* Major Management Mistakes
1. Don’t recruit your best friend or your brother-in-law simply because you think you’ll get along with them — unless they have actual qualifications and experience to bring to your team

2. Don’t assume that your past success selling insurance will help you develop and market a new consumer product. Promote the success, but make sure you’ve recruited talent who know the new industry.

3. If you’re a one-person shop, don’t promote this as a management philosophy. It’s tough to wear every hat and succeed; show that you’re confident enough and savvy enough to build strengths in areas you’re weak in by recruiting top talent.

* Bad Money: How to Avoid Venture Villains
When you’re looking for financing, you’re going to welcome anyone who comes along and gives it to you. But that may not always be your soundest move. Sometimes the money comes with more strings attached – or more potential problems down the road – than you may have bargained for.

* Business Building Lessons From the Trenches
Paul Neilsen says he made a lot of mistakes in the five years he’s taken his company, DumpRunner Waste Systems from a one-man operation to a successful mid-size trash and debris removal company in the Calgary, Alberta area.

* Explore any form of financing you can find, including programs such as those offered by the Canadian Youth Business Foundation.

* If you succeed in getting financing, particularly unsecured financing, leverage it into more financing from traditional sources.

* Use credit whenever possible; get as many credit cards as you can.

* Business Plan Writing: 4 Mistakes that Will Kill Your Financial Chances
Your business plan can make a real impression on potential funders. Make sure it’s a good one.

1. Don’t simply follow a template
While you can find many good guides to creating a business plan, different factors are more important within different industries. A template for a capital intensive industry such as manufacturing might not be appropriate for your business. Even worse, it might make you look out of your depth.

2. Don’t talk in general terms about your industry
Your business plan should set specific tasks, delineate responsibilities, define objectives, set deadlines and call for specific progress reviews (including the criteria you’ll used).

3. Don’t use the business plan simply as a funding document or one-time planner
The business plan should be your constant guide. Update it regularly, assessing goals and priorities, successes and failures, and changing course as need be.

4. Don’t try to impress people with sheer volume
A business plan should not exceed 50 pages, and should be shorter if possible.

*Tips to Turn Your Company Newsletter into a Winning Marketing Tool
A company newsletter can be one of your strongest marketing tools. Unfortunately, too many businesses simply do it wrong. A newsletter that offers little pay-off for the reader or that’s simply a flyer in disguise won’t do anything for your business. Use these proven techniques to power up your newsletter.

1. Keep it short. Two, four, or eight pages max. Give a lot of information, but give it in short articles (300 words or less). Keep the sentences fairly short, but vary the length for interest.

2. Keep your writing style in sync with the character of your customer base. Are they executive types, mothers-to-be, or engineers? Write to them.

* Ways to be There When They Want to Buy
You made a good presentation. You thought you’d developed a rapport with the buyer. And you expected them to call when they were ready to order. But they didn’t. They bought from someone else. What happened?

When a buyer or client chooses a competitor, it’s not necessarily a reflection on the quality of your product or service. More often than not, the winning seller is in the right place at the right time. The seller made contact when the buyer was ready to buy.

If you only contact your existing and prospective customers once a year, your odds of being in the right place at the right time are pretty small. Regular contact is obviously the solution. But how do you do it without appearing pushy. Here are 10 ways to strategically touch base.

* Ways to Effectively Market Your Business on the Cheap
Financing is a great way to grow your business. But if you can save money while still taking steps to get customers through the door, it’s almost as good as a cash injection. Try these 10 low-cost marketing techniques for your business.

1. Get a big return for small ads. The price of print advertising may have scared you off, but big half-page or full-page ads don’t always pull more. Try running small ads regularly. Or look to the classifieds to find a group of ready-to-buy prospects actually searching out your ad. Make the most of the small space by providing a quick tip, offering a big benefit, or giving a strong reason to respond.

2. Don’t waste any opportunity to market. Mail a sale announcement with customer statements. Print pertinent sales information on your business cards. Put your name, number and a strong reason to call you on your vehicle.

