Productivity In The Workplace

September 22, 2016 by

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There are many factors that affect the profitability of a firm.  For managers and directors of firms, one of the most important factors is to increase profitability for their stakeholders.  The income a company earns over a fiscal year must exceed the expenses they incurred.  Profitability is then one of the many reasons management tries to increase the productivity of their workforce.  Productivity in the workplace is a major challenge for many companies, and research over the years have shown that happy employees are more productive than non happy or stressed employees. But how about working remotely? How is the productivity level compared to those working at the office?  For more about this, follow the links below.

Study: Whopping 93% Say They’re More Productive Working Remotely

Catherine Conlan’s spent her fair share of time in offices. These days, though, the rural Minnesota writer clocks in from home to a content marketing agency in Baton Rouge, La. Still, many of the work-life balance challenges are the same.

“There are days where I’m still rushing around to pick up the kids or the laundry just doesn’t get done, because I’ve put a priority on my work productivity,” Conlan says. “But working remotely, especially with an employer who embraces a project- or results-based approach to work and is dedicated to supporting employees’ lives away from work, can make finding a sense balance a lot easier.”

Boosting America’s Workplace Productivity

Here’s the plain truth: whether at home or at work, productivity tends to suffer under stress. And while stress triggers are highly personal, one thing many workers seem to have in common is uncertainty around how to handle personal finances. In fact, according to a recent study commissioned by MassMutuali, while most Americans say they prioritize understanding the importance of their personal finances, many admit they actually know little or nothing about them, and half say they don’t know how much to spend on benefits. Worse, 37 percent of those surveyed find managing their personal finances “somewhat” or “very difficult” and 40 percent say personal financial problems are a distraction at workii.

It’s clear from the research that personal finances bedevil many Americans, especially when it comes to understanding and making the most of their employee benefits. And employee stress doesn’t just affect employees – the prevalence of distracted employees in the workplace poses a huge productivity issue for employers that, if left untreated, will likely become worse.

Productive mobility is poised to give business a virtual boost

Throughout history, new technologies have constantly changed the way we’ve worked. They’ve been responsible for full-scale revolutions. And continued investments have come as corporate demand for worker productivity drives tech spending.

We should expect augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to eventually attract increased spending in the enterprise as they combine with new mobile network advancements to make an emerging trend called “productive mobility” a reality.

Productive mobility is about being as productive out of the office as inside, and as productive in a virtual instance as a physical one.

Consider Boeing’s use of augmented reality glasses to streamline plane assembly workflows, decreasing assembly time and reducing errors by 25 percent. This is amazing. It’s also just the beginning of this reality-transforming workplace future.

That’s where critical mobile network developments come in. Many of the most exciting AR applications require instant environmental interpretation, and rapid delivery of contextually relevant information and functionality. VR, in particular 360 stereoscopic video, greatly raises the payload overhead of rich media.

Fixed and mobile broadband network advancements like fiber and 5G, along with service provider-centric content delivery topologies, deliver higher throughput with lower latencies. New convolutional network designs find patterns among previously insurmountable massive data sets, enabling rapid, intelligent predictions about the network, the things connected to it and the users engaging with it.

 

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Branding Your BusinessThe Right Way

September 14, 2016 by

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As a small business owner, the branding of your business may not seem important enough for you to worry about it just yet.  Getting the business off  the ground seems to take all the time you have to worry about branding your business, or the social media aspect of it.  But, remember that having a brand that customers identify quickly, can be a great boost to your business.  Having your business logo, colors and fonts form a cohesive image that translates to social media can help customers identify your business online, and perhaps begin a relationship that can last for many years.

For more about branding, follow the links below.

Despite being a branding company, how we failed and sailed with our internal branding

We all know that a brand is an intangible asset. It’s a heavy word though. Branding is what makes or breaks a brand, isn’t it? Well, it’s certainly an exercise that can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors. For instance, with consistent advertising, and a decent product, you can create a brand image that is way above your competitors. It can help you make your brand aspirational. What’s more? It can influence people to associate with your brand. Even if that means they have to pay a premium to associate with your brand. So, the power of branding cannot be ignored.

