Archive for February, 2009
How Positive Psychology Can Boost Your Business
Bringing in a coach helped eliminate some of the crippling emotional effects of a merger
David Yellen
To understand how positive psychology—the so-called science of happiness—is being used by entrepreneurs, it helps to look at a company under siege. After all, it’s one thing to talk about the connections between a positive mental state and a healthy company when a business is running well, turning a profit, and grabbing new customers. But tougher times really test entrepreneurs, separating those who hunker down and hope the worst will pass from those who use their strengths to find opportunity amid rubble.
Robert Aliota is determined to be, when necessary, one of the latter. In 2004, Aliota, the owner of Carolina Seal, an 11-employee Continue Reading
How to Build Trust in Your Business
Customers need a reason to believe in your company. Here’s how to woo skeptics
Whatever happened to trust? Banks don’t trust one another enough to make loans. Customers don’t trust banks. Republicans don’t trust Democrats. Democrats don’t trust Republicans. Independents don’t trust anyone.
When distrust rules, it’s harder for entrepreneurs to sell customers on the wonders of their new products and services. That means entrepreneurs need to create what I call a real reason to believe, which leads to credibility for you and your company. Here are six ways to do that, along with some of the most innovative examples I’ve seen in the past year.
1. THE WHOLE STORY.
Tell Continue Reading
The Franchising Way to Grow
Here’s what you need to know to decide if franchising is the route to expanding your company quickly and relatively cheaply
By Sarah Max
Lisa Flynn, a mother of two young boys, never relished having her children photographed. For her, birth announcements and holiday portraits meant either spending a small fortune for a professional photographer who didn’t cater to colicky clientele or settling for cheesy props and fuzzy blue backdrops at the mall portrait studio. “I thought, ‘There has got to be a better way to get your kid’s picture taken,’ ” says Flynn, who was running her own marketing and advertising firm at the time. She looked into buying a franchise that specialized in children’s photography but, Continue Reading
A Guide to Self-Employment
Advice for recently laid-off workers considering going into business for themselves
So you lost your job. Now what? As an employee, you had a daily routine, health insurance coverage, and a regular paycheck. You liked the security—while it lasted. And if you sometimes daydreamed about the freedom of working for yourself, leaving a full-time job never seemed worth the risk.
But now, laid off into a recession and the worst job market in decades—2.6 million Americans lost jobs in 2008, with 524,000 eliminated in December alone—you may be thinking self-employment sounds like the best path out of unemployment. Rather than try to land one of the few open jobs out there, maybe you could work as a freelancer or consultant, at least until the job market Continue Reading
Buy Your Loan Back From the Bank
Here’s how you can negotiate a significant discount on your own debt
By Monica Mehta
Trouble for America’s lenders could mean opportunity for you. As banks scramble to shore up their balance sheets, savvy business owners have found it the perfect time to buy back debt at a substantial discount.
Why would a lender sell a $5 million loan, say, for $3 million? Over the past few years banks were only too happy to get paid Tuesday for a hamburger today. But many now would rather get what they can immediately and forgive the rest. Negotiating a discounted payout may be a way to actually take advantage of the credit crunch.
Liberal lending policies and ravaged stock prices have left many bank balance sheets a wasteland of toxic debt. As Continue Reading
Hidden Tax Tips for Entrepreneurs
Twenty-five tax deductions you may not have heard of—but should
Are you missing tax deductions you’re entitled to? Small business owners, self-employed workers, and independent contractors can write off many legitimate business expenses immediately, reducing the amount of income on which they pay taxes. But if you overlook applicable deductions or fail to keep adequate records that will back up your write-offs during an audit, you give up opportunities to cut your tax bill.
The Schedule C tax form used by sole proprietors to report business profit or loss has 21 line items for business expenses—including such catch-all categories as “office expense,” “supplies,” and “other expenses.” The tax forms for Continue Reading
The Stimulus’ Key Small Business Tax Provisions
Experts who are in the process of familiarizing themselves with the new law explain how it will benefit small companies in terms of tax relief
The stimulus bill signed into law by President Barack Obama on Feb. 17, formally known as the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, provides $288 billion in tax relief to individuals and companies. But how much of that will benefit small business owners—and how? You can read the 407-page law posted online, but we wonder how many members of Congress managed that. Instead, columnist Karen E. Klein has made things a bit easier by highlighting the law’s most important tax provisions applying specifically to small firms. Bear in mind, these changes only apply to federal tax liability, not state.
Net Continue Reading
How to Win Frugal Consumers and Influence Them to Buy
Consumer shopping habits are changing. But the right sign, well placed, can bring sales even in a recession, says retail guru Paco Underhill
American shoppers are complex: They’re excitable, but often creatures of habit; sensitive to influence, but harder to manipulate than marketers like to acknowledge. And now, as Americans consume more sparingly, an already complicated retail pas de deux has become even more so.
