Solo entrepreneurs are used to facing the business day alone, but developing a power team for business and personal support makes the entrepreneurial lifestyle much more tolerable. List the qualities of people in your network and plug each one into a niche based on their skills.

Overview

Power teams are often used in business networking groups to refer to others in a related field who can help a small business owner or solo entrepreneur market a product or service. Financial planners may share a power team with real estate agents and loan brokers since all three serve a similar client.

But in-depth Power Teams are those who can assist at all levels of a business operation. This is also developing an “entrepreneurial eco-system” that can sustain you and your business. This is phrase is borrowed from Daniel Isenberg who wrote in the June 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review about entrepreneurial successes in Rwanda titled “The Big Idea, How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution.”

Strategic Partners

Members of a Power Team are there to help you think strategically. Your bookkeeper or CPA may help on a regular basis to enter expenses, income, and prepare quarterly taxes. However, they should use the data to help you make business decisions like whether or not to keep a client or drop one who’s behind on payments.

Power Team members can help you see the larger picture and business environment and point you to opportunities or warn you of potential dangers.

Partner Qualifications

You might know many opinionated people. However, the qualifications for someone to be on your Power Team for the purpose of advising you in business operations should include the following:

Proven success in a particular area (turning around struggling companies, skilled in handling finances, or knowledgeable in a discipline like marketing)

Good listening skills (someone who can grasp your needs and takes time to listen before giving advice)

Well-connected (knowing talented individuals who can contribute positively to your business if you call upon them)

Empathetic (they can grimace with you when times are tough and encourage you for tomorrow)

Sample Network

In forming a Power Team, you as the solo entrepreneur can ask a person if they would like to be a trusted advisor to your operations. You can mention that perhaps they would do so during the next six months and be willing to take an occasional phone call or lunch meeting to discuss important matters.

You can agree to limit involvement to no more than four face-to-face meetings and six phone calls or emails. Don’t expect the relationship to go indefinitely.

Choose those from business disciplines that may include the following:

• Accounting or finance
• Production
• Marketing
• Sales
• Management
• Customer Relations

You might have a CPA, a web designer, an executive of a small company, and someone skilled in customer service on your team. Or substitute with an area where you know you need to improve like a skilled salesperson.

List your goals with each one and then review your goals.

Gather the team together once in a six-month period to thank them. It can be over coffee, dessert, or plan to have a fun cookout.

After six months, a few may want to stay and remain in touch while others will be busy and wish to have their relationships elsewhere.

Your Power Team members should not normally be close friends or relatives. Perhaps they don’t know you well and that can serve to your advantage since they’ll have an objective look at you and your business.

Forming a Power Team is a way for a solo entrepreneur to develop and exhibit leadership skills, too, in addition to building and forming a supportive network.

What makes it tick to survive in business, – not only survive but succeed and grow, is a subject matter for deeper analysis, within the vast arena of strategic and successful business planning. A large number of small business start-up strategies, have been postulated, but some of these are extremely useful in the planning process and offer the right keys to survive and grow in business.

Most entrepreneurs seem to make the start with a highly fanciful idea that has germinated in their minds, – ideas are welcome and undeniably the crux of any good business plan. What one needs is the precautionary steps to determine whether the idea meets a few practical requirements – if the new product/service is a clear step ahead of the others, if it will solve a prevailing issue/need better, plus if it will expand on the user circle directly or indirectly.

An in-depth analysis of the functioning of small businesses seems to provide some clear directions for survival and growth, the first being the power of the planning process, and the second the all important influx rate of capital to meet the bare minimum needs, as spelled out in the business plans. Very often businesses, which have survived for five years or more, have invariably shown marked strengths in both of the above.

Pulse of the market: Top in the order of importance, successful business planning requires measuring the real pulse of the market, as against complicated mathematical projections/estimates of sales and numbers. What one needs is the practical insight into whether the products cover a gap in an existing market, or the affordability of the targets, or even whether the customer has the right perceptions about the product.

The idea concept: Successful home based businesses also have to capitalize on the impetus from new ideas by reorienting their strategies to use them (ideas) effectively. Ideas and solutions should trigger positive customer response by establishing solutions, or by infusing recurring demand,  in effect improving the customer’s perception of contentment and satisfaction.

Business plans and Finances: Businesses that survive and also grow seem to have a strong armory comprising of a well-conceived dynamic business plan and the right mix of schemes for capital funding and financial inputs. While the business plan acts as the forerunner for the business, including the finances, an integrated outlook based on internal and external performances should ensure the proper environment for the successful functioning of the business. A plethora of funding agencies coming from governmental/non governmental sectors, chambers of commerce and trade associations offer various types of financial support to business enterprises, in the form of grants/loans and so on. What is needed is the right combination of financial planning with effective business strategies to meet what the business needs at the appropriate stages of start-up, development, manufacturing or marketing.

Core competencies: An innovative idea/product, coupled with a receptive market situation may not be enough for a business to survive, except when sufficiently equipped with the basic core abilities/competencies in terms of consistency in production, supply, the right mix of skills for buying, making and selling, apart from others.

Mentors: Successful entrepreneurs are not born, but made. Very often businesses that survive and grow, are run by entrepreneurs who are able to acquire the right solutions at the right time for many of their problems. Taking the clues from previous successes is an art, and successful business plans need to adopt from proven models, and tailor them to suit the individual business. Again, when entrepreneurs do not have the necessary skills, in special disciplines, the right thing would be to use the services of a consultant, or advisor or even locate a mentor, who could guide and support with their expertise on some critical areas, identify the plus and the minus and help him/her in the tools and techniques of successful business planning and ultimately continued successes in business.

Last but not least it is absolutely necessary to understand that adequate time and effort is allowed for planning, at the time of starting the business (formative stage), which is none else than the hard core of successful business planning.

In any business, launching your product in the market is an event that comes at the end of your planning cycle. If you are expecting that you will first launch the product and then work backwards, you will be making a huge mistake. The starting point is with having a business plan in place along with sales strategy, product positioning as well as promotions and distribution plans in place.

Along with your product strategy runs the sales strategy and promotions plan too. All of these are aimed at building continuously a customer database that can be worked upon for getting sales leads. The database building is not one time job ending with product launch but all your promotions and interactions with community through internet posting, forum and blogs should be aimed at adding customers to the database.

Just technical capability and knowledge will not make you a good businessman. To be successful you must know the other functional areas that are important in business namely marketing and finance. Though you may not be involved in day to day operations, you should be involved as management and be able to control the operations.

A successful businessman is he who always keeps a watch on competition and is ahead of them. He is also aware of the environment in which he exists including socio, economic and political climate around him.

The future of your product and your business is governed by your investment into innovation and quality. These two if you focus on and get it right, they can take you ahead of competition and help you retain the leadership for a long time.

To be able to build long term future of your business, it is essential that you have a short term as well as long term plan and vision for your business. Product innovation and R&D should be a part of the plan and focusing on these two along with adapting tomorrows technology today will undoubtedly push you ahead of competition and make you a leader in your segment.

Your aggressive growth strategy should also involve plans to get into joint venture with other companies so that you are able to leverage both on your strength as well as borrow from your partner’ strength and grow your business faster.

Joint ventures can be extremely profitable for both parties provided they are in line with your strategic business plans that you have drawn up for yourself and your company. Besides the partners should share the same ethos, values and outlook that you have towards business as well as opportunities. It is important to ascertain these factors before committing huge financial resources to the JV partnership.