Archive for May, 2009

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Tips For Opening Boutiques – Your Ultimate Guide

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Opening boutiques can be difficult especially if you do not have the correct information on how to start one. DO NOT start your own boutique if you do not know what you are doing in the first place. To help you on this one, here are some guidelines and tips for opening boutiques.

* The first thing that you need to consider is your target customer. In opening boutiques or any kinds of business for that matter, it is very important to identify who your customers will be so that it will be easier for you to position your product.
* Once you have decided on your customers, it is now easy to know what kind of clothes you can sell in your boutique. For instance, if your customers are teenage girls, you should sell hip and cool clothes appropriate for their age. Do not sell clothes that your mother will wear.
* Another important tip for opening boutiques is to think of a name for your store. The name should be catchy and easy to remember. Avoid names that sound like the names of famous boutiques if you do not want to lose any chance of making it big because of having no identity. Be unique and original.
* You should also find a location that will make your boutique visible to many people. In opening boutiques, good location is very important. Imagine a boutique located at the most hidden part of your town, without any passers-by. Nobody will buy from it no matter how nice the clothes that are because nobody knows about it.
* Start Saving: When you factor in rent, electricity, and the price of clothes to stock the shop, opening a boutique can cost quite a fair bit to most people especially if you are new in industry. With a mapped-out business plan and good credit (your credit card payments have always been on time), you can get a jump-start with a government small-business loan.

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The Importance of Paydex Score in Building Business Credit

Monday, May 25th, 2009

You may already be familiar with your credit report and your FICO score. But if you’re a new business owner, are you also understand the elements that make up your corporate credit? Do you know what Paydex means? This article discusses the basic points that you should know about business credit.

Your Paydex Score

Your Paydex Score is the equivalent of your FICO score. Dun & Bradstreet – a major business credit bureau, uses this method of calculation to measure a business’s credit. Once you’ve registered with D & B and you have received your D&B number, your financial dealings with creditors and other businesses will be reflected in your business credit report. When you obtain a copy of your credit report from D&B, part of the report includes your Paydex score.

A Paydex score ranges from 0-100, with 90 and above considered as excellent, 80 as good or acceptable, and 70 and below indicates a poor rating. Just as individuals aim for a high FICO score, business owners also want to reach a high Paydex score and maintain an excellent standing.

How to Raise Your Paydex Score

How do you achieve a high Paydex score? Timeliness of payment plays a vital role in how your business credit score is calculated. Of course, the best way to achieve an outstanding score is to always submit your payments on time. If you can pay your bills earlier than your due date, then the better it would be for your business credit.

Would occasional late payments affect your score? Yes. In fact, even a single late payment can pull down your score by a point or two. Nevertheless, if your average score is around 95 or more, falling one or 2 points down would bring you to a score of 93 which is still considered as an excellent rating. On the other hand, if your average score happens to be 82 flat and you’ve lost 2 points because of occasional late payments, then that would bring your total score down to 79 which can be considered as a poor rating.

Thus, as much as possible, it is crucial to be on time in submitting your payments to all your creditors. What if you can’t afford to pay all your creditors on time? It would be better to pay off your highest bill first to lessen the impact on your credit score.

Using Your Paydex Score to Get a Business Credit Card

Obviously, a high Paydex Score makes you an ideal client for banks and lenders while a low score makes you a high-risk borrower in the eyes of creditors. It is interesting to note that the best business credit cards in the market always require good to excellent credit.

However, if you have a poor business credit, you may consider getting a secured business credit card as a tool to raise your Paydex score. Understandably, a bad credit business credit card would have higher interest rates and lower credit limit than credit cards that require good credit. Nevertheless, by using your credit card account and paying your bills on time, you can make an improvement in your score within just a few months. Find a credit card that would report your payments to the major business credit bureaus as it is the only way you can raise your Paydex score. Eventually, you can ask your credit card issuer to upgrade your account once you’ve raised your credit score.

