How to learn business: 10 practical tips + cases + ideas

Let’s think about how to learn a business from scratch. After all, absolutely any person, as soon as he leaves the "comfort zone" and activates cognitive abilities, begins to think about his business. And also about some kind of commerce, he thinks how to learn business, entrepreneurship.

Well, who, being in his right mind and sober mind, wants to support at his own expense, "someone else’s uncle" and live according to the army schedule:

• 6 am – rise;
• From 7 to 8 – the road to work;
• Then 8 to 17 – work + 1 hour for a lunch break;
• And from 17 to the morning – free time;
• Saturday and Sunday are days off (if you’re lucky).

And about half of what they earn is taken away for the maintenance of management, accounting and other engineering and technical personnel. In this mode, there are 80% of the working population!

Only they are mesmerized by uniformity and monotony.

Being between the trees it is difficult to notice that you are in the forest. Only by rising above a series of circumstances, you can assess your actual state.

Lao Tzu

How to learn business – What is business

Ideas about the unknown must be based on something. Therefore, let’s figure out what such a phenomenon as business is. The main thing is to roll your eyes. As practice shows, even businessmen cannot always define this word.

Therefore, one-time transactions also fall into this category. Their size doesn’t matter. From a legal point of view, the grandmother who sells seeds near the metro is a businessman. She did not think long about how to start a business – she bought a bag of seeds, fried them and began to sell them in glasses.

From a professional point of view, the scheme looks like this:

1. Wholesale purchase of goods;
2. Heat treatment;
3. Small packaging (bags of two types);
4. Retail.

The resale scenario is typical, points between the first and the last, allow you to increase the added value. But in general, the sector of application of efforts is first determined.

How to start a business

Each person has certain skills and advantages that can bring him income. It is necessary to determine the parameters of the launch pad. Everything that is in the asset must be written out on a piece of paper, and this must be done right now, or all "steam will go into the whistle."

Reference: Procrastination is a psychological syndrome of postponing things “for tomorrow".

This asset is needed to determine the vector of application of efforts, to choose a business niche, a segment in the economic field.

Some of the search directions can be designated as follows.

Education

If you have a higher education or any professional, this is a big plus. Even if there is absolutely no knowledge left, you devoted some time of your life to the process of obtaining a diploma. And in any case, the remnants of profile information are gathering dust somewhere in the back streets of memory.

Food for Thought: Entrepreneurship is a slippery road, and the crumbs from the granite of science will help keep you out of a silly situation.

To expand the range of opportunities, remember what your classmates and classmates are doing now. Imagine yourself on their way to success, and figure out if you would have enough knowledge for the same start.

In the bottom line, even if knowledge is not useful immediately, it will still find practical application in your future. Because your knowledge is a suitcase that will only be unpacked when necessary.

Hobby

Even if there is only a secondary school in the asset, then in my youth there were some hobbies:

• A bike;
• Photographing and video filming;
• Modeling;
• Embroidery;
• Dogs, cats, other animals.

Yes, everything! There are just instructive examples. Aleksey, a schoolboy, living in the countryside, studying in the 8th grade of an ordinary village school, decided to experiment with breeds of chickens. Therefore, he made cages in a barn, started a diary and began selection. And he scrupulously kept statistics on the daily growth of chickens and, in general, all work.

By the end of the tenth grade, he had several shared notebooks with the results of experiments and a stable genetic branch. In 1998, immediately after graduating from a rural (!) School, he was admitted to the 2nd year of the Orenburg Agricultural Academy without exams.

IMPORTANT: this guy did not think how to build his business. He was engaged in what was interesting to him, and required a minimum investment of funds. And his consciousness lived in another plane.

In general, from children’s and youthful hobbies, extremely stable business models develop.

Life experience is the best way to learn how to learn business

If a person has lived to his age, then he is something and sometime:

• Engaged;
• Passed courses (welder, slinger, lifter-watchman-security guard);
• Trained;
• Worked part-time;
• Trained;
• Watched;
• Collected, etc.

