Happy Business

Leveraged Buyout

2009-03-03T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by David Gass

As a small business owner, you must have knowledge of various financial issues and investment options. In the primary and secondary markets, you must have come across the term LBO, or Leveraged Buyout, several times. You may perhaps know what leveraged buyout is, but you may not have enough knowledge about its working. So, as an investor as well as a businessman, have a look at LBO and its various aspects.

Leveraged Buyout- What Is This? A typical dictionary definition of this term is "a debt-financed transaction, usually via bank loans and bonds, which aims at taking a public corporation private." In simple terms, a LBO takes place when a financial supporter gets control over a majority of a company's equity through the use of borrowed money or debt. Leveraged buyout is also known as high-leveraged transaction or bootstrap transaction.

It usually follows a ratio of 70% debt to 30% equity. LBO is basically a strategy in which a company acquires another company and in order to meet the acquisition costs it uses borrowed money like bonds and loans. Major companies as well as acquired companies assets are used as security for getting such loans.

As an investor, you can be a part of LBO either by purchasing the debt or by purchasing equity. There are mainly three types of transactions in the LBO market:

The transactions in which a public company is taken private,

The divestures that result from selling off divisions of a public conglomerate,

Private market transactions that involve companies whose stocks are not publicly traded.

In the context of LBO, a leveraged balance sheet contains a little portion of equity capital and a major portion of loan capital. The loan capital is generally borrowed through banks and public/privately placed bonds. In this case, the debt appears on the acquired company's balance sheet and its cash flow is used to pay back the debt.

The LBO option gives lucrative returns on investment, nearly 20%. It happens when a major corporate restructuring takes place and the financial guarantor sells shares in a public offering or sells the main company to another company.

On one side, LBO can make more efficient use of company's resources; but on the other hand, it can also cause great economic suffering. Despite this, a recent market study says that the market is quite friendly to LBO activities.

Whatever the case, as an investor you should have knowledge of LBO. It will surely help you in your portfolio management. If you are eager to know more about it, fix a meeting with a market expert or start searching the Internet for useful details.

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Organizing Your Electronic Files

2009-03-02T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Barbara Hemphill

Have you ever sat in front of your computer looking for a document knowing it was there the question is: "Where?" The answer gets amazingly complicated if the document is an attachment someone sent to you from someone else's e-mail account!

In addition to organizing the additional paper that results from our new technology, we now also have to organize the technology itself. Did you know that 80-95% of the information we work with daily is generated by email and electronic files?

How Computer Filing Works

Your computer is basically an electronic filing cabinet. This is true regardless of what kind of operating system your computer uses, what kind of graphical interface it uses to show you how things are organized, what tools are available to you, and what kind of words or icons it uses to identify and describe the features of those tools. Whether you use a Windows based program or a Macintosh, the principles of organizing the programs and the information are basically the same.

The problem with computers is that the information isn't organized according to how we work and think. It is organized by format or application source (email, documents, web pages, contacts, etc.). Yet we comprehend by subject, person, company, project, and some other criteria appropriate to the work we do.

What many computer users overlook is that with today's technology we all have the advantages of the 255-character file name, which can be a combination of key words and phrases! This feature, plus the search capability of the computer, gives you access to a powerful organizing tool which can save you hours of time looking for or recreating information which already exists!

"Today's Mail is Tomorrow's File" One of my overriding Paper Tiger principles is "Today's mail is tomorrow's pile." How do you apply this to your computer? If you have a computer full of unidentifiable files, and you waste more time than you can afford looking for what you need, the easiest way to get yourself out of the quagmire is to start over!

What does that mean? Ignore all your old files! Design your new computer-filing system, using the principles I am going to describe. Then re-file your old files into the new system as you need them or, back them up on some other media, or delete them.

How do you design an effective computer-filing system? First, remember one of the most important (and neglected) principles of organizing computer files: A computer's value is that it allows you to use a file again but only if you can find it again! Sometimes you may simply want to print another copy. Other times, you may want to update or change the document in some way, or excerpt parts of it to create a new document. In any event, your key to success in finding the information you need is keywords!

Setting Up Your Computer-Filing System

The first step to success in easy file retrieval is to point all files into one directory. Windows created "My Documents" for that purpose but you may create another directory. In addition to making it significantly easier to retrieve information you need, this technique provides another major benefit. It's much simpler to back up your data for archives or for transfer to other locations.

So here's my system -- or it was until I discovered another great productivity tool (see sidebar): I use My Documents. Then I create a subdirectory for each of the computer programs I use, such as Word, Excel, Power Point, Paper Tiger, Access, QuickBooks, etc.

If you don't keep many electronic files, you can ignore the option of creating subdirectories and keep all your files in one directory. But if you have lots of files, that would be like tossing all your tools in your garage and then spending hours looking for a screwdriver!

In addition, you can create additional subdirectories for projects, clients, or categories of work. But be careful this can get you in trouble. For example, if I create a subdirectory for Clients, and a subdirectory for Articles, and then write an article for a client, where do I file it? The fewer directories, the fewer places to look and you'll soon see how keywords will allow you to find any file in your computer in a few seconds!

Note: If you're working on a networked computer, you may have a choice of multiple drives. Your organization may already have made this decision for you of which drive to use. For example, all files of mutual business interest or used by a single division of the business may be filed on one drive, while employees' private work files may be filed on another.

In any event, don't make your strategy too complicated. It would, for example, probably be more confusing than helpful to send separate projects to separate drives, when there's space for all of them on the same drive, especially if they're all related to the same role or client in your work life.

The Power of Keywords In the early days of computers and DOS, files had to be named with eight letters and a 3-character extension. As a result, we got into the habit of creating shorthand for naming documents. The problem (as with paper files) is that often we don't think of the same name every time we look for the document. Fortunately, we don't have that limitation anymore! The good news is that you now have up to 255 characters to name a file and the name can be a combination of words and phrases.

For example, when I am writing this article, I save it in My Documents/Word. I name it: Organizing Your Computer Files, article, 2003, website, DJ Watson, editor. Any of those words could be helpful to me when I, or someone else, try to find the file years from now.

In other words, to determine how to name a file, use the same technique as the one for paper files: Ask yourself, "If I want this file again, what word will I think of first?" Enter that word first, and then any other word or phrase that might help you retrieve that file. You can separate the identifying words with commas or semicolons. (Some punctuation marks and symbols are not allowed.)

Finding Your Electronic File in 5 Seconds or Less!

So let's say I'm out of town and my assistant needs to find this article. She can go to the Start Menu, Search, My Documents and type in any of the words I used to describe the article voila! It's there in seconds!

My favorite electronic coup: An editor of a banking publication calls to say they would like an article for their newsletter (today, of course!). I do a search on "Article" and instantly I have a list of every article in my computer. I scan the list quickly and see an article I wrote for a real estate newsletter, which I can easily adapt in a fraction of the time if would take me to write a new article!

Information is power if you can find it when you need it! (And you'll really feel smug when others can find it too!)

© Barbara Hemphill is the author of Kiplinger's Taming the Paper Tiger at Work and Taming the Paper Tiger at Home and co-author of Love It or Lose It: Living Clutter-Free Forever. The mission of Hemphill Productivity Institute is to help individuals and organizations create and sustain a productive environment so they can accomplish their work and enjoy their lives. We do this by organizing space, information, and time. We can be reached at 800-427-0237 or at www.ProductiveEnvironment.com

Financial Aspects Of Online Business Startup Advertising

2009-03-01T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Sean Mize

There are two ways to do things online---on a shoestring or with a budget. If you are operating on a shoestring, you are going to need to do things like article submissions, forum posting, and other free traffic methods. If you have a budget, you have the flexibility of adding in ezine ads, PPC, and paid article marketing.

You need to decide up front how much money you can spend online, and then you need to stick to your budget. If you have a campaign that is not making you any money, you cannot throw money at it and have it start making money. You will just be spending more money. On every campaign you do you will either bring in less than you spent, you will break even, or you will make a profit. This sounds simple, but I think that too often people forget that every campaign they do needs to make money. Just because you are making more than you are spending online is not enough. You must make changes to every campaign that is either breaking even or losing money--even if you have plenty of others that are making you money.

If you decide to go the 'free' route and generate traffic without spending any money, know one thing: you will pay for your 'free' traffic with time. And there is nothing wrong with that, as long as you know it up front. You will need to commit several hours per day to generating traffic. If you do, you should make it online. If you do not, you will not make money online.

This has been an excerpt from "Step by Step Guide to Building an Online List", a step by step report on building massive lists. To read more by this author, simply follow this link: Internet Marketing Secrets

Are you interested in learning how to build a responsive mailing list? Click here: List Building

Jump Start Your Credit Repair Business

2009-02-28T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Jay Conners

If you own, or work for a credit repair business and you are looking to add some clients to your book of business, buying credit repair leads may not be a bad place to start.

Credit repair leads may not be a bad choice because these potential customers have committed to having their credit repaired by a professional such as yourself.

People looking for credit repair are not just surfing the web looking for information, they are serious about it and are waiting on a phone call.

Where can you find credit repair leads?

Credit repair lead companies are out there and are very easy to find by using just about any search engine available over the internet.

Look for credit repair companies that obtain their own leads through sites they own and operate them selves. This way you can be sure that the lead is of good quality.

Steer clear of companies that buy their leads from third party vendors and than sell them to credit repair companies at a profit.

This type of credit repair lead is better known as a recycled lead, or better put, plain old junk.

So, when buying credit repair leads, research the companies you are considering doing business with very carefully.

You work hard for your money, so make sure you get what you pay for.

Jay Conners is the owner of two mortgage related lead sites where he obtains leads from people looking for credit repair. Please visit his sites at http://www.callprospect.com/credit_repair_leads.html And http://www.callprospect.com

Culture Shock When Moving From An Urban To A Rural Area

2009-02-27T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Jody Hudson

Culture Shock: When Moving From an Urban to a Rural Area.

by Jody Hudson

Rural Real Estate is popular. But, Think ahead and don't open yourself up for; Culture Shock; An Unnecessary Evil, when moving to a rural area. Anyone CAN prevent some of the Culture Shock that may occur when they move to a rural neighborhood!

Before you move to a rural property -- get to know the folks there and seek to learn the culture of the area -- the existing culture -- NOT the one you are accustomed to and not the one you want to make it into.

Our company just recently sold one of the most perfect Homestead Properties I've ever seen, at a very low price! Why? Because the new owner made himself so unwelcome in his new environment and so terribly alienated the neighbors that they eventually made him unbearably uncomfortable. Thus, he no longer wanted to live there.

He is an impolite environmentalist and decided to move from the city to a rural community where many of the families go back 400 years on the same land. He was a city boy with a degree in forestry, biology and ecology and had not a wit of people sense. His applied religion was based on watching Walt Disney movies; where the trees talk and man is evil and animals and plants are perfect.

He didn't want his new neighbors to hunt deer, to farm the fields early in the morning, to use agricultural chemicals or artificial fertilizers on the crops. He didn't like the airplanes that sprayed the killer bugs early in the morning. He didn't like the smell of chicken and pig manure spread on the fields either. He spoke out constantly, loudly and aggressively. He made enemies of nearly all his neighbors. He's gone now and I hope the new purchaser, also from the city, will not repeat his social errors.

Most of the folks that live here are great and realize they are in a new place and seek to become a part and work within our cultural, social and economic structures. Most of our new arrivals are wonderful and we have many as the population here in southern Delaware is doubling about every 6 years!

There is a tiny noisy scat of people, only a tiny few, who come and hate it here. Yet they left where they were to come have a better life in this area. We see it all the time. The locals call them environmental whackos, tree huggers, bug kissers and much worse. These are the people who have learned all about nature from Walt Disney, Nature Channel, Discovery Channel and Sierra magazine. And yes they often have college degrees. They are not aware that reality is different from their movies, readings, classes and dreams. Thus too many of them flee the city and then seek to enforce their ignorance and miseducation on those in the community they have joined. They try to bully others and try to get them to agree with the rules, regulations, concepts and philosophy they left behind in the city. NOT a good plan if they want to have a pleasant place to live. Many of these folks think they know more about nature, trees, plants, animals, the earth and everything else; than those whose families have lived in harmony with earth's life forms for decades or even centuries here. Hopefully my strong language above has impressed you to read and learn here, rather than at the eventually harsh hands of a rural community if you don't pay attention to what is here.

It is wise to visit the area you plan to live several times before you move there. Join the church, support the Volunteer Fire Department, buy gas at the closest gas station, purchase your beer or wine at the local liquor store, become familiar with every public area and visit the community centers and philanthropic groups in the area. Most of all chat with folks and tell them you are considering a move into the area and ask them for advice. Visit the Lions Club, Sertoma, Elks, Rotary, Red Men, etc., and seek to learn instead of teaching. Listen instead of talking. Ask, don't tell.

There is little, if anything, the newcomer can teach the locals about local things. If you must try to teach the locals something; if you try to teach them about your expertise where you came from, what you were paid to do in the past, about the job and area you fled (if you can find anyone who cares) - you are on a wrong course and will shorely wreck.

Obviously, if you are one of those people who left all that urban stuff, you are one who doesn't really find it all that valuable either. Otherwise you should have stayed there. And you can bet that is exactly what your neighbors will be thinking if you move into a rural area and take a know-it-all and I'm-so-much-smarter-because-I-come-from-the-city attitude. They may be quiet, or even polite in your presence for a while, but that sort of an attitude will cause only animosity in those around you. And, they will talk about you, briefly to each other and your bad attitude will preceed you and be nearly impossible to correct later.

Find out what the community needs and wants from new or prospective members, such as yourself; really find out, don't guess or assume and leave pre-judgement out of the picture. We've had numerous folks who have moved here to be marketing experts or PR experts or Graphic Design experts. Not one of the several dozen I've met over the last 30 years is still in

business and none of them are even still here as far as I know. The service they were hoping to charge big money for was not wanted at any price, not even free.

One of my customers from some twenty five years ago -- moved from San Francisco into a "small (pop. 800) unspoiled, rural, quaint, picturesque town -- populated with salt-of-the-earth and down-to-earth folks" as she spoke of them at first. The couple I speak of had gelded their son, actually they had a surgeon do it, so that his voice would not change with age - all so he could sing in a world famous choir.

They wanted to start training the locals to build a "Boy's Choir". They were infuriated that the local school district would not support a boy's choir that they were certain could be the envy of the world, if they could just show everyone how to do everything. A year later they spoke of "the nasty little town full of stupid irritable ignorant slobs, shanties, shacks, old trucks, fat toothless men, red necks, gossipy women, uneducated Rubes and inbred hicks whose idea of culture was a beer and burger in a pickup truck.". The San Franciscans are gone now too. Their name seldom comes up, and when it does, it is not in a good humor or a good vein.

I am in the business of selling rural land, forests and homes. I love the people who already live in the several areas where I work. I love the customers I do business with. MOST of the time, the newcomers fit in well with the preexisting community. Some, very few, of my customers move in and spoil the area for themselves and for a little while, for those already here. The only reason is that they have not learned of the REALITY of rural, country life in the particular community before they purchase there.

It is often, in fact usually, not possible to rent before buying in a particular area; so it is very, very wise to look well before you leap into a rural community if you did not grow up there. Even if you did grow up in a rural area and then did not stay in touch with family and friends there since, you may find you no longer fit in. But you can relearn those customs you left behind, if you really want to "return to your roots". And if you've never lived in the area, you can learn the ethnicity, the customs, and learn to be a good neighbor.

IF you seek to fit in and contribute to the community, according to what IS really needed and wanted in that particular community -- you may well enjoy a type of heaven-on-earth in your new home.

One fellow comes to mind who came, loved and was well loved. He was a military radio expert who had traveled the world, made tons of money, lived in DC and Northern Virginia for decades. Attended the finest, fastest, and most expensive functions in the area and after retirement decided to move to our rural resort area. He moved here at the height of the CB craze, when almost everyone of the rural folks had a CB and wanted it to work better or needed one properly installed in their home or car. He did it all free of charge for anyone who asked. He was after all retired. Every time I visited him he'd load up my Wagoneer with eggs, fruits and vegetables from the farms, orchards and gardens of those he'd helped. I helped him with making the contacts he wanted to make and with getting permissions to private "fishing holes" away from everything. He was a catch and release fisherman and would always clean up any and all trash around the fishing hole, before he even started fishing there.

One neighbor kept this gentleman's grass cut and told him he get a good cussing if he wastefully bought a lawnmower. Another neighbor wouldn't take a nickel for changing the brakes on his car. Another neighbor fixed his roof for free. Several of the ladies in the neighborhood would cook some extra dinner for him, two or three times a week, and bring it over. He was invited to dine somewhere in the surrounding community almost every night. And, he was asked for stories of his world travels and the fancy parties he went to. He was fit, and actually fairly wealthy as he lived simply, had been paid well and invested well during his working years.

He could have afforded an expensive home but he chose instead to live simply and well within his means. His car broke down, it was about 8 years old, one time and he pulled over, got out and planned to walk a couple of miles to get some help. He told me three cars stopped to give him a ride in the space of a few minutes and one of them, in a pickup truck hooked up his car and towed it to another friends house where it was fixed for free.

He later sold the car at a very reasonable price to a lady in the neighborhood who really needed some help. He sold it to her for $1,000 -- about what the dealership would have given him and a couple of thousand less than one would have cost her. He paid cash for another car three years old. He could have afforded a new Mercedes, if he wanted one. He was constantly telling me how great his neighbors where. Why? Because he was a good neighbor to everyone else!

He passed away, we don't know why, and there were hundreds at his funeral, more than most natives would have and none were family... He left a nice inheritance to the local volunteer fire department, for new equipment and asked that instead of flowers, folks plant a tree. We use him as an example of a GREAT newcomer and he set a high standard for us all as neighbors!

Jody Hudson has been a Realtor in Delaware since 1972 and has sold in many areas of America as well. He has a lot of other articles and essays on his web site: http://www.kate-jody.com/essays/index.html

Pricing Your Products

2009-02-26T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Marc Singer

In our scramble to find a way to offer the lowest prices on the Internet, we often overlook the basic steps that we should be taking BEFORE we even offer a product for sale.

We also overlook something even more important: you don't HAVE to have the lowest price in order to make great sales. Following are some things I do before and after determining my bottom line. I sell by having products drop-shipped for my sites, which works VERY well, but these steps should be covered no matter your distribution method.

Should you be selling this item now?

Snowboards don't sell well in the summertime. You may have a hard time moving a pair of roller blades in January. Don't waste your time and your site space marketing products out of season. Ask your supplier for a little historical information regarding the best time to sell their products. Believe me, to everything, there IS a season. They have the figures. If they don't want to share this info with you, find another supplier.

Identify your costs

Profit isn't just the difference between wholesale and retail. You have other costs to consider. Think about every penny you spend in order to get that product to the customer's door, and plan accordingly. For example, your merchant account probably costs you about 2.2% plus 30 cents per transaction. On an item you'll sell for $20, that's 74 cents. Don't forget that calculation when pricing the item. Are you warehousing the item? How much is that space costing you per item per month? Did you spend money stocking up on shipping materials? How much per unit? What about advertising? Monthly hosting costs? You may need to project some estimated sales in order to arrive at some of these figures.

This may seem very complicated, but it's really not. Just take the figures one at a time, and you'll arrive at a wholesale cost plus an amount that, when added together, becomes your initial ESTIMATE of "cost of goods sold". Identifying all your costs is critical if you want to price your products properly.

Check out the competition

Search on the item you plan to sell. Check out the competitors' prices. But DON'T get caught up trying to beat the wrong competitor. You need to stay within your "venue".

My stores are built in Yahoo Shopping (http://store.yahoo.com). 90% of my traffic comes from there. When I seek out my competitors, I look for other businesses like mine ONLY in Yahoo Shopping. Then I compare.

If I'm thinking about selling a product, and I get 1,500 hits in 400 stores on that item in Yahoo Shopping, forget it. If I get a hundred hits in 20 to 40 stores, I'll look into it further.

So check out the competition, narrow down your product list, make a note of the five lowest prices you find, and then ask yourself another question:

Is anybody going to buy this thing?

This doesn't have much to do with pricing, but it should be said.

When considering products, there's unique, and then there's too unique. Yak Cheese may sound like something that nobody else has for sale on the 'Net. There's a reason for that. If you sell more than 3 boxes a year, I'll EAT some.

Unique is Rain Barrels made in Maine. It's Exotic Cheeses imported from Italy. Silk Parisian Lingerie. Things you don't see every day, but would be proud to give as a gift.

Then there's "common". Everybody and their grandmothers are selling Alabaster Figurines on the Internet. Do they sell? Sure, in a limited fashion. Do you want to sell them? Not if you want to make any real money.

In my experience, unique products, like Rain Barrels and Parisian Lingerie, DO sell. So do Coleman Sleeping Bags, and Conair Hair Dryers. BRAND NAMES sell. Look at your potential product, and ask yourself honestly if YOU would buy it on the 'Net.

Set your price

Take the five lowest prices you collected on a product in your list that has survived the above. Calculate your estimated cost, then subtract that from the lowest price. If you don't see at LEAST 15% profit, don't bother.

If you do, there are a couple of ways to proceed. You can undercut the lowest price in your "venue" by a bit, and hope to "kick off" the product and get yourself noticed. Chances are, though, that the following week you'll find that someone has undercut YOUR price by just a bit. That becomes a losing game.

I generally set up a couple of "loss leaders". These are desirable items (in my general product line) that I sell dirt cheap just to bring in customers. Then I price the rest of my products at the second or third lowest price in my venue. The customers come in for the loss leaders, and then I can market everything else to them via email. I spend a lot of time making my site look better and easier to navigate, and pay a great deal of attention to my customers.

That makes me more reputable in the eyes of the customer. You'll find that people don't mind paying just a little more if they feel comfortable in your store. They don't like to worry that they're buying from a "hack" who may not deliver. Nothing says "hack" like a cluttered, confusing storefront.

Follow up

After you've sold an item for a month or two, revise that "cost of goods sold". Measuring past performance is just as important as setting the correct price to begin with. If sales drop, recheck your competition. If that's not it, drop the product, or shelve it until the "season" comes back around. Don't get sentimental about your products, and NEVER just let your store sit there in limbo once it starts to make money. This is a dynamic business; stay on top of it!

A last word (or three)

Retail pricing on the Internet is so fraught with permutations that it would be impossible to cover everything here, even if I KNEW everything. The steps above are just the basics of a process that works for me. Hopefully something here will strike a chord and work for you as well. Patience and persistence are the keys to a successful Internet business, so hang in there, and don't quit the day job for at least a couple of weeks. ;o)

I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

About The Author

Marc Oswald Singer

CEO WSP Advertising Inc.

http://www.wspromotion.com/

Compassion Bringing Your Humanity To Work

2009-02-25T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Roger Schwarz

Compassion is one of five principles of the Skilled Facilitator approach. (It's also one of the four core values of the approach.) I have already written about the other four principles: curiosity, commitment, accountability, and transparency.

Compassion means temporarily suspending judgment so that you can appreciate others' perspectives or situations when they are different from your own. To be compassionate you need to be genuinely concerned about the other person or people's needs. You need to think about and feel it from their perspective.

Here's a simple example. When I'm teaching facilitators to work with groups, sometimes they get really frustrated by the group. The group members don't stay on task or they don't keep commitments. When the facilitators get frustrated they wonder why I can seem so "patient." My answer is that I have compassion for the group. The team members are trying to change (which is why we're working with them) and they don't always change at the pace we would like them to. Getting angry at the team for not changing fast enough doesn't help them or me.

If you're working with someone who is feeling overwhelmed by his workload and you don't think he has that much work to do, being compassionate means temporarily saying to yourself, "This sounds really difficult for him. Let me understand how he's thinking and feeling about it. I may be missing things that he sees." It's easy to be compassionate when you agree with the other person's situation; it's more difficult - and more meaningful - when you're compassionate with others who see things very differently from you.

Sometimes people think that compassion means feeling sorry for people and taking care of them in a way that rescues them. Not in our approach. Our definition of compassion means appreciating their situation and holding them accountable. It means sharing all the relevant information with someone even if she may feel bad hearing it. Sometimes a client will tell me, "I don't want to give a coworker negative feedback because it would hurt her feelings." But when you withhold feedback that can help someone change and improve, you take away the chance to change. I think that's cruel, not compassionate.

When I introduced compassion to my work a number of years ago, I was concerned that my clients (some of whom work in scientifically-based organizations) would see it as "touchy-feely." To my surprise and relief, they immediately understood the value of compassion - often because it was missing in their own workplace.

It's hard to have compassion for others if you don't have compassion for yourself. As a recovering perfectionist, I know this well. As long as I demanded perfection of myself, I would take myself to task when I didn't meet my own standards. And I did the same with others. If you are always judging yourself unfairly; you will do the same to others.

Compassion makes it easier to use the other principles I've discussed in earlier columns. When you have compassion, it's natural to be curious about what leads people to do what they do and it's easier to be transparent about what you're thinking. That's because the questions you ask and the points of view you share stem from your interest in learning rather than simply judging. When you have compassion, it's easier to maintain accountability because accountability is in the service of development rather than punishment. And when you have compassion, you are more likely to surface everyone's underlying needs; that makes it easier to generate commitment.

What do you think? Share your thoughts with me and others at the Mutual Learning Action Group.

Roger Schwarz, Ph.D., is author of the international bestseller "The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Managers, Trainers and Coaches" and co-author of the recent "Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook: Tips, Tools, and Tested Methods for Consultants, Facilitators, Managers, Trainers, and Coaches," both available on Amazon.com and via other quality booksellers.

You can subscribe on our site to Fundamental Change, Roger Schwarz & Associates' free, monthly ezine: http://www.schwarzassociates.com/ezine_signup.html In exchange for subscribing, you'll receive a link to a free .pdf copy of "Holding Risky Conversations," a chapter from our recently-published fieldbook.

We write Fundamental Change to help you create workplaces and communities that are simultaneously highly effective and that improve the quality of life.

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* Address issues important to you as practitioners and leaders
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Selling A Business

2009-02-24T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Kent Pinkerton

Once you have decided to sell your business, there are a number of steps that you need to take to help you ensure that you find the best deal possible. Among these steps, one of the most important is for you to be aware of the process of selling your business. This is because selling a business is considered one of the most complex processes in business. In addition to this you need to ensure that you cover all your bases so that you get the best deal for a business that you have worked so hard to build.

The first step you need to take is to make sure that the decision of selling your business is confidential. If word gets out that you are selling your business, it may have some adverse effects not only on your workers and suppliers, but also on your customers. The next step you need to take is to look for a broker who can put in the legwork in looking for interested buyers. However, you need to ensure that you are dealing with a reputable broker. One of the ways to do this is to get referrals from the Better Business Bureau in your area. After doing so, you need to contact an appraiser who would give you a fair valuation of your business, which can be helpful in the negotiations with potential buyers.

Once your broker has located a buyer who has offered you a price that you are willing to accept, the buyer then needs to furnish you with a Letter of Intent, which outlines the terms and the tentative price of the transaction. Usually, these letters allow buyers to investigate your business and to work out whatever needs to be finalized for the sale. After which, a purchase agreement would be drafted, which finalizes the details of the sale and then it would be signed and the sale becomes complete.

Selling a business is considered one of the most complex transactions in business. Therefore, entrepreneurs who are planning to sell their business need to do their homework to ensure that they get a good deal. This includes knowing the process of selling a business very well because doing so can help business owners get the best possible deal for their businesses.

Selling A Business provides detailed information on Selling A Business, Selling A Website Business, Selling A Small Business, Tips For Selling A Business and more. Selling A Business is affiliated with Merger And Acquisition Strategies.

Rental Companies Have Record Year

2009-02-23T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Mike Mavison

2005 proved to be a very good year for the rental industry. Several companies showed record earnings and revenues last year. Caterpillar, H&E, Ingersoll-Rand, and JLG were among the leaders in earnings.

Caterpillar, Peoria, IL, had record profits and revenues in the third quarter. With revenues of $8.98 billion and profit of $667 million both numbers were up dramatically from the 2004 year. Caterpillar attributed the growth to strong global demand and improved pricing.

H&E Equipment out of Baton Rouge, LA had a very strong third quarter as well. Their gross profit rose to $13.4 million, an increase of 40.1 percent from the year before. They also had a revenue increase of 22.7 percent to $27.5 million that quarter.

Ingersoll-Rand, Annadale, NJ showed an increase of 10 percent in the third quarter to $2.6 billion. This was led by growth in their compact vehicle technologies, construction technologies, industrial technologies, and security technologies. There was also an increase in their parts, service, attachments, rental and used equipment sections.

JLG Industries, McConnellsburg, PA had a record fourth quarter as well. With a sales increase nationally of 33 percent and 36 percent internationally JLG showed a 34 percent increase in over all revenue.

Financial forecasts were upbeat and hopeful for this year as well. Equipment prices will be higher this year due to higher material and transportation costs, but the demand for renal equipment should not change.

Article From http://www.rentalcow.com.

What To Say When The Media Calls

2009-02-22T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Carolyn Moncel

If the media were to call you today for an interview, would you know what to do or say? That question was posed during a recent conference on small-business ownership and micro enterprise creation, which was held here in Paris. I watched the reactions around the room, and it occurred to me that for most small-business owners, the only thing more frightening than conducting a follow-up phone call with a reporter is having that same reporter actually interview them.

There is only one way to overcome the fear. You have to simply adopt and apply an old U.S. Army recruitment slogan, "Be Prepared." Don't get caught without an answer the next time the media calls. Follow these quick tips for success:

Ask the reporter to describe the subject and story angle for the interview.

Establish the medium for the interview (i.e. live or taped television, print, radio, etc.)

Discover when (date and time) and where (by phone, e-mail or in person) the interview will take place. Also try to determine if the reporter will need additional information from you, as well as the story's deadline.

Research the reporter's past articles so that you'll be comfortable with the story's tone.

Create talking points. These are brief positive statements about you and your company that you will want to be included in the story.

Anticipate the types of questions that that reporter might ask, and prepare truthful answers for them.

Assume that everything you say to a reporter - jokingly or otherwise, will be used in the story. Always be aware of what is being stated, and if an awkward silence develops, don't feel obligated to keep talking if you have no more to say on the subject matter.

Avoid speculation or hypothetical situations. It could lead to being misquoted. You are the expert so stick to what you know.

Admit when you don't know the answer to a question. However, make it your top priority to find the answers and deliver them to the reporter immediately. It is also fine to take a moment to think before answering a question.

