I’m not a big proponent of incurring a lot of debt to fund or build your business. But even if you’re a small business owner that is completely committed to bootstrap-financing your venture, there will come a time when you’ll need more cash than you currently have to continue growing your business, or you won’t want to tie up all of your cash in the business. At times like that, you’ll need ready access to business credit. One of the very first tasks you accomplished...

Until now we’ve dealt a lot with processes – your production process, your lead generation process, your customer service process. In step 17 of 30 Steps to Build a Better Business, we’ll focus on the numbers. Many small business owners make the mistake of not measuring their business performance or only measuring one area of their business, like sales. While it’s better to measure something than nothing at all, not measuring enough can be almost as bad. Let’s go back...

The practical wisdom and real-life advice offered in the 30 Steps to Build a Better Business blog series is now available in a paperback or instantly downloadable eBook! Here’s what’s inside: The 6 business building blocks every small business must have Strategies and techniques to help you transition from ‘the dayjob’ to being a full-time business owner 20+ innovative marketing and promotion methods for first-time or part-time entrepreneurs Low-cost or free small business productivity...

In Step 12 to Building a Better Business you looked at ways to speed the rate of cash coming into your business. In this step, we’ll discuss ways to slow the rate at which cash leaves your business through expenses. Here are some options to consider: Pay With Checks – The same reason you don’t want to accept checks from your customers is the same reason you want to pay with them whenever possible. Checks take longer to process, which means you hang on to money in your bank account...

If there’s one thing that is a constant concern for most small businesses, it  is the availability of cash. Day to day fluctuations in cash flow can limit a business’s ability to respond to needs and opportunities as they arise. The obvious way to ease short-on-cash woes is to sell more, so you can earn more revenue and bring more cash into the business. But, another equally important, yet less obvious way is to increase how fast you receive cash into your business. Think about it....

Over the years, I’ve had the chance to see and work with a number of different businesses. What I’ve noticed is that most small businesses often hit a wall within the first 1-3 years of existence. They have a good product, paying customers, but for some reason can’t ever seem to move from being a surviving business, to being a thriving business. But the truth is, most of these businesses could readily move to the next level, just by fine-tuning some key areas of their operations. After...