If someone were to ask you, what do you think the most valuable attribute in attaining success in a computer home based business is, what would you say? Perhaps knowledge? Desire? The Dream?… Well yes these things are also important but they would be completely useless without one thing. PERSISTENCE!Persistence is the biggest obstacle any one faces when trying to start an internet business. YOU WILL get fed up at times and want to quit. It’s part of the game. The question is though, are you really just going to give up? Ask any successful entrepreneur and they’ll most likely tell you the same thing. What really got them to where they are now is the fact that they didn’t stop, EVER. They may have fallen flat on their face and slowed to an almost motionless crawl but the forward motion never subsided. This is the kind of persistence you need to have if you hope to succeed in a computer home based business.You see talent and brains can only do so much for you and your computer home based business. You can know what to do and how to do it well, but if you don’t do it consistently than your business will never succeed. Someone who knows absolutely nothing and totally sucks at all of the skills necessary to run a computer home based business but puts in a conscious daily effort will far outdo anyone with brains and/or talent. Why? Because they have persistence!Let me tell you now, you are most likely going to suck at this computer home based business thing at first. Now listen closely… SO WHAT! You witness the glamorous lives of professional athletes and successful business men, but what you don’t see is the years of blood, sweat, and tears that went into their success. Yes, YEARS OF PERSISTENCE.Bumps and roadblocks are inevitable in a computer home based business and in all of life for that matter. Some obstacles you’ll breeze right through, some are going to need a little more persistence. Just remember, there is no better time than now. So stop procrastinating, get out there, and start building your computer home based business empire! Persistently;)

One of the first thing that people who are looking to start a home-based business will ask is “Where do I find a good home-based business opportunity?”, and they will go on to look for high-paying opportunities offered by other people. But instead of searching endlessly for an “opportunity”, what about using your own skills and knowledge to create your own products and start your own real home-based business, selling things you make to customers who are very willing to pay your to learn what you know.You may think that you don’t have any expertise or anything relevant to teach others, but almost everybody has some skill set that they can turn into an ebook, into an MP3, or even into simple videos that teach others how to do something. So if you know how to teach someone to lose weight, how to knit, or how to do pottery well, then you have a skill that you can sell to others and make a good living, all from the comfort of your own home.Some of the opportunities that you see online and in classifieds are scams, many of them charging you a significant amount of money just to learn how to make money, and when you see these, no matter how attractive it may look or how much money is promised, be very wary and run the other way. Do you really think that if someone had a job that they did from home that made them $75/hr that they would want to show you how, and ultimately increase their competition? Of course not, so you have to be skeptical and really think about these types of scams.Instead, you can easily and quickly start your own home-based business with nothing more than a couple of information products that you can create over the course of a weekend, and sell them to hungry consumers for as little as $20 to as high as $1000, depending on what type of service or product you will be selling.Here are a few benefits that you can expect if you take the initiative to start a real home-based business instead of pay someone to let you have access to their revolutionary ‘opportunity’:1 – A home-based business selling your own information products can be run on an almost completely automated system after you have created your products, building freedom for you and your family.2 – Information products sold from the comfort of your own home have helped many successful online entrepreneurs create multiple six-figure or seven-figure businesses, all from home. There is nothing special about them, you can achieve the same results.3 – It is a “real” business, something to be proud to tell your friends and family, and not just some scheme that you are told will make you a millionaire in the next 30 days.

Countless landlords elect to manage investment properties by themselves but occasionally landlords require more assistance, and that’s where a property management business will make sense.

Management companies work directly with potential and existing tenants, helping you save time along with marketing and advertising your current rentals, collecting rent payments, dealing with routine maintenance and repair problems, answering the different renter issues, and in many cases seeking evictions. A property management service can help you stay away from the headaches of being the property manager and concentrate on experiencing and enjoying the rewards.

Why you need to retain the services of a management company?

A management firm will primarily be dealing with the maintenance of your investment property or home. Just about all properties need routine maintenance however if you have a paying tenant you are required to solve maintenance problems immediately. Normal property maintenance helps keep the value of your investment property up and in many instances keep your property safer. This can really help you save cash over time since it will increase the life of your investment property.

Based on the age of a home you will probably discover more problems. For this reason it is very important your property is carefully examined prior to tenants moving in. Any issues that are found will be fixed in hopes to reduce the amount of problems and complaints which will arise once the property or home has been leased out.

There are many types of property maintenance which will need to be examined and this maintenance vary from becoming major issues like roofing repairs to small jobs like interior painting, carpentry work along with yard projects.

When should you employ any management company?

*You do not live close to your rental property.

If the rental home is located far from where you live, working with a property management company may be important in working with the many challenges that you won’t be able to manage from very far away.

*You just are not serious about hands-on management.

