Does Your Small Business Accept Customer Payments via Phone or Mail?

Customer Payment
While an increasing number of customers prefer to pay via credit or debit card online these days, a large number of consumers still prefer to pay over the phone or via snail mail. Furthermore, not all customers are comfortable with providing credit card information with these types of payments and would prefer to write a check instead. For this reason, business owners who want to make it as easy as possible for customers to make their preferred forms of payment should have a merchant account that offers not only electronic credit card payment processing, but phone and mail payment processing as well.

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Where is My Package? How Online Retailers Can Plan for Busy Season

How online retailers can plan for busy season
As an online business owner, you must know when to expect a major increase in the number of orders you’ll receive. After all, it’s no mystery why some major retailers increase their workforces by tens of thousands of people during the holiday season.

There are plenty of other times outside the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas when your business could see a spike in orders, and if you are not prepared to manage them, you could end up with dozens of unhappy customers, and less-than-stellar online reputation that will undoubtedly turn those high volume order periods into non-existent order periods.

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How to Create Optimal Floor Plan for Restaurants

How to create optimal floor plan for restaurants
If you had to choose between a restaurant with a nice, quiet ambience with privacy versus a restaurant where people are bumping into each other amid noisy atmosphere where would you take your date for dinner? This is the difference floor plan can make. A good floor plan can create a sense of privacy and quietness in the restaurant. It can also increase the productivity and sales at any restaurant. That’s why you have to pay careful attention to how various sections of the restaurant are laid out.

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Tips for Organizing Your Office to Improve Productivity

Tips for organizing your office
Imagine this scenario. You are working in your home office. A client had sent you a contract worth $100,000 to sign and the deadline to send it back is today. You have to read the contract, verify and send it back or lose this biggest contract you will sign for the year. Unfortunately, you just cannot find the contract anywhere. You are trying to call the client to send a duplicate, but he is out on vacation and cannot be reached. What do you do?

For many people who are not organized this scenario plays all too often leading to lost documents and missed opportunities. Good news is it doesn’t take long or much effort to organize your office and be able to find anything you need in a quick second. All you have to do is spend some initial time to get everything in place and then keep at it on a daily basis. Here are some tips on how to organize your office to improve your productivity.

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How to Organize Your Office Desk for Maximum Productivity

How to organize office desk for maximum productivity
Look around your desk and see how it is organized? How many items do you have lying around and taking up precious desk real estate? If you are like most people your office desk is cluttered with items that you rarely use. Over time the desk has become a garbage dump of papers, staplers, pens, scissor, paper clips and so on. This is pity because research shows that the cluttered desk can reduce the productivity of the person sitting on it. A desk that is neatly organized can help find items quickly and improve your output significantly. The P-L-A-C-E method we described below can help you achieve the goal of organizing your desk for maximum productivity.

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Warning: You may Run into Trouble without Proper Record Keeping

Importance of record keeping
In a small business it is easy to forget the importance of maintaining accurate records. These records need to be kept far longer than the time they are active. Even after an order is completed and fulfilled or, in the case of a purchase from a vendor, after you have received and fully paid for the merchandise and service, all records will need to be maintained. The typical rule of thumb is 7 years, however there are certain regulations that may increase or decrease that period. In some professions you are required maintain the records indefinitely.

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First Impressions Matter – Importance of Immaculate Washroom Services

Importance of immaculate washrooms
According to Andy Warhol, “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”

You can also argue that art is an attempt to bring order out of chaos – and when it comes to your business’ washroom services, this statement can occasionally ring true.

Keeping your company’s washroom’s clean is an art, and the need for immaculate and well equipped toilet facilities should be top of any business owners list.

Why?

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7 (Not so) Secret Ways to Save on Electric Bills for Small Business

7 secret ways to save on eletric bills for small business
Many small business owners consider the cost of electricity as fixed and do not pay much attention to it. They receive a monthly bill in the mail, make a payment and move on with their daily business. For some, even if they want to do something about it, they feel helpless thinking that they do not have many options to save on electricity, other than to cut the usage.

While this may have been true in the past, many options have opened up recently that can help small business owners save money on their electric bills. Some of the options are driven by the elimination of monopoly and rise of competitors. Companies such as commercial electricity suppliers British Gas have been very proactive in helping business owners with ideas and presenting them with alternatives that can be tailored for specific situations.

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Small Business Owners – Do you Know How Much Asset You Own?

How much asset do you own
Here is a simple question you should be able to answer quickly – how much asset do you own in your small business? No, you cannot look at your balance sheet statement to find out the value of total assets. I am talking about the inventory of everything you have in your business. I bet most small business owners do not really know what they own. And yet this is one of the places where they spend lot of money.

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Maximize Sales in Small Business by Managing Retail Space

Maximize sales by managing retail space in small business
The largest expense for most retail businesses is real estate. With floor space rents increasing every year maintaining a floor space large enough for your business is an ever increasing cost. In addition to the rent you have to pay by the square foot for retail space, you also incur associated cost that increases with the size of the floor space. Insurance premiums are often based on square feet, maintenance and janitorial costs increase, and security needs become more of a challenge. To reduce the costs associated with retail space you must be able to display as much retail product as reasonably possible in as small of a space as possible.

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