Avoid using technical terms or jargon. You must be able to explain your ideas simply and concisely.

Take notes and don't be afraid to ask the reporters questions as well.

Make yourself available by phone or e-mail in case the reporter has additional questions or wants to do a final fact check before completing the story. This will help give clarification to something you've said or give an opportunity to fix something if you've misspoken.

Thank the reporter for selecting you for the interview.

About The Author

Carolyn Davenport-Moncel is president and founder of Mondave Communications, a global marketing and communications firm based in Chicago and Paris, and a subsidiary of MotionTemps, LLC. Contact her at carolyn@motiontemps.com or by phone in the United States at 877.815.0167 or 011.331.4997.9059 in France.

Paper Shredder Reviews

2009-02-21T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Peter Emerson

Paper shredder reviews offer critical evaluation of the features and functionality of paper shredders. Paper shredders have now become an integral part of stationery accessories. Paper shredders are available aplenty in the market with various specifications. Paper shredder reviews help you find out the right product which will meet your specific needs. Paper shredder reviews provide detailed information on the characteristics of paper shedders and compare their utility in practical experience.

Paper shredder reviews are generally written by customers out of their personal experience. However, some dealers include some promotional reviews also. Paper shredder reviews evaluate shredders based on the capacity and style. Paper shredder reviews are available for all the three styles of cutting mechanism such as crosscut model, strip cut and the confetti-cut.

Paper shredder reviews usually rate shedders with respect to their efficiency and pricing. The rating depends on the overall performance of the model, ease of maintenance, ease of use, reliability etc. Reviews also include the pros and cons of the product in detail. The narrated strengths and failures of the model are substantiated with the aid of personal examples. Special features of the product such as automatic sensors, built in features, noise level, multi utility etc are usually given preference in the reviews.

Paper shredder reviews also provide guidelines for consumers regarding maintenance and cleaning. They give information such as ideas for the proper disposal of the shedder waste, particular function of some keys, selection of the apt shredder bags, positioning of the shredders etc. Customer support from the company is usually given special appraisal in product reviews.

Paper shredder reviews are available in magazines and Internet sites. Paper shredder reviews are currently available for models such as Fellowes PS-70, Royal VF1000MX, Staples, Memorex Michael Graves Shredder, Aurora Electronics AS505S, GBC Shred master, Adler Royal HT500X, EPS-611X, Primera, and more.

Shredder provides detailed information on Shredder, Paper Shredder, File Shredder, Chip Shredder and more. Shredder is affiliated with Shrink Wrap Systems .

It Consultants Save Your Clients From Themselves

2009-02-20T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Joshua Feinberg

As professional IT consultants, don't let your clients be the first on the block to buy something new, unless they have a really good reason and can cost-justify the bleeding-edge purchases.

"Latest and Greatest" Isn't Always the Best Choice

While buying the "latest and greatest" does have its time and place, this kind of purchasing strategy really puts your neck on the line and can rapidly deplete your clients' limited technology budgets which of course they need to conserve to afford your expert guidance.

Instant Depreciation

Buying the latest and greatest PC, whether it's a desktop, notebook or server, is a lot like purchasing a new car at the beginning of the model year, as soon as it becomes available. Sure, your clients will get the fastest processor, the most RAM and the slickest supporting components.

However, your clients will pay steep price premiums for the novelty of being early adopters of state-of-the-art PCs. This means your clients may incur massive depreciation expenses much like the way new cars lose several thousand dollars in book value the moment you drive them off the dealer's lot.

IT Consultants Should Monitor Their Clients New PC Purchases

Because these PC purchase-related expenses are rarely trivial, start things off right by keeping your clients new PC purchases under close watch. Don't be shy about recommending bona fide bargains on last year's model whenever possible.

At the end of the day, this leaves more money in their technology budgets for high-level projects where IT consultants like you can really make a dent on your clients' bottom line results.

Where Smart IT Consultants Find PC bargains:

To keep abreast of special promotions and other PC bargains, check out the following sites

CNET Shopper -- www.shopper.com
eBay -- www.ebay.com
TechBargains -- www.techbargains.com

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Computer Consultants Secrets. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}

Joshua Feinberg has helped thousands of computer consultants around the World get more steady, high-paying clients. Learn how you can too get more steady, high-paying clients. Sign-up now for Joshua's free Computer Consultants Secrets audio training.

Create Or Buy Your Own Product

2009-02-19T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Sean Mize

One of the keys to making money online and creating a long-term viable income is that of owning your own means of profit. What that means is, whatever you do, you own it. Whether it is a product, a website, a marketing system, or a collection of leads, you must own it.

If you do not own it, you are simply building for someone else, much like when you work for someone else offline. When you build for someone else, sure, you receive a commission, but once you stop promoting, your income disappears.

So you must own the means of creating your own profit. If you choose to sell online, create or purchase a product. Then sell it. If you choose to promote a website, promote YOUR website, not someone else's. If you are building a list, build your own list, don't build one for someone else that you can mail. If you want to own a marketing system, build your own.

Does this mean you cannot promote someone else's product or system from time to time? Of course not. But promote it to YOUR list. Or what about using someone else's marketing system when you are first getting started? Sure, but do it to get started, knowing that on down the road, you will have your own.

Build your own website, and send traffic through it first--never send traffic directly to an affiliate site.

This has been an excerpt from "How to Create Your Very Own Online Money Making Empire", a step by step report on achieving remarkable success online. To read more by this author, simply follow this link: Internet Marketing Success

Are you interested in learning how to build a responsive mailing list? Click here: List Building

7 Simple Steps To Uncovering Great Niche Market Web Site Ideas

2009-02-18T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Brian Terry

Discover how easy it can be to come up with potentially profitable web site ideas by following these simple 7 steps.

1. What are your personal passions?

All niche marketing experts agree that when you're working on creating your first niche product it's important to "tap into" any passions you might already have.

Imagine how much easier it's going to be when you're working on something you have a real "passion" for!

Here's a great place you can start start to get things moving...

Spend 5 minutes "brainstorming" all that interest you, go ahead and just write down anything that comes to mind.

If you can't think of anything right now then I've got the perfect solution for you. Recently I created an amazing web site that actually generates niche website ideas at the "touch" of a button.

You can access this great web site idea generator right here for free: http://www.TheresAnIdea.com/new/web-site-marketing-idea.html

2. Who else shares your passion?

It's all very well having an interest or a passion, but what if there are few others who love what you love? What you need to look for is a large group of people (or a niche market) online who share your same passion.

This is easy to do, just go to Google.com type in the subject of your passion then add the word "forums" to the end, then press the "Google Search" button.

So for example if you have a passion for Fly Fishing just do a search in Google for "Fly Fishing Forums".

In less than a second you'll see at a glance how many forums there are about your chosen subject. Go ahead and check a few of them out so see how active they are.

It's these forums where you'll find all the people who will ultimately become your customers or visitors to your niche market website idea.

If there are none or very few of these forums, just go back to step 1. and brainstorm some more. On the other hand if there are plenty of these online forums around move onto step 3.

3. Show me the money!

Once you've found a market of people who share your interest there are a few more things you need to know before taking another step...

a) Do they have a credit card? b) Are they used to making online purchases.

The reason why you need to ask this is because not everyone has a credit card and is prepared to use it online.

So how do you find out if your niche market has what it takes to buy whatever you plan on selling?

Simply go back to the original search you did on Google. This time look at the advertisements on the right hand side of the page. If you can see plenty of advertisement that's great! it means that other people are paying money to advertise to your niche market (or the people who share your passion).

If there are few advertisements on your Google search results page, just go back to step 1 and start over.

4. Give 'em what they want!

Here's where the fun begins...

You've found your niche market, you know they have money to spend, now you need to find out what they want.

What you must do now is get into the "meat" of the matter and find out from the horses mouth exactly what people need, create a product to fill that need, then sell it to them.

How do you do this?

Step 1: Set up what's called an "Ask Campaign" website.

Step 2: Advertise your "Ask Campaign" website in Google to target your niche market.

5. Words are the true currency

It's time to get back to "brainstorming" again as this time we need to know what the people in your niche market are searching for, more specifically what words and phrases they're using.

There's a great free tool I recommend called "Good Keywords" which you can get here: http://www.goodkeywords.com.

This is the "brilliant" tool that's going to get you ever more "closer" to discovering your next great niche market web site idea. It's through this essential tool that you'll discover how many people are searching for things within your niche market.

What you need to do next is collect the top 10 keywords and phrases people are using within your niche market. Once armed with this list it's time to get your Ask Campaign set up and in place.

6. Ask it!

Everything you need to know about setting up an Ask Campaign can be found here: http://www.askdatabase.com

Once you've got your Ask Campaign website set up it's time to get it in front of as many people in your niche market as possible. What you're going to do is get them to ask you a question. The questions they ask you will reveal the problems they are facing. Once you know what problems they face you're in a great position to deliver the solution.

Here's my own Ask Campaign web site... go ahead an ask me a question :-) http://www.theresanidea.com/AskBrian.php

7. Google it!

Build it and they will come... only when you have your Google Ads in place!

To open up your Google AdWords account just go here: https://adwords.google.com/select/

What you're going to do now is write small ads that drive people to your "Ask Campaign" website where you just ask them to ask you a question, for example... "As someone interested in "X" what is the biggest problem you're facing right now?"

So there you have it... the "7 Simple Steps To Uncovering A Great Niche Market Web Site Idea".

Recently one of my subscribers asked me "If there was one single skill to master that makes the biggest difference as an online niche marketer, what would it be?"... I simply said, learn as much as you can about how to Advertise in Google.

To help you on your way, here's a great no cost Google Adwords course: http://www.theresanidea.com/adwords.html

Brian Terry is the creator of the world's first online niche market website idea generator. You can generate well over 4,708 niche web site ideas at the touch of a button by visiting There's An Idea!: http://www.TheresAnIdea.com/new/web-site-idea.html

Business Phone System Solutions

2009-02-17T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Ken Marlborough

Businesses today cannot afford important employees being out of touch. A business phone system is an ideal solution to this problem. Whether it is a small, medium or big business organization, business phone systems have become the absolute necessity in today's competitive world. Business phone system solutions also play a vital part in uplifting business establishments.

Modern business phone systems come with solutions for all the data transfer hassles in a business organization. Features such as auto attendant, call groups, cell phone call forwarding, call recording, call reporting, access for remote workers, email integration, and unified messaging are included in most businesses phone systems. These cutting edge features have helped to increase the productivity of big and small business organizations equally. Apart from increasing productivity, businesses phone systems solutions improve customer services. This enhances the relationship between customers and entrepreneurs.

The choice of business phone systems basically depends on the type of the business organization. Business phone systems are available in four different models. They are key systems, private branch exchange (PBX) systems, KSU-less phones and voice over IP (VoIP).

Small business organizations that require less number of extensions can opt from key phone or KSU-less phone business systems. The key phone type business system is perfect to support extensions above five and below forty. A KSU-less phone system is suitable for an organization that requires less than ten extensions. Thus, this system is widely used in small and home based business organizations.

But, if the number of extensions is more than 40, then private branch exchange (PBX) business phone system is the best solution. Earlier PBX businesses phone systems were very huge and extremely expensive. But with the advance of technology, the PBX businesses phone system has developed to a point that it can be accommodated on a desk. This type of business phone system can also be programmed, depending on one's need. With the introduction of the Internet, voice over IP systems became more popular. In recent years, voice over IP systems have incorporated the most advanced technologies for businesses everywhere.

Business Phone Systems provides detailed information on Business Phone Systems, Small Business Phone Systems, Affordable Business Phone Systems, Professional Business Phone Systems and more. Business Phone Systems is affiliated with Business Phone Services.

The Mathematics Of A Firefight

2009-02-16T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Arvind Kumar

When you examine the mathematics of a firefight, it's easy to see why the big company usually wins. Let's say that the Red squad with nine soldiers meets a Blue squad with six. Red has a 50 percent numerical superiority over the Blue. 9 versus 6. Or it could be 90 versus 60 or 9000 versus 6000. It makes no difference what the number are, the principle is the same.

Let's also say that, on the average, one out of every three shots will inflict a casualty.

After the first volley, the situation will have changed drastically. Instead of a 9 to 6 advantage, Red would have a 7 to 3 advantage. From a 50 percent superiority in force to a more than 100 percent superiority.

The same deadly multiplication effect continues with the passage of time.

After the second volley, the score would be 6 to 1 in favor of Red.

After the third volley, Blue would be wiped out completely.

Notice how the casualties were divided between the two sides. The superior force (Red) suffered only half the casualties of the inferior force (Blue).

This result may be just the opposite of what you have been led to believe by all those Hollywood movies-the handful of marines decimating a company of Japanese before the marines are finally overrun.

In real life it's different. What happens when a Volkswagen Beetle hits a GMG bus in a head-on collision? You wind up with a few scratches on the bumper of the bus and a very thin German pancake. (The bigger you are, the harder they fall.)

The two vehicles have exchanged momentum. It's a basic law of physics. The larger, heavier vehicle sustains less damage than the smaller, lighter force.

There's no secret to why the Allies won World War II in Europe. Where the Germans had two soldiers, we had four. Where they had four, we had eight. The skill and experience of an enemy who had practically invented modern warfare and the leadership of men like Rommel and Von Rundstedt could not change the mathematics of the battleground.

In the military, the numbers are so important that most armies have an intelligence branch known as the order of battle. It informs commanders of the size, location, and nature of the opposing force. (The case of General William C. Westmoreland against CBS was based on whether order of battle documents in the Vietnam war were falsified or not.)

This article may be re-printed as long as following resource box is included as it is with out any alteration.

This Marketing Idea is published by http://www.nuttymarketer.com Visit us to find more of cheeky gorilla Ideas.

Think Property First For Commercial Real Estate Mortage

2009-02-15T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Joseph Hanoa

Make sure the condition of the property you want to buy will survive market conditions before seeking a commercial real estate mortgage. When you go to purchase a new residence, a good lender does a thorough financial background check on the individual seeking to borrow money. On the other hand, when you go to apply for a commercial real estate mortgage, the lender's greatest concern is the property. Some of the most important issues include your credit score. But that's not enough. The lender wants to make sure the property is in pristine condition and will survive tumultuous market conditions.

Research the commercial market

Before deciding to seek a commercial real estate mortgage, scout the city or town and get a sense of the market conditions. Are there many "for rent" or "for sale" signs for multi-family units such as offices or apartments? Is the commercial property in a part of town that receives enough traffic flow or is it difficult to locate? Talk to professionals in the area to find out where you can find the best deals before obtaining a commercial real estate mortgage.

Prepare to put money down

Just as you would put money down on the purchase your dream house, you will need to come up with money for a commercial mortgage. Most lenders want between 15 and 20 percent down. Next, you are ready to see if you can pre-qualify for a property. A loan officer will put together a loan package before giving you a letter of interest. Then, the lender will review the file and create a loan document.

Gathering documents for mortgage

You can begin getting together the documents you need in order to move along the commercial mortgage process. Put together your employment history for the past two years as well as with salary, employment dates, pay stubs and the contact information of your employers. You should also figure out your net worth and list all other assets. Make sure you have all of your tax records organized. Bring along your social security card, the last three statements from savings and checking accounts, stocks and certificate of deposits. You should make a copy of your 401K or IRA plans, the title of your automobiles or loan information. Finally, write down the names, addresses and account numbers for all credit cards, loans and mortgages so those facts and figures will be handy for your loan officer.

Joseph is the proud owner of Commercial Estates, a website that will explain everything you need to know about Commercial Real Estate. We invite you to visit our site today and see what we have to offer.

The Story Behind Blue Cross Blue Shield

2009-02-14T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Christopher Luck

Developed in 1929 by a man named Justin Ford Kimball, Blue Cross was an association of health insurance plans. It was in 1982, after Blue Cross had originally lost its affiliation with the American Hospital Association, that they merged with National Association of Blue Shield Plans to form Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Technically, Blue Cross Blue Shield is a trade association for a series of locally operated plans. There are 40 local member companies of Blue Cross Blue Shiled that operate under the umbrella. In addition, the company, or rather its local affiliates, act as Social Security administrators. Many would say, in fact, that managed health care in the United States is very closely linked to the Blue Cross Blue Shield design.

Blue Cross Blue Shield's operating headquarters are located in Chicago Illinois and in Washington D.C. The company employs about 850 people in its headquarters. The Member Blue Plans part of the company employs over 15,000 people, making it one of the 20 largest employers in the United States.

About a third of all Americans, including those in Puerto Rico, or 93 million Americans, are being provided health care from Blue Cross Blue Shield. Their insurance plans reach a variety of people through a variety of products including those for small business, large corporations, or private individuals.

Since the inception of Medicare by the US government in 1965, Blue Cross Blue Shield has helped to process the claims and payments. In 2003, in fact, the company's Medicare contractors processed about 90 percent of the Medicare claims from hospitals and about 72 percent of those from physicians and practitioners in the health field.

The Blue Card Program is one that links healthcare providers and each individual Blue Plan in the country through one electronic network for both claims processing and reimbursement. This allows them to serve large nationally known corporations like Microsoft, Xerox, and UPS. Over half of the fortune 500 companies are covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The company also includes a very comprehensive website. There, you can find out more about the history of the company, locations for the 40 national member companies that are in line with Blue Card Program, and you can also look up doctors and hospitals on the Blue Card Program. There is contacts information and even a very comprehensive frequently asked questions page that is helpful. Press releases are easy to find, as is the glossary, which is very helpful if you are unfamiliar with insurance and health care related vocabulary. Overall, the website is easy to navigate, easy to read, and most importantly it is comprehensive and helpful.

If you are wondering about healthcare options, then you should at the very least know who Blue Cross Blue Shield is. Through the information available here or at there website, you will be able to make educated decisions on whether or not their healthcare is right for you or your company.

Christopher M. Luck has over 15 years experience in working in upper management at Blue Cross Blue Sheildand is now offering his free professional Health Advice to the public. If you are at all interested in Christopher's health insurance advice, tips, or secrets, you can visit his health insurance blog.

10 Blazing Ways To Skyrocket Your Profits

2009-02-13T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Rudy Cline

1. Use a "P.S." at the end of your ad copy. This is were you either want to repeat a strong benefit or use a strong close like a free bonus.

2. Publish a free ebook and give it away from your web site or in your e-zine. This will increase your traffic, sales and e-zine subscribers.

3. Create multiple streams of income with your web site. You could sell your own products, join affiliate programs, sell advertising space, etc.

4. Give your visitors compliments in your ad copy. This can earn their trust and put them in a good mood, in return they will be easier to sell too.

5. Create new products or services only if there is a strong need for them. You won't have anyone to sell them to if you don't have a market.

6. Sell your backend products to your customers right after they order. Take them to a "Thank You" web page that includes other products you sell.

7. Sell a few products on your web site instead of selling a large amount of products. To many choices can overwhelm your visitors and they won't buy.

8. Include content and free stuff on your web site that promote the products you're selling. If they don't read your ads, they may read your offerings.

9. Remind your visitors that you're human not just a web site. You could publish information on your family life, a picture of yourself , a profile, etc.

10. Provide a "Contact Page" on your web site. Give your visitors as many options to contact you as possible. This'll add credibility to your business.

Rudy Cline publishes "Home Business Tips", a fresh and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people like YOU! If you`re looking for the *best rated* home business opportunities from an honest friend in the business, come by and grab a F-R-E-E subscription today at: http://www.homeworkforyou.org

How To Know If The Interior Design Business Is Right For You

2009-02-12T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Robert Smith

Have you ever seen a beautiful house or office building and wondered who did the work? Have you ever wished that you could do some of the work that you've seen elsewhere? Many people wonder what it would be like to be an Interior Designer, but they rarely ever go beyond thinking about it.

An interior Designer is a consultant. You are there to beautify any particular environment as well as provide your clients with the service of explaining why you are recommending, and doing the things that your project will require. You must educate your client about interior design as well as design.

You have obviously given the idea of being an Interior Designer serious thought or you wouldn't be reading this. Of course, like most people, you are probably wondering whether or not it is the right choice for you. I can guarantee you, that after you've read this, you will know for sure if Interior Design is the right career choice for your future.

Interior Design can be a very lucrative job choice for the right person. You might be wondering exactly what an Interior Designer does. It is really simple. An Interior Designer creates, organizes, and designs commercial and/or residential properties. Basically, an interior designer works with the interior of a particular space, such as rooms, offices, boardrooms, and various other internal spaces. Here is a list of some of the places that interior designers can work in: hotels, banks, restaurants, stadiums, arenas.

This doesn't seem very broad, but think of all of the other types of homes and businesses that I didn't mention. The possibilities are truly endless in this field. Interior Designers do more than just decorate a space. In some cases they can add extra rooms, design patios and gazebos, add or remove wall space, and they spend a great deal of time networking with people.

Interior Designers are responsible for creating a comfortable and relaxed space for their clients to live and/or work in. It is your duty to offer clients the best work that their needs, and budget can give. People put a great deal of trust in you, and you must reward that with the best final result possible.

About The Author
Robert Smith Find more articles and tips about decorating interior design by visiting http://www.decorating-interior-design.com This article is available for reprint in your opt-in ezine, web site or ebook. You MUST agree not to make any changes to the article and the RESOURCE BOX MUST be included. (c) 2002-2005 www.decorating-interior-design.com All Rights Reserved

Should We Admit Failure

2009-02-11T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Jeffery Glaze

Failure is something that none of us ever plans for but it is a part of the human condition. As we go through our lives there are few if any who have never experienced this phenomenon. So as we experience failure, how do we accept it and move on if we are unable to admit it?

I am not suggesting that when we fail that we broadcast our failure to the world at large. I am suggesting though that admitting failure is a necessary tool that we must use if we are ever to be successful again.

An admission of failure is a very personal thing and it should be done with those whom we have a special relationship. Often we can find it difficult to admit to those we love that we have failed. It is especially difficult to admit failure to those who had expected it from the beginning.

To be wildly successful at anything requires us to go into a venture with a narrow definition of what success looks like. if we have not defined success before we attempt something, how do we know when it is time to give up on it and try something else?

Most people define success as having a dollar amount attached to it, but it is always not a financial reward that comes with success, often success is totally unrelated to finance.

Therefore as we work in a business we must be prepared to make a determination as to what success in that business looks like. If our success depends on a financial reward, we need to know what we must do to achieve that reward, otherwise we are at risk of failure. If on the other hand success is determined by the impact that we have on the lives of others, we can not always expect that this success will have financial reward.

So is it possible then to actually fail and succeed at the same time? This is the point that I would like you to ponder. As you go through your life, ask yourself what the impact is that you have had on the lives of others. Then weigh that impact on the result that you have achieved. It may not be a situation where you can claim a financial victory immediately, but it may also be a situation where you are primed to go forward and accomplish something that will reap a great financial reward.

It is with this thought that I would like to close this article. I know you have read the books that used this phrase and I believe that to achieve success we must all be prepared to live by these words. Whether we are successful now or have been in the past, we are all involved in a process of "Failing Forward" and it is in this common condition that we should all remember to be supportive of others when we see their need for support.

Jeff Glaze is the Editor of http://www.AtlantaEvent.com, founder of http://www.privacy-first.com e-mail certification program and the author of several e-books. His company, Mostcool Media Inc. ( mostcoolmedia.com ), specializes in marketing planning, coaching, business networking training, web and media development. His e-book "The Six Xtremes Of Power Business Networking" is available here: http://www.atlantaevent.com/ebook.htm Jeff Glaze is available to speak to your group and can be contacted at 678.508.5975 Copyright © 2006 by MostCool Media Inc.

5 Great Ways To Make Money Online

2009-02-10T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Andrew Jamaz

The reality is that there are so many ways to make money online that the hard part is choosing what avenue you would like to take first! There are several E-commerce opportunities available on the Internet that would allow you to work from home. As with any information you receive from the Internet, be sure to do your homework. Research all companies before you sign up or invest with them.

Affiliate income: Selling someone else's proven product can be a great way to earn income without a high investment. Using your unique link, you refer customers to their product site and when they buy you receive a commission. Sometimes as much as 50%! If you have your own product you can also use affiliate programs to drive traffic to your website. Special tracking software is available to keep track of your affiliate programs.

Selling on Ebay: There are many ways to sell on Ebay. Many people clean out the attic and sell what they find. Others scour yard sales and flea markets for unique and/or valuable finds. Still others market their new products by holding auctions and opening a storefront directly on Ebay. For a small fee you can set up an action on Ebay. And don't worry, you can set a reserve price to make sure you get at least as much as you want/need for the item.

Selling E-books: The number one product for sale on the Internet today is information. The term E-book is short for electronic book. They are books available, for a cost, for immediate download. Any information you have that would be beneficial to someone else can be packaged and sold as an e-book. No printing costs, no shipping costs, high markup. Most e-books are in .pdf format, and can be read with Adobe's free software Acrobat Reader, which makes them all the more appealing to the layperson.

Taking Surveys: Believe it or not these companies not only ask for your opinion, but actually pay you for it. What a find! By filling in an online survey for these companies you are helping them with market research, and they can reward you by paying you or offering you gifts or special offers.

Earning per click from Adsense: Adsense is a program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to put text, image, and video ads on their sites. These ads then pay you on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. AdSense has become popular because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is targeted to the website. This service is free and involves a minimal time investment. It is also customizable so that its appearance will compliment your site scheme.

This Article By Incomemax.com. There are thousands of opportunities to make money online at Incomemax.com. Visit us today!

Advanced Ftp Hosting For Designers Architects Printers Etc

2009-02-09T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Adam Hobach

Irrespective of their business volume, companies are registering for FTP hosting services to make client communication efficient and secure. If you are looking for a smart option to send large files over the Internet then it is recommended to register for advanced FTP hosting services. Advanced FTP hosting service provides necessary support to transfer large digital files safely from one computer to another via Internet. Email service is not sufficient for business process to exchange vast pool of information, nor it is the right option to keep the information away from Internet predators.

FTP, commonly known as File Transfer Protocol, is an efficient communication protocol that serves all purposes of corporate communication. You can send large files irrespective of their format (text file, image file, audio file, video file, multimedia file, etc.) through Internet by keeping the privacy of the content. Advanced FTP service provider will allocate separate space in their server as you register for FTP hosting service. This space will remain private for your business and allow you to store information in the allocated space that you want to share with other.

Advantage of File Transfer Protocol

File transfer protocol comes with two major advantages transmitting large digital files and securing the information. Large file size is the main barrier for sending digital information over the Internet. You can share information and transfer files in the following ways:

Sending files as attachment via Email
Uploading files on the FTP server to share with other parties

There is a drawback in the first option. Email does not always allow files, which are large in size. Moreover, a mail server doesn't always support all files types. Some common file extension, which are restricted by the mail server: '.wav', '.scr', '.pif', '.exe', '.bat', '.com', '.lnk', '.hta', etc.

There is no restriction on file type in FTP hosting service. Therefore you can easily transfer files via FTP server.

Advanced FTP hosting services are the right option for Designers, Architects and Printers to share their files over the Internet. It is observed that image files are large in size and creates problem when sending them through Email. Designers or printers need to send layout or multimedia presentation in digital file format. Therefore, Advanced FTP is a suitable communication protocol to fulfill the business purpose of graphic artists and illustrators.

Printers, Architects and Designers need a communication protocol that can transfer their artworks as well as protect images and the multimedia presentations from unauthorized third party. If you are in printing and publishing or you are a designer, advanced FTP service allows you to transfer files protected by secret password. In other word, it can be said that you can transfer files by encrypting the content. This feature of advanced FTP hosting service comes with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or SSH (Secure Shell). You can store encrypted files in the FTP server and provide the password as a 'key' to the recipient to view the actual content of the file. Therefore, it is recommended to designers, architects or printers to use advanced FTP hosting service with added security feature for ultimate protection.

Transferring large files via advanced FTP

Graphic designers or architects take the help of advanced FTP hosting service to transfer large images, layouts or presentations to their clients. Digital files are uploaded on the FTP server through a remote computer that has access to the FTP site.

FTP hosting service provider's will allocate you space on a server to store files. Moreover, they will provide you with option to create multiple FTP accounts for other users of your business process. Only the users who have the authority to access the allocated space can transfer files through their FTP account.

Remarkable features of FTP hosting service are:

Fast transfer with high speed connections
User friendly Control Panel to manage FTP accounts
SSL/TSL 128-bit data encryption
No upper limit of the file size
Suitable uptime
Remote monitoring
24/7 Technical Support

Advanced FTP hosting service comes with the feature 128bit FTP encryption. This encryption feature is available in FTP hosting services that have security tools like SSL or SSH. Users will encrypt the content of the file and upload that compressed file on the server. Another authorized user, who has the 'key', can download that file to his/her local drive. The recipient will use that key to decrypt the content.

Adam Hobach is a Network Engineer with "InstantFTPsites.com". You can learn more about "FTP Hosting" services online at http://www.InstantFTPsites.com.

© 2006 InstantFTPsites http://www.InstantFTPsites.com You may reprint this article online and in print provided the links remain live and the content remains unaltered (including the "Author Biography").

Pain At The Pump

2009-02-08T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Matt Christensen

Everyone is feeling the pinch to the pocketbooks at the pumps these days. What can be done? Should anything be done? In this capitalist society it is not the duty of the government to interfere. However the gas prices are getting out of control. Katrina is over and production has recovered yet the prices increase. Oil companies are recording record profits. Obviously we need an alternative power source. However what is the incentive to a major company to invest in alternatives when oil is so profitable? Protecting the environment despite how obviously important it is has never been a motivator for companies.

Some Senators are debating enforcing a winfall tax. However I feel this is a horrible idea. Studies show the free market is better suited for dealing with changes than the government. A winfall tax will take profits from the oil companies and put it in the hands of the government which it will no doubt be wasted or used to line the pockets of dirty politicians.

My advice if any oil company execs are reading is to take your excess profits and invest in your own futures. Oil will run out or become so high priced it will be abandoned. The best option is to invest in alternative energy and excel in it as you have with oil. Look at other industries as times change. Kodak was in trouble as digital cameras emerged. Kodak adapted and got in the digital market. Phone books had to adapt to the internet. No one uses a phone book to look up a number any more. They had to create a web presence. Those are two small examples but you get the idea. Sure it might be 20 years away but eventually oil will not be needed whether oil companies adapt or not. It is in the oil companies best interest to take their profits and invest in alternative energy before the government imposes a tax and wastes it.