Unfortunately, more often than not, we think that branding is all about external communication only. But to cut a good picture externally, companies tend to forget that branding is a lot about what’s done internally too. It’s only after burning our hands that we tend to really understand the power of internal branding.

Branding feelings: Why marketing leaders do it

A name. So you think that a brand is about remembering a name. A company, product, or service. True, but there is more. When you hear a name, how do you feel? Strong brands evoke strong feelings. Including the “I gotta have it” urge that propels buyers to the checkout counter. What about other feelings?

Trust. Trust is the foundation feeling. We bond with businesses, products, people, and places we trust.

“Great companies that build an enduring brand have an emotional relationship with customers that has no barrier. And that emotional relationship is the most important characteristic, which is trust.” – Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO

Feeling dominoes

One good feeling leads to another. When we trust a brand, other feelings are added. Positive feelings about quality, special features, usability, service, and overall value.

Loyalty. That is the sticky feeling that keeps us coming back for more. The stronger our composite feelings about a brand, the more we are inclined to continue buying from that company and their products. Even when a competitor has strong offerings.

6 Ways Personal Branding Is Your SEO Secret Weapon

Search engine optimization (SEO) has a lot of potential angles and strategies associated with it. Though there are some universal best practices you’ll need if you want to rank higher (such as cleaning up your technical on-site SEO and building natural inbound links), there are variable approaches you can take to find success in your own niche.

For example, you may adopt a local SEO strategy to gain more traction against your larger competitors, or you could opt for niche, long-tail keyword targeting to get a faster rise for lower-volume queries.

But there’s one angle—my personal favorite—that can propel almost any SEO strategy forward, and I don’t see nearly enough companies and organizations using it to fuel their ongoing efforts. Personal branding is your secret weapon, and it’s time you integrated it into your campaign.

 

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Small Business Challenges Facing the Small Business Owner

September 7, 2016 by

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Data security for the small business owner that deals with merchant accounts or other type of high sensitive information, is a very serious business.  Keeping the information secure is for many small and big businesses nothing short of miraculous.  Target, a big retail store had a security breach not long ago, and following that, had to settle a law suit because  of it.  For many small business owners, the idea of being in charge of their own data security is daunting.  The need to have a data security expert in your payroll may not be possible, but the need is real and many small business owners need to address the issue right away.

For more news about this, follow the links below.

5 Data Management Challenges Facing Small Business Owners

Small business owners must now where an additional hat – the data scientist hat.

As small business owners, we generally wear all the hats. And if we’ve grown to where we aren’t wearing all the hats at the same time, we at least rotate through them a few times a month.

One hat that is becoming increasingly important – and scary — to wear is the data scientist hat.

Although data scientists come in many forms, with varied skills, a small business data scientist is mostly responsible for parsing through and analyzing data to present key findings about a business. The goal is to use data and the findings to address challenges, find opportunities, and ultimately, help a business save time and money.

While most of us don’t have the luxury of hiring a bona fide data scientist to handle these figures, there are a few things you should know and consider as you run your business and aim to become as efficient as possible in your business functions.

7 ways to make your small business attractive to venture capital funding

In 2015, venture capitalists invested over $58.8 billion in businesses, yet African-Americans only received one percent of venture capital funding. While opportunities to grow small businesses have been scarce in the past, large investors are beginning to dedicate more attention and inclusion to minority commerce that fosters growth and success. This leaves new opportunities for African-Americans to obtain the money they need to reach more customers.

Before jumping into the big leagues of expanding your business and making a global impact, here are seven ways to attract the right venture capital players and stand out from the competition.

  1. Know Your Business

Investors are looking for companies who have studied their market, discovered loopholes and are creating a valuable solution to a problem. When presenting your plans,you must be very knowledgeable of your project and of the venture capitalist industry. Useful websites like A VCand Both Sides of the Table offer practical advice through the lense of very successful startup founders and investors. From the materials used to where investors distribute their money, build your confidence so that no investor will doubt the future of your company.

The SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard®: Most Still Struggle to Offer, See Value in 401(k)s

Less than a third of small business owners offer the retirement saving vehicle.

GLENVIEW, Ill., Sept. 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — The majority of small business owners (66%) do not offer a 401(k) plan and 42% of those not offering it don’t see the value in it, according to the August 2016 SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard®.

