50 Cents 4 Lessons For Success In Business & In Life

Success comes from seeking an advantage in each and every encounter, here the US rapper 50 Cent offers indispensable advice on how to win.
‘The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own—what makes you different. I lost that fear. And once I felt the power that I had by showing the world I didn’t care about being like other people, I could never go back.’ 50 Cent

50 Cent’s Key Lessons On Success & Business

1. See Things for What They Are – Intense Realism
Reality can be rather harsh. Your days are numbered. It takes constant effort to carve a place for yourself in this ruthlessly competitive world and hold on to it. People can be treacherous. They bring endless battles into your life. Your task is to resist the temptation to wish it were all different; instead you must fearlessly accept these circumstances, even embrace them. By focusing your attention on what is going on around you, you will gain a sharp appreciation for what makes some people advance and others fall behind. By seeing through people’s manipulations, you can turn them around. The firmer your grasp on reality, the more power you will have to alter it for your purposes.

2. Make Everything Your Own – Self-Reliance
When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every manoeuvre in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose – you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.

3. Turn Sh!t into Sugar – Opportunism
Every negative situation contains the possibility for something positive, an opportunity. It is how you look at it that matters. Your lack of resources can be an advantage, forcing you to be more inventive with the little that you have. Losing a battle can allow you to frame yourself as the sympathetic underdog. Do not let fears make you wait for a better moment or become conservative. If there are circumstances you cannot control, make the best of them. It is the ultimate alchemy to transform all such negatives into advantages and power.

4. Keep Moving – Calculated Momentum
In the present there is constant change and so much we cannot control. If you try to micromanage it all, you lose even greater control in the long run. The answer is to let go and move with the chaos that presents itself to you – from within it, you will find endless opportunities that elude most people. don’t give others the chance to pin you down; keep moving and changing your appearances to fit the environment. if you encounter walls or boundaries, slip around them. do not let anything disrupt your flow.

Extracted from Robert Greene and 50 Cent’s new book The 50th Law
Order “The 50th Law” now

Britain's Six Most Exciting Young Entrepreneurs

It is fair to say that London schoolboy Nick D’Aloisio probably isn’t worried about the spiralling cost of Britain’s higher education system. Last year, aged just 17, he sold the business he’d started in his bedroom for a cool £19m to Yahoo!. The search giant loved his Summly app, which provides smartphone users with abridged versions of other web sites’ news articles. Nor was it the only admirer – Apple named Summly its best app of 2012 and it was downloaded 500,000 times in its first month on the market.

The good news is that D’Aloisio is no flash in the pan as far as young British entrepreneurs go – a string of youthful business founders, male and female, are making impressive progress with exciting new ventures that prove you don’t necessarily need years of experience to get a business off the ground.

One of the first to spot D’Aloisio’s potential was Startups, the British website that is devoted to covering the start-up sector, with news on what’s happening and advice for those at the sharp end of running brand new companies. In 2012, it named the teenager as one of its young entrepreneurs to watch – and was proved spectacularly right.

Two years’ later, Startups has just published this year’s version of that list, profiling some of the most exciting businesses founded by young entrepreneurs (it defines them as under 25) in Britain today. See http://startups.co.uk/young-entrepreneurs-to-watch-in-2014/ for the full list, but here’s six of the most interesting:

Mainstage Travel

 Founded by Aden Levin and Rob Tominey, Mainstage won £100,000 of finance from the BBC’s Dragons’ Den show last year for its business idea – it provides holiday packages geared around festivals and clubbing to young travellers, using its block purchasing power to source cheap tickets on everything from flights to clubs. Unusually for a start-up, the business has been profitable from the start.

Eatro

Founded by a trio of entrepreneurs in their early 20s, Eatro is already attracting rave reviews in the media, despite having only launched earlier this year. The business puts would-be chefs in touch with local people, enabling them to sell their home-cooked food to people looking for something different to the normal takeaway fare. Eatro acts as a middleman, pocketing 12 per cent of every mean purchased.

