Promote your business, week of February 5, 2018 small business |
- Promote your business, week of February 5, 2018
- [Followup] Day filling up with nonbillable work: In which I discover that which should have been obvious.
- Looking for a CRM for meeting notes and not sales
- Partner wanting buyout.
- Do any of you have mentors? If so, how did you go about approaching them?
- I'm a flight attendant and amateur photographer and would love some suggestions...
- Help! Trying to understand financial documents of a prospective sub shop store I want to buy.
- Just bought a small business and have to change pay structure
- POS/Accounting software for online and brick-and-mortar store
- How best to thank my contracting agent offices?
- Seting up and running a business with the absolute minimum necessary knowledge about the product / service, just by hiring the right people and being street smart about regulations?
- Refusing certain clients to improve variation
- Designing an app to help with small business Grant management! Please help us out!
- Cyber Security Service Help!
- Looking to have other businesses sell my service to their customers. Need advice!
| Promote your business, week of February 5, 2018 Posted: 04 Feb 2018 04:11 PM PST Post business promotion messages here including special offers especially if you cater to small business. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2018 06:19 PM PST My business has continually, repeatedly hit this wall over the years and we are so lucky to have a community here that understands this kind of issue. Since I reached out last month, I've gone a little overboard with a few productivity approaches, but overall it's not moving in circles anymore but in an actual direction (whether this direction is up or straight into the ground is not yet apparent to me). In that first thread someone said, "when my business changed, I didn't," which rang in my ears for days. A source of constant, disabling, frustration for me has been to form intentions for the day and feeling thwarted by other people (calls, emails, pop-ins, questions from the staff, yadda yadda yadda) who made it impossible to work. It makes me peevish and exasperated. My response has been to stop forming intentions at all, which risks setting the company adrift. That statement set off a chain of realizations for me, chiefly that I hadn't changed my expectations or my own performance objectives because I hadn't thought of my new role as conductor of the orchestra, that I am no longer the only/primary person who has a stake in how this company functions, and my opinion of how it should be is far less relevant than I'd thought. The question I should have been asking is, given the fact that I am no longer the best person to do the work, or all the work, how do I make sure the work gets done anyway? My earnings are tied not to invoices but to the value I extract from the entire chain. I wrote out all of the little jobs my job is:
Each of these headings is followed by a list of tasks involved, and as I slosh around from one thing to another over a week, the conceptual fences around each one has made it possible to time track and actually measure, if imperfectly, how much time each stage occupies. Design is a persistent bottleneck, just a swamp of undone items that I, personally, need to be in the right frame of mind to do, and for which I constantly underestimate the required time commitment by 3x or 4x. It's a chore for me. So the money for a designer is there provided I am realistic about how long design actually takes and provided I bill properly for all of that time. I listed the job and got a storm of interest, which I'll be interviewing for in the coming weeks. ...I'm still taking out the garbage myself. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for a CRM for meeting notes and not sales Posted: 04 Feb 2018 09:04 PM PST Firstly, I sincerely apologise if I'm in the wrong sub for this, but I honestly have no idea what else to call it. Basically, I work for a 'lobby group'... an organisation that represents a section of small business, and meets with people of influence (CEOs, government officials, etc) in order to try and shape the way regulations are changed for the industry. I can provide more detail, but trying to represent in the abstract. What I would like to do is set up a 'CRM' (again, probably not the right tool exactly) where we can track who we met with, who they work for, what we spoke about, when, etc, and be able to search or review it. Kind of a CRM without sales functionality. I tried shaping SuiteCRM to do the job, and it kind of works, but falls down in a few places; The biggest hangup is that it only allows one-on-one interactions. Ideally, I'd like to have the option to include multiple people from both sides and be able to see all who attended and connect the meeting notes to all. Has anyone got any ideas? Is there a product (preferably open source and/or self hostable) which does this? Am I looking for the right type of product or is there a 'meeting and relationship manager' type of application? Thanks for your time and advice. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2018 09:07 AM PST So, we have a 3 member llc, even split. One of us has decided that they want to leave the business. We have no articles of organization or anything like that. Do we have to pay them 1/3 of the value of the business, or can we just give them 1/3rd of the value of our actual assets? Obviously we will be hiring an acquisition lawyer when the time comes, but I was just wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation. [link] [comments]  |
| Do any of you have mentors? If so, how did you go about approaching them? Posted: 04 Feb 2018 11:00 AM PST |
