azfranchises:

As a professional business broker and franchise consultant I am often asked by small business owners about when is the right (or best) time to sell an existing franchise business. Like most things in life, timing can mean everything when selling a business. This includes choosing the right time to sell a business or franchise that will help you maximize your return on your investment and years of hard work. Here are a few helpful tips you might want consider if you are debating if its time to sell and cash out now.

Sell When Things Are Going Right:
Its sounds simple and logical right? Unfortunately it takes a lot of discipline and will power to pick the right time to make the decision to sell, especially when profits are up and the business is growing and running smoothly. Logically its makes good business sense to put a business on the market when sales are still heading North because who knows what unforeseen circumstances may lie ahead that could adversely affect your business. This includes personal issues like illness and divorce as well as broader economic factors like increased competition in your market niche or a major economic downturn like we are experiencing now. The bottom line is you are more than likely going to get the best possible price and terms for your franchise business when you can demonstrate to a potential buyer that business has never been better.

Read full article.

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WKOW-TV.com:

It’s an innovative kitchen, and there’s nothing like it in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin innovation kitchen is the largest community-access kitchen. Anyone can prepare their own recipes in the one million dollar kitchen, and can actually sell them.

The facility has its own food processing services.

Owners say the kitchen will create jobs and give farmers and food entrepreneurs access to tools and equipment.

Tom Schraeder, Executive Director of the Hodan Center, says, “Today is a combination of four years of hard work, of trying to get an expanded food kitchen, to show off our Papa Pat’s homemade recipes, which is made at our Hodan Center, made by people with disabilities.”

Owners are hoping this jump starts small business start ups as well.

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PC Magazine:

A computer network is an essential element of modern business, and it’s increasingly indispensible in the home, too. A network lets your computer connect to the Web so that you can check e-mail, update a website, or teleconference. It also lets you communicate locally with other computers on the same local network. Creating a network is simple—all that’s needed is to connect a computer to a router with an Ethernet cable. That’s a very rudimentary setup, however. You’ll need other components if you want to add multiple computers to your network, share files, stream multimedia, share a printer, or control which computers can access data on the network. And complexity increases if you decide that some links in your network will be made wirelessly. Fortunately, we’re here to assist. We’ve gathered together a list of all gear you’ll need to quickly and easily set up a home or small home-office network, and some key hints for getting it all to work together. Continue reading this post here.

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MiamiHerald.com:

As a small-business owner struggling through a recession that shows almost no signs of letting up anytime soon, the federal government probably isn’t the first place you would turn to for marketing advice. But believe it or not, you should. With the U.S. economy still in tatters, you might be surprised to learn that the federal government offers free online tools to help you market and promote your product or service.

To find out more about how the feds can help your business, BizBytes turned to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Nancy Rackear, public information officer for the administration’s Miami office.

“The SBA is primarily known for making loans to small-business owners, but we also offer free tools on our website, www.sba.gov, that entrepreneurs can use to promote their businesses.”

Here are five free online tools from the feds that you can use right now to market your business in a recession.

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There are companies that take the slow and steady approach to growth. This is the most sustainable type of business attitude if you are afraid of failure. But there are certain companies that take the slow and steady growth route until they see that it is time for their turn to grow. One company doing such is North American Bancard. After ten years, they have grown so significantly that they acquired a building to house the ever growing staff. The staff-up was obviously in anticipation of its recent acquisitions. To understand the history of the company, you might want to visit the North American Bancard Wikipedia page

The company is very focused on its customer service. The CEO said himself that customer service is a big part of the infrastructure set in place, so the sales people can go out and sell, and the customer service is actually so good that they even support the sales people. The reason the customer service has to be available for the sales people is that there are sales agents all over the country. They are referred to as ISO’s (Independent Sales Organization). Since they are operating away from corporate headquarters they need to have resources available in order succeed. The call center is one resource, and the North American Bancard Agent informational site.

If you check out the North American Bancard Linkedin Page, you can obviously tell the CEO did a very good at hiring talented employees. Just take a browse through their page and you’ll see. Sometimes it takes a decade to build a company up where you can recruit and retain very talented employees.

The merchant account industry should keep its eye out for this company, because it’s taking the industry by storm. If you read the store about North American Bancard Acquisitions, you will see why.

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Law.com:

There are some good reasons why your clients should patent their inventions, but there are even more good reasons why they should not.

Perhaps the best reason for your clients to patent their inventions is that they can make millions of dollars by enforcing those patents against those who make, use, or sell products embodying those inventions.

Assume, for example, that your client invented intermittent windshield wipers. You might think that that would certainly be a great invention for your client to patent, right? With such a patent, your client could collect millions and millions of dollars in royalty payments by enforcing that patent against automobile manufacturers.

But you would be wrong. Intermittent windshield wipers were patented in 1967 by Robert Kearns of Detroit, Mich., who made millions of dollars in royalty payments by enforcing his patent against automobile manufacturers. The rule is that only the first inventor of an invention is entitled to get a patent on that invention, and your client wasn’t the first inventor.

Patentability v. Marketability Continue reading this article.

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Setting up an online business is no easy task. There’s a ton of work involved and business owners often get so swamped with setting up in website design, content development, and marketing initiatives that they neglect other important processes. Among them, an effective strategy for securely processing customer credit/debit card orders.

The following are a couple security tactics to keep in mind if you currently accept credit cards or are considering accepting them in your online businesses:

Diversify Merchant Providers Across Multiple Sites

Most ecommerce owners owning multiple websites, typically use the same hosting provider for all of them. However, this same kind of piggybacking should not be done with credit card processing. Whenever a customer uses a credit card online, the underlying website in which the merchant account is assigned to shows up on their credit card statement. This is regardless of the site in which the service or product is purchased from.