Matt Christensen http://www.mattchristensen.net

Whats The Best Product To Sell Online

2009-02-07T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Tim Knox

I wish I had a dime for every time I've been asked, "Tim, what's the best product to sell online?" I also wish I had a nickel for every blank stare I received when I answered: "That's simple: information." I'd have enough money to finance another startup or two.

As more and more entrepreneurs move to the Internet seeking their fortunes, "What's the best product to sell online," has become the number one business question of the decade.

The next question is always: "Why information?" Again, the answer is simple: because no other type of product is easier to create, faster to bring to market, easier to distribute, and potentially more profitable.

Many info products net as much as 75% to 95% profit on the initial sale after all costs have been deducted. And residual sales to established customers can offer 100% profit.

Informational products come in many forms. An info product can be a digital book (e-book" is the accepted term), a digital report or white paper, a piece of software, a website, a newsletter, etc. Any product that is informational or informative in nature can be considered an info product.

Here's why information is the best product to sell online:

Fast to create, fast to market

Forget a product development cycle that is years in the making. Forget an intense design and costly manufacturing process. I have literally created info products in as little as two hours and had them generating revenue shortly thereafter. If you have an appealing topic and a computer, you have all the tools you need to create an info product.

No inventory to stock

Forget filling your garage with boxes of cheap watches and cases of mega vitamins that you will never sell. When you sell information there is no inventory to stock. Your product is digital (I like to call it electronic air) and requires no space in your garage, just a little space on your computer. One of my most successful info products is a 30kb e-book that requires almost no space at all.

Low startup costs

When you sell information you can literally create a product for next to nothing. If your product is an e-book the only investment required will be in the time it takes to put words to digital paper. If you become an affiliate marketer of someone else's info product your investment can be zero.

You can automate the sales and delivery process.

Thanks to internet technology you can sell info products 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and never lift a finger. In fact, you don't even have to be awake or at home to make money with an info product. I know many successful info entrepreneurs who are getting rich despite the fact that they work as little as an hour a day.

They check the website and their email, then go play golf or hang with the kids for the rest of the day. You can completely automate the sales and delivery process so your website does everything for you.

An automated website can give a potential customer your sales pitch, take the order and process the payment, deliver the product by email, and even follow up in a few days to make sure the customer is satisfied and offer to sell them additional products.

You can offer immediate access or delivery

Online consumers are an inpatient lot. They want things NOW! These are people who stand in front of the microwave impatiently tapping their foot and frowning at their watch. Selling information is the best way to give your customers immediate satisfaction. As mentioned earlier, an automated website can process the order and payment, then immediately email the download link for the product to your customer.

There's no shipping and handling

One of the things I never liked about selling hard goods was the manual process of taking the order, running the credit card, placing the order with a dropshipper or filling the order of my stock. I hated finding a box and packing peanuts and printing the label and taping it all up and lugging it to the post office. Every minute I spent filling orders was time that I was not being compensated for, therefore, my profit grew less and less with every minute spent on shipping and handling. Informational products require no shipping and handling. Most are delivered by email. In the time it takes you to click your mouse, you can deliver an info product.

What if you don't have your own info product to sell?

This is one of the most appealing aspects of selling information. If you don't have an info product, creating or finding one is much easier than you think.

We'll discuss that process in detail in the next article.

Small Business Q&A is written by veteran entrepreneur and syndicated columnist, Tim Knox. Tim's latest books include "Small Business Success Secrets" and "The 30 Day Blueprint For Success!" Related Links: http://www.smallbusinessqa.com http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

Business Loan Brokers

2009-02-06T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Steve Valentino

Are you planning to open your own business but do not have enough start up capital? Have you always wanted to run your own show and be your own boss yet you can?t seem to get enough money to get the ball rolling? There are business loan brokers who will take care of all that.

Starting a business these days is not so hard anymore. Gone are the days when a denied loan application from your banker was enough to quash those dreams of financial success. With loan brokers in the picture, you have a second chance at making your dreams come true!

Business loan brokers are especially favored by many small business entrepreneurs mainly because they hold a friendlier attitude towards small businesses than banks normally do. A bank can be quick to deny a loan application, whereas a business loan broker will usually reconsider an application on the grounds that they do not have to worry about regulatory restrictions like banks do.

Business loan brokers handle both short-term and long-term loans. Depending on your assets and credit history, these lenders can lend you up to $5 million. With the cash safely in your hands, you can start purchasing equipment that you need for your business. You can also use it for physical development plans and enhancement projects.

If you think your restaurant's kitchen equipment needs a little updating, then a long-term loan may be just the thing you need. Think you?re being upstaged by the new shop next door? Well, maybe a little sprucing up will give your store a brand new competitive edge!

Applying for a loan from a business loan broker is an easy task. The basic things that you need are copies of three to five years of tax returns and your personal financial statement.

Business Brokers provides detailed information on Business Brokers, Small Business Brokers, Business Loan Brokers, Business Broker Network and more. Business Brokers is affiliated with Internet Businesses For Sale.

Is Your Sales Letter Too Long Or Just Plain Old Boring

2009-02-05T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Stuart Elliott

Interestingly enough the majority of people who ask me whether their sales letter is too long have missed the boat somewhat.

You see, their mind is focused on the length of their sales letter rather than the job the sales letter has to do, and when they do that it is impossible to write in a manner that will convince the reader to take action and buy their product.

No, your main focus when writing a sales letter must be on the job it has to do and that, in a nutshell, is to convince the reader that he or she needs to buy your product.

Pay special attention to the word 'need' here. You must focus upon the emotional need of the reader - this could be nothing more than simple 'one-upmanship' over a neighbour instead of a logical need.

For it is a fact that man..

"Buys based upon emotion and justifies that decision with logic."

Just think about that statement for a second. When was the last time you bought something based purely upon cold hard logic? Probably never right? It was your emotions that directed you toward the purchase and the logic that justified it.

Take a shiny new car as an example. (And by the way, 'shiny new' is a subtle emotional trigger...)

If you were to look at the purpose of a car through the eyes of cold hard logic then there would be very little reason to buy one with all the latest gizmos that are designed to pamper you. (and cost you more)

All a car has to do is get you from A - B safely, dryly and quickly. Given that logical explanation, who has need of a radio, electric windows, self adjusting vibrating seats, automatic distance sensor for reversing and so on?

They don't help you in the primary purpose of getting from A - B do they? No, rather they serve to pamper you at an emotional level.

So going back to your sales letter you need to identify these emotional triggers inside your prospect and write about them in an exciting way that is sure to trigger those emotional needs further.

If this means that you have to write 30 pages of copy to do so then do it!

The more you have to write the better the chances you will have of getting the sale.

However...

Don't just go and write thirty pages of waffle or repetition. You should ensure that your pages are full of emotional excitement and not just page after page of boring old features.

You also need to prove how your product has helped others. Social proof in the form of testimonials from other satisfied customers is a powerful addition to your sales copy. They are usually written in a persuasive, emotional way - after all the writer has bought your product and it has helped him or her - and are often all that needs to be added to your copy to convince your reader to buy.

Going back to the car again...

Here are a couple of features that will do nothing to add excitement to your sales letter:

Auto reversing distance sensor...

It has the latest auto-reversing, distance sensing device.

"So What?" You say, " What use is that to me?"

--------------------

Vibrating Seats:

The seats vibrate as you drive.

"Er... Excuse me?" You think, " Why do I need a car that has seats that shake about when I drive? I mean if I drive over a bumpy road I'll get the same effect won't I?"

--------------------

Blah, blah, blah... What is this doing for your prospects emotional needs? Nothing! It's just another page full of boring old words, Goodbye!

Now if you change the above sentences to something like...

For the auto reversing sensor:

Save Money On Your Insurance Premiums...

The truth about sky rocketing premiums is out. Major insurance companies have admitted that 60% of all claims for minor bumps on vehicles they insure is due to parking bay mishaps.

"Many people just don't know how big their car is and accidentally bump into another one when manouevering around in busy parking lots..." Quoted an Insurance company spokesperson.

The shocking truth is, Your premiums are being loaded due to others carelesness, but...

Now you need never worry about those fools or how big your car is again, because XYZ model will actually tell you when you are getting too close to another car. This means you have the pleasure of driving and saving on your insurance premiums at the same time.

--------------------

For the vibrating seats:

Personal Masseuse, Yours Absolutely Free With Every Car...

Imagine your very own personal masseuse... yours to pamper you as you drive... takes away the stiffness in your back and legs in an instant... You stay fresh and alert whilst you drive and arrive safely at your destination - No other car has massaging seats that will pamper you like a king.

--------------------

Don't these two paragraphs create a little more excitement in your mind?

All you have to do when you write your sales letter is keep building more excitement with every word until your prospect suddenly says "Wow! I gotta have one of those!"

It doesn't matter if you have to write 50 pages of copy to create that feeling, as long as you keep the excitement building up your copy won't ever be too long.

Remember that your sales letter has to be exciting and long enough to do it's job otherwise you won't get the sale.

Stuart Elliott is a world-class copywriter who has written numerous articles about sales letters and copywriting. Drop by: howtowritekickbuttcopy.com to pick up your Free Copywriting Power Guide.

Great Ways To Help Secure The Loyalty Of Your Employees Through Reward Schemes

2009-02-04T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Hyacinth Fraser

1. Allow staff to design their own recognition award scheme.

2. Praise them verbally in private.

3. Praise them verbally in front of the staff team.

4. Provide written praise in the company newsletter.

5. Run company competitions and offer a prize for the winner.

6. Organise team lunches and pay for it from the team budget.

7. Offer to undertake a particular aspect of a colleagues work for a day.

8. For a set time period offer `difficult to access' parking facilities.

9. Provide staff with their own office for a week.

10. Provide gift vouchers for a job well done.

11. Staff who exceed their targets offer them a choice of reward.

12. As well as advising the individual member of staff and their staff team about successes, send a memo to senior management advising how well the member of staff has done.

13. Have an employee of the month award.

14. Name an award after an outstanding employee.

15. Put plaques up for high achievers.

16. Have the outstanding employee photographed with the senior manager and have that photograph displayed in a prominent position.

17. Offer to buy lunch for the employee for a month.

18. Offer surprise payments for those employees `acting up' in positions outside of their usual roles.

19. Arrange an all expenses paid lunch with a senior manager.

20. Organise a fun activity team day out.

21. Buy cakes or something else as appropriate for staff to indulge in.

22. Create an employee of the month badge/pin.

23. Provide tickets to a popular event.

24. Buy a bottle of champagne or non-alcoholic equivalent.

25. Offer to contribute to the employees' favourite charity.

26. Offer to pay for the employee to have a day out with their family.

27. Offer an all expenses paid `pampering' day.

28. Offer `X' number of days to work from home.

29. Upgrade company car.

30. Offer a company car for a staff member who does not have one.

31. Offer a cash prize.

32. Heading up a prestigious project.

33. Increase in budget.

34. Employee to have a choice of prestigious cars to choose from to drive for a couple of weeks.

35. A work exchange with someone in a different country.

36. Help staff to feel important by inviting them to your home as a special celebration for a job well done.

37. Upgrade the member of staff's office furniture.

38. Nominate staff for formal company award schemes.

39. Nominate staff for industry award schemes.

40. Tell at least five people in the company about how well that member of staff or team has performed.

41. Write in a trade journal about your team's achievements.

42. Praise the team/individual over the company public address system.

43. Keep a note of birthdays and send a birthday card.

44. Award a certificate for a family photo session.

45. Offer a clothing allowance gift certificate.

46. Buy a beautiful pen set and have a special message inscribed.

47. Hold a surprise party.

48. Have a senior manager give a `pep' talk at the beginning of a significant project and so encouraging all concerned.

49. Enable staff member to choose their next major work assignment

50. Add your own ideas to this list.

For more coaching and personal development ideas, including free 7 day e-coaching course (sign up under newsletter tab) and free email course (sign up under free profits tab) please do visit me at http://www.answerlife.co.uk

You'll also get great ideas on growing your business EXPONENTIALLY.

"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts" John Wooden

Hyacinth is a Master Practitioner of NLP and a Master Hypnotherapist.

Hyacinth, a Coach, independent consultant and trainer for fifteen years. Highly regarded and ensures that her solutions are informative, exciting and presented in such a way to ensure all learning styles are catered for. She works with personnel at the highest levels in the private, public and voluntary sectors, up to and including members of the board as well as front line staff.

Hyacinth has worked within a number of large public sector organisations, including: Home Office, Probation Service, DfES, DfT, CPS, OfCom, NICE as well as within many of the London Local Authorities.

The 10 Most Deadly Mistakes Business Partners Make And How To Avoid Them

2009-02-03T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Stephen Furnari

One of the best ways an entrepreneur can find the investment money he or she needs to grow their business is by finding a strategic or joint venture partner. In a good partnership, each partner will bring expertise or assets that the other party is missing, but that are necessary for the business to be successful; for instance: CASH!

If done correctly, a partnership can be great a way to grow your company without implementing difficult and time-consuming changes to your business. A partnership can help you increase your market share, gain a new competitive advantage, and help you to respond and adapt more quickly to change in the marketplace.

But, business partnerships can be tough, and getting out of a bad one can be worse than an ugly divorce.

In my practice, entrepreneurs often come to me when it's too late. In a typical scenario, communications have broken down between the partners, they have been kicked out of their business, money has been stolen, and everyone is about to sue everyone else.

Let me put this into tangible terms for you. What I have found is that when I help my clients outline their relationship with their partners in writing before they get started, it will cost them between $1,500 and $7,500 for a simple partnership. When clients do not do this up-front work and hire my firm to sue their partner (or defend a lawsuit) when things go bad, it can cost up to 10 TIMES that amount in litigation!

What I have found is that when future business partners hash out the terms of their relationship before they get started, they have longer and more successful partnerships, and they save a considerable amount of money on legal fees. To help future business partners get the conversation started, I have created a Business Partners Questionnaire that helps future partners begin to outline their relationship in writing. To get your FREE copy, email me at sfurnari@furnarilevine.com.

Here are a few other suggestions to help keep you and your partners out of court!

1. Go Back to the Basics

Before you even start hunting for a potential partner or decide that a partnership is definitely the way to go, take a look at your business plan. Decide whether such a move is in line with you business goals. What are your organizational goals? Would a partnership help you achieve these goals? Is it consistent with the objectives of your company? A partnership is not a magic bandage that will solve your company's problems. If you feel that your decision to partner is a defensive move, it maybe an indication of a core problem that should be fixed within your company, not externally. Similarly, don't rush into partnership because you rely on one to start your business.

2. The Deadly E's: Ego & Emotion

The deadly E's can trap you in a potentially awkward situation with your partner. Surrounded by a myriad of official documents and important decisions to be made, your ego can cause you to make claims and opinions that can come back to bite you later on. For example, by distinguishing yourself as the company's official decision maker, you become responsible for your partner's decisions too. Just as dangerous are your emotions, which can lead you to form unrealistic expectations or impromptu promises or commitments.

3. Don't Ignore Possible Opportunities/Stay Flexible

Cash-strapped entrepreneurs have a tendency to stop their search for a partner once they find the first person who demonstrates an ability to write a check. Remain uncommitted until you sign an agreement with your potential partner. Actively cultivating your alternatives can give you a better perspective on the partnership process and allow you to ask yourself, "is this partnership truly the best option?" Keeping your options open can help you compare the relative advantages and disadvantages of each alternative, including that of a partnership. Not only does this prevent you from devoting excess time, money and effort on the sub-prime partner candidate, but you get the assurance that whatever decision you made was the best one.

Also, consider possible opportunity costs. Along with the benefits of a partnership, you also assume liabilities, like your partner's competitors. Will this fact conflict with potential opportunities in the future?

4. Form an Exit Strategy Before You Get Started

Be realistic. Conflict is inevitable and you never know how severe it may get. Although it seems cynical, you should think of how you'll exit from the partnershipbefore you get started. Consider it staying prepared for your next opportunity. While you and your partners are still on good terms, it's crucial to determine how to allocate your business' assets in case you and your partner decide not to work together anymore. You should also agree about what to do with the business or assets in case of an untimely termination, such as a partner's death. Having an exit strategy will help you maintain your autonomy your fate and that of your business remains in your hands, not your partner's.

5. Map Out Your Mutual Expectations In Writing

Before you get started, and possibly before you meet with your lawyer, prepare a plain English roadmap of the relationship between you and your partner. Some major advantages are: it allows you to draft the partnership agreement with your lawyer before presenting it to your partner's lawyer; its flexible structure enables you to experiment with different relationship configurations to see which one you're most satisfied with; you'll have a clearer idea of what you want from the partnership; and most importantly, you can clearly distinguish business issues from legal issues, and use lawyers only to discuss the latter which will save you money on legal fees.

This brings us to the next point.

6. Get Legal Advice Early

Get legal advice from the beginning. Let your lawyer know what your goals are and he or she will let you know what you need to do to get there. A lawyer can also assess how realistic or beneficial your aspirations are. They can help you strategize your negotiations and plan what to ask for and when. Also note that the attorney representing the other side is the one you should look out for. You and your future partner should discuss the business side of your relationship first and, if possible, only introduce lawyers later.

7. Don't Do Everything Yourself

A good leader knows when to delegate responsibilities. Don't try to do everything yourself. Assuming you've already taken the steps to carefully choose reliable consultants and employees, communicate with those working for you. Lawyers, accountants and managers can provide an objective, specialized perspective and a more realistic tone to what might be an overly optimistic plan. Having technical and expert advisers on hand can also help you understand financial and operational implications pertinent to both parties.

8. Haste Makes (Costly) Waste

It's true, time is money. But ignoring details and attempting shortcuts will likely cause delays or worse, bad decisions when forming a partnership. Remember, if your partnership blows up, it will cost you far more time, money and heartache than if you do things right from the beginning.

9. Don't Overlook Details

As an entrepreneur, you already have a knack for seeing the big picture. It's the details, however, that will add value to your vision in the long run. Covering the following bases will help buffer you against uncontrollable changes in the market, operating costs, and even sentiments between you and your partner. Before you get started: establish the objectives and expectations of each partner; determine each partner's contribution in terms of funds, skill and time; assess how much revenue will be allocated relative to the amount and type of work done; assign the roles and related tasks of each partner; for example, decide who will manage the partnership, who will get training and hire employees, etc.; form evaluation objectives and plan ways to monitor and assess performance; and determine a procedure to resolve problems when things break down; for example, mediation or arbitration.

10. Trust Your Gut

My present partner excluded, I have been guilty of some bad decisions about business partners. I was involved in a partnership where I owned and managed an investment property in a ski resort with two other people. My partners were social acquaintances whose company I enjoyed very much in that type of setting. However, throw money, emotions, power, and economic risk in the mix, and things quickly got tense.

The first indication that the business partnership might not be a good one was in the very beginning. We were sitting in a quaint Vermont restaurant and one of the partners threw a temper tantrum about making an offer on a property we were considering. What was a very logical and arithmetic decision for me, was a very emotional one for this person. After the outburst, I had a bad feeling about the interpersonal dynamics of the partnership. I decided to go ahead anyway because the economic prospects were outstanding.

Sure enough, in less than a year we were not on speaking terms. Luckily, before we got started, I insisted on an iron-clad partnership agreement that had a mechanism in it for me to get out. I ended up making money on the investment, but not enough to pay for a year's worth of arguments, stress and distraction from my law practice. I didn't trust my gut and it cost me in the long-run.

A business partnership is truly a marriage. As all marriages go, when things are good, they're great, and when they're not, look out! If you get a bad feeling about your future partner, trust you instincts, they are usually correct.

Stephen Furnari is a securities attorney with Furnari Levine LLP (http://www.furnarilevine.com). Stephen helps young and growing companies obtain the funds they need to grow their businesses and accomplish their financial goals. He also teaches entrepreneurs how to avoid costly and avoidable legal mistakes.

Over Regulation Stifles Free Thinking And Innovation

2009-02-02T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Lance Winslow

In modern corporations mostly due to the DotCom era, when corporations were seeing investors move to faster moving companies; we saw a paradigm shift in Corporate Management. Tom Peters and others saw this and started writing about it. These corporate management gurus were trying to tell us all along what Deming and others had noticed. It seems like America goes thru cycles of losing sight of the ball. But once again we see the return of the suggestion box, although with the flow of thought set up correctly they would never be needed, because innovation would be constant and a moving target.

Today's corporations have to be innovative simply to attempt to comply with the rising tide of over regulations, if they don't they will drown. Yet they are so busy in the boardrooms discussing transparency with lawyers and accountants they have little time to listen or to brainstorm. The former head of HP made that statement this year at the Davos Convention 2005. With these restrictions it means less innovation can take place and even a great idea is will not work because it has to fit into a perfect box that a regulator has predetermined.

Thus the problem that hurts the most and denies us our future; it hurts the employees, managers, customers, consumer and tax base. No one wins and it adds to the harsh barriers and unspoken restriction of "Not Invented Here" to the flow of thought. Man is generally a copier, with very few in the populations capable of free flowing original thoughts. We need to slow the bureaucracy and over regulations and allow for those who know what is going on to guide us and lead us forward, not the government regulators who have never had to make a pay check and always have a hot cup of coffee and plenty of time to stand their and drink it as it cools to an acceptable level. Think about it; we are.

Lance Winslow - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

The Internet Revolution

2009-02-01T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Samuel Abdullah

The Internet has revolutionized the planet, and was the cultural phenomenon of the late 20th Century. It has its detractors, but most people see it as a force for good. Information on the 'Superhighway', as it's known, can be accessed in workplaces, schools, universities, cyber cafes and homes around the globe.

It's used for research, online buying, booking holidays, chatting to friends and family, games and downloading music and films. However, it's probably had the most impact on the world of business. Whether a giant corporation or a small business run from someone's kitchen, suddenly everyone was in a global market.

Not everyone survived and mistakes were made. Trading everything from rare comics to state of the art electronic goods has never been easier, and the developing countries are also enthusiastic participants.

Communication in the office, by way of email, is second nature now, and emailing customers and suppliers is quick and efficient. Of course, Spam is an annoying by-product, and it's an ongoing battle to combat it. Another by-product of the Internet in offices is 'Cyberslacking'. A recent survey in the UK showed that the average employee uses up 57 minutes a day, illicitly surfing at their desk.

Advertising and marketing on the Internet is a whole industry in itself. It's value for money, when you consider how many people are being reached, and the most effective means of targeting certain categories of people. Users announce their interests and marketing companies make use of that information. Web sites exist for every product under the sun, and a prominent search engine position is worth its weight in gold. Some companies use banner advertising and pop up ads to get our attention. It's a fiercely competitive market. Strategic advertising will combine television, press and Internet marketing, presenting a unified brand image.

Weblogs, or 'blogs', are increasingly popular, and some organizations welcome their staff running a blog detailing product information, in order to appeal to prospective customers who will then be directed to the blogger's company.

Use of the Internet and the World Wide Web, has enabled some employees to work remotely from home, known as telecommuting. A lot of companies find this is an efficient way for their staff to operate, as they are away from office distractions and don't get held up on the freeways. It's not for everyone. Often, people miss the social contact they get at the workplace, that good old gossip round the water cooler. Also, staff can be in constant contact, via email, with the office. This can be considered a good or a bad thing! Security has to be a consideration, when employing staff who work remotely. There have been cases of companies suffering security breaches in this way, and the same security protocols must be observed, whether employees are at their desk or on the beach with a laptop.

Samuel Abdullah is the owner of several websites for more information visit http://www.BizProspecting.com or email him at: samarenterprise@yahoo.com

How To Hire Some Help A Virtual Assistant And Give Yourself A Raise

2009-01-31T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Donna Gunter

"There's no way I can hire anyone to do what I do. No one can do it as well as I can."

Do you resemble that remark? If so, you've got much in common with most other business owners in the world. We never think that anyone else will give something the time, attention, and dedication that we will. And, you're right, to some degree. No one cares as much about your business as you do. However, if you don't choose to delegate those things that prevent you from engaging in business development, marketing, and sales activities, you won't be in business very long.

Whether you're just starting out or have been in business for awhile, the thought of bringing on a support team member can be daunting, and you wonder, "How can I bring in someone else when it's just going to increase my expenses?"

You need to make the shift to seeing this cost as an investment in your business, rather than as an expense, and let go of the need to be in control.

I recently read about a statistic quoted in the life insurance industry, which stated that for every additional support team member employed in a small professional services firm, the firm experienced a 40% increase in gross revenues. Why does this increase occur? Because your support team takes work away from you, which allows you to focus on increasing revenues - either by making more sales or working on the marketing systems that will lead to more sales.

I realize this sounds overly simplistic -- if you want to increase your revenues by 40%, simply just employ someone on your support team. Of course, it is not that simple in reality. Hiring a support team requires you to trust your own judgment and ability to use this extra time to generate more revenues. And that's the key here - if you hire a support person and keep doing what you're doing, the concept won't work. You have to hire the person and ensure that you're taking on the role of business development.

The best way to illustrate this is to look at your "lost opportunity" costs. Say, for example, you're a marketing consultant and you charge $175 per hour. Yesterday, your ACT! database was malfunctioning and it took you 7 hours to fix the problem and do the mail merge and printing and mailing of your sales letter to the new list of 100 prospective customers that you just purchased. Do you realize that 7 hours really cost you $1225? How? Your hourly rate of $175/hour multiplied by the number of hours it took you to do this task (7) equals $1225.

What would have been more effective? Finding a great Virtual Assistant to do this for you in half the time for a portion of your hourly fee. If you had hired the expertise of a masterfully skilled Virtual Assistant charging $45/hour, for example, my guess is that she probably could have completed the project in a portion of the time, say 4 hours, for a final cost to you of $180. Big cost savings over the $1225 it cost you to do the same project. With that project off your plate, you then have the time to go out seeking more $175/hour opportunities.

Amazing, isn't it? For a $180 investment, for example, you now have the time to complete the proposal to do that corporate training program you spoke about with an HR person two weeks ago. A week later, the HR person calls and tells you that they've accepted the proposal valued at $10,000 in income over the course of the year. Would you have had time to complete that proposal if you had not handed off this ACT database project? Perhaps, but I bet it would have forced you to work late into the night to complete it.

What operational aspects of your business could you delegate to someone else? If you had extra time, how could you increase the revenues of your business? Give these questions strong consideration--you may be pleasantly surprised by what you discover.

Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed professionals make more profit in less time online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE ebook, TurboCharge Your Productivity: 50 + Tools To Help You Automate Your Business and Make More Profit in Less Time Online!, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizCoachingCompany.com.

What You Know Can Work Just As Well As Who You Know

2009-01-30T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Carolyn Moncel

We all know the saying in business, "It's not what you know but who you know", right? This saying is definitely true when it comes to small business and on occasion, the same can be said in media relations. However, what you know can sometimes get you just as far - especially if you're trying to tell your story to the local press.

Some time ago, a small-business client approached me about handling public relations for her firm. She had been writing her own press releases and submitting them to the press but all of her efforts had generated no press. She asked me to critique her work to discover what she might be doing wrong. Upon reviewing her press releases, I found that her writing skills were outstanding but the problem came when I began to investigate the methods by which she was submitting her releases. The five rules below illustrate the lessons that she learned about distributing press releases to the media.

Rule #1: Do your homework on reporters. You can start with the Bacons' Media Directory, which serves as the public relations practioner's Bible. If you don't know what it is, basically it lists the name, address, phone number, fax number, e-mail, beat (issue or specific type of story to cover), deadlines, and story preferences and angles for most every reporter and news producer anywhere in the world. There are five volumes of books: Newspapers, Magazines, TV/Cable, Radio and International. You can purchase the books or get the same information from Bacons' in CD-Rom format or through an online subscription. These books are invaluable but unfortunately are also very expensive. Here's a tip: You can access them for free usually at your local public library or a college library. Use these books to help you narrow down the reporters that you think would be helpful for launching your story. If Bacon's is completely out of your budget, just follow your favorite local newspaper to determine which reporters cover which stories.

Rule #2: Verify your sources. Just because you found information on reporters in Bacons' doesn't mean that your work is done. Most reporters are assigned a beat but those beats change from time to time and as a result, reporters tend to move around a lot. Because the Bacons' books and their competitors are only published once per year with occasional updates, it's very important that you call media outlets and verify that you can still reach the reporter you would like to talk to. More importantly, find out if the reporter still covers the beat that is important to your story. If for some reason there is a new reporter covering that beat, make note of those changes in a database or spreadsheet, and always call before sending out a new release.

Rules #3: Know where to call for information. Most people are afraid to just call up a reporter (they can be scary people) to find out this information, however if you want to avoid that aspect of the job, then simply call the News Assignment Desk - the nerve center of news operation. It is here that you can verify the reporter information and also get a sense for the types of stories that an editor might find interesting enough to assign to an individual reporter.

Rules #4: Know how a reporter likes to receive information. When it comes to distributing press releases or letters, all reporters are different. It's your job to find out how a reporter wants to receive his or her information on a potential story. For example, some reporters only read faxes while others only look at releases sent by mail. Still others will only read e-mail, and yet others will only accept a story idea over the phone. This is important because if you violate the reporter's rule for receiving information, then your release likely will never be read. It will get a one-way trip to the trashcan.

Rules #5: Adhere to a reporter's deadline. Just as you can find out the name and e-mail address of a specific reporter, you can also find out their writing deadline. This is very important because the last thing anyone wants to experience is being on the line with a reporter when he or she is on deadline. Here's another tip: Most daily newspapers are put to bed at 5pm. Call the reporter between 8am and 9am because you might catch them before they go their morning editorial meeting. When calling up a reporter directly, always asks the reporter if he or she is currently on deadline as a courtesy. They will respect you for it and this will give you an indication as to how long you have to speak with that particular reporter on the phone. If you're nervous about speaking with the reporter, then create a short script that you can state comfortably in 60 seconds.

While it's always great to know a reporter personally, few small-business owners will ever have that luxury. However, if you know what to do and whom to contact when the time comes to tell your story, your chances of coverage are just as good as anyone else's. After all when it comes to media relations, it's not just who you know but what you know - plus a little luck never hurts either.

About The Author

Tips For Selling A Business

2009-01-29T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Kent Pinkerton

For small business owners, the process of selling their business can become more complicated than the process that bigger companies go through when they sell their business. This is because in contrast to big business owners, small business owners do not have ready access to Wall Street investment bankers, merger and acquisition firms, and high priced brokers who can make the process a lot easier. However, this does not mean that small business owners cannot have access to the guidance that they need to help them get the best possible deal for their business. This is because there are some sources from which business owners can get very helpful information, which can help provide them some direction on the steps they need to take when they sell their business. One of these sources is the Internet, which hosts a number of websites that provide financial advice to people.

