I am a long time US Bank customer, but lately I am getting a little irked about them. First they install new ATMs in my area that are so low that any SUV driver has problems reaching down to the money dispenser slot. Not happy about this at all. In the area of the country where I live many people drive SUVs and trucks and this is just bad how this works out for US Bank customers. Second I ran into a situation yesterday that is just plain stupid. US Bank blames VISA for this, but I think it is stupid and really bad customer service. [Read more...]
Computer Consultant 101: How to Build a Stable Business
Computer Consultant 101: How to Build a Stable Business
Know How To Bill and What to Charge
Without knowing how to bill and what to charge, you’re going to lose a lot of money that’s really yours. If you get your billing and pricing wrong as a computer consultant, you’ll send a bad message to people that you’re trying to quote for business.
You’ll be screaming that you’re a rank amateur rather than a skilled computer consultant. It could take you years to recover from this. A lot of times you would need to scrap existing clients and completely start over because certain clients you brought in at the wrong level.
Perform IT Audits
If you know how to do them right it’s an incredibly powerful technique. You get paid to write proposals and do needs assessment work. If you don’t know how to do this you’re going to wind up doing a lot of exploratory work for free. You can actually get paid for your initial consultation time for doing the technology assessments and the IT audits.
Build Local Partnerships
You’ll need partnerships as your computer consultant business evolves. These will get you some of your best clients along the way. If you don’t have good local partnerships, you can almost guarantee that you’ll lose clients along the way with this as well. You need to learn how to find these key players and how to negotiate with them.
Exceed Client Expectations
If you want to get paid the big bucks as a small business computer consultant, your clients will expect a lot from you. Your clients’ idea of perfection may be different from yours. You need to learn the magic words you need to know to avoid a lot of the stress and intense pressure. You want to come out smelling like a rose to exceed their expectations.
Maximize your Utilization Rate and Profitability
Making as much of your work-week billable as possible and eliminate a lot of the non billable, time-draining non revenue draining computer consultant activities. It’s all about delivering small business virtual IT services and how to build a stable business; how to get clients for life.
Joshua Feinberg helps small business computer consulting firms get more steady, high-paying clients. Learn how you can too. Sign-up now for your free access to a one-hour audio training program on Small Business Computer Consulting Tips.
Accounting Methods – Cash and Accrual
Accounting Methods – Cash and Accrual
When starting a business, you have to determine the method you are going to use for accounting and paying taxes. The two choices are the cash method and the accrual method.
Cash Method
If you are looking for simplicity, the cash method is probably your best accounting choice. Generally, income and deductions can be claimed when payment is actually received or made. This is best shown with an example.
I open a small business and have to order business cards and stationary. I receive the products and pay the invoice on November 18, 2005. Under the cash method, I can deduct the cost on my 2005 tax return.
Some businesses are restricted from using the cash method. C corporations may only use the cash method if they have less than $5 million in gross revenues for a particular year. Professional Service Corporations can use the cash method without limit, while farming corporations can due so if gross revenues are less than $25 million. Tax shelters are prohibited from using the cash method.
Accrual Method
The Accrual Method of accounting is a bit more complex. Under this method, the focus in on the date the expense is incurred, not paid. Although this may seem a small difference, it can play havoc with your books and piece of mind.
Using our previous example, assume I order business cards and stationary on the December 18, 2005. I receive the products on December 30th, but don’t pay the invoice until January 20, 2006. When can the expense be claimed? It depends on when economic performance occurred.
Generally, economic performance occurs when goods or services are provided to you. In the above example, economic performance would arguably occur when the business cards and stationary were delivered with the invoice on December 30th. Thus, I would be able to deduct the expense for the 2005 tax year.
In Closing
As you can see, the cash method is the easier of the two accounting methods. To determine the best method for your business, speak with a tax professional.
About the Author
Richard Chapo is with http://www.businesstaxrecovery.com – recovering overpaid taxes for small businesses. Visit our article page – www.businesstaxrecovery.com – to read more tax articles.
MLM Success Training: Why Some People Become Wealthy in Network Marketing and Others Don’t
Regardless of whether you watch the Oprah Winfrey show or not, the story of her success is fascinating. You can’t say where she is today is the result of any special advantages she had growing up.
In fact, she came from a broken family and she was abused as a child. She’s also African-American and a woman, so discrimination was likely a factor that counted against her somewhere along the way.
So why is she now worth a billion dollars while many Harvard-educated, white males who grew up with every advantage only make a comfortable living?
Ever wonder why success seems to come easily for some people while others struggle at everything they do? What makes the difference?
Success in Multi-Level Marketing (MLM), Network Marketing, or anything else in life is predictable and can be duplicated by following time-tested principles that all millionaires use.
In fact, if you don’t receive training in these principles of wealth, you can NEVER have it in your life. At least not for long. If you do somehow become wealthy in MLM without learning these principles, you won’t keep it.
Want proof? Just look at people who have won the lottery:
- William “Bud” Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988. Now he lives on his Social Security and food stamps which amounts to $450 a month.
