With the recent passing of the JOBS Act, there is hope on the horizon once again for small businesses. That hope brings the possibility of new jobs, decreased unemployment numbers, and more. Looking at the small businesses slowly gaining popularity, there is a decidedly noticeable absence of truly innovative, successful entrepreneurship. Are they all gone?
According to the latest Kauffman index, we are actually at some of the highest levels of entrepreneurship in over 15 years.  As people have been laid off or “retired early,” many have needed income beyond their pension or unemployment check.  Some of these have gone into [...]

The nation diligently awaits the signing of the new JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act by President Obama. This conglomeration of measures is designed to boost the nation’s dwindling number of startups, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. The good news is it’s the first financial matter thing in a long time that both parties have agreed upon without too much fuss. It still remains to be seen if this is just a seat saving action of an election year or not.
This bill that seems to have escaped news media headlines actually has some pretty strong supporters, including the Small Business and [...]

Cash is the most crucial element needed if a start-up company is to grow and prosper. In study after study conducted into why businesses fail, poor cash flow emerges as the number one problem.
When you start to create a business plan, it is easy to become bogged down in calculating potential sales and revenue and forget about considering the factors relative to cold, hard, cash-in-the-hand. But a well-executed cash flow statement will not only lay the foundation for your success; it will be an valuable asset in your presentation for financing.
There are three secrets to creating a creating an effective [...]

Good decision making is at the heart of every successful business of every size.
However, for the small business owner who has to wear an array of hats on a day-to-day basis, sometimes additional “mental manpower” can ease the pressure of running a business and provide for greater overall efficiency.
One way of getting this needed expertise and outside perspective is through the use of advisory boards.
As the name implies, advisory boards are a group of members, selected by the business owner, to assist and offer feedback with making decisions— from hiring, to company policies, to investments, to legal matters, to marketing, [...]

In many conversations about small business funding and how to get it, there’s a major element that’s missing. We’ve addressed this before in different ways, but for many small business leaders, it comes down to whether the prospective loan will truly boost the small business, or start dragging it down. Here are some very relevant ideas to think about BEFORE you start to pursue a business loan.
Can You Handle the Debt?
Sometimes, it takes a finance expert to point out to a potential borrower that the lender has absolutely no incentive to act in the borrower’s favor. Although it can seem [...]

A lot of business people tend to see the term “service oriented architecture” as part of the jargon around IT, but understanding what SOA means is not really that hard. In broad-spectrum intros like “SOA for Dummies,” experts point out that in reality,  SOA really just relates to the idea of getting software applications to “talk to each other.” When you think of SOA in this way, it’s not too much of a leap to start attributing various purposes to it, such as enabling a sales force or making a business’s web operations more valuable to customers.

A “service oriented architecture” [...]

In a rapidly changing business world, where understanding new technology is often the key to anticipating trends, small businesses can often improve their positioning in local markets through keeping up on how consumers are accessing more sophisticated ways of buying products and services. Various media reports cite a 2012 “Mobile Future in Focus” survey from comScore that’s showing a big move to smartphones and similar devices, with more consumers using these tools to check prices for various transactions, including many of the kinds of transactions that small businesses hope to attract.

Benefiting From Price Transparency
Many of the best small businesses that [...]

 
If you’re a small business owner thinking about how many people it takes to do a particular job, consider some of the “background costs” involved an individual hiring. Some leaders who
don’t do the math end up spending much more than they should on inefficient labor strategies, partly because they may not factor in additional costs involved in hiring one additional staffer. Seasoned small business consultant Tim Berry, in a recent blog post on his Planning Startups Stories site, details some of the large expenses that pad an actual salary for a typical employee including:
• Vacation pay
• Health Benefits
• Workstations
• Other [...]

When entrepreneurs who lack access to capital or have been rejected by investors start to talk about the exclusivity of angel investor or venture capital circles, many of those who hear these comments might dismiss them as “sour grapes,” but in fact, there’s a good case to be made that investors as well as media venues often focus exclusively on a very small part of the wide spectrum of small businesses that make up the American small business landscape.

A writer named Sramana Mitna addresses this issue in a January article on the ReadWriteStart startup site, relating some of this “attention [...]

We’ve often focused on showing small business leaders and entrepreneurs how to get more startup capital or subsequent rounds of capital for funding operations, but for many new businesses, it can be helpful to take this a step further and look at how to use existing capital effectively, to cut down on the business owner’s need for more fundraising efforts that take up more time and resources. Some thrifty small business leaders can fine-tune their existing operations to work on a leaner budget, freeing up more time for optimizing a business plan or generally improving the way that products and [...]