Six different excellent and experienced people will still do things six different ways. Repeating contract language in an effort to impart greater emphasis is dangerous, as differences in context can lead to confusion in meaning and an unfavorable interpretation in a court of law. You want to build a strong …

You could make no greater mistake than to rent a shabby place on a back street. You will not be able to use this model if the margins are too low because initially you will be selling at a loss, which is a certain route to disaster. To stay in …

Excellent systems to find, keep, and service customers will maximize your bottom-line by selecting the best opportunities available for your company. Take the time to challenge some of the core assumptions of your prior plan to see if they still hold up. In a large business, a department may have …

In pull strategies, the manufacturer promotes the product directly to consumers, perhaps by providing coupons and free samples, to encourage them to request the item from retailers. Designate a separate part of the house as your office ' a spare room or warm garage is ideal if you have one, a …

But it s a good idea to take the initiative here and propose something that will be used if you suspect a banker will require it. One of the reasons for differences among plans is that industries are different. While the other clerks are joking, do you be learning. Certainly …

It is worth while inquiring briefly how the share of labor in the distribution of the social income is determined. Take them to lunch every two months. If you are starting out without much money, choose something which is relatively low-cost per unit ' first because buying stock will cost you …

Do whatever it takes. You may have sold a lot of products in a week, but unless you have actually received the money for them it is not going to hold much sway with the man on the doorstep who needs to be paid for the raw materials or equipment …

'Double-entry' simply means that every transaction is recorded in two places, with the entry in one account offset by the entry in another. Will you command a rapidly growing empire? It is important, however, that the new product offer something the older one does not in order to prevent confusion …

Simply by having chosen to serve a niche versus a broader market will make it easier for you to come up with a strong USP. But the good news is that recessions serve as sort-out time (that is, they sort out the weak businesses from the strong ones and allow …

Nobody has your interests so much at heart as you have. To motivate your workforce, you've got to give them a reason to be motivated. Fix a big dial two feet or more in diameter in some prominent part of your store, and announce that when a customer has traded …

Install accurate financial systems, accurate estimating and pricing systems, and cost controls. The reasons we present here aren't in any particular order. A banker may not be interested in your rosy projections of future growth. If these important things aren't adhered to in a systematic and standardized way, the customer …

If you need to pay your suppliers thirty days after receiving their goods and services ' known as thirty-day payment terms ' for example, then try to persuade your customers to pay you quicker than that, for example fourteen days after they receive their goods and services from you. The only way …

But any amount is better than none! You want to reveal any positives that your business may have and make sure they receive due consideration. The marketing options are many and expensive, including door hangers, newspaper coupons, mailings, advertising, website placement programs, and billboards. Business-builders are not task- or project-focused …

If, in addition to these powerful inducements to patronage, you combine shrewdness in buying and cautiousness in trusting, if your goods are excellent in quality and generous in quantity, if your place of business is neat and attractive, and your service marked by promptness and politeness; then it is impossible …

Some customers want to know who they are doing business with. Is your business moving toward giving you what you wanted when you started your entrepreneurial journey? What's the worst that can happen'? If you never try, you'll never achieve. Writing a business plan is one of those skills that …

The globalization of production refers to the sourcing of goods and services from loca- tions around the globe to take advantage of national differences in the cost and quality of factors of production (such as labor, energy, land, and capital). You make sales after you have built connections and trust …

Get started small. Intellectual capital is proprietary information and in-house knowledge of technologies, materials, processes, and markets useful to an organization. You ll use proper, respectful, and easy-to-understand language to make sure your audience clearly gets your message. Show your key people how you want things done and then let …

All that information flowing up to senior managers in the form of plans helps keep the brass informed. Most companies you compete with probably provide good service, good quality, and good prices. A commercial mortgage broker might hold industry forums twice a year with speakers presenting on the economy and …

Outsourcing is a key strategy for startups. In a world where word travels fast through social media, you want to provide top-notch customer service. You built your friendships by spending quality time with them and doing lots of fun things together. The many disciplines in business are often organized and …

Show them pictures of what you have done, what you can do for them, and how you can solve their problems. Offer them a report giving them the answers they need to solve their problem. It just feels all wrong. Remember that brevity is not brusqueness.