- Ken Proxmire was a machinist when he won $1 million in the Michigan lottery. He moved to California and went into the car business with his brothers and he filed for bankruptcy within five years.
- Suzanne Mullins won $4.2 million in the Virginia lottery in 1993. Today she’s deeply in debt to a company that loaned her money using the winnings as collateral.
- “Winning the lottery isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be,” says Evelyn Adams. She won the New Jersey lottery not just once, but twice (1985, 1986), in an amount of $5.4 million. Today she lives in a trailer and all the money is gone.
- Janite Lee from Missouri won $18 million in 1993. She generously gave her money to a variety of causes including politics, education and the community. According to published reports, eight years after winning, Lee had filed for bankruptcy with only $700 left in two bank accounts and no cash on hand.
- Willie Hurt of Lansing, Mich., won $3.1 million in 1989 and two years later he was broke and charged with murder. His lawyer says he spent his fortune on a divorce and cocaine.
- Charles Riddle of Belleville, Mich., won $1 million in 1975. Later he got divorced, faced several lawsuits and was indicted for selling cocaine.
People have a “financial thermostat” and just like the thermostat that controls the heating or cooling in your house, your thermostat is currently set for the amount of money you have.
If you somehow receive more money from your MLM business than your financial thermostat is set for, like the lottery winners above, you’ll waste it away until you are back to your set level.
If you want more money from your Network Marketing business, or you want to keep the money you are receiving, you have to raise your financial thermostat. It’s that simple.
How do you raise your thermostat? By learning and practicing the principles of wealth. All self-made millionaires live by these principles.
If you’re not currently having MLM success, it’s likely because you aren’t applying the same principles that Oprah and all other billionaires and millionaires apply to achieve their success. All that’s standing in the way between you and success is the application of these general principles.
So where do you learn these success principles?
The best place is directly from people who understand the principles and have had success using them. There’s no quicker way to get where you want to go than to find a mentor to guide you along your way.
The person you want is someone who is currently where you want to be, and is willing to teach you the wealth principles. Of course, not all successful people fully understand these principles even though they naturally apply them.
Another good way to learn the principles of wealth is through the greatest success book of all time, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. The principles you need to understand are in this book. You’ll need to do some work to uncover them, understand them, and put them into practice, but they are in the book.
Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich is all about using the same resources that millionaires use to get the same results as them.
If you are not experiencing the kind of financial success you desire, perhaps all you need is a little MLM success training from a mentor or by learning and practicing the principles in Think and Grow Rich. Sometimes all it takes is few subtle shifts in your thought processes to create a GIANT difference in your results!
About the Author:
Tim Bruxvoort is the Internet’s Foremost Home-Based Business and Success Coach who helps people create successful and profitable lives in their own home-based businesses. You can visit his website at www.homebasedriches.com. If you are interested in discovering how you can be successful in anything you do, go to www.thinktorich.com for a free report.
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Customer Loyalty, we all want it. Don’t we?
Some people say it’s dead – they say that customers are fickle, that they don’t want loyalty, that they just want the lowest price and the fastest way to get it. Some say that customers have changed and that the pursuit of loyalty is foolish, since it’s the customers that are not interested in it. I don’t agree. Loyalty is not DEAD, it’s just sleeping.
I agree that customers have changed (because our needs have changed). We’re more demanding than ever before, we have more choices than ever before, we’re more educated than most of the companies we do business with (about their products and their competitive position). And here’s the truth: we don’t give our loyalty to companies that don’t give their loyalty to us.
Companies have in the last ten years made it more difficult, more confusing, and more frustrating to deal with them than ever before. They give all the “special offers” to the new customers; they’ve removed human beings from answering phones and answering questions. They make us pump our own gas, check on our packages, book our own airline tickets and figure out when they’ve made mistakes on our accounts. They cut their training budgets and have trimmed their service staffs to the bone. They pay big bonuses at the top, but at the bottom of the corporate pyramid, where the customers lie (if they make the pyramid at all) they charge us fees for the privilege of using their services!
Is it no wonder we’ve become rather selective to whom we pledge our loyalty?
No, customer loyalty is not dead, but it is ailing. It is given only to those companies that earn it and keep earning it by delivering value and positive experiences on a consistent basis.
Companies that want to Thrive…not just survive in this century better figure out fast that keeping more of their customers, and keeping them happy is a critical economic necessity.
Good and loyal customers are critical to profitability. Estimates are that it costs 6 – 30 times more to get new customers than it does to maintain the ones you have. If you keep losing customers and have to keep replacing them, it makes sense that you are spending money on sales and marketing that could be going elsewhere.
It’s your LOYAL customers that give you referrals and sing your praises in your advertising and testimonials. Referral business is like “free” new customers. So the money you would have paid to GET the new customer drops back down to your bottom line.
I find it is sadly true that most companies don’t have a strategic plan for keeping customers, keeping them happy OR keeping them coming back time and time again with their money and their friends. Even though Customer Loyalty was determined to be a #1 concern of CEO’s (according to the Conference Board) how many companies do more than pay lip service to the importance of customer service and loyalty in their organization? Your guess is as good as mine. Based on the service I receive as a customer, well, I can understand why more customers aren’t loyal, can you?
