One of the most compelling reasons for an entrepreneur to strike out on his or her own is lifestyle. For some people it might be health reasons or inability to tolerate a long commute anymore; for some of us it may be a craving to be location independent or it could be the birth of a child. Whatever the reason, lifestyle is often a huge motivator when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Family
Universally cited by women who get off the corporate ladder as the biggest reason to start their own businesses, opportunities for stay-at-home parents (mostly targeted at Moms, though also often applicable to Dads) are everywhere. Whether it’s Brazen Careerist founder, author and blogger, serial entrepreneur Penelope Trunk, Forbes magazine’s “Mompreneur,” Lisa Druxman, or dedicated online communities, such as Work-at-Home Moms, opportunities for parents to build a family-friendly business only continue to grow, as does their recognition as truly viable business models.

Geography
As someone who likes to pick up and move a couple of thousand miles away every couple of years, this is one of my biggest motivators: being able to work no matter where I am. In the age of the Internet, a laptop and an Internet connection are a mobile entrepreneur’s best friend. Author of the best selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, blogs about the his misadventures abroad, while communities like Location Independent offer advice to entrepreneurs building geo-neutral businesses.

Schedule
The single biggest complaint I hear from anyone who has ever worked for themselves and has then gone back to working for someone else is about the schedule: being told what hours to work, not having the luxury of picking your own routine and needing to account for your hours. Whether you are a night owl, a highly social power-networker or just someone who likes to be able to take an afternoon nap, having at least some measure of control over your daily schedule can make all the difference between enjoying your week or dreading it.

For most of us, I think it’s ultimately about time: we have limited time on this planet, limited time to do the things we want with the people we love, and limited time to see and explore all the experiences we want to take in. While there are definitely always times when being your own boss is more time-consuming than working for someone else, knowing that your work is going towards allowing you to have some measure of control over your time so that you can spend it on your priorities is often worth the sacrifice.

I know entrepreneurs who are motivated by a desire to spend time with their grandchildren, those who want to volunteer with their church, some who never want to have to wake up before noon and one (other than me!) who wants to be able to have time to water ski every single day. Whatever the reason, these entrepreneurs want a lifestyle first, and are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to support that goal.

So out of all the lifestyle reasons to be your own boss, which matters most to you?

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Stephanie Williams of Mobile Massages by Stephanie:

Specializing in Swedish, Shiatsu, Thai, Deep Tissue, Lymphatic and Neuromuscular Massages… Stephanie has served the Atlanta area for more than 15 years and has worked with such artists as Sean Combs.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Ariana Jewell of AJewell Skin Care:

Professional skin care & waxing by Ariana Jewell, licensed esthetician & beauty consultant in Bremerton, WA.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free company profile today!

Yesterday on VentureBeat, author Jacob Brody reported on an entrepreneur’s Meetup in NYC where the founders of several successful startups discussed a common sales problem for small businesses: how to get larger, established organizations to take you seriously enough to be able to close a deal.

It’s not surprising that this was such a hot topic at the event, because for many small businesses, a single large deal with a big company can be a make-or-break opportunity.  And while small businesses must always be careful not to rely on any one customer for too much of their revenue, one can never dismiss the fact that a single big job with a large, well-known, respected big company has great potential for opening doors to other opportunities.

The highlighted a few critical elements to accomplishing this potentially lucrative goal:

• Build a relationship with someone on the inside who can be your evangelist.
• Be patient, and don’t try to rush closing a deal until you’ve built some credibility.
• Approach them as a strategic partner whose input will help inform your final offerings.
• Tailor your pitch to both the specific company and the specific individuals in the company.

Most of these are common sense, but the one I found the most interesting was about building a relationship with someone inside the organization who can help be your cheerleader.  The consensus among the group was that the C-level was the wrong place to start.  This is actually a valuable strategy for entrepreneurs, because the demographic that they recommend looking for are the people lower in the organization, who are doing the hands-on work.  And, quite often, this group of people can be easier to access.

One of the things that often happens is that like congregates with like: entrepreneurs tend to network with entrepreneurs, and employees tend to network with other employees.  In many ways this is illogical and counter-productive, but it is still a common trend.  So, for entrepreneurs who are looking to find opportunities to build relationships with larger companies: find professional networking events to attend that are employee-centric, not entrepreneur-centric.

Pick you niche: do you sell an IT product?  Find a tech professional networking event to attend.  Do you build or design websites?  Find a marketers event.  If you handle outsourced operational functions, take a look at what events you can find for HR, administrative or HR professionals.

Sites like LinkedIn and Meetup are a great place to start looking; as are professional associations such as WITI, Project Management Institute, the American Marketing Association, International Association of Business Communicators, the National Human Resources Association or community organizations, such as Rotary, Active 20-30 or Kiwanis.

Sales people at large companies take this approach all the time, and they do it for a reason: it’s often the best way to learn about a potential customer.  An employee will often give you great insights into the needs of a large company; and if they are in a position of expertise, they can make valuable recommendations or connections that can come in handy.