A number of property owners enjoy the challenge of locating good renters and the advantages of having a secure and desirable property or home on their own. However, if you look at rental property ownership purely being an investment and desire little or nothing regarding the day-to-day managing of the properties, think about employing assistance to manage your property.

*Your time and energy is limited.

Even though you appreciate hands-on management, you might not have enough time to be able to spend on your business, particularly if land-lording is not your day job.

Getting a property management company is definitely an appealing option if you’re able to afford the service fees. Many companies charges you a percentage of the rent or lease, while various other property management companies charges you a flat rate fee.

Should you decide to retain the services of a property management firm, be careful in choosing one and ask questions to evaluate the services provided.

Most of the time when I talk to people about the investment industry I get the distinct sense that they would rather talk about almost anything else. While there are certainly many potential causes for such an understated response, I also don’t get the sense that an overwhelming degree of satisfaction is usually one of them. Rather, there seems to be a persistent state of frustration lurking under the surface that occasionally reveals itself in comments like, “I’d like to be able to get more confident with my investing”, and, “Do you ever get to talk to the person managing the money?”

To the extent that lurking frustration exists, it is not for lack of investment expertise. Not only are there thousands upon thousands of investment professionals, but there are also terrific credential programs like the CFA and the CFP, a substantial and diverse active management industry that has a business model predicated on developing proprietary insights, and research that suggests it works. For example, the study “Best Ideas” [Cohen, Polk, and Silli, 2010] shows that the typical active money manager actually does outperform with his/her best ideas (the problem is that most portfolios also contain a lot of other ideas which aren’t nearly as good).

So why do investors continue to be frustrated when all of this expertise is available? The answer, in a word, is friction.

Sources of friction

Just like the progress of any vehicle is slowed down by the friction created by its contact with the road, so too is the efficient transfer of investment expertise constrained by a variety of structural sources of “friction” in the industry.

One important source of investment friction is the tendency of many firms to focus more on the business of investment management than on the profession of investing. Because the universe of significant investment opportunities is limited in a competitive environment, managers must settle for progressively less attractive alternatives as a fund grows larger — and this dilutes performance. The conflict of interest between an investment manager’s desire to grow assets (and therefore business profits) and an investor’s desire for a smaller fund focused exclusively on best ideas is one way in which investment expertise often fails to benefit clients.

A second source of friction is essentially a corollary of the first: Many firms fail to focus on the types of activities that are closely associated with generating superior investment returns. For example, many firms persist in charging high fees for investment services despite widespread evidence that high fees detract from returns. Many run portfolios that look very similar to their benchmarks rather than concentrating on best ideas (i.e., high active share). Many react (and overreact) to short-term results for which there is very little information content (i.e., low signal to noise ratio). Each of these types of activities is a well-known structural impediment to good investment performance and each is the result of a choice, a tradeoff, made by an organization’s leaders. While it is unfortunate such impediments exist, they are absolutely avoidable.

A third source of friction is over-specialization. When an environment remains stable for a long period of time the most successful entities are those that focus on a very narrow area of expertise. Examples include narrowly defined functional silos such as industry-specific analyst coverage and very narrowly defined investment mandates. In such an environment, flexible business approaches and policies to insure against large losses represent unnecessary opportunity costs. In a more tumultuous environment, however, the costs of focusing too narrowly can be debilitating and sometimes even deadly. It’s fine to pack only swim suits and t-shirts for the beach as long as the weather stays nice. If it gets cold and rainy, you’ll wish you had better choices.

What you can do

While various sources of friction often prevent investors from deriving as much benefit as they might from the industry, the good news is that they also provide a clear target for improvement. If you want things to run more smoothly and efficiently, just reduce or eliminate the sources of friction. For investment firms this is simply a matter of making policy choices — of choosing to focus, on the margin, more on the exercise of investing than on the business of investment management. For investors, this is just a matter of identifying the firms that are not only willing to accept, but to actually encourage, making the tradeoffs that benefit investment results.

Another way for investors to derive more benefit from the investment services industry is to find better user interfaces. Steve Jobs revolutionized the computer industry by developing a graphical user interface (GUI) that made it much easier for normal people to interact with computers. The same needs to be done with investment firms. While a great deal of investment expertise does exist, only a small subset of that resides with organizations that have cultures truly oriented to helping people. Without such a culture, the path of least resistance is for that expertise to first benefit investment firms and their employees.

The investment services industry is interesting as a case study because it defies so many well established norms in other industries. Exceptionally few businesses in a competitive environment can afford to persist with processes and behaviors that impede performance and client satisfaction. If you went to a nice restaurant and ordered an expensive meal and the waiter came out and just threw it down in front of you without explanation and walked away, you would probably be miffed and might consider never coming back. Oddly, the same behavior happens with investment firms all the time — except in these cases investors tend to resign themselves to accepting such treatment. You can do better, but you will almost certainly need to look for new approaches that avoid old, and predictable, sources of friction.