Here are all these skills written out on a piece of paper. Give it a whole day off, turn over the memory.

For example, a man was guarding a warehouse. Having nothing to do, instead of counting the raven, he fantasized and wondered if it was possible to fit in a particular room more goods (bags of cement or flour, or boxes of shoes). Maybe he even figured out a way to make more efficient use of the storage space.

From a professional point of view, this is called logistics and design. And it must be included in the asset.

Relatives

Immediately give up thoughts about exploitation. Interaction will be based on assertive principles. You will give your relative the opportunity to earn money, and invest your intermediary interest in a trading allowance.

There was a real example:

Igor, worked for himself as a boring department head in a bank. Life was good. But in such a position they quickly sit up. Finding himself without work and without special skills to do something with his hands, he began to move his brains. He remembered that his aunt worked as a confectioner all her life, and cooks exceptionally tasty and beautiful cakes.

At first, he simply asked her to bake a beautiful cake for himself. He photographed it from all angles, asked how much she would sell it for. The aunt thought that it was very profitable for her to bake such cakes for 600 🪙.

After 3 days, Igor found a customer via the Internet for two cakes at once, for 1.5 tr. for every.

I paid 750 rubles apiece to the confectioner, and the pensioner was delighted! After 2 months, working exclusively through the Internet, he was already selling 30 cakes a week. He did not shy away from delivering pastries himself. His own relative found her “colleagues”, unemployed or pensioners, who almost prayed for a benefactor.

Only six months later, when he settled on the bar of 9-10 cakes a day, he had to open a confectionery shop and legalize.

IMPORTANT: in fact, a criminal business scheme worked. But all the participants were satisfied and did not bring physical harm to anyone with their actions.

📌📌📌 Business ideas with minimal investment

Ethical categories in entrepreneurship – a case from real life

Legally, the above example of a confectionery shop is a clear reason to start a criminal case, with all the ensuing consequences. And as an example, it would not be worth giving. But the principle of reasonable assumptions intervenes.

Here is a man who knows how to cook good garage doors. Together with his son, he installs them in a few hours. And the neighbor asks to make him the same, with the installation. And then another friend asked for a favor, there was a third, a fourth.

Legally, this person must register as an entrepreneur under a simplified scheme, and already start paying taxes. And if he no longer has these orders, then it turns out that he himself gave the money for no one knows what and it is not clear to whom.

There is a real example of long-term work on the market of a fairly successful company dealing with stretch ceilings. Two school friends, Alexander and Victor, by the age of 32 managed to serve together in the army, achieve sports categories and work in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. About 15 years ago, when stretch ceilings had just begun to penetrate the regions, they phoned the head office in Moscow, showed interest and received installation instructions along with the terms of cooperation. The whole scheme looked like this:

1. Find a client, conclude an agreement, receive an advance payment (80%), set an installation date no later than 10 days later;
2. Call the Moscow office, send them an order for an installation kit, immediately receive an invoice, and pay it during the day.

On average, the Transport Company delivered the goods in 2-3 days.

3. In 5-6 days after receiving the advance payment, the guys mounted the ceiling and took the remaining 20% ​​from the client.

Both knew how to work with their hands, but Victor also had an artistic flair, and Alexander gravitated more towards the exact sciences. Therefore, measurements, calculations, communication with Moscow and the financial part of the work lay with Sasha, and Victor led the physical embodiment and the logistical part.

IMPORTANT: two people went to the measurements and installation, they did everything with their own hands.

How to start your own business – example

The nastiness of the situation was that Alexander thought out an exceptionally non-standard scenario of how to start his own business, without legal troubles and all the accounting and tax fuss. Only legally this scheme was criminal through and through.

Alexander bought a color laser printer on credit and printed contracts on it. Documents were replicated on expensive paper, in full-color format with watermarks, and legal details were filled in according to the stamp found! The client was left with a seemingly chic document, but in fact a beautiful piece of paper with a real phone number.

