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    Thursday, April 1, 2021

    Home Unlabelled Business Whataburger gives employees more than $90 million in bonuses

    Business Whataburger gives employees more than $90 million in bonuses

    April 01, 2021

    Business Whataburger gives employees more than $90 million in bonuses

    Whataburger gives employees more than $90 million in bonuses

    Posted:

    I Convinced Our CEO to Pivot From a SaaS Company to a Table Company. Here’s My Story

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    I am a former product manager and this is my story.

    I was really tired of working on software for the entire 10 years of my career. One day I had a huge epiphany and applying all the knowledge I had from my carpenter father, I designed a productivity-focused table. I pitched the idea to our CEO and the rest of the team but as you might guess it was rejected. After all, why would we forgo an extremely profitable SaaS business and jump into an entirely different world?

    Well, it wasn't easy. But after my initial rejection, I didn't give up. I worked hard on my idea and improved the prototype. Unlike my first attempt, I wasn't going to let things go that easily. So, I followed a different strategy and swapped our CEO's desk with my table and forced him to try it.

    The result was quite unexpected as the entire company loved the table, loved the idea, and everything it stands for. We got the green light to work on The Table and fast forward to today, we finally launched it on PH. I've written a whole post in Indie Hackers about my story. If you want to learn more about the whole journey you can check it out.

    Here's the original story: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-convinced-my-ceo-to-pivot-from-saas-to-building-actual-tables-236de8aebb

    submitted by /u/LorthemarTheiron
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    Pakistan allows sugar, cotton imports from India as ties improve

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    Have you known people who were horrible at sales but became great?

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    Thinking of developing this website to help small businesses, check out my survey!

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    I want to make a human Zoo. But problem is if someone is on human animal park as human, they don’t appreciate their social status. But if the human Zoo is as same status as USA president, they will do it. How to solve this problem? I think that psychology can help it

    Posted:

    Bet365 boss earns £469m in a single year

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    Microsoft wins $21.9 billion contract with U.S. Army to supply augmented reality headsets

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    Twitter now lets you add stickers to Fleets

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    Hitachi to buy U.S. software developer GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion

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    Creating Business Value Through Content Scaling with CMS Platforms

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    Credit Suisse aims at wind-up orders for Gupta's Liberty arm

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    Hitachi to buy US IT firm GlobalLogic

    Posted:

    I want to open my own art business from home at 19. Am I crazy for trying to make it happen?

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    Hi everyone,

    I am 19 years old and have always dreamed of opening my own art business. I am perfectly okay with it not being a full on business at the moment, I would just want to sell art out of my apartment essentially. I've gotten into contact with local places about doing an internship or to see if they'd like to host any of my art in their galleries. I know a little bit of the inner workings of businesses from my father and I am a graphic arts major and business minor in my fully remote college.

    The lucky thing about my situation is I'm not having to pay rent and I can take my classes whenever I want. I already know a bit about graphic design and how to set up and code a website. I would like to get business cards in the near future as well as stickers with my art on it. I want to also sell commissions, art prints, and originals of my art. I think the main thing holding me back right now is my finances. I have 25 different artworks of different mediums that I can sell right now. My pricing ranges from $2-$300 for different items. I have a full-time remote job that I can also work whenever I want.

    In a day, I normally work and do schoolwork from 7am to 11am, then later 5pm to 7pm. I'm a pretty big night owl and would absolutely be able to manage 3 different things at once. I guess my real question is, how do I prepare myself to do something as big as this? I know I'll make mistakes along the way but I'm prepared for the consequences. Another thing, I live with my boyfriend who is willing to support me, I have zero credit except on a authorized user card. I am looking into secure credit cards too.

    I live in a very art-centric area that would receive my art very well. I have 5 local businesses within walking distance that want to host my art. I have a local gallery that all they need me to do is submit a fee and then I am evaluated with a board of directors who decide if I should be in the gallery or not. I have a small (30-300 people) presence on all social medias. My business name is only connected to my etsy (which I need to update with new works). So far, I have been able to sell 3 commissions to people on facebook marketplace and I am waiting on 5 people to buy my original artworks (they need money). None of my originals are on hold for people, except one, because it is sentimental to me. As long as I get a print of it, I will be fine.

