If you think it would be wonderful to wake up every morning without an alarm, and you can imagine yourself being happy sitting down to work in your casual, comfy clothes, then a home based business may be right for you. A home business would also get rid of commuting, and office politics, but you have to think about the pluses and minuses before you take the plunge. Most people who start a home based business start out part-time, but when businesses are laying off workers, there are also people who find themselves needing to replace their income. Here are a few things to consider, if you think working from home could be right for you.Discipline and Time ManagementWhen you become your own boss, you need to have a tremendous amount of discipline. You are at home, and others may think it is no big deal for you to pick up the kids, or go to the store, make dinner, do laundry, clean the house, but you have to learn to say “No” and explain that the time you need for your work is necessary for you to build your business. You can also get distracted online with email, forums, reviewing products, studying the amazing amount of information available online on how to build your business, which uses up valuable time you need to make your business happen. You have to set goals for each day or week of what you need to accomplish, and make sure you get to the projects that will meet your goals and build your business.BudgetIf you are starting your business to make money, which is why most people start a home business, and you do not have unlimited financial resources, than you have to set a budget and stick to it. When you start looking at ways to make money online, you will be amazed at the array of products you can choose from and almost all of them promise you will be making millions overnight if you follow their amazing system! You have to be very careful. Do research before you buy any product. Reputable products will have reviews online for you to research before you buy.Other costs can include setting up a website, and the monthly costs for the company that hosts your website. If you sign up to be an affiliate with an online company, and there is a recurring income opportunity with that company, you will likely be paying monthly costs to maintain your status with that company. The biggest expense can be advertising, with Pay Per Click ads being the primary expense for many online marketers. These things add up, so you need to consider your financial resources before you start, as it could be months before you see any revenue from your efforts.OrganizationWhen you first start working online, you will find yourself registering at a variety of sites. If you decide to market digital products you will probably join ClickBank.com or Commission Junction. You will likely be joining forums to meet others working at home to learn and share ideas, and social sites like Twitter, MySpace or Facebook. You may be setting yourself up to be an affiliate of one or more programs, setting up a blog, and in all of these situations you will be creating sign in information or being assigned an affiliate identification number or personalized link to the merchant’s website. The best thing to do from the start is to make sure you keep everything organized. Set up folders in your email account, and keep every confirmation email you receive with all your account information. That way you can easily find whatever you need, without having to go through the frustration of searching through pages of emails. You should also keep a register of all this information off line in case you have a problem with your computer. Better safe than sorry!ExpectationsWhile you will see ad after ad promising that you could be buying your first Ferrari in a matter of weeks, the reality is that starting a home based business requires a tremendous amount of initial startup time to build your business. It is not unheard of for people to spend months working full time before they see any money at all. It is like any business you could start, and you have to have the ability and perseverance to hang in there to get to the point where you can start seeing your efforts pay off. If you are looking for instant gratification, you will be disappointed. There are a lot of people making a very good living with a home based business, but they worked very hard for a long time to get to that point.If you think this sounds like just the ticket, and you have the drive and the patience to invest the time and money to build your business, then you have the makings of a successful home based business entrepreneur. Once you build your business, and get over the hurdles of all you have to accomplish to be successful, you have the opportunity to benefit from all your hard work for years to come.
Eleven Key Attributes of a Good Property Manager
Property Management is a career profession. The industry allows for employment growth, continual learning experiences, and the opportunity to work with diverse people and income groups. The Property Manager can work either directly for an owner of real estate properties, or for a property management company, contracted by an owner or legal entity to care for the real estate over a specific period of time.
The Property manager has a fiduciary relationship with the management company and property owner. A fiduciary relationship is one that is based on a mutual trust and complete confidence in one another.
The Property Manager is provided an owner’s real estate portfolio to manage to its “highest and best use” in exchange for an employment contract or salary. Real estate assignments for the property manager includes apartment buildings, condominiums, hotels, storage facilities, shopping centers, office buildings, government subsidized properties, rooming houses, abandoned buildings and plots of vacant land, to name a few.
I have managed almost all of the above types of properties for over twenty years. I have managed public and private housing, for non-profit organizations, for the federal government, and for private developers and real estate investors. I also owned my own property management company for eight years. I now teach, speak, and write about property management standards and techniques. Here are some crucial skills, which I know from first hand experience, must be accepted as required attributes and learned skills in order to be a good property manager.
