Techniques to Build Your Dream Start-up Team

Starting a new business with like-minded people who share the same vision and philosophies is not always easy. The key to successful business is recruiting top talent. Here are few steps to use when building your start-up dream team.

Identify positions - The most important members of your team are the founders. Before hiring anyone else, you and your co-founder have to settle on how decisions will be made within the start-up. Once that has been agreed upon, you should identify the positions needed to complete your team. Jobs in SEO, sales & marketing, programming, account management, and project management are just a handful of examples of positions that need to be filled.  In an IT business, it wouldn’t make sense to hire five project managers and not a single programmer. 

Identify candidates – Search the candidates based on their experience, willingness to join on a limited salary, whether you know them directly or through your contacts and their passion or liking to work on your product/service. If you are able to find such people, you will have a dream team.

Contractors Vs. full timers - When starting out, you may not have to hire full-time employees. You also may be able to hire people on a part-time basis who are excellent at what they do. It's safer than taking the chance on a full-time employee who may not deliver. Having people as contractors at the beginning and then moving to full-time employees is the best way to leverage a full set of skills for your business.

Lead employees to strive for the best – After you hire your employees; you need to be their role model and motivator. Little competitiveness is good for your business.

Value individual strengths - Each person is a vital member of the team, so you need to help them recognize how they can best support the group. It's important to nurture them along the way and make each person feel important.

Promote a supportive culture - The mental pressures of meeting an ambitious goal, especially when you're working long hours can be harder than physical hurdles. Readily available support from everyone, not just the leader, holds a team together when the pressure mounts.

When you and your employees together enjoy the process of growing your business and reap its benefits, you have developed a winning team!

If you believe you have an innovative idea to start your own IT business, please register on TheGongzuo.com and get advice from our mentors to build your dream team.

How to Raise $100,000 for Your Start-up Business?

Having an idea for a business is only a first step in the process. To turn the idea from a dream into a successful business venture, it requires time, energy, and of course, money. The main question most aspiring entrepreneurs face is “how much money exactly do I need?”

According to the data published by census bureau, baseline figures would be around $100,000. Entrepreneurs of all types, regardless of industry are more likely to be successful if they have adequate start-up funding.

Raising $100,000 might seem like a mountain to climb when you are just starting in the early days of your business, but it need not be that hard. Self-finance and banks are not the only options available to you. There are a few other ways to get going.

Founders must research the investor market, figure out which segments to focus on, reach out to the relevant contacts, and present a compelling solution. You can maximize your chances of fundraising success by following these four steps:

• Research - Within the IT domain, there are specialists in hardware vs. software, and further diverse areas within the software space. Some organizations only consider investing in early-stage companies (angel or seed), whereas others will filter for start-ups. Some investors may invest in 100 different companies, while the others may select only 10 and invest their funds. Considering these factors, you can evaluate the investors and have clarity on which organizations may have interest in your start-up.
• Analyze - Investors are long-term partners, and in order to develop healthy relationship, the interest needs to be common. Assessing various other factors such as their connections, experience in your niche field etc. is a great way to narrow down your choices. 
• Reach out – When you are ready with a shortlist of potential investors, convince them to meet you. Most investors are more likely to take a meeting with a founder if they have been referred by a trusted contact. So, networking is crucial to get favourable response from your target investors.
• Sell your business idea - You can maximize your chances of fundraising success by convincing investors that your start-up offers a high score. You can reinforce your idea by presenting them with your financial model and the assumptions underlying your growth estimates.

The other ways of raising funds include bank loans, venture capital, help from friends and family, personal finances such as credit cards and home equity etc.

If you have a great business idea and looking for an investor to fund your start-up project, register on TheGongzuo.com. We will introduce you to the investors who would be interested in funding your dream!

How to Start Tech Business?