Thirty-five percent of those not offering a plan said the fees are too expensive, and 23% said they don’t know how to manage a 401(k).

The small business owners that do offer a 401(k) said they do so to build retirement savings for themselves and their employees, with just 5% saying they offer it to attract new employees and 6% saying they offer it for tax breaks.

In total, 28% are offering a plan and another 6% plan to add one soon, the Scorecard survey found.

 

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Small Business Hiring And News

September 1, 2016 by

64002400Small business owners across the United States are being careful after the dismal reports of hiring across the country.  They are holding off any hiring they may do, and are still reticent to make any moves that will put their financials in jeopardy.  Economic growth seems to be inching forward a bit slowly, and some small business owners are still holding off till elections are over.

To read more about this and other stories follow the links below.

Dear Donald Trump: I’m a Small Business Owner, and I Want More Regulation

We love the election-year attention but the presidential candidates are focusing on the wrong things

In election years, I love calling myself a “small business owner.” It’s the one time when the act of selling falafel, building a website or otherwise trying to make a buck comes off as heroic. We’re the “backbone” of the economy, you know, and the “heart and soul of equal opportunity,” as Fran Tarkenton told the Republican convention.

It’s the season when politicians shower us with love and policy papers. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have put forward proposals to make our businesses great again, together. I prefer Clinton’s, but mostly I think the election-year pandering to small businesses misses what really matters.

 Trump, like most Republicans, focuses on tax relief. He proposes lowering the top rate for pass-through business income to 15%. This doesn’t move me. Why? My company doesn’t earn enough for the proposal to make much of a difference, as is true for most small business owners. The lion’s share of pass-through income is earned by a small percentage of businesses, which means wealthy individuals would catch a giant tax break while the majority of small business owners are unaffected.

Columbus, Ohio: A growing mecca for small business

In a prior life, Joe DeLoss worked as a banking analyst, but today, his day job couldn’t be more different. DeLoss owns the wildly popular Hot Chicken Takeover in Columbus, Ohio, serving up Nashville Hot Chicken, a spicy style of fried chicken.

 But it’s not the leap from banking to fast food that makes his story so interesting. It’s the fact that his two-year-old restaurant is staffed by a nearly 50-person workforce that has largely experienced incarceration. Some employees have criminal arrest records, while others have served time for everything from misdemeanors to felonies. DeLoss admits they might be overlooked by other employers, but he’s a firm believer in second chances. Make no mistake, though; it’s no charity.

“We created Hot Chicken Takeover to be a fair chance employer. A large part of our workforce has been affected by incarceration in the past, but it’s not what defines our future. We have a team that works harder, is more productive and more motivated than most people in our industry,” DeLoss said.

 State lawmakers OK parental leave for small-business workers

SACRAMENTO — California parents who work for small businesses would be eligible for six weeks of job-protected leave under a bill heading to Gov.Jerry Brown.

The bill was among the myriad of proposed laws sent Wednesday to Brown on the final day of the two-year legislative session. Brown has until Sept. 30 to act on the hundreds of bills on his desk.

With Wednesday’s adjournment, lawmakers concluded a year in which they raised the minimum wage, extended greenhouse gas reduction targets to 2030, added gun control measures and approved $2 billion in bond money for housing and treating mentally ill Californians who are homeless.

On a lighter note, lawmakers approved a bill Wednesday declaring denim as the state’s official fabric under AB501 by Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael.

 

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Small Business Health Coverage And Retirement Plans

August 23, 2016 by

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Saving for retirement as a small business owner is hard.  The extra cash is immediately invested in the business, and retirement plans are always for tomorrow.  According to  the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), many Americans are falling short when it comes to retirement. In 2015, 28% of Americans had less than $1,000 dollars saved, and a whooping 64% had less than $50,000.  While retirement plans are not always available through their employers, many workers should be happy to know that the ease to open a retirement account through other mediums is fairly easy and pain free.

To read more about this topic, follow the links below.

Some Small Businesses Restore Group Health Coverage

Backtracking reflects tighter labor market and pricier individual plans.

Some small companies that dropped group health insurance for their employees are reversing course, driven by a tightening labor market and rising costs and fewer choices for individual coverage.

