How to Fix Your Business

Provided by Van Lanier, Content Partner for the SME Toolkit

A Roadmap for SMEs: Lead Your Business Away from Trouble and Back to Success

Owners of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are entitled to the same turnaround help as large corporations. Unfortunately, they don't receive it because turnaround consultants are expensive and their methods are not readily known. A turnaround roadmap can remove the mystery about turnarounds and provide a guide for owners of SMEs that are underperforming.

Like GPS navigation, a turnaround roadmap provides waypoints to help the user navigate from one location to the next. The seven major waypoints on a turnaround roadmap are listed below. If you can follow a map, you can turn your business around.

STABILIZE - The first action in any crisis is to stabilize the environment so you can make good decisions. The key to stabilizing a small business is to maintain a positive cash balance at all times. Never spend more in a week than you had at the end of the previous week. For example: if you have $100,000 cash in the bank on Monday, that is all you can spend this week, even though you may collect $125,000 on Thursday. This way, you will maintain a positive cash balance at the beginning of each week. This simple cash control budget works like a tourniquet; it maintains sufficient cash while you determine what went wrong and what to do about it.

How to Be an Optimist in a Pessimistic Time: A Techonomy Manifesto

David Kirkpatrick, Contributor

It’s no secret that technology is changing the world. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who don’t get it. Many of them, even more unfortunately, are important leaders in business, other powerful instutitions, and governments. To meet the challenges that face us—whether as leaders of organizations, as leaders of countries, or as the global community addressing our collective challenge—we will only be successful if we unreservedly embrace technology and innovation as essential tools. The Techonomy conference, which begins in Tucson on Sunday November 13, aims to underscore that idea and send a pointed message to leaders that Luddites have no place in the 21st century.

Five Ways to Increase Profit Margins

If your profit margins aren't rising, chances are your company isn't thriving. Here are five solutions to the problem

by Doug Hall

Ryan Snook

Is your profit margin higher than it was five years ago?
I asked that question, along with several others, in my last column. I suggested that one way to boost your profit margin might be to get rid of some of your customers. Now let's look at some other reasons your profit margin might not be rising—and what to do about it.
I believe that your profit margin trend is the single most powerful indicator of your company's health. As margins decline, companies cut their sales and marketing efforts. Manufacturers postpone plant upgrades and delay research and development. And it becomes a lot less fun to own a business. Obviously, something needs to be done.
Here are five bold solutions to help increase your profit margin:

1. Fire Your Customers.

Getting rid of the 20% of your customers who provide the lowest profitability frees up capacity and resources to do work that is more profitable.

How to Start A Bussiness

Starting a business is no more difficult than determining that you have the risk-tolerance and temperament for such an endeavor, and deciding to just take your idea and go for it.

There's no single recipe for starting a company.

Despite the catchy title, this Instructable is more personal story than authoritative how-to: It chronicles how and why Squid Labs, Instructables, and our sister companies were started, and what we've learned along the way. Squid Labs is a research and design firm that did innovation consulting, and built prototypes for services and products, many of which have since spun-off into separate companies: Instructables, this project-sharing website; Potenco, which is making a hand-held generator for cell phones and laptops; Howtoons, comics showing kids of all ages how to do things; Makani, an energy company seeking to harness high-altitude wind; OptiOpia, a vision-correction business developing low-cost portable vision-testing and lens-fabricating devices; and MonkeyLectric, which makes LED lighting systems for bicycles.

I hope to inspire the creation of more businesses and companies like Squid Labs by telling you how we did it. Take all the information in this Instructable for free; there's no franchise fee! The world needs more people dedicated to having a positive impact.

Step 1Motivation For Writing This (Now)

Squid Labs has spun off several companies from technologies developed in the lab, and those companies are still in their early stages. My definition of business success for Squid Labs would be any (hopefully all!) of the spin-off companies positively impacting both their customers and employees, and through that, becoming wildly profitable, going public, or being acquired and successfully integrated into a larger entity to enable the company to grow faster than it could on its own.

