Navtej Kohli Business Blog

Navtej Kohli Business Blog brings yet another update on the Small Business Trends for the year 20008. Navtej Kohli Shares his personal view on what will happen to the small scale industry this year.

Small businesses are the heart and soul of the global economy. They create, inspire, and fundamentally change people’s lives.

Below are some of the small business trends for the 2008 economy.

1.      Embrace the world

Small businesses will reach the world and help the economies realize globalization. When the saturation reaches in the native markets, branching out globally offers a wealth of opportunity.

2.      Do whatever it takes

Small businesses will do whatever it takes to survive among their budding competitors—and going global will be the mantra to thrive. For most entrepreneurs, decisions will be made fast, and living with the consequences will be a fact of business life.

3.      Take the outsider perspective

Small businesses are good at adopting an insider view when making judgments while immersed in a situation. But the trend will change this year with small businesses adopting outsider lens which would call for removing oneself from a situation and establishing a realistic view.

4.      Break the existing rules

Small businesses will not settle for the ordinary, or for establishing rules, because they have things to accomplish. They will break rules to overcome obstacles and achieve brilliant results.

5.      Set priorities

Small businesses will align their goals and priorities for going global. They will set a few priorities and will be on toes until results are achieved. Their productivity will be very high.

6.      Invest in quality innovation

Small businesses will realize that innovation is the fundamental driver of economic opportunity.

Social networking and media are merely the tip of the iceberg. More collaborative innovation will take place this year, with further emphasis placed on orchestrating resources and reaching outside of an organization for new ideas.

Use of Internet will act as an effective tool to create market pull. Push forward to build Internet share, which is critical for success, rather than mindshare.

So get out and start your own small business, who knows you might just be the winner.

So get out and start your own small business, who knows you might just be the winner. 

Navtej Kohli Business Blog tells a short story on the effective delegation of work in words of Navtej Kohli himself. Navtej Kohli summarizes the short story followed by its moral in business world below. 

A Wolf had been prowling around a flock of Sheep for a long time, and the Shepherd watched very anxiously to prevent him from carrying off his Lambs. But the Wolf did not try to do any harm. Instead he seemed to be helping the Shepherd take care of the Sheep. At last the Shepherd got so used to seeing the Wolf about that he forgot how wicked he could be.

One day he even went so far as to leave his flock in the Wolf’s care while he went on an errand. But when he came back and saw how many of the flock had been killed and carried off, he knew how foolish to trust a Wolf as he exclaimed. “I have been rightly served; why did I trust my sheep to a Wolf?”

Moral of the Story - It is very important to delegate the tasks wisely and only to the trusted people. Effective and successful managers know that in order to climb the ladder of success it is important to assign tasks to right people only. Trusting everyone blindly always harms in the end.

Navtej Kohli Business Blog brings a short business fable on importance of work experience.

This is adapted from (apparently) a true story. *

An elderly couple retired to the countryside - to a small isolated cottage overlooking some rugged and rocky heathland.

One early morning the woman saw from her window a young man dressed in working clothes walking on the heath, about a hundred yards away. He was carrying a spade and a small case, and he disappeared from view behind a copse of trees.

The woman thought no more about it but around the same time the next day she saw the man again, carrying his spade and a small case, and again he disappeared behind the copse.

The woman mentioned this to her husband, who said he was probably a farmer or gamekeeper setting traps, or performing some other country practice that would be perfectly normal, and so not to worry.

However after several more sightings of the young man with the spade over the next two weeks the woman persuaded her husband to take a stroll - early, before the man tended to arrive - to the copse of trees to investigate what he was doing.

There they found a surprisingly long and deep trench, rough and uneven at one end, becoming much neater and tidier towards the other end.

“How strange,” the old lady said, “Why dig a trench here - and in such difficult rocky ground?” and her husband agreed.

Just then the young man appeared - earlier than his usual time.

“You’re early,” said the old woman, making light of their obvious curiosity, “We wondered what you were doing - and we also wondered what was in the case.”

“I’m digging a trench,” said the man, who continued, realising a bigger explanation was appropriate, “I’m actually learning how to dig a good trench, because the job I’m being interviewed for later today says that experience is essential - so I’m getting the experience. And the case - it’s got my lunch in it.”

He got the job.

*Source: businessballs.com

Many times people in franchise business think about how to make their franchise a million dollar enterprise. The best way is to buy a million dollar franchise such as mcdonald and set yourself. The problem here is that many do not have the capital available. But when you start at grass root level you learn a lot of stuff on your way to the million dollar goal while spending a lot of your sweat.You can use a number of different strategies in this process. First you have to decide what type of franchise business model you want to be involved with. To build a really big owner-operator business, you’ll need to make sure the concept you’re starting with has the potential to grow a single operation to this level. If it’s a territory-based service business, for example, you need to know that the territory has sufficient population to support a multimillion-dollar volume of sales. Even though, in this circumstance, you’re focused on an owner-operated business, you should be aware that most owners who grow such an operation to this size end up adding more layers of management into their business over time to help deal with all the volume.

The more common form of business model for franchisees wanting to build a huge business is the executive version. In this situation, you’ll probably build a number of units that operate independently of one another to deliver product or services to the customers, each managed by different people who report to an executive up the organizational chart (probably you, at least in the early stages of growth).

Though it might sound obvious, another very significant consideration if your goal is to build a huge business is the typical amount of profit produced by the business. The fact is that most people who decide to grow a huge business rather than just buying one immediately make that decision because they don’t have enough money to buy it now. That means they must depend on the business to generate profits, in excess of what they need to live on, in order to fund their expansion.

Many franchises are designed to provide a very nice income to the franchisee, commensurate with the level of capital and time commitment the franchisee invests in the business. Nothing wrong with that–a trillion-dollar industry has been built mostly on that premise!

The challenge is, if you want to build something really big, you’ll probably need a business that both supports you and provides additional capital to grow. Those types of businesses exist, but they aren’t common, and you need to conduct a careful analysis to make sure any business you contemplate has the ability to get you where you need to go within the time frame you’re willing to allow.

Start by figuring out how much capital you have to work with, how much you need to support your lifestyle while you’re building your business and how long of a time frame you’re willing to allow for the business to be built. Now you have the parameters to determine whether a concept can meet your goals.

There are lots of great franchise businesses that can be used as a platform for building a very large and successful multimillion-dollar business. If this is your goal, the secret to finding the right one for you is to take the time to understand what you have to work with in terms of your resources, what you want to accomplish in terms of your goals and what you need the business to contribute to meet your goals. Then you can determine whether a specific franchise is the vehicle you can use to reach the destination you seek.

Navtej Kohli shares views on Business Process Experts which is the latest in business trends.

Have you ever wondered who is a business process expert and what are the ingredients to a successful business process expert?

Now, let us discuss what does a business process expert actually  do? BPXs specialize in looking at a business problem and modeling a solution that can be implemented through the use of technology. There are people who are Business Process experts and are not even aware of it.
Consider the following scenario:

It’s the beginning of a new week and you’re faced with a new task that must be completed by the end of the week. Your objective is to evaluate an existing business process and suggest recommendations for new technology that will support the process.
This is a common scenario for the business process expert – a situation that requires high- to mid-level business-side analysis and a quick but comprehensive set of solution recommendations as output.