Gojimo

Aged just 21, George Burgess is already a serial entrepreneur, having been running businesses since his school days. He came up with the idea for Gojimo while studying for his A Level exams – it publishes a suite of revision apps and exam preparation tools and already has contracts in place with Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times and one of the world’s best-known educational resources companies. Plus Burgess has secured $1m of funding from Index Ventures.

Beer52.com

Craft beers are increasingly popular with British consumers and James Brown’s Beer52.com is the business to supply them. It works with independent microbreweries all over the country, boxing up their wares to sell to enthusiasts who would otherwise struggle to source the product. Beer52 has been boosted by a successful financing round on Angels Den, the crowdfunding platform.

The *TeaShed

Having already secured distribution deals with more than 150 retail outlets, ranging from John Lewis to the V&A Museum, The *TeaShed is expecting to sell more than £250,000 worth of its artisan teas this year, capitalising on a growing trend for the drink amongst hipsters who would once have been coffee snobs. Founder Jules Quinn, who launched the business in 2011, now spends much of her time on the road sourcing new products.

Reviveaphone

Like Mainstage Travel, Reviveaphone won backing from the BBC’s Dragons’ Den, picking up £50,000 of funding for its very modern business idea. Founder Oliver Murphy sells small bags of chemicals which smartphone users who have had an accident with their phone – like getting it wet – use to draw the impurities out of their handsets and get them working again. Britons are obviously a careless lot – sales are on target to hit £250,000 this year.

From Forbes

Avoid These Five Common Small Business Accounting Mistakes

Keeping the books is one of the more challenging aspects of running a company. It’s also one of the most important. Accounting errors can be damaging—even fatal—to businesses, but mistakes are surprisingly common. Here’s how to avoid five of the most common accounting mistakes that plague small businesses.

1. Invest in the right hire

You know the old saying: You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it. But when it comes to accounting, the reality is that you can fix your problems by dedicating more resources. “The mistake I see most often is underinvestment in accounting, particularly from a people standpoint,” said Chris McKee, founder of Venturity Financial Partners.
Skimping is especially common among expanding businesses. They’ve outgrown their junior finance person and now need a senior controller, whose salary is likely to be $70,000 or more. But that sounds expensive, so they hire someone in the $40,000 range. The cheaper hire might be great at processing accounts payable transactions but likely lacks the experience necessary to fully maximize the financials and enable the company to grow.
“You can save a little on salary, but later you have to go back and fix all the mistakes, which can be a very expensive proposition,” McKee said. “And all that time you’ve been making bad business decisions because you didn’t have a handle on important metrics like gross margin.”

2. Don’t overspend on tech solutions

This is in fact not a direct contradiction of the first point. It’s a reminder that fancy new accounting software will not necessarily pay for itself.
“Many times, I’ve seen businesses overinvest in accounting software,” McKee said. However, few—if any—small businesses need the firepower of an expensive enterprise-level accounting system.
Before your business sinks too much into a system you don’t need, evaluate the tools that are designed specifically for small businesses. These platforms focus on the areas that concern small enterprises most—cash flow, invoicing, compliance, and the like—and won’t bog you down with unnecessary functions that don’t apply to your business.

3. Don’t hire your brother-in-law

Surprisingly, some business owners think it’s a good idea to hire family members to handle their accounting. This invites financial trouble, as well as domestic strife. Neither of which, it turns out, are particularly good for business.
“We see it all the time, having your spouse or your brother-in-law do the books on the cheap,” McKee said. “People do it because they’re starting a business, and they get a lot of people in the family involved. Maybe their wife or husband kept the checkbook at home, so they figure they can do the accounting.”
Hiring a professional might be more expensive than hiring a family member, but the cost will be easily offset by the lack of productivity-draining family turmoil.

