What is a B2B portal?

A b2b portal is a collection of web pages where both large scale sellers and buyers can register themselves to commence business activities. It acts like a base where sellers can display there product features, price and the minimum order approved to attract large scale wholesalers or dealers globally.

At the same time, it also acts as a one stop shop for all the buyers, dealers and wholesalers to source products of their choice without going through any hassles. All that is needed is to register to a b2b portal and most of your business needs will be sorted. A b2b portal also provided with useful related articles and important business leads to help you reach newer growth heights. In today’s time, a b2b portal has almost become a necessity for any size of business as it helps in reducing costs and increasing revenues.

What are B2B Manufacturers, Suppliers and Exporters?

Manufacturers and suppliers of any kind of product who register themselves on a b2b portal to provide access to a wider consumer base are known as b2b manufacturers or suppliers. It does not however mean that these suppliers commence business only through such portals. These are manufacturers and suppliers with already running business units. By registering to a b2b portal however they get an access to a global base of customers and have an opportunity to enhance their business performance to a much large extent.

Similarly, b2b exporters are the manufacturers or suppliers that engage in international supply of their products by getting orders through such a portal. For instance, a supplier of leather shoes could register and display his products on a b2b portal and get overseas orders. He becomes a b2b exporter by supplying goods internationally. You can find a list of all the b2b exporters or suppliers in any of the online B2B Directory. You just need to do a search of the product that you are looking for. These directories are normally designed alphabetically and are very easily accessible.

Today more and more business houses are commencing business through such portals as it not only gives a larger consumer base but also increases efficiency and revenues in no time at all. Companies also get a one up by registering with a b2b portal before their competitors do so as they would be more widely known than others in the international market. A b2b portal has therefore become an indispensable device for the growth of every kind of business.

* 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.

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.

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.

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 gifts that you will give away can be cheap. In fact there are many companies that use the same method to promote their business. Having in mind that you are still at the starting point of your business, you must be sure about the item that you will use.

Choosing the right item is not that hard. You just have to consider several things when choosing a product. First thing that you should consider is the usability of the product. This is very important when choosing the right item to use. If an individual constantly uses certain products and items, there is a high chance that they will remember where that product came from.

Next thing that you should consider is the durability of the item that you will use as promotional items. The receiver will be able to use the product for a long time if it’s durable. Also, if you don’t choose a durable product, it might only last for a couple of weeks or days. You don’t want to waste any money especially when you are starting your business.

You should also consider what other companies give away. Most of the time if the product that you will be giving away is the same as what other companies give, they will not be used or sometimes the receiver already has that item. If this is the case, then your giveaway will be wasted. So, try to know what the other companies distribute. You may be able to do this if you attend one of their seminars. Ask for a sample of the product that they give away.

So, if you don’t have any plans for promoting your business, you can give away promotional products to endorse your image and brand.

According to software vendor SAS, a recent survey of 1100 businesses revealed that performance alignment was the PRIMARY benefit companies hoped to receive from their performance management efforts. Aligning performance to your organization’s goals and objectives is critical to your organization’s success. On the other side, lack of alignment increases inefficien­cies and risks and prevents optimal execution of the organizational strategy.

Think of this scenario as a model for linking corporate strategy to business objectives:

The executive board collaborates high-level strategic planning and identifies goals for the CEO and organization. The CEO then meets with his/her senior executives who in turn develop objectives derived from the CEOs goals and integrates those goals into the strategic plan. In turn, those executives meet with their managers who develop objectives derived from the strategic plan, and so on. Then, each subordinate goal is tied to one or more goals of their manager. Ideally, the final result is that every tracked goal in the entire company can map back to a corporate objective developed by the board.

Chances of organizational success are greatly increased by translating each high-level objective into a cascading series of focused performance measures. Using our previous example, the CEO may focus on net cash flow while the CFO looks at debt-to-equity ratio. The controller may focus on liquidity ratio, while the accounts receivable manager looks at days sales outstanding, and the accounts receivable clerk worries about percent of collections over 30/60/90 days.

This article discusses aligning corporate strategy to four key areas: departments/ divisions, workforce, finance, and systems.

Departmental Performance Alignment

Departmental performance alignment can be difficult when business processes within an organization span across multiple business units and functional support groups. To avoid bottlenecks, finger-pointing, and redundancy of work, shared performance measures that align people across organizational boundaries must be identified and responsibilities accounted for. For instance, a performance measure that includes percent of collections over 30/60/90 days might be applied both to accounts receivables clerks and sales representatives, thus sharing and integrating performance measures, encouraging collaboration and boosting overall performance.

Workforce Performance Alignment

When workforce performance is aligned with corporate objectives individuals in an organization develop a stake in that organization’s performance. Employees at every level are measured by something they understand and control, and that same measure is clearly linked to the goals of their direct supervisor and the organization as a whole.

Financial Performance Alignment

In an economy where results need to be achieved fast and investor confidence is low, CFOs and finance organizations are implementing integrated performance management to improve information quality and visibility. One challenge organizations face aligning performance is finding financial measures that are meaningful to those responsible for carrying out the work. Using the previous example net cash flow is a critical performance measure for executives, but it probably means very little to the accounts receivable clerk who has no idea of how their contribution improves net cash flow performance. Stick with simple financial metrics that employees can understand and control.

