Small Business Thread

I would say networking. There are groups that get together to self promote aka network. meetup.com is a good one, there could be someone that could offer even more ideas. I'm not sure if you're able to sponsor a group and offer discounts to members. There are geek and possibly tech groups that might be interested in sponsorship. My sponsor for my group was Peet's coffee, it wasn't a lot of money but it was cool to have someone pay for the up keep of my group.

 

You did't build that...

 

... Do you get it now?

 

Having a Facebook page for a business is pretty much a no brainer these days.
I'm not sure what you mean about having it under your name or not. When you make a FB page for a business it's in the company name but you control it with your personal FB.

 

A dearly friend of mine (although lately I've been wanting to choke him to death) and I, are trying to start a small business. But we are currently facing a lot of "out of stock" messages or zero replies from possible service suppliers.

In the meantime, he's more focused on bringing even more ideas to the table (I can say for certain that we have plenty of those to start with), instead of searching for other suppliers (no raw materials and no suppliers mean: no product to sell). That leaves me with the pressure of gathering all the information we actually need right now.

He has a marketing degree which is a great tool to have but what's troubling me is that he's focused on the theory of the product while I'm focused on making it real.

Have anyone ever worked with family and friends before and went through the same situation?

Any other good piece of advice is also welcome!

 

Communication between the key members of a business is crucial. I think you need to be able to feel free to bring this up (and doing so will also show how possible it is to bring anything like this up in future) for the health of the business, even if only in meetings. It will take skill to bring it up in the right way to be constructive rather than critical, and your ability to do so and your friend’s ability to receive it well and take the message on board will be a good indicator of how well you are likely to work together.

 

I did! I told him about it before exploding and he reacted quite well... He promised to get some key spreadsheets done and such.

He calmed me and asked me nicely not to bring bad vibes into OUR project and he was right. However, I expect a little bit more of him though.

Working with friends and family (I worked for my brother once and it didn't last long) is not easy.