4. Don’t mix business with personal finances

Business and personal finance are a bad combination. And yet, too many small business owners use a single checking account for both sets of finances, a problem that becomes worse still when they commingle the expenses on their company’s books. Was that 48-pack of microwave popcorn for your home or office? Who used the company credit card for $500 worth of video games? You need clear boundaries.
“It can get out of hand very quickly,” McKee said. “Then after two years, people realize they’re not making money because they spend a lot on themselves, and they put it all on their business credit card.”
Mixing business and personal finances can also cause problems with the IRS, which is now taking an aggressive stance on things like claiming your Caribbean vacation as a business expense.
“The IRS will take a sample of a period of a few months and, if they see a lot of personal expenses there, they will extrapolate that to the whole period under audit and compute taxes on it. It can get really expensive really quick,” McKee said.

5. Don’t do it all yourself

This is an easy one, especially since you probably don’t really want to do it all yourself anyway. The DIY approach works well enough when you’re starting out—your operation is small, and the books are simple. But as your business grows, you can easily find yourself in over your head and spending eight hours a day crunching numbers.
“The best investment of your time is rarely the accounting,” McKee said. “As soon as it’s practical, you should bring somebody in to take it off your plate.”

From Forbes

How To Strengthen Your Company: Start In The Middle

The volunteer sector has a lot to teach business.

On the surface it seems as though managers would push employees in a different way than they might push volunteers. After all, you’re paying the employees, so you can threaten to can them if they don’t get busy. But when it comes to volunteers, most managers figure they’re stuck taking whatever they can get.
But there’s more to it than that. Management author and former Herman Miller CEO Max De Pree has said that businesses should treat their employees as volunteers anyway, because to do otherwise is to not take seriously the ability of talented workers to dump you for a better situation.
For that reason, author T.J. Sullivan says that the psychology of the volunteer workforce can inform the business world.

Sullivan has studied the dynamics of volunteer organizations while spending the past two decades advising college-student organizations around the country and speaking to at least two million students about leadership and motivation. The way to improve and maximize the performance of these organizations, he says, is to “start in the middle.”

He mentally divides every organization into thirds: A top third, filled with diligent leaders and worker bees who take pride in their group identity; a bottom third, with the ne’er-do-wells, the flakes and the malcontents; and the middle third, composed of people who seem to fly under the radar.
The middle part of a workforce gets the least attention but has the most to offer, Sullivan says.

Stop Fighting the Bottom Dwellers

“Top-third members spend most of their time doing all the work, focused on their tasks, and wishing they could change the bottom third,” he says in Motivating the Middle: Fighting Apathy in College Student Organizations.
That only makes the top third bitter and wastes time and energy, since the bottom third is something close to irredeemable.
Sullivan suggests another way: Cut your losses with the bottom third. Set some minimal expectations for them and then stop worrying about them. Then, find ways to draw out the middle third members, who often have hidden-gem talents to contribute to the organization.

Understanding the Middle Member

“Middle members are usually jugglers,” Sullivan says. They’ve got many balls in the air, and they’re often making sacrifices in other areas just to make the minimum contribution to your group. As such, he says they won’t voluntarily take on more responsibility, and they may not take kindly to having more duties pushed onto their lap.
But Sullivan says they oftentimes do step up and make greater contributions, if artfully drawn in.
He advises a few steps to engage the middle member:

• Ask for their opinion. “But don’t ask for anything else,” Sullivan says. Simply get feedback and perspective from them that could be immensely beneficial. You could ask, “What one thing could we be doing that would make our group stronger?”
• Thank them for their current level of participation and service. And show respect for their other commitments, especially their time.
• Find out what things they most enjoy within the life of the group, and give them the go-ahead to take the lead if they’d like.
• Find out if there’s a way for you to make their busy lives easier.
• Realize that they’re often willing to play a supporting role that ambitious top-third members would shun. “Say, ‘The treasurer could really use some assistance,’” Sullivan says. “Let us know if you’d be willing to step in for a few days and help him get caught up.’” While top-third members gravitate toward high-visibility roles, “a middle-third member might feel great doing a very low-key task that helps the organization.” Especially, he says, if the task is for a limited time.
• Make sure you’re taking the time for middle members to feel invested in the group’s decisions. “Middle members don’t like wrangling with top-third members in the heat of a meeting,” he says. After the meeting, go to them and give them a chance to express concerns before a decision is finalized.

