Category: Tools and Information

5 Features You Should Look for When Buying a Router | Life Hack

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Based on personal experience, you may find that the router provided by your ISP isn’t the greatest. Whether you are a habitual or pro gamer or whether you want to stream HD movies on Netflix, your router plays a key role in creating the whole experience.

There are some common features that every router must have. However, everyone uses the Internet differently. You may need to spend more time doing research in order to find a router that fits your needs and provides you with all the required features and functions. Here is the list of five important features you should look for before buying your next router.

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5 Questions to Ask Your Team After a Bad Sales Week | AllBusiness.com

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If your industry is seasonal or fluctuates based on demand, you will have occasional dips in sales. Although this is not ideal, it’s expected. How can you cope with this fluctuation? Round up the troops, and talk about why sales are struggling by asking the five following questions. Also, always be transparent, and during your conversation, look for immediate and actionable solutions.

1. How far were we from meeting our goals?

Were you short by just a few hundred dollars? Or are you thousands of dollars behind? First, let me start off by saying, no decrease in revenue is a good thing, but in business, it’s bound to happen. How you react moving forward will depend on the severity of the fluctuation.

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Seven Tips For a Better Home Office | The Startup Magazine

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Whether a business is being run from your home office or there is an occasional telecommute or perhaps it is where you pay your bills and plan your schedule, you deserve more than a simple metal desk and an additional chair placed in a corner. Why is this important? If your office reflects the decor and comfort level of the rest of your home, it will be an area you do not minding spending working hours in.

Here are seven tips to help create a working space that is comfortable, practical and charming:

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5 Items Your Books Need to Balance Before a Capital Raise | Getentrepreneurial.com

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Unless you are an accountant, the last thing on your mind is probably bookkeeping.  However, whether you like bookkeeping or not, it is important to the health of your business.  This is especially true if you are looking for a business loan, as you will need to ensure that the following 5 items are balanced before you can receive a capital raise.  So if you are thinking about how to get a working capital loan, then you need to read this article.

1.  Taxes Payable

We must pay our fair share, but the tax laws exist for the benefit of small business owners.  I realize some of you are doing a double take after reading the previous sentence, but it is true.  The tax code helps small business owners to offset the investments they have made in their business in the form of tax credits.

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Is it Time to Modify Your LLC Operating Agreement? | Small Biz Trends

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I recently wrote about the importance of creating an Operating Agreement for LLC’s (Limited Liability Companies). While no state actually requires an LLC to have an Operating Agreement, it’s an essential document for managing the company in the years ahead. The Operating Agreement is much like corporate bylaws: it sets the rules for how the company will be governed; it spells out how decisions are to be made and everyone’s roles and responsibilities. By doing so, it can help prevent conflict and misunderstandings among owners.

Whether you hastily drew up your Operating Agreement when you first launched your business, or you carefully reflected on every word with a lawyer, the fact is that any business evolves over its lifetime and situations will change. You need to make sure that your original Operating Agreement is continually updated to reflect these changes.

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4 Lessons About Handling Stressed Customers That I Learned From Being a Mover | Entrepreneur

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A recent study on easing anxiety for stressed-out customers looked at “high-emotion services” (the purchase of a new home or car, computer repair or airline travel, for example) that elicit intense feelings even before the product is purchased or the service begins. The problem the researchers found? These types of companies often fail to sufficiently address emotional triggers in their business models.

Certain product and service providers, it seems, make enduring impressions on distressed customers. If you’re such a provider and you can’t adequately respond to those buyers’ concerns and feelings, your customers will remember (and share) that your service left them feeling overwhelmed, helpless, neglected or, even worse, frightened. Those notions don’t exactly add up to top customer satisfaction scores.

So, what can you do?

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SPONTAN Laptop Rack | IKEA Hackers

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This is a modified Spontan magazine rack. We attached them to the walls outside the bathrooms at work so that you have somewhere safe to leave your laptop (rather than on the basin inside!).

The Spontan is made of metal (with an enamel coating). While it is designed for magazines and newspapers, it is quite strong, and can hold a laptop fairly easily. One of the problems though is that the metal surfaces may scratch the body of our precious laptops. We needed a padding solution.

For the “inside” of the rack, the part that you can’t see, we cut pieces of high density foam to size. It has self adhesive on one side. We stuck it on the “inside” surfaces of the rack. This must extend down to where the bottom edge of the laptop will rest.

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31 Days to Financial Independence (Day 11): Trimming Your Spending – Food | The Simple Dollar

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“31 Days to Financial Independence” is an ongoing series that appears every Thursday on The Simple Dollar. You might want to start this series from the beginning!”

Last time, we started looking at the average American family budget, going through each category and examining how one could trim the cost of typical expenses in that category.

Today, we’re going to take a look at food spending. As you can see from the budget above, the average American family spends $6,602 per year on food. That averages out to $550 per month. Remember, however, that this “average American family” includes single adults, married couples without children, and families with children, too. In other words, a single person is probably coming in below that, whereas a large family (like ours) is probably coming in above that.

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14 Online Tools That Help Your Team Stay Connected, Productive, and Happy | Life Hack

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Being able to work remotely, or even build a company that’s remote, is not easy, but it’s possible today. Some of today’s most notable companies, including Basecamp, Buffer, Virgin, and WordPress are building companies with over 100+ employees all around the world. How did they do it?

They found the right ‘tools’. When your team members are living on opposite sides of the continent and in different time-zones, effective tools are vital to your team culture, productivity, and success. We’ve tested hundreds of online tools to maximize how we stay connected, productive, and happy.  Here is a list of top 14 online tools that you will find useful for yourself and your team. The first four deal with connectivity while the last four help to make your team happier. The remaining six tolls help to increase your team’s productivity.

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