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How to Design Your Authentic Business Brand

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

Branding is yet another necessary element to every business that is almost always overlooked by small business owners and solo-professionals. Most people believe branding is for big companies. But the truth is that even if you haven’t consciously designed your brand, your business has an essence and you are putting that essence out there consistently. So why not do some identifying and analysis once to become clear about what you intend to project with your business. It can make a huge difference in the type of people you attract into your business and how the market reacts to you.

There’s a new paradigm in marketing called “attraction marketing”. The days of hype and hard selling, shouting, and pressure are over. A good brand design allows your business to target its market authentically. And now more than ever, people (the market appreciates that). Defining your brand allows you to steer your potential customers away from their “pre-conceived notions” (they are always incredulous), and makes emphasis on the importance of understanding your ideal customer, making you incredibly irresistible because you are coming from a place of authenticity. This type marketing is especially important for solo-professionals because “you” are the business.

When a business owner comes from a place other than just making a sale, customers are magnetically drawn to you. That is what designing an authentic brand is all about. It’s defining your core values in a such a way that it will set you apart from your competitors. It’s not just about portraying a pretty picture to the outside world it is about portraying the uniqueness and diversity that you possess. Once you have defined these values, they are what you use to guide your business.

Here are 6 Steps to designing your authentic business brand:

1. Begin with the end in mind. Know where you are going. In order to take the right steps toward success, you must have a clear vision of what your goals are. From here
you build up your brand.

2. Identify your unique qualities. Being authentic means knowing yourself and communicating that to the world. Forget about portraying something you are not in the hopes that you will be liked. It won’t work. Instead, be bold and true to the characteristics that make you who you are. These qualities are what make up the essence of your brand.

3. Identify your target market. Knowing who your ideal market is allows you to craft your message from a place of understanding. If you understand your market, they will be attracted to you.

4. Package your brand. Once you know what you are all about and who you are all about, create your brand features. Prepare a brand statement and tag line that consistently tells people what you are all about and present it all with an image that is consistent with that. If you are about innovation and power and are packaged in a conventional and dull fashion, you are not being authentic.

5. Know that your brand is connected to everything you do. Your brand is your business personality. You can never set it aside. How you dress, project yourself, communicate, show up and what you carry with you says everything about your brand. Make sure there is consistency at all times.

6. Evaluate your progress. When you have positioned your brand and it has become recognized by your market, continually evaluate what is and isn’t working for you. Successful businesses continually work on their brands so that it is of importance and value to its target market.

Remember that designing your brand is about setting the stage for how people consider you as opposed to someone else. And even if you don’t care about branding yourself, your brand is already there. It’s a part of you. So become aware of that. Identify the essence of all that is already there and let it be teh guide for all you do and create in your business.

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How You Can Enhance Company Recognition With a Virtual Office Address!

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Company recognition is very important in the competitive business world. It is a must if you want to succeed. Recognition takes on more than one form however, that a business can develop. A company must cast the right image to entice and keep clients which may involve different types of online services to make that happen.

With the economy in the toilet, many people are starting a small business. A big mistake being made by these entrepreneurs is not taking advantage of a virtual business address. They can use a prestigious U.S. virtual office address to show customers an enhanced business presence, incorporate, use a registered agent service, or appear in local search-engine results. Best of all, a company can check their postal mail online! As long as you have access to a computer and Internet connection, you can sort, scan, shred, save mail, forward hard copy, and much more.

Mail forwarding services, coupled with a virtual office address are also very helpful in creating the right kind of company recognition. The fact is that many consumers associate metropolitan areas with different types of products and services. Why not set up a mailing address in those cities? For a very low cost, it is possible to establish a mailing address in a prestigious location. This immediately helps to elevate the status of your business with many prospective clients, as the right address implies success and stability. A great move in one of many business development strategies.

You can also help to increase the level of company recognition by establishing several different mailing addresses in major cities around the world. This can allow you to move from pursuing a national clientele to an international one. By having a mailing address that is native to the area where you are attempting to secure business, your chances of being taken seriously are greatly enhanced.