The Internet is host to a number of websites that provide helpful financial advice to people, which include people who want to sell their business. Among these websites, there are some pieces of advice or tips that are quite common, the following sections discuss some of the most common tip that these websites give. One of these is that most websites say that business owners need to conduct a preliminary assessment of the value of the company, which can help business owners have a platform value or base information on which they can base their next course of action. Another tip that most websites offer is that business owners should also perform a strategic business review, which can help them assess whether their company is ready for the selling process. Other helpful tips include the need for business owners to know who their potential buyers are, to familiarize themselves with all the steps of the whole selling process, and to arm themselves with information on how they can close a deal using some of the most effective negotiation tools.

For small business owners, selling their business may seem daunting given the complex nature of the transaction and the high cost of getting professional help that can make the process easier. The good news is that even without the help of high priced professionals, small business owners can gain access to the information that they need to help them get a good deal. One good source of information is the Internet, which provides helpful tips that can guide business owners in selling their business.

The Top 5 Characteristics Of Internet Millionaires

2009-01-28T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Matt Bacak

If you want to join the growing numbers of internet millionaires, your best bet is to learn from the best. The trail to success has been blazed by thousands who have come before you, and their achievements can teach you how to make millions with your own internet business. These successful millionaires have many traits in common that you, too, can cultivate. Here are the top 5:

1. Internet millionaires don't play the "Blame Game." Those who are not internet millionaires have a tendency to blame someone else for problems and failures. Millionaires, on the other hand, take every difficulty, every failure as a lesson. They take advantage of every opportunity to learn something new - even from their own mistakes. They don't waste time dwelling on blame. They learn how to avoid the mistake the next time, and they keep moving forward.

2. Internet millionaires are decisive and action-oriented. They don't waste months mulling over possibilities and strategies. When they see an opportunity, they jump on it immediately, taking quick, decisive action. One such successful businessman has said that internet millionaires "go first." They make things happen. They certainly don't give someone else the chance to get the jump on them!

3. Internet millionaires trust their intuition and their gut. They trust themselves when making quick decisions. If something feels right, they go for it. Cyberspace is a fast-moving, ever-changing world, and you can't afford to spend a great deal of time thinking about a decision. If you do, someone will beat you to it, and the next thing you know, your idea will be old news.

4. The internet millionaire is single-focused. They focus on their business or niche. That's not to say they don't focus on all of the aspects of their business. This can mean attending marketing seminars, selling their products on eBay, researching search engine traffic, writing articles, building their customer lists, and capitalizing on joint ventures and pay-per-click advertising. But all of these actions have the same goal and are focused on the same vision - expanding and building their core business.

The bankruptcy model, on the other hand, is someone who has a core business but is also a real estate investor or who sells 200 unrelated products on the internet. This kind of scattered action will only pull you away from your vision and your financial goals.

5. Internet millionaires are primarily marketing focused. A billionaire once said to me, "Matt, if you want to make a decent income, then you sell products and services. But if you want to become insanely rich, then you create and control markets." All of Microsoft's top executives have a marketing background. Bill Gates was a marketing major at Harvard, and he knows marketing is what it's all about.

It doesn't matter what kind of business you have, the key to your business is internet marketing. You can have a better product or service than the next guy, but if he's better at marketing, he'll beat you every time. If you don't find hot and hungry people to come after your products and services, it doesn't matter if you have the best product since sliced bread. People have to know about it, and they have to want it!

How can you start today to cultivate these characteristics and add your name to the list of internet millionaires?

Matt Bacak, Entrepreneur Magazine e-Biz radio show host became a "#1 Best Selling Author" in just a few short hours and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to Retire From Your Job This Year and Still Make More Money Than the Average Medical Doctor... You Can Do It Once You Know the Proven Steps Outlined here! ==> http://www.internetmillionairemind.com

Leadership Lessons From The Great Pyramids Part 2 Of 2

2009-01-27T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Arthur F Carmazzi

...While "attitude" was enough to build the smaller Pyramids (like that of King Sneferu), the largest, grandest, and the only of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient world still standing, with a height of 450 feet and 756 feet square: The Great Pyramid of Khufu, needed more than just a great attitude.

True greatness lies in self-actualization through work

When work becomes choice, it no longer manifests itself as work. It is the convergence of personal desire and the actions we gladly take.

As it turned out from the discovery of a Workers Cemetery, building Pyramids was a dangerous business. Even with a great attitude, that's a real bummer. So why would anyone choose to put in their whole hearted effort and risk their lives in the process. Was it Bak, or feeling special, or was it more?

Harvard's George Reisner found workers graffiti created by "Building Teams" that called themselves names like "Friends of Khufu" and "Drunkards of Menkaure".

These findings and ancient Scrolls suggest that these teams were made up of many classes of people on a rotating basis. This means that the managers, architects, and even the priests would take part in building.

Did Pharaoh himself go down and carve bricks? Only Ra would know.

But in today's context when nurturing the psychology of a superior workforce, a Hands-on CEO often commands greater respect.

Why?

Because he/she leads for others and not for a personal ego trip.

The term "Hands on" should be qualified here: a CEO that gets into other peoples job because of frustration or tries to do everything themselves is counterproductive. The hands on type I'm talking about is an individual who takes the time to have assist his personnel by supportively guiding them. And, who lets his subordinates teach him what and how they are doing in order to have a greater understanding of even the least significant function. This would be a Leader who may see a mop and proceed to clean the floor while the janitor's on his break, then ask the janitor if he did it right when he comes back. Or, who may go to the source when a manager is having difficulty with equipment and assist him in solving the problem as the manager takes charge. These of course must be taken in context of time requirements, but a great leader will have more time because they would be more effective in assisting people to achieve greater and faster results.

In these teams people were equals and as equals established unique identities within the masses. Each of these teams was divided into 5 smaller teams where more cohesiveness amongst team members could be formed.

With individual group identities, leaders were able to establish the groups as an essential part of the same vision. They were part of something greater than the individual, they had ownership in it. It was a higher purpose. As a part of these select teams they had strength that no individual could ever have, they were greater than themselves and even Pharaoh.

This became a way for the average person to have real power, to feel an equal to royalty. The Pyramid became the achievement that no one but them could achieve, a part of history that they could tell there children about. A physical manifestation of owning a part of something no one else could do.

This higher purpose bred cooperation and efficiency; there was pride in Daily accomplishments. And each team celebrated with other teams after each completed step of the process. These people didn't work as individuals, not even as groups, but as an extension of the organization.

To achieve self actualization in a workforce, a modern company must ask "Why?"

Why would someone feel powerful working in your organization?

Why would they be proud to be a part it?

What is your "Pyramid", the greater purpose your staff could be a part of?

Each person has their own values they must equate and align with the organizations vision to achieve self actualization. To lead self actualized individuals, a leader doesn't direct or even guide; at this stage a leader collaborates with his people as equals, empowering them as entrepreneurs and not employees. Self actualization stems from personal power. When you feel power in and of your actions, when you feel like YOU matter in the grand plan of those actions, then you reach the pinnacle of your success.

There are 4 steps to achieve this:

1. Create mixed rank teams that maintain equality

2. Allow the teams to develop unique identities that align their own values with those of the organization

3. Assist teams in finding their own greater purpose

4. Measure success on a daily basis to maximize sense of achievement

Secrets of a motivated, dedicated, and well organized Organization

When Pharaoh set out to build the greatest of the great Pyramids, he assembled his greatest and wisest people and encrypted the writings below as a path to greatness:

Secrete writings of the mysterious code hidden in the Pyramids that illuminates the force of superior management.

Source: The Carmazzi Scrolls -

The Pinnacle of greatness comes when individuals see their work as their purpose. To cultivate this, leaders must Collaborate as equals with their people. There must be a greater purpose to the work, something greater than the individual, or the group. When working on the plane of " SELF ACTUALIZATION, people work at the level of "Organization"

The Core of building greatness is formed through Attitude. To develop this attribute for success, leaders must Guide their people, cause emotions of significance that couldn't be inspired alone. Leaders develop reciprocity by creating an environment of personal growth that is far superior to the standard. When working on the plane of "ATTITUDE", people work at the level "Group"

The Foundations of building greatness should be based on skill. Leaders should Direct and teach individuals until those individuals have mastered the required skill. When working on the plane of "SKILL" people work at the level of "Individual"

Much of this article is based on the Directive Communication Psychology developed by Arthur F Carmazzi. For more information and articles, visit the Directive Communication website or, Email Arthur at: afc@carmazzi.net

Vending Routes How To Fail

2009-01-26T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Steven Gillman

When I was young, I invested $2500 with a fast-talking salesman who convinced me I could have a great income in just weeks. He told me he had racks of earrings in hair salons, gift shops, etc. He said he had 110 just in the Grand Rapids area, and they averaged 13 pairs sold per week. He just ran the route once a week to collect his money.

I did the math, as he knew I would. 110 racks times 13 pairs at $5 per pair was $7150 weekly in sales. I knew nothing about earrings, but I started to get interested. I bought 10 racks and 1100 pairs of earrings to fill them. I'd pay him $1.75/pair. Since they sell for $5.00, and the store owner keeps $1.50, I'd have a profit of $1.75 times 13 pair times 10 racks. $227.50 per week, I figured, and then I could expand from there.

How To Lose Money Selling Earrings

I was dissappointed to find that retailers weren't lining up to have earrings in their stores, despite not having to pay anything up front. After approaching 130 places in my small town, I got five racks placed. They averaged 3 to 4 pairs sold per week.

I tried, and it may have worked for the right person. I had no experience though, and after running out of places to attempt placement, I gave up. For some reason the salesman didn't want to buy back the earrings as he promised he would. With persistence, I did get my money back eventually.

The Truth About Vending Routes

I've since talked to many people with vending routes. If you can make $25 gross profit per site per week with pop machines or anything else, AND you can have 100 sites within an hour of home, you really can work a few days a week to make $8,000 per month. It is a lot of work to get started, however, whatever a salesman may tell you. If it were easy, the salesman might be running his own route, instead of selling you $6,000 worth of gumball dispensers.

Obviously vending routes work. The people I talked to were doing well. I'm sure it was possible to make good money with those earrings even. I was certainly doing many things wrong, but how do you do it? What should you sell? How do you establish a route?

You don't do it the way I did. I didn't even check other suppliers until later, when I found that I could get the same earrings for 50 cents instead of $1.75. With no experience, I wasn't even willing to spend a few dollars to pay for the knowledge of others. A good book on vending routes might have been all I needed.

A mentor would help even more. If you won't be competing in the area, someone might let you follow him around as he services his route. Vending routes are still a great opportunity - if you avoid my mistakes.

Steve Gillman has been studying every aspect of money for thirty years. You can find more interesting and useful information on his website; http://www.EverythingAboutMoney.info

Quotplanningquot To Make A Decision

2009-01-25T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by John Robertson

The longer I've been around companies the more I believe the words "Planning"

and "Decision" are seldom used in the same sentence! And the business fallout

because of poor planning when making decisions is staggering.

The effects of a decision gone bad tend to linger around for months or even

years. It is a fact that most businesses fail not because they did not make decisions but because they did not make good decisions.

With so much riding on your ability to make the right decisions it is prudent to brush up on the technique of decision making and the process involved in planning to make them.

Planning allows a decision to be made on your terms and in a much more

comfortable and intelligent way. It allows you the time to consider several

options without the last minute rush.

There are four benefits to decision-making planning:

1. PLANNING ALLOWS YOU TO SET THE GOALS YOU WANT. That means you are not so much focused on the external events that don't relate to what you are trying to accomplish. Many decisions are incorrectly made based on things that steer one's life rather than becoming proactive decision-makers.

2. PLANNING PROVIDES A WAY TO MEASURE SUCCESS. The plan of action is your mirror to measure how close (or far) you are from accomplishing your goal. This measure is important because it can show you immediately when you are off course and need to make adjustments and corrections.

3. PLANNING CHANGES THE "DO" TO THE "GET". Planning converts ideas,

values and activities into action. Planning is not the end result; it is the tool to convert the idea into a specific action or actions. Planning helps you convert your company's goals into your individual goals and helps you get results. Remember most companies pay you for action NOT activity. It's not the "do" it is the "get" that makes the difference. A good plan is to keep what you are trying to accomplish in the focus at all times. Ask yourself is what you are "doing" now, "getting" the results you are responsible for?

4. PLANNING HELPS ALLOCATE YOUR RESOURCES IN AN EFFICIENT

MANNER. Few companies have unlimited resources. A good plan helps you maximize the resources you have. Remember that dollars are not your only resource. Resourse that you will need to manage includes people, tools, assets and company propriety information. By consulting you plan often, you can see concerns before they become problems and you can shift available resources to cover the unexpected issues.

Planning to make a decision is a perfect example of the Pareto principle - the idea that by doing 20% of work you can generate 80% of the advantage of doing the entire job. Pareto analysis is a formal technique for finding the changes that will give the biggest benefits. It is useful where many possible courses of action are competing for your attention.

Perhaps by spending the 20% of your time thoroughly planning you next decision can save you 80% of your time. Why not give it a try?

There are several methods you can use for planning. Words such as Strategic, Tactical, and Operational may come to mind. However, these are specific

planning procedures. Each has their place in business

Sr. Level Management in several Fortune 500 companies. His real world experience will bring credibility to your company. TrainingConnections.ORG focuses on three categories of Employee Performance Improvement; Leadership, Management and Sales Training. Contact us today for more

information or check our web site.

www.TrainingConnections.ORG

info@TrainingConnections.ORG

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Business Owners Essentials Cashflow Is A Critical Factor

2009-01-24T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Andy Warren

It's certainly possible to start a business with no initial money but it's a big challenge. Whether you have funding to begin or not one of the most critical elements of your business is how you forecast and control your cashflow.

The first step is to build a business model to establish how cash much you will need. Your business model should include a month by month projection of your predicted sales and all related costs. You need to make sure you have thought of all possible costs that you could incur. And you need to include enough money to make sure you can live.

In your business model you should have calculated how much it will cost you to start your business and how much you will need to cover your early start-up phase. Never underestimate the amount of money you will need to start your business and always make sure you're covered for slower sales and higher or unexpected costs.

Many entrepreneurs kid themselves that they are building a business when in fact they are putting all their time in for free and borrowing money from their own bank accounts and credit cards to fund the business.

If you're going to do this, be honest with yourself and be realistic about how long it can last. Running out of money is one of the most common reasons for businesses failing. With a little forward planning you can make sure that you don't end up as one of them.

Of course some people have created successful businesses from this type of start but many more have lost their business and ended up with large personal losses and debts. You also need to be aware that if your business is struggling then you could get into serious trouble if you start repaying debts to yourself before you repay other suppliers. This can lead to criminal charges, so be warned.

To begin your business you will need some basic start-up costs. This may include building a website, setting up a company, opening a bank account, buying some basic equipment like a PC, software, a printer, phone and internet access. You also want to consider the costs of marketing, promotion and travel.You may also have extra costs if you are setting up an office.

In the early stages of your business it is most likely you will be making a loss each month until you have reached a reasonable level of sales. An ideal business would be profitable from day one but in reality most are not.

If you have a business model that says you are profitable from day one, you may want to pinch yourself and look at it again. It's most likely that you've made some overly optimistic assumptions and missed out some significant costs. Or perhaps you've assumed that you would begin selling on day one into a cold market where no-one has heard of you. Just take off your wishing hat and take another look with a little more realism.

When you look at your business model, you can use the monthly loss as an indicator of how much cash you will need. You need to keep adding up the monthly loss until the point at which you start to make a profit. This gives you a pointer towards the amount of cash that you need to fund the running of your business. So if your initial plan showed you losing $50k, $40k, $30k, $20k and $10k in the months before your model became profitable then your initial cash funding requirement would be $150k.

However, because of the way most businesses run this won't actually represent your real cashflow each month. In reality it will probably take at least 30 days to collect payments from your customers and you may have to pay your suppliers in advance. Many suppliers want advance payments from start-up companies to reduce their own risk of not being paid.

To get a better feel for the amount of cash you need for running the business it is best to calculate the total of the last two months' worth of sales before your business becomes profitable and then add that amount to the total cash that you originally calculated that you need. Let's say that in the last two months of the example shown above you sold $60k and $80k respectively, this means you need to add another $140k to the cash funding you need as it's very unlikely you will collect that money until two months after you've made the sales. This gives you a minimum cash requirement of $290k.

This is a more realistic view of the cash you need, assuming everything goes to plan. Next calculate your start up costs and add these to the total, if you haven't already included them, and you'll have the minimum amount of financing that you need for your business.

We say this is the minimum because the experience of most businesses is that they spend twice as much on costs as planned and take three times as long to hit their sales targets. Try changing your business model to reflect this and see how much cash you need then. It can often show you needing at least three times as much as you originally planned. You may need to rethink your business plans following this exercise.

When you've done all this you should also add an extra amount (at least 5 -10%) for the unexpected (we usually call this a contingency plan). This total should be your real target for financing.

The reason you go through this process, and any business owner should be doing this regularly, is to determine your real cashflow needs.

Cashflow is the lifeblood of your business and you must have an understanding of how it works. Many businesses go bankrupt because the owners were looking at their profits and when they saw they were profitable they believed everything was alright but their cashflow caught them out.

Equally many businesses have closed down or sold out due to simply not understanding the timings of cash flows in and out of their business when there wasn't even a major problem. I'll repeat it again because it's so important. Cashflow is the lifeblood of your business.

Create a business model today and use it to plan your cashflow needs for the next year, no matter whether you're just starting up or you're already running a business. It could make the difference between success and total failure.

You can visit http://www.yourexitstrategist.com for more information, guidance and support. You can also request a personal consultation.

Andy Warren is a qualified chartered accountant, entrepreneur, consultant and coach with business experience at director level in blue chip companies, SMEs and start-ups.

He has successfully bought, sold and managed companies ranging in value from $100,000 to $100,000,000 and raised significant private equity funding for successful start-up ventures.

Andy is also a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and has trained with Anthony Robbins in the US in behavioural sciences and life skills. He has extensive knowledge, skills and experience in the field of coaching and developing human behaviour.

Dont Make Online Business Decisions With Ad Copy

2009-01-23T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Ryan Ambrose

Those of you who have ever looked for methods to make money online may have noticed that everyone has the "easiest, fastest, and best" system. At least, according to everyone that's marketing the "easiest, fastest, and best" system. And some of those people marketing their 'super' systems do it very well. They have superb ad copy, testimonials, fancy mini-pages, and even video, and it's all designed to make you want to buy.

Here's the problem: If you go out and buy these systems because their ad copy sounds good, the only people getting rich will be the ones selling them to you. I'm not trying to sound high and mighty, because I've been tempted (and occasionally nailed) myself. A lot of marketers are good at what they do, and can be extremely persuasive.

The trouble is, you don't need them all. You don't even need some of them. What you need is an understanding of the ways you can make money online, and a plan to make it happen. This will involve you getting the things you require to make your vision a reality and leaving the rest alone.

Now, some of those people marketing online business systems, tools, or other peripheral stuff aren't all selling what you require. Some of them might be selling what you need, an example being a service to take credit card payments securely for your product's mini-site. Some are selling things that aren't necessary but might be handy, such as a high-end, heavily featured web development tool. And a lot of them aren't selling anything but the next wave of 'super' systems which are only going to get you more desititute.

I know that ad copy is tempting, especially when you hit bumps in the road and things aren't going the way you want. I've seen pages where I'm sorely tempted to buy into an ad copy because I'm a bit demoralized, knowing I may only get burned again. And yes, I've been nailed on occasion, much to my dismay. But when things aren't going right with your plan, the answer isn't randomized action. Step back, analyze what you're doing, and fix what's wrong. Resist the urge to make an online business decision with someone else's ad copy, because that's only going to lead you to disappointment.

Ryan Ambrose is the web master of Financial Self-Reliance, a web site about how to actually make money online. To find the software, services, and how-to information to help your online business aspirations become a reality, visit The Solutions Page there.

A Neat Google Shortcut To Help You Browse Search Results Faster

2009-01-22T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Jason Lewis

Discover one of Google's little known shortcut buttons, that will allow you to quickly browse through the pages of each search result. Saving you time and a whole load of effort.

When you use Google to find information, wouldn't it be great if you could find a faster way of wading through all those search results? Well, now there's a way...

When you perform a search using Google, the web page results Google returns are usually pretty accurate. However, if you are anything like me, you rarely find exactly what you are looking for, from the very first web page they offer you.

For example:

You might perform a search for 'vegetarian recipes', and Google will return an accurate search result, with the first entry being highly relevant and containing information on 'vegetarian recipes'

Unfortunately, the first site might not have a recipe or contain the information you want, so you will then have to hit the 'back button' in your browser, so that you can go back to Google's search results, and click on the next web page link to check that one out.

If you use search engines to find information quite often, I'm sure you are already used to this tedious process by now. The thing is; there is a much faster way of viewing the web pages in Google's search results. Here's a neat trick to help speed up your research...

Google's 'Next and Previous' Shortcut Buttons

The shortcut buttons I'm about to tell you about; are only available on Google's free toolbar. If you don't have the Google toolbar installed at the moment, you can download it from Google's site here: http://toolbar.google.com/

Once you have installed the toolbar, open up your browser and you will see it displayed near the top of the page.

1. Click on the link or icon that says 'Options'

2. A pop up window will open. Click on the tab at the top which says 'More'

3. Under the sub headline 'Even More Buttons'; you will see the option titled: 'Next & Previous'. Click on the box to the left of it, until the green tick is displayed.

4. Click 'OK' to finish.

Right, now when you look back at the Google toolbar in your browser, you will see the 'Next and Previous' option being displayed. Depending on your toolbar settings, you may or may not have the actual words displayed. If you haven't, look out for two arrows next to each other, one pointing to the left and the other to the right. They both also have a little eyeball graphic on top of them.

If you haven't just done a search using Google, these arrows will probably be 'greyed out', and not available to be clicked on.

Hop over to Google's home page, and do a quick search for something. Then click on the first search result in the normal listings.

As soon as you get transferred to the web page for the top listing, check out the 'Next and Previous' buttons on your toolbar.

You should initially see that the 'right arrow' has turned from grey to blue, indicating that you can now click on it. Try clicking on it, and you will now be transferred to the next listing in Google's search results.

As soon as you reach the next website, you will then see that the 'left arrow' can now be clicked on. By clicking on the left arrow, you can now go straight back to the previous web page in the search results, without you having to hit your back button and go back to Google.

Using the 'Next and Previous' shortcut buttons, you can flip back and forward between all the web pages listed, on Google's first page of search results.

If you regularly use Google to look for information, I'm sure you'll find this a nice little time saver, as I do.

Jason Lewis is creator of the "Find Stuff Quickly" video series, a comprehensive step-by-step guide, showing you how to find information faster and more accurately using Google. To improve your research skills, visit: Google Search Engine Tips

The Business Day Lease Purchase Or Otherwise

2009-01-21T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Sue And Chuck DeFiore

For those of you conducting a lease purchase business (or any other business), the first thing for you to do each morning is to check your goals. How many calls are you to make, how many contacts, articles, etc. Your goals will depend on where you are in your business - just starting, in business for a year, two years, etc.

The next thing to do for those in lease purchasing or any other business is to check your calendar for the day, and to check your tickler file. Depending on what is on your calendar and in your tickler file will determine what else you will be doing for the day. Let's assume you don't have any appointments scheduled. Your tickler file is empty, other than for your To Do list.

Next you check any e-mail you have received and answer it. Answer any snail mail from the previous day. For those of you operating a lease purchase business, next, be sure you have enough newspapers with sellers to call, otherwise go through the next one in your stack. The same goes for your FSBO sites on line (if you already have a list to call from fine, if not, go to the FSBO sites and pull down the information you need to make calls). Once this is done, start calling (be sure to follow your script and leave the appropriate message).

After you are done calling, send out any follow up information you need to. Be sure after calling to update your databases.

Next you want to do some reading in your area, both on and off-line. Don't forget you can do some of this during your lunch break. Also be sure to visit on-line groups that relate to your business.

Be sure to check e-mail again in the afternoon and respond if necessary.

At the end of the day, straighten out your desk, do your To Do list for the next day, check your tickler file, and add any appointments to your calendar.

Depending upon when your mail is delivered, you will need to deal with this also. Open and respond to any snail mail, or put it in mail folders to deal with later or the next day. If you use a mail box you will need to schedule this in during the day. Decide if you need to go daily or a couple times a week.

In addition, for accounting and deposits, I do this on a weekly basis, however, others might feel more comfortable dealing with it daily.

Also for those of you with merchant accounts, it is best to run your credit cards in batches and then batch out at the end of the day.

For items purchased that I e-mail out, I do that during down times, after work hours, lunch time, break times. For items that need to be mailed, I schedule two post office runs each week. You waste too much time going every day. For those of you running a mail order business, you might want to look into services that come to your home for pick-up or use a service that goes to the post office for you.

For those of you in the lease purchase business, the above is just part of what you need to do each day. What I mean is if you are in the middle of a deal you will also have to schedule time for credit checks, showing the property, and calls from tenant buyers. With good time management and organization skills it can be done. We do it every day, plus a whole lot more. While some days we might concentrate on coaching or consulting, other days we will concentrate on writing or research. However, we get it all done with time to spare, How? Organization and time management....plus a lot of years of practice.

So, don't get discouraged, persevere and some day you will be in the same place we are.

Interested in having your own successful, home based creative real estate investing business? Chuck and Sue have been helping folks start successful home based businesses for over 19 years, and we can help you too! To see how, visit http://www.homebusinesssolutions.com for the latest FREE tips and tricks, educational products and coaching in creative real estate investing and home based businesses. No time to visit the site? Subscribe to our "how to" Home Business Solutions Digest, it's like having your own personal coach: subscribeHBS@homebusinesssolutions.com

A Guide To Imports

2009-01-20T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Kent Pinkerton

Products or services that one country purchases from another are referred to as imports. Imported items vary; a product could be for consumption, reprocessing or even for re-exporting. In the U.S., there are two kinds of imports: domestic and international. Domestic imports refer to the purchase of goods and services within the country between different states. An example of this would be goods that are produced in the state of Texas and transported and sold to the state of Alabama. International imports include all goods and commodities imported from one country to another. An example of this would be when goods that are produced in France are transported and sold to the United States.

With domestic imports, the tax levied on the goods is marginal but not completely absent, as the goods or services in question have been produced within the country itself. The tax levy is marginal because it poses no harm to the country's industries. However, when it comes to international imports, each country tends to vary on the percentage of tax levied on different classes of goods and services. These regulations are decided by the government and are a component of a country's foreign policy. This is done for a variety of reasons but primarily because it gives an advantage to the local companies. The percentage of tax also depends on the nature and the use of the goods. For example, a tax levied on a super luxury car would be more than the tax for a life-saving machine. The need for the medical equipment is more and its purchase will help a larger section of the population.

In today's world, imports are important as they not only increase the degree of specialization in different fields but also lead to greater interdependence between different countries and regions. This cooperation promotes harmonious relationships between different regions of the world.

Import provides detailed information on Imports, Import Models, Import Tuners, Import Cars and more. Import is affiliated with Localization Web Sites.

Forming Nevada Corporations

2009-01-19T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Damian Sofsian

In order to form a Nevada corporation, a real presence of the corporation must be established in the state. If the business that incorporates is not dealt with like a Nevada corporation, the benefits can never be reaped. A Nevada corporation is considered an entity created by law and is separate from any other corporation and state corporation.

The establishment of a Nevada corporation involves the generation of judgment proof, which serves the purpose of elimination of state taxes, and proof of business. One has to have an address and an office to start the corporation. It should have a genuine phone listing with an address in order to prove it is a Nevada corporation doing business in Nevada. The fact that the corporation does legitimate business is reinforced by the business license issued by the state of Nevada. The corporation's office should have people to answer phone calls from customers, to receive and reply for the mails received, and to attend to anyone who comes to the front desk with enquiries.

The corporation always has a separate existence from its stockholders and is considered to have its domicile where it has incorporated. As a result, it is mandatory that the corporation has a resident agent. The corporation can have transactions in other states and the offices. The power derived for the transactions to be done by them will be from the laws in which they are incorporated. This provides a platform for better profits as the income is tax-deductible by the state laws.

The meetings held on behalf of the corporation by the directors should be recorded as minutes and resolutions, as this paperwork is very important for the development of the corporation. These meetings can also be even held out-of-state. The directors need not be in the state of the continual progress of the corporation. They can appoint a nominee who will have to reside in the state.

The corporation must have a bank account in its name. All major sales, purchase, funds, and service contracts should be signed and notarized at the Nevada office. All money transactions must take place only through the corporation registered bank account. In order to maintain a Nevada corporation, it costs around $50-$200 per annum.

Nevada Corporations provides detailed information on Forming Nevada Corporations, Nevada Corporation Advantages, Nevada Corporation Commission, Nevada Corporation Law and more. Nevada Corporations is affiliated with How to Start an LLC in Nevada.

How To Get Your Talent Online And Earning Income

2009-01-18T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Lorene Radenz

Finding fresh ideas for an internet business is a difficult task. Everyone is good at something but they don't know how to cash in on their knowledge. You may think what you know is of no value but you're wrong! You would be surprised to find out how many people are earning a comfortable income on seemingly trivial subjects.

Find Your Niche

You've heard it before but it bears repeating. Why? Because it works! The key is to be happy doing what you enjoy and what you're good at, and then build your online business based on those factors. If you don't enjoy the subject, you will bore of it quickly and it will seem like any other job. You will be learning more as you go, so make it interesting. Find something people are attracted to or something that solves a problem.

Are you good at services? Many services can easily be transferred to an online business as well. Putting up a website and announcing what you have to offer can get you more sales than you can imagine. Display samples of your work if possible. Testimonials from satisfied customers are crucial. If you must, do some work for free in exchange for testimonials.

Try writing an e-book containing all you have learned on a certain subject and put it up for sale on your website. Then start an affiliate program to increase sales. For example, did you just buy a car? "How to Shop for a New or Used Car without Being Cheated" can be valuable to other people in the market for a car. Most will be willing to pay for the information in order to save money in the long run. If you haven't bought a new or used car but will be doing it soon, research the topic extensively, buy your car, and write your e-book!

If you're the artistic type, making homemade jewelry, blankets, and craft items could be the thing for you. If you have been doing this already then you have a start. Put these items up for sale on your website or auction them off. It's not as difficult as it sounds. Many people make it a full time job going to rummage and estate sales, then selling their goods for a hefty profit.

