Starting a business is like pulling off a band-aid RIGHT OFF!

Collected here are 6 immediate steps you can take to get started on your path to financial freedom.

Lease an Office

With so many tenants moving out, you can easily grab a sublease from an office and get your own unit. The trick is, to make the decision as fast as possible. The more you sit around and think about it, the less likely you’ll do it.

Get the office before you even have an idea, it’s the best motivation you’ll ever find.

Market Your Skills

Will someone pay you to do any sort of work? Test the market for your skills by posting some notices on Craigslist and respond to WTB (wanted to buy) posts online. If people are willing to pay you to work, you have an immediate income for when you get started on your new venture.

Save Your Money!

If there’s one thing all businesses need, it’s working capital. Make sure you have enough money to runway your own personal living expenses at least 6 months, and more likely 12 months. You’ll want to make revenue as soon as possible, but it’s better to be overprepared when it comes to financing.

Make Your First Sale Before You Have a Business

Are you extremely cautious about quitting your job without any guarantees? Well then start selling your product/services. If you actually land a big account, you’ll have to work your ass off to deliver on it, but you’ll have a guaranteed income coming in and the only risk will be staying in your job and losing this opportunity.

Stop Working 40 Hour Weeks and Work 80 Weeks!

Hate your boss? Hate your job? Even clock-watch until it’s 5pm? These are just a few of the motivators that help entrepreneurs appreciate life as their own boss. Working for yourself you’ll often work about 80 hours a week, but you’ll love every minute of it.

Do You Want To Be Rich?

Besides taking Government bailouts and receiving $40+ million bonuses, the best way to get rich is to work for yourself. Every day you develop your business you grow the overall value of the company, but working for someone else, you’re just helping them build up themselves, and you don’t get any long-term return.

Not all business people are rich, but almost all of them are happy.

Entrepreneurs have to make some tough decisions this Holiday season, amid the worst recession we’ve probably ever seen. If we cut back too far, we’re going to lose valuable employees, and when the economy comes back around, it may take us an extended period of time to ramp back up.

However, if we don’t cut-back, the company could suffer, and there may not be any business at all.

So what is an entrepreneur to do? How can we cut costs, effectively?

7 Easy Cost Cutting Measures

The President-elect has told us we need to be prepared to living lives of efficiency. Recycling, reusing, and re-inventing ourselves is the motto of the 21st century.

Instead of layoffs, employers are looking for ways to keep the company intact, employees happy, and business expanding. Hopefully these examples below will help you in your business.

4 Day Workweeks
This can be a real blessing for parents struggling with daycare. Plus, who wouldn’t like to work less than they do now. This shaves 52 days off your payroll, and can make your employees happy as well.

Extended Holiday Vacation
At the end of the year, not much work gets done on the 24th of December and on New Years Day. If you don’t already, give your employees these days off as an un-paid vacation.

Spring Break
Unpaid vacation sounds really menacing until you get to take off for 1 week in the middle of May. Finding creative ways to give your employees time off can help assuage the negative thoughts surrounding unpaid vacation. These breaks will have your staff rested, and ready to come back to work.

Voluntary Salary Reductions
If you have every employee volunteer a 1% reduction in salary, it can save the company a large amount of money, and won’t cause a huge material affect on overall morale.

401k Matching Hiatus
Yes, retirement planning is important, but keeping employees paid is also a priority. Create a deal with your employees. Suspend 401k matching for 1 year, with a promise to restore payments at the end of the year.

Turn Off Your Computers
This is perhaps one of the most overlooked. Simply turning off computers and monitors everyday can save huge amounts on your electric bill. Configure the power settings to power-down all monitors, and PCs so you can have the process be automatic.

Eliminate Overtime
Paying 1 1/2 times salary for overtime work is typically an example of efficiency that can be improved. Eliminate overtime, let employees go home early, and you’ll get more productive employees that work 2x better when they’re not overworked.

Sure, employees are any company’s greatest expense, and also their greatest asset. I’m not suggesting that you are wasting your time, thus costing your company money, but rather that your company is not getting the most out of you, by not maximizing your efficiency.

So how much money is your company wasting?

Salary X Unused Time = FAIL!

Let’s say you make $50,000 a year. This would be a nice salary for anyone not in the Bay Area, and you work only a 40 hour work week.

That’s $960 per week or $24 per hour.

For a typical work-week, if your company was able to get 5 more hours of productivity out of you, they would make:

5 x $24 per hour = $115 per week

$5,980 per year

You Gotta Spend Money to Save Money

So if we can get 5 more hours of productivity out of our employees, we can save our company $6,000 per year. If you have a company of 20 people, that’s $120,000 per year, which is quite a nice cost-savings.

