Improving Front-Office Efficiency: Take a Long, Hard Look at Your Back Office

A bag of popcorn in one hand and your favorite person in the world in tow, when you sit in front of that giant screen, you know what you both will be seeing – the movie, the finished product. Depending on the film’s genre, you can end up screaming your head off in fear, laughing like you’ve never laughed before, or falling in love all over again.

There are four truths at play in the scenario above:

  1. You came to see the movie, and it was what you paid for – on the surface, at least.
  2. The time, effort, technology and talent it collectively took to bring what once was a figment of the imagination to the big screen are what makes or breaks the success of a film.
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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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A Case Study in Customer Service: The Name Badge Industry

Great customer service in the name badges industry? It may not sound too exciting at first, but at Meluba Badges we deal with a huge variety of customers, from the sole trader to the largest organisations who all work differently, are looking for a bespoke product supplied quickly and at a competitive price.

name badge

Meeting such a variety of demands with a great product and customer service is what we believe sets us apart, and by following our example, you can set your business apart too!

Understand your customers

Providing great customer service is impossible without first understanding your customer and your place in the market.…

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5 Tips to Having The Best Terms of Service

This is undisputed, really — a growing successful company needs direction, plain and simple. Without it, you’ve got a corporation just going wherever the wind blows, and sometimes that wind will blow clear across the ocean, into a monsoon, with crashing waves, and the ship gets way too torn up to see the light of day. It’s not a pretty sight.

creating terms of service

To avoid the storm, though, you’ve got one concept here acting like your guiding compass: the “Terms of Service” agreement. Let that lead you. With that kind of document, you can rest assured that you’ll always find your way with your company.…

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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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PPC Advertising is Not Just About Keyword Match Types

Novices to PPC Advertising might very well believe that managing a PPC Advertising Campaign is all about selecting the right keywords and attaching those keywords to appropriate advertisements and their respective landing pages.

Even though this is the basic idea behind PPC Advertising, without a doubt, and one of the reasons why Google AdWords Advertising is one of the easiest to get involved in, this is not the be all and end all to PPC.

pay-per-click advertising

The possibilities for getting really creative with your PPC Advertising are endless. The types of PPC Advertisements available to the average online marketer are expanding all the time.…

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