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Your client database can generate money in the bank over and over and over again. Many small business owners do not take the time to build a client email list. This is one of the biggest marketing mistakes a small owner can make. Why? An existing customer is your best customer and being able to communicate with him at a moment’s notice is crucial. Example of How to Trip Your Monthly Income: You own a dress store. You are at a fashion convention to purchase new clothing for the fall. You run across a beautiful unique coat, but you are not sure if your customers will like the coat. The coat is fairly expensive, even at the wholesale price and you would hate to purchase 3 or 4 and they just sit on the rack. Solution: Send your client database an e-mail with an image and your price for the item. Tell them that you are in New York City at the Annual Fashion Convention and want to know if any one would be interested in the coat? You explain that there is a limited number of the coats av...

In 1998 I started a small (miserably so) online business and had my first experience with selecting a hosting company. Back then it was really no big deal because mine was way too small a business to have many hosting needs and in those early times there was less competition amongst hosting companies. About all I was concerned about was having adequate storage space. Traffic wasn’t even an issue. Still, I ran into unexpected difficulties and soon learned that even very small businesses have to be concerned with more than just disk space. Support was the detail I hadn’t considered. That first experience soured me somewhat because I learned that it can be like pulling teeth to get support from a company that doesn’t take this aspect of business seriously. The company I first hosted with turned out to be located in someone’s home — a fact that was never divulged in the advertising. The man was nice enough, and he tried very hard to accommodate me as lon...

Having recently graduated with my BS in Business Management I just got my first job in finance working for a large investment firm in my area. They offered, as part of my job package, tuition re-imbursement, which would pay for about half of the cost of an MBA program. Having done my research on schools and degree programs I have been reading more and more about the CFA, or Chartered Financial Analyst. I became curious to learn just what the CFA was about and what it might mean, in dollars and cents, to my career. It all brakes down to a few basic questions: What is needed to become a CFA, how much does it cost, how much study does it take and whether or not I am cut out to do the work? Information available from the CFA Institute tells the story in numbers (I hope you like numbers, if you’re going to be a CFA, or an MBA, you’ll find yourself working with numbers a lot!). 11% of CFA’s surveyed were serving either on the board, or as “C” level executives (CE...