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When the Numbers Don’t Add Up: Three Ways to Improve Your Business Credit Score Quickly

If you find your business becoming rejected and denied for loans left and right, then chances are that your business’ credit score and history are to blame. Obtaining a copy of your current credit report will allow you to quickly see just how bad things have gotten, especially if you have an extensive list of negative accounts and activity within it. Fortunately, there are several effective ways that you can get the ball rolling in the right direction again and eventually improve your business credit score over time.

Business credit report analysis

Identify and Rectify Your Errors

Although the vast majority of the information that is reflected within your business credit report is accurate, it is possible to have an abundance of errors in it, as well.…

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How to Explore Overseas Market: Learn from Illy and Estee Lauder

SMB CEOs… want some inspirations on how to explore overseas market? Check out this Singapore Sessions video, featuring a candid talk with Estee Lauder Companies’ Executive Chairman, William P. Lauder, and Illy’s CEO, Andrea Illy.

This session features on how Illy Coffee and Estee Lauder approach the challenges presented by the South East Asian market.

South East Asia is a market promising significant growth, but is surely challenging, especially for coffee and cosmetic products. Fortunately, there is not a single way to market to Asia, which mean that the market favors companies with innovative business model and sound strategy.…

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Apps for a Small Business’ Accounting Needs

Being in the accounting department of a small business doesn’t mean being tucked away in the back corner of the office hammering away on a Dell desktop running Windows XP and an old copy of QuickBooks. No sir, accounting can actually be fun thanks to the help of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, and some nifty apps as well as long awaited Mac accounting software.

small business owner using mobile accounting apps

The idea of putting accounting-related tasks into a mobile device might seem scary to some accounting pros. But the concept of being able to touch, swipe and manipulate numbers at the stroke of a finger can be pretty liberating.…

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Broken Data Storage – How to Recover Your Data?

As winter storms strike North America, chances are good that disaster will strike right at the heart of your business.

Hopefully you have surge protection to safe-guard your IT equipment and storage devices…

Hopefully you back up your data so persistently that there’s no chance you won’t be able to do a fast and easy disaster recovery once the storm lifts…

broken hard drive

There’s a lot of things an SMB CEO needs to be hopeful about. If you are like most people, some lessons have to be learned the hard way, and you now find yourself in a position where you have to recover some uber-important data from a dead or otherwise discombobulated storage device – your laptop, PC, thumb drive, SD card, or main server.…

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8 Essential Small Business Sales Apps for 2014

I just received a package delivered by one of the leading International shipping companies. The package needs to clear customs, and thus I obviously need to pay some fees. The company accepts collect-on-delivery (COD) payment, so I took that option. To my surprise, the delivery man requests the fees to be paid in hard cash – or a bank transfer before the delivery is made.

collecting payment using sales apps

I don’t know how about you, but as I rarely have cash at home this arrangement is, by any means, not that convenient for me. I thought, “Why on earth such big business don’t facilitate payment collection via credit cards/debit cards method?”…

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8 Great Tips on How to Effectively Manage Generation Y and Z Employees in the Modern Business Landscape

Managing the modern employee pool is much different from what it was back in our parents and grandparent’s time. Gen Y (a.k.a., “Millenials” estimated 71,000,000 people) workers are now fully steeped in the work force, and Gen Z (a.k.a., “The New Breed” estimated 23,000,000 people and growing) workers are coming up through the ranks every day. This makes for a major changes in personalities and skills. And consequently, major changes in the way that an employer or manager has to deal with their employees in order to be successful.

young employees

Generation Y was a new breed when they entered the professional workforce in the late nineties and early two-thousands, with less tolerance for the traditionally aggressive, uncompromising “Devil may care” management style that most managers had utilized since the start of the Industrial revolution back in the nineteenth century.…

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Dear US-Based Small Business Owner: It is Time to Get Your Books Ready for Year End

Profits, depreciation, travel costs, healthcare, startup costs, training expenses, charitable donations – all these and more represent little numbers on a page that can save you money if you have your books in order when the “Revenue Man” comes a calling in the next couple of months. Rules and paperwork vary significantly from one country to the next, however most do employ many of the same basics.

For those of you with businesses based in the good ‘ol “US-of-A”…

It’s crunch time!

working with business tax documents

If you don’t have your tax paperwork in order, then you’ll be in for a real slap in the face when business resumes full-swing in the New Year, and your accountant starts hassling you for the receipts from that big move you made to a new location this year, so they can deduct it from your individual 1040 return.…

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Easy Step by Step Approach to Make a WordPress Site for Your Small Business

Almost every small business owner is faced with the challenge of building a website to help develop and market their brand at some point. To those of us who’ve successfully built a few, or dozens of sites, it seems almost silly that anyone would anguish over such a task – it’s really not that difficult right?

small business website building

However, for those of you who haven’t, but desperately want to: you probably have a hundred different questions running through your head:

  • “Do I really have the time to mess around with this darned website thinga-myjiggy right now?”
  • “What if I do all this work – research, planning, executing, outsourcing, maintenance – and it doesn’t make me any money?”
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Top 10 Business Trends for 2014

Business in 2014 is bound to be more vibrant, connected and tech savvy. Here’s how things are set to be in the year to come:

business trends 2014

1. Visual Explosion

Pictures can speak a thousand words and they are really more effective in communicating ideas and messages. This is probably why platforms like Pinterest and Instagram have become platforms and vehicles for those who’d like to tell a story with their products and services. The super duper success of YouTube perhaps is why we have a phenomenon called Vine today. More power to images which in turn propel businesses to a new level.…

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Critical Business Mistakes to Avoid in the Coming Year

As the new year approaches, most of you will be thinking of ways you can improve both your personal and professional lives in 2014. Oh, the agonizing decisions we’re going to be faced with whence the New Year’s bell rings in Time Square: app development; content marketing; social media; new competition taking established customers; what’s the bloody government going to tax us on this year; tech changes; will the first quarter be strong – or will our profits reign in the fourth; will the economy get stronger – or flatline as it has without warning in so many past years?

business mistakes

All these and many others weigh on the minds of any business owner.…

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