Gratitude Should Be a Year-Long Habit for Your Business | AllBusiness.com

Small business owners have plenty of reasons to be thankful. And the Thanksgiving season is a great opportunity to express gratitude to the people who help your business succeed and improve and enrich your daily work life.

That said, it’s important to make thankfulness a genuine, continual (even daily!) habit. As you decide how best to communicate your gratitude over the coming year, consider the many individuals who contribute to your success.

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Asking These 3 Questions Will Improve Your Small Business Financial Management | Small Business Trends

What does financial management at leading, growing businesses look like — right now? Today’s fast growth businesses often require CFOs to work closely with the controller to ensure that the organization gets the full benefit of the controller’s talents and knowledge and, the controller’s office is operating at the highest levels of efficiency and accuracy. As the office of the controller becomes ever more strategic — creating higher levels of financial visibility to help drive growth and profitability — the organization’s relationship to the controller role must evolve as well.

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4 Tips to Build a Strong In-House Marketing Team | Business.com

You have to make plenty of difficult decisions when designating an in-house team. Today we are going to learn what you need to do to build a strong marketing team.

Due to the complex work environment of many companies, they like to use outside agencies to get work done for them. These agencies have great skills, there’s no doubt about it. However, nothing compares to having a high-quality in-house marketing team.

You have to make plenty of difficult decisions when designating an in-house team. Today we are going to learn what you need to do to build a strong marketing team. It’s your job to make sure that everything runs smoothly, and the best way to do that is by making smart business decisions about who you hire and how you use them within the company.

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Energy Efficiency Ideas For Businesses | The Startup Magazine

Business people often say that it is necessary to spend money in order to make money. However, there are certainly some areas in which savings are especially appreciated and needed. In terms of the overall balance sheet, spending money on some green energy strategies can be hard to swallow in the short term, but beneficial in the long run.

It is not surprising that numerous business owners feel nervous out making major outlays in this realm and question whether the instant hit to capital funds are worth any savings generated down the road. Though it is likely that case that doing so will in fact produce financial gains in the future, knowing how to finance these upgrades often proves challenging.

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The SBA and PROdnose – The Wisdom and Musings of Jim Ely, SBA pro

prodnose

PROD-nohz

verb intr.: To pry.

noun: A prying person.

After Prodnose, a pedantic and nosy character, who appeared in the newspaper columns of J B Morton in the Daily Express.   J B Morton wrote under the pen name Beachcomber.  Twenty years before the word appeared in his column, the poet Dylan Thomas once wrotein 1934:  “I want you to think of me today … singing as loudly as Beachcomber in a world rid of Prodnose.”

_____________________________________________

TIP OF THE WEEK

SBA 7(a) loan approvals for the fiscal year ending September 30th totaled $25,372,457,900.  That’s 0.3% less than the prior year.

Being a prodnose about this, I calculated the correlation coefficient between SBA 7(a) loan volume and GDP for over six years using the Microsoft CORREL function.  It came out to a statistically significant 0.86.

That would imply the economy won’t continue to grow as rapidly as it is now.

Continue reading “The SBA and PROdnose – The Wisdom and Musings of Jim Ely, SBA pro”

Are Workers’ Perks Good for Productivity, or a Flashy Waste of Money? Two Experts Weigh in | Inc.com

Axe-throwing classes. Onsite barbershops. Free gym memberships and catered lunches. Do they bond workers to a company and boost productivity, or do they blow resources in a very colorful way? To find out, Inc. called on two noted thinkers on the topic, who espouse thought-provoking–and vastly different–answers to the question.

What explains the rise of perk culture?

Jody Thompson: We like to see people in the workplace, so we provide amenities and spend money on making the office nicer. But work isn’t somewhere you go. It’s something you do.

Phil Libin: There’s a tendency for tech companies and startups to look at all aspects of work-life balance, and create programs that increase productivity and retention.

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My new Writing Room / Sanctuary. Features a monster desk! | IKEA Hackers

I’ve recently taken up writing again, but I needed a nice quiet place to do that – and a place that makes me feel peaceful and happy. We decided to fit out a spare junk room into a writing room, a functional working space.

First, we painted it a lovely pale blue and then decided to make a monster desk out of METOD kitchen cabinets. It was put together over a few weekends – but really probably you should allow two solid days to do this properly (not counting the work to glue up the pinboard).

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Here’s what Samsung’s wacky folding phone looks like in action | TechCrunch

As rumored, Samsung showed off a prototype of a folding display today. Folded, it’s a smartphone. Unfolded, it’s a tablet. Neat!

Less neat: The company sort of went out of its way to not really show very much. A prototype was onstage for about 45 seconds, and it was deliberately backlit to be intensely silhouetted. They “disguised the elements of the design” to keep secret whatever secret sauce they have.

Finding that clip of the prototype folding/unfolding means digging through Samsung’s two-hour developer keynote, so we went ahead and GIF’d it up for you.

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