GIA: A Small Café With
Big Potential!
Small Businesses in Kuwait
This blog is all about the new small businesses in Kuwait, businesses that are owned and started by Kuwaitis. This blog will keep you updated with stories, ideas, and information about small businesses in Kuwait.
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Saturday, December 14, 2013
GIA: The Hidden Gem
Friday, December 13, 2013
Guest Author: Laurence Abbott
Starting
Small Businesses Has Never Been Easier
I believe
that it got easier to succeed with small businesses now more than ever. There are
more opportunities for entrepreneurs to start up small businesses nowadays.
Here are some
good reasons for why I believe this is true.
A) With the
increase in population comes an increase in opportunities for small businesses.
Generally, a
sparse population requires a small business owner to provide a wide variety of
goods or services to survive. With a denser population, the small businesses
can still survive by providing a very narrow range of products or services.
For example,
in a smaller population a small business that provides gardening services would
probably need to offer many things. Services could include general garden
maintenance, planning, tree felling, lawn cutting, vermin control, pond
planning and maintenance, hard landscaping etc.
With a bigger
population a small business could thrive perfectly well by providing just one
of these services, as there are more people who will need it.
B) The costs
involved in starting and running small businesses has never been so low in
proportion to income.
Technology
has replaced many of the things that people used to do, and technology does the
job a lot more cheaply.
Today it's
possible to reach literally millions of potential customers around the world
very cheaply.
For example,
only a few decades ago the cost of mailing to thousands of households was
prohibitively high. Unless you had a very good product or service that sold
well, a small business just wouldn't risk it.
Another
example, business premises security used to involve security guards walking
around checking that all was well. Now a good security system can be bought for
less than 1 week's pay for that security guard, and it will work 24hrs per day
for years, for no pay.
C) Because
modern life is so complex today, small businesses and individuals are open to
new ideas, products and services like never before.
This creates
a huge market for training courses, information provision services, educational
aids, specialized products and services, novelties, etc.
With this
great diversity come great opportunities to combine different products and
technologies, thus making whole new areas of business possible.
For example,
you can combine a low-light camera with wireless communications and a bird box.
This means a nest may be watched remotely on a television or personal computer
screen.
Another
example would be to combine voice-chip technology with passive infrared
technology to make it sound as though you have a huge dog indoors whenever
anyone approaches your house.
In our recent
history, these opportunities just didn't exist.
D) It may not
feel like it, but many people today have a lot more leisure time and a higher
disposable income than in any previous age.
This spare
income (and with the current attitudes to loans, a little more besides) tends
to get spent on sports, games, hobbies, crafts, amusements, entertainments,
holidays and weekend breaks etc.
This creates
many opportunities for the entrepreneur to start up small businesses to satisfy
all this extra demand.
E) To thrive
in a modern society you need to have a lot of different skills.
Nowadays
people cope with a variety of complex tasks. They buy and use a wide range of
consumer equipment, fill out many forms, and communicate with all kinds of
people from all walks of life (often from different countries and cultures).
They also do difficult transactions like house purchasing, and so on.
All this is a
long way from the average people who were around just a few hundred years ago.
Many were farm laborers who could barely read or write and never travelled more
than a few miles from home.
So now, the
pool of potential business people is far greater than ever before. If a person
can live well in a modern society, they already have the abilities they need to
start up a small business enterprise and succeed.
The good news
also is that if you lack a certain skill that your small business needs, and
then you can probably employ someone with that skill far more easily than ever
before.
F) More
people have access to money than ever before.
Until the
late 1960s, most people were paid weekly and spent money as they earned it.
It was normal
among manual workers to run right out of money around the time of their next
pay packet, which often contained notes and coins!
Today most
people have many bank accounts (with overdrafts) and access to credit cards,
which alone have spending limits equal to a half or full year's income.
Savings and
share holdings are greater than ever before. A large proportion of the
population can raise money on their house and if they don't mind paying a high
interest percentage, they can borrow with no security at all.
