5 simple things you should do every day to succeed with your business

From workitmom.com

Running a business is one of the most stressful, exhausting, all-consuming, and challenging things I’ve ever done – and I’m proud to say that I’ve paid my dues with hard work before I started my own company. Every day there are too many things to do and absolutely never is there enough time to do them. During the first few months of my stint as an entrepreneur I would often get completely overwhelmed by the amount of work to be done (not to mention the fear of failure, but that’s for another article.) Feeling overwhelmed made me extremely unproductive, creating this horrible cycle of having too much to do and not enough time or focus to do it.

 

So I sat down and wrote down a list of 10 things I’d try to accomplish every day to move my business forward. Once I had the list, I read it, and realized that it was too long. So I cut it down to 5 things and I’ve stuck to doing each one every single day for about a month now. I hasn’t yet made mine a million-dollar business, but I can honestly say it’s made my day-to-day more focused, organized, and has allowed me to get some insights into the business I am not sure I was getting otherwise. So I thought I’d share my 5 things with you and perhaps they can help you succeed with your business!

1. Do 3 things every day to get the word out about your business.

Getting the word out about your business is a continuous process. If you get a huge PR hit, great; if you run an ad campaign and get good results, also great. But great PR hits are rare (and some great PR hits don’t produce any real results) and few small business owners have tons of marketing dollars to spend on advertising. But there are endless things you can do every single day to spread the word about your business, such as

• Participate in discussions on relevant blogs, related to your business or with readers who would benefit from your business. Make sure that any comments you leave are genuine comments and are not just there to pitch your site or product. This will get you nowhere fast.

• Personally connect with a blogger or journalist who writes about your industry or related products. Don’t pitch your business – just introduce yourself and say something (a) nice and (b) relevant about their blog or writing. This is a great way to get on their radar.

• Compile a list of useful data that is related to your business and make it available on your site or blog. You can then mention this useful list – and it should be useful! – to any bloggers or journalists you contact.

2. Make one tough phone call (or send one tough email) per day.

Being an entrepreneur is about making tough phone calls – to suppliers, to business prospects, to potential clients, lawyers, accountants, and even competitors. It’s not pleasant but it definitely gets easier the more you do it. If you stick to doing this once a day eventually it will not be a big deal at all. (I’ve now learned this through my own experience.)

3. Spend 20 minutes each day thinking about daily, weekly, and monthly priorities.I like to write things down so I have a notebook where every day I make a list of daily, weekly, and monthly to-dos and priorities. This forces me to not just think short-term and allows time to plan ahead and work out initiatives that might need lead time.

4. Connect with at least one customer per day in a personal way.

Whatever your business is, whether you’re selling a product or service, you have customers. And the best way to build a successful business is to connect with your customers who will then spread the word about your business to new prospects. If you write a blog or send out an email newsletter to your customers, that’s great. But every day aim to connect with at least one customer personally. Send a thank you note to a recent customer. Reply to a comment left on your blog. Send a personal email as a reply to a customer service inquiry. Customers are people – make sure they get to know you as a person.

5. At the end of each day, write down one what went great and what needs some more work. (Look at your notes first thing in the morning the following day.)

This need not be a long and exhaustive list, but I find as an entrepreneur that what I have no time for is reflecting on the business – there is just too much business to actually do! So I’ve made this a rule for myself and by sticking to it I think I’ve learned a lot. And reminding myself about the things that go right has turned out really important. Running a business involves constant challenges and disappointments – not growing fast enough, too much competition, not making enough money, etc. Making notes about things that do go right is a great shot of positive energy and optimism that I think we ALL need as entrepreneurs.
Do you have daily habits that you stick to as a small business owner? I’d love to hear them!

5 Things Your Small Business Should Do Today To Increase Profits

From Crowdspring.com

Here are five practical tips from my own experience with crowdSPRING that you can implement today to increase sales and profits for your small business:


1. Evaluate What’s Working And What Isn’t. Wasted time could be a small business owner’s worst enemy. Your time is limited but you have a great deal to accomplish every day. It’s OK to have occasional unproductive days, but most successful small businesses figure out what works and what doesn’t - and focus on the things that work for them.
For example, it’s entirely possible that a huge amount of your effort is spent on daily activities that aren’t contributing to building your brand, your sales/profits or accomplishing the other meaningful goals you’ve set for your business.
Some small business owners are so protective of their accounting, for example, that they’ll resist the need to bring in a part-time accountant to help them to maintain their financial records. While this appears to be prudent - after all, you’re saving the cost of paying a part-time accountant - such decisions turn out to be very short-sighted for many businesses. If you’re running a solo business, you could be focused on sales during the hours you devote to accounting. Or you can be working to improve your product or service.