During a downturn in the economy, it’s small steps like these that help the good companies survive and the weak fail, and when the economy starts turning around, these strong companies can now flourish.

So Where Can We Find These 5 Hours?

Dual-monitors are proven by Microsoft to be one of the best ways to improve your productivity.

If you assume you’ll spend $1,000 on dual-monitor setups for your employees, you can easily pay for this capital expense in about 2 1/2 months, plus it’ll make your employees a lot happier.

Let us know any tips you have for improving employee productivity.

Everybody knows about the free lunches, and bouncy balls and full decor that adorn the Google offices, but here are some of the perks you may not be aware of. To apply for any positions, head over to Google’s job page.

The Perks of Life at Google

Cold Hard Cash

Who wouldn’t like a $1 million bonus? I know I would. Take the case of Niniane Wang, a 27-year-old engineer who received a million-dollar founders’ award for her work on a program that searches computer desktops. This bonus was setup to keep Google’s best talent and encourage further innovation by rank-and-file employees. Who says you have to be an Investment Banker to cash in a 7 figure bonus check?

Have a Baby? Dinner’s On Google
Google really does want to save the world. If you are a new parent, and have a baby, Google will allow you to bill them up to $500 for take-out food. The last thing you want to do after working 12 hour days is have to cook dinner, so Google foots the bill and keeps employees happy, mommies happy, and baby happy.

The Google Shuttle Bus
How would you like to not have to sludge through rush hour traffic and instead sleep get right to work on your way to work? Aside from saving money on gas, this WiFi equipped shuttle-bus is better for the environment, and makes your commute social. Talk about that episode of LOST on the way to work, or catch up on your fantasy football team …all on your free commuter bus.

Say Goodbye to Laundry Day
Do you hate doing laundry as much as me? And what about taking your clothes to the dry cleaner? Google offers free laundry and dry cleaning services to employees, so you can put your clothes in the wash, get some work done, drop your clothes off in the dryer, and grab the clean clothes as you leave to go home. I don’t think there’s any guarantee socks are not subsequently lost in the dryer, and mixing whites and darks is strongly suggested.

The Doctor Is In
Have a doctor’s appointment? Going to be late for work? No longer. With Google’s in-house doctor, you can get your annual checkup or go in for that nasty cough. Whether or not you want to visit this same Doctor on your day off is up to you.

The Punchclock is Dead
Hate the 9 to 5 grind? What about the 3-12am shift? Night owls are more than welcome at Google, they’re encouraged. Google allows workers to have flexible schedules, so that employees can work around life’s dilemmas, and still maintain productive.

Looking over this list, we have multinationals like Wayne Enterprises, and lowly coffee shops like the Central Perk, but the one consistent question you should have in the back of your head is: Are they hiring? Now that the economy has gone to hell, hopefully these guys have some job openings

The Best Fictional Companies in TV & Film

Vandelay Industries
The venerable corporate behemoth run by mastermind George Constanza of Seinfeld fame. George was a latex salesman for Vandelay Industries, and Jerry actually ran an entire condom manufacturer out of his 900 square foot apartment in New York City.

Speaker City
In Old School, Vince Vaughn aka Bernard ‘Beanie’ Campbell, owned a number of Speaker City Franchises, and he ran a number of the commercials in the movie as well. It turns out, this supposedly fictional company, is actually a real Canadian electronics retailer.

Dharma Initiative
Jack, John, Kate, Sawyer and the LOST crew are constantly battling with the good/evil Dharma Initiative, which is responsible for any number of mysterious scientific experiments they conduct on this remote island paradise/bermuda’s triangle of an island.

Binford Tools
Host Tim Taylor, of Tool Time fame, promoting Binford everyday at work. Home Improvement the television show was one of the longest running comedies, and was the spawn of Pamela Anderson’s career, as she was the inaugural ‘Binford girl’.

Hudsucker Industries
Back when Paul Newman was still alive and Tim Robbins wasn’t a political radical, Hudsucker industries invented the hula hoop and revolutionized the civilized world. Hudsucker also led to Robbins inevitable demise, but it is one of the great mega-corporations of our fictional world.

Shelbyville Nuclear Power Plant
While not as famous as Springfield’s nuclear power plant, Shelbyville is the neighboring town everyone loves to hate. As Ned Flanders famously shouted at Shelbyville while driving away with their lemon tree, “Yes, eat all of our shorts”.

Acme Corporation
Who can forget the makers of dynamite and really really bouncy springs, and all numbers or seemingly single-use products like Acme. Their entire product line seemed to consist of weapons, that were completely ineffective, used to kill Roadrunners. Still, their design and labeling are design marvels even in today’s standards.