How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates

How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates a strange offshoot of the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock by Philip Greenspun

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As a graduate student in computer science at MIT earning a $1600/month research stipend, I feel amply qualified to instruct the entire Internet on the art of becoming as rich as Bill Gates (check the Wealth Clock to see how much he has right now). I get my confidence from Dr. Leo Buscaglia, author of Love, Born for Love : Reflections on Loving, Living, Loving and Learning, and Bus 9 to Paradise. Dr. Buscaglia, our nation's most prominent lecturer on the subject of love, turns out to be divorced ("it was a very loving divorce").

Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully

5 Ways to Make Money Fast and Easy

By Jack Reynolds

This is where the rubber meets the road. Traction is something we all lack when we are doing research and ultimate field tests in the quest for our first million. More traction would be great, whatever step in the ladder you are at. So lets give you a little traction before you seize your jets. The following 5 strategies will give you the moves to take you to the first level. -A guy/gal with a proven idea that can be replicated - (An enviable position to be in)
1) Let's get this straight. Million dollar bank balances are numerical in nature. By that I mean a million bucks is not made up of 1 large million dollar bill. Its made up of exactly one million single's. Or to go to the lowest common denominator, its actually numerically made up of One thousand, million (or 1 billion) cents.
Make money fast and easy by thinking of money as numerical and therefore exponential. A dollar that you hold in your hand is the same as $1 million dollars. No difference at all. Its a seed that grows into a tree, then that tree spurs more seeds. (I apologize for the metaphor, but how else can we put this so you understand the nature of the reality as it is)

How to Make Easy Money

Edited byn. wells and 208 others

Article Edit Discuss History

How do you make money without any skills, and without significant planning or preparation? You do not have to resort to deception or stealing. All of the following steps are easy and accessible to about anyone. Just remember that you get what you give, so don't expect to get rich--for that, you'll have to work hard and work smart! Read and learn!

How to make money blogging

A step by step guide to making money blogging

If I have been asked the question," how on earth do you make money blogging ?" once, I have been asked it a thousand times. There is an awful lot of misinformation out there about blogging and the problem is that the failures outweigh the successes by about a million to one, so for every successful blogger out there, there are 999,999 people telling you that you cannot make money blogging. What they really mean is they cannot make money blogging.
The other problem is that a good proportion of the people who make money blogging do it by selling crappy advice to the other 999,999 failures. I am not going to do that. I am not selling a damn thing, although if you take my advice and sign up for the tools I use, I will make a couple of dollars in commissions. All I need is 999,999 people to take my advice and I will be set for life, in which case - anyone want to buy a few blogs?
Just kidding, I would never part with them . But let's go back to the question most people really want to ask - "Can I make money blogging ? and if so - how?"

The answer is yes. I am a professional blogger and have been for several years. I do it with a combination of freelance writing, several niche blogs, article writing and, for the last 18 months, writing a business blog for a luxury property portal. This last one - if you are considering blogging for business - requires you to have already developed a reputation in a particular industry, and being able to demonstrate the necessary skills to make it work. Which includes generating traffic, building relationships and incoming links and actually being a successful blogger.

How To Make Money With Facebook

If you always wanted to earn online income but didn’t know where to start, why not jump on the most popular social network site and take advantage of their ad serving platform?

Featured Story: Click Here to read about 2 College Guys Who Made $119K in One Month Using Facebook!

Believe it or not, tens of thousand of people are using Facebook every day to chat with their friends and have fun… while others are making money at the same time.

Would you like to know how to cash-it on this social phenomenon?

Would $5… $50… or $150 in additional income make you happier? What would you do with the “new found” money?

Let’s make it happen, here are three quick steps:

Step #1

Once you have signed up to Facebook your first step should be to think about how you want to present yourself. You don’t want to fake it, just be yourself and showcase your skill, your hobby or knowledge – that is what makes money from Facebook.

Don’t forget that you want to attract the attention of a specific group of people here, so that you become known as someone who is something of an expert on one particular subject. So choose wisely!

5 Ways to Save Money Using the Internet

5 Ways to Save Money Using the Internet

These are tough times. The economy has yet to recover, joblessness is at an all-time high, and for many Americans, their patience is beginning to wear thin. Fortunately for everyone, now is the time when opportunitiesare plentiful for technology to help make the day a bit brighter by offering you ways to save money by using the internet. Here are five strategies to tell you how: