Business Articles
How To Create a Life Strategy for Business Success 
Part One of a Series
Are You SURE You Want To Start Your Own Business? 
Part Two of a Series

How To Create a Life Strategy for Business Success 
Part One of a Series
Copyright 2004, Charles and Holly Egner

Ask yourself the following:

1. I have created a life-strategy plan for the next:

a. 20 years.................Yes No
b. 10 years.................Yes No
c. 5-years..................Yes No
d. 1-year...................Yes No
e. 1-week...................Yes No

If you knew how to create a life strategy and implement it,
would you be interested in doing so?
...................Yes No

Very few people take the time to think through, and commit to
paper, a life strategy for the future.

Surely, we all set certain life goals such as finishing High
School, obtaining a college degree, attaining a specific
professional position, reaching an athletic goal, or achieving a
particular level of personal income.

However, in general, few people look to the future and fashion a
wide-ranging and cohesive life strategy that would reach
5-10-15, or even 20 years into the future.

Normally, people maintain much shorter life-strategy horizons
because it is difficult and very challenging to look far into
the future and predict an outcome. In addition, most people,
from an early age, do not learn why it is important to create a
life strategy.

The lack of long-term life-strategy horizons could also be an
intrinsic consequence of our culture and its orientation to
instant gratification and wanting everything NOW! You could
say a lot about the importance of living in the moment and of
not being obsessive to the point of planning one's life down to
the last detail. After all what about spontaneity and embracing
the naturalness of life as it unfolds?

We could not agree more.

However, we have always encouraged people to develop some form
of a life strategy so they have something to look forward to,
and, at the same time, set productive goals that have meaning,
substance, and represent a raison d'être for their many years of
living.

A life without some life strategy is like a boat without a
rudder.

Your boat will definitely get you somewhere due to the forces of
wind and water currents, but where you end up may not be where
you really want to go.

For that reason, it is important to give your life some
direction to end up where you want to be in life in the future.

Bear in mind that you do not have to give up spontaneity or the
natural evolution of your life to embrace a life strategy even
20 years into the future. It is equally important to be open to
all possibilities in your life so that you do not overlook
opportunities that might come to you.

You will discover that when you have a life strategy that has a
15-20 year horizon you will be continually refining your life
strategy as you gain more knowledge and experience in your life.
Additionally, you will also learn to fine-tune opportunities as
they present themselves, which further enhances the fulfillment
of your life strategy.

Consider a long-range life strategy as a chart of your future,
which has elasticity so that you can tweak it from time to time
to perfect its outcome.

Conversely, you should build your life strategy on a solid
foundation of clear life-goals.

Goals like self-reliance, financial self-sufficiency, and
entrepreneurialism.

For instance, let us say that one of your major long-term goals
in a 20-year life strategy is to retire a multi-millionaire at
age 50. That certainly is a reasonable and worthy goal for
anyone. However, let's say you get within 10 years of your goal
and lose everything in a bad business deal. At that point, you
literally have to start over to rebuild whatever portion of your
multi-million dollar retirement nest egg that you had already
accumulated.

Does your life strategy change? Yes, it certainly does.

The biggest change is that you now have to extend your
retirement age to 60 instead of 50. Then again, based on all of
the knowledge, valuable contacts, and business savvy you have
acquired in your life thus far you might be able to shorten the
time horizon to your goal.

More often than not that is exactly what happens with
entrepreneurs who encounter a major setback, they come back even
stronger. As a result, the life-strategy goal of retiring a
multi-millionaire does not change, only the timeline changes.

Clearly, developing a life strategy makes a lot of sense and can
be useful to just about anyone.

In future articles, we'll discuss these questions:
How do you go about creating a life strategy?
What are the steps, and how do you maintain a life strategy
over time in order to reach your goals? 


Charles and Holly Egner are veteran entrepreneurs. 
They have trained, coached, and mentored hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs. Their last entrepreneurial venture sold for just under $400 million in 1999. BuildOnYourDreams.com was founded to help promising entrepreneurs to build the business of their dreams. For a f.ree Life Strategy Planning Teleseminar,
 visit http://www.BuildOnYourDreams.com today.