Have a Business Plan

First of all, make a list of all the goods or services you want to provide. This can be a short list that you can add to later. Know who your potential customers are and how you will reach them.

Know what your goals are and don't get sidetracked until you're satisfied in your accomplishments, then you can move on to the next. Too many projects going on will leave another area lacking. Learn step by step and stay with the plan.

Set up a budget and stick to it. This will include any materials, software, web hosting, and marketing. When setting this up, do research on what is available and how much it will cost. Where else but online can you set up a business for such little cost?

Burn the Midnight Oil

If you're working now, don't quit your day job just yet. It takes time and patience to establish an online presence and you still need your job to pay the bills and any expenses your online business incurs. Keep learning about things you're interested in so when your first business takes off, you can open up another and create multiple streams of income.

With every new avenue of income, you gain security. If the market changes and one venture isn't earning you the income it used to, then you will have another to fall back on. Keep updated on trends current and marketing. These rapidly change. What's hot and what works one day may be outdated and ineffective the next.

Don't Give Up

Your internet business will start off slow so have patience. If you stick with your plan and nurture it, you will begin earning trust from the online community and the money will start coming in. Don't be afraid of failing, everyone has that fear when they just start out and not everything works. It's NOT taking any action that will get you nowhere.

About The Author

Lorene Radenz is the owner of http://www.ibizedge.com The All-In-One Resource Guide for Online Business, providing ideas, resources and webmaster tools for entrepreneurs.

Are You An Internet Business Quotwannabequot

2009-01-17T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Ron Larkin

Are you one of the many people who would like to become the next Internet Millionaire? You've read all the stories about people who are making money sitting at home in their underwear or on a sunny beach and want to get in on the action. Well, you can, but it isn't as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of hard work and some cash . Here is a short list of some of the things you will need:

1. A Comprehensive Business Plan - Don't even think of starting until you have made a plan that includes who you will sell to, what you will sell them, where you will get it, how you will sell it and how to get the money to pay for all these things.

2. Your Own Domain and Website - You won't get very far using a free website with a long domain name. Prospects will think that you are not serious about your business if you are not willing to pay for your own name and site.

3. An E-Commerce Program - You must have the capability to accept orders, arrange for payment, preferably by credit card, and ship the product.

4. Well Written Sales Copy - Your website, sales letters, e-zine advertisements, etc., will need hard hitting selling copy to persuade your prospects to buy from you instead of your competitors. If you can't learn to do it yourself you will need to pay a professional copywriter.

5. Patience - Building a successful business on the Internet takes both time and money. Don't fall for the "overnight miracle" stories. You will need to re-invest your early profits back into the business. You will make mistakes and need to make changes to your plan. Test and re-test all aspects until you get it right.

Ron Larkin is a copywriter and business owner with over 40 years experience in various industries. He is the editor of an e-zine for beginning entrepreneurs. Free subscriptions are available at: http://www.HomeBusinessSuperStoreNews.com

Finding The Balance Between Efficient Freight Transportation Amp Environmental Responsibility

2009-01-16T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Victoria Slotover

To many, it might seem that efficient freight transport and taking care of the environment are incompatible objectives.

After all, the traffic produced by freight transportation damages the environment by polluting the air and creating noise. As well as undermining the quality of life in cities it also contributes to global warming.

However, freight transportation is necessary in order for us to receive products into shops for us to buy. As a result, it is necessary to find a way to have an efficient freight transportation system and to look after the environment at the same time.

Recent European legislation has made significant inroads into reducing the environmental impact of freight transportation. For instance efforts are being made to enhance the way in which different modes of transport operate together. The idea behind this is to combine modes of transport to minimise the effects on the environment for any one shipment whilst also maximizing economic efficiency.

Another example of how European governments are trying to make freight transport more environmentally friendly is the new policy introduced by the UK last year. Tony McNulty, the then transport minister, announced a new policy that was designed to reduce the impact of freight transportation on both congestion and the environment. The particular objectives of the new freight policy were to cut down on accidents, pollution and congestion caused by the UK's freight industry.

Amongst the government's plans to reduce the negative impact of the freight trade was the merger of water freight grants and the sustainable road haulage budget from April 2005.

Between 2005 and 2007 a total amount of £50.4 million will be available in rail freight grants. £2 million of this has been assigned for new applications, whilst £19.2 million will be available in road and water grants.

According to Tony McNulty,

"Current freight programmes have separate budgets and are administered separately even though they all have the same objective.

"By bringing these programmes together into one funding pot we can focus on the overall aim of promoting cleaner, safer freight transport that does not add to congestion.

"These new arrangements will provide better value for money for the taxpayer, and will ensure that the additional funding announced today to support the freight industry brings real benefits for the environment and the economy."

GBS Freight Services Limited:

Freight Shipping UK

UK International Freight Forwarders

When Should You Fire A Cleaning Customer

2009-01-15T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Steve Hanson

Years ago the phrase was coined, "The customer is always right." But this is not always a true statement, and keeping extremely demanding or troublesome customers may be biting into your profits. When you first started your cleaning business you were no doubt eager to get any paying customer you could get to sign on. But do you have customers whose phone calls you don't want to answer? Or are there cleaning clients on your list that are low profit, yet demanding and take up a lot of your time? Trimming these customers off your list will allow you to spend more time on building up relationships with higher profit margin accounts.

Just running a business is tough and stressful. If you have cleaning customers who are never happy, are always complaining, expect you or your employees to do something illegal or unethical, or are just more trouble than they are worth; then it may be time to tell these clients to look for a new cleaning service.

It often tends to be smaller accounts that absorb most your time. Keep in mind however, you probably don't want to fire a customer that accounts for 25% or more of your sales or profits unless you have a good lead to fill that vacant spot.

So how do you go about "firing" a customer? First take a look at the contract you originally signed with your client. Did you include a termination statement in your agreement? Your contract should include a clause that either party can terminate with a 30-day written notice. You do not need to tell your client that they are "not worth it", but give them a written notice that because of circumstances you will no longer be able to clean their building. The termination statement should also include the wording that you (the contractor) can terminate at any time for nonpayment of services. So if you need to fire a customer for nonpayment of services, you have it stated in your agreement.

If you do not have a contract or your contract doesn't have a termination statement, give your client a 30-day written notice that you can no longer provide them with cleaning services. Again, don't feel compelled to tell the client that they are more trouble than the profit that they bring to your cleaning company. After all, you want to leave on good terms if possible.

It might seem counterproductive to fire a paying customer. But there are always going to be certain customers that will never be happy. If you have a customer that is constantly giving you headaches, calling nonstop, or burning up time that you could be spending in more productive ways, then it is time to consider firing that customer. Getting rid of the "deadbeats" and building up a customer base of loyal, appreciative cleaning customers will not only make you happier, but make your cleaning business more profitable.

Steve Hanson is co-founder of TheJanitorialStore.com, an online community for owners of cleaning companies. Sign up for Trash Talk:Tip of the Week at http://www.TheJanitorialStore.com. Read success stories at http://www.cleaning-success.com.

The Computer Consulting Business Selling The Network As An Investment

2009-01-14T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Joshua Feinberg

Most small business owners equate expenses with overhead items and capital expenditures such as buying a PC, notebook, printer, modem or version upgrade to Microsoft Office XP. These kind of small business owners often desperately need your computer consulting business assistance to see the big picture and the total solution.

In order to help your prospects and clients leverage their IT infrastructure, you need to elevate your price quotes, proposals and invoices from transaction status to investment.

Your Computer Consulting Business as an Investment

An investment usually has at least the perception of quantifiable and somewhat immediately measurable benefits. If you're still proposing individual hardware and software purchase recommendations, it's time to move your sales pitch toward a more cohesive, proactive technology plan - of which your proposed small business network becomes "mission control".

Small business IT expenses tend to be somewhat random and haphazard. When technology is looked at as overhead, purchases are often made only when there's an emergency.

Have a Plan

When IT investments are made, on the other hand, there's a written plan of attack. This is the project plan that your computer consulting business started developing during your initial consultation and IT audit for how standards are supported, how purchases are made, how projects are implemented and how pilots are rolled into production use.

Take the results of the IT audit, or similar fact-finding mission, and be proactive. To run a successful computer consulting business, you must help your small business clients get out of the fire extinguisher mode.

Understanding Client's Downtime Costs

While the investments associated with data backup, power protection or virus protection certainly are not trivial, they often become quite small in the whole scheme of things -- when you compare costs to the value of the data being stored and the potential business impact if the data were partially or completely lost. It's crucial for you to understand your computer consulting business' client's true costs of downtime.

It's much easier to protect data when the data is well organized. In many small businesses, you'll find critical data being stored on an individual's local "c:" drive. Because the data is so decentralized, it's nearly impossible to adequately protect the valuable information.

The Bottom Line about the Computer Consulting Business

Alternatively, data may be stored on a server in a disorganized fashion, making it difficult for others in the company to locate the files at a later date. You can add tremendous value to the installation, and help increase ROI on your client's networking investment, by devising a well-organized file, folder, and share structure.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Computer Consulting 101. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}

Joshua Feinberg, co-owner of Computer Consulting 101, gets computer consulting businesses more steady, high-paying consulting clients. Now you can too. Just sign-up now for your free access pass to these field-tested, proven computer consulting secrets at Computer Consulting 101.

Ceramic And Pottery Defects 2 Defects From Raw Materials And Batching Errors

2009-01-13T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by John T Jones, Ph.D.

Some folks use materials right out of the ground to make ceramics. A high-volume example of this is the brick manufacturer up the road. (If you don't have clay or shale where you live, there is no brick manufacturer up the road.)

Brick manufacturers usually mine clay by the open pit method. That means that they usually don't tunnel for the clay. They carefully remove the overburden (the dirt, weeds, trees, old cars, and what-have-you on top) leaving a clean clay or shale face. Then they mine the clay or shale and deliver it to the factory.

At the factory, it is crushed or ground as required, water is mixed in, and the clay is extruded by means of an auger into a very long rectangular cross section that is cut into brick as it moves along the conveyer belt.

Now days, everything is automatic in most plants including the loading and unloading of bricks into and out of the kiln. (See Ceramics: Industrial Processing & Testing, John T. Jones & M. F. Berard, Iowa State University Press)

In other words, brick manufactures have a one component composition (the clay or shale). Now there is always an exception. Clays and shales happen to have some sulfate content. This is not good. You might get blistering or scumming or some other unpleasant defect.

What do they do?

They add barium carbonate or some other chemical to tie up the sulfates because barium forms insoluble sulfates. These materials are not premixed into the clay. They are just sprinkled on the clay and the extruder does sufficient mixing.

I'll tell you a secret. Some other manufacturers may add barium sulfate such as the sanitary ware manufacturers that manufacture your bathroom fixtures. Some potters add it too.

Vanadium compounds cause scumming in otherwise pretty white bricks.

Defects caused by raw materials are usually related to impurities or particle size. The defect can turn up at any time in the process. Here are some examples of defects caused by impurities:

Impurity Defects

Lignite

Lignite is common in many clays. It can be hard anthracite or softer bituminous coal or lignite which is softer than the first two.

Screening can reduce lignite from slurries.

Soda ash can react with soft lignite and turn it into a useful colloid that will keep the slurry dispersed.

In other words, some lignite can be beneficial in slip casting operations and other operations that use slurry. But the hard anthracite and other coal varieties are not good. They can cause blisters and pits during bisk and glost firing operations.

Clay companies have some control over the size and amount of lignite in their clays (often by blending.

You can run a screen analysis on the material and see how much lignite remains on the screens. If it is higher than the previous shipments, call the clay company and say these words: "What's with all this lignite!"

That should get their attention. Once I said, "What is all this plastic?" (The filter bags had melted in the air floatation equipment.)

Make sure you blame them for all defects generated for the next six months. (Hey, you think I'm kidding! Make that the next two months or whenever that batch of clay is used up.)

Grit

We had a recurring blistering problem in fine china where I once worked and for years nobody could figure out what was causing it.

I was new with the company but not inexperienced in solving material problems.

I called each of our suppliers and said that we had blisters and it was their fault.

The representative from a kaolin company asked, "What's the grit?"

I wasn't sure what he was talking about because I had not used that particular clay before. Rather than tell him that I didn't know what he was talking about, I said, "Hold on a minute."

I asked the quality control manager, "What's the grit in that stuff?"

He had a questioning look on his face despite his 30 years of service. He pulled out the specification sheet for the last shipment, found that there was such a thing as "grit," and gave me a number.

The number represented the amount of coarse material that showed up during a screen analysis of the clay. For this particular clay, the grit was in the form of mica.

Mica is not good!

Hearing the number, the representative said, "That is too high! I'll call the mine!"

We set a control standard and never had that problem again.

I'd paid my first years salary in five minutes a few days after joining the company.

Iron and Manganese Compounds, Silicon Carbide, Soy Beans and Salts

Sometimes clay manufacturers ship clays to storage areas by rail, ship, or barge. Dockside raw material storage is always dangerous for contamination. The reason is that these facilities ship iron ores, ferrosilicon, silicon carbide and they are not very careful about cleaning out a shed of ferrosilicon or other contaminant before loading it with a shipload of clay. (We changed from bulk to Super Sack® shipments.)

Some of these materials give off oxygen when they decompose. That occurs at some characteristic temperature.

We used the same British china clay in two different plants.

In one plant we had blisters in our decorated ware, the worst possible condition.

The other factory using the same clay didn't. Why? The bisk temperature was much higher in the not affected plant. The contaminant, a manganese compound, decomposed before glazing and decoration.

The affected plant had both lower bisk and glost temperatures. The material did not fully decompose at these temperatures and bubbles were still appearing at the decorating temperatures.

The problem was complicated because we had to prove that the supplier caused a heavy loss that their insurance company should pay.

I'll not go into the details because they proved we were right and did pay.

The reason for reimbursement was that I had requested them to never ship us material from a certain pit (mine). It had caused the company loses for years and I wanted no more of it.

They shipped from that pit rather than shipping us the processed clay that I specified.

Identification of impurities can be tricky without a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM).

Heavy liquids can be used, but that is a nuisance. Microscopes are good for those who know how to use them. You can look at the contaminants from the heavy liquid separation.

Sometimes you must use an outside lab if you don't have the correct equipment.

To isolate a contaminant before you send samples out, elutriate clays and screen non clays.

To elutriate a clay, take about ten pounds of clay and keep washing it down until only the contaminant is left. Put the contaminant in your body or glaze and reproduce the defect you are seeing in production.

Chloride can be detected from salts by washing the clay with deionized water and testing with a soluble silver nitrate solution. A milky precipitate is silver chloride. Salts cause blisters!

We had soy beans once in one of the plants I worked. The clay picked up the beans from a hopper car. They make big holes in your ware but they are easy to screen out if you have screening in your operation, which we didn't!

There is a funny story that goes with the soy beans but I don't have room to tell it here. I'll save that for another article.

Particle Size

One of the most serious formulating errors is in not controlling particle size in the batch recipe.

For example, if you use too much of a certain clay having a very fine particle size, you will have problems. Let me say this, you must choose the correct particle size distribution for your process.

Slip casting requires a coarser particle size distribution than a plastic forming process for the same formulation. What does all this nonsense mean? You must use some coarser grained clay(s) in your casting process. If you don't you will still be trying to cast a piece when the next millennium comes in.

If you want to have control of your casting process, then use a coarse-grained kaolin plus a fine-grained kaolin, and a coarse-grained ball clay plus a fine-grained ball clay. Changing the ratio of fine to coarse clays will give you control. You must maintain the total amount of kaolin and the total amount of ball clay to preserve color of the product.

Look at the particle size distribution of the clays you are using in your process. This information should be provided to you with each shipment.

Look at the particle size portion that says <0.5 microns. (If that information is not there, the <2 micron information usually is. Use it but it is not as good for control.)

The <0.5 microns is called the colloidal fraction. Keep the colloidal fraction the same in each casting batch. (Send me an email if you can't figure out how to do this. Hint: if you have 30% Clay A in your batch and the colloidal fraction of the clay is 20%, the colloidal fraction added to the batch is 6%.)

You control your shrinkage by controlling particle size (and water content). Too fine a formulation will cause excessive shrinkage and you will get distortion and cracking problems.

John T. Jones, Ph.D. (tjbooks@hotmail.com, a retired VP of R&D for Lenox China, is author of detective & western novels, nonfiction (business, scientific, engineering, humor), poetry, etc. Former editor of Ceramic Industry Magazine, Jones is Executive Representative of International Wealth Success. He calls himself "Taylor Jones, the hack writer."

More info: http://www.tjbooks.com

Business web site: http://www.bookfindhelp.com (IWS wealth-success books and kits and business newsletters / TopFlight flagpoles)

Do You Have What It Takes

2009-01-08T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Kurt Mortensen

Every day, people are achieving economic and creative independence by turning their skills into dollars. Garages, basements and attics are being transformed into the corporate headquarters of the newest entrepreneurs, home-based business people. With recent technological advances and a rising demand for "service-oriented" businesses, the opportunities seem to be endless.

Today, accountants, architects, public relations consultants and computer geniuses, as well as chimney sweeps, maid services, mail order businesses and answering services have swelled the ranks of home-based business and brought with them a new perspective on making a house more than a home. If you're like most people, you've probably already thought about working at home. Its appeal is obvious. Beyond the commute, the advantages include better use of time, more time with your family, flexible working hours and independence.

Starting and managing a business takes motivation, desire, talent, research and planning. Like a chess game, success in small business starts with decisive and correct opening moves. Though initial mistakes are not fatal, it takes skill, discipline and hard work to regain the advantage.

To increase your chance for success, take the time up front to explore and evaluate your business and personal goals. Use this information to build a comprehensive and thought-out business plan to help you reach these goals.

The process of developing a business plan will help you think through some important issues that you may not have considered yet. Your plan will become a valuable tool as you set out to raise money for your business. It should also provide milestones to gauge your success.

Before starting out, list your reasons for wanting to go into business. Some of the most common reasons for starting a business are:

-Be your own boss

-Financial independence

-Creative freedom

-Full use of your skills and knowledge

Not everyone is predisposed to work in their own living environment. For some, isolation is a problem; others lack the necessary self-discipline. Another consideration: starting a home-based business is similar to starting any small business in that you must ask yourself if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

To determine whether you measure up, study the characteristics of successful business owners and decide whether your personality traits, experiences and values are similar to theirs. Assess your experience, skills and life goals; do you want to invest the energy, time and resources that successful entrepreneurship requires?

Learning how to persuade and influence will make the difference between hoping for a better income and having a better income. Beware of the common mistakes presenters and persuaders commit that cause them to lose the deal. Get your free report 10 Mistakes That Continue Costing You Thousands and explode your income today.

Starting a business is risky at best; but your chances of succeeding will be improved if you understand the problems you're likely to encounter, and have them worked out before you start. The first question you need to answer is about yourself: do you have what it takes?

Conclusion

Persuasion is the missing puzzle piece that will crack the code to dramatically increase your income, improve your relationships, and help you get what you want, when you want, and win friends for life. Ask yourself how much money and income you have lost because of your inability to persuade and influence. Think about it. Sure you've seen some success, but think of the times you couldn't get it done. Has there ever been a time when you did not get your point across? Were you unable to convince someone to do something? Have you reached your full potential? Are you able to motivate yourself and others to achieve more and accomplish their goals? What about your relationships? Imagine being able to overcome objections before they happen, know what your prospect is thinking and feeling, feel more confident in your ability to persuade. Professional success, personal happiness, leadership potential, and income depend on the ability to persuade, influence, and motivate others.

Kurt Mortensen's trademark is Magnetic Persuasion; rather than convincing others, he teaches that you should attract them, just like a magnet attracts metal filings. He teaches that sales have changed and the consumer has become exponentially more skeptical and cynical within the last five years. Most persuaders are using only 2 or 3 persuasion techniques when there are actually 120 available! His message and program has helped thousands and will help you achieve unprecedented success in both your business and personal life.

If you are ready to claim your success and learn what only the ultra-prosperous know, begin by going to http://www.PreWealth.com and getting my free report "10 Mistakes That Continue Costing You Thousands." After reading my free report, go to http://www.PreWealth.com/IQ and take the free Persuasion IQ analysis to determine where you rank and what area of the sales cycle you need to improve in order to close every sale!

Attract Product Buyerscreate Your Home Page With Marketing Pizzazz

2009-01-07T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Judy Cullins

Your home page needs to grab your visitors by the collar--persuade and engage them.

You have the power to gain your visitors loyalty, to book mark your site, and eventually, to buy your products if you write irresistible, streamlined copy that engrosses them all the way to your sales message and order pages.

Here's a rough draft for a new home page:

Part One. Start with an intriguing headline that is benefit-oriented that will lead your visitor to your products.

Sample: "Want a Quick and Simple Way to Quadruple your Web Sales within Four Months?" This headline link takes my potential buyer straight to my sales letter for the book "Ten Non-techie Ways to Market Your Book Online."

Sample: For book coaching services, my home page headline and link, "Let the Book Coach Make your Book Dream a Reality." Takes my visitors directly to my coaching services information and why I may be the right coach for them.

Sample Testimonial and Link: "Save yourself from headaches, disappointments and money down the drain. Read, "Write Your eBook or Other Short Book--Fast!" before you write another word. Judy puts you on the fastest track to publishing success."
-Marcia Reynolds, www.covisioning.com.

This link takes my visitors directly to my eBook sales letter.

Part Two. Add who you are and what you can do for your visitors, but make it short. Nothing turns a visitor off more than long bio copy. They don't care about you; they care about what problems you can solve for them. They especially love free information.

Sample: The Book Coach can answer your questions, and make your book dream a reality. Judy Cullins, M.A. offers her 20 years as an author, publisher and marketer of over 40 books and special reports on book writing, publishing, and online marketing
--all in short, easy-to-read, formats, with lively teleclasses and phone coaching.

Part Three. Add some specific benefits with a personal approach:

Sample: I can help you answer questions about your book.

- What are the first steps to writing a great selling book?
- Will my book attract my desired audience?
- Do my potential buyers know they need my book and it's worth the money?
- Will my books sell enough copies for my satisfaction?
- How should I publish my book?
- Now that it's written, how can I best promote my book?

Part Four. Use a testimonial and benefit statement from a pro for your ezine.

Your visitors will also say, "Who cares?" For you to convince them they must have your ezine, add a testimonial from a well-known expert in your field.

Sample: Dan Poynter's testimonial below:

"Chock full of nuts and bolts on book writing, publishing, and marketing. Definitely worth your time."

Offer a free report when people subscribe to your ezine.

Sample: To subscribe on my home page, my Web master has provided these links: www.bookcoaching.com/opt-in.shtml and www.bookcoaching.com/opt-out.shtml.

Put some passion into your web home page and others. The biggest mistake writers make is they write weak sales copy. Always give your web site visitor a reason to buy.

Just think--the more pizzazz, the more visitors will return to your site to surf, get free information, and buy your services and products.

Judy Cullins, 20-year book and Internet Marketing Coach, Author of 10 eBooks including "Write your eBook Fast," and "How to Market your Business on the Internet," she offers free help through her 2 monthly ezines, The Book Coach Says...and Business Tip of the Month at http://www.bookcoaching.com/opt-in.shtml and over 140 free articles. Email her at mailto:Judy@bookcoaching.com

10day Rule For Franchise Sales Cooling Off Period

2009-01-06T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Lance Winslow

In franchising law we have what we call a 10-day rule, which in laymen's terms goes something like this; The prospective franchise buyer must receive the (UFOC) Uniform Franchise Offering Circular for ten business days before any monetary compensation is given to or collected by the Franchisor. Sounds like a good idea right? Well, it is very problematic for willing buyers and sellers to operate under such constraints of trade. One of the proponent reasons for this law is that the UFOCs are generally about 200 pages long and that is a lot to read and the government regulators wish to make sure you take it to an attorney first. Currently the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing all the rules in franchising and determining whether we need more over disclosure and which kinds of stipulations to add to the franchise rule. Typical isn't it adding minutia on top of already over loaded and cumbersome disclosure?

I would like to comment first on the 10-day rule. I agree that if such a rule is to remain in play that it should be a number, which is easy to figure out, due to holidays, state holidays, semi-holidays, which are different. If you are going to keep the cooling off period rule, then two weeks in a better idea for clarity so I concur with the commission on this thought. However I warn the commission of leaving the rule in place, I believe the rule should be lowered to one week if not entirely and immediately dismissed. Why? Well because the consumer does not really want any more barriers to buying a franchise. They do not like the 10-day waiting period, which ends up half a month with holidays. They do not want to go through a long sales process. They want instant gratification and they want to start their new career/business and embark on their new chosen lifestyle. All these regulations have complicated the issue and made it tougher to buy franchises, all to the frustration of the consumer, the economy and jobs in our country.

Tell me did anyone ever take a survey of the sales process and large documents of given out during their purchases to existing franchisees and ask them what they think of the whole mess, which has been created to supposedly help them? Has the Federal Trade Commission done this? NO, of course not. Yet, I cannot think of a franchisor, which does not constantly survey their end users of the franchised outlet for the desires and events leading to a sale of goods or services and on all those surveys they always ask the same things. Did you feel that all your questions were answered, were you happy with the buying process, were your needs met, etc? Why doesn't the Federal Trade Commission ask real franchise owners what they think of all the paperwork, large documents and rules? Simply taking the information from lobbyist groups of franchisee advocate rabble-rousers will not do it. Taking Internet complaints will not do it. Ask the actual franchisees already in the systems, the good franchisees, which follow the system. By making more rules you are actually hurting the franchisees, lengthening the documents and impeding the process of allowing franchising to fix America's problems thru simple real world free market fundamentals. DAH! This causes new case law, more stipulations and boilerplate phrases all adding to the length and complexity of the documents, agreements and buying process and thus only helping the S2D2s.

The ten-day rule was taken from the life insurance industry. I cannot understand why a person can go out and buy a new Turbo Porsche for $200,000 and it is a done deal. Recenssion of contract period is only 3-days. Apparently the Automobile industry has a stronger lobby? Let's get real. This is a dumb law? Who got the wild hair up their butt in the first place, can anyone remember why we have that rule in franchising or who put it there? It does not belong there in the modern day of business at the Speed of Thought. We allow people to gamble away entire life savings at casinos without a ten-day peak at the future, why the arbitrary rules in franchising? We are the greatest industry in the world, providing jobs, innovation, and efficiencies to a world, which needs more Umph! We are looking at problems of global recession, yet here in the states we are our own worst enemies impeding the flows of commerce? Why are you impeding our cash flow with the 10-Day rule? Why are you causing franchise buyers anguish when they are trying to juggle finances and timing is an issue in the qualifying for financing of the franchise?

We need to completely re-think our over regulation in the franchising sector immediately.

Lance Winslow - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Employee Evaluation Not An Arena Of Torture By The Honest Answer Consultant

2009-01-05T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Greg Doucet

Employee evaluations are a necessary task that every company should use to improve their human resource and should be used to pick the prospect with the most potential to advance and acquire more responsibilities. Some time, the only way to know the history of a person is through their evaluation as the supervisor may have retired, been promoted or left the company.

I have seen both spectrum of employee evaluation. I have been in an organization where the evaluation was convoluted and very complicated to complete. On the flip side, I was involved with another company where I received an evaluation once in the five years that I was there. Both situations were frustrating. On the former, the organization was very bureaucratic and it seemed that the evaluation process was used as a punishment tool. It was very negative and only dealt with mistakes that occurred during the year. Concerning the latter system, I continue by normal standard of working not knowing if I was doing things correctly or if my supervisor was satisfied with my productivity. I would be criticized out of the blue for the work that I had been doing for years the same way. It would get very frustrating and my motivation would always go down when this happens.

A good evaluation process should be simple to complete and straight forward. It should emphasize the qualities that the company wants to see and will help accomplish the company's mission statement. In my opinion, it should not contain criteria like dress and deportment as this is just common sense. People should know how to behave on their own. In my readings, the best system that I have found was put forward by Jack Welch from GE. His system is simple, straight forward and emphasizes a group of qualities that every employee should try to master. The system is based on 4 E's: Energy, Energize, Edge and Execute.

Energy

This quality is the enthusiasm that the employee brings when he comes to work. This will also cover absenteeism and discipline on completing their tasks. A person should be in good spirits to be able to serve the customers in a friendly manner and work well with their co-workers. A good attitude will always be better than somebody that has a lot of experience. The procedures can be learned but to teach enthusiasm and a heartfelt need to do a good job is almost impossible to accomplish.

Energize

A company should try to get their employees to help each other when somebody is having a problem. This should be done diplomatically. Also, the employee should be able to bring people spirits up and try to be beacon of consistency during the good and bad times. A leader that shows confidence especially in the face of adversity is extremely important. It is easy to lead and motivate people when things are going great. The real test is where there is a crisis and your team are worried and stressed out. The leader should be able to point his team in the correct direction by being able to provide a sensible plan and being flexible. All employees can show this fortitude in front of problems. If more people have this quality, problems will be dealt quickly and people can concentrate on more productive challenges in the company.

Edge

Everybody in a company should have the power and be able to make decisions. This quality is based on employees taking the risk of making decision. The decision should be sound and based on experience. There is no problem if the person seeks advice but should not take forever. They should not be paralyzed to make the decision and have enough confidence to take the plunge. Company should provide some training and supervise at the beginning to make sure that the decisions that an employee makes are correct and not place the company in awkward positions.

Execute

When the person makes the decision, they must be champion of their choice and make sure that the results intended are achieved. They must gather all the necessary resources if needed and make all parties follow the plan if there is one. The employee must also supervise to make sure that things do not get side tracked. Once the final results have been accomplished, they must review the process to see if things were done correctly or could have been improved. They will have to verify to see if the results were acceptable or exceed their expectations. Of course, common sense will have to prevail. A person will definitely not spend a great a deal of time on trivial things but still make sure that things are done correctly so that a trivial task does not turn into a major problem.

Scheduling Evaluations

Evaluations should not be delegated to the HR department. The best system would be one where peers and the supervisor are involved to get several views and well rounded picture of the employee's performance. Evaluations should at least be performed once a year. Twice a year would even be better. They should emphasize the good behavior and show where the person can improve. This would also be a good time to set goals for the employee to strive for. A twist that could be used is that the first evaluation could be between the employee and immediate supervisor. The second one could be performed by the employee. They would fill out the form and present it in front of some peers and supervisors. The committee would then provide comments on the employee's self evaluation. They could point out where the employee has graded himself too low or too high by providing examples of the behavior in question. This will get people involved and will help the employee improve his confidence when dealing with people and presenting their arguments. To look at an example of an evaluation form, you can find one here.