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How Personal Revolving Debt Affects Business Credit

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Many business owners are shocked to find that their personal finances have such a large impact on their business’s ability to access credit. Revolving credit, in particular, can have an unexpected affect on any individual’s ability to access new lines of credit or business credit cards for their business. In fact, your individual FICO score can factor up to fifty percent into a lender’s decision to approve your business for credit or not.

In order to understand how revolving debt impacts your business’s access to credit, it is important first to have a good understanding of what revolving credit is and how it works.

Revolving debt includes all of an individual’s personal credit cards, department store cards, and any home equity lines of credit they may have out. Revolving debt is the ratio between how much credit is available to the individual from these three sources and how much is actually owed. This is a reflection of your financial state. If an individual has all lines of credit maxed out or nearly so, it will appear that something is going on in the person’s financial life, or that they are desperate for more capital, not what a lender wants to see when deciding to grant you access to more money. For example, if an individual has a total of 10,000 dollars available to them in all his credit cards, department store cards, and home equity lines of credit, but has a total balance owed on all three of only 4,000 dollars, that would be a forty percent ratio. Anything under fifty percent is generally good.

After incorporation is a critical time for a business to go to the next level, and this usually requires more capital in the form of loans, credit cards, or other lines of credit. It is exactly at this time when your personal revolving debt comes into play so crucially for your newly incorporated business. Your numerical FICO score will play a large role as well. It is usually ideal to have at least a score of 680 at this time, but this requirement will vary depending on the type of credit being requested. The requirements to finance a mortgage on a new property, for instance, will be vastly different than the requirements for a new business credit card.

Particularly in the case of a new business, your personal finances will be key. This is because as a newly established business, the lender has little to examine other than your personal finances. Managing your personal debt is one very important way to ensure that lenders will have a positive outlook on giving your business access to credit, but it is not the only factor involved. Having no credit cards, or only one or two, is not ideal. Lenders will want to see a fairly diverse and long credit history, so having one or two long-established accounts is great, but three or four total open lines is a much better number. Also, if you have bankruptcies, judgments against you, this will likely weigh into the bank’s decision. Make sure your personal finances are in great shape before you risk the success of your business on them.

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Printing Banners – For Faster Black Friday Sales Ads For a Pet Grooming Business

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

The best alternative for printing Black Friday Sales ads is to use vinyl banners. Black Friday is just around the corner and nothing could beat printing banners to inform people of your sales event. Offering discounted pet grooming services or selling your pet products at sale prices can encourage patronage. Giving freebies for purchases of service is also one way of enticing clients to patronize your pet grooming salons. Below are five benefits of using vinyl banners.

5 Benefits of Vinyl Banners

1. Quality. Advance technology can now print banners digitally. Digital printing creates full color banners with a photo quality. Online printing companies offers proof of your designs with no upfront payment so you can see how your finished product look like before actual printing.

2. Economical. Online printing companies offer affordable printing banners and can accommodate your orders without minimum quantity. They can customize your orders in design and in quantity to fit your requirements.

3. Turnaround. Digital vinyl banners are printed faster. Order and confirm online and have it delivered right at your doorstep within 24 hours.

4. Flexible. Because banners and other printed materials have optional grommets, you can re-position your banners anywhere you like. After this year’s Black Friday Sales, you can choose to use it again next year.

5. Greater visibility. Because of its size, banners can easily be seen at a distance.
Print your printed materials now and your Black Friday Sales for your pet grooming salon will never be the same again.

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Social Media For Small Business Promotion – The Secret to Using Twitter For Getting More Leads

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

You’ve heard about social media. You know it’s the key to getting more leads and clients. But where do you start? Read on to find out.

I can still remember how I felt when I first tried to navigate social media. They can be confusing. There are so many ways, and it seems like it would take a huge amount of time.

So I know how you feel. I’ve been there myself.

