How to Negotiate a Business Loan | businessnewsdaily.com

January 19, 2021January 18, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Business loan terms are often negotiable, giving borrowers a chance to secure more favorable rates and better terms.

Negotiating your business loan terms can help your business get to the next growth stage more easily.
Your interest rate, prepayment terms and personal guarantee provisions are three important areas that you can negotiate.
Before heading to the negotiation table, you should know the key terminology to make the best case for your business.
This article is for small business owners considering borrowing money for additional funding.

You can’t start or grow your business without funding. Unfortunately, applying for and getting a business loan isn’t usually a fast or stress-free experience. On top of that, some small business owners believe that they have to take the loans at face value and can’t negotiate the terms. Thankfully, that is far from the case. So, what parts of a business loan are negotiable, and what should you know before heading to the negotiation table?

How To Log Your Daily Activities And Manage Your Time Better | Life Hack

January 18, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Go to business school, and you’ll hear it over and over again: What gets measured gets managed. Often attributed to Peter Drucker, this maxim also applies to time management. The best way to improve your time management is to log your daily activities. Simply seeing how your time is spent empowers you to be more productive.

Before you begin recording your daily activities, you have two choices to make—where to do it and how to do it. Let’s discuss them both.

Where to Log Your Daily Activities

Generally speaking, you have two options for logging your daily activities: physically or digitally. Although there’s no “right” answer, there are reasons why people choose one over the other.

Digital Logging

For a few reasons, many people prefer to log their tasks in a calendar or productivity software:

1. Accessibility

Who wants to carry a planner everywhere they go? Digital tracking tools can be accessed from your phone, which is probably in your pocket from when you wake up to when you hit the hay. They can also be pulled up on your computer, where you’ll analyze the data.

2. Customizability

Do you like to view your tasks as a calendar or a list? Do you like to categorize them by type, participant, timeline, or something else? Do you color-code them? Digital activity logging tools put you in the driver’s seat. If you change your mind about a layout or color choice, you can always adjust it later.

5 Ways To Have Better Sales Conversations | AllBusiness.com

January 15, 2021January 14, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Having trained more than 1,500 insurance agents since 2013, I have learned that one of the best strategies to improve the outcome of sales is to improve an agent’s ability to have better sales conversations with their prospects. Simply put, the more significant our conversations are with prospects, both in building rapport, fact-finding, and presenting our opportunity, the more sales we are going to make.

In this article I’m going to share five of my favorite strategies for improving sales conversations with prospects that will help you improve trust and close more deals.

Don’t Make These Cybersecurity Mistakes in Your Business in 2021 | Small Business Trends

January 15, 2021January 14, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Data privacy and cybersecurity became buzzwords in 2020, and for good reason. Due to bad privacy practices and cybersecurity mistakes, businesses both big and small were affected by data security vulnerabilities.

Data breaches such as the Solar Winds hack, Nuclear Weapons Agency Breach, and Clearview AI’s entire client list being stolen were just a few results of software vulnerabilities. Hackers gained access to T-Mobile’s employees’ email accounts, compromising customer and employee data, and Nintendo left 160,000 users vulnerable from a massive hijacking campaign.

Even Twitter experienced a large phishing attack that resulted in penetration tools being stolen. The number of attacks were ample, proving that businesses must take cybersecurity and data privacy more seriously.

Should You Use the Same Fee Structure for These Two Consulting Engagements? | David A. Fields

January 14, 2021January 12, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Consulting engagements come in many flavors. Your consulting firm’s work for a client could range from answering questions in real time based on your knowledge and experience, to developing research-based recommendations, to constructing and implementing complex solutions.

Where does advisory work fit in, and should you construct contracts for advisory work differently?

5 Predictions for America’s Small Businesses in the Biden Era | Inc.com

January 13, 2021January 12, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Before this past year, in which the coronavirus took more than 374,000 lives and permanently shuttered around four million small businesses, few people appreciated the crucial role of the U.S. Small Business Administration as well as Karen Mills.

Today, the former SBA administrator has plenty of company. More than 7.1 million businesses received some form of aid from the agency in 2020. Over 5.2 million small businesses received a Paycheck Protection Program loan during the first and second tranches of the aid program, 1.8 million businesses received debt relief from the agency, and more than 42,300 businesses received a loan through the SBA’s flagship 7(a) loan program in 2020.

YouTube and WhatsApp inch closer to half a billion users in India | TechCrunch

January 12, 2021January 11, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

WhatsApp has enjoyed unrivaled reach in India for years. By mid-2019, the Facebook-owned app had amassed over 400 million users in the country. Its closest app rival at the time was YouTube, which, according to the company’s own statement and data from mobile insight firm App Annie, had about 260 million users in India then.

Things have changed dramatically since.

In the month of December, YouTube had 425 million monthly active users on Android phones and tablets in India, according to App Annie, the data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. In comparison, WhatsApp had 422 million monthly active users on Android in India last month.

The Plan to Build a Global Network of Floating Power Stations | WIRED

January 12, 2021January 11, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

EARLY LAST YEAR, just a few weeks before the pandemic brought life in the United States to a standstill, Yi Chao and a small team of researchers dropped a slender metal tube into the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaiian coast. After nearly two decades as an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Chao had left the space agency to commercialize a seafaring generator that can harness the limitless thermal energy trapped in the world’s oceans. His company, Seatrec, is based just down the road from his old NASA stomping grounds in Pasadena, but Chao regularly travels to Hawaii to test hardware in the tranquil, cerulean waters around the Big Island. On this trip, Chao and his team planned to push their invention deeper than it had ever gone before.

“Respect for Users”: The Reason Why Many Are Switching From WhatsApp to Telegram | Entrepreneur

January 11, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Given the changes in WhatsApp for 2021 , especially in its privacy policies, many users are moving to other messaging apps. The reason behind the change is not fortuitous and Pável Dúrov, co-founder of Telegram, explains why his application has become a favorite of those fleeing Mark Zuckerberg’s platform.

Last Friday, through a statement published on his official Telegram channel, Dúrov explained that the great attraction of his app is precisely the weak point of WhatsApp.

“I hear that Facebook has an entire department dedicated to finding out why Telegram is so popular. Imagine dozens of employees working on it full time. I am happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give away our secret for free: respect its users, ” said the Russian entrepreneur.

Real-Time VR System Enhances Therapy | CoolBusinessIdeas.com

January 8, 2021January 7, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

A compelling new study, published in the journal Pain, has found integrating an immersive virtual reality system into a chronic pain treatment can significantly enhance a patient’s pain-relief outcome. The research suggests “digiceutical” therapies may be effective for patients suffering chronic pain.

The study focused on VR as an adjunct to spinal cord stimulation (SCS), a therapy for chronic pain involving a surgical implant designed to deploy electrical pulses that interrupt pain signaling to the brain. Fifteen subjects with SCS implants for chronic leg pain were recruited for the study.