| I'm a flight attendant and amateur photographer and would love some suggestions... Posted: 04 Feb 2018 05:39 PM PST Hey guys. I'm a flight attendant and spend a lot of layovers in mainly big cities downtown, and some small cities. Do you have any suggestions on how I can take this opportunity to start some sort of photography/videography business. I mean I get to see so many historical sites in major cities and I would love to take advantage of this opportunity. I'm a somewhat newbie photographer. I have a DSLR and a few lenses. Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Help! Trying to understand financial documents of a prospective sub shop store I want to buy. Posted: 04 Feb 2018 03:05 PM PST So, there's a local absentee-owned sub shop for sale where my brother lives in S. Carolina, and we got the financials from the seller's broker. Some of language in the P&L and tax documents is a bit confusing for us due to our non-financial backgrounds. What kind of lawyer or accountant should we hire to advise and go over these documents with us? And is a sub shop that's selling for 375,000, with sales of about 600,000 on average the last 3 years, with an NOB (normalized owner benefit) of 105,000 on average. The only competition nearby is a Jack in a Box and a dairy queen. I know Subway as a whole is struggling as a franchise but I believe this individual shop is doing pretty well especially since the owner is absentee. Any ideas or suggestions for a very nervous first time possible business owner? [link] [comments]  |
| Just bought a small business and have to change pay structure Posted: 04 Feb 2018 08:07 PM PST Long story short. I bought a business and the previous owner will still work there. I have a non compete agreement signed for 2 years. Beforehand he was making full profit of his money, and now isn't liking the idea of a pay structure. I have a meeting with said emotion the morning for lunch. This is by no means out of the blue happening...I've brought it up a few times before the purchase only to be told "it's cool we will handle that later." He was more wanting to just focus on getting it sold and probably thought that he could dictate the situation when it came to be. However, I have an investor as well that (of course) wants a return on his investment. I have a business I bought to grow....so is it really that crazy to want to get a percentage of what the employees bring in to go back into the business/promotion/operation costs? Prior we would split bills and operation costs. However, I've agreed to 100% take care of all expenses once we begin this pay structure. It's a cash based business and we charge how we see fit (artist) so the scale will be 60/40% with 40% going to the shop. Nothing else is or will be held out and again we set our own prices. Any suggestions on handling this? Also with the no compete signed bu is, also by a notary, and given back to my lawyer that created the document, does that truly stand legally? Thanks:: [link] [comments]  |
| POS/Accounting software for online and brick-and-mortar store Posted: 04 Feb 2018 05:54 PM PST I'm in the early stages of starting an adult boutique that will have both an online store and small brick-and-mortar location. I'm beginning with pop-up shops and a limited e-commerce site and will be expanding over the next year to having a shop space and a few employees. I'm looking for recommendations on software for POS/inventory management/accounting. I'm comfortable learning new programs to manage this for myself in the beginning but I'd like the option of rolling this over to a bookkeeper at some point. Currently, I have a website using Stripe and in-person sales using Square. Could you make some recommendations as I scale up? Willing to invest now to not have to transfer systems later. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| How best to thank my contracting agent offices? Posted: 04 Feb 2018 09:29 AM PST I own and operate a single truck, trucking company. I'm leased into a small company that specialized in a niche sector of trucking, the company itself is basically a conglomerate of brokers and freight forwarding agencies. I work heavily (ie:90+% of my business) with two specific offices. I've grown very close and fond of these two offices, each of which have roughly 10-15 individuals that work at either respectively. For Christmas both of the office managers sent me a very nice letter, thanking me for my dedication and service in addition to a small gift, I did want to do something similar but couldn't find the time. As it stands we have our one year anniversary of working together heavily, and I'd like to do something for the people at both offices to express my gratitude and appreciation, because frankly I have made an ungodly amount of money from these folks and their hard work. But I'm also a cheap bastard. So basically, how best to thank roughly 30 people in two time zones, for under $300? I was thinking Starbucks gift cards, but I'm not sure of the exact count of employees and I don't want anyone to be excluded. Any gift would be sent with a nice typed, hand signed letter expressing my gratitude and specific mentions of key players to the office managers. Any ideas are appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2018 02:14 PM PST I've heard of people who can't code own super profitable websites, people who don't smoke own top cigarette companies. And they weren't even mere shareholders - they actually set up those companies from scratch starting off as sole proprietors. An analogy would be a chef and the taster boss who doesn't know how to cook (though in this case, the owner still knows about the product):The chef is also a good taster and is so good at cooking that he can cook anything you tell him to cook, but he lacks creativity. So, the taster boss is creative (idea implementer?), knows what the majority wants (past research) and also know how to taste so the boss puts in the money, takes the risk, instructs