are petitioning for congressional aid. A recent study showed a 90% growth in the rate of companies needing a government bail-out. The study failed to conclude the reason for this, but a follow-up study is planned for 2011.

“It’s just not fair,” said CEO of GM as he stomped his foot and frowned. “Nobody cares about big business anymore. We never got a bail-out, even though we’ve been selling the same cars for what’s probably been hundreds of years!”

One thing is for sure, we owe everything our country stands for to Rick Thomas, a brave man who fought bankruptcy, a hurting economy, and big business all for his right to $14 trillion in tax dollars.