I created a curated directory of 400 startup grants and gov loans small business |
- I created a curated directory of 400 startup grants and gov loans
- SA on lead génération for recruiting firm. What has worked best for you in advertising as a small business?
- How to access bill of landing data
- Pos type app for hair stylist
- Canada: Do I need to get a separate bank account before I start selling?
- Insurance company startup. In Canada.
- Are you ready to promote your business promotional products with Workslocal?
- Feedback Request: Coworking Space Project for Human-Centered Design Course
- Business Debit Card
- What's wrong with my ecommerce store?
- Looking for a tool to build audit work flow
- I was approached by another local, legitimate business to acquire/merge/partner with my business. What is the best way to structure our organizations going forward?
- Looking for advice on how to acquire clients for a new web design & content marketing business
- Best laptop for a small business
- Any T-shirt printing service which can manage product payment?
- Which business bank account would you recommend?
- Sharing files/folders with remote partners
- Prospecting help!
I created a curated directory of 400 startup grants and gov loans Posted: 03 Nov 2018 06:35 AM PDT I thought it would be good to build a simple and useful site that can help startups and growing businesses find the right resources to fund their growth. Hopefully the site will become one of the first sites you look at when you are trying to find startup or business expansion funding, but I'm looking to add new resources, and therefore I thought r/smallbusiness might be the ideal place to ask 🙂 FinanceLinx.com is a curated directory of resources to help you find grants and government loans for your startup. It includes an overview of more than 400 programs, divided among 32 countries. This allows you to raise capital without having to give away equity, or expand an existing business with low or no interest government backed loans. This project is 100% community supported, to preserve impartiality, and save you a ton of time by not having to find all of these resources on your own. It would be great to hear your thoughts! 🎉 [link] [comments] | ||
Posted: 03 Nov 2018 10:16 PM PDT Hi I run a staffing company and I need to get more warm leads/resumes to my recruiters. Currently I am rebranding and redoing our website. We have teamed with Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud. My hope is that our new website will be more aesthetically pleasing and functional so that the marketing cloud will yield meaningful traffic for candidates as well as new clients. Our main lead sourcing is coming from Indeed free postings with case by case paid advertising. We have tried paid job boards including: Zip Recruiter, Career Builder, Monster, etc., and did not get our ROI. What has been your best success for lead generation in advertising? We have not tried Google Jobs which I now see has partnered with Zip. "After ZipRecruiter integrated with Google's job search experience, organic conversion rate from Google grew 4.5x." [link] [comments] | ||
How to access bill of landing data Posted: 03 Nov 2018 06:12 PM PDT
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Posted: 03 Nov 2018 07:43 PM PDT I am looking for an POS type app for my mother. He is an independent contractor hair stylist with a high end clientele. She is looking to become more independent and not rely on the salon for many basic things (appointments, call reminders, cc machine, etc) Here are somethings that would be required. A monthly fee for the app is okay. Scheduling appointments (manually as she schedules a year out for each client, although online scheduling would be a nice addition) Text/Email reminders so she doesn't have to call everyone. Payment processing. Ideally a lowe rate I'm sure I am missing a lot of must have features but this is a start. Thanks! [link] [comments] | ||
Canada: Do I need to get a separate bank account before I start selling? Posted: 03 Nov 2018 06:51 PM PDT I am signing up for wave finance to track my expenses, purchases, PO, all that jazz. I've also got a sub-bank account under my personal account for shopify transactions (payments etc). Do... I need.. a separate account at this point? It is just a 1-product 'business' right now. [link] [comments] | ||
Insurance company startup. In Canada. Posted: 03 Nov 2018 06:35 PM PDT Is there anyone in this sub that can give me info about how to start an insurance company, or where I can find info? I have googled it and what I have found just leaves me with far more questions. Thank you in advance. [link] [comments] | ||
Are you ready to promote your business promotional products with Workslocal? Posted: 04 Nov 2018 12:09 AM PDT Workslocal presents you with a wonderful platform to showcase your promotional products and services, meet potential customers, and explore new market opportunities. They offer you lots of brands, products, gift item, accessories, stationery and more with your business logo and expressive message. Now, you can promote your products with huge discounts. [link] [comments] | ||
Feedback Request: Coworking Space Project for Human-Centered Design Course Posted: 03 Nov 2018 03:52 PM PDT I'm taking a Human-Centered Design course with Ideo and +Acumen, and we are at the prototyping stage of the course. My team and I are looking to get feedback on our ideas from entrepreneurs, so I thought I would post here to see if anyone would be willing to contribute their thoughts. Our design challenge is to find a way encourage more young people to become social entrepreneurs. We've decided to prototype a hypothetical coworking space that would be in collaboration with a university. It would grant students of the college and also, anyone 23 and under, free membership, so that young people that don't have the opportunity to go to college are also included. We thought it would be easy to get lots of people under 23 to sign up for a free membership, but we also would need older community members who are able to pay for membership to sign up in order for the space to survive financially. We thought that having benefits for paid members, like workshops, yoga/meditation/wellness classes, and other events, would attract more of those people. Also, being part of a coworking space with younger people could be a way for more established social entrepreneurs to find volunteers or interns, willing to do work for free to gain experience. What are your initial impressions and/or ideas? We were worried about how to get non-college students to buy in. What could the hypothetical university/coworking space do to make community members feel welcome? Any constructive critiques are welcomed and appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time! [link] [comments] | ||