Some people think that employee evaluations are a necessary evil. I think that they are an excellent opportunity to improve employees by showing them what they are good at and providing a path so that they can improve to greater success. The process should not be a stressful situation. It should be a situation where the supervisor and employee can work together to improve the workplace to achieve the individual and company goals.

Any suggestions or comments, please write to Greg Doucet at greg.doucet@caromat.ca or visit us at www.caromat.ca.

Greg Doucet is a consultant whose main purpose is helping businesses grow and expand while enjoying life. His philosophy is to provide value first, help people in their endeavors and have fun while doing his work.

He accepts consulting assignment that will contribute to business' profitability and realize their goal of running a successful business.

He has a Computer Science degree which is complimented by a MBA. He is also a member of Toastmaster and Junior Chamber International where he enjoys meeting new people. He is always ready to provide excellent advice to people that are ready to put in the effort to improve their business and personal lives.

Always Have An Exit Strategy

2009-01-04T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Craig Dawber

Options and alternates is an essential fact of development and progress. Even when your business is doing great and you have everything going for you, it may not be a bad idea to take a step back and reflect. Reflect on what you want to do and where you want to go. Is this something you want to do all your life? Can you imagine stopping to publish your website? Many of us cannot imagine what if - but as a good planner it is imperative to have an exit strategy.

When you consider an exit strategy, the three available options are:

1. Sell the Site. The first option is to sell a profitable site and make a handsome one time profit. If a site is profitable, it will always have a number of interested customers. You may chose to sell your site to a competitor who may want to expand his business, a content contributor who may find it profitable to get a business for which he is contributing the content, or a subscriber who may be interested in taking on the business.

However, when you sell the business, ensure that the contract caters to your commitment to subscribers who have already signed on and paid for the subscription. This would cater to any future plans on a new business where you would have an established track record and customers would already have established trust in your services.

2. Convert the site into a self-maintaining site. This can be achieved by converting all the content available on your site into individual .pdf reports. Now all these reports can be sold piece meal to individuals online. Your commitment to the site can be reduced by closing facilities such as the discussion forum as these need to be moderated and require a presence. As a second step, you could also give out the pdf reports to all subscribers free of cost and also offer them a pro rata refund for services that could not be provided.

The major advantage of this strategy is that you would get relieved of your responsibilities of maintaining the site and services on a daily basis. You would not be committed to regular interaction with the subscribers and yet all your content would continue to sell. The content shall be delivered online and instantaneously.

However, this option entails adequate finances as back up as this would be required to pay off all your subscribers.

3. Shut the site down. A non - viable solution but still an exit option would be to just close down the site. This too requires that you pay off all subscribers and thus a heavy expenditure is involved.

A well thought out plan is easy to execute. Planning helps in achieving many ends easily. There is no permanence and thinks change. Today the running of the site that excites you and keeps you involved may tomorrow cease to interest you or your health may not permit its maintenance.

These are the instances when you may consider an exit option. This exit option if planned well in time would permit easy transition.

This article was written by Craig Dawber of smarket.co.uk Need advice and guidance with your online business check out the resources found in this website.

Wholesale Information How To Buy At Real Wholesale Prices

2009-01-03T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Jorge Olson

Learn how you can buy merchandise at real wholesale prices. You have to learn how wholesale prices can vary so you can know when you are buying at real wholesale prices and not what the supplier wants you to believe are wholesale prices.

Is finding products at wholesale prices difficult? The answer is no. It's not difficult. The difficult part is getting them for "real" wholesale prices.

What do I mean by "real wholesale prices"? Well, most suppliers will know in the first 20 seconds if you are a seasoned buyer or just starting out. They will price their merchandise accordingly.

If you are buying wholesale products to sell on eBay, to stores or out of your home it's all the same to them. They will have up to 10 different "wholesale prices" for the same items.

Even experienced buyers and large established business pay too much on their wholesale products. So don't expect to know more than them when it comes to buying at real bottom wholesale prices.

I got my first introduction into the wholesale product pricing in one of my first wholesale consulting gigs. I was going over the prices of their best selling products to see the profit margins when I was impressed with just how low the price of merchandise was. Or so it seemed to me at the time.

As part of my job I visited all the wholesale trade shows around the country comparing prices. This is when I noticed large discrepancies in pricing for the same exact items.

Walking from booth to booth I was looking for a list of about 500 items in just a few product categories including small electronics, sunglasses, house wares, tools and toys. We needed anywhere from 50 to 100 different products from each category.

After some walking and more walking I found the exact same products with the same brands in different booths. The products were the same but the prices were much different, more than double, as much as 150% more in one booth compared to another, in the same trade show, sometimes the booths no more than 100 feet apart.

This was a shock to me. I thought prices would only range by 3% or a few cents. I was very wrong. Later I found out that only a few people are really manufacturers or buy direct from manufacturers. Fewer suppliers are real importers of products. Most buy from wholesalers themselves and then resell the products to other wholesalers or retailers.

Later on, when I visited current suppliers of my customer I renegotiated prices and told him I knew the "other" suppliers' prices. After a few meetings I managed to lower prices by as much as 50%. Now, to give you a good perspective, my customer had been purchasing from these suppliers for 12 years and with these new prices his profit doubled. Needless to say my customer was very happy and very surprised.

Here are some tips and techniques you can apply immediately to lower your wholesale purchasing prices.

Get to the source: What does this mean? It means you should know who the original source is for the products you are buying, especially if those products are not name brand items. For example, if you are buying t-shirts you should know who makes the t-shirts and where, who imports them, who prints the design if they have one, what is the material and who is selling it and where. Don't just buy 1,000 t-shirts because they tell you they are "good sellers". Make sure you know where they come from.

Even if you are buying closeouts you have to make sure who else sells them and who is the source. I've bought and sold a lot of closeouts in my time and let me tell you, they are closeouts for a reason. Even popular closeout websites that claim they are selling closeouts or liquidations are expensive. I check out their prices often and they are usually wholesalers selling products for a good profit.

Knowledge will be the key to your products. If you know what you are buying and the real prices of production, transportation, warehousing you will be able to negotiate with your suppliers. If you don't, you will usually pay up to 150% more for the same items that others are buying in the same quantities.

Here are 5 questions that you can ask your wholesale supplier that will help you determine the right wholesale price:

1. What is the real retail price of the item and where does it sell for that price?

2. Who is selling it to those Retail Stores and how much profit does the store make and their supplier? This will give you an idea of how much the store pays and how much the store supplier pays.

3. What is the price per case, per pallet and per truckload? This will give you an idea of their best pricing.

4. Who is your best customer? How much do they buy per month? This will tell you who gets the best price for the product.

5. Do you manufacture or import this product? This will tell you if they are the original source for the product or, if, like you, they are a wholesaler or distributor.

Jorge Olson is a consultant, speaker and entrepreneur and owns several Wholesale Distribution companies. Visit his consulting website at http://www.DistributionBiz.com His latest Website teaches you step by step how to get started and make money in Wholesale Distribution. You can find it at http://www.WholesaleTeacher.com.

The Internet A Numbers Game

2009-01-02T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Richard Grady

If you take a close look at this 'working online' business, you will see that it is quite simply a numbers game (this is actually the case with most if not all businesses).

At the most basic level, building a successful website is just a matter of getting sufficient visitors to the site and ensuring that some of them purchase something. I am a firm believer that you can sell pretty much anything if the price is right and whilst your products may not appeal to everyone, they will appeal to someone.

So, back to the numbers game. Once you know the percentage of visitors to your site that will actually buy something (the conversion ratio), you can give yourself something to aim for.....

If one out of every 100 visitors buys something then you have a conversion ratio of 1% (which online is actually not that bad). This means that 500 visitors to your site should result in five sales.

To increase the number of sales there are a couple of things you could do. Firstly, you could increase your conversion ratio by improving your sales page or reducing your prices etc. Alternatively, you could work the numbers game and increase your traffic - you already know that 500 visitors will give you five sales so if you can get 1000 visitors to your site, you should generate ten sales (assuming that the quality of the traffic is equal to or better than that which you are already receiving).

This may seem obvious but it is often the most obvious things that people miss. I was talking to one of my customers recently and they had managed to build their site up to the point whereby it was receiving around 250 visitors a day and was generating approximately $50,000 a year in sales (this was a site selling physical goods so this figure is the sales cost, not profit).

Despite this, my customer was finding it hard to visualize the steps that he needed to take to improve his business further. His target was for the business to generate sales of $200,000 a year and the difference between the current earnings and the target earnings seemed too great to be achievable.

To get over this perceived problem, I asked my customer to look at things in a slightly different way. I asked him to forget about the sales figure and concentrate on visitor numbers to the site. If 250 visitors a day generate $50,000 a year in sales, then it is fair to assume that 1000 visitors a day will generate $200,000 in sales (as long as the quality of the visitors remains constant).

This made the task seem fair more achievable since my customer 'only' had to find another 750 visitors a day instead of $150,000.

Of course, finding that many new visitors a day is a big task but if you are mentally prepared and believe you can achieve your target, you are far more likely to succeed.

This numbers game principle can be applied to pretty much any aspect of an online business, for example....

If you write a newsletter and you have 1000 subscribers that generate income when you promote a product of, say, $100, then to increase this figure to $500 you simply need to increase your subscriber numbers to 5,000.

If you know that each time you add a new page of content to your site that this will generate, on average, ten extra visitors a day from the search engines (once the page has been crawled and indexed) then adding 100 pages of content to your site should earn you an extra 1000 visitors a day!

If you are a regular contributor to online forums and know that each post you make (that contains a link in your signature to your website) will gain you 5 new visitors to your site a week, then making 10 posts a day should boost your visitor numbers by 350 a week.

If you create your own products such as eBooks or software and currently earn $250 a month from each one, then it is perfectly possible that every new product you develop will earn you an extra $250 a month (once marketed and established).

And finally, if you have one website that earns you $50,000 profit a year, what would happen if you had two websites? Or three? Or five?......

Online business is just a numbers game - the principals behind the numbers are far more complicated and I am not suggesting for one moment that doing any of the above tasks is easy BUT if you keep the numbers at the front of your mind it should make the targets seem far more achievable.

About The Author

Richard Grady has been helping people earn online since 1998. Find out more about Richard at: http://www.thetraderonline.com Free wholesale search engines: UK- http://www.wholesale118.co.uk and US http://www.thewholesaletrader.com.

The 3 Most Effective Methods To Determine Your Companys Value

2009-01-01T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by John Reddish

How much is your company worth? How much of that worth is attributable to your performance? Is a valuation for estate, or divorce, purposes a true reflection of the business worth? These are tough questions and they make calculating the selling price of a closely held company difficult.

Although there are three generally used methods of valuation -- industry norms (usually based upon some multiple of earnings computation), comparable sales of public companies, and formula approaches -- no one method does a consistently good job of expressing the value of the closely held business for purposes of (the various types of) sale.

Attempting to consider a purchasing decision, or structure a selling price, on factual data (when available and confirmed) is, however, a worthwhile of estimating approximate value. Collectively used, these 3 valuation methods can help establish an objective range of value, which provides the basis for successful negotiations and sale.

Even with objective values, the watchword in buying a closely held business remains, Buyer Beware. The closely held company is one of those strange animals that can alternately command pennies or fortunes. It can be, and often is, worth whatever you can get for it. What you value and how you value it, are critical to the process. Some items that had been deeply discounted or handled as contingent liabilities in prior years are now viewed more as key elements in a sale the value of key employees and contractors governed by sound (and enforceable) golden handcuffs and the value of software licenses, for example.

Valuations for estate purposes, or equitable distribution (divorce), however, are seldom reflective of a true selling price. That's not their purpose. Use such values warily when considering a sale. Also, be aware that a sale in too close proximity to a key owner's death or divorce might result in the sale being challenged if the value is significantly different.

In preparing to conduct a valuation, a true picture of the company's performance must be prepared. Unfortunately, the tax code is structured in such a way that there is little incentive for the private company to show comparable profits to its publicly traded counterparts.

Thus, declared earnings often do not mean much. Before applying any model, a valuation expert will need to "recast" the financial statement, taking tax shelter considerations out of the picture and presenting new numbers based on what the company's performance would look like if run by hired managers.

In the industry norm method, the company will be compared with other assumedly similar companies in their industry that have sold at various multiples of (recast) earnings. That's OK if the company is truly a typical company. If the company has either proprietary products or services or market position that make them unique, the multiples approach negates that uniqueness.

The comparable sales method presents similar problems. Are the sales being compared truly comparable? Few public companies have the same infrastructure as their privately held counterparts. Key to a comparable sales method working is the ability to compare "apples and apples".

There are dozens of formulas used in valuation analysis. Formulas can establish ranges of values. Using both the right formulas and knowing how to interpret them for a given business can give a close indication of true value, but ratios derived from "norms" (averages) also produce a leveling effect. Confused? What is your company worth? It's worth whatever you, the seller, will accept. It's worth whatever the purchaser is willing to pay you. Reviewing objectively prepared vales and going over them help bring a sense of reality to a transaction that can be very emotional. Using traditional valuation methods help to establish guidelines, which usually put buyer and seller in the same ballpark.

Selling a family or entrepreneurial, business isn't like selling a product or even a service; it's like selling a piece of yourself. If you engage the right advisors, give yourself time (usually 1-3, or more years) to find the best buyers and are realistic about the possible outcomes, you can increase the likelihood of achieving a successful sale. And what's that really worth?

John Reddish works with and speaks to entrepreneurs and top executives who want to master growth, transition and succession, helping them to get results faster, less painfully and in ways that work for them. Author, speaker, consultant and mentor, John is a member of the National Speakers Assn.

For booking and product information: http://www.getresults.com or call 800.726.7985 in the US, 01.610.388.9335 internationally, or at johnr@getresults.com

Paid Online Surveys

2008-12-31T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Philip Culver

Have you ever come across those online surveys that offer to pay you if you take them? I'm sure you didn't think much of them and maybe even considered them a scam of some sort. Well, guess what, some of them are true. I actually earned $100 for spending a mere five minutes on one of these paid online surveys.

Like most of you, I found in unbelievable at first. I'd never heard of an online survey that actually paid anyone before. It's amazing to believe that these surveys are actually true. Of course, everything depends on the company that's initiating the survey how credible they are in the market, how prompt they are with payments, how consistent they are with remittances, etc but I have come to realize that paid online surveys are a viable and exciting business opportunity.

I guess I was just plain lucky because I came across this paid online survey totally by chance. I was surfing the net one day and this colorful and attractively designed banner ad caught my attention. I clicked the link, found it to be a paid online survey, and immediately started thinking of all the things which my friends had said about them: they're a scam, they don't pay, don't be a fool, etc. You can imagine that I was skeptical about the whole thing. However, the copy was very professionally written and quite compelling, so much so that I actually found myself doing the survey. Besides, I didn't have to shell out anything at all to take the survey, so I thought, why not?

I read through the conditions of the paid online survey carefully and discovered that I would actually get paid for my efforts. I followed the instructions it mentioned, created an account and started answering questions. It was the first paid online survey of my life. The questions asked were mostly inquiring about my opinion on the fastfood industry in America.

Of course, like many of you, I was no stranger to the numerous horror stories about paid online surveys that collected your personal information and then sold it to spammers and third party users. Ordinarily, I would not give out my personal information to just anybody online, but this particular survey asked for nothing more than my name and my food preferences. I gave them what they needed, proceeded to take on the survey, and was finished in no time. Shortly thereafter, I was informed by the site that I had just earned one hundred dollars for answering the survey. I was absolutely thrilled.

After that, I logged on to the site as often as I could to participate in as many online surveys as possible. I wasn't lucky all the time. For instance, some of the surveys targeted people with a certain profile that I didn't fit, while others targeted people in specific areas. However, overall, I managed to make over a thousand dollars on online surveys in my first month alone. And right now, I'm still earning. Try them for yourself and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Naturally, I was hooked. And kept returning to the site for more paid online surveys. Of course I would be lying if I said that I had similar success each day I filled out paid online surveys. Some of the paid online surveys were not targeted at people like me while others specifically demanded people living in other cities or even states. And not all paid online surveys were five minutes long or paid hundred dollars. But overall, I got to fill up enjoyable paid online surveys, spent relatively little time online and eventually managed to make over a thousand dollars in my first month alone! Paid online surveys had become an income stream for me and my family. Naturally I got them hooked onto it as well and pretty soon, the entire family was filling out paid online surveys and getting paid in cold, hard cash for it. There surely couldn't be an easier or better way to make money!

Looking for finance and business information? Go to: http://www.thefinancearena.com for more information.

Accountability

2008-12-30T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Adam DesAutels

Why is this happening to me? When is somebody going to train me? When am I going to find good people? I am sure you have all heard questions similar to these.

You may have even asked these questions yourself. But what ever happened to personal responsibility? People are too quick to point a finger and fail to realize that three fingers point back at them. They judge others in thirty seconds but don't even take ten seconds to assess themselves.

Let's pretend for a moment that you are a manager of a cell phone stand at the local mall. The stand is only big enough to have two employees working at once. On this particular day you are working with Joe. Joe has been with you for five months. He has been through all of your training programs, and you even sent him to a strategic selling seminar last month to help him increase his selling ability. It is a nice sunny day, so the traffic in the mall is minimal. After opening the store and not seeing a customer for the first two hours a middle-aged couple comes to your stand looking for a phone. Joe is with them for an entire hour! Everything looks like its going well. Then they walk away. That couple could be the only potential customers to walk over all day. You wonder what happened. Why did he lose the sale? Immediately you walk over to Joe to ask. He says, "They weren't going to buy today They were just looking They didn't find a style they liked." Pointing the finger! They, they, they! All he needed to say was that he was outsold! No excuses. Just admit you were wrong and then figure out what you can do differently next time. Until Joe is willing to admit he is wrong he cannot move forward and he will to continue to lose sales.

People often reach a point in their performance that they cannot seem to surpass. They think they are so good that they don't need to change. One way they can get through that is to admit they could have done things differently. If customers told Joe all day everyday that they were "just looking" and Joe didn't overcome that objection, he would lose a lot of sales. Joe needs to quit making excuses and accept responsibility so he can formulate a way to overcome that. He might ask them open-ended questions like, "What did you have in mind?" or, "What can I show you today?" Rather than, "Can I help you find something?" Questions like these will help prevent losing valuable customers to the competition.

The only thing worse than excuses is, "I'll try" or "I tried". All that means is that you are too lazy to even come up with an excuse! One day I was listening to a fellow consultant and he was telling a story about one of his follow-up seminars. During this follow-up meeting, one of the students said that they tried what he taught and it didn't work. Without delay the consultant took out a pen, walked over to the gentleman, set the pen on the desk and said, "Try to pick up this pen". The man picked up the pen with ease. The consultant took the pen and set it down again saying, "Don't pick it up. Just try to pick it up." After one more try the man understood the consultant's point. There is a significant difference between doing and trying. People that "do" don't "try". And people that "try" don't "do".

Take a lesson from Joe. The power is in the question. What can I do to improve? What can I do differently today? What image do I want to project of myself? Start asking yourself the right questions and take responsibility for your actions.

Author Bio: Adam DesAutels President and CEO of DesAutels Communications Agency. A full service business development firm that specializes in planning, marketing advice, research, and general business Q and A (consulting). DesAutels supports the most successful small businesses around the nation in growing their companies. For a complementary Business Evaluation ($200 value) call 866.521.3780.

How To Build Some Stability In Your Monthly Online Income And Sleep Better At Night

2008-12-29T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Evelyn Lim

You have just started an online business and sitting around hoping for the click-thoughs to happen. Then you start getting impatient as the cash inflow is not as strong as what you have hoped for. In fact, if there is an income, it can be pretty irregular. You are ready to conclude that it's just not possible to rely solely on your unstable online income to pay your monthly household bills. And you're also about to give up altogether the idea about quitting your full time job for your online business.

But hang onyou read somewhere that statistics show that prospects need to visit your website at least 7 times before they click over to buy. You realize that it takes some time to build up your subscriber or customer base for there to be some kind of stability. So what concrete action can you take in the meantime?

Think about the advice that you have been reading from top gurus like Robert G Allen (author of best selling book "Multiple sources of income"), John Milton Fogg (the greatest networker in the world) and Joe Girard (the World's greatest salesman). All espouses the same theory on finding stability through multiple sources of income.

Therein lies your answer. You need to build a steady monthly income through multiple sources that you can depend upon without working much harder for it. Now how do you go about this? Here are three examples:

1. Build a new membership site. A membership site requires monthly payment from its subscribers. What a wonderful way to generate recurring income for yourself!

2. Promote other membership sites. Some membership sites pay their affiliates in tiers. This means that you get a high commission payout in the first month for a successful referral and if the same referral renews his membership for the second month, you get another commission payout (although this may be a smaller percentage compared to the first).

3. Use a multitude of sites and business models. For instance, you own a directory site. What is to stop you from writing an ebook on how to start up a directory site? Most internet marketers I know have many sites and means by which they draw regular cheques from.

There you have it. Less work for possibly more income. Be patient. Your efforts will gradually pay off! Paying the bills and sleeping at night just gets easier.

Evelyn Lim publishes a free newsletter on article marketing and other online business tips. An ex-banker and a qualified financial analyst, she also now specialises in educating others in their search for financial freedom. Visit her website at http://www.e-BizMap.com or her blog at http://www.EvelynLim.com.

Ten Ways To Ensure Your Business Success In 2006

2008-12-28T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Angela Booth

It's a bright and shining new year, and you've got a clean slate. What will you do with this opportunity?

Here are some ways to ensure your business success this year:

1. Keep your business moving forward

If you haven't set your goals for 2006, decide what you want NOW. Take out a notebook, put today's date on the top of the page and write out your business goals.

While you're at it, you may as well create some goals for self-improvement and family and relationships. To make the most of your business in 2006 you'll not only need to be healthy, but you'll also need the support of others.

Leave some space on the right side of the page for a "Due Date" column. This is the date by which you want to have achieved each goal.

The next step is to create an action plan for each goal. Don't spend too much time on this, but make sure that you've broken down each goal into small, manageable steps, and have translated those steps into daily tasks.

Write or type: REVIEW GOALS into each day of your daily planner, and then do it. Look at it this way: you'll never achieve what you want to achieve unless you try. So try, and give it 100 per cent of your energy.

2. Expect to be successful, and repudiate your doubts on paper

Do you expect your business to be a success? Are you positive that your business will be successful? Are you so determined that you'll be a success that you'll do whatever it takes?

I hope you answered a loud and heartfelt "Yes!" to all three questions.

If you have doubts, write the doubts down. Most of your doubts will be trivialities and hypotheticals. You'll see how ludicrous they are once they're in black and white and you'll be able to laugh at your fears.

If a doubt has real substance, by writing the doubt down, you'll be able to make a plan so that you can work around the challenge. Once you've made a plan, you'll get a huge surge of confidence and relief.

Remember, writing your doubts and repudiating them on paper is vital to your success.

3. Don't sweat the small stuff (it's all small stuff)

Keep your eyes on the prize: that is, the achievement of your goals. The bumps and bruises of life will only steal your enthusiasm if you allow them to. Things will go wrong. Expect this. Handle each challenge, and get on with working towards your goals.

4. Close your office door

Block out at least two hours each day in which you can work without interruption. Close your office door, and let the answering machine or voice mail take your messages.

5. Do what makes you uncomfortable

Do at least one thing that makes you uncomfortable every day. Maybe it's making a dozen cold calls to drum up some business. Maybe it's clearing up clutter in your office. Maybe it's giving a presentation to a new client.

Successful people force themselves to do the things unsuccessful people don't do.

(No one said this was supposed to be easy.)

6. Market your business every day: repetition counts

Marketing your business never stops. Your prospects will need to hear your message many times before they remember your name.

You'll need to get in touch with current clients consistently too.

7. Trust your intuition

Always go with your gut instinct. In fact, make it a rule that you never sign an agreement without sleeping on it first.

If you're thinking that you don't have intuition, you do. Everyone does. To access your intuition, start paying more attention to the feelings in your body as you go through your day. The tightness in your belly, the crick in your neck, and the pain at the back of your eyeballs are trying to tell you something.

Your intuition lives in your body. It's your (un)common sense. Pay attention to it.

8. Trust your dreams

You can access your intuition about your health, other people, and life situations more easily if you pay attention to your dreams.

You don't need to become a New Age flake, but if your dreams consistently feature floods, fires and earthquakes, it may be wise to pay attention to the warnings you're being given.

Consider your dreams your early-warning radar.

9. Don't buy into limitation

How are you limiting yourself?

We all place limits on ourselves. What would you do if you knew, absolutely, without any doubt at all, that you could not fail?

Write down five things you would do if you knew you couldn't fail. Can you turn them into goals and make plans to achieve them?

10. Stay passionate

If you're not passionate about your business, you might as well be working in a regular job.

So if you've lost your passion, get it back. Do some thinking and writing. Write down the answers to the following questions:

Why are you working in your own business? What do you hope to achieve? Where will your business be next year, and in five years? What are you grateful for? What can you offer others? What do you love?

(The writing part is important.)

Wouldn't you like to clone yourself as a writer, or have someone do your writing tasks for you? Contact Angela Booth at http://www.angelabooth.com now because Angela expertly ghost-writes articles, proposals, marketing communications, Web copy, and books. Yes, you're the author of the words Angela writes for you. Angela is fast, reliable and professional, and works with individuals and small businesses as well as large companies.

Never Go To The Bank Again How Businesses Save Time And Money With Electronic Check Processing

2008-12-27T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Lisa Hephner

What is Electronic Check Processing?
Electronic check processing means that you can convert a paper check received from a customer into an electronic transfer (sometimes called an e-check) that takes funds from your customer's account and places them into your account. (You may have seen transactions of this type on your checking statement.) This transfer takes place via the Federal Reserve Bank's Automated Clearing House (ACH) system. It's a faster, less-expensive way to get your money.

What is the ACH Network?
Put very simply, the ACH network moves money from one entity to another--electronically. The Automated Clearing House (ACH) Network is a highly reliable and efficient nationwide batch-oriented electronic funds transfer system which provide for the interbank clearing of electronic payments for participating depository financial institutions. The Federal Reserve and Electronic Payments Network act as ACH Operators, central clearing facilities through which financial institutions transmit or receive ACH entries. The process is governed by NACHA, The National Automated Clearing House Association (nacha.org), operating rules and business processes.

ACH Transaction Types:

Direct Deposit of payroll, Social Security and other government benefits, and tax refunds
Direct Payment of consumer bills such as loans, utility bills and insurance premiums
Business-to-business payments
Electronic Checks (E-checks)
E-commerce payments
Federal, state and local tax payments.

If you're getting your paychecks directly deposited into your bank account, you're already using the ACH network. You can leverage this system for your business so that you never need to go to the bank againyou can process checks electronically from your computer.

Processing Electronic Checks
Electronic check processing is the means by which you can take a paper check and submit it for payment electronically instead of taking it to the bank. Your bank may offer you this capability if you purchase a check scanner from them. The scanner takes an image of the check and submits that image to the bank electronically. The bank then processes that check just as if you had handed over the physical check itself.

An easier way to process checks electronically is to use a software program or a web-based payment processing service. When using a web-based system or ASP, you don't need to install any software or buy any hardware. You simply key in check information and submit the transaction.

The process is simple:

1. Notify
You must notify your customers that their paper checks will be processed electronically. You can do this in writing on your invoices, or you can post a sign with this information at your place of business.

2. Collect and Convert
When a paper check is presented as payment, it is converted to a one-time ACH-based electronic payment, with pertinent information regarding the customer's financial institution and account number captured. You then make an image for archival purposes (you should keep this copy for 2 years), stamp the original check "VOID" and discard it.

3. Process
An ACH file is created and presented to your financial institutionthis is typically done by the payment processing system you are using; the payments are processed through the ACH network, the customer's account is debited, and your account is credited. It typically takes about two business days for the money to reach your account; this is about the same time it takes when you submit a paper check to the bank. However, you will be notified of insufficient funds in about 48 hours with an electronic transactionit can take over a week to get that information with a traditional transaction.

4. Confirm.
Once your customer's account is electronically debited, the payment is listed on their bank account statement under "other electronic payments" or a similarly labeled area. The description will include the check number, amount, and the billing company name. Your customers won't be able to get a copy of the check with their statements, but they can request that you provide a copy (which is why you need to keep one in your files).

Electronic Check Processing Enables Your Business To:

Improve cash flow with quicker access to your money
Save your customers time and money
Increase on-time collections
Receive 48-hour notification of NSF
Eliminate manual reconciliation of insufficient funds
Eliminate time-wasting trips to the bank

Why Use Electronic Check Processing?

It costs on average $1.22, in manpower and incidental costs, to process a paper check. Electronically processing that check can cost as little as 55 cents.
Check conversion requires very little effort or time to set up, and once it is established, your company immediately begins saving money.
Your customers will appreciate the convenience too! With electronic check (or e-check) processing they can give you the check information over the phone, or submit it via an online form. They no longer need to pay postage!
Check conversion relies on the same secure network used for Direct Deposit and Direct Payment, the Automated Clearing House (ACH).
The Federal Reserve's Regulation E and the NACHA Operating Rules regulate electronic payments processed through the ACH network. Because of Reg E and NACHA's Operating Rules, consumers have greater protection with check conversion.
Check conversion is the fastest-growing type of electronic payment ever. Over 1 billion consumer bill payments by check were successfully converted to ACH payments in 2004.
Check conversion reduces time and resources needed to process payments, resulting in continued cost savings to your company.
Electronic processing reduces the burden on our nation's transportation systems and the environment. It takes a considerable amount of fuel to ship our country's millions of checks each year between companies, financial institutions, and customers.

(statistics provided by electronicpayments.org)

Tips for selecting an Electronic Check Processing System

Choose a system that does not require you to purchase expensive hardware or software upfront
Look for a flat rate on electronic check transactionsyou should never have to pay a percentage of the transaction to the processor.
Pay attention to both monthly fees, transaction fees, and monthly minimums to select a system that makes the most financial sense for your business
Choose a system that securely stores customer information so that you will be able to eliminate duplicate data entry when your customers submit multiple payments.
Choose a system that can easily export customer data so that you can automate your entire a/r system by integrating payment processing with your main business management software.
Look for a system that enables you to both process electronic checks and to do direct-debit transactions. (This means collecting from customer bank accounts without having a paper checksuch as check by phone transactions, online bill pay, or recurring monthly charges deducted automatically from customer accounts.) You should be charged the same flat transaction amount for direct-debits that you are charged for electronic check transactions.
Security is important when transferring funds electronicallymake certain that the payment processing system you use has powerful security and encryption tools in place such as a 1024-bit Digital Certificate, 128-bit encryption, and a SSL (Secured Socket Layer) compliant with CISP -- Cardholder Information Security Platform.