    If anyone has any questions just let me know! Examples of my art are in my post history.

    submitted by /u/helpmeplease2023
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    The Most Common Type of Incompetent Leader

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    Insurance market Lloyd's hit by loss after £6.2bn Covid payouts

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    Behind the scenes of a small freelance business—Our 2020 revenue, profits, challenges, and future plans [Long post]

    Posted:

    Every year, I like to share how our business has performed over the previous year and how that impacts on our business and personal finances. My hope is that being transparent about our revenue, expenses, profits, challenges, and plans is helpful to other small business owners. The aim is to:

    ​

    • Share our business finances transparently, straight from our bookkeeping and tax returns.
    • Show that small businesses can create a reasonable income, even tiny ones like ours!
    • Inspire other people that you really can make money working for yourself, although it's not the easiest thing.
    • Explain our challenges and plans, because I'm sure there are many commonalities with other small business owners.

    Let's get into it. (I'm sorry there's not a TL;DR, but I hope you'll find reading this post worthwhile)

    ​

    About us and the business

    • Myself and my wife run a freelance business, established in 2014 in North Carolina.
    • I provide freelance writing services (mainly to B2B clients in the technology and finance spaces) and she provides freelance editing and proofreading services, directly to private clients and via the Fiverr Pro platform.
    • We're both in our late 40s, and had professional careers prior to becoming freelancers. We've used much of the experience gained there to run this business.
    • Our business is set up as a multi-member LLC, currently taxed as a partnership, although I have applied for S Corp filing status from this year.
    • Our clients are probably around 50% US-based, and 50% from elsewhere in the world.
    • The business is 90%+ of our personal income, with the rest being dividends and capital gains.
    • We're financially stable, saving for retirement, and middle-class, without massive personal expenses (home paid for, no debt, no kids.) This means we're not planning to radically grow the business, just get some moderate growth year-over-year. In fact, as we're getting older, we're realizing that time and freedom are just as important as money in the bank.
    • Between 2016 and 2019, we managed to up our revenue each year, both due to taking on more work and raising rates. 2020, and the pandemic, stopped that trend.

    ​

    Our business principles

    • I'm a huge productivity / automation geek, so I try to optimize how our business runs as much as possible. This means being very on top of our daily operations, and also thinking about medium- to long-term changes we need to make. Yes, it also means I love a spreadsheet.
    • We never compete on price, but instead on providing as much value as possible to a client. So, our services are definitely in the more expensive range of freelancing, but we provide a ton of additional expertise, reliability, flexibility, professionalism, experience, etc.
    • Our services are all based around demonstrating that value and experience, which means knowing our audience and their problems, and providing high-touch, high-value solutions—basically being fast, hassle-free, and keeping our promises.
    • We openly publish prices on our business websites, so if a prospect contacts us, we know they've looked at our prices and considered us in budget. That saves enormously on conversion, as all of our leads are warm / hot.
    • We rely completely on inbound content marketing and SEO. We don't apply for gigs, advertise, cold email, or anything else. Partly because I don't want the expense or time overhead, and partly because as a freelance writer—content marketing should be all I need to do—as that's the service I'm selling to clients.
    • I have no desire to start or run a freelance agency!

    Alright, let's get into the finances.

    ​

    Our business revenue, expenses, and profits in 2020

    I've shown our business finances below, rounded to the nearest $1,000. I've also included 2019 figures in brackets next to each, so you can see how they changed. Any disparities are likely to be rounding errors.

