Why an FDD Should Be Your Guiding Beacon

With over 3,000 choices of franchise concepts in the marketplace today, your options for owning your own business are limitless. But not all franchises are created equally. So, how will you be able to gain the necessary piece of mind that the opportunity you intend to pursue is legitimate?
Read More

Keeping Track of Sales

Being in business requires that you keep great accounting records both for the IRS and general financial management. An equally critical tool is a good sales tracking system that monitors your sales activities and makes sure potential sales are not lost in the hustle of each day.
Read More

How to Know When You Need a Contract

Do you sometimes lie awake at night wondering what will happen if your biggest customer doesn’t pay you? How about if the vendor handling your website upgrade takes off with your thousand-dollar down payment? These scenarios would be a nightmare for any bootstrapping entrepreneur—and they happen all the time.
Read More

Protect Your Cash, Part 3

If you implement the policies that prevent the same person from handling all the cash and banking functions, plus review receivables, payables, and your financial statements regularly, you will have a better chance to catch anything questionable early on.
Read More

Protect Your Cash, Part 1

There is no sense in doing the work if you’re not collecting the cash for the work you do. That, from a business standpoint, is one of the most important things to do. But once you get the cash in the door, you must make sure you protect that cash from employee theft and other mismanagement. There are some simple and very easy things that you should do to make sure that you protect your hard earned cash.
Read More

Profit Is Not Cash

Each month, your profit and loss statement tells you whether you earned a profit or had a loss. It does not tell you how much cash you have. You must turn your profits into cash by collecting your receivables and paying the expenses incurred to produce those revenues.
Read More

How Long Does It Take to File for a DBA?

It’s been our experience that, for the most part, timeliness is second only to price for many of our customers. And interestingly enough, customers tend to be concerned mostly with how long it takes to file for one of three things: DBA ‘Doing Business As’ names, copyrights, and trademarks.
Read More

Intellectual Property Awareness

What happens if you’re trying to do business on a national or global level?  One thing is certain. You’re going to have intellectual property issues to deal with. And you may not even realize that these issues exist. Here are a few things to think about in determining whether you need outside help.

Protecting Your Intellectual Property

When you’ve taken the time and effort to develop a unique product or service, you will want to protect your intellectual property so that other companies are not able to make money off of your ideas. There are a variety of forms of protection for intellectual property that you can get in the United States, and it’s important for you to know the differences between them and what you need to do to apply for these protections for your business.
Read More

Succession Planning

What will happen to your business after you retire? Most small business owners want their companies to survive after they leave, but only a small fraction of businesses actually manage to last into a second generation. To make it, you need an effective succession plan.
Read More