As most business owners know, qualifying for a business loan or a line of credit is very hard. Bank lending criteria is so strict that few companies ever manage to get any financing. But that is changing.

If you own a company that sells goods or services to other businesses (or the government), then there are two financing options that are available to you. They are invoice factoring and purchase order financing.

Are your clients taking up to 60 days to pay their invoices? Consider invoice factoring.

Selling to mid size and large companies is great, as they can provide you with reliable and steady business. However, their payment terms are always challenging. They usually demand the right to pay in up to 60 days. In the meantime, you must cover paying rent, salaries and suppliers. This can easily be fixed by factoring financing. Factoring can eliminate the 60-day wait and get your invoice paid in 2 days. The process is simple, you sell your invoices to a factoring company, who pays you up front for them (less a small fee). You get your money up front, while the factoring company waits to get paid.

Need money to pay your suppliers? Consider purchase order financing.

If you sell products as a reseller or wholesaler, then your biggest challenge is getting the financing to pay your suppliers. In this case, purchase order financing may be the right solution for you. Purchase order funding provides you with the necessary funds to cover your supplier expenses, allowing you to fulfill the order and deliver to your clients. The transaction is then settled when your client pays their invoice and the collateral is the purchase order from your client.

Conclusion

Both factoring and purchase order funding are easy to obtain and can be set up in days. The biggest requirement is that you own a profitable company and that you do business with reputable clients.

Sometimes, we get stressed when everything happens all at once. When this happens, a person should take a deep breathe and try to find something to do for a few minutes to get their mind off of the problem. A person could take a walk, listen to some music, read the newspaper or do an activity that will give them a fresh perspective on things.

When facing a current or upcoming task at your job or business that overwhelms you with a lot of anxiety, divide the task into a series of smaller steps and then complete each of the smaller tasks one at a time. Completing these smaller tasks will make the stress more manageable and increases your chances of success.

Another technique that is very helpful is to have a small notebook of positive statements that make us feel good. Whenever you come across an affirmation that makes you feel good, write it down in a small notebook that you can carry around with you in your pocket. Whenever you take a break from your business task, open up your small notebook and read those statements.

In dealing with your anxieties at your job, learn to take it one day at a time. While the consequences of a particular fear may seem real, there are usually other factors that can not be anticipated and can affect the results of any situation. Get all of the facts of the situation and use them to your advantage.

As a Layman, I know that our anxieties and stresses can be difficult to manage at our place of work and in the business world. The more control you have over your stresses and anxieties, the better off you will be in the long run at your job and other business endeavors.

In this year citizens of Florida gave their opinion. They decided that they are no longer paying huge property taxes. They submitted their vote for reducing these taxes to 30 percent. This means that all government entities will have to decrease their expenses by 30 percent for rendering their services. All Government agencies have to decrease their budgets and sustain within 70 percent.

This has caused a frightfulness of some sort for Government agencies. This is because the budget they were using will no longer be available in this year. But, there is a method to recover the lost revenue. That remedy is to charge more amount for traffic tickets, traffic citations, parking tickets, speeding tickets and red light violations. What used to be a one-hundred pound traffic citation is now changed to a four-hundred pound traffic citation. You can say that as soon as the red lights start to flash behind you, you can hear your bank account go ‘Ka-chink’.

Yes, you may have to pay more amount for every driving fault because of this fact. Who can blame the police? The agencies have to work with less budget. The citizens of Florida have to suffer even more because the voters spoke out their voice. Therefore, they have also spoken back by saying, “we will charge more to all traffic citations and traffic tickets across the board”.

Commonly the person who drive, don’t have that kind of cash on hand to pay for the traffic citation when it is due and have to rely on other methods. In such times BobCOP warrants and Citations Payment System comes into scene. Its your privilege that you can use this payment system to pay for the traffic penalty. Put this on the card so as you can have your cash in your hand and still pay for your citation. You need not have to worry if you don’t have the amount with you at the end of the week. This is the easiest way to pay violation penalties.

BobCOP offers many more ways to pay, including paying for almost everything you need to pay for. BobCOP will manage all penalties due to any government body and everywhere in the country. This is the company named BobCOP has been around on the net for ten years and operates directly with court and police jurisdictions to help you in paying the traffic tickets, speeding tickets, parking tickets, Fastrak™ violations, and most other traffic citations or collections. This is all done on the net and it’s done within seconds. In this regard that’s the good part. Its fast, accurate and maintains a private record for you, so you are always be sure that it has been taken care of. Visit http:www.bobcop.com and try it for yourself.