Bear in mind, Sullivan isn’t being judgmental in dividing up a team TISI +0.35% into top, middle and bottom. He points out that oftentimes we ourselves are in the top third of one organization, the middle in another, and the bottom of still another.
In other words, bottom dwellers happen. And sometimes we’re that bottom dweller. For the bottom third, Sullivan says all organizations—volunteer or professional—should offer a list of minimal expectations, with the thought that, “If you do these things and don’t cause any problems, we will leave you alone.”

“Setting minimum standards for bottom-third or poorly engaged employees is something that HR departments usually do,” Sullivan says. “But there are many companies, especially small businesses, that allow these disengaged bottom-third employees to not even meet minimum standards. It’s sad that it’s actually a dramatic suggestion to many businesses that they even set [clearly defined] minimum standards.”
Sullivan, who is the CEO of the CAMPUSPEAK college-speaker organization, is now writing a Motivating the Middle book specifically for business. “The challenge for businesses,” he says, “is, ‘Can we get more out of middle-third employees? Do we have those employees who actually do care about the company, value the relationships, enjoy the work, but who could do more if they were given opportunities that fit for their interests? Could that middle-third employee think of a great sales idea if given the chance to sit in on sales meetings from time to time?  Could that middle-third employee in accounting have any good ideas for marketing? If we don’t create systems that allow these people to contribute in comfortable ways, then we’re missing out.”

From Forbes

Women entrepreneurs flourish: Meet 4 young start-up divas determined to succeed

As a fresher from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, Minnat Lalpuria Rao rejected 25 to 28 job offers when she graduated. Instead, the 28-year old decided to follow in her father's footsteps and become an entrepreneur.
While he spent his career in real estate, going from construction to re-development, she went in a completely different direction, setting up 7Vachan, a wedding-solutions provider in Mumbai some 15 months ago.

With some 10 million weddings held in India annually, this was an opportunity waiting to be tapped — Rao organized 150 weddings in 2013, based almost solely on word-ofmouth and in 2014 she thinks she can piece together 1,000.
At a time when there is a sharp focus on diversity and women are being encouraged to break through unseen glass ceilings, turning entrepreneur is proving to be a good way to get more women into the workforce.


With more women in management programmes (30-50%, according to various estimates) and societal pressures easing, more women are getting comfortable starting up.
For example, ISB was the Indian partner for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneurs Program, a five-year programme to aid the development of women entrepreneurs.

Across seven cities, spread over 16 weeks, women went through this programme to sharpen their entrepreneurial skills. It saw over 1,300 attendees in total, says Kavil Ramachandran, who anchors ISB's entrepreneurship initiatives. "Apart from stray management programmes, the potential of women entrepreneurs hasn't been tapped," he adds. "Attendance at our programmes shows that there has been a sharp interest in entrepreneurship among women."
  Doing Their Own Thing
Start-ups may provide a new way for more women to enter and stay in the workforce. At a time when established companies are turning cartwheels to meet their diversity targets (women being a key metric in this), the lure of the unknown and the thrill of entrepreneurship may be a bigger draw than the stability of a routine job.
According to various estimates, women account for 25-35% of employees at start-ups and the number is increasing. According to venture capitalists and other risk capital investors, a growing number of women, emboldened by start-up success stories both in India and the globe, are taking the plunge.
The growing interest in entrepreneurship is visible in many places. For example, at start-up events and forums hosted by the likes of Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels, the number of women in attendance has increased sharply in the past couple of years. Individual angel investors say that more women are also walking up to them with clever business ideas.
"There has been a noticeable increase in the quality and quantity of proposals we receive from women entrepreneurs...but it is nowhere close to where it should be ideally," says Sasha Mirchandani, founder of Kae Capital, an early-stage investor.
While more women have been able to get (and stay in) a job, turning entrepreneur comes with its own set of challenges.