Posted: 03 Nov 2018 07:32 AM PDT Hey everyone, does anyone here know what I should or could use a business debit card for? Thanks! [link] [comments] | ||
What's wrong with my ecommerce store? Posted: 03 Nov 2018 05:27 PM PDT Hey everyone, We launched our first store on shopify about a few weeks ago after months of reading and upskilling. Finally bit the bullet and launched it. We thought we got the store to the right stage/point before launching it but have yet to make our first sale. We've been told on other forums that our branding needs more cut through on the website - it looks too generic but we would beg to differ. We're getting to a point where the pressure is building to make our first sale to "keep the lights on" for another month. Keen to get some feedback from all you ecommerce wizzs' out there and would appreciate any help from others too. My biggest challenge currently is driving traffic to the store. I'm not too keen on throwing money at ads until we have built a decent following on social media (social trust). Open to any ideas! Thanks everyone! [link] [comments] | ||
Looking for a tool to build audit work flow Posted: 03 Nov 2018 12:58 PM PDT GA everyone, In my business I often conduct full risk management audits with my clients. While I do this mostly verbally and with basic forms I've created, I have been wondering if there may be a better way. Ideally I'm looking for a tool I can utilize for creating a full audit work flow for use during client meetings. Elements I'd like to address: 1. These are the steps we will be completing together. 2. Basic information gathering. 3. These are the documents I will need from you. 4. These are the questions we address together. 5. This is the report I've prepared. During step four as I mentioned previously, it would be great to have something we can fill out together while also indicating some guiding questions so I can be sure nothing is forgotten. Thoughts and insight would be most appreciated. Microsoft VVA was suggested to me and haven't utilized it before so insights there would also be great ! [link] [comments] | ||
Posted: 03 Nov 2018 12:46 PM PDT I own a residential energy efficiency sole proprietorship that is in the process of expanding from myself to include my partner. He currently is "unpaid" and participates in assisting me with tasks related to the business (this might be a whole other topic). We're at the stage currently where we are way too busy for just myself to work full-time and not quite busy enough for him to work full-time (but in the spring we will 100% be, a lot of my work is seasonal). We were in the process of looking to transition him as an employee or find another alternative that would work for us as he's not legally part of the business at this point. However, we were approached recently by an engineering firm that does similar work (commercial) and were interested in partnering up with a company that covered the residential side and could fulfill additional services they could not (energy assessments). When they found us, they proposed to either acquire our business, merge or look at some other alternative organizational structures. Neither business has experience in doing something like this and my background is not in business, and obviously they're engineers so their experience with this is limited as well. We do not want to be acquired and have our business dissolved however. One of their proposals was to do this, and keep us on as staff. We are not interested as I have created a career where I can work from home, make my own hours and have control over my business in all aspects. Alternatively, a partnership or merger of some sort would be more beneficial as their business also provides us benefits - they have employees (4 + 2 partners), access to resources, a wide client base that we can also for residential work, and more. However, we would like to retain our "brand" as we have worked hard to separate ourselves from the competition and fulfill a niche with our services. Our clients know us by our trade name and don't want to give that up. Is there any way to merge companies and keep separate trade names? What are our options? [link] [comments] | ||
Looking for advice on how to acquire clients for a new web design & content marketing business Posted: 03 Nov 2018 12:46 PM PDT BackgroundI very recently decided to start a side-business in web design, social media management and content marketing. My main job is in another business that I founded. During the start-up period for that company, I had to teach myself how to design websites due to an inability to afford web designers! As I met more and more business owners, I learned that (like me at that time) they often neglected their websites and marketing through no fault of their own - just because they spent all their time actually running their small businesses! This planted a seed which I kept in my back pocket until I knew my main business was in a strong enough position to allow me to consider this as a side-business/potential new venture. The idea is simple: help small business owners with the things they know are important but don't have the skills or time to actually do. Whilst the idea is simple, everyone reading this will probably know that execution wins any day over ideas. And that's the reason for my post today. I'd like to hear your thoughts on how I might go about acquiring clients who are looking for websites or are struggling with their branding, social media presence, or content marketing. Now, I don't expect you do to all of the leg work! I thought the best way to get things started on this would be for me to write a little bit about my own ideas on how I should acquire clients. Hopefully that will facilitate some critiquing and further advice! 