January is the planning month: business owners normally find themselves rejuvenated after the holidays and ready for a better new year. And they asked themselves: what should I do better this year? This is when planning comes in.
These days this is even more true, as we have to put the difficult 2009 behind us. If you followed our previous posts, you understood that planning is the single most important management tool for success. We wrote about business plans, marketing plans, strategic plans and so on. In fact everything should be included in the business plan. And the marketing plan is the most essential component of the business plan. Read more…
The 7 (8) Essential Startup Steps
If you wish to start a new business, then you must take the 7 Essential Steps as indicated in the excellent article from Entrepreneur. I added another step, Create a Business Plan, so now we have 8 steps in total. Well, the article includes business plans in the step number 2, Show Yourself the Money. But only of you are looking for investors. Instead I think that creating a business plan is important especially for you, and it will be foolish going into any business without it. Read more…
How to boost cash without depending on external financing
The answer is: manage your suppliers and your customers. You have to watch closely your cash flow and cash cycle (what is the cash cycle? Will talk about it in a later post). In simple words you have to reduce the time it takes to collect your receivables and prolong the payment to your suppliers.
Read more…
ARC Loans (America Recovery Capital), also called SBA Stabilization Loans, can be used to make payments of principal and interest on existing debt. These loans are relatively new (they are part of the 2009 Recovery Act), and are made by commercial lenders who are SBA participants. SBA guarantees 100% of the loan and pays the interest throughout its term. Moreover, there are no fees to be paid to the SBA. The loan disbursement can be effected over a six-month period, and repayment of the loan principal is up to five years, with the first repayment after 12 months after the last disbursement of the loan amount. In other words, there is nothing to be repaid for 12 to 18 months, depending on how you receive the loan amount.
Read more…
Cash flow is nothing more than the movement of money in and out of your business, just like the flow of blood through the body. Cash is in continuous circulation through the “arteries” of the business, carrying value to its “organs”. If the flow is stopped or severely reduced, then serious consequences result. Read more…
Jay Conrad Levinson is the creator of Guerrilla Marketing and he wrote more than 55 books on the subject. I personally found it more than useful, absolutely essential. Why is this?
If you are an entrepreneur, you need guerrilla marketing more than ever because the competition is smarter, more sophisticated, and even more aggressive than it was in the past. But this is not a problem for guerrillas. Why? A guerrilla marketer, instead of relying on a “big bucks” marketing campaign, uses creativity, time, and energy. And, in these areas, nobody can beat you. Read more…
What does really mean break-even? It is the level at which the company makes neither a loss nor a profit, but just covers it’s fixed costs or overheads. It’s the floating point, at which you know that you are not sinking. In practical terms it could be the level of monthly sales that, once reached, will give you the security of paying your bills, at least for that month. Or for a whole year. Or even how many units you need to sell in order to cover all the fixed cost, to pay all your bills. Read more…
Why do we need a Business Plan? As everybody knows, without a plan you don’t know where to go. But this does not mean that, in order to be successful, every business has to prepare a 70 pages written plan, with charts, spreadsheet and the like. The answer of this question is that planning is important, but not necessarily the plan. In other words it is the process. Planning is important because it helps us, business owners, to focus, prioritize, manage and finally track our performance. Read more…
Why for some companies, the economic downturn is business as usual?
This is the title of an article published by the Wall Street Journal on March 23, 2009, which is full of useful information even for us, small business owners or managers. I’m saying this because the article is obviously directed towards big companies. But I liked the ideas and I tweaked the content a bit to make it more suitable for businesses like ours, that is small. Read more…