How You Can Start Today: Start by listing on a sheet of paper - or in an electronic document - all of the tasks you do on a regular basis (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly).  Do your best to break these tasks into logical areas, such as sales, accounting, marketing, inventory, etc. Second, assign times to each task. How long does it take you to pay your bills every week/month? If you have to maintain inventory, how long does it take you to review your inventory and order replacement inventory? Do this for each task to begin to understand the time you are spending on each activity. Third, assess whether each activity is important. You’d be surprised how many things we all do during a normal day that add little value to our business. Once you understand the importance of each activity, rank the activities (or logical areas) to better understand where YOU should be focusing. If you’re like me, you’ll find plenty of activities that are only modestly important - but those activities sometimes take the most amount of time to accomplish. Determine whether those activities are sufficiently important to continue - or whether you need to find someone else (part-time or full-time) to help you with those activities. We all have areas in which we excel. And we all have areas in which we don’t. Focus on the areas where you bring the most value to your business and find the right people to fill the gaps in areas you don’t. If you focus on the things that work, you’ll be more efficient and productive, and you’ll see meaningful impact to your bottom line.
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2. Experiment With Hyper-Local Advertising on Facebook. Most small business owners don’t know that in March of this year, Facebook made some very powerful upgrades to its social network. Those upgrades are especially important to small business owners because it’s now possible to target customers based on the language they speak and where they live/work. This means that a bakery can now advertise specifically to people who live within a certain mile radius of the bakery. A language tutor can advertise to families who speak Russian or Chinese - within a 10 mile radius - to target families that may want to hire a tutor for their kids.


How You Can Start Today: Advertising on Facebook is comparatively inexpensive and more importantly, measurable. When you place a print ad in your local newspaper or in a Yellow Pages directory, you are rarely able to determine whether the cost of the ad is justified. However, when you run ads on Facebook, you’ll get reports that will tell you exactly how much it’s costing you and by combining your Facebook advertising with your analytics reports, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of this type of advertising. I am not suggesting that hyper-local advertising will work for you - but you should give it a try by setting a small budget and experimenting.


3. Study Your Competitors. Most small businesses are so focused on their own activities that they never take the time to understand and evaluate their competitors. This is a mistake. While you no doubt are operating your business better than many of your competitors, you’ll always learn from studying your competitors. Sometimes, you’ll learn what you can do better. Other times, you’ll learn about what you should NOT do.

How You Can Start Today: A few weeks ago, I wrote a detailed post sharing how I evaluate competitors. In that post, I offered 10 tips to help other small businesses evaluate their competitors. I encourage you to read that post or the more detailed post in my personal blog, where I presented the 10 tips with a detailed analysis evaluating two competitive businesses - Mashable and TechCrunch.
image credit: TheBusyBrain


4. Set Meaningful Goals. Most small businesses - even successful small businesses - fail to grow because the owners don’t take the time to set meaningful goals. I’ve talked to thousands of small business owners. Most want to work for themselves and operate a business that will provide them and their families a good standard of living. But those aren’t the goals I’m talking about. Most small business owners fail to set quarterly or yearly goals for their businesses. They simply operate the business, focusing on day to day activities, without establishing what they hope to accomplish within a certain amount of time. While your overall goal can be to make a ton of money and find enough free time to enjoy other activities, you should establish operating goals for your business.

How You Can Start Today: You can start by asking yourself where you want your business to be six months from today? One year from today? If you are the sole owner/employee, do you want to have five employees in one year? If you have five clients, is your goal to have 15 in six months? If your revenues are $30,000 this year, do you want to have revenues of $75,000 next year?

Yet again why government shouldn't run healthcare

From KELOLAND.COM:


Dealers are still waiting for cash for clunkers cash.

Auto makers will release their monthly sales reports Tuesday and they're expected to show the first year-to-year increase since 2007.  While the Cash for Clunkers program is getting all the credit, local car dealers are still waiting for their cash.

During the month long program, Billion Automotive sold close to a thousand vehicles but has only been reimbursed for 272 of them.  Vern Eide sold over 200 cars and has only been paid for 27 of them, and that's fueling lots of concerns in the auto industry.

Billion Automotive cashed in during Cash for Clunkers, but owner Dave Billion is still waiting for the rest of his money from the government run program, $3.2 million.

"I wonder how long they'd wait if I owed them $3.2 million.  I think they'd be at my door or at least my banker's door," Billion said.

