General Business Talk

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.

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.

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.

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%.