In this Episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, Financial Planning Expert, Jason J. Hamilton, shared three important skills every business owner needs to develop if they’re to succeed in managing their finances. The California-based President and CCO of KIS (Keep It Simple) also shared some advice on the best way to pay off a student loan and how to plan your retirement.

Key Questions Asked:

What are the three skills that every business owner needs to know when it comes to financial planning? Are there any tools or websites that they can use? What suggestion would Jason give for people or business owners who are feeling stuck? How has the role of mentorship played out for him in his business? Is there a smart way to pay off student loans? How much do people need to set aside for retirement?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

Tips and Advice

He started his business 100% debt free because Jason does not believe it’s good to start a business having too much debt since it adds a lot of risks. Finding mentors is crucial, if you can find a specific mentor in your field, it would be good if you can talk to him for a few minutes every couple of weeks. A huge part of the mindset that business owners need to have is being able to see their goal and their vision when nobody else does.

Skills

The first skill every business owner needs to know about financial planning is to make sure you have a cash flow plan or a big budget because the number one reason for business failure involves cash flow problems. The biggest things you need to avoid are not planning for taxes and not collecting on what may be owed due to a bad receivable system in place. Jason recommends that you set up a completely different business checking account. The second biggest skill that is to make sure that you maintain a schedule at least on a weekly basis when you could actually work on your business. The third skill is not focusing on the money first, but focusing instead on delivering value to your clients. If you focus on being a man of value and a business of value, long-term, you’re gonna have a very solid foundation to build from as well as be able to establish trust with clients.

 Paying Off a Student Loan

Become aware and realize that you are in a critical situation, you have to realize however the situation this is and how much it could potentially be holding you back from your long-term success. Line up your student loans smallest to largest and then identify your minimum payments. Subtract those payments from your monthly budget and whatever you have left every single month, take that dollar amount and apply it to the smallest student loan first.

 In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, Lucy interviews Outsourcing Expert, Yeukai Kajidori about his journey as an entrepreneur and how he got started with his online business. After having felt like working in an office is not going to work for him, Yeukai decided to quit his 9-5 job and instead partnered with his aunt in building a family business. However, he didn’t just stop there. When he faced a greater need, he was determined to find the solution. And by the time he did, Yeukai has already made up his mind to deliver that solution to all the business owners who might be in need just like he was before.

In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur entitled ‘The Beginner’s Guide for How to Get Started with an Online Business,’ Tiffany Sartor shares her insights and experiences in building her own business, discussing three major steps to starting on the right track in marketing your business online and getting tremendous results.

 Key Questions Asked:

What is Tiffany’s background and how did she get started with her own business? What were the changes that she had to go through during her transition from being an employee to managing her own business? What were the roadblocks that Tiffany had to overcome prior to taking the leap of owning a business? How did she overcome those roadblocks? What is the first step every start-up business owner needs to take and what is the best way to get it done? How long did it take for Tiffany to complete her research before launching her business? What were the key pointers to identifying which model or business to follow? What is the right mindset for a business owner when it comes to getting started with an online business? What was the biggest thing that had to change for Tiffany during the transition process? What advice would Tiffany give to those who are just getting started or thinking about starting a business? How does Tiffany generate belief in herself and in what she is doing? What other biggest challenge that start-up business owners deal with when starting their own business?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

 Starting Up

Conducting research is extremely important for startup and even long-time business owners in all types of industry. Startup business owners must establish and identify their target audience, which group of individuals they want to present their products or services to. It is also important that business owners familiarize themselves with current market trends.

Business Model

In selecting which business to model yours after, use a business or brand that is thriving in terms of what they’re doing in their industry and how they are raising the bar or setting the standard. When starting something that you’ve never done before, you have to believe in your product and in what you’re offering, and you have to be disciplined as well. The best piece of advice Tiffany has gotten is not to tell too many people when you are first starting your business.

In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur, Vid Lamonte Buggs Jr. talks about his amazing journey from being a professional basketball player into becoming a full-time business owner. Vid also shares important insights about how to get started with publishing business in today’s market and what motivates him to keep moving forward.

Key Questions Asked:

How did Vid get started with his business and why did he decide to go into publishing? How long did it take for Vid to actually establish his own company? What major roadblocks did Vid have to face when he was starting to establish his company? How has Vid managed to deal with the difficulty of balancing time? Who were Vid’s mentors and what were their roles in the growth of his business? What were the common pitfalls he had fallen into and how can they be avoided by other business owners that are just starting today? What are the best tools or ways to build a team in this time and age? What were the major changes that took place in Vid’s life as well as his mindset as he transitioned from being a professional basketball player to a full-time business owner? How is the world of publishing different now than when Vid first got started? Where should business owners focus their efforts if they want to succeed when it comes to self-publishing? What has publishing his own book done for Vid and what opportunities has it opened for him?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

Research, Plan, Delegate

When starting a publishing business, it is important for every business owner to do research, plan, see what the other publishers were offering and what they were lacking and build the company around that. Because the field is constantly changing, planning and research will help all business owners to maintain their short-term and long-term goals. Vid’s first major mistake was trying to do everything by himself. His advice to overcome or avoid this is to delegate tasks to other people who are experts in the areas where you are weak or you might not have time for.

