What's the best business to start? What do you know best? What do you really enjoy? If they're the same thing, you have a starting point.

Most profitable small businesses begin with an individual or group of individuals applying their skills and experience.

Best Business to Start

The best business to start is where your skills, experience and passions converge. You may have been thinking about getting into a business of your own for quite some time, but the decision to go into business shouldn't be taken lightly.

Most Profitable Small Businesses

Most profitable small businesses are those driven by passion. There's just too much work involved in any business to succeed without it. But how do you identify which of the things you enjoy might make you enough money to make them worthwhile as a business?

Best Small Business to Start

If you're looking for business suggestions, you're making a mistake. There are many people that would be happy to offer you an opportunity to make quick money, guaranteed money with simple cookie cutter formulas. Don't believe it for a minute. Unless it's a proven franchise and you already have financial and personnel management skills, you're much better off creating your own business. So, how to do that?

The best small business to start is the one you'll find when you chart your skills, your experience and your passion. It's a metric only you can weight.

As a starting point consider this simple exercise

Take a moment and list your skills. Beside them evaluate your level of competence: novice, experienced or expert. Then, beside that, on a scale of 1-10 fill in your passion - the reward practicing or applying that skill gives you.

Now take a moment and review your skills rated experienced to expert on the experience measure and over 5 on the passion measure.

Look for skills that complement each other. What sort of business would they lend themselves to?

What role would you play in the business?

Would your skill set provide you what it would take to head up the business yourself with the support of a few key consultants? Or perhaps you would be well served by having a partner?

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There has been much talk, as of late, in regard to our Industry being a "Service" Industry as opposed to being a "Sales" Industry.

Now, some may argue that in order to provide a service for a client, we must first sell the client on the service! Now, there is some truth to this statement, but in order to sell the client on the service they must first see value. In other words, the prospect must see a valuable commodity before them... something they MUST have!

I know, this starting to sound like the age-old question- Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

In the case of the Martial Arts Industry, it is definitely the egg. Oh! I mean service!

Back when I opened my first school in 1985, my mindset was that when a student joined my school he now had the honor and privilege of being in my presence (The magnificent instructor that I was) and if so deemed (in my infinite wisdom), I would, maybe, impart some knowledge upon him!

Well, times have changed (Thank Goodness)! Today, it's all about service. Now, before we can provide a great service we MUST have a servant's mindset.

Yes, I did say WE! As the Sensei's, Sifu's, Guru's and Kwan Chan Nim's of our organizations, the buck stops with us! Leadership is influence and if we want to influence the rest of our team to have a servant's attitude, we're going to have to lead by example.

Servant Leaders...

· Are motivated by LOVE. The love of our students must be unconditional, unending and unselfish.

· Possesses a security that allows them to serve others. The insecure are into titles, the secure are into cleaning! A Servant Leader will do the little things like clean, help a student with a belt, help the child find his card, or sit with a child when they're crying because their mother still hasn't arrived.

· Initiate servant ministry to others. Don't wait around for someone to clarify protocol. Where there is a need you must meet it.

· Want nothing to hinder their relationship with their students. Our students are truly our teachers! They've been put on this earth to help us become better teachers. Every challenge we have with student is designed to strengthen and stretch us. We DON'T want to miss out on what our students have to teach us.

· Teach servant hood by example. If the Sensei can change, so can the rest of the Team. If he can clean, so can the rest of them (I repeated this twice because it's the one I forget the most!).

· Live a blessed life. By living a servant's life, we will be blessed with all the abundance the world has to offer. Zig Ziglar says that you can have everything in life you want if we just help enough people get what they want.

Here are some questions that will help you lead a servant's life:

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If you are a conventional web developer building your own websites with core frameworks of PHP or J2EE (or similar technologies), you would be interested to know what content management systems (CMS) are. You could have heard about the savings in time and effort these systems can help you to achieve. Let us discuss what these systems actually are and ways they can help.

What are content management systems?

Content management systems are frameworks that can be readily deployed in the form of web applications. You need not design the architecture from scratch. Moreover, these systems assume some common functions that are required across web applications. For example, theme management and menus management are some common functions that almost every website would require. Based on the assumptions, the developers of the content management systems work on the common functions and deliver them along with the core system. This means, you need not develop the assumed common functions once again from scratch.

How CMS can help you?

1. A CMS Can Save Development and Maintenance Effort

Just because you need not develop functions from scratch, you are going to save plenty of your valuable time. You could use the time saved in a more productive way. Moreover, maintenance of CMS systems is fairly simple. Generally, any CMS would have an administration section with links to settings pages of different functions/features. For example, if you wish to add a new menu item in the navigation bar, you could do so within minutes from the corresponding settings page. In case you had not used CMS, you would be working at least half an hour in building a new menu item and testing the same.

2. Most of the Content Management Systems are Free to Use

Though few CMS systems require a fee to download and install, most of the systems that are popular can be used without spending a penny. A common expectation among most open source programmers is that the systems they use must be economical. This expectation is perfectly met by popular free CMS like Drupal, Joomla etc.

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