Of course, the other advice that’s important is to be patient.  While your entry point into a large organization may be a specialist or a manager, sometimes they aren’t going to be the ones who can approve a purchase.  So you’re going to have to invest some time into building the relationships you need to ultimately be in a position of trust.  But as long as you’re sincere, helpful and can genuinely provide value, your patience can really pay off.

In this week’s Managing Your Cash series, I’m sharing the top 3 things you can do the better manage your cash and how WorkingPoint can help. Monday, I wrote about one of the biggest mistakes business owners make in managing their cash and that is tying up their money in inventory. Wednesday, I encouraged you to keep on top of your customer collections.

Today’s tip: Keep Good Relationships with Lenders, Bankers and Creditors

If you are in business long enough, you’ll find that even the most successful businesses need to borrow cash at one point or another – whether it is due to tough economic times or for an expansion into a brighter future. Your relationships with lenders, your bankers and your creditors are critical to getting that loan that keeps you in business or helps you grow.

Here are some easy things you can do to build strong relationships with your lenders, bankers and creditors:

• If you bank locally, take in your deposits personally and make an effort to get to know your personal banker.
• Investors rely on references when deciding who to get into business with so protect your reputation by practicing good business habits, in dealing with your customers, your vendors, and your community.
• Pay your bills on time so your accounts are in good standing: you’ll protect your credit and you’ll be the kind of business creditors will want to lend to.
• Be ready to provide solid, professional financial reports. With WorkingPoint, you can run the top 3 financial reports that lenders, bankers and creditors require when considering you as an investment or a loan. By keeping your records current in WorkingPoint, you’re just a click away from quality, informative reports.

Good cash management is simple with WorkingPoint. Dashboard widgets and reports help you gain clear insight into your financial position by knowing when, where and how your cash needs will occur.

Author Marc Compeau recently wrote an article on Forbes entitled, Cost-Cutting Won’t Get You There.  In it he touches on many points that seem to be recurring lately.

First, the idea that cutting costs are the ticket to solving financial woes.  Yes, of course, fiscal discipline is important and if your business is bleeding money because of $200 lunches every day, and last-minute, first-class airline tickets for sales opportunities that could be just as effective via WebEx, then a little fiscal discipline certainly wouldn’t hurt.  But the bottom line is that, when it comes down to it, the percentage of over-all gains you are capable of attaining through cost-cutting is never going to stack up to the gains you could make by selling more.

Of course, how do you do that?

In the corollary to the VentureBeat article by Scott Olson to which I responded earlier this week (Excel Where Your Competitors Suck), Marc points out that great customer service is the key. Good customer service builds good relationships and on-going customer loyalty.

This is great news for small businesses.  In a 24/7 wired world of automated telephone voice trees, website customer service autobots, offshored customer service techs who have to read from a script to answer the most basic questions and email auto-responders, what is business lacking more than decent customer service?

Small businesses have the ability to impact their customers’ perceptions on this front than large businesses do.  Without the large staff, training problems and lack of personal accountability that major corporations face among their ranks, small business owners with small teams can focus on delivering real customer value without making the customer feel like they are a neusance.

There is an added bonus to keep in mind, too: people are far more forgiving of mistakes if they feel like your heart is in the right place.  A faceless corporation will almost always lose that battle, because it is too impersonal.  A small business, with one-on-one relationships that provides a sense of value to their customers is always going to be better positioned to bouncing back from life’s unavoidable errors.

Your customers talk.  And at least some of the people they talk to are other potential customers.  What are they saying about you and your business?  Give them something (positive) worth talking about, and see where it leads.

Hi, I’m Tony Pecora, CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) here at WorkingPoint. As a long time marketing guy working with small sellers at eBay and having faced customer acquisition as a part of large and very small businesses myself, I wanted to share with you some of the things I have learned over time.

Starting with making sure you can be found on the Internet.

There are many things you can do to improve your ability to be found on the Internet, and I’ll address many of them over time, but the first order of business is to just make sure you are there. Nobody can find your business on the Web if you do not have a presence there.

According to Nielsen Online, a market research firm, 227.7 million Americans which is 74.1% of the total population of the United States have been using the Internet over 2009, most of them on a regular basis, many of them daily.

You can slice that total market number into very thin segments of potential customers who may be most relevant to your business and whom you may want to target, and the reality is that most of your target segment use the internet and are on it regularly.

Bottom Line – the Internet gives you access to a whole lot of potential customers with little effort and at a low cost.

I am surprised by how many small businesses have not yet decided to place a signpost – at least a simple company page – on the Internet. There are a number of ways to gain a simple presence. Most of them are very low cost compared to creating a signpost anywhere else.

• On the small end of the spectrum, you can do something as simple as buy an online yellow pages posting for your business.
• You can create a simple one-page Online Company Profile on WorkingPoint. Why not? It’s free. If you haven’t done this yet, click here to learn more.
• You can go to a web site hosting company, and many of them offer templates you can use to develop your own simple web site.
• You can hire a web developer to create a simple, template-based informational web site for you, typically for less than an thousand dollars.
• You can decide to develop a fully customized small business web site typically for somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.

