SBA’s 8(a) Business Development program can help qualifying minority-owned firms develop and grow their businesses through one-to-one counseling, training workshops, and management and technical guidance. The program also provides access to government contracting opportunities, allowing these businesses to become solid competitors in the federal marketplace.
One of the most crucial roles you’ll play as an entrepreneur is the role of “decider.” Hopefully, one day you’ll rely on a team of advisors from individual departments within your organization to give you information and advise you of your options, but even in that context, the final decision will come down to you. You’ll be responsible for setting every major directive and making every significant call when charting the course of your business. While it can be an intimidating position, you can grow to become more skilled at it.
Marcelo Claure is President & CEO of Sprint. After one year of his leadership, Sprint is demonstrating progress in many areas and gaining momentum while executing on a clear plan to transform the company.
Sprint is competing aggressively with bold, decisive action and pioneering industry innovation. In the second quarter of 2015, Sprint had 675,000 total net additions, an improvement of nearly 900,000 from losses of 220,000 a year ago. The company also made similarly dramatic strides in keeping existing customers during the quarter, recording its lowest turnover, or churn rate, in company history. The Sprint network’s speed, clarity and reliability all have drastically improved, garnering high marks in third-party studies.
Organizations understand the need for being prepared and ready for disasters, but often consider the process for getting better prepared as cumbersome and complicated. Since its inception in 2008, the Ready Rating program has been recognized by preparedness experts as the much needed, easy to understand and not intimidating solution for helping an organization take the steps to become prepared to respond to and successfully withstand a disaster and other emergencies.
Tuesday, September 15th. Today marks the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — a time to recognize the contributions and cultures of the nation’s fastest-growing population group. The idea started as a special week in 1968 and was expanded to a full month 20 years later. There are 54 million Hispanics in the U.S., 17 percent of the total population, forming the nation’s largest ethnic or racial minority.
What’s my target market? What should it be? How would I know? Here’s a list of five things that will help you figure it out.
1. Don’t try to please everybody
Strategy is focus. Say you’re running a restaurant; which of these three options is easier?
- Pleasing customers 40 to 75 years old, wealthy, much more concerned with healthy eating than cheap eating, appreciating seafood and poultry, liking a quiet atmosphere.
- Pleasing customers 15 to 30 years old, with limited budgets, who like a loud place with low prices and fast food.
- Pleasing everybody.
I really hope you chose one of the first two, and not the third. Because this is the essence of target marketing—divide and conquer.
It’s impossible to be an entrepreneur without taking a huge amount of risk. Risk is inherent to the whole process, no matter what part of the world you’re from. But people take those risks all the time because they believe their ideas are strong and because the payoffs are potentially huge.
At the same time, however, they understand that they’re holding their time, cash flow, reputation, personal capital and possibly even other people, hostage. Building a company is never easy, yet people do it. And, in many cases, like me they will do it over and over and over. (People like me simply enjoy a challenge.)
Some U.S. companies are feeling growing pressure to raise wages as unemployment falls and workers become harder to find, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday, a potential sign of a long-awaited pickup in Americans’ pay.
The report, based on anecdotes in the Fed’s regional survey of economic conditions known as the beige book, suggests wage growth remains sluggish nationally. But it offered strong evidence that in some pockets, such as parts of the Midwest, northern California and New York, workers are gaining leverage and starting to see a boost in pay.
“Several Districts reported increasing wage pressures caused by labor market tightening,” the Fed said.
“Policy not Politics” was the theme of the afternoon as a group of small business owners had a very engaging conversation over lunch with Rep. Gwen Graham. The small business owners represented a wide range of business segments. The conversation covered a lot of ground including access to capital, business tax codes, business regulations,the Affordable Healthcare Act and government procurement.
We look forward to a continued dialogue with Congresswoman Graham in the very near future!
Small businesses are often guilty of neglecting or rushing their website design in order to get it running as soon as possible. But the fact is – a wrong website design with substandard images and cluttered navigation can easily drive a lot of your customers away, leading to losses of thousands of dollars in terms of potential revenue.
So no matter if you are a budding entrepreneur looking to build a website from scratch or a seasoned businessman planning to revamp your existing website, check out the below infographic by AddPeople – one of the biggest and most experienced Internet Marketing agencies in the UK. A comprehensive compilation of the basics of building a great website, this amazing infographic has some great tips to get your website start working for you!
