Business Management Advice From Famous Entrepreneurs

Small business management is not for the faint of heart. When the inevitable struggles, scuffles and setbacks of starting a business get you down, remember that the greatest entrepreneurs of the last century have been where you stand, learned some hard lessons and succeeded. Refer back to this article as needed for advice to put you back on the road toward your business goals.

Mary Kay Ash, Founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics

Tired of working in a male-dominated culture, Mary Kay grabbed $5,000 out of her savings account, hired a handful of independent beauty consultants and opened a tiny store in Dallas in 1963. Today, the late Mary Kay's business is flourishing world-wide, with hundreds of thousands of beauty consultants and revenue in the billions. There are two tactics that Mary Kay started early on that were instrumental to her success, both involving how she managed people.

First, she started with a strong business plan based on her Christian faith and guided her employees and consultants to prioritize God, family and work, in that order. This business plan was the crux of her leadership philosophy throughout her career and was a consistency her consultants could count on. Second, she created a lucrative incentive program for her consultants that included her famous pink Cadillacs for top sellers. Mary Kay is frequently listed in surveys as a top business to work for.

P.T. Barnum

He has been called a scam artist, a showman and a promoter of hoaxes. But there is one thing this founder of the traveling show that eventually became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus will never be called and that's a poor salesman. Barnum understood that sales only worked when you could identify your prospect's needs or wants and then satisfy them. If his sales pitch was rejected, he simply modified his pitch to help his prospect solve an issue they were having and tried again. He knew that it wasn't just about getting the sale; he aimed to make each customer feel so good about their purchase and themselves that they came back for more.

Barnum also knew how vital risk-taking is to the growth of a business. He took chances in business, tried new sales tactics and wasn't afraid to fail. He once famously had a large, advertisement-wearing elephant grazing in his front yard, so that passing trains could clearly see it. His policy of giving customers a good value for their money was what he used to back-up all his wacky sales tactics.

Richard Branson

If there's one thing Richard Branson knows, it's branding. The Virgin group brand he started building in the 70s as a mail-order record retailer is now an international power house that includes an airline, music stores, mobile phones, hotels, nonprofit organizations and so much more.

While Branson has his hands in many honey pots, each Virgin company follows the corporate philosophy that he developed when he started out more than 40 years ago. His brand values include sustainability, wellness, equality of people and embracement of change. Branson never waivers from these core values and they are felt in every aspect of his brand. Having a brand that provides value to the consumer and keeping that brand consistent is important to retaining customers as your business grows. As you move forward, never forget where you started.

Warren Buffet

One of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffet's shrewd investments have amassed him a fortune worth more than $60 billion. Buffet is not afraid to go against the grain and take a chance on investments that others might overlook. Throughout his life, he has eschewed the safe bets that the average investor went after and took a chance at becoming above average by listening to what he calls his "inner scorecard" and trusting his own judgment.

However, his risks have always been very calculated. Buffet believes in close monitoring of expenses and limiting the amount of money you borrow or charge to credit cards. He also advocates spelling out all aspects of a deal, in writing, before getting started. This is when your bargaining leverage is the strongest and you won't find yourself surprised later on.

Walt Disney

The man who famously said "if you can dream it, you can do it," certainly lived those words. The Disney brand, for him, was the pursuit of a dream, created out of his own imagination. It was a creative outlet but, because he believed in it so greatly, it was a business success.

Because Disney's brand was so infused with his own heart and soul, customers over the decades have developed strong and lasting emotional ties to the Disney brand. Disney knew the responsibility he had to his audience and put a premium on their happiness and satisfaction. He had a relationship with his customers and it paid off in big dividends for his business.

Disney literally did what he loved and the money followed.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates owes his success to two things: 1). His innate ability to read the market and forecast its needs and 2). His unabashed geekiness. What you can take away from his example is this: Follow your passion because there is a reason it was given to you.

Years before Microsoft was founded, Gates was a teenager obsessed with computers. He attempted to take the well-trodden path of so many others, half-heartedly attending Harvard, but his love of writing computer software wouldn't leave him alone and the entrepreneurial opportunities just kept presenting themselves. Everyone has a talent. This was Gates'. The only difference between him and everyone else is that he was willing to give everything in him to make his dream a reality. He took big risks and saw big rewards.

Business failures, lawsuits, threatening market shifts, accusations of monopoly and fallouts with business partners couldn't squelch Gates' passion for what he does. If something is gnawing at you day and night, don't ignore it. Almost everything can be successful with enough determination and a ton of hard work.

William Randolph Hearst

Perhaps one of the most hated entrepreneurs of the last century, there is no doubt that Hearst was a man of perseverance and resilience. While his tactics of unethical practices, questionable personal and political decisions and reputation of terrible treatment toward his associates would put a modern entrepreneur on the fast track toward business failure, one can learn quite a bit from the resilience he showed throughout his career.

Faced with one business or personal failure after the next, Hearst got back up, dusted himself off and jumped right into his next business pursuit. While he may not have had much faith in the world around him, Hearst believed in himself and that is vital to business success.

Steve Jobs

There are many things entrepreneurs can learn from the man who created the Apple dynasty but one of the biggest can be understood in this quote from Jobs: "It's not the customer's job to know what they want." Apple created loyal customers because he understood Apple's audience, knew what that audience needed and provided solutions to those needs. It's that simple.

