There’s a brush fire bearing down on your business. You have one hour to evacuate – which means you have one hour to execute a disaster preparation plan.

This is a scenario similar to what thousands of small business owners face each year. Luckily, that’s enough time to take care of a company’s most valuable assets – its employees and its data.

Disaster prep is one of those tasks that many small-business owners keep putting off.

While it’s understandable that some owners don’t get around to disaster planning, they’re courting danger.

“This is wrath-of-God stuff,” said John Toigo, a disaster recovery consultant based in Dunedin, Fla.

Minimal preparation – the kind you’d have to resort to if a disaster were in fact on the way – can be accomplished in an hour. And you can do much more if you have an entire day.

Toigo said the first thing to be done is to put together a list of contact phone numbers and physical and e-mail addresses for everyone on the staff, and to be sure everyone has a copy.

Luis Yepez, vice president of Mainstream Global, a Lawrence, Mass.-based computer reseller, said that it’s also important to know how you’re going to stay in touch with your clients, customers and vendors. They need to know your situation because what happens to you affects them.

Toigo noted that it’s easy to pop a flash drive into the USB ports of your computers and back up all your information, including customer and vendor lists, your firm’s books and inventory lists and the projects you’re working on. You can also e-mail data to a non-work address for safekeeping.

Photo by Timm Williams

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Stabilo Boss

With online businesses growing before our eyes, I feel it is important to provide these online business owners with as many tools to help them in their venture as possible. We all know that you can never have too many resources and helpful suggestions to fall back on. Below are some great tools that I recently saw posted on CrowdSpring that will come in handy for your online business.

• Google Website Optimizer is a great free tool that is easy to use for anyone and allows you to test several different conversions on your site such as text and image conversions.
• Gmail Apps. This is a wonderful tool that supplies you with several different applications such as state of the art email, calendars, and intranet solutions for small businesses. The best part about this program is that it comes at a low cost to you.
• Campaign Monitor. This is probably one of the more important applications that you can find on the Internet at such a great price. This tool is great for online and email marketing campaigns, tracking your results and managing your subscribers. With marketing branching out in all sorts of different forms, this tool would be perfect for online small businesses.

Basecamp is a web-based project collaboration tool It allows a team to share files, assign tasks, centralize feedback and manage projects.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: madebytess

When setting out to hire new talent for your company, the challenge of finding the absolute best there is can be very frustrating and time consuming. With so many people out of work today, you are bound to have hundreds of applications rolling in just for one position to fill! I have put together a suggestion list of ways to ensure you find your company the very best there is out there.

• Background checks. Always, always, always do a background check on every person that you are seriously contemplating to fill your position. You may think by their resume, references and interview that they are just awesome, but you never know what they have been able to cleverly hide up to this point in life.
• Give your serious candidates a personality test. People can “fake” their way through almost anything in order to get a great paying job. But if you perform a personality test, it will give you a good sense of the type of person they really are and if they will fit well in with all of your other employees.
• Manage Smarter suggests performing a drug screening test. Yes this is become more of an issue today. Actually, a recent study showed that 75% of illegal drug users are already employed somewhere! Why take the chance of getting into that situation and jeopardizing your companies reputation.

Expose the candidate to the work and the work environment: Give the candidate a realistic understanding of what the day-to-day work will be like. Don’t just paint a pretty picture. It’s best to be honest with candidates about what the job entails, including the high points and the low points.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: pfala

In business it can become very difficult over the years to continuously manage your cash flow. Often times as business owners we get into a groove of letting things slide here and there, letting customers slide here and there, and before we know it our cash flow is much less than what we would like it to be. Look below for some great tips on how to manage your cash flow better.

• Include payment due dates on all of your invoices.
• Accept partial payments if the entire balance can not be made.
• Make sure to get all of your invoices out on time.
• When you receive the payments make sure you deposit them right away.
• Include discounts as well as penalties.
• Review your expenses at least every 6 months to see if you still need them all.

By keeping up on the above mentioned areas, you should be able to see better cash flow coming into your company within a few months provided you keep at it, recently stated on Capital Solutions Bancorp.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: kristafurry

So you have decided to take the step out of your 9-5 job and become an entrepreneur. First, congratulations on your new venture. Second, there are some things about being an entrepreneur that you should know and realize what you are about to get yourself into.

Being an entrepreneur means loving day in and day out what you have chosen to do whether times are going great for your business or if they are going horrible for your business. It is by no means an easy way out of your 9-5 job.

You have to know your customers inside and out. Know who to target, where they are, what they need, what they want and expect from your company and most importantly…how to sell them on it all.

If you have just started this new business of yours, you may not be in a position quite yet to start hiring a whole staff of people, but you still should have someone other than yourself to rely on, someone that you can pass little tasks over to or pass tasks that you are not quite an expert at to. This is where a VA (virtual assistant) would come in handy.

Work/Life Balance: Some entrepreneurs believe you can’t find success unless you’re working long hours each and every day. This burns you out. Don’t work longer, work smarter. Finding time to step away from the office helps keep your entrepreneurial mind focused and sharp, not to mention well rested.