For one, women have traditionally had lesser access to capital to fund their businesses, hampering their ability to get their start-ups off the ground. Some of the statistics make grim reading.
According to the Gender-GEDI Female Entrepreneurship Index, a study by hardware giant Dell, India ranks poorly on all fronts. Overall, it came in 16 of 17 countries in this survey last year, with some statistics — 26% of women in India have bank accounts compared with 100% in developed markets — telling their own tale.
  Multiple factors restrain women from starting their own enterprises. Most prominent, Mirchandani of Kae points out, are social norms, which dictate that women put home, family and kids before their own aspirations — entrepreneurial or otherwise.
"There are signs that this is changing — husbands willing to play second fiddle, when the wife has a smart start-up in the works or a support system for children when both parents are at work," he adds.
Creating a Network
In some parts of the country entrepreneurial women are making waves. For example, in the arid regions of Latur and Osmanabad in Maharashtra, women are leading the charge at organizations such as Swayam Shikshan Prayog, which is building networks of rural businesses. Here, women are handpicked to sell products such as gas stoves and the best ones given charge of a region to manage.
"Women are seen to have stronger networks in the community and have more empathy with other women who control the household budget," says Aparajita Agarwal, director, Sankalp Forum, a facilitator of social enterprises.

According to Agarwal, women may prefer entrepreneurship because it lets them be more flexible with their hours, even as they earn a steady income.

From The Economic Times

IIM graduates launch new ventures; turn down high paying jobs

MUMBAI: WhenTarun Tiwari, Akhil Malik, Paavan Nanda and Dharamveer Singh Chauhan passed out of IIM-Calcutta this month, they graduated with an MBA and a fledgling new business. Zostel, a chain of backpacker hostels for young travellers that the four of them started with three other friends last year, is fast growing into a fullfledged business. Two such hostels — offering a bed at less than Rs 500 a night — are already open at Jodhpur and Jaipur.

"At least 7 more hostels will come up in one year," says Nanda. Zostel is getting good reviews on travel portals. The seven of them started the venture with money pooled in from friends and family as well as the Rs 20 lakh-odd they won in various business plan contests.
At least 20 IIM graduates from the Class of 2014 have stood down from this placement season to launch their own ventures — everything from express bike washes to alternative investment funds, agricultural advisory firms and test preparation institutes. To name a few, Prakhar Bindal, also from IIM Calcutta, has started Axsiom.com, which helps companies acquire premium domain names and IIM-Indore's Ashish Jain is in the final stages of R&D before launching an FMCG product.
Also, IIM-Indore's Niraj Taksande has floated an engineering innovations company. All of them graduated this year and chose entrepreneurship over a regular job. The number of fresh IIM graduates opting to turn entrepreneurs is by no stretch of imagination big. Nor is there any guarantee that the few that have dared will succeed. Also, IIMs lag IITs when it comes to fresh graduates choosing entrepreneurship.
Nevertheless, the few new business ventures graduating from the IIM class of 2014 do need to be taken note of. Also, with IIMs offering incentives including deferred placement options to graduates choosing entrepreneurship, their tribe is bound to grow. Most of the 20 entrepreneurs ET tracked opted for the policy which will allow them to sit for campus placements in the next couple of years in case their startups fail.
IIMs are also fostering entrepreneurship in other ways. Shaunak Chhaparia and Sushil Kumar, who are setting up a logistics venture, have been offered a co-working space at CIIE (Centre for Innovation, Incubation & Entrepreneurship) at IIM-A. As many as 13 students from the 2014 batch at IIM-A have turned entrepreneurs.