Learn about your audience. What are their hopes, dreams, goals, problems, failures, insecurities and issues? Find out what they need from you, design a great product or provide a great service that gives them what they need. Then do this over and over again.

Another thing Jobs understood was the importance of hiring the best team possible. In fact, he believed that hiring a talented team is your most important job as a business leader. As a small business start-up, you are in a great position when you start hiring to create a dynamic team of the best professionals possible. They are the future of your business.

Estee Lauder

From the time she was a counter girl at Saks Fifth Avenue, selling her perfumes and cosmetics, until her death as a millionaire at the age of 97, Lauder's personal sales technique earned her a loyal following that is as rich as her skin creams.

As an entrepreneur, you are selling yourself as much as your product. Listening to your consumer and providing them a service from which they can really, truly benefit is the key to creating loyal customers. Estee Lauder's approach was that she wanted to make women feel beautiful and happy, not make a sale. With that approach she built her cosmetics empire.

Mark Zuckerberg

Disney once said "we don't make films to make more money; we make money in order to make more films." Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, had the same sentiments when he said "we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services." If you build a great product, and do what you love, they will come. It's a value shared by nearly all great entrepreneurs.

Through a lot of personal and professional turmoil, one of the world's youngest billionaires stays focused on his company and continuously strives for improvement. If you keep your head in the game, success will follow.

Are you a San Diego entrepreneur or business owner looking to take your business to the next level? Contact me at kim@kimberlyjonesliteraryartist.com to see how my marketing writing expertise can help.

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Should The U.S. Be Worried About The Globalization Of Accounting?

The globalization of accounting can be very beneficial but also very dangerous for many people. It will make an overall understanding and certain system for everyone to follow on a global scale, that way every one should be reporting the same way. But it's dangerous because if everyone is adapting to the new IFRS then GAAP may be no more and the USA has always followed the rules of GAAP, religiously.

One of the great social processes in the history of humanity is the globalization. Globalization has become apart of everyday life in our age, almost everything and anything is seeming to become globalized. This may be because it is easier for everyone to follow one unique system rather than have several different types which is hard to compare one to the other. The roots of the globalization are in the illuminists works like David Ricardo and Adam Smith ":The reaches of the nations" going forward through the Karl Marx opera until our ages. Why appear as very present the globalization in our ages is because it has become an economical need for our society, especially for the companies which want to go international or work international. The accounting receive, due to this fact, an order from the companies which needed to go on other markets for capital to supply an international accounting system which will allowed all the external users to relay on the financial statements presented by this system. This process of globalization in general and the imposing of an international accounting system on the other side are emphasizing some considerations related to the need on going global on one side and to the obvious cultural differences between the countries from other side.

Accounting standard-setters around the world generally believe that it is in the public interest to develop and maintain a universal set of high-quality standards for financial accounting and reporting. As Graham Ward, President of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), states, "We firmly believe that it is in the public interest to have a single set of international standards, of the highest quality, set in the public interest by an international expert body which transparently consults with, and recognizes the legitimate interests of, the international community." The key assumption is that universal acceptance of a single set of high-quality standards would make the world's capital markets more efficient by enhancing the consistency and comparability of financial statements. Greater efficiency in the world's capital markets would in turn lower the costs of capital for businesses, and lower capital costs would encourage economic growth on a global scale.

Historically, U.S. GAAP has been regarded as being the highest-quality set of financial accounting and reporting standards in the world. But its acceptance is far from universal, and its standards have been slow to evolve and improve as the business world has become increasingly complex and globalized. Consequently, it became possible for alternative standards to emerge and assume a level of importance that is likely to surpass that traditionally accorded to U.S. GAAP.

Specifically, compliance with the International Financial Reporting Standards IFRS' promulgated by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) is now, or is scheduled to be required of publicly-traded companies in most countries. While there are many similarities between international standards and U.S. GAAP, significant differences do exist, and today, U.S. standards are not automatically presumed to be "better." This situation has affected the process by which both U.S. and international standards are developed and maintained, and has already resulted in changes to both U.S. and international standards.

According to IASB Chairman Sir David Tweedie, "IFRS' are now used by 100 countries throughout the world. Within the next five years we expect the accounting standards of major economies such as those of Japan, Canada, China and India to converge with IFRS' while at the same time the differences between international standards and U.S. GAAP are being eliminated."

Some may think outsourcing to different countries as the same thing as globalization. Where some industries seem to be taking-off and thriving in the outsourcing age, some industries are feeling the reverse effects and are even considering coming back to the United States. Industries such as IT, software, and telecommunications will continue to thrive off of cheap internet in these developing countries, whereas the manufacturing industry need to thrive off things such as natural resources but will continue to struggle due to the high energy costs. Not to mention, shipping their finished products from one side of the globe to another is not a cheap task. With the process of globalization, outsourcing has become a global spectacle that is here to stay. Recognizing this reality, governments should take measures to prevent needless outsourcing of certain jobs to prevent developed countries employees to have their jobs "stolen" by creating a sophisticated infrastructure designed to help new industries and offset any jobs lost. Outsourcing could mean the loss of jobs for many people which could affect their living style and family dramatically. Everyone needs to prepare to adapt to these globalization processes.

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