What’s next

But the guys were always in touch, advised on all relevant issues and fulfilled their contractual obligations ahead of schedule! And the quality of work and material was impeccable.

After receiving the ceiling, the client no longer needed this contract. But he was handsome and worked as a partisan advertisement.

The financial side: out of 80% of the prepayment, 60 percent was spent on the purchase and delivery. That is, for themselves, they had 40% of the order “clean”. On average, one ceiling cost 20 thousand, 8000🪙 remained for advertising and for life.

In the first six months, there were only 2-4 orders per month. Three years later, the same number of orders per week. The guys bought several rolls of material in Moscow at the maximum discount, and already from the order they had up to 60% left.

They trained several finishing teams, who sometimes bought material from them at a discount. In addition, we formed a couple of our own teams of students who wish to earn extra money and can arrive at the facility on a call.

Case results

An interesting fact: During the measurement of the object and the calculation of the cost, Alexander was always mistaken in favor of the client! The amount of the error was small, well, to round up. For example, after the calculation, the amount of 21420 rubles was obtained, and as a result of the “oversight”, exactly 21 thousand remained. The client, of course, noticed this mistake, but never disputed it, and a priori agreed with the contract.

Over the 8 years of operation, they have had several hundred satisfied clients, but they have not bothered to enter the tax-legal field lately. At the same time, for all the time they had no more than half a dozen, promptly resolved claims.

In general, legalization and functioning in the legal field, without any conditions, is an extremely important aspect. However, 150 years ago, N.S. Leskov, in the work “Odnodum”, through the mouth of the mayor, gave the conclusion: “recently, the law is like a horse: where it is necessary, go there and return it.” You need to register, but first create your first business, stabilize it at least a little so that it pays for itself, and then …

How to learn business – ideas for business

All written assets are not necessarily the object of study. To smoothly and tenaciously enter into commerce, you need to look at well-known objects from a different angle and analyze them.

For example, a person likes to ride a bicycle, but at the same time he faces specific problems: puncture of wheels, loss of body kit, minor breakdowns. And for a cyclist, you need protection, hiking equipment and camping equipment – this is a huge commodity niche. That is, the bicycle is turning from a hobby into a possible business niche.

There are some novelties that are not yet available in your city. Some people traveling abroad notice some commercial developments that are simply missing recently.

IMPORTANT: not everything that is popular in the West has taken root lately.

Elasticity as a category of economics

All goods and services can be divided into categories of elastic demand and inelastic demand. Here is a simple example: bread, laundry soap, matches and salt are in demand in any financial situation in the country and in any social system. Demand for them is inelastic.

But scarves for ankles, rhinestones for the navel or luminous nail polish, during the economic crisis, and even more so war, hardly anyone will need it.

Services have the same division.

Advantage of cheap goods

From the outside, it seems very attractive and prestigious to sell Ferrari cars, expensive jewelry and other attributes from the luxury segment. With one such transaction, you can earn several tens of thousands of dollars at a discount.

And you can not sell anything for a year.

But the main thing is that there is always a minimum margin for expensive goods.

A real case from post-war life:

“In the summer of 1945, the front-line soldiers who ended the war in Germany were demobilized and went home. They brought trophies with them: someone had a motorcycle, someone else had a car, carpets, clothes, shoes. The fellow soldiers laughed at their colleague, an ethnic Jew, who was bringing home from Germany, two suitcases of sewing needles.

After 5 years, they met in Stalingrad, where their unit began its combat path. The veteran who told me about this case at the end of the last millennium never ceased to admire the thoughtfulness of the choice. After all, cars crashed, clothes and shoes wore out, but ordinary sewing needles after the war were the most popular goods. And the markup on such items as needles, laces, buttons and other household trifles reaches 1000%!

Here the category of prestige intervenes, and for it there is one wise answer: "Money does not smell."

Can demand be predicted?

The ability to anticipate the emergence of demand is a powerful enough foundation for a successful start. And an ideal option to learn business. But not always such plots can serve for long-term activity. Here are two examples:

How to learn business – the first case

1. In 2001, Sergei saw the celebration of the "City Day" in Moscow during a news release. He drew attention to the luminous bracelets. I found a place for their sale in the capital, collected 15 thousand and after 4 days he had 4 thousand of these bracelets.