    Revenue in 2020: $125K vs. 2019: 146K

    • Annual revenue from proofreading / editing: $37K ($25K)
    • Annual revenue from freelance writing: $88K ($120K)
    • Total annual revenue: $125K ($146K)
    • Revenue per day from writing: $370 ($500)
    • Revenue per day from editing: $155 ($100)
    • Total revenue per day: $525 ($600)

    Revenue thoughts

    • We saw an overall reduction in income of around 15%, which, given COVID and the terrible impact it had on so many businesses, means I think we were lucky.
    • My freelance writing business took a fairly big hit from COVID, reducing income by around 27%.
    • Two of my biggest clients were related to currency exchange and travel money, and they fell off the radar completely, probably resulting in about a 10% to 15% drop by themselves, with the remainder coming from cut marketing budgets elsewhere.
    • The inbound marketing work I was doing for our editing business in 2019 and early 2020 paid off, with almost a 50% rise in income there.

    ​

    Expenses in 2020: $21.2K vs. 2019: 24K

    I've shown our business finances below, rounded to the nearest $100. I've also included 2019 figures in brackets next to each (Rounded to nearest $1,000), so you can see how they changed.

    • Health insurance premiums: $11.7K ($11K)
    • Accounting fees: $1.8K ($3K)
    • Computer software and subscriptions etc: $2.4K ($2K) (SaaS subscriptions, web hosting, etc)
    • Bank and credit card charges: $1.6K ($2K)
    • Office costs (Home office deduction): $1.5K ($2K)
    • Business donations to charity: $1.2K ($1K)
    • Internet and phone: $1K ($1K)
    • Other expenses: $2.1K ($2K)
    • Total expenses: $21.2K ($24K)

    Expense thoughts

    • Nothing surprising here, my accounting in 2020 was less complex than 2019, so reduced fees there. Additionally, less revenue meant lower card processing and bank fees.
    • Expected, standard increases across other areas.
    • In total, expenses accounted for around 17% of our revenue in 2020 (8% without health ins premiums), compared to 16% in 2019 (9% without health ins premiums).

    ​

    Total profits (pre-tax) in 2020: $104K vs 2019: $122K

    • Again, no surprises here. Reduced revenue from COVID resulted in lower profits.
    • Our pre-tax profit margin was 83% of revenue in 2020 vs. 84% in 2019.

    ​

    Taxes (self-employment, federal, state) in 2020: c. $27K vs 2019: c. $33K

    • No surprises here. Our overall tax burden in 2020 was 26% of profits, compared to 27% in 2019. It was 22% of revenue in 2020, vs. 23% in 2019.
    • Some of these taxes are applied to other income like capital gains and dividends, but the majority are from business income.
    • The rule of thumb I use is to pay around 30% of profit in taxes as estimated taxes through the year, resulting in a small refund at tax time.
    • That held true again this year (approx a $2K federal tax refund.)
    • I hope to get S Corp tax election status for 2021, which should allow me to reduce my self-employment taxes by around $6K to $7K.

    ​

    "Take-Home" Pay after expenses and taxes in 2020: $77K, 6.4K a month vs 2019: $89K, $7.5K a month

    • Our take-home pay fell by approx $12K net in 2020 vs. 2019.
    • That's around a 15% decrease.

    ​

    Monthly living expenses $4.5K a month in 2020 and 2019, $55K a year

    • Our monthly living expenses didn't really change at all between 2019 and 2020. Any cost of living increases were offset by things like not going out to restaurants.
    • We have paid off our mortgage and don't carry debt.
    • We don't have kids, which significantly reduces our expenses.
    • We do have "emergency" savings to cover six months of expenses.
    • Main expense items are groceries, utilities, property tax, pets, entertainment, etc.

    ​

    Disposable income in 2020: $1.9K a month, 23K a year, vs 2019: $3.3K a month, $39K a year

    • We spend 20% - 30% of this on charitable donations, larger projects, and fun stuff.
    • 70% - 80% of this disposable income is invested over the medium- to long-term, mainly in retirement accounts. Only 15 years away from retirement and need to build those funds up!

    ​

    Financial summary

    OK, that's it for all of the finances. To summarize our annual 2020 figures (any disparities are rounding errors):

    • Business revenue: $125K
    • Business expenses: $21.2K
    • Business pre-tax profits: $104K
    • Taxes: $27K
    • Take-home pay: $77K
    • Living expenses: $55K
    • Disposable income: $23K

    Looking purely at the figures, my conclusion is that COVID19 had an impact on our finances, but we were still able to stay ahead of our costs and maintain a good standard of living.

