Small Business is about many things – sales, marketing, customer service, employees, but invariably it all comes down to finance. You can make it, sell it, and ship it, but if you don’t collect the payment, manage your cash well and document all your transactions such that you don’t run afoul of the tax man, [...]
Goals. In business planning you set goals, assess how far you are from your goals, come up with strategies to reach your goals and set up mechanisms to measure how much progress you’ve made towards achieving your goals. Then, you periodically review your goals to see if they need to be revised. It’s a straight [...]
There may have been a time when an honest days hard work paid off in and of itself, but as we have progressed from the Industrial Age to the Information Age working hard without working smart is now a quick path to ruin for a small business. Imagine keeping your books or doing your tax [...]
What value do you deliver to your customers? Sometimes, as business owners, we get so caught up in trying to get the day-to-day things done that we lose sight of this simple question. In order to justify high margins, you need to provide good value for your customers. If you don’t, you can bet someone [...]
The biggest reason that small businesses fail is that the owner or owners give up and throw in the towel. Persistence doesn’t always pay off, but lack of persistence is a sure recipe for small business failure. There will be crises. Count on it. Still, I have seen many small businesses plug along when they [...]
Business planning for a small business is not all about writing a business plan. Many small businesses have never written a business plan and get along just fine without one. That doesn’t mean that written business plans aren’t helpful or sometimes even necessary (potential investors and banks will want to see a business plan, for [...]
I recently finished reading Small Giants – Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. Mr. Burlingham an editor at large with Inc. magazine, gives us a look at 14 small businesses of various sizes that choose to follow a path of [...]