Rules to follow to succeed in your Start up business

A startup company or startup or start-up is an entrepreneurial venture or a new business in the form of a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. These companies, generally newly created, are innovation in a process of development, validation and research for target markets. The term became popular internationally during the dot-com bubble when a great number of dot-com companies were founded. Due to this background, many consider startups to be only tech companies, but this is not always true: the essence of startups has more to do with high ambition, innovativeness, scalability, and growth.

What does it take to start and succeed in business? Although there is not one answer that fits all businesses, there are a number of practices followed by successful business owners. No matter what you sell, you'll be ahead of the game if you live by these essential rules for succeeding in your own business.

Ø Don't start a company unless it's an obsession and something you love.

Ø Be true to yourself. If you run a business you don't like or don't believe in, even if you have temporary success, it will come back to haunt you one way or another.

Ø Hire people who you think will love working there.

Ø  Sales Cure All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales.

Ø  Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but aren't as expensive to pay.

Ø Choose products or services that you can sell for a lot more than it costs you to make or buy them. If the difference between your cost and selling prices is too low, you will have difficulty growing the business. When profit margins are too low, you won't have enough money to hire employees, pay for rent, advertise more, and do other things needed to expand.

Ø Make realistic estimates of your expenses, then double them. Most new businesses either forget about marketing, fulfillment, overhead costs, income taxes and self-employment or greatly underestimate them.

Ø Be true to your customers and prospects. Don't promise what you can't deliver. Don't lie or exaggerate the benefits of what you sell and always deliver a quality product or service. Word-of-mouth marketing has always been one of the primary ways small businesses find customers. The Internet and social networking sites spread the word (good or bad) to even more potential customers.

About Author: The author of this article has a passion for writing and has written many blogs related to Company Registration, Copyright Registration, Intellectual Property Rights, legal services, LLP Laws, Trademark Registration

How Finance Fits Into Your Startup

Cloud Costs

For many companies, depending on size and stage, cloud spend is the second-highest cost after payroll. Of course, the current slew of cloud wars between the industry’s best and brightest — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — are helping the costs to reduce themselves, but this sort of passive maintenance is far from ideal. By working in conjunction with the Systems team, a plugged-in finance teammate can reduce cloud costs by another 25 percent (at least).

Business Analyses/Forecasting

There is no underestimating the power of well-calculated, defensible numbers displayed on a page. Many CEOs will have a rather good gut sense of paths that work best for their company —from pricing analyses to company-wide resource allocations to 5-Year P&L and cash forecasts — but until all relevant numbers are put on a page, it’s not possible to make a truly informed decision.

A finance person can help tell a story with well-sliced data and, if necessary, a few well-explained assumptions. It is difficult to argue with well-calculated numbers, and there’s no better sense-check for a company’s current state or trajectory. Of course, anyone could enter a few functions into excel, pound the table to defend certain assumptions and declare themselves a data genius.

A model is only as good as the person building it and the assumptions layered into it. It’s therefore very important, especially if a CEO would like to lend any credence to the analyses put before him/her, that the finance hire be a good one. As helpful as correctly calculated data can be in critical business decisions, slapdash data with unrealistic assumptions can be misleading and destructive. Not to mention it can leave the company’s board unimpressed if unrealistic data — or constantly changing data — is set before them.

Following in this vein, and specific to pricing strategies, a product’s story isn’t fully told until a finance person is given the opportunity to dig into a pricing/profit analysis. While a business development or marketing professional should have a good sense of pricing stratagems that work in the market, a finance person should have a firm understanding of the various cost drivers that inform the creation and management of a product.

When running through what-if pricing scenarios, it is this handle on cost drivers that informs the ever-important margin calculations. While seemingly straightforward, this gut check is surprisingly often overlooked.

Budgeting

And now, the fundamental portion of finance professional’s role: budgeting. Budgets should be put together and conducted with as much granularity as possible, because such finely detailed data can lead to extremely useful analyses and quarter-over-quarter comparisons down the road.

This sort of painful attention to detail is unfortunately exactly the type of housekeeping that allows for well-informed boards, tidy investor packages and grounded five-year-plus forecasts — not to mention that it further lends a level-headed dose of reality to oft-runaway startup spend.

Budgets reek of a decidedly corporate stink.

If the correct infrastructure is put into place early on in the company’s life cycle, budgeting becomes a once-monthly 15-minute nuisance for anyone outside the finance team, and provides outsized value for data-driven decisions down the road.

These are all functions that a finance professional could lend a startup early on in its trajectory, well before IPO preparations and before even your first 409a valuation. Further, if hired correctly, the finance team need not put a damper on a startup’s uniquely geeky, fast-paced, entrepreneurial culture.

About Author: The author of this blog has a passion for writing and has written many blogs related to trademark registration, Company Registration, Intellectual Property Rights, legal services, LLP Laws, Copyright Registration

Benefits of registering a business

Clear advantages exist to registering a business, in some cases registration is required for tax purposes or to be legally allowed to operate.

