Business and Finance

I was on my way home from the office
tonight and I caught an interview on the radio with Paul McCartney. Usually I’m not very in tune to these kinds of things but the title to his new album “Memory Almost Full” caught my attention. He went on to say, and I loosely quote…”When I talk to the business people in my life I always tell them…I’m an artist, I need a significant amount of empty space in my head to allow a song to find it’s way in there”. As a small business person I thought to myself “how convenient for you Paul!” A little jealous I suppose, I got to thinking about this feeling that there are no such conveniences in the small business world, and that perhaps, there should be. If we go beyond the point of “memory almost full”, or perhaps more appropriately to our technological advances, “virtual memory running low”, and lose site of the creative process could we be allowing the onslaught of technical information to “crash” our success?

What percentage of small business owners would say that they face exponentially greater demands for technical production today than they did two years ago? What percentage would have said the same thing two years before that? Even those of us (myself included) who have prided themselves on a neat and tidy worldview seem to be at a cross roads between a calm, happy lifestyle on one hand, and being consistently “frustrated” with the competition and complexity of a maturing on-line marketplace.

When it comes to the challenge of succeeding in the face of technical adversity and simultaneously successfully managing our private lives, how can we tell if we are on the right track? What can our frustrations tell us about the direction of our small business in relation to the general marketplace? Are we on information over-load or are we simply chargning down the path to success?

Continue reading ‘Memory Almost Full… Defeating Technology and Frustration!’ »

When you first decide to start your own small business, you realize you can use all the start up help you can get. The federal government can be a great source for assistance, and shouldn’t be overlooked. They can provide small business start up help in many different ways. This article will discuss three areas that your government offers help in getting your small business off the ground.

1. Every small business needs money, and the government can help you get the cash you need in two different ways. The first option available is a loan. Believe it or not, the government provides hundreds of millions of dollars in funding specifically for small business and entrepreneurs. There are a ton of different loans created specifically for special circumstances. For example, low-income businesses, handicapped individuals, military veterans, women owned small businesses, and many more.

Continue reading ‘Getting the Small Business Start Up Help That You Need’ »

This is the time of year when we all can use a little extra cash. Perhaps you’d just like some extra money for catching up on bills, or you may want a little more to be able to pay for all the holiday spending you know you are about to do. No matter the reason, before you can have that money in hand you have to figure out how you are going to earn it.

You could take on another job somewhere, but that would be more time you are out of the house. Instead, you may want to start a business from you home. Chances are you already have everything you need to start a business inside your house. If you’re reading this article, you’re online so you have access to a computer. Now look around you. What do you have at home that you no longer want or need but could be a valuable item to someone else.

People collect all sorts of things, so these days items you think can go, could be a treasure that someone else is waiting to find. This is how complete businesses pop up on websites like eBay.

Continue reading ‘Make Extra Holiday Money With an Ebay Side Business’ »

Are you selling liquidation handbags
as part of your business? The key to selling handbags successfully is making sure you know what women who are buying those handbags want.

In the liquidation world you can get a lot for a little outlay of cash. This is great when it comes to buying liquidation handbags to resell, but you also want to make sure you are getting items that are popular enough to resell to others at a great profit.

In the handbag market the only way to do this is to keep yourself one step ahead of the fashion trends and be selling what all the fashionable women want to be wearing. Here’s a look at what fits that bill for The Winter 2008-09 season.

Continue reading ‘Knowing What's Hot in Liquidation Handbags’ »

When most people think about marketing, they think advertising. While advertising is a part of marketing, marketing is much bigger than advertising. There are lots of different marketing methods floating around out there, and the challenge as a business owner is figuring out when it’s appropriate to use each one and the best way to use it.

Public relations, or PR, is the art of getting someone else to write or talk about you or your business. Preferably in a favorable manner. Traditionally, “someone else” was the media. In this day and age however, someone else can also be a blogger, a freelance writer, an e-zine publisher or even an owner of a big Web site. For purposes of this article, I’m using the word “media” to refer to all of those folks.

PR is also being able to get yourself on a big talk show to talk about yourself or your business, or writing your own article that’s published in a desired outlet. (Not your own newsletter or Web site.)

PR is one of my favorite marketing methods, but it can also be one of the more frustrating ones. Even when you do everything right, you still might not get the publicity you want. Or for that matter, ANY publicity at all. When a PR campaign doesn’t work, you can find yourself wanting to pull out all your hair in frustration.

Continue reading ‘Is PR Right for You? Six Questions to Ask’ »

According to Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, the fear of being a bad speller is a remarkably common fear for people who want to write but are creatively blocked.