Are You SURE You Want To Start Your Own Business? 
Part Two of a Series
Copyright © 2004, Charles and Holly Egner

Why, exactly, do you want to go into business for yourself? 

* Is it because you cannot stand the thought of working for 
an uptight, demanding, and perfectly dreadful boss? 

* Is it because you cannot bear the thought of going through 
another downsizing or restructuring, knowing that your job 
could be on the line? 

* Is it because you want to be your own boss, call your own 
shots, or see more up side in your earning potential, with 
the possibility of financial self-sufficiency? 

These are all good reasons for wanting to go into business. In
fact, studies have shown that many entrepreneurs get their start
due to some life-altering experience such as losing a job or
finally walking away from a dead-end job or a demoralizing work
environment. 

It is amazing how creative, resourceful, and innovative you can
be when, finally, you reach the edge and find yourself in a
survival situation professionally. In times like this, the
entrepreneurial spirit comes alive and you figure out that you
can simply do it on your own. 

Does dissatisfaction alone in some area of your life constitute
reason enough to venture into business and the life of
entrepreneurship? Many potential entrepreneurs get to this
bridge and never cross because they do not know how to discover
and unleash the entrepreneur within himself or herself. 

Many people resist giving credence to their entrepreneurial
tendencies no matter what the circumstances, ignoring the
potential for self-expression, independence and the fulfillment
of their dreams. Herein resides the real tragedy. Many people
experience paralysis from fear of the unknown and fear of
failure. Consequently, they never pursue entrepreneurship and
the potential freedom that it can bring to their lives. 

Although entrepreneurship appears to offer many advantages for
personal and professional growth and accomplishment, why is it
that so many new entrepreneurs fail? In fact, studies have shown
us that out of every 100 entrepreneurs who start their own
businesses, 14 will succeed and a whopping 86 will fail in the
first five years. The odds, so to speak, are stacked against you
as a nascent entrepreneur. Therefore, if you are contemplating
starting your own business you should take it very seriously. 

The two biggest reasons people fail in a new business are: 

1) they don't know what they are doing, and 
2) their business is undercapitalized. 


When we say they don't know what they are doing, we mean they
literally don't know what they are doing in terms of running a
business day in and day out. It also makes perfect sense that a
new business might be undercapitalized (not having enough
working capital to run the business). In fact, many new
entrepreneurs, who don't know what they are doing have a hard
time finding either equity or debt capital for the reason that
lending institutions and savvy investors typically do not like
to give money to people who don't know what they are doing in
business. 

In order to improve your chances of beating the odds, what is
important is that you educate yourself about business
development. There certainly is enough information out there on
how to start and run a small business. For instance, if you go
to Amazon.com and type in a search for books on
"Entrepreneurship'" alone, you will have over 21,000 book
choices. Nevertheless, where does one start in deciding what to
read, who to listen to, and what to implement? 

In the more than 55 years of combined experience in the world of
business that my wife and I have had, and working with hundreds
of hopeful entrepreneurs, we discovered four basic stages to
business development that every entrepreneur must go through to
enhance their chances for business success. 

1. Reflect 
2. Envision 
3. Create 
4. Build 


Most entrepreneurs, especially the 86 that fail, usually skip
one or more of these essential stages of business development
and find themselves in a heap of trouble before they know it.
Typically, a new entrepreneur will get and idea (envision) and
go straight to market (build). They simply unknowingly skip the
"reflect" and "create" stages, and charge into business with an
"if-I-work-hard-enough" attitude everything will be all right.

Well, statistically we know that not everything is all right and
it does not work. 


Writer's Resource Box:

Charles and Holly Egner are veteran entrepreneurs. They have
trained, coached, and mentored hundreds of aspiring
entrepreneurs. Their last entrepreneurial venture sold for just
under $400 million in 1999. BuildOnYourDreams.com was founded to
help promising entrepreneurs to build the business of their
dreams. For their free Life Strategy Planning Teleseminar, visit
http://www.BuildOnYourDreams.com  today.

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