Laura Cottrell, owner of a seven-person home-furnishings and home-improvement products business in St. Louis, dropped group coverage in 2014, not only because of the cost but also the complexities of picking the right plan within a short deadline. Instead, she gave her employees a raise that they could use to buy their own health plans, sparing her from choosing for them.

Now Ms. Cottrell is looking at adding health benefits to make a cabinetry business she launched this year more attractive to potential employees. If she makes the change, she says she would offer coverage to employees of both of her businesses.

“People are looking for health care,” said Ms. Cottrell, who said she was recently turned down by one job candidate because she doesn’t offer health benefits. Adding to her pain: UnitedHealth Group Inc., her personal carrier, won’t offer individual coverage in Missouri next year.

When can you quit your day job when starting a small business?

Q: When you’re starting a small business, when is the right time to quit your day job — financially speaking? If you’re starting your own business and you plan to take out a loan, should you factor in your own living expenses?

Anonymous business owner.

A: When you are starting a business, your personal finances are inseparable from the business. So you need to factor your living expenses into all your financial calculations.

An exercise I use with my students is to have them calculate their “runway.” It is a simple calculation to determine how long they have before they and the business run out of money. How long before the business has to take off. How do you calculate your runway?

 You begin by estimating the cash needs of the business. This includes investments in property, plant and equipment, lease improvements, inventory and all the other outflows of cash required to get a business off the ground. Don’t underestimate your monthly outflows.

California set to join states offering retirement plans

Workers without a workplace option can now open accounts.

More than half of American workers — roughly 55 million — don’t have access to a retirement savings plan on the job.

While those people can open an individual retirement account with an investment company, less than 1 in 3 American households has an IRAand even then most of those people have access to an employer-sponsored plan such as a 401(k).

This week California lawmakers are expected to vote on a bill that would enroll employees who are not covered by an employer-sponsored retirement plan at work into a state-run one.

Lawmakers in California, the nation’s most populous state, are not alone. Since 2012, more than half of state legislatures have considered bills that would create government-run retirement plans for private-sector workers. (See map below.)

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Business News For The Small Business Owner

August 17, 2016 by

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It is perhaps the ability of a small business owner to keep optimism at high levels to be able to do what they do every single day.  There is no other people telling you what to do, or what jobs require top priority.    As a small business owner, the credit and blame stop with them.  There is no employee that works in a small business, that is not the responsibility of the owner.  The successes and the failures mean something else for them as well.  To be a small business owner is to be different.  To have the courage to do what many others wish to do, but are afraid to take the first step.  Read more about business news by following the links below.

Abrams: Small businesses have already won the gold

Small-business owners: If you’ve been watching the Olympics, you may be getting the wrong message. I’m here to tell you that you’re winners, even if you never get the business equivalent of an Olympic gold medal.

For the past week, I’ve been mesmerized watching swimmer Katie Ledecky breaking world records with ease. Usain Bolt running faster than any man on Earth, and smiling as he does it. Those amazing, fearless gymnasts, led by Simone Biles, risking life and limb.

But one aspect of Olympic coverage that frustrates me is when someone asks a silver- or bronze-medal winner if they’re disappointed because they didn’t win the gold.

Most of these fantastic athletes react the way American swimmer Nathan Adrian did when asked whether he was upset that he “only” got a bronze. He looked surprised, then, with an endearing grin, he reminded the correspondent that hey, he was at the Olympics and he won a medal. How great is that?

The Truth About Hiring Friends in Your Small Business

Hiring friends must be done with care to be successful.

Small business ideas are often mulled over by friends long before you take the plunge and say, “I’ve made the decision. I’m starting my own business.” Friends’ reactions may range from encouragement to total negativity, but there’s a good chance at least one friend might be interested in working for you or with you.

While mixing business with friendship can work out, many people choose to keep business separate from friendships. Business relationships gone sour can ruin relationships, and some people avoid this risk by starting out with a “no hiring friends” policy. Most people fall between the two extremes of wanting to hire friends and refusing to do so. With strict boundaries, it’s possible to successfully hire friends for your business.

Hiring a Friend Will Be Fine, Right?

