Jonathan Yates, advice »

Ask for help is my favourite, top, number 1 piece of free advice—some of the best free advice I was never given when I was struggling to start up.

When that dark cloud looms overhead and the huge block-age in your path seems unmovable, don’t sit back and despair, find a way round it. “How?” I hear you cry. “How can I get past this issue that I have no experience of when my business is suffering and I have no cash to throw at the problem to solve it?”

Let’s see if TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? can give us the answer. This quiz involves you answering a number of questions correctly. You’re given four possible answers, but if you don’t know the right answer with absolute certainty, what can you do?

1. You can choose to make a strategic guess.
2. You may have an inkling that you know the answer and go 50/50, where two of the wrong answers are taken away, which is a better way of saying that you’re guessing.
3. You can decide to ask the audience, who probably don’t have a clue either.
4. You can phone a friend.

In all my business dealings where I don’t know the answer, I go for option 4. I phone a friend. By friend, I mean someone who might be able to help me with my specific problem at that moment. I have solved hundreds of issues just by picking up the phone and calling someone, even though I may never have met or spoken to them before, and asking them how they solved or would solve this issue.

Successful people like to help people who want to be successful. Call non-competing organizations and just ask them where they get their bottled drinks filled or who their packing specialist is, where they source this component and which company would they recommend that specializes in advertising in the industry. As long as you’re not a competitor, I am certain that there will be someone there to help, particularly the higher up into the business you call. If they can’t help you then they often refer you to people they know who can—and an introduction by referral is a lot stronger than a simple cold call.

Be professional, have your question ready and detailed, and don’t waste the person’s time—be succinct, be quick and 0ffer them some gratitude. I started by sending over bottles of wine, but I soon realized that this is not what people require for responding to a simple telephone call asking for their knowledge. What they do want is professional recognition of why you came to them in the first place, something that makes them respond: “Wow, this guy called me today and asked if I could help with his packaging problem because he loved the way we do ours. Flattery and gratitude are two watchwords in this instance. Not only have you solved the issue at hand, you have probably extended your network exponentially.

There are other ways to ask for help. Go to online forums there are thousands of these dedicated to specific niche industries, all packed with contributors looking to help you out in business. As a starting point, have a look at the UK website Enterprise Nation and the US website Entrepreneur.com, which have a multitude of forums aimed at every type, size and shape of business, packed full of people who have been through similar situations and who want to help you.

of course you could always go to the join in forum on this site and pose a question to be solved just click here and post your question.

Enterprise Nation advertises itself as a free resource to help you start and grow your business at home. If it’s free and people are there to help, then why not give it a go? If you are unable to find the answer you are looking for on business forums, have a go at finding solutions on self-help sites, which explain how to do almost anything you can thing of. Here are some self-help and how-to forums for you to browse through—many are US based and the terminology and legal advice may be different, but the principles are
the same:

• Free Management Library
• eHow
• WonderHowTo
• HowTo
• wikiHow
• How To Do Things
• Videojug
• Squidoo
• HubPages

Good luck and keep going, its never as bad or as good as it seems at the time.

Remember to look out for more handy Freesourcing ideas on the site and in the book – available here

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