Lisa Hephner is the PaySimple marketing manager.

PaySimple provides effortless electronic payment processing via a simple web-based interface used to perform auto recurring billing, electronic check processing, direct-debit and credit card processing.

For more information on Electronic Check Processing See: http://www.paysimple.com/electronic_check_processing.html

For more information on ACH see http://www.paysimple.com/about_ach.html

For more information on Auto-Recurring billing see: http://www.paysimple.com/auto_recurring_billing.html

To contact Lisa Hephner email lisa@paysimple.com

Failure Is Not An Option

2008-12-26T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Diane Hughes

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that online businesses -- just like brick and mortar businesses -- have a very high failure rate for startups. Ever wonder why that is? There are several business consultants, success gurus, and motivational experts who can tell you. The problem is: Most of us don't listen.

How many times have we heard the "success secrets" of the multimillion-dollar pros? Countless times we have all been preached to about setting goals, having a defined plan, giving it all we've got, and aiming high. Yet still, take a look around. The statistics of small business failures have not changed. In the first five years of starting a new business, the odds say that you'll fail.

Ready for the good news? There is one thing I can tell you -- from personal experience, and from the experience of well-known, successful online business owners that I know. More important than setting goals, more than following a plan, more than shooting for the moon, is your mindset. Ask people who have succeeded online how they did it, and they are sure to tell you that they had to. That's right -- they HAD to. Why? Because failure is not an option.

When you set your sights on something as grand as starting your own business, you simply have to have the mindset that, regardless of what happens, you will not allow yourself to fail.

When difficulties come, the "failure is not an option" attitude will drive you to overcome them. When things aren't going as you originally planned (and many times they won't), "failure is not an option" will keep you from folding. When everybody else tells you that you can't make it, you will be able to tell them you can because "failure is not an option."

Those whose thinking allows them an "out," those who begin a business with the idea that if it doesn't work out -- "oh well," are the ones who will most likely falter. However, on the other hand, those who have no choice but to succeed will do exactly that.

Are you considering starting a new business? Do you have a business that isn't performing the way it should? Take a look at your attitude. Yes, it is important to set goals and follow through with them. It is vital that you have the knowledge and funds to operate a business the right way. However, those things won't carry you very far if you allow yourself to think that it's OK to fail.

Take some time this week to double-check your thinking. Are you "hoping" your company will make it? Do you "wonder" if everything will work out all right? When you eliminate the option of failure, you open up the flow of creativity, you boost your level of willpower, and you energize your thinking so that only those things that lead to success can control your mind. Once you accomplish that, the only viable alternative is to make it, and make it big!

About The Author

Diane C. Hughes * ProBizTips.com

FREE Report: Amazingly Simple (Yet Super Powerful)

Ways To Skyrocket Your Sales And Build Your Business

Into A Tower of Profits! ==>> http://madmarketer.com/diane

Medical Billing Gu0 Record Field 62

2008-12-25T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Michael Russell

The endless road that is medical billing and trying to make heads or tails of CMNs, is enough to drive even the most sane of us totally out of our minds. It seems that there is a CMN for every possible item. Some CMNs are fairly simple to understand and then there are those, like the DMEPOS CMN, or as is known in electronic billing circles as the GU0 record, that are about as convoluted and confusing as they come. This is now our tenth installment on the GU0 record with no end in site. It's no wonder medical billers are frustrated. We pick up our review of the GU0 record with field number 62.

GU0 field 62, positions 266 - 269, is Reply NUM L04 N01. This field is the reply to the first question on any DMERC certification requiring a four position numeric response. The following forms are supported for this field. For forms 02 and 09, the valid responses are 0001 - 0024. For forms 03, 08 and 10, the valid responses are 0000 - 9999. For form 04, the valid responses are 0001 - 0099. For form 06, the valid responses are 0001 - 0099. However, these responses are only valid if field GU0-27 is filled with N or D. Forms 01 and 05 are reserved for future use.

Further clarification is needed for these values. For form 02, this is the number of hours in the day that the patient spends in a wheelchair. For form 03, this is the number of episodes of sleep apnea during testing that last for ten seconds or more. For form 04, this is the number of months prior to ordering the device that the patient sustained the fracture. For form 06, this is the number of months that the patient has been in considerable pain. For form 08, this is the milligram dosage of the drug being given to the patient. For form 09, this is the number of hours during the day that the patient is infused with the drug. Form for 10, this is the milliliters per day that the patient is given the amino acid.

For those who need to know where these actual questions come from, here is a brief explanation and mapping. For form 02, the question is number 5 from that form. For form 03, the question is number 12 from that form. For form 04, the question is number 6.B from that form. This is an osteogenesis stimulator CMN. For form 06, the question is number 4 from that form. For form 08, the question is number 1.B from that form. For form 09, the question is number 6 from that form. And finally, for form 10, the question is number 4.A from that form.

As you can see, it can take quite a bit of time and space to explain even one field of the GU0 record. This is why medical billing is so confusing, complicated and ultimately, so expensive. If the process could be simplified, maybe medical costs would come down a bit, at least from the billing end.

In our next installment on medical billing, we'll pick up with the GU0 record and field number 63.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to Medical Billing

Are You Mentor Material

2008-12-24T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Tim Knox

Q: I've been approached by a young man who asked if I would be his mentor. I'm flattered by his interest, but I'm not sure I'm cut out to be a mentor. In your opinion what makes a good mentor? - Kenneth P.

The mentor/mentee relationship is very much like that of a parent and child. The younger, less experienced child mentee will look to you, the older, more experienced parent mentor, for guidance, wisdom and advice. They will come to you with questions and expect you to have all the answers. They will bring to you their problems and expect you to solve them. And if you don't give them the attention they think they deserve they may pout and complain about you to all their friends.

In short, if kids get on your nerves, Kenneth, don't even think about being a mentor. Buy a goldfish or even better, a rubber plant. They require far less attention and everyone will be much happier in the long run.

Typically, there are three things every good mentor should have: time, patience, and a genuine desire to help another person succeed without expecting anything in return. If you have an abundance of those things, then being a mentor can be a highly rewarding experience. If not, please see the rubber plant reference above.

Why do some people make excellent mentors while others do not? It's all about motive. Are your reasons for being a mentor unselfish or are they self indulgent? Are you considering becoming a mentor because you truly feel that a mentee might benefit from your wisdom and experience or is it because you like being the center of someone else's adoration?

You should not become a mentor just to feed your own ego because you will be doing your mentee a great injustice because there will be no give and take to the relationship. I know many successful entrepreneurs who consider themselves mentors, but truth be told they simply revel in holding court and having younger entrepreneurs hang on their every word as if its gospel. They care less about hearing their mentee's questions than they do about hearing the sound of their own voice.

As my mama would say, "If you talk just to hear your own head rattle," then mentoring is not for you.

One of the keys to a successful mentor/mentee relationship is to set some ground rules and stick to them. Sit down with your prospective mentee and discuss the expectations of both parties, i.e. what do you and the mentee expect to get out of the relationship? It's a given that the mentee is seeking your time, wisdom and advice, but if you as the mentor don't also get some kind of mental satisfaction your interest in the relationship will quickly wane.

Discuss how often you will get together. Will you meet for lunch once a week or for an hour in your office several times a month? It is important that you create an actual meeting schedule and stick to it. Without a set schedule life will get in the way and you will cancel more meetings than you attend.

Next, set some guidelines and limitations. How often can your mentee call? Is it OK for them to call your cellphone or should they go through your secretary? Can they drop by the office anytime? Can they call you at home after 5pm?

Set some goals for the mentee. Assign them homework, give them a task. The relationship must be more than just chewing the fat. The point is to help the mentee grow, personally and professionally. Give them a list of books to read. Recommend seminars they should attend. Have them outline their business goals in writing, then you set milestones and hold them accountable for reaching them.

From your side of the fence, don't be afraid to share your successes and failures. Let your experience be their guide. Help them identify opportunities and avoid pot holes that you may have hit along the way. Don't be embarrassed to tell the truth, especially if it can keep your mentee from making the same mistakes you did.

As a mentor you should also introduce your mentee into your circle of friends and associates. Sponsor them into Rotary, take them to luncheons, and introduce them to others who might also help their careers.

Being a good mentor also means that you are a confidant; your mentee will share not only his business problems and goals, but also his personal feelings, his secrets, his plans, and his angst. Respect the mentee's privacy. Your discussions should not be fodder for your next poker night. When something is told in confidence, respect that or get out of the mentor business.

One final point, a successful mentor/mentee relationship should not be a temporary relationship, but one that in ongoing, that grows and evolves until the day you are no long mentor and mentee, but peers.

My own mentor, who probably has no clue that he holds that spot in my life, started out as an investor in one of my companies. As our business relationship grew so did our friendship and I found myself calling on him many times for advice. We eventually became business partners and today we are peers.

I tell him he is the entrepreneur I want to be when I grow up.

He tells me to shut up and pay for lunch.

That's how the process should work.

Here's to your success!

Tim Knox

Tim's latest book is "The 30 Day Blueprint For Success!" We asked 58 Top Internet Money Makers: If you lost is all tomorrow and had to start from scratch, what would you do to be back on top in the 30 days? Their answers just might make you rich!

Workplace Violence A Growing Concern

2008-12-23T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Jeffrey Miller

Workplace violence has become one of the biggest concerns for managers, corporate executives and Human Resource Departments in the past several years. In fact, the shear number of incidents of workplace violence is staggering.

A report issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) after an extensive study, showed that "homicide is the second leading cause of fatal occupational injury in the United States. The report stated that almost 1,000 workers are murdered, and 1.5 million - about 1-in-4 - employees are assaulted in the workplace each year. According to the BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), in 1998 alone, there were 709 workplace homicides which accounted for 12% of the over six thousand fatal work injuries in the United States that year."

A Global Concern

This issue is not limited to the United States, as some might assume. It seems that every country is showing a marked increase in the number, frequency, and severity of workplace violence incidents every year.

Duncan Chappell and Vittorio Di Martino, in their work entitled: "Violence in the Workplace," say that a 1996 European Union Survey showed that during the prior year, four percent of workers (about 6 million) were subjected to physical violence while at work or on duty. They also say that, "workplace violence - be it physical or psychological - has gone global, crossing borders, work settings, and occupational groups.

Who is at Risk?

Statistics show that, although no single occupation is immune from violence, violence in the workplace can definitely be seen to be clustered in certain occupations. Occupations having many, if not all, of the following characteristics also show the highest rate of incidents:

Contact with the public
Exchange of money
Delivery of passengers, goods, or services
Having a mobile workplace such as a taxicab or police cruiser
Working with unstable or volatile persons in health care, social service, or criminal justice settings
Working alone or in small numbers
Working late at night or during early morning hours
Working in high-crime areas
Guarding valuable property or possessions
Working in community-based settings

Depending on the area, taxi drivers had, by far, the highest incident rates. But, again, this is not to be seen as a national or international thing, but something that is dependent on the region where the assaults occur. The number one occupational group suffering the greatest number of assaults is not police and security officers as is often believed. No, the occupation shown to be most at risk are retail sales people, including but not limited to, convenience store personnel. This group is followed closely by those in the service industries like administrative personnel, teachers, and medical professionals. In fact, a report on incidents in one of the "calmest" countries - Sweden - shows medical professionals to be the highest occupation victimized by assault and other workplace violence. And, contrary to popular belief as reported by the media, the greatest threat comes, not from within a company's ranks but from outside.

The most difficult part of getting to the truth of the matter, as with all statistical data, is the fact that the numbers are probably far lower than what is actually occurring. Just as Human Resource managers and the companies that they represent are concerned about legal action in regards to giving reference information about past employees, most are also fearful of their public image should word spread about assaults against their employees.

Prevention and Countermeasures The growing trend for dealing with the problem of workplace violence is in teaching employees, supervisors, and executive management how to spot trouble signs before they occur. This is an excellent place to start to build a sound program. As with anything involving danger, the more information and awareness that can be developed, the more effective we can be in preventing the danger from ever occurring.

However, no program can be considered complete without including employee training for effectively handling, escaping, and surviving actual physical assaults. The fact is, that no amount of understanding and preventative measures will stop certain assailants from attacking. At that point, all that remains is for effective action that will ensure the physical safety and survival of the intended victims.

Remember: Workplace violence is real. It can happen to any employee, in any company, at any time. And, it can happen to you or someone you care about.

Jeffrey M. Miller is the founder and director of Warrior Concepts International, a company which focuses on teaching effective self-protection and personal development techniques to individuals, groups and companies. He is the author of the "Foundations of Self-Defense Mastery" eCourse and can be reached through his website: http://www.warrior-concepts-online.com. For information about how he can help you protect your company and employees from the violence, damage, and potential loss from workplace violence, contact him.

The Benefits Of Business Improvement Programs

2008-12-22T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Groshan Fabiola

By attending to an effective, well-structured Business Improvement Program (BIP), business owners are able to learn elaborate, reliable marketing and business management techniques with minimal time and effort. A solid, coherent Business Improvement Program can easily make the difference between a poorly managed, low-rewarding, average business and a prosperous, lucrative, well-run business with long-term prospects and well-established goals and objectives. Business Improvement Programs are appropriate for both small and extended business owners, providing program attendants with a set of comprehensive materials that account for all the relevant aspects of a prosperous, successful business.

There are various reliable training websites and online services that offer business owners the opportunity to enroll in professional Business Improvement Programs for free or in exchange for a reasonable sum of money. You can either choose to participate actively, by attending to specific business seminaries and courses, or, if your time doesn't allow it, you can simply purchase self-study oriented materials that allow you to assimilate valuable information in the comfort of your home. However, it is best to personally attend to Business Improvement Programs, as active participation allows you to exchange opinions and interact with well-trained professionals.

In addition, business seminaries and courses encourage attendants to confront their opinions with other people, allowing participants to express their ideas and beliefs regarding business management solutions and marketing strategies. Considering the fact that most Business Improvement Programs are focused not only on theory, but also on the development of practical skills and logical abilities, attendants are able to view their business from a different perspective, approaching and solving problems in a more objective manner.

Business Improvement Programs are appropriate for all business owners, regardless of the nature of their managed business. Such programs account for very important features such as innovative sales and marketing strategies, effective solutions for consolidating the relations with clients, reliable strategies for attracting new potential clients to a certain business, strategies for neutralizing competition, strategies for establishing priorities and long-term objectives, and various other business-related aspects. Business Improvement Programs are presented and taught by the best professionals in the branch, providing you with support and encouragement over the entire period of the training program. By the end of the training program, you will have developed an extended package of valuable information regarding proper business planning and management, corroborated with a set of practical skills and abilities that will improve your relations with your employees and potential customers.

A solid, well-structured Business Improvement Program can help you boost the profitability of your business in a short amount of time. Whether you own a struggling, oscillating business or, by contrast, a successful, properly managed business, BIP can teach you how to get the most out of it with minimal effort. Business Improvement Programs can also help you better evaluate the overall efficiency of your business, teaching you how to quickly identify and correct emerging problems. Business Improvement Programs are the best means to rapidly enhance the efficiency and the prosperity of your business.

So, if you want to find more information about Business Improvement Program, we recommend you clicking this link.

Basic Marketing Plan For Indie Games

2008-12-21T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Juuso Hietalahti

Introduction

A marketing plan might sound something awfully hard to do for a game developer, but to briefly put it: the marketing plan is your flightplan on how to get your game to your players. The contents of a marketing plan can be divided into several sections. A strategic plan or the company's business plan will describe the company's strategic objectives. The marketing plan will focus on those major objectives, and how to reach those goals.

You don't have to have tens of pages long marketing plan that you will never use. It's much better to have a short plan that you use. Use your computer's desktop wallpaper or a one page printed plan where you put the marketing plan: goals, actions and notes. Then use and refine the plan.

Contents of a Marketing Plan

These sections of a marketing plan are listed below.

[1] Goals
[2] Distribution
[3] Product
[4] Promotion
[5] Website
[6] Demo
[7] Measurement
[8] Maintenance
[9] Refinement

1. Goals - Make Sure You Know Where You Are Heading

Goals define where you are going. In an indie marketing plan, you can start by choosing the goal for the desired income. Then, you continue by adding the goals for sales, downloads, conversion rate, and the price for your product. Let's assume your goal is to make $50.000. The pricing of a game may depend on several variables. You might look at what others are using and settle for $19.95. Or you might try a bargain price and go with $9.95. Some people have used $29.95. Depending on your game, the company's profile, target market, you might price your game differently. It's worth noting that you might want to adjust the price later. Maybe you realize that $9.95 is too low and go with $15.95 and still get the same number of sales. But for starters, let's assume you use $19.95 as the price of your game.

The eCommerce provider gets about 10% of each sale, so the actual profit for you per game would be about $18. To make $50.000 you would need about 2800 sales. If you assume that one out of hundred players purchase your game, then game's conversion rate would be 1.0%. The rule of thumb could be that very targeted games receive higher conversion rates, up to 2%, 3% or even 5% while more generic games, or games with severe competition may receive a .1% - .5% conversion rate. That means about 1-5 sales per 1000 downloads. Let's assume you try to get your game's quality to such a level that you receive a 1.0% conversion rate. Now as you do some math you can see that to reach 2800 sales you would need 280.000 downloads for your game.

A goal wouldn't be a goal without an exact date. Have an exact date for the goal. Split the goal in smaller divisions: months, quarters or years - or something that suits you best.

Example marketing plan goals for Edoiki game

The goals for Edoiki are:

* Direct Sales goal: $50.000 (after eCommerce provider expenses)

* Other Sales goal: $50.000 (after publisher/distributor expenses)

* Total Sales: $100.000

Exact direct sales details:

* Initial price: $19.95

* Conversion rate goal: 1.0%

* Downloads goal: 280.000

* Units goal: 2.800

* Deadline: By the end of 2007

The quarterly download & sales goals for direct distribution:

* Q3-Q4/2006 - 600 units, 60.000 downloads

* Q1-Q2/2007 - 1100 units, 110.000 downloads

* Q3-Q4/2007 - 1100 units, 110.000 downloads

2. Distribution - Select the Right Channels For Your Game

There are several options for distributing your game. Indie and casual games tend to follow these main distribution channels:

* Direct website store

* Retail stores

* Portals

* Content delivery systems

* Publisher channels

Depending on your company's strategy, your marketing plan might use more than one distribution methods. An easy choice for direct selling would be to set up a website and concentrate on optimizing your website.

If you have a casual game, you might consider casual game portals. Different portals have different requirements for games. Here are some of the most common portals: Big Fish Games, EA's Pogo, Gamehouse, GameXtazy, GameZone, Playfirst, Real Arcade, Shockwave, Trygames, Yahoo Games. Include the portals you want to target in your marketing plan and check the top 10 bestsellers from each portal. After you have gone through the list, you have a better understanding on what kind of games portals want and how you can improve your product to meet their guidelines. Indies typically sell through portals or through their own website, but retail stores can be a valuable choice to consider. It is possible to contact retailers directly but in some cases, it can be very difficult or practically impossible. However, you can make it so that it's easy for them to contact you. Set up your company website in such way that distributors can easily get touch with you. Arrange the distribution options by country or by some other region. If you want to contact some publishers, then go on and make a deal. There are publishers that can deal with the retail stores.

Besides retail stores and portals, there's always the publisher opportunity. There are many indie game publishers that can get a deal for you: some of the popular ones are Garage Games, Indiepath and PopCap. All these companies provide different terms, and your marketing plan can change depending on the deals you make. If you commit yourself to creating an exclusive deal with some of the publishers, then you might not be allowed to sell the game through your website, thus making direct selling options unavailable. Besides pure publishers, there are also content delivery systems available. Valve's Steam is perhaps the biggest example and could be appealing to indies.

Your marketing plan should tell you which channels you are going to use, and which ones you'll ignore.

Edoiki distribution channels
Edoiki will be sold directly through Edoiki website. Besides the direct websites we'll approach Mumbo Jumbo/United Developers and Tri Synergy to discuss retail channels. There are other retail opportunities: Dreamcatcher/The Adventure Company, Cylon Interactive, Merscom, MWR connected - some of them will be considered in the future, while some of them will be ignored.
We will also contact a few publishers for a non-exclusive deals. The first ones to target are Shrapnelgames, JoWood and Matrix Games. Edoiki will omit the casual game portals, as the game is targeting a different audience.
We'll also approach Valve and discuss the distributing opportunity via Steam.

3. Product - Have Something to Sell

Offer a high-quality product that people want to purchase. If the conversion rate is very low, then it might suggest that your product simply doesn't offer enough quality. Ask what players and other developers think about your product and refine the product until you start hearing that the only problem with your game is that "it's too addictive". Remember: the low conversion rate doesn't necessarily indicate a bad product. Ask people: if you hear comments that say that your product is fine but the website or the demo are poor, then forget polishing the product and move on to the next step in the marketing plan.

Make sure your product offering is in sync with your distribution strategy. If you are aiming for the portals, make sure your game appeals the portals and their players. If you are using retailers to get hardcore gamers to play your game, you need to design your product for the retail store customers.

4. Promotion - Make People Aware of Your Game

The next step in the marketing plan is to choose how to get people information about your product. You need to make people aware of your game and either guide them to your website for more information, or to get them to download the game through various sources. How you make the offer depends on the market segments your company has targeted. There are different types of players, games and needs. "Casual gamers" have different playing habits than "hardcore gamers". 6-year old kids play differently compared to 15- or 30-year old players. Females and males have different needs and wants for games. In Japan , they favor different kinds of games than in Germany. It's your job to define the market segments, and decide which segment (or segments) you choose to target your marketing.

There are several ways to segment the consumer market. The four common marketing segmentation variable types are: geographic (most likely world region or country, but also cities), demographic (age, gender, education, religion, occupation, income, family size), psychographic (social class, lifestyle, personality) and behavioral (casual to heavy user, attitude towards service, loyalty towards company, awareness stage, attitude towards product, genre, favorite games). Also the technical aspects (speed of Internet connection, age of computer) could be included in the segmentation.

After you have chosen the segments, you position your marketing message. Positioning is arranging your whole market offering in a way that it distinguishes your product. If you position yourself as offering the lowest price for young strategy gamers then the market message is much different than if you try to get offer high-quality, non-violent games for very religious players.

After you have selected your target segments, you need to reach those audiences in different ways. Here's a list of promotion efforts you might want to consider: major download sites, advertising, press releases, PAD services, magazine reviews, website reviews, news sites, other major websites, blogs, contests, nominations, affiliates, articles, forums, conferences, banner ads, text link ads, link exchanges and newsletters. There are also very creative options such as advertising banner in your own car back window or leaving demo CDs in busses - so use your imagination.

Depending on your distribution channel options, the promotion could be totally handled by the parties you are dealing with. If you sign a publishing deal, then you can expect the publisher to take care of the promotion.

Edoiki promotion efforts
Edoiki aims to please board gamers and non-casual gamers, players that are addicted to the online multiplayer game experience, and look for games where they can challenge their friends. These gamers don't necessarily have a favorite genre, their main goals is to play with friends - as long as the game is good. They are over 20 and mostly male. Their income level is more than $10,000 yearly and they can spend $20 or $30 easily for entertainment now and then. Our players own a high-speed internet connection (256 KB or better) or at least a fast IDSN connection. Our players have at least basic understanding of the English language, they are interested in Japanese/Chinese mythology and know something about Eastern cultures.
Edoiki will use several promotion methods: Google Adwords targeted directly to board games, banner ads on multiplayer and similar online sites, multiplayer gaming forums, press releases, newsletter announcements, major review sites, article writing, community forums, PAD services, blogs, entering the Independent Games Festival.

5. The Website - Get Players to Download Your Game Demo

The indie game marketing plan lists what you will do for your website. Your website's main purpose is to get people to download the demo of your game. That means your plan should include the steps you will take to enhance the website's marketing capabilities. If your site gets visitors that visit only the first page and leave without downloading, then you need to refine your website. The other reason for your website to exist is to get people to purchase your game. Make sure user can access to purchase page within one or two mouse clicks.

Edoiki website
Edoiki website will use a virtual private server to handle traffic and make sure the system is online every hour of day. The website will present screenshots, player forums, contact information, company information and present clear and easily distinguishable download and purchase buttons. The website won't use Javascript or font that would make it hard to use the site. The headline of the site will be tested and the game requirements, features and any other game-related hints & tips will be listed. The site graphics will be polished by the game artist.
The website traffic will be estimated and website specific goals (the rate of downloads) will be refined to meet the download goals after initial number of downloads are received.

6. The Demo - Get Players To Purchase Your Game

Your game demo has only one single goal: to close the deal, to get the player to purchase the game. It's very important to have a good demo version of your game that fills its purpose. If the conversion rate - the rate of people who purchase the game after testing it - is low, then you might need to adjust your demo. Concentrate on following issues:

[1] Demo feature limitations: does the demo have limited features (like less units, levels, powers etc.) compared to the full version? Are you sure you are telling the player what he will get if he buys? Add nag screens to both beginning and the end of the demo. Use those screens to explain the limitations and benefits of purchasing the game.

[2] Demo time limitations: time limitation combined with feature limitations can be advantageous: offer 15 demo launches or 60 minutes of gameplay, or a 30-day period. Or try something in between.

[3] Guide the player to make the purchase: is it easy (within one or two mouse clicks) for player to purchase your game or enter to your game's purchase page? If not, adjust the demo.

7. Measurement - Be Aware of What's Going On

The only way to make sure you are flying in the right direction is to constantly check where you are heading: be sure to measure impacts of different modifications. If you decide to change the price, promotion or demo, be sure to measure the effects. Conduct an A/B split test for your game price: try both a $20 and a $30 price to see which one works better. Offer a money back guarantee and measure how it impacts sales. Do you get more sales with different demo limitations? Test it. Do the sales increase if you offer a better tutorial in game? Does it help to have nag screens in the beginning and in the end of the demo?

Be aware of where you are flying.

8. Maintenance - Make Sure The Passengers Are Happy

Your marketing plan involves maintenance: how are you going to deal with the customers and build such a relationship with your current customers that they come back and purchase from you again. Customer support could include FAQ lists, support databases, and automated emails. Your marketing plan should describe how you will maintain the relationship with your customers. Will you use support forums or outsource your customer support? Will you use customer relationship management (CRM) tools? Will there be an online chat available for those who purchase? Will you use blogs or newsletters to inform the players about your product updates?

Your marketing plan will tell you how you will deal with the relationship: it will tell you whether you let your publisher or portals handle customer support, or use all or some of the methods discussed earlier.

9. Refinement - Adjust Your Flight Plan

The last step in the marketing plan is to refine the plan. Go to step 1 and adjust your goals. If you think your conversion rate is dropping to .5% feel free to double the goal for download number. As you double your download number goal you know that you need to focus on more promotion rather than optimizing the demo, website or product. On the other hand, if you choose to refine the conversion rate, then you know that you should focus on the quality of your game, demo or website rather than promotion.

Conclusions

The indie game marketing plan describes the goals derived from a company's strategic objectives. The main idea for the marketing plan is to describe the goals, decide the actions necessary to reach those goals, measure and eventually refine the plan as the production progresses.

Author is the game producer at Polycount Productions and writes daily game production resource GameProducer.net.

Politics Lawyers And Franchise Rule Making At The Ftc

2008-12-20T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Lance Winslow

The Federal Trade Commission is working through the necessary changes of law to protect the consumer and be fair to business owners in the franchising industry. Unfortunately as with most all regulatory agencies whenever they wish to make rule changes they have meetings to discuss it with the industry, but the lawyers all show up and take over the process. The franchise rule changes are no different so it makes sense they will not serve the industry or consumer, only the lawyers.

It is incredible that these entire sets of discussions at the Federal Trade Commission and the comments spanning 10-years on the franchise rule are being made by attorneys, who gain financially from the incessant rules. The regulators who have never been in business before, probably never even worked in franchise corporation or owned a franchise outlet, have no clue as to what it is all about; but would fervently argue that they do; having talked to all these attorneys blowing smoke of their butts. Franchisors have not the time to deal with these issues. And they know they cannot trust the government agencies to listen to their comments. For instance many entreprenuers have given the FTC insight to the real issues, yet their voice is unheard and drowned out by attorneys who are special commenters because they practice law?

Yet the actual problem here is they are attorneys in the industry, therefore they should be barred from comment as their comments are too self-serving. Dah! Obviously, so obvious it should not even need to be pointed out. We need to down size the rules, simplify them or eradicate them all together. If we are looking to make a huge positive change for the betterment of all civilization, this would be the best tact to take. These runaway rules, opinions, regulations, lawsuits and ever increasing case law created are clearly choking the life blood out of franchising and destroying the possibilities for economic vitality in the future. If lawyers are to be allowed to comment the ratio ought to be 1-5% because in franchising there are 2000 franchisors, 400,000 franchise outlets, 20,000 vendors and only 200-300 lawyers who specialize solely on franchising. Think about it.

Lance Winslow - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Size Matters Keeping It Small Can Mean Big Business

2008-12-19T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Gunnar Berglund

Everything these days, it seems, have embraced the catch phrase made popular by a movie that featured a gigantic green lizard. Size matters. The sexual connotations of that phrase aside, size does seem to matter in every facet of human existence. The sight of a Big Mac is more appealing than a regular hamburger. Well-known companies want to establish offices in tall skyscrapers. A country's prominence is determined by the depth of its economy's pocket. Thick books are more respected than skinny publications.

This inclination to favor what is big has caused a universal desire for expansion. We may start small with an endeavor, but we nurture dreams of eventually making it grander. The fact that the internet provides a gateway to a global market further fuels these dreams into a frenzied state.

Lost in the hoopla of our collective fascination for catering to a larger market are the distinct advantages of keeping the business small. For all the fame and glory associated with a large scale business, the stability and reliability that small businesses enjoy are often missed. It would be prudent to consider the benefits of maintaining a small business before plans of expansion are pursued.

Let's take a look at some reasons why small businesses are better kept small.