Establish a Team

In building a team, it is important that everyone is able to work together, otherwise, your company or your product just falls apart. In looking for people to hire, Vid advises you to find people that you have chemistry with. Having a survival mindset and waking up every day knowing that his team depends on him changed Vid’s attitude about his business

In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, Virtual Teams expert, Yeukai Kajidori talks about how to get started with virtual outsourcing and how to best reap it’s fullest benefits. Now with clients in Australia, Canada, United States and the United Kingdom, Yeukai also shares a few things about his journey as an entrepreneur and what challenges he had to face to get to where he is today.

In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, Karate Champion and Body Engineer, Alexandra Merisoiu shares important tips on how to stay healthy despite the rigors and demands of managing a business. Alexandra also talks about how important it is to stay positive while running your own business.

Key Questions Asked:

What is Alexandra’s background and how did she get started with her business? What sort of skills would Alex say she can transfer into business easily from her achievements and success as an athlete? How did those play a role in her success as a business owner? What common mistakes do entrepreneurs usually make, especially during the early stages of their business? How important it is for business owners to stay in their best shape?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

The most important skills every business owner should have are discipline and being consistent with what they do. Being disciplined makes things easier to manage and also helps you be consistent. As an entrepreneur, you should pay close attention to your physical health, nutrition, and mental health and Alexandra explained how you can do it. She recommends business owners to come up with their own mantra that they can use to motivate them.

In this Episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, Alvin Carlos, a certified financial planner and a managing partner of  District Capital Management, shares his expertise, particularly the critical skills he’s learned and developed through the years that every business owner must have in order to achieve greater success with managing their finances.

Key Questions Asked:

What is Alvin’s background and how did he get started with the financial planning industry? What are the critical skills that business owners need to develop and how can they develop them? How important is having an outsider work with the business owner either as a mentor or adviser? What practices can business owners implement right now to get them started on the road to saving money for retirement? What is the perfect mindset a business owner should have about developing these skills when it comes to financial planning? What criteria does Alvin use to identify who to go to? Knowing what he knows now, if he were to start all over again with building his business, what are the two areas that he would have focused more on that can help him or that is helping him now to reach his goals? How does Alvin go about finding experts? What other criteria do they need to look out for apart from their credentials? How important is financial planning today to a business person and why is it important that they should act now?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

Critical Skills

The very first important skill that we all should have is just being aware of the impact of the things we do in our credit score. The most important thing that small business owners need to be aware of is paying bills on time. If you have a late payment it will stay in your credit report for seven years and creditors will see that for the whole time and it will raise red flags. The second important skill is smart tax planning. A lot of small business owners intermingle their personal finance and their business finances. One of the first things that Alvin asks his clients is to separate that.

Mindset

If you have a spending plan in place, you can take steps to bring your debt down and improve your credit score. Business owners must have an open mind and be capable of accepting advice from experts. They also need to be able to identify who to listen to. You will want to work with a financial adviser that has the right credentials. Look for certified financial planners. One thing that Alvin has come to appreciate when he was starting out was the connections he’s made with the experts from different industries. The sooner business owners act, the sooner their finances can get solidified and can then have more financial stability.

In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, Rob Shneer, HR Pals’ managing partner and a senior professional in human resources, talks about how every business owner can find real quality job candidate at a fraction of a cost of a traditional recruiting firm. Having had eighteen years worth of experience with HR leadership in large corporations, mid-sized companies, and small privately held businesses, Rob shares a few important things that start-up business owners cannot ignore or miss about HR.

Key Questions Asked:

What is Rob’s background? What is the most satisfying part of working with people from global corporations as well as those from small companies? What are the ways of recruiting that exists today and which of them are the best ones? What are the main differences between his company’s model compared to a headhunter? What is the common process of hiring an employee? What particular tools do they use to assist them in the process? After identifying the right person, what should business owners do to finally get the right candidate into their organization? What can business owners do when they’re feeling getting unstuck in the whole recruitment process? what sort of services do HRPals offer and how can they be of help to business owners? How does Rob go about marketing his business today?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

Tips and Strategies

According to Rob, if you’re not hiring the right people from the start, it doesn’t matter how well you’re managing or motivating them or compensating them. While outsourcing is a great option for a lot of businesses, it makes more sense for some others to hire someone in-house as an employee. HRPals have developed a third method of recruiting which aims to provide a premium level of service to business owners. The best strategy Rod uses to market himself is by giving great service to their clients and have no shame in asking for referrals. Rather than being reactive and waiting for people to apply, Rob’s approach is to sit down, identify what his clients exactly want and then proactively go out and find them.