    ​

    Here's how 2020 compared to 2019

    • Our overall revenue decreased by $21K, around 15% YoY.
    • Our overall profits decreased by $18K, around 15% YoY.
    • Our take-home pay decreased by $12K, around 15% YoY.
    • Our disposable income fell by $16K, around 40% YoY.

    My thoughts for 2020, 2021, and beyond

    If there's one thing 2020 taught me, it's that small businesses have to be prepared and adaptable. Here's what I learned and what we are going to do:

    Diversify even more

    We were already pretty diversified with our client base prior to COVID, but losing just two major clients put a sizable dent in our income. I'm focussing even more now on getting clients across a wider range of industries.

    Maintain healthy savings

    We have six months of living and business expenses in ur bank accounts, and although we did need to dig into them a bit, having that money there significantly reduced our stress levels.

    Keep contributing to longer-term investments

    We delayed our retirement contributions while our revenue was unsteady, but caught up towards the end of the year. The compounding effect is so important that I didn't want us to miss out.

    Get government help

    I applied for an EIDL loan when our revenue took a nosedive. I've repaid the loan since, but the short-term security that provided, together with the small grant, was still very helpful.

    Automate wherever possible

    I want to save time, effort, and cognitive load so integrating all of our apps together lets me streamline that process, putting aside more time for paying work.

    Focus on inbound marketing

    The months of May through June / July were very quiet. I completely rebuilt my freelance writing website to drive up organic search performance. It worked, and all of our inquiries are now 100% inbound, with around 20 writing-related keywords in the top 3 Google results. Previous work on our editing website means we have about 25 there in the top 3.

    Focus on value, not price

    All of our rates are published openly on our websites, which isn't something that a lot of freelancers do. We find that's very helpful for pre-qualifying leads, and also sets an expectation for the quality of work a client can expect.

    I also rewrote all of our "services" pages to speak to how we can help clients and make their lives easier. In a time of COVID, people already have so much cognitive overload, and what to hire experts that can make stuff happen, without much oversight, so that was a real value-add for our target audience (mainly B2B clients, marketers, and agencies needing people with technical knowledge).

    Maintain independence over your work

    Although we do get some work through the Fiverr Pro freelance platform, all other work is either through marketing agencies, or directly with clients. I find this level of control very helpful, as it means I can speak directly with clients.

    Be exceptionally professional, but friendly at the same time

    We don't see ourselves as "just freelancers" but as running a business that's as professional as those we serve. That means being very flexible and reliable, responding rapidly to questions and communications, staying completely on top of work, and being friendly and hassle-free, and charging fair, transparent rates.

    Emphasize proactive communications

    Part of business professionalism is keeping clients informed, rather than them coming to us. That means weekly emails and updates on when work will be returned, checking in, and such.

    Keep your pipeline full

    I've struggled with the balance between existing work commitments and taking on new clients. I could move to retainer contracts, so that's something I'm thinking about. As it happens, our revenue does vary a fair amount from month to month.

    Help your professional community

    We all grow through sharing knowledge with our peers (hence the reason for this post). It sharpens up your thinking, lets you see how other people are doing, optimizes your approach, and gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling!

    Realize that at some point in life, freedom and time are as important as money

    I'm not sure when it happened, but I've grown to value independence over my work, and choosing to do only what I want to as equally important as earning money. Now, that's probably because I have enough money, but chasing the dollar is no longer as important as it once was.

    Play with dogs!

    Because, y'know, working from home must have those benefits, right?!

    Alright, I think that's it. Thanks very much for sticking with me through this. I'm happy to expand on any of these points or answer any questions. Over to you!

    submitted by /u/paul_caspian
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    Aside from the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies, what types of companies might avoid posting their open positions on Linkedin?

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    Micron Technology forecasts Q3 revenue, EPS well above consensus, shares rise

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