1. Smaller risks. Keeping the business small exposes it to less debilitating dangers. Small businesses don't have to deal with customer complaints on a large scale, as any problem can easily be isolated. They don't have to experience the issues that plague big businesses, and there is no need to hire $500 per hour lawyers to fix such headache-inducing tribulations. Keeping it small provides for a simpler setup that is more resistant against unwanted complications. Besides, those who play big lose big, and, assuming the worst, small businesses will only lose in proportion to their size.

2. Potentially higher profit ratio. It's not the amount of profit that matters, rather, it's the amount of profit vis-à-vis the costs of investment. Big businesses may rake in a larger amount of income, but they have to offset the equally enormous amount of expenses they have incurred. Small businesses spend less, and successful ones earn a higher profit ratio compared to their more illustrious counterparts.

3. Move faster with less. The owner directly controls the small business, and more often than not, does most of the dirty work. He needs little amount of help since most software make some processes fully automated. Small businesses don't have to spend a fortune in advertisements, as well, as their client base is usually a dedicated lot, and in most cases, the latter does the marketing for the enterprise. Also, efficiency is better guaranteed as the operations are clearly delineated and centralized. The same thing cannot be said about big companies who often suffer from disordered distribution of roles caused by a cluttered bureaucratic setup.

4. Easier to corner specific markets. Since small businesses operate in a smaller scale, they could easily concentrate on a particular group of people who share an interest that a small business can provide for. In modern internet parlance, this is called nicheing. Getting the most out of a particular niche is a rewarding business strategy because this tactic makes good use of people's unwavering passion for something which your venture's products or services provide for. Big companies will have difficulty cornering specific markets because the latter are often overlooked and their concerns are seldom satisfied.

5. Clients relate to the small business in a more personal level. This is probably the best facet of small businesses: their ability to connect with their patrons in a manner that no big business could. Small businesses, given their gift for specialization, develop more intimate relationships with their clients. When answering e-mail queries, for example, small businesses take time to personally reply to each and every one of them whereas big businesses merely use a generic template for theirs. The client would feel more secure with a responsive small business, as he would be reassured that his concerns will be expediently considered.

6. Grow at your own pace. The small business owner does not have to keep up with the demands of his client base, because the latter is kept manageable. Hence, the small business owner can take his time to perfect the intricacies of his trade to be able to offer better service, and eventually grow at his own pace, in a manner of his own choosing.

There is a saying that goes "it is better to be the star player of a Minor League team than a bench warmer for a Major League squad." If a business is kept small, it will be the king of its niche. Expanding may open up bigger markets, but it will also bring bigger perils and more difficult compromises. Expansion is not bad per se, but are you prepared to possibly be regarded as a peddler at the expense of your lofty throne?

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© 2005 Gunnar Berglund Gunnar Berglund has been a "internet- hardworker" for the last five years He publishes The meonit Gazette http://gazette.meonit.com and run http://www.meonit.com and http://www.grabinternetprofits.com/traffic

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Club Promotion Made Easy With Myspace

2008-12-18T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Paul Giordano

The nightclub and bar business is an ever expanding industry where so much money is exchanged every night. Every bar or nightclub owner knows how important good promoting is for their business. That's why club and event promotion has become huge in itself. Being someone that attends bars and clubs myself, I've seen all kinds of different promotion methods. Some work better than others, but I know for a fact that promoting to the right crowd is key. That is why MySpace has become such a huge medium for club and bar promotion. But since so many people use MySpace to promote their clubs and bars, there are tips and tricks to getting ahead of the game.

Club promotion has become an industry in itself. I know that in college, at least half of my friends had a job handing out flyers, or setting up a guest list for several nightclubs and bars. It's such an easy and fun job for college students to do, and a lot of money can be made in this. For some of my friends, even a career. Now with MySpace being so popular, this can make promoting easier, more fun, and best of all more profitable. Some of the friends I had who promoted in college are still promoting but all now use MySpace, and are making more money than ever. Several actually own their own bars now. Nightclub and bar promotion through MySpace has been proven to be profitable, but you have to know the right methods to be successful

The first important factor when using MySpace to promote anything is having an attractive profile. When you have an attractive profile, you will have a good following of people regardless of what you are promoting. MySpacers will always remember you by your profile; I know this for a fact. A great profile will always stick in the head of the casual MySpacer. This sometimes can give you more MySpace friends, which is the next factor.

Having an extensive MySpace friend list is the heart and soul of your promotion. With a friend list, you can send bulletins, event invites, comments, and messages to everyone. It is also much easier for a friend to ask you questions or even comment on the club or bar you are promoting. The only thing that can get difficult in this area is adding friends. This is a very tedious process, and without the right means, can be very difficult to get people to accept you. That is why almost every successful MySpace club or bar promoter is using a MySpace automatic friend adder to do the work for them. There are some great friend adding programs out there such as The Official Friend Adder that can take your promoting to the next level. Imagine being able to add 500 friends a day to your MySpace promotion profile. Even better, being able to send comments, messages, bulletins, and event invitations to all of your friends with just the push of one button. Programs like these can make your guest list overflow, and put money in your pocket by making MySpace work for you.

I know that personally, I get the best drink discounts and club news from some of my MySpace friends that all promote using MySpace friend adders like The Official Friend Adder. So if you are a college student looking to make more money, or even a club or bar owner looking for a packed house on Friday or Saturday, do yourself a favor and start using MySpace to crank up the attendance at your next party.

PaulG is an expert on internet social groups, especially MySpace. Check out MySpace Trends for more great tips and ideas about MySpace.

Beauty Salon Equipment An Overview

2008-12-17T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Josh Riverside

Equipment to outfit a hair, nail or tanning salon ranges from basic to extravagant, with a vast array of equipment falling somewhere in the middle. Basic, inexpensive, salon equipment may be well suited for a start-up venture or for a salon owner who values simplicity. On the other hand, a veteran salon owner's business may benefit from more expensive salon equipment that helps streamline services provided to the client

An example of a simplistic and basic piece of salon equipment is a basic barber's chair. The barber's chair is typically a chair that features a thickly padded seat, for comfort, as well as the ability to recline and lift. This feature allows a stylist the convenience of quickly adjusting the chair to a client's height. Other equipment used in providing hair styling and hair-cutting services includes washbasins, hair dryers, hairstyling chairs, mirrors, and styling stations.

The kind of salon equipment used will vary according to the different services that a salon offers. There are specific pieces of salon equipment for providing day spa services such as manicures, pedicures, waxing, tanning, and massage. Salon equipment used to provide day spa services includes pedicure spas, manicure tables, massage tables, facial beds, tanning beds, and tanning booths. If purchased new, this type of equipment can be costly. The same equipment is also available for purchase in used condition. There are many suppliers who specialize only in offering used salon equipment.

Smart consumers who choose to buy from a reputable retailer can often save a tremendous amount of money by opting to purchase used equipment versus brand new equipment. The overall atmosphere of a salon also plays a role in determining the type of equipment that will be found in a particular salon. A salon that offers costly, high-end, services will want its equipment to reflect the overall atmosphere of the establishment. There are many features that may be added to basic equipment that ensure the client has a relaxing, enjoyable salon experience. Of course, any additional features will significantly add to the overall cost of the equipment.

Salon Equipment Info provides detailed information about beauty, hair, nail, tanning salon equipment, as well as wholesale and discount salon equipment. Salon Equipment Info is the sister site of Hair Extensions Web.

4 Step Guide To Contracting Opportunities For The Disaster Relief And Reconstruction Process

2008-12-16T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Gloria Berthold

The federal government anticipates spending over $150 billion dollars for the Katrina and Rita hurricane disaster relief and reconstruction efforts. Contracting opportunities abound for businesses of all sizes and types and there is a great need for varied services and products. Businesses throughout the US can explore the contracting opportunities by following these four steps.

The disaster-related services and products needed in the Gulf states will cover every aspect of life, business and government in the affected areas. Savvy companies are working to fill the needs now. However, this is a long-term, multi-layered process. While initial contracts have already been secured, there will be many more contracts worth billions of dollars to come over the next 6-12-18 months and longer. Those firms that employ both short-term and long-term strategies will be the most successful.

Step 1: Identify the Agencies with the Budgets to Buy What You Sell

This is one of the advantages in doing business with the federal government. Unlike the corporate environment, you can find out what agencies have budgets projected for your products and services and when they are planning to spend it.

The Department of Commerce Hurricane Contracting Information Center (HCIC) will help U.S. businesses, especially minority and small businesses, participate in the Gulf Coast rebuilding efforts. The website www.rebuildingthegulfcoast.gov allows companies to register with government agencies that are providing contracts to rebuild the Gulf Coast. The website also provides basic information on doing business with the government, e-mail alerts regarding specific contracting opportunities, links to other government and local agencies, and information about minority business services.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is constantly changing to best serve the nation's requirements. The 22 agencies that initially made up the DHS originally maintained independent purchasing power. Now, the eight offices listed here are responsible for all procurement functions of the DHS.

DHS Acquisition Offices:
DHS Headquarters
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Note: FEMA is the key agency responsible for the majority of disaster-related budgets
Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Transportation Security Administration (TSA)
U.S. Secret Service (USSS)
U.S. Coast Guard Office of Procurement Management (USCG)

Check the DHS website for specific information regarding the disaster-related contracting opportunities: www.dhs.gov/openforbusiness

FedBizOpps is a federal government website that provides a central listing of most current federal contracts. Register at www.FedBizOpps.gov to receive the notices of bids and contracts that go through the normal contract advertising process. However, it has been noted on the FedBizOpps web site that many emergency contracts may not make it to this public forum. You may need to contact each agency to determine the specific opportunities available.

For past expenditures, check with the Federal Procurement Data Center (FPDC), part of the U.S. General Services Administration. The FPDC manages the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), which is the current central repository of historical information on Federal contracting. The system contains detailed information on contract actions over $2,500. The Executive departments and agencies award over $200 billion annually for goods and services. The system can identify who bought what, from whom, for how much, when and where.

Prime or General Contractors (GC) will be a source of sub-contracts for companies of all sizes. This disaster is of a magnitude that the US has never seen before and many contracting operations will be handled directly by Primes or GCs.

Action Items:

A. Check the agencies that have a history of purchasing your products and services. Go to www.fpdc.gov.

B. Use some sort of contact manager software like ACT! or Goldmine to build your own government procurement database and schedule regular follow-up.

C. New vendors: Get registered in the Central Contractor Registry: www.ccr.gov

Step 2: Find the Specific Offices in Your Targeted Agencies That are Most Likely to Purchase Your Products and Services

The DHS and US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) have nationwide agencies and offices, as do Primes and GCs. Do you want to target areas that are geographically convenient to you? Do you have service, shipping or delivery issues that demand a local presence to your customers? How will this affect your bottom line? Can you effectively offer regional, national or international support? You will be most effective if you geographically prioritize the specific agencies, primes, GCs and offices to target.

Action Items:

A. Check the DHS open business opportunities that are listed on the Federal Business Opportunities web site: www.fedbizopps.gov/katrina.html. Go to each DHS agency link and click on "Offices" to identify offices geographically.

B. Contact the agencies to participate in their Vendor Outreach and one-on-one sessions.

C. Review the DHS Prime Contractors list on the DHS website for the top five that are your best matches. Contact the small business liaisons to schedule capabilities briefings.

D. Visit the USACE website: http://www.usace.army.mil/ and identify the General Contractors (GCs) that are your best matches.

Step 3: Identify the Specific PEOPLE in Your Targeted Offices

You want to find the specific decision-makers because they are your best connections to getting the business you want. They are THE KEY to your success. Finding the right people and taking the time and effort to building solid relationships will guarantee your long-term success.

Finding the agencies and end-users who buy what you sell is one of the most difficult aspects of government sales. And yet it is one of the most important because finding the people who buy your product or service is the most critical step in a successful targeted marketing and sales program.

Within the agency, thousands of program managers, program professionals, operating supervisors, engineers, and scientists participate in deciding what to purchase and from whom. These are the people you want to take the time find and to whom you want to introduce yourself.

The strategy is to identify both the end-users and the people involved in the actual procurement process. Market your abilities, solutions and products to the end-users so that they recommend your products and service specifications to the procurement personnel, so that yours is the company the bid "was written for."

Action Items:

A. Use the DHS and USACE websites to identify the following people who are keys to your success and put them in your contact manager software:

--The Points of Contact (POC) for the US Army Corps of Engineers, DHS agencies, State agencies, Red Cross, etc.

--The Small Business Specialists

--Prime Contractor Small Business Liaisons

B. Use the information you have researched from the FPDC web site to detail the specific people who have purchased your products or services in the past. Add them to your contact manager.

C. Set up a schedule of contacts with these people. The contacts should include personal phone calls, emails, direct mail, visits during procurement conferences and all out-reach sessions. Try for at least 12 to 18 touches per year. Since active procurement projects are progress, step this up to every few weeks.

D. Long Term Action Item: As you build relationships with the Contracting Officers and Specialists, ask them for the names of the end users who are involved in the projects related to your products and services. Ideally, as you work with them you can begin to really understand the problems they experience and educate them how you can solve those problems. And perhaps become a preferred vendor.

E. Join the International Association of Emergency Managers: www.iaem.com

Step 4: Identify Business Development Processes Appropriate for Your Services and Products

If you want to develop both short and long term business opportunities involved in the disaster reconstruction process you must develop a strategy that utilizes a variety of tactics. These are the most effective:

Web site: Make sure it is specifically addresses the government's purchasing best practices on your home page. Does your home page also note your GSA schedule and certifications?

Email: Is it professional? Do you use your business domain name? Or are you still using yahoo, hotmail or some non-business related address? It is very important to appear as professional as possible. Your business should be stable, reliable, established. Free or personal email accounts make you appear fly-by-night or non-professional.

Do you accept government purchase cards? This is mandatory in the government contracting environment. And it also works to your advantage by speeding up payments.

Action Items:

A. Take a critical look at your business development tools to determine if they meet the specific needs of your government prospects and clients. Give your website TOP PRIORITY.

B. Identify the companies that could be good teaming partners. Add them to your contact manager and start the relationship building process.

C. Schedule a pro-active contact process with all targeted contacts and assign specific tasks to specific people in your firm.

If you use these specific tactics and strategies you will find that you will have better opportunities for government contracts in both the short and long term.

Gloria Berthold is President of TargetGov at Marketing Outsource Associates, Inc. She is one of Maryland's Top 100 Women, a Winner of the Innovator of the Year Award, Past-Chairwoman of the Baltimore/Washington Corridor Chamber of Commerce, a national speaker, educator and expert in government contracting and effective business-to-business marketing strategies. She can be reached through http://www.targetgov.com

Getting An Introduction

2008-12-15T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Bette Daoust, Ph.D.

I have talked about how to get donations and doing volunteer work. You are probably wondering what they have to do with gaining business relationships and giving you more business. Through service organizations you will gain recognition and stature, especially if you get really involved. These organizations also give you opportunities to meet people that you would not normally meet through your regular business channels. Even though most non-profits do not promote doing business with each other, it is certainly an off-shoot of membership. When I change cities, I often go to another Rotary Club to do a make-up meeting. It is here that I can find out more about the city and often someone knows people at the firm I will be visiting. I am always happy to get more information.

If someone in my club knows a person in a company that I wish to approach, I feel comfortable in asking for an introduction. This, at least, will break down some of the barriers. The introduction does not mean endorsement; it simply means that they are willing to share the relationship they have already established with the company. Do not overdo the introduction component with everyone as it will get to be a sore point. You do not want to be known as the person that joined the club just to do business.

Introductions need to be a two way street. If someone takes time to introduce you to someone, you should take time to find out if they need to be introduced elsewhere. Up to this point we have only talked about what you can get out of a service club. You also have to be aware that you will need to determine what it is that you can do for them.

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. is a speaker, author (over 170 books, articles, and publications), and consultant. She has provided marketing, sales, business development and training expertise for companies such as Peet's Coffee & Tea, Varian Medical Systems, Accenture, Avaya, Cisco Systems to name a few. Dr. Daoust has also done extensive work with small businesses in developing their marketing, training, and operational plans. You may contact Dr. Daoust at http://BizMechanix.com. You may also view her latest publications at http://BlueprintBooks.com. Dr. Daoust also writes for the National Networker http://theNationalNetworker.com.

Electronic Medical Record A New Medical Technology Walk Through

2008-12-14T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Joe Miller

Electronic Medical Record

The electronic medical record, or EMR, has been redesigned by technology to suite the 21st century medical practice. The entire process has been wrapped around your finger. In other words, information, records, superbill, transcription, soap notes, and medical procedure codes are all at your finger tips.

All electronic medical records have been organized and stored in a variety of ways, usually depending on the needs and budget of the practice. Often, multiple databases store patient information, medical collection, medical transcription, and other information vital to effective medical practice management.

Technology has simplified electronic medical records every step of the way by streamlining the databases, even for multiple offices of the same practice, in a secure online data environment. Another reason why technology has made electronic medical record so user friendly, is that it now saves practices money, through simple installation and management.

A Tour of the Medical Process

Technology can be a scary thing sometimes, so it is important to research the positives and negatives of adopting new technologies, especially in the medical profession. Accurate and complete information in an EMR system are a type of "preventative medicine," which not only protects the patient but also the medical practice.

"Keep to the code" is not only a good line for a blockbuster pirate movie but also for medical practices. There are many codes to keep track of, and they are all necessary to keep around and refer to you. New medical office software includes easy access to icd9 codes, 2004 CPT codes, diagnosis code, and HCFA 1500 forms.

Medical office software also must be managed by a qualified medical billing specialist with a qualified HIPPA consultant available to assist in the processing of the electronic medical record. Medical office software puts practices in touch with qualified individuals to help process the electronic medical record.

In addition to working with codes and qualified consultants, medical billing software, medical claim software, and electronic claim processing combine their technology in order to manage all claims and billing, including Medicare billing. But, medical office software packages also remember to include access and management of every medical transcription job created on a transcription machine.

Electronic Medical Record Accessibility

In short, those who are not authorized have no access and those who are authorized have very simple and convenient access. Electronic medical records are secured and even backed up, allowing access codes and login information only to those who are authorized.

Those who are authorized not only have access at their office but also by medical billing PDA, which allows records and appointments to be managed on a PDA. Download medical palm is a convenient way to work with real-time information and to manage a medical practice, even when away from the office.

Technological Catch-22

The catch with technology will always be "fear not" on one hand, and "be careful" on the other. It is no different with new medical technology for medical practices. This article has provided terms and links to assist medical practices in getting started on learning new technology and making educated decisions on effective and affordable technology to adopt.

Joe Miller is a specialist in online advertising. For more information on electronic medical record, please visit AdvancedMD.com.

Nine Trade Secrets You Should Keep To Your Self

2008-12-13T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Craig Dawber

Business competitors are not meant to be relied upon. Of course, there are instances of healthy competition and you may even be friends with your competitors. Nonetheless, all competitors want to know the trade secrets of their opponents. As a result, be careful, no matter how cordial your relations are with your competitors; never ever reveal your business secrets to them.

Let's look at some of the most common trade secrets that you should keep from your competitor:

1. New products Any changes that you make in your product or service line should be kept under wraps till you are ready to reveal it to the public at large. Otherwise, you never know, maybe your competitor would beat you to it. These new changes, could take the form of new products that you may be launching or closing off some earlier ones etc.

2. Pricing strategy Everyone uses a customised strategy to decide the price of their goods and services. It would be fatal to reveal this to competition, which of course would be ready to give an arm and a leg for it. This is also illegal and thus the Federal Fair Pricing law prohibits competitors from doing so.

3. Target market Your key customer base and strategy to attract them is quite crucial and should be guarded well. All intelligent businesses keep this in mind and never ever reveal their actual customers and the means of engaging them, to their competitors.

4. Customer count The numbers of customers that you have or the amount of sales that you have made is also one of the most well kept secrets. Otherwise, your competitor would be able to judge your exact position and standing in the market.

5. Guard yourself Be always on your guard and take care of what you say or write. This is particularly important in case of your own and competitor's product. Make sure that you avoid commenting on competitor products and services. Try playing safe and say that you have not tried their products or services to comment about them. Otherwise, anything that you say or write against your competitors can be used against you in any adverse way, be it in legal matters or in marketing ones.

6. Marketing strategy All products and services need to be marketed or promoted to the people. Otherwise, they would not get around to buying your product or service. You can do so by various means such as advertisements in media, banners, letters etc. This is all a part of your marketing strategy and should be kept secret from your competitor.

You may wonder that this would be quite easily apparent to the competitor but the idea is that they should not come to know of your plans before you launch your scheme. Otherwise, there are strong chances that they will try to beat you to it.

7. Product sources One should never reveal to their competitor their sources and contacts through which they work such as names of suppliers, distributors, wholesalers etc.

8. Technical and other aids in business At times you may be using some particular technical or computer tool that has made your business processes much easier and better. This is an advantage that you have over your competitor. Therefore, it would be advisable that in order to maintain this advantage you keep it a secret from them.

9. Don't trust your competitor No matter how cordial your relations are with your competitor don't ever trust them. Never tell them about any episode that you have had with your customers, either good or bad. This also holds true for your staff, products and services. This is so because you don't know how they may use this information and at times, it may have bad repercussions.

Practice Caution

Everyone wants to follow the leader. If you are able to make your business a success then you can be sure that there would be many who would want to follow in your path and use the same business model as yours. This is part and parcel of success. However, no matter how much you are prodded, it is never safe to talk about your business and its workings with any outsiders. You would come across many a situation, when you would be asked about various aspects of your business but be cautious and don't reveal the details.

This article was written by Craig Dawber of smarket.co.uk Need advice and guidance with your online business check out the resources found in this website.

Finding Balance In A Tilted World

2008-12-12T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Stephen Fairley

THE STRUGGLE -- I was recently talking with one of my entrepreneur friends. He has started three businesses in the last several yearsa budding entrepreneur. He was relating some of the joys he has experienced in those enterprises: a sense of freedom from the corporate world, pursuing his dreams and passions, setting his own schedule, controlling his destiny and a large potential for financial rewards.

However, he did mention a few downsides: little to no outside accountability, lack of consistent capital, feelings of loneliness, no steady revenue stream, feeling disconnected from others who don't understand his drive to succeed, constant struggles to survive and a severe lack of work-life balance. Sound familiar?

I think most entrepreneurs struggle with similar issues, especially balance. There are many reasons they can give for their lack of life balance and low satisfaction: "I have too much work to do. I just need a few more hours to finish this project. I need more money. I have bills to pay. My business depends on my hard work. My family needs more income. I am solely responsible for developing, marketing, selling and servicing my product or service."

Any or all of these reasons may be true, which might lead entrepreneurs to find great difficulty in managing the two sides of entrepreneurshipbalance and success. How often do you struggle with working longer hours than you know you should to try and secure the next sale? How many times has your family and friends tried to pull you away from your office this last month? Take a moment and count up the actual hours you have spent working this last week or month. There is always the temptation to do a little more, work a little harder, talk to one more potential customer in hopes of making one more sale.

What specific things are you doing to take care of yourself: physically, emotionally, and spiritually? Many entrepreneurs overlook these vital areas of life in search of professional success, yet these areas are full of potential for sparking the creative, outside of the box thinking that leads entrepreneurs like yourself to discover life changing products and services and find a new perspective on your business venture.

ASSESS WHERE YOU ARE

Take a moment and write down these 8 life areas:

friends & family

fun & recreation

physical environment & home

romance & significant other

fitness & health

career

finances

personal & spiritual growth

Next to each area assess where you currently are. On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being "completely dissatisfied" and 7 being "completely satisfied" mark how currently you are satisfied in each area. Add up the totals of all eight areas before reading further. The scoring is at the end of this article.

DEVELOP A PLAN

As you look at your current level of satisfaction what patters or themes do you see? Where areas are you the least satisfied with? The most?

For you who recognize a change is in order, here are a five simple steps to help you start finding the work-life balance that leads to success:

1. Choose 1 area that you are dissatisfied with and would like to see some immediate improvement in. This should not be your worst or best scoring area, but somewhere in the middle. Take a couple minutes and write down in detail what balance would look like for you in that area.

2. Now, get out your planner and make a note to yourself one week from today. In the note, write down:

the area that you want to improve your level of satisfaction in

the "score" where you are now and the "score" you want to be at the next week

2 things you are going to do to move yourself towards that goal over this next week

3. Tell someone about your goal and ask them to hold you accountablewhether it's a friend, a mentor, or your coach. It's easy to make "new year, new leaf" promises to yourself, but more difficult to follow through with unless you know someone is holding you accountable to reach your goal.

4. Set up a time to talk with your accountability partner the next week. Did you reach your goal? If not, talk about what kept you from reaching it and what will you do differently this next week. If you did reach your goal, congratulate yourself. Do something simple to celebrate your achievement.

5. The final step is to go back to step 1 and do it over again.

Creating life balance is never easy and it's never complete. There will always be room for improvement. The point is that you can make your life more balanced by taking small steps in the right direction. Like most worthwhile things in life, creating life balance is a process, not an event!

SCORING RANGE

816 Wow! Things must be pretty rough right now.

1730 Average score of many small business owners

3045 There are some very satisfying and very dissatisfying areas in your life

4556 You recognize the importance of life balance to life success

Stephen Fairley, M.A., RCC is the President of Today's Leadership Coaching, a premier executive coaching and training firm, and a Registered Corporate Coach (RCC). Today's Leadership Coaching focuses on "Developing Leaders Who Deliver Results." You can contact him at 630-588-0500 or at Stephen@TodaysLeadership.com

Ultrasonic Cleaning Hightech Cleaning Services

2008-12-11T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by Steve Hanson

Are you looking for innovative ways to increase your services and your profit margins? Ultrasonic cleaning services can be a way for your cleaning business to add another income stream that can be highly lucrative. How does ultrasonic cleaning work? The item being cleaned is immersed in an ultrasonic tank filled with water and a small amount of cleaning agent, and then agitated with high frequency sound for a brief time. The item is then rinsed in another tank filled with water and a small amount of rinse-agent, and then dried.

The underlying process is the creation of microscopic bubbles in the liquid. Agitation causes these bubbles to collapse with great force. This force produces shock waves up to 20,000 pounds per square inch. These waves then loosen and displace soil from the item being cleaned - this is called cavitation. Some of the advantages of ultrasonic cleaning include:

-- Use of state of the art technology.

-- Surfaces and cavities are cleaned without scratching, brushing or scraping.

-- Oddly shaped and complex objects with tiny crevices and holes can be completely cleaned.

-- It takes very short time for cleaning, normally just a few seconds to clean objects such as mini-blinds.

-- The process is simple and uses fewer chemicals than in conventional cleaning.

-- Cleaning is automated making it more efficient than the traditional tedious form of manual cleaning.

The types of items that can be cleaned with ultrasonic technology are almost limitless:

- Window blinds

- Fire restoration, mold restoration and disaster recovery contents

- Electronics

- Plastic and silk plants

- Patio furniture

- Light Diffusers

Cleaning electronic equipment has always been time-consuming and cumbersome. When using ultrasonics to clean electronics, the process becomes efficient and can be very profitable for your cleaning business. However, there is a lot of confusion about how the process affects electronic equipment.

Many people believe that electronic equipment cannot be placed in water. While it's true that you should never place electronic devices into water that are still plugged in, use of the proper solution to clean and proper drying techniques allows items to be cleaned and restored using ultrasonics. With the proper equipment and training, there is no damage to electronics being submerged in water.

Many people also believe that ultrasonics will loosen solder joints and the item will not work properly. This thought is based on the theory that ultrasonics shakes off debris with vibrations. The cleaning process is called cavitation, which forms and collapses tiny bubbles - a safe and effective cleaning method.

Some people don't believe the ultrasonic cleaning process works. This is usually due to a lack of understanding of how the process works. Plus many people have never experienced the results firsthand. If you invest in the proper equipment and perform the process correctly, ultrasonic cleaning is not only effective, but actually reduces cleaning time and save tons on labor costs.

Ultrasonics is not just for cleaning small items such as jewelry. Ultrasonics can clean and restore items such as window blinds, light diffusers, small electric appliances, silk plants, and much more. Just think of all the homes and office buildings with mini-blinds and silk plants. The possibilities are endless for your cleaning business.

Adding ultrasonic cleaning services to your cleaning business should not be entered into lightly, as there is a large investment in equipment and training. However with proper training and an effective marketing plan, ultrasonic cleaning can not only be another service you provide to your clients, but a great added income stream for your cleaning business.

Steve Hanson is co-founder of TheJanitorialStore.com, an online community for owners of cleaning companies. Sign up for Trash Talk:Tip of the Week at http://www.TheJanitorialStore.com Read success stories at http://www.cleaning-success.com

The New Ways To Do The Business Mba Or Cio

2008-12-10T18:00:00.001-08:00

Writen by J.C. Melo

The old and standard business administration concepts included in any current MBA program are very important, but today the companies are very different.

This new situation strong demands a new MBA program including the General Control Theory, the control engineering, the new business technologies, the Management by Exception concept automated by computer systems, the Feedback Control System and several other subjects like Internet Marketing & Sales.

As we know the CIO is the abbreviation of "Chief Information Officer" and is a new professional, usually between the CEO and the other Directors including the IT Director. He don't replace the IT Director, with the exception in small companies.

A CIO Chief Information Officer has entrepreneurial experience and at the same time technical experience in Information Technologies. The entrepreneur usually has only the entrepreneurial experience and the IT manager has only on technical matters. However business is more and more the information system and the information system is more and more the business.

The companies are more and more electronics, as for examples the ERP Enterprise Resources Planning, the CRM Customer Relationship Management, the Voice over IP VoIP, the sophisticated Call Centers, Business Intelligence BI, the Internet, the new Internet Marketing, etc. Therefore, to survive a modern business administrator must learn those new ways to do the business and how to manage those modern enterprises.

In other words, the current MBA will be substituted by a CIO in a very short period of time. And a recent report from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the primary accrediting body in North America lambasted its members for maintaining a curriculum that is out of touch with modern business practices. As a matter of fact, the current MBA it's an 60-years old curriculum in the begin of this digital age.

Publishing Guidelines: You may publish my article in your newsletter, on your website or in your print publication provided you include the resource box at the end. Notification would be appreciated but is not required.

About the Author:

J.C.Melo is a 73-years old IT professional with 54 years of experience in computer science & technology entrepreneurship. He was the owner of the first minicomputer factory in South America and Consultant for the U.S. Government in several contracts. Now is the CEO of the organization http://mba-open-university.net and http://online-learning.distance-learning-mba-online-mba-program-executive-jobs.net .