5 Questions To Ask Before Going Into Business With A Friend|Forbes

July 9, 2014 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, co-presidents and co-founders of Juicy Couture became famous for their celebrated casual clothing line, which they went on to sell in 2013 for a whopping $195 million. Sure, their story of success has had its share of ups and downs—like any other business—but according to the best friends, the greatest decision they ever made was to go into business together. Noted Skaist-Levy, “You spend more time with a business partner than almost anyone…When you’re together, the highs are even higher and the lows don’t seem so bad.”

As great as this kind of 50/50 arrangement sounds, so many partnerships, especially among friends, don’t survive. In fact if you research how to start a business with a friend, you’ll see that expert after expert likens business partnership to marriage: Are you willing to hang in there with this person through the celebrations and failures? The curveballs and the monotony? Can you accept that the little things about them that may annoy you now could only magnify under stress?

It’s Not Just Disruption: More Management Wisdom You Should Doubt | Businessweek

July 8, 2014July 7, 2014 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Some of what you learn in business school may be wrong!

We’re sorry to be such downers to those of you who just received your MBA congratulations, by the way, and those of you getting ready to start business school congrats to you, too. But the truth is, there are some “best practices” taken as gospel at many business schools that may actually do your company—and, by extension, your career—more harm than good. Here are some bits of management gospel you should question:

Structure follows strategy

This may be true up to a point, but like many B-school truisms, it breaks down in the face of complexity. If your organization has to meet many conflicting requirements, and you create many structures to address them—compliance departments, quality assurance departments, safety czars, logistics czars, units in charge of standardization, and units in charge of customization—then you wind up with burdensome rules, contradictory demands, and breakdowns in work processes.

Bureau of Labor Statistics Chart | Industry Employment

July 8, 2014July 7, 2014 ~ lmehit ~ Leave a comment

How well are U.S. industries recovering from the last recession? Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics BLS show that most industries added jobs between June 2009 and March 2014, a period spanning the end of the recession into the ongoing recovery.

Private service-providing industries added 7.2 million jobs, compared with 0.5 million for goods-producing industries over that period. But, as the chart shows, the mining and logging industry had the greatest percent increase in employment. The next largest percent increase, by nearly half, was for professional and business services. Employment fell in three of the 13 industries in the chart—construction, utilities, and information.

The employment data in the chart are from the BLS Current Employment Statistics program. For more information, visit http://www.bls.gov/ces or call 202 691-6555.

Just Say No to Writing Checks | AllBusiness.com

July 7, 2014 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

If you still use paper checks to handle your small business’s expenses, such as paying your suppliers or your staff, writing checks could be costing your company money, a new survey by Dwolla reveals.

The study reports that the 67 percent of U.S. small businesses that still use paper checks, spend an average of nearly $900 a year doing so. That includes time spent on writing checks, maintaining paper check operations, labor and buying the actual checks and supplies. But that’s not the only way that using checks to pay your bills—and not offering your customers other payment options—can cost your business money.

3 Ways to Make Sure Your Next Virtual Meeting Runs Smoothly| Mashable

July 3, 2014 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

When done right, virtual video meetings — specifically Google Hangouts — can bring distant teams together, make sure everyone is on the same page, and allow everyone to be involved without the dim conference room atmosphere (who doesn’t love chilling out on the couch for a meeting?).

But when done wrong? Google Hangouts can be a huge waste of time, not to mention extremely distracting and awkward 15-second pauses are never fun.

Want to have an efficient and successful Google Hangout that doesn’t drive everyone crazy? Here are a couple of key things to keep in mind.

Goodwill is a Good Thing | Business-Valuation.biz

July 3, 2014 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

As suggested earlier, there are multiple interpretations of goodwill which extend beyond the SBA’s formulaic definition of “Selling Price Less Book Value of Acquired TangibleAssets”. Although there is some consistency between new GAAP rules on goodwill accounting, the IRS’ “residual method” and this “formula” method, the general shortcoming with the line of thinking put forth by the SBA to restrict or monitor goodwill-based lending is that goodwill should NOT be considered a negative feature or outcome or the reason why businesses default on their loans To the contrary, only successful firms will generate the profits needed to foster the presence of substantial goodwill however defined. In fact, the more profitable successful a firm becomes, the greater the firm’s goodwill value becomes all other things equal. The more profitable an asset-heavy manufacturing firm becomes, the greater the portion of value that is attributed to goodwill – is this a bad thing? In short, “goodwill” is a “good thing”.

Coinbase Launches A More Secure Bitcoin Storage Option Called ‘Vault’ | TechCrunch

July 2, 2014 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

One of the amusing things about the fast-maturing Bitcoin ecosystem is how the better-funded start-ups in the space are offering products that increasingly resemble services proffered by banks, the very entities they arguably are trying to disrupt.

With Bitcoin, transactions can be handled anonymously and irreversibly without the need for a third-party mediator. Yet that ability also has made Bitcoin historically prone to theft.

So many bigger Bitcoin start-ups have stepped up to offer different tiers of security. Today, Andreessen Horowitz-backed Coinbase jumps into the ring with a new product called Vault. It is complementary to Coinbase’s wallet, which is intended for day-to-day spending like a checking account.

The SBA Does Not Loan Money | Peter Mehit

July 2, 2014January 22, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ 1 Comment

The SBA Does Not Loan Money

Q. Should I get a loan from the SBA?

A. You can’t get a loan from the SBA, but you can get a SBA loan guarantee.

Come again?

Well, first off, the SBA does not loan money, so you can’t get a loan from the SBA. Only banks loan money. The SBA writes guarantees to limit the losses a bank will experience if your loan goes bad. This is important to know, because it means you will have to qualify under the bank’s rules.

These can be very different from the SBA’s. For example, it is not a requirement for you to collateralize the full loan amount to get an SBA guarantee. Under SBA rules if you run out of assets, but have pledged what you have available, you can be approved. Right now, we know of no bank that will make a loan without collateral equal to our greater than the amount you’re borrowing.

Each bank’s rules are slightly different, with the large banks having the most restrictive and the local and regional banks being the most liberal.

Continue reading “The SBA Does Not Loan Money | Peter Mehit” →

Could Color Wheels Make for Easier, More Secure Passwords? | WIRED

July 1, 2014 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

The password as we know it is in critical condition. These days, with big-name security breaches popping up seemingly as often as Justin Bieber scandals, we’ve had to try to find new ways to secure our online identities. One finger in the dike has been the “strong” password, or the practice of sprinkling numbers, symbols and capital letters into our codes. If “spike” could be guessed with a simple brute force attack, perhaps “Spike!” leaves us a bit safer.

Of course, strong passwords have the same inherent problems as all passwords. As WIRED writer Mat Honan, himself the victim of a devastating hack, evocatively put it, they’re a “Band-Aid that’s now being washed away in a river of blood.” Still, in the here and now, there’s another problem with these so-called strong passwords, according to design student Renee Verhoeven. It’s something much simpler. “People can’t remember them,” she says.

That’s precisely what she tried to tackle with “ID Protocol,” her graduation project at the Royal College of Arts in London. For the project, Verhoeven created a conceptual series of password tools that scrap letters and numbers in favor of personal, mnemonic codes. Mnemonic memory devices have been around in some form or another since the ancient Greeks, and include basic everyday memory tricks like acronyms and rhymes. Teachers love them: Remember committing My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas to memory, to remember the order of the planets?