Finance Coach - Vol. 34

Finance tip: Leisure

Consider fractional ownership. For those of you looking at spending some of your hard-earned money on a ‘leisure investment’ (think holiday house, boat, plane, jetski, etc.), consider going the fractional ownership route. This is where, instead of buying the object or property yourself, you pool up with a number of other interested buyers, and each pay a proportionate amount of the total. The idea is then to share the usage of what you have bought, based on calendar days or some other equitable formula. The reason that this form of ownership has gained in popularity in recent times, is that people are realising that they actually get better value for their money – they were never going to use the property or object all year in any case, so they may as well only pay for a smaller proportion of it, and let others use it when they’re not. This then ties up less of their precious capital (which they can then invest in other things), and they still get to enjoy the benefits of using what they have paid for. For even more convenience, the next level is to pay a small levy, and get a third party to administer and maintain the property or object for all the owners, freeing them up from the potentially time-consuming aspects of ongoing maintenance and trouble-shooting...

Business tip: Marketing/PR

Write for publications to increase your profile. If you’re looking for an avenue to increase your exposure to the public, or to a particular industry, consider writing articles/submissions for publications that your target market would read. Most editors are constantly on the lookout for content to fill their pages (if it’s relevant and of a high enough standard), and gratefully accept submissions from those interested in writing them. Writing like this has a number of benefits to your business: Generally, if you do submit an article, the editor will allow you to put in a short footnote, where you can mention your company and perhaps some contact details. Even if they are a bit restrictive on this aspect, they would at least attribute the submission to you and put your name on it – if people want to find out more, they could simply Google you. If you do this regularly over a period of time, you’ll start to build up a reputation of being an expert in your field, which will put you at top-of-mind when people are looking for more information on your particular product or service – leading to more contacts and sales leads...