Establishing Business Bank Accounts

You need to provide proof that your business is properly registered with the state to open a business bank account. A business bank account is an important asset to a small business because you can separate your personal activities from your business activities. It is also more professional to give your clients a business name for payment instead of your own full name.

Getting Loans

When you apply for small business loans, you're going to have to prove that you're actually a business. Lenders and investors will ask to see your business registration along with other application requirements before approving you for a loan.

Reputation with Customers

Customers and clients, especially people you've never worked with before, need assurance that you are a legitimate business. When a business is on file with the state, it could put your clients at ease when making a decision about whether to spend money with your company.

Supplier Arrangements

A registered business also makes you eligible to receive supplier discounts that you wouldn't normally receive as an unregistered operation. Suppliers commonly reserve wholesale rates for business owners who can show official paperwork from the state.

Hiring Employees

A business registration allows you to hire full-time employees and pay them in accordance to state laws. When you register your business with the state you'll receive a state identification number that allows you to route state taxes on the employee's behalf.

About Author: The author of this blog has a passion for writing and has submitted many blogs about company registration, copyright registration, intellectual property rights, trademark registration, legal services, LLP laws etc.

Trademark License

One of the drastic turnarounds caused by the introduction of the new Trade Marks Act, 1999, repealing the old Trade Marks Act, 1958 was broadening the definition of the phrase ‘permitted use’. In the new Act, the use of a registered Trade Mark is now permitted not only by the registered user, but also by a third person who is permitted to use the captioned registered Trade Mark with the consent of the registered user. A license agreement would be signed between the registered user and the third party. The clauses would mainly include granting of rights, royalty payment, duties and obligations of both the parties, arbitration/mediation clauses, termination and its consequences, to name a few. This practice is called licensing which is treated as a part and parcel of any business these days.

The Trademarks Act does not mention the term ‘License’ but the concept under the Act is mentioned as that of a ‘Registered User’.

Trademark licensing is advantageous to both the parties. While the licensor enjoys its rights to the mark by getting the royalties for its use, the licensee is able to expand its market operations by using the brand and developing its reputation.

The advantage of Licensing is that it widens the scope of the product that the Trade Mark covers and extends its growth in terms of value and reputation. It is a win-win situation for both the proprietor of the Trade Mark who has already established himself in the business arena (the licenser) and for the person who might be just a start-up company (licensee).

Licensing, the licensor is open to license the rights over the trademark in manner it may like. The Licensor can restrict the rights of the licensee in a trademark or brand with respect to the products or services wherein the licensee can use such brand, with respect to time for which it can use such mark, with respect to area within which it can use such mark.

The main difference between patent licensing and Trade Mark licensing is that a patent holder can solely license his invention as a patent whereas under the Trade Mark law, a Trade Mark cannot be used solely for the purpose of licensing.

When it comes to determining what exactly constitutes ‘quality control’, McCarthy in his book ‘Trademark and Unfair Competition’ has observed that under the understanding of the quality theory, the consumer assumes that products sold under the same trademark will be of equal quantity regardless of the actual physical source or producer of the goods. This means, as per the expectations of the potential consumer, the legal form of ownership and control of a Trade Mark should not affect the final produced goods or service. Hence, whatever be the form of quality control exercised by the registered proprietor over the use of the Mark by the registered user, the provision of the quality control and the expectations to provide the same, must be written in an agreement (which is between the licensor and the licensee) as one of the stipulated Condit.

Copyright Movies

While buying products such as books, Music CDs, Video CDs, software etc. you must have come across the symbol © printed on them. This symbol means copyright.

What is a Copyright? 

A copyright registration essentially a set of rights granting protection to different forms of human expression of thoughts such as videos, music, books, a play etc.

Copyright is just one form of intellectual property. It is not the same as trademark, which protects brand names, mottos, logos, and other source identifiers from being used by others for certain purposes. It is also different from patent law, which protects inventions. YouTube offers a separate removal process for videos which violate trademark, trade secret, or other laws. The rights are basically to prevent another individual from reproducing or distributing, in an unauthorized manner, the product of the copyright holder’s skill and labor.
The Indian law, i.e. the Copyright Act, 1857 recognizes a ‘video’ as being entitled to copyright protection too so let us understand why at all should you obtain a copyright for a video.

Which types of work are subject to copyright?

When a person creates an original work that is fixed in a physical medium, he or she automatically owns copyright to the work. Copyright ownership gives the owner the exclusive right to use the work in certain, specific ways. Many types of works are eligible for copyright protection, including:

·        Audiovisual works, such as TV shows, movies, and online videos

·        Sound recordings and musical compositions

·        Written works, such as lectures, articles, books, and musical compositions

·        Visual works, such as paintings, posters, and advertisements

·        Video games and computer software
     Dramatic works, such as plays and musicals