Maybe? After deciding to start your own business, it’s intuitive that many people want friends on board to help build the business. And since close friends tend to be vocal supporters of your ideas, and may be willing to work long hours with little or no pay it makes the choice a quick solution.

Aetna ditching 70% of its ObamaCare business

Insurance giant Aetna won’t be offering coverage under ObamaCare next year in 11 of the 15 states it now serves — an announcement that instantly became an issue in the presidential race.

Aetna’s decision led Donald Trump to charge that President Obama’s health care reform was “imploding.”

“Aetna’s decision to leave the Affordable Care Act’s public marketplaces is the latest blow to this broken law that is slowly imploding under its regulatory red tape,” said Trump campaign deputy national policy director Dan Kowalski.

“Millions of Americans have lost their health coverage under this disastrous policy, eliminating their ability to choose their doctors. Thousands of businesses have been forced to cut employment or shutter their doors in response to Obama’s signature achievement,” he added.

The company had previously warned that it expected to lose more than $300 million this year on the 900,000 patients it covers under the Affordable Care Act.

Aetna said it is pulling out of ObamaCare markets in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas.

 

 

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Don’t Let Passive-Aggressive Employees Harm Your Business

August 8, 2016 by

64735957Passive-aggressive is a word you hear people use a lot.  But, many of them use it to describe someone’s actions when it doesn’t actually apply.  They don’t seem to understand what it really means; it’s just a buzz word.

Small business owners are some of the people who don’t understand it.  Overall, they rarely recognize the behavior and don’t see how it’s negatively affecting their company.  That’s a problem, because odds are they’ve had in the past, currently have or will in the future have passive-aggressive employees.

The smart owner will learn what passive-aggressive behavior is, be able to recognize it and know how to manage it.  If it’s not managed it can and will: undermine authority, damage morale, lower productivity and quality, harm customer/vendor relationships, create a hostile work environment and increase staff turnover. 

It has turned functional operations into nonfunctional ones, without the owner knowing how it happened.  The behavior is hard to identify if you don’t know what you’re looking for.  It’s a sneaky, deliberate, sabotaging, underground way for an employee to express anger at his boss, managers, co-workers and the company, without getting caught doing it.

He wants to avoid direct, face-to face communication (passive), while still being able to act on his anger (aggressive).  He thinks his anger is justified, but won’t state his concerns or dissatisfaction directly.  Passive-aggressive people believe others “must pay” for their unhappiness, and they “get back” at them in indirect ways. 

Some of these ways include:

  • Always having excuses (“good reasons”) for not doing tasks they’ve agreed to do, have been assigned to do or are their regular job duties.
  • Regularly missing clear deadlines, with excuses for why they couldn’t meet them.
  • Withholding information, sometimes critical, from others while feigning ignorance — “All they needed to do was ask me for it.”
  • “Stirring things up,” then standing in the background to watch the fireworks.
  • Going over someone’s head or behind their back to make them appear incompetent.
  • Using innuendo and rumor to sabotage others and their work. 
  • Not taking responsibility for their actions/words, while repeatedly blaming others.
  • Giving others vague, incomplete instructions and blaming them when the job goes wrong.
  • Claiming information has been sent when it hasn’t — “The text, email, fax, phone message must have gotten lost.”
  • Appearing busy (texting, emailing, walking around) without doing any identifiable work.
  • Taking credit for others’ work.

Doing some of these things doesn’t make a person passive-aggressive, it makes them human.  Instead, look for someone who has a pattern of consistently deflecting fault by having an excuse — which includes blaming someone or something else — for doing poor or incomplete work.  He believes he’s a victim, but it’s really the business that’s a victim of his behavior.

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Taxes, Insurance And The Small Business Owner

July 28, 2016 by

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For any business that wants to attract talented employees, marketers agree they need to consider the perks associated with attracting and keeping employees that every business wants.  Health insurance and retirement accounts are the basic benefits that many of these businesses offer. Others include gyms on site and free lunches to their employees without blinking.  But many of these giants offer benefits that many small business owners cannot afford.  And although many employees are lured to the extra benefits they can get, others are happy to work for the small business owner, and be an intricate part of making the small business succeed.

For more about this and other topics, follow the links below.

Should Your Small Business Offer Health Insurance?