the chef to cook what he wants him to cook and great dishes and profit are made. (In the following case, the owner knows less about the product)Say you want to buy shares, you don't know programming, you don't know how their trading softwares work, you don't know accounting, you don't know who's in that brokerage firm, but you know which shares you want to buy and you know regulations. You know which regulatory bodies are responsible for which areas and that the brokerage firms should be registered at so and so bodies and go through a clearing house, and should have insurance, etc. You don't know a lot about how these brokerage firms and softwares work behind the scenes, but you know who's watching who, and you know who will take care of who when shit hits the fan. You know enough. So, knowing these you can be safe from theft and scam because you let the right people/organizations do the right job for you instead of auditing everything and doing all the research alone. What about when you want to run a tech business like building and running a website that has, let's say, user interaction when you don't know all those coding and you want to outsource the coders?How do you stay on top of them and make sure you're not being screwed over? (For example, the programmer can just put a line of code that logs the user names and passwords of your users on your website and send the information to his email or server or whatever... RIP). Same with apks. How can the non-coder owner know the apk does not have malicious code in it? (You can of course learn from the coder by asking him questions sitting by him while he's coding for you if he was physically with you, but what about the remote coders whom you outsourced?) You hire a supervisor/manager? What if that supervisor/manager is conspiring with the coder? How do you actually cross check? What kind of incentives? Who watches who? Game theory? Laws are useful in non-corrupt countries but still if the tech savvy offender thinks he can get away with it, he'd still do it despite the law. And this is even worse in countries with corrupt systems where no one cares about the law. How do you prevent / at least minimize the risks all these? Edit: I've studied some business administration that had HRM and Finance, but still it didn't answer the questions. [link] [comments]  |
| Refusing certain clients to improve variation Posted: 04 Feb 2018 08:30 AM PST Hi there, first time poster here. I'm having some difficulties finding a solution for following problem. I work in an event organisation and every know and then new participants register their car on our website (we organize exotic car events) lately we noticed a lot of BMW M owners registering their cars for our next event (limited places) problem is we have to much BMW's in our current group which hurts the variation of cars attending our event. (first world problem, I know) Of course we don't want to discriminate any potential clients, but without a decent variation of cars we won't attract a lot of visitors or new owners with higher end cars. We were thinking about limiting the available places for BMW owners, but not for other car brands. Which isn't really customer friendly. Any feedback or suggestions on this? Cheers [link] [comments]  |
| Designing an app to help with small business Grant management! Please help us out! Posted: 04 Feb 2018 06:10 PM PST |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2018 01:50 PM PST Hey everyone, I am a masters student conducting research on small businesses that use or employ cyber security services or professionals. If you currently use some sort of cyber security software or employ a cyber security professional to help your business I would greatly appreciate if you could answer these questions for me:
Thanks for the help! I look forward to your answers. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking to have other businesses sell my service to their customers. Need advice! Posted: 04 Feb 2018 12:48 PM PST I provide a service that matches well with another industry. I think that partnering with local businesses in this industry would be mutually beneficial. Not only can they increase revenue by selling my service to their customers, but they also offer their customers a huge convenience by providing this service "in-house". My niche is... small... so I won't provide details but here's a very similar example: Hypothetical: I detail cars and I know a few people who own parking lots. When their customers come in and pay for parking, the parking lot attendant can sell them my car detailing service, collect the payment, and notify me that a car is ready to be detailed in their lot. I wouldn't interact with the customer at all, though the service would be provided by my business and not actually the parking lot. Is this just a principal-agent relationship? Can I legally have other businesses sign into my site, take a credit card payment on behalf of my company, and issue the necessary legal documents/waivers without an actual employee of my business being present? TL;DR I want employees at other businesses to sell my service and sign up new customers. Can I let them take payments through my website on my behalf, sign documents on my behalf, etc? Is this just a principal-agent relationship? If anyone has advice or stories of doing something similar, I'd love to hear it. Thanks! EDIT: Okay so I'm learning more about Law of Agency and I've been looking at sample contracts for different types of agent-principal relationships. It turns out there are pretty straightforward laws when it comes to having non-employed agents sell your service! I'm planning to have a lawyer help make the contracts and shape my plans a bit, but I'd still love to hear from anyone else who has done this before [link] [comments]  |
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