ETO Home
Telework
Teletrade
Telecooperation
Links
Definitions
FAQs
Events
Search
Feedback
Discussion
Site management
Page updated:
10 February 1997
Page owner:
ETO Site Team
I like the idea of "Doing Business across the Networks", how do I go about it?
Building a business "online" has some similarities to building a conventional business "offline", but also some differences.
The similarities are:
- Its hard work
- You need some money to start with (unless you plan to be just working
on your own and self employed, in which case you only need enough money
to survive between contracts, otherwise you will need to fund your marketing
and other costs until you have built a sustainable cash flow).
- You have to have "the idea" for your business
- You have to know how to differentiate your business from others that
do the same thing (or say they do the same thing, which is the same in the
customer's eyes!)
- You have to be good at (or develop the skills in) selling and marketing
relevant to the business, the market and the proposed customers
- You have to be good at putting up with difficulties, knock-backs, people who say "no", shortage of money, difficult customers, difficult colleagues, and unhelpful legal and regulatory environment, and people who want to help small firms but don't always know how to do so . . . etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
- The overheads can be lower (no premises, maybe no employees (people
working under contract or on a results basis instead), lower costs of printing,
posting etc for marketing, lower costs of advertising . . . ).
- Depending on the market you go into, you may have a smaller local
opportunity but a much bigger global opportunity.
- The marketing and selling skills are different "online"
compared with "offline".
- Relationships with colleagues and customers are handled in different
ways and with different skills.
- How to start?
One other difference is that online you can more easily start by bouncing your idea around and surfacing some people who are interested and may join in with you. Even this needs some thought and certainly some online skills. many people put their exciting idea up in (say) a discussion list and are deeply disappointed when only three people in three hundred send a response and two of the responses appear to be negative. Here are some hints about how to avoid this disappointment:
1. Where to place your messages
If you want to reach a particular type of people you have to find the places they are likely to congregate. Let say your business idea is to develop an international network of people with relevant skills to combine together to take on projects in the area of:
Civil engineering
Structural
Plant design
Piping
Waste water
etcetera.
If you send a message to a general "telework" discussion list it will inevitably have only a few engineers and such who work in these particular fields. You might get comments on your business idea but they will mainly be theoretical ones from people with no understanding of your sector, and you will get very few responses from "engineers".
However, there are probably newsgroups, websites, lists etc that do attract people with these interests, what you have to do is to find such places and "advertise" there (being careful not to make your adverts look like junk mail!).
2. Building a "network" with a commercial purpose is very hard work
People sometimes get discouraged when they have a good idea and send out a message about it and either get no responses or even get negative responses. But you can't build such a network just by sending out a few messages, as a minimum I think you have to:
- Have a website.
- Make that website an attractive and useful sourcepoint for the kind
of people you want to attract.
- Open up a special discussion list relevant to the topic (ie not "telework",
but "Engineering Skills Online" for example.
- Hang out in lots of relevant lists (all the ones you can find) and
look for opportunities to "drop in" with a helpful reference to
your site/lists.
- Carefully place your website in all the relevant search engines.
- Get some funding from the bank, the local authority, the Commission or somewhere - its not yet possible to go selling engineering projects from a zero capital base.
In other words building an online business is hard work like building an offline business. The only real difference is in the skills, the online marketing skills are different from the offline marketing skills, the relationship skills are different, the way you motivate people is different . . .