What can YOU do to change that? What can you do to turn the tide on this disturbing trend and develop long lasting, loyal customer relationships?
And what’s LOVE got to do with it?
Everything. Business is based on relationships and relationships are based on qualities such as trust, respect, appreciation, understanding, generosity, clear open and honest communication and heavy doses of kindness, compassion and affection. Sometimes known as LOVE.
Studies show that the main reason customers will leave a company they are doing business with is that they perceive the company does not care about them or their needs. And conversely, studies show that when asked why they stay loyal to a particular company for a long time, customers respond, “Because they cared about me.” This perception and feeling of caring is the emotional bridge between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. And, it’s often the bridge between lackluster profits and thriving good health on the bottom line.
It’s about emotion. Loyalty is an emotional attachment to a company based on the customer’s subjective perception that the company is delivering the value they desire or need, when and how they need it. It’s based on their needs, and it’s based on their experience of doing business with us. As a customer myself, I know that the companies I chose to give my loyalty to are those that make me feel good about the whole experience of doing business with them.
When we FEEL good about doing business with a company we form emotional ties, not just financial ties with them. Let’s face it, customers are emotionally attached to their money – if we want them to give some of it to us – we need to get them emotionally attached to US.
Emotions have been “undiscussable” in business for a long time. “Feelings” is the “F” word of the business world. How many times have we heard that we are to keep our feelings out of it, keep our emotions away from our business decisions, and park our personal problems at the door? Sound familiar? Well, I’ve learned that you cannot expect your staff to bring their passion to work but not their feelings. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s time we developed an emotional literacy in business.
Employees and Customers are people. People have feelings. And as people, their decisions are effected by their feelings, whether they can identify the feelings or not. Any salesperson can tell you that while people make decisions that look logical, they are more often than not, based on emotion.
As people we are perceptive, conscious, sensitive, alive and feeling beings! It’s an essential part of our nature. When we recognize that in business, we’ll work harder at building the emotional equity with a customer that determines whether or not they become a loyal customer or a lost customer.
It is the perception, the feeling of being cared about that keeps the customers coming back. And it’s what we do to build and support and create that feeling that creates a positive experience for the customer.
Every customer has two sets of needs. The business needs are logical, rational, and practical. The personal needs are emotional, illogical and sometimes even irrational, but carry a lot of weight. The fulfillment of the customer’s business needs is usually what gets them in the door in the first place-you are selling what they need. But it’s the fulfillment of the customer’s personal needs that will keep them coming back. Once the business needs are met, they often take a back seat to the customer’s experiential needs.
It’s the quality of the emotional experience you have with a company that will determine whether or not you want to keep recreating that experience. We come back to companies that have what we want and create a positive experience for us. We leave companies that don’t have what we want or create a negative experience for us. Experience is emotional.
When a customer walks away from the whole experience (your greeting, interacting with your Web site, the dealing with people in your office…) of doing business with you with positive emotions like happiness, joy, delight, caring, security, welcome and appreciation-they will most likely want to come back (if you recreate the positive emotions consistently).
If they walk away from the experience with negative emotions like frustration, anger, disgust, fear, incompetence, indifference, if they leave with a lack of confidence, if they leave feeling stupid-and if that’s what’s delivered consistently-they usually don’t stay around unless they haven’t YET found some other place to go.
It’s the quality of the emotional experiences that customers have with you that will determine whether or not they will continue to do business with you over time.
What’s LOVE got to do with it? Maybe more than we thought!
Tim Sanders, Chief Solutions Officer, Yahoo writing in “Love is the Killer App,” says “What do I mean by “love?” The best general definition that I’ve read comes from philosopher Milton Mayeroff’s brilliant book, On Caring. Love, he writes, ‘is the selfless promotion of the growth of the other.’ When you help others grow to become the best people that they can be, you are being loving, and as a result, you grow.”
What a great description for what we want to happen in our business relationships! I want to do business with a company that believes in the selfless promotion of the growth of ME and my business! I want to give my money to companies that want to help me be the best ME I can be-whether I’m buying cosmetics or computers or telephone service or food. I want to do business with someone who has my best interests in mind.
In lieu of that – I’ll do my own research, haul my own lumber and pump my own gas – but if I’m doing the service work-then I want the lowest price possible! I’m not loyal to companies that don’t care enough about me to make my experience with them easy, stress and hassle free, and pleasant. How about you?
What’s love got to do with it? A whole lot more than we ever thought. Let’s start doing a better job of creating experiences that the customer perceives as positive, caring, and yes, maybe even loving.
About The Author
JoAnna Brandi is Publisher of JoAnna Brandi’s Customer Care Coach TM, a weekly training program designed to teach managers “The Art and Science of Exquisite Customer Care.” You can sign up to get her latest tips and get your personalized weekly coaching program at www.customercarecoach.com. You can reach her via email: joanna@customercarecoach.com