Even though Billion is beginning to get some of his reimbursement money, he's still concerned because he says there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the program.

When Cash for Clunkers was first announced, dealers were supposed to be reimbursed within 10 days of a sale. Billion says that hasn't happened.

"The program started in July and we haven't gotten paid for cars we sold back then, but then on the other hand we got paid for a car we sold last week.  They don't have an accurate format.  It's not like they're taking the first deals that were submitted and working those.  I don't know how they're doing it, no idea.  I know it's very random" Billion said.

Plus, he's had problems getting some vehicles qualified.

"We had a situation where we had a submission, they rejected it for multiple reasons.  We didn't see anything wrong with it, so we resubmitted it.  They rejected, we resubmitted it.  They rejected it, seven times and finally they paid it, and we never changed a single thing on it," Billion said.

But Billion thinks he'll get his money eventually, it just may take longer than what the government first said.

We can only imagine what language he speaks with his accountants and tax attorneys.

From the Wall Street Journal online news about the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Chaiman Charlie Rengel and the really big problems he has had with financial disclosure statements:

When you're a powerful Congressman and working diligently to increase tax rates to pay for President Obama's health-care plan, we suppose it's easy to lose track of one of your checking accounts. That would be the one at the federal credit union with a balance somewhere between $250,001 and maybe as high as $500,000. And when you're crunched for time and pulling together bills to pass in a rush, we guess, too, that you might overlook several other investment accounts, even if some of them are sizable, such as the ones Mr. Rangel missed at JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer and BlackRock.

Among other issues, Mr. Rangel is currently under investigation regarding his use of four rent-stabilized apartments at New York City's tony Lenox Terrace and soliciting donations with his official letterhead for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York, which was itself built with a $1.9 million earmark. Yet another part of the probe is his failure to report $75,000 in income from a rental villa at the beachfront Punta Cana Yacht Club, in the Dominican Republic.

Mr. Rangel blamed that last one on the language barrier because he doesn't speak Spanish.

Click the above link to read more about Charlie Rangel's hidden assets and income and discover why term limits that are good enough for the President should be good enough for Congress.  

Coffee, tea or candy? You'll pay more when higher sales tax kicks in

From the Belvidere News Daily

Candy no longer will be taxed at the lower food rate, but at the higher general merchandise rate. It is defined as any food for human consumption sold that has sugar, honey, or other natural or artificial sweeteners in combination with chocolate, fruits, nuts or other ingredients or flavorings in the form of bars, drops or pieces. It does not include any food that contains flour or requires refrigeration.
"You have to be careful to look at the ingredient label," Hofer said. "If it contains flour, it's a food."
Some grooming and personal hygiene products also will be taxed at the higher rate, and the inequitable taxing of similar items will be addressed. These items include but are not limited to body soap, cleansers, shampoo, toothpaste, mouthwash, antiperspirant, suntan lotions and sun screens. The change comes to those products that claim a medicinal value, which had been taxed at the lower rate.


Click the above link to read more.

How does the retailer know which rate to charge?

The answer is flour or refrigeration.

From the Illinois Department of Revenue Information Bulletin issued 30 days before the new rates take affect:

You must check the ingredients label or package. 

If you are wrong about the ingredients or perhaps the candy doesn't have sugar in it?


I guess you punt.  Based on the poor job Revenue has done enforcing the soft drink rate changes from several years ago, you can't really worry about it.

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Health Care Strategies for SELF-EMPLOYEDS

Health care reform is in the news. And for good reason.

Today’s soaring health care costs continue to be a consistent financial threat to all self-employed individuals. The National Coalition on Health Care reports that in 2006, the average family health insurance premium topped $1,200 per month. That’s more than the average family’s mortgage—and health care costs are rising faster than interest rates!

Raising your health insurance deductible just a few thousand dollars can cut your premium by up to half. But that leaves you responsible for out-of-pocket costs. And even if you itemize, those are deductible only to the extent they exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income. Is there a way to capture premium savings from high-deductible insurance and tax savings for out-of-pocket expenses? Fortunately, there are two.

Medical Expense Reimbursement Plan

If you have self-employment income, even from a startup or sideline business, you can take advantage of a little-known tax break to save a bundle on your family’s health care costs. Medical expense reimbursement plans (“MERPs”) let you reimburse your employees, their spouses, and their dependents for uninsured medical costs. Plan benefits are deductible by the business, and nontaxable to the employee. Here’s how they work:

You have to establish the plan for employees. If you operate as a proprietorship, partnership, LLC, or “S” corporation, you're considered “self-employed,” and not eligible. If you’re single, you can establish a C corporation and pay benefits to yourself as an employee. If you’re married, you can hire your spouse and pay benefits to them. (If you operate as an S corporation, you and your spouse are both considered self-employed. In that case, segregate part of your income through a proprietorship or C corporation and pay benefits through that entity.)