1. Friends/Referrals/Word of MouthSo this is the most obvious method for me to start out. I have recently acquired my first client by doing exactly this and am in the process of designing their website. Their reaction so far to the work I have been doing has been extremely positive and so I am hopeful that on completion of their website, they will give me a shout-out when they announce to their clients/friends that their new website is now live. I read elsewhere that around 80% of business to business custom is through word of mouth and referrals and so I am acutely aware of how important it is to not only find new clients, but to look after any existing clients like gold dust. My job in this is to make their lives easier, and in return they'll likely make my life easier too. Having said that, I am not exactly surrounded by friends who run small businesses and are looking for this kind of help. Whilst I can keep my ear to the ground and be pro-active in asking my friends to refer me to their friends, I feel like my overall strategy to get clients should be a bit smarter than this and cover some other routes. 2. Content MarketingA fair number of you may have been reading to this point thinking "erm, you're offering content marketing as part of your business. Do that!" and you'd be absolutely right to think that. I'll be writing a number of posts that I believe will be of interest to potential clients including:
I strongly believe content marketing is the best way to authentically connect with people who are interested in what you have to offer. It provides a great opportunity for you to show what you know, that you can communicate it clearly, and build goodwill at the same time. When bringing in new clients, all of these things are invaluable. However, content marketing obviously becomes more and more useful once you have a small presence, mailing list, social media following to talk to. In my case, I'll be starting at 0 and so whilst building a foundation of posts will be of use, I feel I'll need to do more in order to get clients in. 3. Facebook AdvertsI understand the merits of a well-executed Facebook advertising campaign and I've actually no problem with exploring this avenue in the future - especially to increase activity on the business' Facebook page and subscribers to the content marketing I alluded to earlier. The problem is, if at all possible, I'd like to try to bootstrap this project. Whilst I'm happy to re-invest money, I'd like to explore various different ways of acquiring the first group of clients without having to start paying for advertising that may or may not convert. Final CommentsSo, there you have it. I'd be happy to answer any questions people may have - I've purposefully given no information regarding websites I've built or the business as I do not want this post in and of itself to be a promotion. Instead, I hope the information I've provided will facilitate an interesting discussion that will help me decide where to go next. Depending on how the post is receive, I would be happy to provide updates as to how things progress! TL;DRNew side-business in web design/marketing for small businesses. I'm looking at how to acquire my first group of clients without using paid adverts. Referrals/Content Marketing seem the strongest routes; however, I'd love to hear your thoughts, experiences and advice! [link] [comments] | ||
Best laptop for a small business Posted: 03 Nov 2018 07:55 AM PDT Hi! What's the best value for money laptop for a small business? We're only going to use it for the following tasks: - Gmail, Google Docs, and Spreadsheet - Microsoft SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Planner - MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint - WordPress - Skype, Zoom, Viber, Slack - Web research Thanks! [link] [comments] | ||
Any T-shirt printing service which can manage product payment? Posted: 03 Nov 2018 08:40 AM PDT Hi there, I'm trying to solve a problem my brother has. He's now using redbubble, teespring and others but the earnings for each sold product are pretty low. Even worse, many designs have been stolen and sold elsewhere by creepy people. The solution we are looking for now is to find a service similar to Printful, but that could also manage the selling process and pay earnings after the sale. But we're not finding one. Anyone can help me with this? Thanks in advance! [link] [comments] | ||
Which business bank account would you recommend? Posted: 03 Nov 2018 08:33 AM PDT Hi everyone, I have a small app development company that is starting to make some revenue now and I am trying to decide which business bank account would be best. I already have an LLC, but currently payouts go towards a personal account. Does anyone have a suggestion for bank accounts that have:
Money will be spent mainly on marketing so there will not be a lot of transactions. Also let me know if you think there any any other important features I should be looking at. Thanks in advance! [link] [comments] | ||
Sharing files/folders with remote partners Posted: 03 Nov 2018 06:54 AM PDT I need to setup a way to share files and folders with a remote client. We produce about 2 GB/year average folder size is about 15 MB. We could use a cloud solution but i'm also trying to avoid redundancy having to save folders on my HD then again on a cloud service. Ideally I could save them once on a shared folder that could be accessed by both parties. has any one had to implement a file sharing solution for their business? What has worked best for your business? [link] [comments] | ||
Posted: 03 Nov 2018 06:33 AM PDT I am a new business owner trying to get my bearings. I am a co-owner (2 of us) completely lost in the world of prospecting game. We are engineers by trade with very little sales experience. Our business is in automation and manufacturing. We are having trouble securing those first few jobs to really help us get the ball rolling. We've contacted everyone we know in the business support side to maybe help us out with finding customers. That's come up short a d we now know that we are going to have to do this on our own. So my question is where do we start? Is cold calling still a thing? Do we make flyers? Random emails? How do we get to the right person at a manufacturing plant? Any guidance would be awesome. [link] [comments] |
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