System Performance Alignment

The IT/IS department’s role is to provide technical support for the entire organization. While we know that this alone is a complex task, today’s business model requires systems to not only support users, but to align technology to meet the business needs of the organization. Understanding business unit objectives and translating them quickly and accurately into IT priorities is essential today. So how does an organization measure how well their systems are aligned to organizational objectives? By implementing vehicles for aligning and measuring IT performance, such as service level agreements, performance-based contracts, and products and services catalogs to generate reports that illustrate how well they are measuring up to business objectives.

If you can move closer to aligning performance in these areas your organization will be well on it’s way to surpassing all of it’s goals and objectives. While the goal of a performance initiative is to align performance to organizational strategy, it is most important to maintain flexibility and adapt to organizational changes quickly.

The second feature of a high-quality green directory is the simplicity of finding the business, organization, or event that you are looking for. Some directories make it very difficult to find the correct information. A high-quality green directory will have a number of different search options like a quick search, map search, and advanced search. If you can’t find what you are looking for with one search, you will find it with another search.

The third feature of a high-quality green directory is a good support staff. There are many directories that don’t answer questions or help out with problems. If they ever get back often times it is weeks later and the subject has already moved on. A good support staff will respond within a day or two and businesses, organizations and events will be added into the directory when requested.

The final feature of a high-quality green directory is achieving an abundance of traffic. If there are no visitors to the directory what is the benefit of having all that content and information? The high-quality green directories will have high search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

I’ve found there are two major reasons that people feel unsuccessful:

1. Not having worked out measures to determine when you’ve attained success.

If you haven’t sat down and really planned where you’re going, in life and in business, it’s hard to know when you’ve “got there”. Many people have vague ideas of what “successful” is to them – ‘being rich’, ‘having time to do what I want’, or ‘being the best in my field’, for example.

You need to define what those things mean to you – are you rich when you have a million dollars in the bank? When you have an income of $200,000 a year? $100,000? Break your goal down into small, achievable steps, and celebrate them when you attain them.

It’s no fun feeling like you’re not “successful” every year that you don’t make $200,000, but what if your goal was instead to increase your income by $25,000 every year until you got there?

2. What’s going on outside you and what’s going on inside you don’t match.

You might have made your million, and achieved what you defined as success. But something’s wrong: you still feel unsuccessful. Maybe, in making your million, you neglected some other area of your life that was important to you. Maybe what you wanted all along was more time with your family, not a million in the bank. Maybe your definition of success includes both, and you need to work on that.

The important thing when setting your business and life goals is to be true to what you really want, regardless of what you think someone else might call success, what you “should” do, or even, sometimes, realising that your goals may have changed.

What you wanted five years ago might not be what you want now, and that’s okay. Be ready to change your goals when they’re not working for you any more.

Bottom line…

If you know what you want, how you’re going to get there, and celebrate your wins along the way, you’re much more likely to know when you’ve “got there”, and you’ll get there faster as well.

You hear about all the business’s crumbling and closing down and your first thought is how terrible it is. When you take time to consider the facts, you realize that no business crumbles in a day. It’s more of a slow fade that takes place over an extended period of time. Now I’m speaking in general, there are always exceptions to every rule. For instance if a military base closed in your town, or a major business, it could cause a number of business’s to close. For the rest of the businesses, there are more concrete reasons to be examined.

As business owners, we are exposed to a number of privileges, with privileges comes accountability. It is easy to get carried away with taking liberties and privileges when your business is booming. Unfortunately, we tend to overlook the parasites that lodge themselves into the heart of our business while we’re playing and living the good life. These parasites are greed, obsession and power. Sometimes it’s never enough, we make a hundred thousand dollars and think, ” I could make two hundred thousand”, and our focus is constantly on more. It’s natural to want to grow your business; you just don’t want to grow it at the expense of your staff and life. As business owners, we obsess over our competition; we’re always checking on them, trying to one up them. Lastly, power, we’ve all spent time reading our own press and believing it. It’s not intentional; it happens over a period of time, it tends to erode our thought process. We forget about our team, our staff, we feel as if it’s all about us. This is a very dangerous path to forge; it’s the path to the slow fade.

I think the key to every business is the heart, without heart and soul; a business is nothing but a shell. You as the owner represent the heart of your business, as you go, so goes the business. You have the ability to guide your business in any direction you choose. It’s not easy holding yourself accountable to a higher standard than everyone else. Leading is hard work and requires discipline and dedication. All eyes are on you; being off your game is not an option. Every day presents a new opportunity to shine and grow your business. You provide the foundation that your business is built on.

There are two paths we can choose from, one is wisdom and the other is consequence. Wisdom is a huge front-end investment in time, obedience and consistency, while consequence has a huge back end, consisting of pain, lack of discipline and regret. Devoting the time to properly train your staff, where you work together as a team, sharing a common goal. Where your staff works with you and not for you, contributing to the shared goal of being the best. Many people run the race, only one wins. It takes discipline and integrity to compete and win. Anyone can win the race once, maintaining a winning level is an attitude in discipline. Holding onto the title is a feat not often achieved by most. It takes strong leadership, and a strong will. How does your team stack up in the race? Do you have the staff in place capable of maintaining a standard of excellence? It all starts with you, and your commitment to excellence.