With so many success stories of tech giants, budding entrepreneurs dream of creating another Google or Facebook. Before taking the leap, they should follow these suggestions:

• Have adequate knowledge - Starting a fast-growing tech business is incredibly challenging, and requires a variety of skills. The time you take for studying, allows you to explore your talents and find the one thing you really excel at. Don’t believe the myth of the college dropout who becomes successful entrepreneur. Building up a company, leading a team and sustaining a highly successful international business is hard work and requires a lot of knowledge. 
• Meet like-minded people - Spending time with ambitious and like-minded people will shape your actions. If you engage with friends or acquaintances who are developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and work for different kinds of start-ups, their experiences and knowledge will give you proper direction towards your goal. Surround yourself with mentors who are founders, CEOs, industry leaders to learn more about trends and important topics.
• Select right co-founders – For starting an IT company, you more than likely need a developer, a user interface/visual designer, one marketing person, and a finance person. With this kind of team, you can start your business. 
• Pick the right location - Depending on your new business, location does matter. If you are an Internet/software business, take care you pick a location that helps you to start. San Francisco is the number one choice for techies, but the costs of living are incredibly high and you will compete with the world’s most successful tech businesses for talent.
• Analyse your ideas carefully - Challenge every single idea with your team to the extreme. Be aware that most ideas that seem great in the first place, are either already taken or not so great once you’ve challenged them further. Finding best idea is about identifying the problems, and finding clever ways to fix them.
• Follow the trends – In technology, you have follow the trends, whether it is cloud or software-as-a-service. You want to create something that stays and adds value to people’s lives, both your customers and your employees.
• Prepare yourself to fail – Starting a tech business is hard. You will experience unbelievable lows, including running out of money, or seeing important people leaving or shutting down a business you worked so hard for. If you build a software product, you need to be prepared for downtimes or bugs.
• Focus on learning, not on earning - While it’s critical to become deeply skilled in one area of the business, the required skill-set to start and run a company is much more varied. Starting a tech business requires a strong sense for products, timing, trends and markets, which you can only acquire through experience.
• Find investors – When everything is in place, the next crucial task is to find the financers to fund your venture. You can reach out individual investors through your social contacts or approach banks. Before setting up meetings with them, you must be ready with your business plan to convince them how their money put in your business has potential to multiply.

If you are thinking on the lines of starting up your own IT company, register on TheGongzuo.com where you will get support from the mentors, advisors and investors to launch your business.

How to Better Manage Cash Flow in Small Business?

Cash flow is one of the most critical components of success for a small or mid-sized business. Many a profitable business on paper has ended up in bankruptcy because the amount of cash coming in doesn't compare with the amount of cash going out. Most business owners don't truly have a handle on their cash flow.

How to improve cash flow?

1. Collect receivables – Speed up the receipts and processing of receivables by requesting customers for electronic funds transfer. If they plan to pay by check, ask customers to preauthorize checks so that banks can draw against their accounts at timed intervals. You can also try offering discounts to customers if they pay bills quickly.
2. Tighten customers’ credit requirements - Businesses often have to extend credit to customers, particularly when starting out or growing. But you have to do your research beforehand to determine the risk of extending credit to each customer. You should do a research and check reports on health of individual customer’s business and whether or not they are having cash flow problems.
3. Increase your sales - If you need more cash, it seems like a no brainer to go out and try to attract new customers or sell additional goods or services to your existing customers. Selling more to existing customers is cheaper and you may be able to do this by analysing what they're buying and why - information that may even lead you to increase your profit margin and, hopefully, generate more cash. 
4. Offer discounts - One option to increasing cash flow is to offer your customers discounts if they pay early. While this practice may impact your profit margin, it may help your management of cash flow by offering incentives to customers to make payments earlier than billing cycles typically require.
5. Secure loans - Short-term cash flow problems may sometimes necessitate a business taking out a loan from a financial institution. Some possible types are credit lines or equity loans. Most of the time this type of borrowing accomplishes its goals, although during the financial crisis banks may cancel credit lines. 
6. Measure cash flow frequently – Ask yourself two questions to get a sense about whether your cash flow is under control or not – “What is my cash balance right now?” and “What do I expect my cash balance to be six months from now?”
7. Prepare backup plan - No matter how much effort you put into perfecting your forecast, unexpected obstacles can throw your plans out the window. For this reason, you need to have a contingency plan for when money is tight to ensure your business is kept running.
8. Don’t under-price your product/service - It can be tempting to lower your prices in order to offer your clients the best deal and stay competitive. Be careful not to under-price your products or services though. Make sure you are bringing in a healthy profit margin.

