Fashion Design Schools
Fashion is a lucrative business. With the growing fascination of the public over the glamour of Hollywood, the fashion industry keeps growing and evolving. Fashion designers can enjoy instant popularity and wealth by bagging a celebrity endorsement. However, the world of fashion design is a tough business to be in. You have to know the right people who will provide maximum exposure your clothes and accessories, especially to the media and the movers and shakers of the fashion industry. But most often than not, creativity and brilliance in design can bring you inside that circle.While talent is something innate, it has to be honed and properly directed for it to blossom. This is the role of a fashion design school. While there are online schools that offer fashion design degrees and programs, face-to face and hands-on training with a professional designer is what you need if you want to become a good designer.Students in a fashion design school are expected to have basic knowledge of design. Though they are not expected to turn out ramp-quality design at the onset, they are expected to turn out brilliant concepts that reflect creativity and uniqueness.Fashion designers make their name through original and highly distinctive designs. For example, depending on your niche, you can stand out by emphasizing sleek design, meticulous attention to detail or interesting accents. Making an original and identifiable mark is part of the training.In fashion design school, students are taught how to choose the right material for a certain item as well as the best way to use such a material. Achieving good color combinations and the right silhouette are also part of the training. Most fashion design schools have alliances with design houses. Students can intern in these houses and learn the ropes of the business directly from the workshops of some of the world’s biggest fashion designers.
Honest Home Businesses – How to Identify Them
It is becoming an extremely difficult task finding honest home businesses these days. There are so many scams and fraudulent schemes operating under the garb of legitimate businesses that people are becoming skeptical about home business opportunities of late. It is indeed wise to cautious, but caution should not be taken to an extreme where it prevents you from taking advantage of honest home businesses when you finally spot them. While many have totally lost hope in finding legitimate home-based businesses, others want to know how really to identify them. They acknowledge that there might still be a few honest home-based businesses around, but they want the ability to discern the good from the bad.You would still be able to find honest home businesses, but they are few and far between. You need to be much more knowledgeable for you to identify truly legitimate home businesses. In order to do that, you have to understand the basic principles of a regular business in the first place. Once you know what a true business is, you would be able to easily spot phonies from a mile away.Every business needs to be founded on sound business principles. For a business to run efficiently, it needs to sell a product or a service. If a business is not selling anything, it cannot survive. That is precisely why programs like email clicking and filling up survey forms are not the best business models. They cannot get you very far. The core of any business has got to involve selling. The entire business needs to be built around selling a product or a service in exchange for the customers’ money. This is what constitutes a good business model. And this is one of the best ways to identify honest home businesses too. They would most likely have selling at the core of the business.It would be easier for me to illustrate this with an example. I have come across quite a few home business opportunities that truly impressed me. I just want to use one of them as a case study, so that you can really understand how to evaluate a home business opportunity. For this example, let me use David Bocock’s 4 Day Money Making Blueprint. I wish he gave a different name to the program since this one sounds a little cocky.I first came across David’s site through an affiliate ad. The 4 Day Money Making Blueprint site has a video where David himself explains about the program. What really impressed me was his sincere concern towards his clients that enrolled in his program. Just one minute into the video, I was convinced that he really meant business. Even before I started evaluating the business opportunity, I evaluated David’s credibility and his sense of moral responsibility towards people who shell out their hard-earned money to enroll in his program. And those were the very concerns that he touched upon while explaining why he started the program in the first place. He went on to explain that every single person that enrolled in his program had a story behind them. There was the aged couple trying to earn a little extra to supplement their retirement income. There was the single-mom struggling to raise her children on her own, looking for ways to earn an income from home. David recounts so many instances of people in desperate situations, trying to learn how to setup a home business to support their families. It was heartening to see that he was sensitive to those needs.After watching the video, I went on to evaluating the actual business model of the 4 Day Money Making Blueprint. I learnt that it was based on the affiliate marketing principle which is an extremely powerful business model. Some of the best success stories have involved affiliate marketing at the core of the business. Then I checked the advertising methods advocated by the program. Selling and advertising go hand in hand. If either is week, the business would not survive. So I wanted to know what marketing methods the program prescribed for its clients.The 4 Day Money Making Blueprint teaches people to use Article Marketing for selling affiliate products. This again is an excellent strategy. Selling products by writing articles was popularized by Travis Sago and his “Bum Marketing” method. David has used the Bum Marketing strategy with Travis’ permission for his program. The 4 Day Money Making Blueprint has a series of videos that teach people everything they need to know to sell affiliate products through article marketing. There is more than 15 hours worth of video on the site to take you by the hand and walk you through the process.Once I knew that the program used affiliate marketing as its business model (which is really a great business model by all standards) and article marketing for advertising (which again is a very effective form of marketing), I knew that the 4 Day Money Making Blueprint is one of the honest home businesses that I could recommend to anyone.
Confidentiality: Why It’s Important To Control Info on Business For Sale
Business owners should keep the fact that they want to sell confidential. Before releasing information to prospective buyers, those buyers should commit to confidentiality in writing and should understand why it is important. Business brokers make commitments to owners of each listed business to keep the sale confidential.In order to keep these commitments brokers must require each buyer to maintain confidentiality. This means that buyers agree not to do anything that would let anyone know that the business is for sale or let anyone learn any of the information about the business that they discover in the process of examining it. The only exception is that buyers may inform their advisors, such as attorneys and accountants, in order that they may assist in the process.These professional advisors must first commit to maintain confidentiality. This is a very serious commitment as the business may be harmed if confidentiality is violated, and the person who breaches the confidentiality commitment may be liable for damages.To maintain confidentiality all communications must be strictly between the buyer and the seller and/or his agent, i.e. the buyer agrees not to contact the business owner, its employees, vendors, landlord, accountant, neighbors or especially customers. Buyers agree to visit only when they make an appointment approved by the owner. Buyers must agree not to discuss the sale with friends or coworkers – it is a very small world!When touring a business be sure not to speak in front of employees or bring any confidential materials provided by the seller or an agent to the business premises. Employees have found confidential business summaries on the tables in restaurants for sale after a buyer – seller meeting!What can happen if confidentiality is breached? Here are some things that have happened:• Primary vendors put the business on COD terms causing a major financial crisis for the owner.• Half of the employees quit in a panic because someone started a rumor that the new owner was going to fire everyone (never true, but employees don’t know that) – rather than wait to be fired, they sought and found new jobs. The owner was unable to operate the business profitably.• Competitors have used the fact that the owner was selling to sell against the business, pointing out to prospective customers that any guarantees would be worthless after the sale (not true, but scares customers and may influence their purchase decisions).• Employees found the offering information left behind by a prospective buyer. When they learned how profitable the business was, they demanded pay increases from the owner!• The word got around inadvertently to employees, who started stealing large quantities of cash and merchandise, thinking that the owner would be gone before he discovered it.The world is sometimes a very small place. The theory of networking says that each of us is separated from any other human being by no more than five degrees of separation. Skilled business brokers have learned from experience that if you speak about the sale in front of strangers, one of the people who overhears you may turn out to be the spouse of a key employee in the business, or a vendor. So pretend you work for the CIA and that all of the information about the business – including the fact that it is for sale – is mission critical, top secret information!