You have to offer benefits to all employees. However, you can exclude those under age 25; those who regularly work less than 35 hours per week; those who work less than nine months out of the year; and those who have worked for you for less than three years.

You’ll need a written plan document. No special IRS filings are required for plans with less than 100 employees. You’ll deduct benefits as “employee benefits” on your business return, which may also lower self-employment tax bill.

Example: You’re self-employed as a real estate agent. You hire your spouse to provide marketing support, and establish a MERP for his or her benefit. The plan covers your employee, their spouse (meaning you!) and your dependents.

Once you’ve established the plan, you can still deduct 100% of your health insurance costs. This includes major medical and supplemental coverage, Medicare Parts A and B coverage, qualified long-term care, and “Medigap” coverage. You can even reimburse your spouse for any after-tax premiums they pay through their employer.

You can also write off 100% of your out-of-pocket costs and bypass the 7.5% floor for itemized deductions. This includes routine expenses such as co-pays, deductibles, and prescriptions; occasional expenses such as eyeglasses, teeth cleaning, and chiropractic care; and big-ticket items like orthodontics, fertility treatments, and schools for learning-disabled children. It also includes nonprescription medicines and health-care supplies. You can reimburse your employee, or you can use business dollars to pay health-care providers directly.

For more information, see our office.

Health Savings Accounts

Health Savings Accounts (“HSAs”) let you buy high-deductible health insurance to cut monthly premiums, then establish deductible savings accounts for routine medical costs. You (and your employees, if any) can establish HSAs if you meet four tests:

You’re covered by a high deductible health plan (“HDHP”) with deductibles of at least $1,000 (singles) or $2,000 (families) and out-of-pocket limits up to $5,100 (singles) or $10,200 (families). The plan can’t provide any benefit, other than certain preventive care benefits, until the deductible for that year is satisfied. This means no drug card—you’re not eligible if you’re covered by a separate plan or rider offering prescription drug benefits before satisfying your policy deductible.)

You’re not covered by any plan that isn’t an HDHP, either individually, as a spouse, or as a dependent.

You’re not eligible for Medicare.

You can’t be claimed as a dependent on anyone else’s return.

If you qualify to open an HSA, you can contribute 100% of the insurance deductible up to $2,650 (singles) or $5,250 (families). If you or your spouse is age 55 or older, you can make extra “catch up” contributions up to $600 in 2005. (This amount climbs $100 annually to $1,000 in 2009.) If you and your spouses are covered by different HDHPs, you can contribute up to the lower deductible.

Withdrawals for “qualified medical costs” are tax-free. These include any deductible medical expense or nonprescription drug that isn’t reimbursed by insurance. You can use your HSA to pay for qualified long-term care premiums, COBRA continuation coverage, health insurance while you receive unemployment compensation, and Medicare premiums (but not “medigap” coverage). Withdrawals for any other purpose are taxed as ordinary income plus a 10% penalty.
MERPs and HSAs won’t make your visit to the doctor less painful. But they may be the best kind of tax strategies because they give you new deductions for money you’re already spending.

Enjoy them in good health!

What Does Washington Have in Store for Your Taxes?

As you already know, the new administration has spent billions of dollars bailing out banks, insurers, and automakers. Congress and the White House are proposing billions more in new spending to reform health care. The federal budget deficit is now over a trillion dollars. And all that money has to come from somewhere.

Where do you think it will come from? That’s right – your taxes!

If you’re like most successful Americans, you’re already asking yourself questions like these:

How high will tax rates climb?
What will happen to dividends and capital gains?
Will you owe new taxes for Social Security?
Will you owe new taxes on health care benefits?
What should you do today to prepare yourself for higher taxes tomorrow?
If you want to keep the most of what you make, you can’t wait for answers. You need to act now. Putting tax-wise ideas and strategies in place today could help avoid an ugly surprise come next April 15!

Call me today at (217) 241-4597 for your free Tax Analysis. We’ll find the mistakes and missed opportunities that may be costing you thousands today, and discover where you may be vulnerable to higher taxes tomorrow. We guarantee you’ll leave with new information, or we’ll donate $50 to your favorite charity. So call now to schedule your Tax Analysis, and be ready for whatever Washington throws your way!