Business Basics
Learn the basic elements of running a business to maximize your success.
Are you new to the business world? Maybe you are looking to start a side hustle or just gain a better understanding of the ins and outs of business.
It is interesting that they don't teach practical knowledge of running a business in college courses - even those with a business degree focus.
What we try to do here is provide you a light outline of the basic elements of running a business - to help you gain a better understanding for what you will be tracking and ways to manage the flow using solid software and systems.
After having been in the business world for over 25 years the author has learned a thing or two about starting a running businesses. For the past 15 years he has been helping other business owners leverage cloud based systems to maximize their success. Over that time, it had become apparent that almost all businesses follow a similar process flow - then it was just a matter of distilling down what steps there are for the particular company he was working with, help them put it together, then they were off to the proverbial races.
This overview course will hopefully provide you insight for those elements you need to include in your business. As you will see in the sessions, we use the Zoho platform as our vehicle to manage the customer lifecycle (the flow of your business). You can find other courses here in Zocademy about the different interconnected apps and how to set them up and use them on a daily basis. But for now, let's get you learning the basics of business...
Here's to your learning!
Your Instructor
David is the founder and president of the Edkins Group, a company focused on helping small businesses get more done through the smart leverage of technology.
Over the past several years David has helped over one hundred small businesses across the country synthesize their business model onto the Salesforce and Zoho cloud platforms. His success stemmed from keeping the approach to the technology as simple as possible. As he would say: "Remove the noise."
David started working at Hewlett-Packard in finance straight out of high school. He had been part of a local school program called Regional Occupation Program - and this internship impressed management enough to offer him a position. From there he moved into their consulting division. Within the consulting division he succeeded in many different roles: from managing finances of large telecom projects to being part of a four person global team commissioned to set up localized engagement with third party contractors to selling intangible services to CTOs and CIOs of Fortune 500 companies.
After twelve years he wanted a change, so he left HP to sell commercial real estate. During his time in commercial real estate, he created an online marketplace to post and reply to wants and needs of investors, property managers and brokers across the country. This hobby eventually encompassed over ten thousand subscribers with some paying between $29 and $1,000 per month for different levels of access.
The real estate market shifted and David then started a managed IT company offering small businesses a flat rate service to make sure their servers, computers and networks ran smoothly. After realizing the future would be in cloud platforms and less about keeping your own server, he sold his company to a competitor and started to focus on helping small companies shift to leveraging cloud technologies.
David is more of a salesman than a technical person, so as you watch the videos, even though he knows these systems inside out, he approaches it from a simple users perspective with the goal to help you not feel overwhelmed if you're starting from no experience with these kinds of platforms.