Last month, fans of Charles Dickens honored the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth with readings, remembrances and musings on the Victorian scribe’s contribution to Western literature.

Amid the celebrations emerged a useful lesson for small-business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.

No, I’m not talking about Dickens’ exhortation against stinginess in the form of Ebenezer Scrooge. I’m referring to the manner in which the author created some of his most famous works: Dickens wrote and published many of his novels in monthly, chapter-length installments.

People who dream of publishing a book often find the process of writing one to be taxing and tedious. The same goes for people launching the business they’d always planned to start. Even thinking of all the tasks involved in running a successful business – marketing, accounting, sales, innovation, and more – often paralyzes new entrepreneurs. Dickens’ example offers a wise strategy: instead of worrying about the entire undertaking, focus on the immediate next step.

Entrepreneurs can look to writers – who also engage in a solitary endeavor that is creative but grueling at times – for lessons on how to penetrate the haze that settles around stressful projects.

Like starting a business, writing a book is a daunting venture: the author must work numerous personalities, themes, and events into a cohesive story. Authoring a book is a lonely pursuit, but publishing one affords the writer the chance to fail in a spectacular, public way. The writer worries constantly that the work into which she’s invested countless hours will result in reproach or, worse yet, indifference, from critics and the buying public.

Like starting a business, writing a book is something almost everyone dreams of doing. Business-ownership and book-authorship both offer the tantalizing prospect of self-expression. Both seem to offer autonomy. Both attract aspirants in droves with the possibility – albeit more elusive than any dreamer would care to admit – of public renown and fabulous wealth.

The trouble is that while the prospect of wealth and eminence beckons from the worlds of authorship and entrepreneurship, it also adds harmful doses of anxiety to each. Embarking on one’s life’s work is far more stressful than, say, organizing the files at a company you work for but despise. Creative endeavors bring a prospect of failure that is real and very personal. That’s why most people avoid them.

Still, a small portion of the population writes great books and starts amazing businesses. Are they fearless? Some are, but most are as scared as the rest of us of criticism and grueling work. I lack evidence that would tell us the camp in which Dickens falls. But having read myriad accounts of writers’ and entrepreneurs’ habits, I have learned something: the successful ones are those who plod through their self-inflicted resistance and do great work, one small step at a time.

Photo:Flickr/garryknight

Videographer Will Ferguson was kind enough to shoot footage from our 2011 Holiday Bazaar and edit it into this nice montage. Check it out!

Photo: Flickr:photomagnon

If you read this blog regularly (bless your heart), you know that in my view, action is the key ingredient to starting a successful business.

It’s tempting to take a class, fuss over your business plan or worry about trade marking your logo, but the fact is that each of these things amounts to mere procrastination. Making your first sale is – by definition – the only surefire way to launch a business. But it pays to think critically about the business you seek to start.

Some would advise commissioning feasibility studies, convening focus groups, or doing hardcore market research before introducing a product or service to customers. I’d like to offer a quicker, simpler way to assess your nascent venture. It’s called a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis is – I’m told – a mainstay of business school curricula. Despite this, it happens to be an easy and practical tool. The “S” stands for Strengths, the “W” for Weaknesses, the “O” for Opportunities and the “T” for Threats. Commence your analysis by drawing a big square. Then, slice it in half by drawing a line down the middle. Add a second line perpendicular to the first to break the square into even quadrants. Label each quadrant with one of the letters in “SWOT.”

You know what the words in SWOT mean, of course, but I’m going to offer some special definitions for our purpose. As far as we’re concerned, Strengths are qualities of yours that help the business, and weaknesses are qualities of yours that hurt it. Opportunities are things beyond your control that could help the business, and threats are things beyond your control that could hurt it.

Let’s say you want to start a small grocery store in New Brunswick. You’re a hardworking person with a penchant for recordkeeping – both strengths. But you can afford only a very small space – a weakness. You see opportunity in the fact that everyone in your neighborhood needs to buy food at one time or another. But the existence of several other grocery stores nearby – and the prospect of more popping up –constitutes a threat.

Is this grocery store business one worth starting? Perhaps. It’s tough to remedy the space constraints, and there’s no legal way to prevent competitors from opening stores in your town, but might there be a way to compensate for the store’s weaknesses and mitigate the threats it faces? Certainly. For example, if the owner focuses tightly on foods from a certain country, his “small” store becomes a “selective” one. And customers seeking food from this country will gladly choose that store over others.

No business owner can eliminate all the weaknesses from which her firm suffers. If she’s smart, though, she’ll devise creative ways to work around them.

Knowing what to do is different from actually doing it.

