My Solution: 10 Steps to Getting Contracts for Exporting Worldwide

By Alen Zivkovic and Raymond Aaron

Are you putting much work into your business and not getting the results you deserve?

Do you have a feeling that your path is too stressful and always lacking time and money?

Do you feel that something is always holding you back with your decision-making, but you don't know what it is?

The failure rate of all new businesses is 20% in the first year, 50% at the end of 5th year; in most recent reports, however, only 1 in 12 entrepreneurs succeed. That said, simply accepting that you have a 91,7% chance to fail doesn't seem like a healthy mentality. There are plenty of ways you can maximize your chances of success by reading this book, where Alen explains in a simple way how to structure your business to be sustainable in scalable in the future.

My Solution describes 10 steps on the entrepreneur's business path, in terms of strategic and personal development. Understanding each step will help you develop your worldwide business without burning out along the way.

In this book you will learn about:
• starting your business, and detaching yourself from it
• building the backbone of your business so that you have a strong foundation from which you can move further
• positioning your business on a competitive global market to get worldwide contracts
• recognizing TA drivers that are not useful for your success

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772774610

Book preview

Chapter 1

Making Business Is Not a Need; It Is a Goal

1

Short Chapter of My Life Before Starting My Business Path

First of all, I would like to congratulate you for taking your first business steps and being interested in improving your business strategies by reading this book. I will share my business path, good decisions, mistakes, and my experiences along the way. By reading my thoughts, you can avoid some mistakes I have made along the way, which took me a lot of time, nerves, and money. But on the other hand, you can also get to know the good decisions that I have made in my business. You must understand that this book is not in the position of a professional manager. Instead, this book describes the personal experiences of running and being in this business for 15 years now.

Before we go to the business content, let me tell you something about my past, which has impacted me and gave me my first stepping stones toward my future successful business days. I was not always interested in the business aspect of my life. Sport was a big part of my life when I was a kid. Since I can remember, I have been intrigued by sports in general. It goes way back in time when I was in primary school. I remember how I was impatiently waiting when sports education lessons would come. As you can tell, mathematics and biology were not on my preliminary list of interests. When I was six years old, my parents signed me up for ski school, and that was my first actual meeting with sports training up to this point in my life. Skiing training gave me a lot of work ethic, but it was not my first sports love. It was tennis.

I fell in love with tennis when I was ten years old. My parents are to blame for that. I remember watching them play, and that was how I became interested in this sport, to the level that I begged them to sign me up to a tennis club. Since then, my dedication to this sport has been unconditional. I have grown from a child with a wooden tennis racket that his dad made for him, to a competitive tennis player. I was doing that for almost 15 years. Before ending my competitive tennis career, I became a tennis coach, and then finished my tennis education on a faculty for sport and became an A-level tennis coach.

My career as a tennis coach was 15 years long, and it started when I was just 17 years old. Why so young, you may ask yourself? You have just entered a senior-level tennis competition, one would say. Well, my father told me one day that he would not pay for my tennis lessons anymore, and if I still wanted to play competitive tennis, I would have to earn my money to pay for my training. That was my first baby step on my future business path. From that day on, I needed to learn new strategies, and I gained a lot of experience in that aspect of my life.

As a tennis coach, I put a lot of emphasis on the psychological part of a player’s tennis development. Why am I telling you that? You will see further in this book that a big part of my business development went through my growth as a person.

At that point in my life, everything revolved around tennis. I liked what I did. I was enjoying it. I could see myself as a professional coach for a long time. You could say I had my dream job. But boy, I was wrong.

Ending One Chapter Is a Start to Another

Can you relate to the feeling when things just didn’t go according to your plans at one point in your life? At that point, you may think that everything is against you, and you don’t get any positive outcome no matter how hard you try. These moments can be hard to deal with.

The important thing I have learned in such cases is that you don’t have to make it even harder by being hard on yourself and pumng yourself down. You don’t help resolve a situation like that. Don’t take it personally. Just try to think about your options, and make your best decision according to your current information.

As I was saying earlier, everything in my life was going according to my plans. I was a tennis coach in a thriving tennis club. My priority at that point was helping develop tennis players in a senior category. I was doing a good job. My greatest satisfaction was that tennis players trusted me and believed in my training. We had a good relationship, and they were happy with their development.

After a few years of training experiences and graduating from college, I was not satisfied with my financial payment of working at that club anymore. So I asked my boss for a promotion. It seemed like a logical step to do. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The club had different goals. So, my big decision, which I will not regret for the rest of my life, was to stop working as a tennis coach at that club, and get new opportunities somewhere else. It may look that this decision took a lot of thinking and preparation, but it was just the opposite. It didn’t take me a lot of time to decide, which is why it didn’t take a lot of energy out of me. I was already thinking about my future, even though my new steps would not be in the direction I was studying.

The main positive advice from that situation I can give you, is that you may be afraid of what the future will bring you because of your decisions. It is normal to have that kind of emotion. You just need to turn that emotion toward you, not against you. Don’t deny it but accept it. Don’t think of the emotion of fear as something terrible, although modern society often has negative connotations of the emotion of fear. Fear makes us survive. It is an old emotion that helped our ancestors survive back when they needed to hunt for their food. It was OK to be afraid of a lion. If you weren’t, you were in great danger. Simple as that.

Also, it is better to be afraid of the unknown than to be unsatisfied with a situation or life position that you may think you know or you may think you control.

It was never hard for me to take new, one would say, big life decisions. Maybe it is because I always felt confident that I would deal with any given situation. To deal with the problem is what is essential. Don’t think about the result too much. Sometimes you have to shoot first before you aim.

So, I was unemployed at that point in my career. What to do next? I asked myself. Well, my father is a mechanical engineer, and he was unemployed at that point. So, for me, it was a logical idea that we team up and start a company. He was a great operating programmer, and I was a former tennis coach. Together, we didn’t know much about business. So, we had an unknown journey ahead of us, but on the other hand, we had a possible product that we could sell.

My business journey began. See how I was thrown into the sea of business and how I needed to learn how to swim, in my next chapter.

Getting to Know My Business and My Product

If you are not confident enough, try to improve your product to the level that will convince you to sell it. It worked for me.

Imagine yourself being in your primary profession—in my case, sports—and then you find yourself in a business world with no mentor or professional education in that area. So many questions would come up. What to do? How to run my business? I solved that problem by learning everything that I had to learn about business, especially my product. How? I decided to give more attention to my product by working on it.

Company Monell pro d.o.o. at first started to produce 19-inch communication and server racks, and additional equipment for IT hardware systems. You might be thinking, what is this communications server rack? My question was the same. So I needed to discover everything about this product. Going along with my research, a lot of questions began to come up. What is it about? How do you develop it? How do you install it? How do you assemble it? In which systems do you use it? By the way, you can find more updated information about Monell pro products and offers on my website, monellpro.com.

Answering these questions helped me very much, but what gave me the most confidence was that I engaged myself in assembling 19-inch racks, and I didn’t hire a person to do so. So never mind if your finances don’t let you hire employees for various tasks at first, because this is how I got to see all positive things and shortcomings in my product. So it wasn’t just the assembling part that I did. In parallel, I was always thinking, correcting, and developing a better product for my customers and, on the other hand, developing a product for more accessible, more cost-efficient production. So I covered both parts of my business, which was just by taking an active role in assembling my products. On the purchasing side, I was making more cost-efficient products and having better purchase prices,