Silver was invented about 5900 years ago.  Oldest silver coins were found in the Aegean Sea Islands and Aegean part of Anatolia, Turkey.  The Lydians are accepted as the inventors of money and they were using silver along with gold for printing coins.

1847 is accepted to be a milestone for the silver industry.  In this year, William Roger, Asa Roger and Simeon Roger successfully produced silver articles such as forks and spoons which opened a new era in silver production.

Interestingly, there are very few mine ores that contain silver as the main value.  Silver is almost always a “by product” in the extraction of other products.  About 75% of silver extraction is produced from the remainings of lead, zinc and copper ores.  About 25% of the total silver production in the world is from the ores which are mined only for the silver values.

For a more detailed article about this topic please visit the article of Mr. Thakur.

Interestingly, Dr. Rhodes says that the first five laws all must be fulfilled to ensure business start-up success. With them the business has a much great chance of success. Businesses that do succeed without the first five laws of entrepreneurial marketing are the exception, not the norm.

The First Five Laws include:

Law of the Angle.

Law of Pain or Opportunity.

Law of the Sweet Spot (the Blue Ocean).

Law of Specialization.

Law of the Neighbor.

By Nate Nead.

Image by dan taylor.

1. Bad initial concept.

2. Inadequate planning.

3. Failure to do proper research.

4. Insufficient capital.

5. Poor cash management.

6. Lack of business domain specific knowledge.

7. Chasing any potential sale.

8. Late billing and collections.

9. Lack of focus.

10. Lack of internal control systems.

11. Hiring the wrong people.

12. Reliance on few suppliers or customers.

13. Not having enough perseverance and resilience.

14. Insufficient performance metrics.

Perhaps the two most important to this list are: bad initial concept and improper planning. Better to avoid a bad concept and poor planning than to get started, get down the road somewhere and realize you not only are in the wrong place, but that you shouldn’t have been there at all in the first place.

Finally, it’s much better to learn and apply the information gleaned from this article than to actually make the mistakes yourself. The latter would be much more painful and time consuming.

Image by rick.

I could not agree more with him.

Mike Myatt, a Top CEO Coach, explained in his knol, “Best Practices are really nothing more than disparate groups of methodologies, processes, rules, concepts, and theories that have previously garnered success in certain areas. However, prior individual or contextual successes rarely warrant being deemed as universal truths.”

From my own experience, implementing best practices do often backfires – my business productivity is slumping to mediocrity and my employees morale went lower than before.

If so, why experts and consultants always insist you to do changes based on best practices?

Best practices do help you enhance your business performance.

However, you must remember that best practices are others’ success stories. As Mike Myatt explained in his knol, you can learn from them and this will benefit you and your business, only if you modify the best practices to suit your business situation and condition.

Here is another interesting take on best practices by Mike – “Let’s examine this from another angle… Why would you want to do business in the same fashion as your competitors?”

Exactly.

Image by kawanet.

I found this knol that you may want to consider reading if you are seriously thinking about starting a new business – Stumbling blocks for new businesses by Dave Cheong.

From the knol, I picked one of my favourite stumble blocks – it is the number 13, not having enough perseverance and resilience.

Resilience, in my opinion, is the key of all keys in driving your business to success. No passion, stale sales proposal and non-kaizen business model are some of the things you must keep working on even on tough times, like today’s recession.

Find whatever ways to keep you ‘pumped-up’ and resilient to stay competitive in the market. Hopefully, this will guide your business to navigate through the road blocks ahead.