For example, Dave Ramsey, founder of an eponymous personal finance empire that produces books, conferences and a radio show, has some interesting advice about meeting one’s financial goals: he often says knowledge is only 20 percent of the battle; the other 80 percent, he says, is reforming the habits of the person you shave with. All the information in the world will prove useless unless you can change your behavior.

A similar principle applies to starting a business. Unless you can muster the courage to sell something to your first customer (and persistence to sell to many more), all the classes and business-planning software in the world won’t help you.

Let’s stop there for a moment: the advice above is the kind with which people easily agree but assume applies only to others. If you have harbored a business idea that failed to become a business, it applies to you. If you have composed a perfect business plan but shielded it from the light of day, take note. If you think your idea will take off only once you’ve found a sympathetic investor or Oprah producer, listen up: you need to find your first customer. Here’s how to do it:

First, try to figure out everything about this first customer. Think about the town in which he lives, the income he earns, his family’s size, and the values he holds. If you struggle to conjure his picture, think of the customers who buy from other businesses in your industry. If your customer is a business, think about that business’s size, the number of workers it employs, its location, and the customers it serves.

Once you have a clear idea of the customers or business clients to whom you will sell, you can give some thought to how to reach them. You can speculate about the websites they frequent, the newspapers or trade magazines they read, the blogs they follow, and so on.

Once you know where your customers are, you’ll have to craft a marketing message that resonates with them. As you work on this, think about why a customer might buy from you. Hint: if your answer is, “People like cupcakes and I bake good cupcakes,” start over. The key is to identify the needs that go unmet within your target market. People who want cupcakes already know where to find them.

To simplify the message-crafting process, let’s think about the qualities that often attract customers to a particular product or service: they look for things like quality, variety, ease-of-care, craftsmanship, promptness, comfort, convenience, and cost. Give some thought to which of these you can offer. Contrary to what you might think, the goal is to find which of these qualities you can omit from your message. For example, if you use the highest quality ingredients, your price will likely rise to a level that repels those seeking low-cost goods.

Now that you have found your target market, identified those of its needs you can meet, and devised a message that succinctly conveys your business’s benefits, you’re ready to sell. Return the business books, leave your plan alone, and abstain from any further research. It’s time to turn your idea into a business and promote that dreamer you shave with to CEO.

The desire to create jobs is a big driver for would-be entrepreneurs. Too often, though, new business owners fail to learn the legal responsibilities that come with hiring employees. Knowing whether to report a worker as an employee or contractor is one of the most significant yet least understood of these responsibilities.

To help new entrepreneurs avoid the tax penalties and fines that can come with worker misclassification, I spoke with Robert Colby, a Highland Park-based attorney who specializes in small businesses. Our conversation yielded a quick guide to correctly classifying workers:

When a business owner hires an employee, she takes on a fair amount of responsibility. For example, she must pay a portion of the unemployment and social security insurance the employee owes, and she is subject to regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

When she hires an independent contractor, she avoids the unemployment and social security charges. And because it’s assumed the contractor works from outside her office or facility, she can avoid OSHA regulations.

Basically, classifying a worker as an “independent contractor” makes for a work arrangement that’s easier and cheaper for the employer. It should surprise no one, then, that employers often attempt to apply the “independent contractor” designation to workers that ought to be considered full employees.

While many employers were getting away with this for a time, Colby said, the days of misclassifying with impunity are over. “Various labor departments found this tacitly acceptable, but in recent years, they have really started to crack down,” he said, adding, “Overall, the default in most situations should be full employment.”

The State of New Jersey uses a three-part, “ABC” test to determine if an independent contractor designation is valid, Colby said:

First, the worker must be free from “control and direction” of the performance of the job. “If the employer will be telling the worker how many things to produce or how many hours to work, they will fail the first part of the test,” Colby said.

Second, the nature of the supposed contractors work must be outside of what is normally happening in the business, Colby said. “Let’s say you have a cupcake factory; if the worker is going to be making cupcakes, you will immediately fail test B,” he said.

Third, the worker must be engaged in an independent occupation. “Essentially, the worker must have a business of their own,” Colby said. He said that while the employer need not know for sure whether the worker is engaged with multiple clients, there must be some understanding that once the worker’s contract with one business expires, he will continue doing the same type of work for other businesses.

For entrepreneurs inclined to pinch pennies (not a bad inclination, by the way) reporting workers as contractors is tempting. But failing to follow state reporting guidelines can cost business owners dearly. To learn more about the legal responsibilities of small-business ownership, contact Colby at Robert.Colby@RobertColbyLaw.Com.