Going International With Your Home Business

For those home business owners lucky enough to survive the
first two years, at some point, you might be contacted by
someone internationally who's heard about your business. Let's
face it, once youve conquered your local area and done business
by post or email with other areas of the country, dipping a toe
into international markets seems like the next logical step.

1. Costs Increase

If you are considering exporting a physical product, you have
to understand that your costs can significantly increase. Thus,
your products should be made as light as possible for the
purposes of international shipping. Check that youd be able to
get the things youre selling to the place where you plan to
sell them without it becoming prohibitively expensive. Next,
check if there are any customs requirements. Sometimes even the
most well planned international businesses flop because they
fail to take into account local laws or customs. s

2. Non Physibal Products

The best kind of product you can sell is a digital one, because
the only cost of distribution is your bandwidth. Of course, you
still need to worry about currency fluctuations. You therefore
might want to price your products in the currency of your
country. Non physical products are often called bits on a wire
products.

3. Maintain A Niche For Your Business

Regardless of your product, be sure that it caters to a niche
customer base. In other words, make sure there is a market for
your product in the country before doing anything. Disney, for
example, made the mistake of opening amusement parks in
countries that held strong anti-american sentiments. The parks
performed extremely poorly. Fast food giant KFC fails horribly
in China, where the general population never eats such huge
meals and avoids eating anything with their hands and finds it
offensive to be served food in buckets. If youre not sure, you
could talk to a few local businesspeople about how they think
your product would be perceived, and they may be able to
suggest a suitable target market for you.

4. Produce Internationally As Well

If the cost of distributing overseas appears to be too
expensive, you will want to investigate the possibility of
producing your product on international soil to eliminate that
cost. At the same time, if you do this, you may be able to take
advantage of hiring international workers that will work for
less, and purchase international materials that will also be
cheaper.

About The Author: For more great home business related articles
and resources check out http://findbizopps.info

The 5 Hiring Best Practices For Every Small Business

You probably don't need a reminder, but it's already the
4th quarter of 2006. The year is more than 75 percent up.
So have you accomplished 75 percent of your important
productivity, sales and revenue goals?

If you have, congratulations. If not, what are you doing
to make this your best year ever?

Whether you still have the motivation to meet your
potential this year or you've given up and are waiting
until 2007 to take the necessary steps, this article
contains the quickest and easiest way to improve the
productivity, sales and profitability of your organization.

Stop Waiting Until All Else Fails:

I'm sure you've tried just about everything this year to
increase the profitability of your company from updating
technology to modifying marketing to reorganizing your
systems. All in attempts to improve the motivation,
teamwork and productivity of your people.

Chances are, none of these costly endeavors have been as
successful as you'd like. The main reason is you still
have the same ineffective people operating the new
technology, servicing your clients and running your systems.

Your competitors that have become the most respected,
productive and profitable businesses in your market have
realized a very important fact. Productive systems do not
make you profitable. productive people do.

Hopefully you'll be able to realize this before every other
attempt to increase your productivity and sales has failed,
drained your revenues and left you felling helpless. To
meet your important goals, don't wait any longer and
replace your unreliable, unmotivated, unproductive team
members with TOP Performers.

The 5 Hiring Best Practices:

To grow your business and meet your important goals, you're
going to need TOP Performing employees in every position.
Not just someone above average that meets your expectations
half or most of the time, but someone that will become five
to eight times more productive than average employees.
Studies have shown, that's what the TOP Performers in a
position are.

To fill your team with the most productive employees, here
are the five hiring best practices:

1. "Active" Recruiting Strategy Don't wait for TOP
Performers to find you because they wont; unless you are
already one of your market's leaders. Classified ads,
general web boards and employment agencies are all
"passive" recruiting strategies and will give you "passive"
job seekers. To attract the best employees in your
industry, you're going to need to actively recruit.

2. Legal Job Descriptions If you haven't developed job
descriptions for every position in your company, you're
setting yourself up for a lawsuit. No, they aren't
required by law, but they are usually your second line of
defense in a trial (first is a file on every employee). In
hiring, they will also help you present to candidates
exactly what is required to get a job in your company.

3. Productivity Standards with "Job Success Patterns"
Whereas job descriptions are the basics, "Job Success
Patterns" are the specifics. In these you present to
candidates what is required to keep their job once hired;
or your productivity standards. More specifically, what
makes your current TOP Performers so successful in regards
to their skills, internal motivators and natural behaviors
and then making these the minimum requirements for
employment.

4. Lead, Behavioral Based Interview Questions If you ask
the same questions your competitors are asking, you'll get
the same answers they are getting too. Mainly because most
organizations ask the same 10 interview questions that your
candidates have learned how to answer in books, courses and
through agencies. Lead, behavioral based interview
questions start with "Describe a time.," and "Give an
example of." and end with something job related.

5. Pre-Employment Culture, Team & "Job Match" Assessments
Since "luck" is not one of the five hiring best practices,
you need to do all you can to remove instinct and emotion
from your hiring decisions. As much as you may hate to
admit it, your instincts have been wrong in the past and
they will be wrong in the future. Most of the fortune 500
and virtually every market leading organization (no matter
the size) uses assessments because studies have shown they
can increase your hiring success rate of TOP Performers by
up to 500 percent.

----------------------------------------------------
Grant D. Robinson is the President of People Values and the
Author of the Market Leadership System. To improve your
"Hiring Success Rate" of TOP Performing Employees, watch a
free, 5-minute, on-line video at:
http://www.peoplevalues.com