For the complete guide to what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, visit Understanding Marketing.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Mi Pah

In sales it can be very difficult to not only make your pitch perfect but to also ask for the closing deal at the end of your pitch. People today are more concerned with where their money is going, if they truly NEED this product or service you are selling, and if they can afford it.

When you do get to the end of your pitch and you’re ready to ask for the order, avoid using any sort of tricky measures in order to get them to buy. Customers are not stupid, nor do they appreciate being treated as if they were, and they will definitely walk away if they sense something fishy is going on.

Entrepreneur.com suggests looking at your customers objections or hesitations as a way of being able to provide them with even more information regarding your product in order to make them trust that buying it would be the right thing for them.

Strengthen your confidence every day. This is done by practice, continuous learning, reading, surrounding yourself with successful people, massive activity and the lessons you get from every experience. Put the wisdom from these experiences into your next approach.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Torley

I came across an article located on Open Forum that talks about how your communication skills give power to your performance. Depending on how you communicate with your staff, team, boss and more, will depend on the performance outcome.

Have you ever had a business situation where someone is describing something like finances to you and it sounds almost as if they are speaking in a foreign language? That’s because often times people will communicate using “big” words that are not necessary just so they sound smart. Try communicating in simpler terms almost as if your talking to a 6 year old.

When sending out emails always make sure that the subject line is clear. Make sure your subject line basically states in very short form what the email is going to be about otherwise there is a good chance that it will be deleted before it’s even opened.

Your defense of “sometimes things take a lot of explaining” isn’t going to fly. If you’re drafting documents, that’s not writing for communications value. That means, you’re delivering information. It’s something different—which is okay, but be clear of your goal. Keep things visually simple, crisp, and broken up.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Gunnar Wrobel

It makes sense to buy a franchise with proven methods, marketing, and product rather than start your own from scratch right? But when getting ready to sign that contract, how do you know that the contract is completely truthful? Below are some franchise contract time bombs to look out for.

• Do the numbers smell a little fishy to you? It is almost unheard of to have a franchise contract that supplies a full income statement. Watch out for exceptionally high and “pretty” looking expected income numbers.
• Take a look at what they want you to pay up front. Some franchisors make money right off the bat with a one time franchise fee. However, if the contract seems to show that you have a lot of costs up front then you should run in the opposite direction. This may mean trouble for you later when your having a tough time and they have already made their money off of you earlier on, recently stated on Forbes.com.
• Make sure your royalty payments are not going to cost you an arm and a leg. Not all franchises charge these but if they do they shouldn’t break the bank to the point where it’s impossible for you to turn a profit.

How Easy Is It To Get Out Of Your Contract? Franchise agreements can last for 10 years, and many franchisers make it difficult for franchisees to cut and run. Breach the contract and you’ll pay “liquidation damages.” Every UFOC contains (or should contain) a section devoted to rules governing termination, renewal and transfer of contracts. Read it–closely.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

My idea isn’t good enough yet” explained a friend who is thinking of starting his own company. He was waiting for the idea to be completely fleshed our before taking the leap.

Here’s a newsflash: Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn’t matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different.

Sounds wrong? Let’s see.

In 1998, a company received $4.8 million in funding to “beam money between Palm Pilots.” I’ll code-name this product: MoneyBeamer.

Here’s the pitch. Alice wants to give Bob some money, but Alice doesn’t have cash or her checkbook. There’s no ATM around. Both Alice and Bob do own palm pilots and they both previously installed MoneyBeamer and, despite having forgotten all their normal modes of money transfer, they did remember to bring their palm pilots. MoneyBeamer will allow Alice to send money to Bob. Well actually it won’t, but it will remember that Alice wants to send Bob money, and once Alice gets back home and connects her Palm Pilot with her computer, and after she dials up to the Internet, MoneyBeamer will contact a server and transfer the money, provided of course that Alice has the money and didn’t secretly change her mind in the meantime.

Would you have invested in them? Not with an idea like that. You’d be wrong though — it was PayPal. Their work with encryption was combined with an idea for a consumer-targeted on-line banking system made it the easiest way to send money by email. They were sold to eBay for $1.3 billion. Today they process $2,000 in payments every second.

Photo by trublueboy.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: fdecomite

We are always on the look out for ways to better manage our time. The problem with that is we don’t realize that time is fixed for everyone, you can not “make” more time, you can not get back lost time.

“The myth of time management never dies. Many people enroll in ‘time management’ classes and learn techniques like making to-do lists. That’s fine. Lists can be useful, even satisfying. It’s great to experience that rush—Ahhhh!—as we check something off the list. However, by the end of the day, or the week, or the month, most people discover projects that are still not checked off and some projects they haven’t even started. That’s when frustration begins to set in. The time is gone, and there’s no way to get it back.

It was stated recently on Changethis.com that there really isn’t a sure way of managing your time, which I would have to agree with. However, you can manage your attention during your waking hours of the day and night. This is where you will be able to manage what you spend your attention on getting done, getting started, and so on.

As long as you’re awake you have the power to continuously produce more attention. Now, what you do with that powerful gift is up to you. This is where you need to manage what you focus your attention on, how long you keep your attention focused, and the drive that you have to keep your attention on one thing until it is accomplished.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.