Central Perk
The best damn cup of coffee in New York City, otherwise known as the hangout for the Friends cast. Whether Gunther was constantly fawning over Rachel or one of Phoebe’s memorial performances at the Perk, it is our favorite coffee shop, aside from “The Coffee Shop” in Seinfeld of course.

Wayne Enterprises
Who else could have enough money to build extremely expensive, high performing tools for stopping crime aside from Bruce Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprises? Forget that question and remember that Wayne Enterprises is a Worldwide corporation that is involved in Biotech, Steel, Shipping, Shipbuilding, Aerospace, Chemicals, Medical, Electronics, and Entertainment.

Did I miss your favorite fictional company? Let us know in the comments who you think should be on our “all time” list.

This country is horrible out of shape, and in bad health. Health care costs are well known to be one of the biggest risks facing this nation as Baby Boomers retire and our children continue to get fatter and fatter. What’s the solution? Well it’s not a simple one, but it’s a start: EAT LESS.

We’ve already seen what’s happened to our beloved Hummers, GM has tried unsuccessfully to sell them to an Indian company, but food is still an issue Americans having quite come to cope with.

Food Makers Have a Huge Opportunity

Food manufacturers should take up this cause and take a proactive step. They can setup a massive PR campaign championing healthy living, healthy eating, and then create products that play into this niche. The key element being: less. Food costs are rising on double-digit levels, and manufacturers are trying to figure out how to deliver the same product with increasing costs.

Do we raise prices?

Do we reduce quantities or make the package smaller so the contents appear bigger?

The answer is: you make the packages smaller, the contents less, and tell the consumer about it!

100 calorie snack bags are exploding. I know we can barely keep them stocked in our pantry. They make a great snack to bring to work, to eat on the weekends, and it’s a great way to control your intake and feel like you’re actually eating less (just try not to eat 2 of them).

Less is More

Marketers should look at the growing trend here for health. People are willing to pay more for organic, natural foods. They’re also willing to pay more for foods that are considered, “healthy.” What’s healthier than eating less crap than you used to? Doritos, why don’t you make mini-snack sized pouches of chips? Claim they’re 100-calorie packs or workout snacks or part of the Weight Watchers line.

Thank You, Recession

Thanks to the recession people will be walking more, eating less, and spending more wisely. This country needs to learn to limit itself, and this recession is coming at the perfect time.

Why else are you thankful for the recession?

Maximize Shareholder Value

No matter how big your company is, the goal is to maximize shareholder value. Whether your company is Dell, and you have a billion dollar market cap or you run an internet music startup, like Grooveshark, your goal is to deliver the best return on investment for your investors. To do this, you have to produce the lowest burn rate possible, and deliver the best returns. While I won’t go into how you can maximize your revenues on this post, I’ll go over how you can cover your costs best and bring in the most value while spending the least amount of cash.

Cash Flow is King

Cash flow is king in a startup. Understanding how cash flow operates is essential, so we’ll first cover exactly what cash flow is, and how you can maximize it. Whenever you have money coming into the company or you have money coming out of the company, you are spending cash. There are different levels of cash and different levels of liquidity and urgency that different types of cash carry. If you’re spending money on a credit card, the urgency isn’t the same as leaving $50 cash on a business lunch. When spending money on a credit card, if it’s a charge card, you have 30 days (or until the end of the month) before you have to pay back that money. If it’s a typical revolving credit line, you have until the end of the month to pay off the minimum balance, and essentially forever before you have to pay down the entire principle, so credit cards provide you an advantage when it comes to maximizing cash flow.

When you pay for expenses with cash or from your debit card, you’re basically throwing away your money. When starting a new company, bootstrapping is essential, and you need to learn to maximize every dollar you have. So throwing down cash on purchases is like putting your company 1 month in the hole. Never make a purchase with cash or debit that you could be making with a credit card.

Bootstrapping Rule #1: Get the Best Credit Cards

Now that you know you should always be using a credit card, you need to make sure you have the best credit card. All good bootstrappers know that your purchases on credit cards should be contributing to the overall benefit of your business. Good credit cards to own include cards that give you bonuses on Airline travel, Gas rebates, and business-purchases bonuses (like using your card at Fedex for shipping). Good credit cards can net you an extra 3% in bonuses, and they definitely stack up quickly. Imagine you’re spending $10k per month on business expenses, that’s an extra $300 per month you could be contributing to gas or it’s an extra airline ticket to San Francisco to raise money. Here are some great business credit cards:

CitiBusiness Card
0% APR on Purchases AND Balance Transfers for 12 months*

Amex Platinum Business
0% Intro APR for Purchases for 12 months.

