'Working for yourself' - the PRIME guide

The Prince's Initiative for Mature Enterprise (PRIME) is a registered charity founded by Prince Charles. It is dedicated to helping people over the age of 50 investigate self-employment and start and run their own businesses.

‘Working for YOURSELF’ is a practical guide to sales, marketing and preparing a business plan, based on those subjects that PRIME found people were least confident with. Following is the full list of contents, and a brief introduction to three of these categories.

1. Customers and selling to them
2. Negotiating
3. Marketing
4. Setting prices
5. Business model, business plan
6. Checking with reality
7. Sources of support selling to them

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Customers and selling to them

Don’t let bad sales experiences from your past become a barrier to setting up your own independent business. Resolve to do it differently to them – and better. If you have a good product or service it stands to reason that there are people out there who would welcome the opportunity to buy it.

Negotiating

The key thing to recognise is when you are in a negotiating situation – when the prices, terms and overall package initially offered are open to alteration. This is not always obvious. The party that doesn’t notice that the offer is negotiable may lose out on a better deal.

Marketing

(Marketing) is considered quite an art because attracting people’s attention and inducing them to act is difficult. Your target customers face lots of other demands on their attention, so getting them to first notice and then respond in the desired way can take some clever thinking.