In the world of banks today, small business owners often feel like the Rodney Dangerfields of loan applicants. They “get no respect,” to borrow that comedian’s old catch phrase. Since the Great Recession especially, banks have pretty much bowed out of funding small businesses. Too...
There may come a time in the life of a business when an owner may need additional funding. A dentist realizes he needs to upgrade his computer system to comply with HIPAA regulations. The proprietor of a salon opens the door one morning to a...
If there were a version of TV’s Price Is Right for small business owners -- one that involved setting the right prices, not guessing them -- the winners of that game would be the businesses with pricing strategies that managed to find the sweet spot....
Experts say it is wise to keep your personal finances separate from your business’s. While this may be true, at some point in the life of a small business, an owner may have no choice but to use a personal line of credit (LOC) as...
“Do what you love, and you will find a way to get it out to the world.” --Judy Collins That quotation wouldn’t be at all out of place on the wall above the home computer of any of the thousands of sellers on Etsy, the popular...
For a while now, you’ve been toying with the idea of buying a food truck. Maybe it began back when you were ten and the ice cream man-- with his popsicles and Drumsticks-- rolled through your neighborhood on a hot summer day. Or you’ve been...
Happy customers come back. Disgruntled ones take their business elsewhere. Who among us hasn’t experienced a rude clerk or waitress, and as a result vowed, “I’m never going back there”? Or the opposite – smiled all the way home from a store or a restaurant...
Let’s pretend for the next few minutes that you’re a lender. One afternoon, three business-loan applications land on your desk. One’s from Pope Francis. Another’s from Martha Stewart. And the third is from a local woman hoping to expand her day-spa business. Like many lenders, when...
If you're not familiar with the word, “Fintech,” you need to be. Given the impact it’s having on the financial industry (and on small businesses, in particular), it is quickly becoming the way the modern user has come to understand money. The word is a mashup...
A comprehensive Point of Sale (POS) system is like a cash register on steroids. In addition to giving your business the ability to accept payments, POS software provides detailed reports that enable you to analyze sales in all sorts of ways: items sold, peak periods,...