Business

If you’ve read any of my books, you know I don’t like the soft clichés that many businesspeople tend to use. I recall once when a sales manager trotted out the well-worn “There is no ‘I’ in team,” I commented, “Yeah, but if you look real hard, you’ll find ‘me’.” (Note: I didn’t last long at that job … heck, I didn’t last long at any job. But I digress.)

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If you’re running your own small business, you need to be careful with your budget, which is usually limited (if it’s not, then good for you!). Here are some simple steps you can take to lower your costs for common expenses like phone and Internet bills.

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The iridescent glow of computer screens on detached faces and the rhythmic tapping of fingers on minuscule QWERTY keyboards is a common scene wherever you look these days. The Internet has come to absorb and intertwine itself into every notion of daily life and work. PDAs and laptops allow us to be constantly connected, even when we least want to be. Parents text message their children in school, friends call each other between classes, and bosses send emails about the major project deadline at the end of the week.

While many of us can simply press a button to turn off our mobile devices and breathe a sigh of relief for just a moment, for others, life and work is the Internet.

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Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, and blogs are getting a lot of attention from marketers, and generating a lot of confusion. Should you use these media? How should you use them? How do you evaluate your results...

Many people start businesses because they want to do a particular type of work as a career, or they want to be the boss. If you think self-employment means getting to do whatever it is you love to do forever, you’re somewhat mistaken: Self-employment is as much about selling yourself, your product, or your service, as anything else. And working for yourself, whether you are a freelancing copywriter or the owner of a small eBay business, brings up different challenges than those faced by people employed by others...

A modern business plan needs to address the possible impact of the business on the environment. Lenders know that negative publicity about environmental problems in a business can reflect badly on the people financing the business, so they want to know that you have thought carefully about the environment in your planning...

License agreements imply ongoing payments. The example everyone talks about is Microsoft, which made its initial fortune by licensing makers of personal computers to install copies of Microsoft's Disk Operating System (DOS) on the computers they made...

A promissory note differs from an IOU in that an IOU simply acknowledges the existence of a debt owed, while a promissory note, as its name implies, contains an undertaking (promise) to pay the amount stated...

If you are starting a freelance business, you should know that a written agreement is the basis for a good working relationship between the client and the consultant or freelancer working as an independent contractor. Entering into any freelance task without a written agreement can be a serious mistake...

Computers and software to run on them are something very few businesses can avoid in this century. For some companies the hardware and software purchase decisions are driven by the need for specific software tools. For most companies, the options are broader and the choices confusing...