Cash flow is important for all businesses, but it is critical for start-ups.  If you cannot manage your cash flow within the first year, you will likely not survive the second year. Register for free at TheGongzuo.com to stay afloat with the help of our investors and financial advisors. Our experts will guide you shape your actions going forward.

Profitable IT Business Ideas

Beyond every reasonable doubt, the advancement we are enjoying in our world today can be attributed to the advancement of technology. Technology has indeed given leverage to all aspects of the human endeavor. The technology industry is so wide and vibrant and there is still room large enough for those who are interested in the industry to come in and create their own impact. There are fantastic business ideas in this industry that an entrepreneur can successfully start and with time earn millions from.

Here are the business ideas in technology field that an entrepreneur who is interested in starting a business can choose from:

• Call centers – Designing, building and maintaining call centers is a business in the info tech industry that is profitable and thriving going by the numbers of call centers that are established in the United States. For this, you would need some IT certifications and trainings before you can successfully run this type of business. The business involves call center software applications development and installation, and hardware installation as well.
• Sale and servicing of IT equipment and machines - IT gadgets like servers, computers, fax machines, and routers et al are all machines that once in a while need to be serviced in order to enable them perform effectively and efficiently. Thus, if you have related info tech training, then you should consider going into the sale and services of IT equipment and machines. All you need to do is to be aggressive in marketing your services especially to corporate organizations and SMEs.
• Online library - You can start your own online library (e – library) and attract membership from different parts of the world. People pay registering fees and of course membership fees to make use of online libraries. If you looking towards starting a business in the info tech industry, then starting a well – equipped e – library is one of your options.
• Manufacturing computer/cell phone accessories – This is another thriving and profitable business in IT world. There is a large market for computer accessories such as laptop batteries, HDI cables, webcams, external memory drives and cell phone accessories such as earphones, batteries, chargers, Bluetooth devices etc. So, if you are looking into starting a business in tech industry, then this is one of your options.
• Developing and selling software applications – In IT arena, one of your options is to start developing and selling software applications; there is a large market for software applications. There are several smart-phone apps that are very useful for our day to day activities. With the help of web developers or smartphone app developers, your business can get rolling.
• Web designing services - Another thriving and profitable info tech related business that an entrepreneur can start is to offer web designing services. Statistics has it that there are well over 350 million active website on the internet and it is not enough to meet the demand of people visiting the internet; there are still pretty much to learn from the internet hence people are opening new websites on a regular basis.
• Blogging - It is safe to classify blogging under info tech industry simply because the internet is the major tool required to blog; blogging is all about educating or passing information to people via an internet portal. Blogging is one of the means several people all over the world are making money from the internet. Blogging is all about creating usefully and perhaps educative content for a targeted audience on the internet.
• Cloud computing - Cloud computing place emphasis on web-based applications.  It involves storing information in and retrieving it from remote but secure web-based servers, thereby allowing users to access information on the go without necessarily having to be with their office computers. There are huge profit opportunities for businesses that offer cloud-computing services.
• E-commerce - More people are now enjoying the convenience of buying things they need over the internet and having them delivered at their doorsteps—without leaving the comfort of their homes. If you have what it takes to start your own e-commerce store, then you should consider starting as soon as possible.
• 3D printing – With 3D printers, it’s possible to print the 3D model of an object from plastic, metal, or any other material. And not only can you see the output, but you will be able to touch it. Yes, that’s the next big thing in the print industry.

If you think, you have a bright idea that can be turned into profitable business, TheGongzuo team is looking forward to take you ahead with your dream. We have advisors to guide you along the way; we will fund your creative idea and help you launch your business. Register today at TheGongzuo to turn your dream into reality.