My dad is a manufacturer’s representative that sells chemical processing equipment in Houston, Texas. He is 78 years old and has been doing that for 45 years. He has been running his own company for 30. I am proud of him because he is still going strong. Two months ago Dad decided to take the plunge and pay a developer to make a simple informational web site for him. If my 78 year old Dad can do it, you can too. Go Dad!!

Question: What is one of the best things about owning your own business?
Answer: No one is going to lay you off.

There really is nothing like a few pink slips to help digest an up-coming Thanksgiving dinner.

Yesterday, software mammoth, Adobe joined the ranks of other big name companies making a clean sweep before the holiday season gets in full swing.

In the past ten days alone, we’ve seen layoffs from a number of other big businesses:

• RealNetworks
• Microsoft
• Johnson & Johnson
• Time Warner / AOL
• Sprint Nextel
• Electronic Arts
• Pfizer

What gives particular sting to Adobe’s layoffs is the fact that not only did Adobe just purchase Omniture in mid-September, and thereby effectively ‘hire’ a whole new batch of employees in the process, but that Adobe has spent a decade proudly touting their place on Fortune’s annual list of “100 Best Companies for Work For.”

This begs the question: if a company that is very proud of their culture, and which makes large, on-going investments in it employee engagement and development efforts still enters the holiday season by handing out pink slips, then where does that leave all of the people working for companies that start off less concerned about their people to begin with?

One of the most important reasons to become an entrepreneur is to build a business that supports your long-term lifestyle objectives and your family’s best interests.  For decades there has been a fantasy that getting a job out of school and spending your career working for someone would be in your long-term best interest.  But if there is anything that the last two weeks should remind us all of, it is that big business’ best interests are not the same as an individual’s best interest.

Does this make entrepreneurs selfish, greedy types only looking out for Number One?  Hardly.  Is looking out for your family’s well-being selfish?  Is building a business where you are helping create more jobs, offer needed goods and services, and actively engaging as part of a community being selfish?  Not even close.  But this is what entrepreneurs do every day.

The Kauffman Foundation issued a report last week which projected that more than 70% of new jobs will come from startups.  This is further evidence that the fantasy about big, stable companies taking care of employees until retirement has out-lived its value.  The value today?  Teaching people with ideas, passion and motivation how to get started out on their own, where they can have some control over their future, and not be subject to the whims of large, faceless corporations whose interests cannot possibly align with every single person in their employ.

For as sad an event as layoffs always are, I hope that at least some of the people handed an early and unfortunate Christmas present over the past week take the opportunity to explore starting that business they’ve always wanted, or join a small startup whose idea is something they can be passionate about.  It can be a scary step, but for some, it’ll also provide the breath of life that their careers have been missing for a while.

The future of small business is now.  And big business keeps showing us exactly why.

As a small business owner, you make a lot of decisions each day. Choosing which account plan to use to run your business shouldn’t weigh you down. At WorkingPoint, we’ve simplified our account plans to make choosing your plan easier so you can start managing your business better today.

Now you can choose from our Free plan and our Premium plan.

• Our Free plan is just what the plan name suggests – free! You’ll have access to all of our base features, and we’ve increased the number of users who can access your free plan so you can have help with your day-to-day operations or share a login with a trusted advisor as you prepare for tax time.

• Our Premium plan gives you access to all of our base features plus premium features, like our Premium Reports and Accounting Package and unlimited invoicing, for a low monthly fee of $10.00.

For more information on the new account plans, check out our new pricing and sign up page.

Note: If you subscribed prior to this change (to the Basic, Bronze, Silver or Gold plan), nothing about your current plan will change (other than gaining an additional user on the Basic plan) — unless you downgrade or upgrade.

In this week’s Managing Your Cash series, I’m sharing the top 3 things you can do the better manage your cash and how WorkingPoint can help. Monday, I wrote about one of the biggest mistakes business owners make in managing their cash and that is tying up their money in inventory.

Today’s tip: Keep on top of your collections.

Another big mistake small businesses make is not following up on customers who have fallen behind in payments. While Accounts Receivable (what your customers owe you) is considered as asset and your Balance Sheet still looks good – you can’t pay your employees or your bills with an IOU.

The easiest way to keep your cash flowing in is by keeping on top of your customers over due invoices.

WorkingPoint can help you monitor “Who’s Overdue?” from the dashboard. The “Who’s Overdue?” widget helps you keep on top of customers who are past due so you can take action to collect the money your owed. WorkingPoint will show you who is past due, by how many days they have past the due date and the amount that they owe. Check this widget weekly and then send friendly reminders of your customers account status from their contact record for anyone who shows up on the list.

Sending an invoice list with the current status is a non-emotional way to nudge your customers to pay. If they don’t – call them to see when you can expect payment and work up a schedule of payments if they can’t pay you in full. Follow up the call with a written schedule or payments to help you both recall what you agreed to. If they just don’t pay – consider not selling to them until they bring their account up to date or taking further collections actions.

By keeping on top of your collections with WorkingPoint, you’ll know who’s overdue so you can follow up and get paid.