A great
variety of people and institutions are now willing to lend money for good small
businesses proposals.
With access
to credit, you can buy the product, ship it to the customer and get paid before
you have to pay for the goods which you sold. This just wasn't possible until
very recently.
G) Advice,
courses and books about starting small businesses are within easy reach of
everyone.
Researching
your chosen business area has never been easier with the Internet so readily
available.
Not so long
ago, you would have needed to buy many books and read them all to get the
specific information you required. Now you can ask a search engine very
specific question and get very specific answers, almost immediately.
This frees up
small businesses and enables them to be far more productive and enterprising.
H) If you
start a small business today you have an immense amount of technology available
to you.
Computers,
printers, copiers, audio and video recording and playback equipment, telephony
and the internet are all easily available to any entrepreneur wanting to get
started in a new small business enterprise.
Not long ago,
the average multi-national company lacked the computing, communicating and
printing power available to the ordinary person today.
You can
probably think of at least 6 different ways to get a simple message to someone
on the other side of the world. 5 of those messages would typically arrive less
than 1 minute after you sent them.
Just 100 years
ago, (and remember mankind has been around for about 3 million years) this same
message would have involved horses and steam ships and would have taken months.
This massive
improvement in technology (especially in communications and information) has really
opened up the field to the individual who wants to go ahead with a new small
business venture.
I) Small
businesses starting up today have far more choices available to them.
In previous
times, it was quite common for there to be only a few companies that they could
go to, to buy business supplies. Whatever business you care to name, you would
not find many suppliers of the materials needed to conduct that business.
Unless your
business is in a very specialist area, you will now find you can source your
supplies from a great many firms. This in turn drives your costs down, as you
can shop around for the best deals.
For example,
there used to be very few ways to get your goods delivered to your customers.
Nowadays you could chose from literally hundreds of different carriers.
New companies
can chose anywhere in the world to set up their small businesses, or indeed
where to place any part of their business.
I know of a
successful paintball company, which operates in the UK in summer. But when the
business falls off due to the cold winter, they find new customers by simply
moving the company to Brazil, and then return the following spring.
They also
take advantage of the cheaper labour in Brazil to manufacture the paint balling
equipment, and when back in the UK use the greater expertise in the UK to
program their systems.
Not so long
ago this flexibility of operating a small business would have been totally
impractical.
Conclusion.
There are far
more opportunities to start small businesses than ever before and entrepreneurs
who do start new small businesses at home are more likely to succeed.
There are
more potential customers, it costs less to start up and you have more choice
over the kind of business to go into. Other benefits are a more skilled and
educated workforce, and easy access to financial support.
If you do
want your own enterprise, you can also use the power of the Internet to carry
out good and fast research, and to support your business in many ways. I
believe there has never been a better time to start up new small businesses.
Laurence
Abbott brings to you an abundance of experience of starting and running small
businesses. From hundreds of ideas for small businesses to recommendations for
many services, small businesses will profit by visiting 4-Small-Businesses.Co.UK
The Blooming Of Small Businesses
Small Businesses:
Independent and Thriving
There
had been a lot of support for small businesses to flourish Recently. Proud to
be Kuwaiti fair (P2BK) was the first project to show small
businesses some encouragement and support. Now and then we see more and more of
these privately owned small establishments, increasingly growing on social
media like: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, also many of these businesses put
their contact number through What’sApp, because it costs nothing! Using social
media and smart phone apps cuts half the costs of creating a private business.
Creating a business through Instagram especially is a smart move! People want
to see your products or services, and Instagram particularly is a great app for
that. People are creating a private business for many reasons, some businesses
aim for uniqueness and others for independency, but they all have one thing in
common, creating a business to earn money that came from their own hard work. And
people either create a business on the side of their real job or as the main
money provider. And that’s why it’s necessary to construct a survey by using
ServiceMonkey.com about “Are Small Businesses successful?” to generate certain
responses; to know wither it’s a successful field or a dying industry, and does
the public think that building a small business is profitable? Click
here to take the survey.
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