Are you a business owner whose business was profitable in 2015? Great, that’s a good thing. Of course, you may hear your accountant say, “you need a tax deduction for 2015.” If you find that you need a tax deduction for the 2015 calendar year, there is an option you may want to consider: a SEP-IRA.

(more…)

If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you shudder when you hear the dreaded words “business plan.” You envision an unrelenting tomb of market research, numbers and statistics, and spreadsheets as far as the eye can see, and fees…lots of consulting fees. That’s just one of the reasons that business plans get bad raps. The biggest one though is that after all that investment, the business plan doesn’t see the light of day.

I know because I’ve been on both sides of the business plan. As a consultant during the heady days of the dotcom boom, I wrote jillions (technical term) of them. And time and time again, I saw them succeed at bringing in the money from a venture capital firm, and then get shelved when reality set in.
(more…)

There are a lot of good employees, but if you are a business owner and are lucky enough to have found an exceptional one, are you doing enough to make sure they stay with you? If your customers highly value one of your employees or if there is one that has unique talents and skills that are hard to replace, what would you do if they told you they were going to leave?
(more…)

The United States was founded on the idea of the American Dream. This dream has been and continues to be the inspiration for many successful small business owners. Reaching that dream encompasses talent, learning, hard work, skill and collaboration. All businesses, no matter how big they’ve grown, started small; and all successful businesses rely on the support of their communities. (more…)