During the "Day of the City" in his subject, he gathered 5 familiar sellers who wanted to make money. They sold bracelets for 10 🪙, the sellers received a thousand each, minus 15 thousand starting capital – the net profit in one evening was 20 thousand.

18 years ago it was a good sum, but such an occupation is not permanent, it is just a successful breakthrough. Sergey took up the cultivation of mushrooms, and the capital allowed him to lay the base.

How to learn business – the second case

2. Having heard about the tragedy at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Vyacheslav suggested that the demand for dosimeters might rise sharply. In a couple of days he created a simple website and found the manufacturers of these dosimeters.

The calculation turned out to be correct! After 2 months, he was selling batches of dosimeters of several hundred pieces. But it was a "ripple effect" – the demand appeared sharply, and within a year, returned to the old framework. During this time, Vyacheslav made a good capital, although before Fukushima he worked as a physics teacher in high school and did not even think about how to learn business and generally go into commerce.

But was it just a coincidence? After all, Vyacheslav never returned to teaching, and having gained experience, he continued to develop other stores on the Internet.

Any accident, there is an unknown regularity – whoever seeks, he finds a connection.

That is, people purposefully changed the inclination of consciousness in order to find invisible images among ordinary objects that can bring income.

Packing value

“They meet by clothes” – an underestimation of this wisdom, ruins 80% of start-up entrepreneurs. The inability to present oneself and declare one’s proposals completely destroys even phenomenal ideas.

There is a simple test that shows anyone how to learn a business from scratch in 10 seconds:

1. Choose a niche or a product or service that you will offer;
2. Turn on the stopwatch on your smartphone and stand in front of the mirror;
3. In 10 seconds, introduce yourself, make an offer and justify your advantages.

During this period of time, you can clearly and intelligibly pronounce a phrase of 30-35 words, ≈ 200-220 characters of text. Try to formulate the text first, write it down.

IMPORTANT: according to statistics, people do not focus more than 10-12 seconds on an object of interest if they do not receive basic information about it.

Remember the example with confectioners: masters make cakes without Igor’s participation. And the product praised itself. Igor just set up the relationship between supply and demand. After all, when setting up targeted advertising via the Internet, he carefully chose the semantic core of target queries and localized the served sector of the city as accurately as possible. As a result, the conversion of visitors was extremely high.

Success in business depends precisely on the ability to establish interaction between the manufacturer and the end consumer. But will the offer be demanded?

How to determine possible demand

This may be the easiest task if you involve Yandex stat. Follow the link and type in the key sentence. If the number of requests approaches 100 thousand, then you can pinch off the share of visitors for your site from this “pie”.

When entering the local market (example with stretch ceilings), the region of receipt of search queries is limited to the target area.

It is a completely different matter if the scale of your passionarity is cramped in the "Procrustean bed" of the city market. After all, you can earn nothing at all by investing, and not notifying anyone.

Dropshipping – or start your own business now

This is the most real way to make a profit, without contact with the goods. The scheme looks like this: Fig 2

1. You find a buyer and receive full payment from him + your allowance;
2. You pay for the goods from the manufacturer and pass the delivery address;
3. The manufacturer sends the purchase, and then has all warranty obligations indirectly with the client.

The whole task of the owner of such a store is to create the most attractive and relevant product descriptions. Do it yourself, or order from an advertising agency, promote through Yandex.Direct for a fee or through social networks for free – only you determine the effectiveness. For this, a complete set of tools and a detailed video instruction have been formed.

IMPORTANT: the concept of any online store control panel is based on maximum simplification. This approach allows you to cover the widest range of potential business people.

When to start your business

Right now! Remember the procrastination syndrome, and don’t get up from your computer until you share a link to your store on social networks.

After all, building a business is hard, but if you approach it strategically, using our advice, you will certainly succeed.