* Email Marketing Campaigns 101 – Build Your Mailing List
In order for your email marketing to succeed, you need to be sending it out. Building and refining a quality mailing list is the foundation of email marketing success. To get your email marketing up and running (and generating income) as quickly as possible, make sure you employ these…

Give them lots of opportunities to sign up.
If you just put your newsletter or list sign-up on your main page or on a special newsletter page, you’re missing out on dozens of opportunities to gain subscribers. Put the sign-up form on every single page of your website. You never know when they’ll feel ready to sign up, so make it easy for them.

* Analyze Your Competition
The banks and funding agencies need to know that you have a firm grasp of how your company stacks up against the competition. Here’s how to show them.

The end result of your work will be a clear overview of and comparison between your company and your competitors, outlining the strengths and weaknesses of each, the market share held by each, and trends and changes over time. You’ll also want to explain what percentage of the market you’re planning on capturing, and how you’ll do it.

* Business Financial Planning
Your financial projections are the heart of your business plan. This section quantifies dollars and cents over months and years, and it had better be built to stand up to scrutiny. The professionals looking at your numbers will bring jaundiced eyes to their review of your forecasts. They’re looking for a specific format and a sense that you’re being realistic in your estimates. Here’s how to do it right.

THE BASICS
Your financial projections must include these fundamentals: profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. While the income is what you’re interested in, your potential funders will want to know how much you plan to leave in the business as retained earnings and how much more financing you’ll need to grow your company.

Learn accounting principles and formats, or hire an accountant familiar with your industry to help prepare this section.

* Exceed the Reviewers’ Expectations
Here are some tips and tricks we’ve gleaned from the experts…advice you can use to make your plan shine.

1. The process is as important as the plan itself. Do it yourself, and you’ll come away from the planning experience with a more in-depth, more organized and more crystal-clear vision of your business. If the investor sees that you’ve invested the time, energy and unified effort to develop your own business plan, you’re already past the first hurdle. When you’re done, you might consider a review by a consultant, who can give you a critique based on the investor’s point of view.

2. Hook them in the first two minutes. The person reading your plan is busy, confronted with dozens of plans each month. Make it look good, with a clean attractive design. Organize it so the reader can find what they’re looking for immediately. And spend a lot of time on your Executive Summary so it hooks the reader into the story of your business and why you’ll be a success.

* Writing a Successful Business Plan
Whatever stage your business is at, a business plan is always an indispensable guide to where you’re heading, a tool to help you measure your progress, and a map to keep you from veering off-course.

With that in mind, we’re giving you a series of tutorials to help you develop a winning business plan.

A good business plan gives models what your business will be, using financial statements and projections alongside verbal descriptions of broad strategic issues and short-term tactical moves.

* $250,000 in Technology Commercialization Funding Available for New Programs
University Technologies International (UTI), Calgary Technologies Inc. (CTI) and SAIT Polytechnic have a special grant pool of $250,000 for new programs and initiatives which support advancements to the technology commercialization and innovation sector. This grant pool is part of a larger funding package of $1.5 million that Alberta Advanced Education and Technology (AET) awarded to UTI, CTI, and SAIT to further technology commercialization and collaboration in the Calgary region.

* Government Money for Rural Businesses in Ontario
From tomato canners to high-tech companies, firms and communities across Ontario are jumping on the cash available from the Rural Economic Development program known as OSTAR.

Ontario Associate Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Brian Coburn, has been dropping down in small towns across the province to hand out oversized cheques. Intended to boost the economy and employment in rural areas and small towns.

* Join a Barter Network
In this article, we’ll look at ways to turn unused assets into cash. A company which rents out industrial equipment decides to expand its facility, so it can offer more equipment. Of course, building is a big capital expense, and the company has to go loan hunting. Or maybe not. What if the company could take an asset it’s not using to full potential… such as equipment which only goes out on weekends, and turn it into that warehouse… or part of that warehouse anyway. Hocus pocus?
It’s called barter.

*Family Financing: How to Grow Your Business Using the “Family Bank”
Whether you’re looking to spread your financing among various sources, or you think they might be able to finance the entire project, looking to family and friends can be a cost-effective and flexible source of financing – both short-term and long-term. It can be rewarding to both your business and the people who invest in it. From your standpoint, family members are often more flexible when it comes to interest rates and security. From their standpoint, they could earn a return while feeling they’ve played a part in your success. Or they may even have a stake in the business and be rewarded by its success.