To find out how stores are responding, I called Paco Underhill. He was one of the first to study how people shop, and over the past 20 years or so his consulting firm, Envirosell, has worked for the likes of Best Buy (BBY), Gap (GPS), and Wal-Mart (WMT). Underhill gathers information for clients by videotaping and tracking shoppers in Continue Reading
Do You Need a Taxpayer ID Number?
Many businesses owners don’t need taxpayer ID numbers, but using your Social Security number may not be a good idea, either
Q: I had a taxpayer identification number years ago for my business as a sole proprietor. Do I have to reapply for a tax ID number this year, or can I just use the same number, or my Social Security number, after all these years?
—DRS, Brooklyn, N.Y.
A: Sole proprietors generally use their Social Security numbers as their taxpayer identification numbers. This number is used on documents such as individual income tax returns and on Schedule C of the Form 1040, where business income gets listed. If you work as a subcontractor, that same number will be used by your clients to report the fees they pay to you, says Steve Continue Reading
For Some Small Businesses, Recession Is Good News
From thrift stores to repair shops to auto garages, the recession brings new opportunities to plenty of small businesses
The current economic picture is certainly a gloomy one, with massive layoffs, bankruptcies, the collapse of financial institutions, and a severe credit crunch. But the recession has also injected life into a slew of small businesses that are thriving either in spite of or because of the economic downturn, giving new relevance to the old adage that one man’s misfortune is another’s opportunity.
Among those businesses that are thriving are pawn shops and thrift stores, which have traditionally catered to those in tight financial straits and which have historically seen an uptick during economic slumps. They’re reporting Continue Reading
Qapacity: A More Social Home for Your Small Business
If you’re a small business or a one man/woman show, how are you promoting your business online? On the flip side, if you’re looking for a consultant, photographer, or a web design company, where do you start your search? That’s where Qapacity jumps in; they’re hoping to be the middle-man for professionals and service seekers, adding a few unique touches to make the process painless on both sides.
Continue Reading
Google to Help You Consume Less Electricity
Remember Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, with Dr. Larry Brilliant at its helm (I just love mentioning that name) and a hefty 1 billion to spend? Their latest initiative is called Google PowerMeter, a service that will let you track electricity usage in your house.
Of course, what you’re probably wondering now is how the hell does Google know how much electricity I spend, and when did I sign up for that? The trick is: it doesn’t. The Continue Reading
TwtQpon Throws A Free Bone To Struggling Retailers
Dell made a cool $1 million over the holidays by alerting Twitter users to sale items. Now, Felipe Coimbra, the developer who gave us twtpoll, twttrip and twtvite, is launching twtQpon, a Twitter coupon creator for businesses to roll out their Twitter marketing strategy. Not a bad idea, when retailers are trying desperately to find a way to harness the outreach power of Twitter. Others retail operations are following Dell’s lead by using Twitter to spread the word on sales and discounts. CheapTweet.com even breaks down all these sales by product.
You create an coupon on the twtQpon site, and then, Continue Reading
Extensions for Google Chrome Coming In May?
If the schedule for Google’s big annual developer conference is any indication, we should expect to see an extension platform released for Chrome sometime this May.
Programmer Nicholas Moline has noticed a session called “Developing extensions for Google Chrome” among the 38 sessions posted to the Google I/O website. It sits alongside two other Chrome-specific sessions (the others titled “Exploring Chrome internals” and “V8: Building a Continue Reading
Facebook Pledges Support For OpenID; But Will Anything Change?
The OpenID Foundation has just announced that Facebook’s Luke Shepard will be joining the OpenID board as a corporate member, and that Facebook has made a $50,000 donation to the cause. The news marks the first time Facebook has officially signed on with the campaign, though some of its employees have been actively involved with improving the open standard for some time.
At this point it’s unclear exactly what change this will bring to Facebook. Facebook’s increasingly popular Connect product, which allows users to secure use their Facebook ID’s as logins across over 4,000 sites Continue Reading
Gmail Adds Support For Multi-Pane Viewing
A new feature in Gmail Labs just launched, giving users the ability to simultaneously view multiple panes in Gmail without having to open another browser window. For users that frequently label their messages and have saved searches, this is a huge upgrade that will make Gmail even more efficient.
Since launching, Gmail users looking to view search results or a subset of their labeled messages saw their results take up their entire browser window. Now, you’ll be able to do multiple things at once.
To enable the feature, first activate Gmail Labs for your account, Continue Reading
Internet chaos as Google goes gaga
Google was brought to a worldwide standstill for an hour yesterday after an employee mistakenly blocked any access to web pages through its site.
Millions of online surfers entering any item into Google from 2.30pm yesterday were met with a message saying ‘Warning – visiting this website may harm your computer!’
Even the BBC and the Harry Potter sites were listed as ‘suspicious’.
Google – the most popular search engine, used by 63 per cent of the world’s internet users – said the glitch, which lasted for 55 minutes, was down to simple human Continue Reading
Obama promises new dawn for America and the world after he is voted first black U.S. president in landslide victory
Lotame Social Media Ad Platform Raises $13 Million 
Google Testing New Service Features On Chrome First?
Six Best Tools to Track Your Time Spent Online
Failure: A Bankrupt Idea