It doesn’t matter that the fear is irrational, it doesn’t matter that every single word-processing program out there comes with a spell checker, the fear of not being able to spell still haunts those would-be writers. And thus, those people remain blocked.

Many people who are blocked creatively suffer from some sort of fear. Some fears are based on creative “myths” (all artists are broke, crazy, alcoholic, dying from AIDS, etc.), some are based on things adults said to us as children and some, like the fear of being a bad speller, appear to be based on nothing at all.

Regardless of where the fear came from, there’s no denying its power. And the harder it is to admit to a fear, the more potent it becomes. After all, imagine trying to explain to someone that you can’t write because you can’t spell. You would sound like an idiot. So you don’t say anything. And because that fear goes unvoiced, it burrows deeper and deeper inside you.

Continue reading ‘Is Fear of Spelling Getting in Your Way?’ »

Here is a scary scenario: Your company uses an automated payroll system linked directly to your bank account. Twice a month, your trusted bookkeeper logs on to the system, enters the appropriate amount of hours for each employee, and then directs your bank to issue paychecks or directly deposit funds into everyone’s account. It’s fast, efficient, and spares you the aggravation of dealing with it yourself. Unfortunately, your trusted bookkeeper has added a few “ghost employees” to your payroll and diverted the funds into her own account every pay period. Over the past year, she’s managed to steal thousands of dollars from your company with just a few strokes of her keyboard.

Does this scenario sound far-fetched? Couldn’t happen to me, you say? Maybe you think she couldn’t pull it off because she’d need real employee tax information for withholding purposes. Well, she’s thought about that too. First of all, she can issue duplicate checks to real employees and simply change the account information for direct deposit. Secondly, she could easily keep a terminated employee on the books, again changing the account number. If she has enough employees to choose from, she can overpay each in small amounts, making it hard to notice the discrepancy. As long as she has little to no oversight, it’s fairly easy to pull this scheme off. In fact, it is a common form of embezzlement.

Continue reading ‘Are Ghost Employees Haunting Your Business?’ »

The other day, a colleague of mine told me about a new marketing agency and sent me a link to their Web site. I checked it out.

Needless to say, it was dreadful.

Oh, it was pretty enough. Very nice graphics. And what little copy there was, was very artfully placed (although so tiny it was difficult to actually read).

Why do I say it was dreadful? Because, even though it was pretty, it had absolutely no personality.

The copy was boring (not to mention full of “we’s” but that’s for another day). The graphics were pretty but boring. There was no life, no energy. Just flat.

It was as though the Web site was trying so hard to appeal to everyone, it ended up appealing to no one.

You see, people want to do with business with people. And they want to do business with people they know, like and trust.

Continue reading ‘How Your Personality Can Grow Your Business’ »

In Quality Digest, manufacturing journalist, Thomas R. Cutler, discusses the value of reusable packaging. Reusable packaging reduces costs without compromising quality according to Cutler. Folding bulk containers, industrial totes, and metal storage bins are used over and over again within a facility or between a supplier and a customer. They can be used literally thousands of times. These bulk boxes are much cheaper in the long term when compared to buying cardboard boxes and wood crates every time that product is shipped. Savings can be observed in the per piece packaging cost. While the upfront investment in returnable packaging may cost more, savings can be realized quickly through repeated use. The containers, bins, and totes are used repeatedly. Labor costs are reduced by eliminating box assembly. Material handling costs are also reduced, as there are fewer moves from stackable containers.

“The quality effect of using metal bins drives fewer rejects from damaged packaging and since plastic and metal containers can stack very high, the amount, utilization, and safety of floor space is immediately enhanced,” asserts David Madden, president of Container Exchanger.

Continue reading ‘Returnable Packaging Leader Container Exchanger Profiled in Quality Digest’ »

MySpace was introduced in the year 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. It was a magical launching and achieved dream acceptance by the masses in all over the world. Basically, it is social networking website but its immense popularity has inspired numerous business persons to discover business making ways and they found it. It proved a great business promotional tool. Now, let’s explore business making ways from myspace.com.
• You can enrich your contacts through social networking platforms like MySpace.
• More contacts mean more business.
• Through your profile, people know about your business and company.
• Hence, concept of business profile developed and customized MySpace page concept prevailed rapidly.
• Design and uniqueness of your MySpace profile symbolically speaks about your company and its quality work. So, nowadays, people are more concern towards designing aspects of MySpace page.
• Hence, numerous designing companies are providing exclusive designing services for MySpace profile. They have exclusive expertise in different segments of my space page designing like MySpace Div Layouts, and MySpace Flash Layouts and so on.
Continue reading ‘Professional Significance of Myspace’ »