Citi American Airlines Advantage
Earn 25k miles after first $750 in spending

Pay Your Employees First

When it comes time to pay your bills, always make sure to pay your employees first. This is a simliar rule to planning for your retirement. They say to always take 20% of your income, and automatically deposit it into a retirement account. This same principle applies to building your startup business. Your employees are the lifeblood of your company, and you need to make sure they’re healthy and motivated to keep working.

Your employees are the lifeblood of your company, so when it comes down to payday, make sure you postpone those credit card payment and pay your employees, because if you don’t have any employees you can’t generate any revenue, and all your bills don’t get paid.

When starting a business, it’s important to realize how to best spend your money, and bootstrapping is key. When you have to spend money, spend money on the right expenses, and when you spend money, spend smart money, and that’s credit. Never use cash or debit cards when you can use credit cards.

Luckily, I’ve been able to pinch a couple of pennies and turn a nickel into 7.5 cents; here are a couple of ideas to get you going:

Sell used, new, refurbished electronics on eBay

Personally I like to sell Apple refurbished computers, primarily on eBay. I buy in bulk, and can sell at a lower price than what’s offered on Apple’s store, so I can turn a profit. The way to make money on eBay is to find either a niche or find the right bundle of items to make your product stand out. There are thousands of laptops on sale on eBay, but how many come with the latest wireless mouse or bluetooth headset?

This is coincidentally how Michael Dell got started, and a number of other entrepreneurs have admitted to getting started by selling on eBay. Personally, I want to move into smaller items than laptops, preferably cell phones or diamonds or something with a high net value but doesn’t require quite the physical space in my office.

Use your 0% credit cards to earn you free interest

Personally, all of my credit cards are maxed out, but if you’re one of the lucky ones that hasn’t had to dip into their credit reserves quite yet, you can make zero risk money by investing your credit card balances.

The trick is you need to have a 0% interest card on purchases. Say you have a $20,000 credit card with 0% until December. What you do is purchase an item, say 20 mac laptops, sell them on eBay, hopefully break-even, maybe even make a couple hundy on the deal.

Then, instead of taking that $20k and paying off your balance, take advantage of the 0% interest and invest that money. Take the $20k balance, throw it into a CD, money market account, whatever. Be sure to keep the money liquid enough to pay the minimum balance each month, but then at then in November, when your 0% period is over, pay off your balance.

If you’re earning 5% annually, you can make $1,000 with zero risk. But you’re in a startup, so you can always try turning that $20k into $40k by investing in more employees or buying even more laptops, cars, etc.

Use your expertise to provide consulting services

Are you a great designer? Can you SEO like nobody’s business? On your personal blog, which I’m sure you have, why not have a section to hire you as talent?

Just because you’re working on your startup, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to bring in more cash flow. At Grooveshark, we have done a number of different odd jobs to keep things afloat:

• Designing web sites for parent’s companies
• Designing web sites for lawyers, PR firms, etc. to get out of paying the bill
• Trade out web design for advertising space to grow the business

When you’re starting off, it’s all about getting the most done with what you have. It that means trading in barter, and putting the project on hold for 2 weeks, then do it. You’ll find that the experience of working on a smaller project will be a good test for your team, and will help you be more cost-conscious with your spending in the future.

Buy used cars, refurb them and flip them for a profit

My business partner has a connect to a dealer’s license, and he’s been flipping cars for over 10 years. He goes on record saying he’s never lost money on a used car. Even if you buy the car today, and 6 months later sell it for the same price, you’ve been able to forego car payments for 6 months.

If you have a particular mechanical inclination, and the right space, you can make a hobby out of grabbing cars from grandmas who don’t know how to flush a radiator and double your money in no time. The ideal time to sell cars is around Jan-March, tax season, when everyone cashes in on their refund checks.

This is the kind of venture that bears some caution:

• You’ll have a lot of flaky buyers, so be prepared for the worst
• Don’t get stuck paying taxes, license fees, etc. so be careful, do your research
• You may open Pandora’s box once you get under the hood

Liquidate, liquidate, liquidate

You saw me mention eBay above, right? I hope you’ve got a big memory card for your camera…

What’s the best resource you have for generating cash right now? You’re probably typing on one or two of them. I’m not advocating selling your only work computer, but if you have any extra video cameras, DVDs, video games, Xbox systems, anything, it’s all worth cash, and if you’re in a pinch, it’s a lot better than putting your hand as collateral from a loan shark.

If you have a Mac, I’ve had a lot of success with GarageSale. It allows you to easily list all of your crap valuable possessions and get some sucker to buy it from you. One man’s trash …

Let me know if you have any good tips in the comments!