For a small business, helping employees sign up for Obamacare often is the best idea for them.

Health insurance is expensive—and getting more so all the time. Does it make more sense for a small company to provide coverage (with employees paying some of the premiums) or let them get a policy on their own through the Affordable Care Act?

Not long ago, it could be difficult and often very expensive for individuals to buy their ownhealth insurance, while the tax code gives an advantage to group insurance provided through the workplace. To keep employees happy and maintain a stable workforce, companies that could afford to offered group insurance.

Now Obamacare, as the law is known, has changed the calculus. Individuals these days can buy insurance with regulated benefits and premiums, and most are eligible for big subsidies. And while companies with the equivalent of at least 50 full-time employees must offer health insurance to those full-time workers or pay penalties, the ACA has no such requirement for smaller businesses.

The upshot is that in many cases, particularly when employees are relatively low-paid, both the company and its employees might be better off if workers buy their own insurance.

Small businesses looking forward to sales tax holiday

A “lackluster” summer for sales have small businesses looking forward to the upcoming sales tax holiday across the state, said Rosemary Elebash, Alabama director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

The holiday from sales tax on a host of items including clothing, computers, footwear and much, much more could provide a much-needed lift to many small stores and businesses, said Elebash.

“It’s been a lackluster summer for a lot of small businesses,” Elebash said. “The sales-tax holiday should help people get fired up and in the mood to spend,” added Elebash in a prepared statement from NFIB touting the holiday and its importance to small businesses.

The sales tax holiday begins Friday, Aug. 5 and runs through Sunday, Aug. 7.

The sales tax holiday comes after the latest FIB Small Business Optimism Index, released July 12, shows that small-business confidence improved by only a fraction of one percent in June.

 

Small Business Owners Put Everything They Have Into Their Businesses– Nearly Nine in 10 Say It’s All Worth It

SAN FRANCISCO, July 26, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — More than eight in 10 small business owners (82%) say they put everything they have into their business, according to the second annual Bank of the West Small Business Growth Survey, released today—and an overwhelming majority (86%) say that all they’ve sacrificed for their business has been worth it.

The survey, conducted online by Harris Poll among a national sample of 505 small business owners and an additional 207 California small business owners, delves into the journey of the small business owner, identifying the unique challenges they face and benefits of the job that drive them to persevere through hardships. The survey also spotlights California, and sheds light on unique advantages and challenges felt by women small business owners.

Additionally, this year’s index number (55) and results from the survey show that small businesses have experienced growth and are optimistic in the future of their businesses amid an uncertain economic and political climate. Further, 70 percent of companies surveyed were in growth mode – up from 64 percent last year. The index tracks four key indicators over the previous 12 months: profitability, revenue, investments, and reductions. On the scale of 0-100, a composite score of higher than 50 indicates growth and less than 50 signals decline.

 

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Productivity In The Workplace

July 15, 2016 by

64735957For a small business owner with few employees, matching the right job to the right person may seem easy.  After all, if you hired the right people, you know their qualifications, and their strengths.  It is important to note that delegating business tasks to employees, have to be carefully monitored to ensure that it is done properly in the beginning.  Matching the right job to the right person is one of the most basic decisions a business owner makes, but some times the task seems impossible.  Know your employees, their strengths and their qualifications, and you will have a strong team in your business.

7 Digital Tools to Help You Get More Done Every Day

Think about the last time you completed a huge project, organized your space, or completed a bunch of necessary tasks. When it comes to work, whittling down a to-dolist may be one of the most gratifying things a person can do. To help, here are several tools to skyrocket any office worker’s productivity.

Typeform

If you need any kind of form on your website, this communication tool can help. It’s a software platform that lets visitors register or pay for things, complete job applications, provide ideas for a suggestion box, fill out incident reports, contact your company, or do anything else that necessitates a form. Focusing on a conversational user experience, Typeform is designed to increase response rates from users by making questions more engaging. The platform has 170,000 active users, about 1 million registered users, and launched in beta in 2013.

Price: Plans range from free to $70 a month at Typeform.

Management Starts Here: 5 Ways to Increase Office Productivity

In the business world, lots of decisions come down to the bottom line, and that line is almost always financial. We’re accustomed to looking at whether or not we can afford to make certain decisions.