For instance, say that a sneaker site and an upscale clothing site are maintained by the same owner under the same host provider and merchant account. Let’s also say that the merchant account that the two sites share was originally assigned to the clothing site. If a customer places an order for a pair of sneakers, the name and information of the upscale clothing site will show up on their credit card statement. This makes it very easy for said customer to dispute the charge with their credit card issuer should they decide to leave the owner liable for the chargeback.

This is why it is very important that owners maintaining multiple websites get separate merchant account providers for each site.

Request CSC Codes and Billing Addresses

Located in the back of almost every credit card in the upper right-hand corner is a three or four digit code. This is known as the card’s cvc code, and is a security feature used to protect against fraud. Asking your customers for this code during the checkout process can substantially ward off fraudulent purchases made online- studies have shown that chargeback rates drop off as much as 26 percent. This code helps ensure that the customer placing the order in fact has the credit card in their personal possession, and that the purchase is being made by the card owner.

AVS- Address Verification System, is another commonly used security tactic that many of you are probably already familiar with. This is where the billing address associated with the credit card is matched to determine legitimacy, and is another great way to protect your small business against fraudulent orders. Plus, most credit card processing, companies like to see online retailers implement these security features on their sites. Many of the larger vendors like PayPal, North American Bancard, and the like, typically give lower rates and/or smaller fees to retailers that do implement additional security protection.

Also, be sure to thoroughly scrutinize orders made from certain countries and parts of the world. While, no worldwide address verification system currently exists, an address from any of the following locations should immediately raise your suspicions as a very large number of fraudulent credit card transactions take place in these areas:

• China
• Russia
• Nigeria
• Indonesia
• Malaysia

Don’t be afraid to conduct extra legwork to verify the legitimacy of any orders you deem suspicious. Calling and/or emailing the customer directly are always good ideas. Warning messages are another good way to deter order fraud. Included somewhere in your message should be an explicit mention that all visitor IP addresses are being recorded.

Additional Measures

A couple other security measures that site owners should consider are:

-Require Customer Signature Upon Delivery- Be sure to keep collected signatures on file.

-Request Copies of Customer’s Credit Card and/or Driver’s License- This works especially well with B2B customers.

Implement A Quality, Cross-Platform Encryption- Take a look at TLS for data encryption and authentication. SSL is still useful, but TLS is better.

Key-Based Authentication is Best- key-based authentication that is encrypted is more difficult to crack that password authentication.

These are just a few things you must take into consideration when accepting credit card payments in your online business. While not the most exciting aspect of having an online business, effectively and securely facilitating your customers’ credit card payments is incredibly important to the success of your operation. Be sure to take the time needed to implement and maintain a strategy that works for your business model and operations.

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Inventorspot:

So, you want to sell your idea or a patent? Here are some factors to bear in mind.

The companies who are your potential purchasers have different criteria for accepting new ideas. Typically, larger companies demand that you have either a patent or patent pending prior to even looking at your invention.

Other small to medium size companies may be willing to look at your ideas with no patent pending and without a prototype.

In fact, one notable U.S. hand tool manufacturer accepts ideas without a patent and without a prototype. If they like it they will build a prototype, test market it within the company, and you still have the opportunity to potentially patent it on your own, AFTER you know that a company sees value in your invention and wants!

See how dramatically different these two approaches are. One suggests that you at least initiate the substantial expense of applying for a patent, PRIOR to even submitting your invention to a company, and the other approach allows you to forego this expense until AFTER you at least get some indication as to the potential marketability and interest in your invention. Read full article.

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Finweb.com:

When you are considering hiring a business tax service, you think about the cost not just in dollars spent but in opportunity cost. “Opportunity cost” is an economic term used to describe the simple fact that every second you spend doing one thing you could be doing something else. In this case, as a small business owner, you could be operating your business if you were not spending time filing your taxes. The comparison, then, is not just a measure of spending zero dollars to do it yourself or spending $200 for someone else to do it for you.

When Will You File Your Taxes?
The first thing to consider is when you will actually find the time to file your taxes. If you are like most small business owners, you are already overbooked. Each minute of your week is budgeted to keeping your business running, and your weekends are time for yourself or your family. When will you choose to file your taxes if you have the choice?

What Else Could You be Doing?
If you choose to file your taxes during business hours, how much money will you be losing by not dedicating yourself to the business? For a sales-driven business, this could be quite significant. You will not be able to make calls, speak to clients, and carry out other daily tasks. If you are a lawyer, writer or graphic designer, these are not billable hours like usual. For example, if you are a graphic design company charging $50 per hour to clients, and it takes you 5 hours to complete your taxes, then you have lost the equivalent of $250 dollars. If you decide to do your taxes on your personal time, the cost analysis is more complicated. It can be difficult to quantify how much a walk in the park is worth, but you should think about it in these terms.

How Much Does the Accountant Cost? Read on…

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Entrepreneurscom:

Every society needs entrepreneurs so as to help keep their economy rolling. Whenever there are newbies in the field, it indicates probable good economic competition. New players usually bring innovation and new ideas to the table. However, no matter how plausible their strategic and business plans are, if they don’t have the start up funds, their ideas remain in the shelves. To start and keep businesses moving, entrepreneurs need money inevitably.

There are many sources available that are lenient and giving to new businesses. They offer great terms and policies that are suited for starters in the business industry. The following are great resources of business start up money:

Personal Savings. First and foremost, personal savings are a great source of business funds. Prior to any implementation of business plans, entrepreneurs have the chance to save up years or months before. If it doesn’t fully cover the business start up costs, it is a tremendous help nonetheless.

Credit Cards. Using credit cards, entrepreneurs can cash money but with relatively great interest rates… Read on.

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