The Process

The first step to hiring an employee is clearly defining what it is and who it is that you want to hire. If you don’t get step one right, the rest of the process isn’t going to. One tool that helps Rob with the process is a search initiation questionnaire he and his team has developed. The second step to take once they’ve nailed down the profile of the candidate, they identify what sources are they going to use to find people who might be a good fit for a particular job. Once the sourcing strategy has been established, the next thing to do is start executing that strategy. When feeling stuck, one way to get unstuck is to go back to your sourcing strategy and really make sure that you’ve done everything that you possibly could to find the people that meet these criteria.

In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, “Soap Queen” and owner of BrambleBerry, shares her amazing journey of building her own business from scratch and finally getting it to where it is today. Anne-Marie started her soap-making business when she was twenty years old and about eighteen years later, she is now enjoying great success and recognition not only in her products and crafts but also in how she continues to manage her own business despite the challenges she faced earlier on.

Key Questions Asked:

How did Anne-Marie decide to move from being an employee to starting her own business? What’s the danger of quickly launching a business without planning? What sort of other roadblocks did Anne-Marie face and how did she overcome them? How did she overcome the challenge of hiring the right people and managing them? What role did mentorship play in her success as an entrepreneur? How did you go about financing your business and managing your cash flow in the early days? What are the common mistakes that business owners commit today? How can they go back on the right track? What tools do Anne-Marie use to track her time? How does she deal with stress? What was the single most important thing that she implements in her business that has produced returns month after month or year after year? How does Anne-Marie do delegation in a practical level? What specific steps did she take to move past the fear of starting her business? What is Anne-Marie’s greatest achievement in all 18 years of running her business?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

Struggles and Solutions

Brambleberry started with Anne-Marie’s desire to help people, coupled with her crafty nature and seeing a need in the marketplace. When you do a small planning budget, it really helps you get realistic about whether or not you can actually build that business and figure out what resources do you need. When you plan, that means you have a goal and you can tell if you’re meeting your goal. Just as most start-up entrepreneurs, Anne-Marie struggled with finances in the beginning. Another struggle she’d had was hiring and firing as well as managing people and at the same time, running a company with integrity.

Mistakes to Avoid

How you do anything is how you do everything so past performance really does show you what the future behavior is. You don’t need to actually have just a single mentor. All business gurus have books, have business channels, doing a podcast, etc so you can immerse yourself in the best minds for literally less. One mistake business owners usually commit during the beginning was going too wide and too deep and too broad. Starting out really targeted and really focused helps you with your inventory and helps you with your planning. The one thing that has produced the most results month after month has been appropriate delegation.

In this episode of Enlightened Entrepreneur Podcast, Stan Kimer, President, and owner of Total Engagement Consulting shares his wisdom and knowledge about diversity, particularly in the business industry. Having worked for Corporate America for 31 years before stepping out and building his own company, Stan has developed strategies and expertise that can help business owners avoid major start-up mistakes as well as reach their short-term and long-term goals.

Key Questions Asked:

What is Stan’s background and how did it prepare him to build his own business? What would Stan say to business owners who are considering the idea of getting a coach? How important was it for him to have a coach? What mistakes does Stan see other business owners are making which slows them down or stops them from going after their goals? What should they do if they have already made these mistakes and they want to fix it, what would be the necessary steps they need to take? What other mistakes does he see a lot of young business owners make? How did Stan get his first client? How does he go about developing the strategies to get more clients? Talking to somebody who owns a business different from his, what would Stan say to them about incorporating diversity training in their organization? Knowing what he knows now, what would Stan do differently if he were to start a business all over again? What are the hottest areas of diversity and inclusion rights now? Why is career development offering very important in today’s business world?

Highlights of Lessons Learned:

Starting a Business

As a start-up business owner, you have to be able to define your own niche and what you’re doing that’s special that’s going to draw your clients and customers. It’s very important not only to have a coach but to also find other people who can help you with your entrepreneurial journey. As an entrepreneur, you have the time to manage your day as you see fit and pursue other interest.

Common Mistakes

The mistake Stan sees people making and that he was able to avoid is entering a field that’s already too crowded. It’s very important to define how you are different and the value that you bring. The second mistake is spending too much time to go after a business that is not really true or valuable business. One thing business owners must learn is how to say no. You need to be very careful and know how to say no and then know how to prioritize and say yes to the few good things. If he is to start all over again, he would fine-tune his sales and marketing strategy, figure out how to increase the close rate on winning business and really analyze the clients he’s going after and perhaps see if he could maximize winning more business.

 Diversity in the Workplace

Incorporating diversity is important for two reasons: as you are growing your business and hiring people, you want to make sure that you have the very best people and you want to get those from the most diverse environment that’s out there; and the second is you want to have the expertise to go after a diverse marketplace. The two hottest areas that Stan sees is generational diversity, as well as the transgender area. In today’s business world, one of the reasons why people want to stay working for their company is that they feel their company really is concerned about their growth as a professional.