"It bodes very well for both the entrepreneurial ecosystem and industry in India that some of the best quality talent from the top institutes wants to be entrepreneurs," says Abhay Pandey, MD, Sequoia Capital India. "This trend has been gaining ground, and the change is very apparent too in terms of the startups that approach us these days -people have better backgrounds and better experience."
Adds Ashok Banerjee, dean (new initiatives and external relations) and coordinator, Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, IIM Calcutta: "The existence of an enabling ecosystem -- incubators and accelerators, angels and impact investors --has also encouraged management and engineering graduates to follow the entrepreneurial path."
Still, it's not easy for IIM grads to walk away from an attractive job offer and opt for risky entrepreneurship. "It's difficult to resist the lure of hundred thousand dollar salaries," says Bindal of Axsiom.com. "But I was driven by this need to build something of my own that people around me would remember me for." Over 150 companies from more than 40 countries have used Axsiom.com's services to buy premium domain names, he says. He started with a Rs 3 lakh investment raised from family and friends.

Taksande from IIM Indore didn't bother taking the deferred placement option. He has started an engineering innovations company based out of Mumbai with two friends. They have designed and manufactured an automatic two-wheeler wash system that can wash any motorcycle in under 5 minutes. "We are targeting motorcycle service centres, wash centres, petrol pumps, parking lots at malls/railway stations etc. We offer this service under the brand name Express Bike wash," says Takshande.
"For these students, having their own start-up is like a self-purification process. It is about adversity and one becomes stronger," says Sharad Sharma, angel investor and former head of Yahoo India R&D. Sharma helped launch iSpirt, a think-tank for software product companies. "Even if their startup doesn't take off, these experiences help the resume. More employers want candidates to have startup experience on the resume," he adds.
Money, fame and independence aren't the only driving factors. Several of these entrepreneurs are also eager to do something for society. Snehil Basoya, an IIM-Ahmedabad graduate has set up Gram Bazaar, a forprofit social enterprise working with farmers and local entrepreneurs to introduce new crops and improved agricultural practices through intensive crop planning and extension services. He will soon implement a pilot project in Alwar district.
"We will also enable farmers to get higher remuneration as well as create job opportunities for rural youth by processing and marketing these new products," says Basoya, who has a partner in Arushi Mittal, a B-Tech in civil engineering from IIT-Delhi. Basoya's IIM-A batch mate Karunamoorthi P wants to help school students learn visually and become more creative.
His venture is to build model schooling systems with a unique set of learning and teaching methodologies that would prepare students for an entrepreneurial future. Also starting out in the education space is Alosies George of IIM Calcutta, who's started GeorgePrep, a competitive test preparation institute. Currently, he's training aspirants only for CAT, but plans to extend that to GRE and GMAT in the near future.

From The Economic Times

Tanzania's Richest Man Concludes Sale Of Vodacom Stake

Rostam Aziz

Vodacom Group Ltd, the African subsidiary of British telecoms giant Vodafone VOD +0.56%announced on Tuesday that it has finally concluded its acquisition of an additional indirect 17.2% interest in Vodacom Tanzania previously owned by Tanzania’s richest man, Rostam Azizi.
In a press release statement, the company said it had fulfilled all requirements as mandated by the Tanzanian regulatory authorities and that the transaction was now unconditional.
“As all the conditions precedent to the transaction have been fulfilled, the transaction is now unconditional and closing is expected to take place today, 29 April 2014,” the company said.
Last November, Vodacom announced it would spend up to R2.5 billion ($240 million) to acquire a 17.2% stake in Vodacom Tanzania from Cavalry Holdings, a  Jersey island-registered private investment company wholly controlled by Rostam Azizi. Cavalry previously held a 35% in Vodacom Tanzania. With this acquisition, Cavalry’s holding the company is now reduced to 17.8%, while Vodacom Group, a Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed entity that previously owned a 65% stake in the company will now own 82.2%. Vodacom Tanzania, which has more than 10 million active subscribers, is the country’s largest mobile phone company, and Vodacom Group’s second most successful operation in Africa, after its South African unit that boasts more than 23 million subscribers.
Azizi, 49, is Tanzania’s first billionaire with a fortune estimated at $1 billion, derived from stakes in contract mining firm Caspian Mining, a Port in Dar es Salaam,  extensive real estate in Tanzania and the Middle East and, of course, cash coming from the sale of his stake in Vodacom Tanzania.

From Forbes