One day your home business might need to expand and you will think about hiring employees and getting venture capital funding. Most small business owners (including home workers) secretly dream that their business project will succeed and they will switch to the new level.

To succeed at our time, you need a great idea that will lead to the product or service in demand (you will have a market for your product/ service) and there will be no cut throat competition in the industry. Business 2.0 magazine has published a guide to your small business success. You can read more detailed instructions for each step at their website:

For entrepreneurs, now is the time

New technologies are creating new business opportunities, and radically reducing costs for startups. Still, success is as difficult as ever.

Phase one: Establish a company

In order to get started you’ve got to test your idea, build a founding team, get a business plan together and pick a company name that will take you to the top. Here’s what to keep in mind.

Phase two: Prototype the product

Finally the rubber meets the road, as you stake out your intellectual property and assemble the demo that will help you sell your idea.

Phase three: Develop the beta product

Now is the time to start installing your staff — hire the best you can afford. They’ll help you perfect your company’s product and begin the beta testing process.

Phase four: Launch the product

Now that the testing is done and the product has been refined, you need to find paying customers. So stop fiddling and start selling!

Searching for angel investors

Here is what every aspiring business-owner should look for in early-stage backers. Remember, it’s not just money you want; you also want brainpower, connections, and experience.

What a VC wants to see in you

You too can woo even the fussiest venture capitalists. Be sure you’re pitching to the right partner — and expect them to present you with a deal sheet that has some tough terms.

That’s it. It sounds easily achievable, but the truth is that millions of people know what steps they have to take to succeed in business, but just a few really do it. I guess it is not enough to know (or even learn by heart) the above guide. Unfortunately, I am unaware of the success recipe as well as the rest of the world.

[tag]small business startup, guide, venture capital[/tag]

Outsourcing progresses fast. This year The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals has announced a first listing of the world’s top outsourcing service providers.

As stated on the website:

The lists are essential reference guides for companies seeking new and expanded relationships with the best companies in the industry. The lists includes companies from around the world providing the full spectrum of outsourcing services – not just information technology and business process outsourcing, but areas such as facility services, real estate and capital asset management, manufacturing, and logistics. They include not only today’s Leaders, but tomorrow’s Rising Stars.

IBM:

Customer Relationship Management; Human Resource Management; Information and Communication Technology Management       

Sodexho Alliance

Real Estate and Capital Asset Management; Facility Services   

Accenture

Human Resource Management; Information and Communication Technology Management; Financial Management     

Hewlett-Packard

Information and Communication Technology Management; Financial Management; Imaging and Printing

Capgemini

Customer Relationship Management; Information and Communication Technology Management; Financial Management     

ARAMARK

Facility Services; Uniform and Career Apparel

Wipro Technologies

Customer Relationship Management; Information and Communication Technology Management; Transaction Processing

CGI Group

Human Resource Management; Information and Communication Technology Management; Transaction Processing

Unisys

Information and Communication Technology Management; Corporate Services; Transaction Processing

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Information and Communication Technology Management  

Full list of leaders plus 100 rising stars are listed here: The Global Outsourcing 100

If large scale business is in the game of outsourcing one can be sure that it is the trend that will keep developing fast. Yes, the companies operate on another level and their outsourcing greatly differs from the kind of outsourcing we talk on the website. But we have different markets and customers. We should learn from top outsourcing providers checking their websites, case studies, press releases: what areas do they operate in, what kind of services do they provide, what techniques and technologies do they apply? Probably, we can use some stuff at our level.

[tag]global outsourcing, top service providers, business, IBM, Hewlett-Packard[/tag]

Scam: A confidence trick, confidence game, also known as a con, scam, grift or flim flam, is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the “mark”) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. (wikipedia.org)

I have written about online shopping scam on eBay. As a sort of update here is a story about a teenager from Lagos, Nigeria, who is a successful businessman in the eyes of his friends: he makes a lot of money on the Internet. With stolen credit cards and other kinds of online fraud…

Akin is 14, wears Adidas sneakers, a Rolex Submariner watch, and a kilo of gold around his neck. Akin, who lives in Lagos, is one of a new generation of entrepreneurs that has emerged in this city of 15 million, Nigeria’s largest. His mother makes $30 a month as a cleaner, his father about the same hustling at bus stations. But Akin has made it big working long days at Internet cafes and is now the main provider for his family and legions of relatives. Call him a “Yahoo! millionaire.”

Akin buys things online - laptops, BlackBerries, cameras, flat-screen TVs - using stolen credit cards and aliases. He has the loot shipped via FedEx or DHL to safe houses in Europe, where it is received by friends, then shipped on to Lagos to be sold on the black market. (He figures Americans are too smart to sell a camera on eBay to a buyer with an address in Nigeria.)

Akin’s main office is an Internet. He spends up to ten hours a day there, seven days a week, huddled over one of 50 computers, working his scams.

And he’s not alone: The cafe is crowded most of the time with other teenagers, like Akin, working for a “chairman” who buys the computer time and hires them to extract e-mail addresses and credit card information from the thin air of cyberspace. Akin’s chairman, who is computer illiterate, gets a 60 percent cut and reserves another 20 percent to pay off law enforcement officials who come around or teachers who complain when the boys cut school. That still puts plenty of cash in Akin’s pocket.

A sign at the door of the cafe reads, WE DO NOT TOLERATE SCAMS IN THIS PLACE. DO NOT USE E-MAIL EXTRACTORS OR SEND MULTIPLE MAILS OR HACK CREDIT CARDS. YOU WILL BE HANDED OVER TO THE POLICE. NO 419 ACTIVITY IN THIS CAFE. The sign is a joke; 419 activity, which refers to the section of the Nigerian law dealing with obtaining things by trickery, is a national pastime. There are no coherent laws relating to e-scams, the police are mostly computer illiterate, and penalties for financial crimes are light. No penalties for breaking the law

“What do you want me to do?” Akin asks in English. “It is my God-given talent. Our politicians, they do their own; me, I’m doing my own. I feed my family - my sister, my mother. Man must survive.”

The scams perpetrated by Akin and his comrades are many and varied: moneygram interceptions, Western Union hijackings, check laundering, identity theft, and outright begging, with tall tales of dying relatives and large sums of money in search of safe haven. One popular online fraud often practiced by women (or boys pretending to be women) involves separating lonely men from their money.

But last November the Economic Fraud and Financial Crimes Commission won a high-profile case that had dragged on for years against Emmanuel Nwude, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years for bilking a Brazilian bank out of $242 million using an Internet scam involving phony bank drafts. The commission is also pursuing a case against 419 kingpin Fred Ajudua, a lawyer and businessman accused of using the Internet to steal $1 million from a victim in Germany.

[source: money.cnn.com]

The story should make you remember that each time you submit your confidential information online you are subject to a high risk of becoming a victim of a scammer. It should not stop you from buying online and getting other benefits that the Internet provides, but it definitely should make you careful.

The fact that the people are not punished for this type of crime make them invulnerable. It is the only business that provides them with a good income in their country, it is their full time job (no freelancing here), so they use their imagination and think hard of new ways to make them more profitable. Just keep in mind this kind of people is out there and on the search for taking your money from you. Do not give them a chance.

[tag]online fraud, scam, credit card, Nigeria, Lagos, ebay[/tag]