1. Must Know and Stay Current on Local Ordinances and State Laws
Managers are required to perform their work according to the laws of the land. The government (city, state, and federal) dictates how real estate is to be managed, from requiring a real estate license (depending on the state), to the use of the real estate (such as rent control laws). From proper trash removal to how and where we must keep security deposits, the manager has to keep abreast of the many legal requirements of managing real estate. If a mistake is made or a task is forgotten, it could cost the owner his or her property, and/or a management company’s reputation, loss of the account, or even the loss of real estate licenses.
2. Must Be Highly Ethical and Honest
Property Managers work on the Honor Code when they handle other people’s money. By collecting rent, security deposits, laundry machine money et al, the property manager holds a fiduciary relationship with the property owner and/or management company. The owner entrusts the property with thousands of dollars each month, plus the value of the real estate itself. The manager is hired to perform at his or her highest level of integrity. On a daily basis, the property manager’s good judgment and sense of what is right and wrong is called into play.
3. Must be Detail Oriented and Organized
Managers collect the rent daily, and must ensure that each rent is paid and posted to the tenants’ account as received. Financial records detailing each and every rent transaction are kept, either by rent cards, or on the computer. Lease expirations and renewals, rent increase letters, and rent invoices must be mailed on time. lines for court appearances must be kept, and clients must receive their written monthly report of operations. A skilled property manager is able to multi-task, keep site files organized, and prioritize repairs and assignments.
4. Must Have Good Communication Skills
Managers must be able to communicate with people from all walks of life, cultures, ethnicities, and personalities. Managers must be able to articulate their cases in front of judges, talk to the owner, negotiate with vendors as well as speak appropriately with tenants, who are often frustrated, upset, or angry. A good manager must be able to stay calm, and communicate in a professional manner. Familiarity speaking in other languages is always a plus.
5. Must have Good Computer Skills
Computer competency is a technical skill, like driving, typing, etc. The use of email, mail merge, and faxing through the computer is at the heart of property management today. This is especially true if the property is on one part of the city or state, and the home office is a distance away from the site. If a manager does not have a solid command of the computer and its basic programs, such as Microsoft Word and the spreadsheet Excel, you may be hard pressed to find an administrative position in this field.
6. Should Like Working with the Public
If everyone paid the rent on time by the fifth day of each month, the manager would not have rent collection work to do. If a property never had problems, such as toilet overflows, lost keys, or defective smoke detectors, a property manager would have little to do. Therefore, it is important that a manager enjoy dealing with people with problems. A manager should at least like helping tenants with dignity, and in a responsible manager. If you do not like being interrupted several times a day with a dilemma to solve, this type of job may not be for you.
7. Must Be Patient and Have a Sense of Humor
There is some pressure involved working with the public. There are days when nothing seems to go right, and if you happen to have a headache that day, it could be a long 9 to 5. A calm personality or a good sense of humor will take you a long way in property management. If you tend to be high-strung, anxious, or become angry or impatient while working with tight deadlines or with people with problems, you may want to re-consider taking on this profession.
8. Must Like to Read and Conduct Research
There are many types of leases, agreements, forms, and other legal documents that must be signed between tenants, the manager, government agencies, the site attorney, and/or the owner. Real estate and governmental regulations change; the manager must be willing to read up on them and stay current. Documentation must be read and checked before submitted to tenants, agencies, the owner, etc. If you do not like to read in order to keep up with the latest trends, legal and industry changes and terminology used, you will not be able to properly do your job.
9. Must Have a Strong Sense of Duty and Commitment
Ensuring that the tenants under your control are treated with respect, have heat and hot water, are not subjected to or committing illegal activities or disruptive behavior of their neighbors, are some of the managers’ duties. Tenants depend on the manager’s sense of obligation to the property and the families or professionals who live in it. The manager may not always have the funds to do everything all the time, but what can and should be done, such as keeping the building clean, and having a sense of urgency to get work completed in a timely manner.
10. Should be Flexible-Minded
Property Management is a fluid profession, in that it follows economic, governmental, industry, and societal changes that impacts how a property is managed. Managers who still like the “good old days” of mistreating tenants and making rental applicants jump through unnecessary hoops to get an apartment (or the opposite, by not checking anything), will find him or herself out of touch, and maybe out of a job. The ability to accept changes of law, obey fair housing laws, have a positive, or at least a neutral, attitude about people who are different, and above all, to be open-minded, is a key element of a successful manager.
11. Must Be an Excellent Follow-Up Person
A manager can never assume that a repair or rent payment plan will happen on its own. Our mantra is: “Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up!” This is one of the most critical skills of a good property manager. The ability to multi-task, keeping several balls in the air without dropping any of them is challenging, and difficult at times. The ability to successfully multi-task is often rewarded both financially and in promotion decisions.
Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation
Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.
If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.
Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.
For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.
No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.
There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.