Productivity is always key; especially in the United States, we’re accustomed to viewing the most productive workers as the best workers.

It’s all well and good to make something great, but if someone else can make 10 things that are good at the same time it takes someone else to make one thing that’s great, well, a lot of companies will choose good over great every time.

Seth Godin calls this mode of thinking the race to the bottom, the urge to compromise instead of insisting on the highest possible quality. We think you don’t have to give up productivity in order to have greatness.

Here are five things you can do to increase productivity and its value while still offering amazing results.

The 8 Digital Productivity Tools Everyone Should Adopt

I’m a super adopter. I love trying out hundreds of new applications, social networks and devices every year. But not everybody wants to live the thousand-app lifestyle. For most people, the goal is to adopt the smallest number of tools necessary to work efficiently. That’s why my friends and colleagues often ask me which technologies I regard as must-haves: the tools and tactics that will make a big impact on their productivity without spending a lot of time or money getting up and running.

While I often find myself recommending specific technologies to people with particular challenges, there are some tools I suggest again and again, because they are useful to just about everybody. In many cases, they are tools that not only benefit individual users, but entire teams, by reducing inbox clutter and communications overhead. But in other cases, they are applications I suggest because I find it viscerally painful to see someone using Microsoft Office for something that could be better accomplished with a purpose-built note-taking or collaboration tool.

 

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Globalization and The Small Business Owner

July 7, 2016 by

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For many small businesses, sales are important if not the most critical part in the success of their business. Having sales people eager to learn, and try new venues to increase their sales success, is pivotal to the small business owner.  Sales tools, and online selling venues that the sales employee wants to try should be encouraged by the small business owner.

For more about this and other topics follow the links below.

This Financial Giant Will Challenge Square and OnDeck With Small Business Loans

The credit card giant will debut an online lending service this year.

American Express is expanding into the lending business for small businesses, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The financial giant will debut a new lending arm, called Working Capital Terms, which will make online loans to small businesses who use American Express credit cards. Loans will range from $1,000 to $750,000, and interest will be tacked on at a rate of 0.5% for a 30-day loan to 1.5% for a 90-day loan, Bloomberg reported.

Online lending is a space that existing financial technology companies where have been attempting to grow, but investors have been skeptical. Square, the San Francisco payments company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has seen growth in Square Capital, its lending arm which provides cash advances to merchants using Square’s point of sale service. Squarerecently announced that it would be expanding into traditional online loans, with fees between 10% to 16% of the amount borrowed.

Strategies: Globalization is a small-business necessity

With the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Unionand a U.S. presidential candidate vowing to build a wall between the USA and America’s third-largest trading partner, globalization is a current buzzword on cable news talk shows.  But for American small businesses, it is a double-edged sword.

For decades, some small businesses have been threatened, or shut down, by foreign competitors. At the same time, many American small businesses have been created and grown as a result of global trade.

There was a moment perfectly capturing the clash between globalization and isolation when President Obama took the stage at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) on June 24 at Stanford University.

In the hall were 700 smart, creative, capable entrepreneurs, from all corners of the globe. These were the types of people — if not the individuals themselves —  building the next Apple, Amazon or Genentech. They were prime examples of the possibilities and inevitability of globalization.

Are You Building a Startup or a Small Business?

There are approximately 29 million small businesses in the United States, about 23 million of which are sole proprietorships. This doesn’t include non-profits, nor businesses with over 500 employees. Of the total 29 million, only 418,000 or so are labeled as startups. Clearly there’s a difference between startups and small businesses, but what is it?

Startups are generally described as new, tech-based businesses focused on exponential growth. They’re generally temporary, use mostly outside investment for funding, and are led by entrepreneurs who want to create something far bigger than themselves. In other words, a startup is an explosive innovation whose goal is to transcend its people.

When we think of small businesses, we tend to think of mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, local law and accounting practices, and similar businesses. We think of the Jones’s and their three generations of financial planners in the same little building they’ve been in since ’57. We think of the mechanic and his 10 guys working on cars non-stop. We think of the local coffee shop owner who just sold his business to start some other venture. Maybe we even think of the marketing expert who climbed the corporate ladder and now does consulting. These images hold true in the data as well.

 

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