Mvenkat's Business Page

BUSINESS

As a small businessman I know it can be pretty confusing to conduct business, from marketing/advertising to taxes to government meddling. I'll add links that have helped me in the future. I will also add a new section in the near future regarding exactly what is needed to set yourself up in business - it took me a lot of headaches to figure out appropriate corporate structure, whether I should hire myself as an employee and if so, exactly what taxes I had to pay, to whom, what about unemployment insurance, workman's comp., yada yada yada I'm going crazy!

Small Business info
Small Business Administration - This is actually quite a useful site, with a number of good links.
Small Business Advisor - Another good site

Law Advice

Here are some good free sites with useful information:

www.lawyers.com freeadvice lawguru lawsmart lawstreet Free Law Advice

Good informational sites
INC - A magazine geared specifically to the small business owner, it has a number of stories that are applicable to sbo's, including about marketing, accounting and strategic planning etc.
IOMA Business Pages
How do you know what your internet customers want? - Simple, read this article from Inc. Magazine - insights will help you change your website to maximize customer satisfaction and hence revenue.

Free Places to Post your Resume

Due to overwhelming interest from my friends, I have added more info about exactly how to post your resume for free on the web, ranging from creating your own webpage resume to how to link it to as many search engines as possible and thus guarantee maximum visibility. After following these procedures I managed to have an average of 6 recruiters a week calling me over the last several months, plus some companies too.

One good place to start is the following article from PC Magazine about online job hunting . After that, you're ready to start:

(1) The first thing you need to do is make sure that your resume is in Word format. Back when I started this I had to make sure that it was in Word, Wordperfect and ASCII but at this point I think people only care about Word. With under 5 years of experience you should look to make the resume one page long - more than 5 years and you can consider going to 2 pages - Don't go over 2 - no one wants to read a novel, and the resume is designed purely to get your foot in the door.

(2) My goal was to have my Resume in front of as many people as possible as cheaply as possible. I started by using keywords 'Resume' 'Free' and 'Posting' to get to some good job-related websites - Fortunately you don't need to wade through all the crap because I've already done it - The best site to start with that I've seen is the careers site at Ohio State University ( Ohio State's Career Services ) - it provides documentation to help you in your job search as well as sites to visit. In addition, the following sites allow you to place your resume on them for free:

Intellimatch                      Gojobs                                  Hotjobs
PeopleSearch                  MonsterBoard
Vjf                                  VirtualResume
USResume                      JobWarehouse

For independent consulting, these are the good sites:

braingigs elance guru niku nowonder opus360 workexchange experts FreeAgent Independent Contractor Exchange

I’d recommend Guru for documentation and links. I found a downloadable book through them which involved setting up contracts, and since I had no idea how to do this for my first client this proved to be very useful.

Also make sure you keep good documentation regarding where you post your resume. Information that you should save should include Username, Passwords, date submitted and status (inactive/active). I’ve had recruiters pester me about jobs because I had submitted my resume to an obscure site that had been bought out and still considered me active. In step (3) below I talk about setting up a webpage for your resume. I think this should be a mandatory step for everyone regardless of how comfortable you feel at your current job. I would also recommend you splurge on the $70 it takes to buy a domain name directly from Network Solutions. In the early days referring people to my resume at http://members.aol.com/mvenkat/resume.html wasn’t exactly something that they would remember 5 minutes later, let alone 3 days later. Now, with http://mvenkat.com/resume.html they have more reason to remember it. With all people who contact you regarding your resume, I would refer them to this page (also include a link to download your resume in Word, since most of the recruiters/HR people will require it in Word format. To include this link, just upload your resume in Word to your webspace and then include a hyperlink to the Word document).

(3) If you're reading this at home then you have a connection to the web, either through a major provider such as America Online or through a smaller Internet Service Provider (ISP). Regardless of who provides the connection, they usually provide you with 20MB of free space to create your own webpage (for America Online, go to Keyword: Personal Publisher, for an ISP send mail to the webmaster and request space for a personal webpage). If the space is not enough, then there are many services on the web who provide free space, including Angelfire. Use this space to create your own Resume Webpage - Make sure that this is updated - this way when all the recruiters start calling you you can refer them to this website - Make sure you link it to as many search engines as you can - most search engines (yahoo etc.) allow you to add a link to them - that way if a recruiter or HR person canvasses the web for someone of your skills, you can be readily visible.

(4) There are many things you can do with an online resume, adding all kinds of bells and whistles. It's a tough thing to figure out exactly what it should look like. I compromised by making mine fairly conservative (My Resume) , except that I increased mine in size, added a nice background and provided links to the companies that I had worked for. I may also provide Email links to my references in the future, with their permission of course. There are some wacky resumes out there utilizing frames, multiple pages, links to work done, this that and the other. Although its nice to be creative, just remember that a resume has one purpose, and one purpose only - To get you through the door! You should close the offer during the interview - intimidating some poor human resources person who just happens to search the web looking for someone normal to hire is probably not the course you want to take.

(5) Choose a resume format you like by doing a simple search of the web, use criteria from your own background, e.g. I would search the web using the following criteria to get an idea of what people like me put in their resume - (Quality Assurance, resume, finance). Seeing what your competition is upto is always useful - remember, it's not stealing, its acquiring!

I'll add more stuff as I think of it and as my friends tell me what else they see - so far these techniques have helped me acquire a nice 6 figure consulting income with more to come in this wonderfully supply-challenged computer consultant environment.

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This page is always under construction!