But fortunately, I have figured out how it works — big time!

And social media has turned into the best thing that has ever happened to my business! I mean, can you say “A flood of new clients is coming to ME”?

Seriously. Where I used to chase them, now they’re chasing after me. And you can make the same thing happen for you.

What does it take? Well, think about it…

Social media is the perfect interface between connecting at a personal level — and doing business together. It’s a balance act too, but not rocket science.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll see that. But where to get started?

Three things: Blogging, Twitter, and Article Marketing.

Let’s focus on Twitter for now.

Twitter may have a frivolous-sounding name, but it’s a total powerhouse. You can reach out to thousands of people at a time. It’s a perfect tool for making initial connections.

And unlike the other two, it doesn’t involve a lot of writing either — just 140 characters a tweet (that’s what they call the normal message unit at Twitter).

So let me give you a couple of tips for getting started on Twitter:

1) Follow people and they will follow you back.

It’s basic Twitter etiquette. Follow people you’re interested in having follow you back — and a lot of them will if you follow them first.

2) Be a friendly community member and resource.

Be sure to keep your sales-tweets to less than 20%. Focus on being helpful instead.

3) How to be seen as friendly and helpful?

Share useful information, respond to other people’s tweets, retweet their useful info, and so on.

And, yes, you can also share what you’re doing right then and there — within reason.

They don’t really want to know what you had for breakfast.

Warning: Don’t underestimate Twitter!

Find out how to use it correctly and integrate it with several other social media tools to get lots of prospects.

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Trade Show Giveaways – Industry Related Stress Balls Could Be Just the Ticket

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

January is the beginning of the trade show season for the construction and services industry. It is when companies of all sizes get to show off their goods and or services to those they hope will begin doing business with them or to impress those that already are. Now more than every before, it is important to try to get and keep your target customers’ attention. Many businesses are fighting for every order or contract so it is nice when you can give those all important prospects something to remember you by. Promotional industry shaped stress balls could just be that ’something!’

You may not realize it but promotional stress balls are one of the most popular products available for promoting your business. They are manufactured in eco friendly polyurethane. What’s more, although they are quite inexpensive, stress balls have a perceived value that makes people want to keep them for a long time and not simply throw them away as so many business gifts are. They often take pride of place on their desktops to show off to passers by and of course to use to de-stress themselves. Each time they give them a squeeze or look at them they will see your logo and details.

Whether they actually work as a de-stressing tool is debatable, but one thing is certain, they do tend to be attention grabbers. If you are exhibiting at a trade show in the New Year, you may like to consider industry related stress balls to decorate your stand. There is no doubt that they will entice people to come to your stand and leave with one of your imprinted.

There are many different industry shaped stress balls that could work for you. Following are some of the most popular;

Construction Shapes: Houses, bricks, hammers, wrenches, skips, drills and hard hats all can be printed with your logo and details for promotion.

Plumbing: Toilets, sinks, dishwashers, bath tubs and washing machines are all very popular stress shapes for promoting plumbing merchants and plumbing companies.

Heavy Machinery: Bulldozers, cranes, cement trucks, cement mixers, dump trucks and forklifts are among the many stress ball shapes that can be printed with your logo.

DIY: There are so many possibilities that it is difficult just to name a few. Of the most popular are paint brushes, paint cans, engines, and many different tool shapes.

In order to get a good idea of all the huge possibilities open to you, you should Google ’stress balls’ and see what comes up. There are a lot of good websites showing different options so look around to get a complete picture. It is important to find a company that deals directly with the manufacturer. These companies will know a lot more about the products and it will save you at least 40%.

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Running a Small Business While Having Jet Lag

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

When you have either a small business or work on your own, 1 or 2 days out of the office can be bad enough. When you couple that with jet lag you can add another 1-4 days, depending on where you traveled and how long you were gone.

What are you some tips to avoid jet lag?

