Starting any business, let alone an Online Family Business can be a huge and daunting task. Before starting an Online Family Business or even a small family business, it is important to take note of a few points.
How To Work With Family Successfully
When working with family, one will need to set boundaries. Each member of the family business must have set jobs or tasks that they are responsible for on an ongoing basis. These family members will need to pull their weight and take responsibility for their duties. They shouldn’t require checking up upon all the time.
A contract will need to be drawn up, in the beginning, stating everyone’s rights clearly, and how many shares each person will own in the business. Make sure to divide responsibilities equally to avoid conflict later on.
Communication is a must. Weekly meetings should be set up to resolve all the disputes and put heads together for new ideas and also to assess the progress of the business. This goes for any business, whether it be a small family business or a large scale business.
Make sure that all the family members get treated equally and fairly. This will also include any outside staff that you eventually take on. If you do take on outside staff, try not to make them feel like outsiders within your small family business.
This one will be a hard one, but don’t provide sympathy jobs for family members that you don’t need. After all, this is a business, and it has to run as would any other business. Before taking on another family member, make sure that they have had the relevant training and work experience.
Remember to develop a succession plan. For instance who will take over, or who will the business be left to in a will, or in the case of a divorce.
Most importantly, treat your business as a business and leave family disputes and squabbles at home. Your customers shouldn’t be forced to witness problems in your personal lives.
Tips For Working With Your Family
Keep It As Professional As Possible
Don’t take family arguments to work. Address each other by name in front of the customers and not Mom or Dad.
Respect Each Other In Roles And Responsibilities
Each family member should have their role, and not have to be constantly challenged by other family members. Disagreements should be bought up in meetings and resolved there.
Someone should be in charge of day to day operations, another the finances, another the ordering of products, etc.
Don’t Talk Business When Socialising
Leave business at the workplace and don’t bring it up at family gatherings. It is irritating for others who are not involved if you talk shop the whole time.
Good Option For How To Start An Online Family Business
If looking to start an online family business that you and your family or spouse can do together there are other considerations to take into account, dependant on your experiences and what each family member is good at.
If you are starting with a new venture, make sure that you get great training, especially if starting from scratch online and if some of your family members are technically challenged.
Research all your options carefully before joining any program, especially one that you find randomly online.
If you want to sell something on behalf of another company, check and see if their products are unique, and if the product has good long term appeal.
Ask yourselves the following:
- Will you be able to build yourself and your family a long term residual for your retirement?
- Does the company you are partnering with have a good track record and cash flow?
- Do they pay their commissions regularly and timeously?
- Most of all, does the company take full advantage of technology, as not everyone can sell, but everybody can plug into a system and be trained?
- Are your websites available to you straight away, or do you have to build them yourself?
- Is there a set of autoresponders in place if you are selling a product, or do you have to write your own?
Entrepreneurs, who are serious about building their online family business, should read and learn all they can about business fundamentals, the latest sales, and marketing techniques, strategies for networking and business development, etc.
Make sure that you and your family members treat your new venture as a business and not a hobby, and in this way you will eventually profit as a business should.
One of the most important aspects of working with an online company is that their Fully Automated Systems must be able to do the heavy lifting so that you and your family can have more time to generate leads and have fun building the business together.
Here Is What I Propose If You Don’t Know Where To Start
If you are wanting to start a small family business or better yet an online family business, and. you have nothing tangible to sell yet, get together and make a list of everything you know a lot about or enjoy doing.
I propose you start a website online. You can choose any topic you are knowledgeable about and if you can find something that everyone in the family enjoys even better.
No matter what you choose, you can always find products to sell online that relate to the topic of your website. This is called affiliate marketing, and many people worldwide are making a killing doing this.
When you own a website, in order to be successful fast, you need to generate a lot of content as quickly as possible. Not only must it be a lot, but it must also be quality content.
If you are doing it as a family, you can all write content, and the website will grow that much faster than if you were doing it on your own. Most websites only start generating an income when they have over 100 posts or more. So as a family, see how quickly you can get to that number.
If you need some training on how to build your own website or even great hosting for your website, I recommend that you try Wealthy Affiliate. Read my Wealthy Affiliate Review here and give it a try.