Its easy to talk …

After your spouse has filed for divorce or your kids have become strangers to you, the damage too often is done. A sales manager can redirect the activities of salespeople immediately, and an accounting manager can make immediate changes in bookkeeping practices. In addition is the need to decide whether …

Tell them your story. Create financial targets. Social capital refers to established human relationships, both within and external to a company, that create and maintain value. You're probably more acquainted with the basic concepts of doing business than you think.

Unwrapping Customer Service

The ordinary wage system has at least the merit that the reward of the laborer is made dependent only on his own efforts. When you have people problems, it's a reflection on the effectiveness of your leadership. So to make lots of money, making money has to be your top …

Ask yourself those same two questions. For this reason, you want your accountant, financial advisor, or attorney to review your loan documents and spell out everything for you very carefully. A board of directors gives you access to expertise, provided you choose them wisely, but at the cost of giving …

Outline the next actions to be taken by the group (things to do, next meeting, etc.). Getting your financial house in order before you start your business can buy you critical time to make a success of your start-up. While speaking at several industry conventions, I surveyed attendees about their …

Bottom-up can work well in industries that are relatively new, in situations where the lower tiers possess unique expertise or resources, and when the cost of errors is not prohibitive. How often have you had a vendor submit you a price and never follow up? It s definite, comprehensive, and …

Plans and loan applications aren t interchangeable, however. After this has gone on for several years, and the financier has backed some percentage of those plans and seen how events have turned out, he or she becomes very good at weeding out plans with inconsistencies or overblown projections and zeroing …

As a business owner, where do you invest the majority of your time? Although many businesses are founded to develop new, never-before-seen products, they re still built around a product, even though it may not exist at the moment. Stocks are a form of equity ownership. That said, be careful …

Through your vision, you should express your ideals and what you wish to accomplish on a larger scale than just within your organization. In our experience, however, few people have the knowledge and intuition to be investors in other people's small businesses. It is an appealing idea to create a …

This area is often not the top priority for most business owners. Plus by then you will have much more experience to be able to make the most of it. If you are waiting on customers, treat the small customer just as courteously as the large one. But until they …

All companies are incomplete and depend for their operations on resources owned or controlled by particular counterparts, whether customers, suppliers, distributors, development partners or public bodies. You must know this number! Profit is financial gain or return from the use of investment capital in your business. Command decision making is …

At the top of the list are public offerings of stock, which may cost several hundred thousand dollars in legal and accounting fees to put together and require a great deal of your own time and attention. Business deals need accounting information that emphasises comparability, verifiability and timeliness: such figures …

You never want to leave anyone (especially search bots) guessing what your content is about. That's why you need to name URL paths using easy to understand language that spells out the content precisely. When your website has evergreen content that's well-optimized for search engines, it ranks higher in search …

Semantic search is powered by a process called word-sense disambiguation. Search engines (and users) look to the site architecture for clues as to what pages are most important. A key factor is how many clicks from the home page it takes to reach a page In theory, it is important …

When a request is made to a server for a page on a website, the server returns an HTTP status code in response to the request. The length of your posts is also an important consideration. Back in the days of spammy-SEO, almost every post was 500 words long. Today …

Web spider-based search engines employ an automated program, the web spider, to create their index databases. it's crucial to know everything about it. The title tag, an HTML tag that exists in the head section of each webpage, provides an initial cue or context as to what the topical subject …

When Google first started, for example, it broke user queries into keywords, and searched for those keywords in exactly the same format as the user typed them in. Typically, your domain may be set to renew on a yearly basis. Globally integrated marketing communications (GIMC) programs are vital for international …

There are also tools to monitor the rankings, but none can (yet) holistically predict why the changes are happening. What 's important is that Google indexes your site, and when it does, it can find all of your content. If the person says no, they have not done any reviews …

Duplicated content - the same content that appears on multiple unique URLs - is not welcome by search engines and can cause a serious drop in a website's rankings. For small businesses, the best approach to identifying target keywords requires diligent research and the proper mindset. So, from a communication standpoint, from …

Find out who is linking to them. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as …