* Bedtime Changes. Adjust your bedtime by 30 to 60 minutes a day to match the schedule of your destination. For example, if you’re going from the west coast to the east coast of the US, there’s a 3 hour difference. If you normally go to bed at 10:00pm PST, begin going to bed at 9:30, then 9:00, then 8:30. When you arrive on the east coast, you won’t find yourself staying awake until 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning trying to fall asleep.
* Change Time. The minute you depart, adjust the time on your watch to the time it is at your destination. This will help you begin to adjust to the new time and what you would be doing at that time when you get there – e.g., eating dinner, attending a conference, etc.
* Drink water. This should probably be at the top of the list since dehydration is one of the worst things you can encounter when traveling. In fact, start drinking water a day or two before you leave, drink ONLY water on the flight, and continue to drink water through out your trip. By all means, stay away from alcohol and caffeine. They can cause enough issues when you’re on the ground and those issues are just magnified when you travel – especially by plane.
* Sleep at the right time. Again, getting acclimated to the time at your destination is critical. Use whatever it takes – earplugs, headphones, eye masks, or sleep aids. So, if you’re on a long flight and it’s 10:00pm at your destination, try to sleep. Even a little bit of sleep will help with the time transition.
* Stay awake. This is just like the previous tip but in reverse. If you should be awake at your destination, then stay awake on the plane. Talk to others, make a few trips up and down the aisles, or watch a movie.
* Exercise. Move your body as much as you can. Not only will you avoid potential blood clots in your legs (which can be dangerous), blood circulation always makes you feel better. Walk a bit. Maybe stand in the back of the plane and do a few toe touches or back stretches. You don’t have to go as far as doing jumping jacks (because, well, that would be silly). Just try to keep the blood flowing.
* Eat light and right. Now is not the time to toss your eating pattern to the wind. Nutrition is key. To help stay away, eat a high protein snake or meal. To promote sleep, eat carbs like pasta. Try to minimize the salt (to prevent fluid retention in your feet/legs) and fats (since they make you feel sluggish.
* Supplements. Consider taking a supplement such as melatonin or a homeopathic product called, “No Jet Lag.” Also, you might want to make sure you are getting sufficient zinc. Zinc is excellent for keeping away infection and a simple Calcium/Magnesium/Zinc supplement taken 1-2 times a day can work wonders.

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Buying a Small Business – Pitfalls to Avoid

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Starting a small business is an equally exciting as well as frightening task. The market research, investments, and time needed to start a business from scratch can be tremendously draining for any entrepreneur. This is one of the reasons that many individuals consider buying an established business instead. They figure if a considerable amount of work is already done for them. This is certainly true, but in order to avoid a major catastrophe you need to take into account several potential pitfalls.

The first you might have suspected is thoroughly reviewing the financial books and status of the operation you are considering. The last thing you want is to buy the business and find out that sales have been dropping steadily for the last year. The nature of the documents presented is critical. Sales tax receipts, IRS tax returns, bank statements are all key to establishing the actual cash flow of a business. Having an independent accountant review the financial worthiness of the company is costly, but will certify that at least to the present, the business is in order.

The second issue to be cognizant of is the vendors required to successfully operate this endeavor. Despite the fact that most investors or owners will only buy the assets and not the liabilities of a company, the vendors may not distinguish between the previous and current owners. It must be made clear and in writing that you will only be purchasing the assets. A call to the vendors may prove beneficial though a complete change of account status is usually the best course to take. Changing the business name may not be required or even desirable, but may be the best option.

The last major issue to consider is the nature of the business itself. Is this is local business or is it national or international in scope? Is this the type of business in which the previous owner’s personality has actually driven much of the business relationships? Believe it or not, many people do not react well to change, and may often be reluctant to patronize the same store when it changes hands.

The occasional reference to the previous owner and how they did things or purportedly charged a lower price will likely come up. This can be especially challenging in small town or in a neighborhood setting where customer grow accustomed to seeing the same people. Determining whether you can successfully fill in and forge a new path beforehand is quite challenging but it is something to definitely consider.

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