Please be absolutely sure, citizens of Florida, that your traffic citation will be managed professionally. It is taken care by the professional people at BobCOP who will handle your traffic tickets suitably. No more worries, not till the agencies begin to raise the penalties again on your traffic citations and parking tickets.

One area in which an extranet is particularly useful is in litigation, where a large number of parties require a massive number of documents over a fixed period of time.

Keeping things organized
An extranet provides a single location dedicated to the individual case. Access to documents can be defined by the need of the user. For example, documents relating to clients are very different than those required by co-counsel. An extranet allows everything to reside in one place, but access can be defined by individual needs. It also automates alerts – so that users know the instant a new document has been posted, and can find it quickly in a dedicated folder.

Many extranets go beyond the simple sharing of documents. Many include tools such as a comment function, calendars, project trackers, and approval functions. These tools can be used to report on the all activities and on the progress of the case.

Providing a permanent record
All actions taken within the extranet are recorded, and most extranets provide powerful search tools that allow users to quickly see who did what, and when they did it. All actions are name and date stamped, providing a complete record of activity in what is often a fast moving environment where documentation is difficult to manage.

Easy to setup and use
Extranets that are offered by application service providers can be created and used in a matter of days. It’s a simple matter of subscribing to a service that provides all the technology and training. Many are so intuitive that they require no training at all – they’re as easy to use as email.

A secure environment
Managing legal documents requires the highest level of security. Extranets require an id and password for access, and many provide encryption of all transmissions.

And when the case is over . . .
It is fast and easy to close the extranet and download all of the information. Often, litigators will create an extranet for each case they handle, and simply close it at the conclusion of the case.

For instance, if a company intends to send a power point presentation to a specific group engaged in a particular task through email, it has to break the presentations into small parts with each section attached to a separate email. The sections do not arrive at the same time, which could create confusions for everyone involved. However, with an extranet all these presentations can be sent at the same time, all intact, automatically filled into a single project folder with all the other related materials.

Moreover, extranets generate automatic email alerts, informing the recipients that the presentations are available; they also provide a comment function that allows each user to share their point-of-view.

Extranets can handle large files

Additionally, an extranet can handle any size of document for document sharing purposes. With e-mail, however, there is a risk of large attachments not passing through the company firewall. An extranet assures that important documents get to the right place, ready for instant response, and puts related documents and messages together. Thus, the budget, schedule, strategic plan, power point presentation, notes, and comments - all appear on the same page. There is no sorting required through a long list of unrelated emails.

Although an email is electronic and instantaneous, it is not a project management tool and does not offer many collaboration functions, whereas an extranet supports the concepts of an organization, workflow, and security. Therefore, extranets can effectively organize a company’s marketing, external and internal communications.

A secure environment

In addition, many extranets are secured with 128-bit SSL encryption. Email, on the other hand, can be accessed by anyone and does not protect the confidentiality of a company’s information.

Mexicans are so eager to buy that they come to the USA looking for products instead of waiting around for someone to call them and sell them something. They visit US trade shows, organizations and many companies. I constantly have someone in San Diego visiting from Mexico to speak with me on how they can find products of all kinds to export.

Who’s looking for products? Mainly wholesale distributors and retailers. They are looking for products to sell in retail stores or to other distributors in Mexico, most of the time they will buy truckloads of product and export them to Mexico themselves, handling the shipping, imports and tariffs.

Why do they do this? Why are they so eager to buy US products? Simple, they don’t have Mexican made products they can sell and they want to be the first to carry a new American product. They know if they are the first to market with a new product they can make a lot of money very fast. After that they just restock their customer’s shelves.

The big question I’m asked by my consulting clients is: how do I get started exporting to Mexico?

To export to Mexico you can be passive or active. You can go after the business or wait until they come looking for you, and believe me, if you have a good product, eventually they will.

—Passive Approach—

The passive approach to getting business is to make sure Mexican businesspeople can find you. Here are a few tactics on how to reach exporters:

-You have to make sure your products are in US trade shows. You don’t have to go yourself, maybe a customer sells at trade shows or you hire a broker that goes to trade shows.

-Make sure all your products and sales materials have an international phone number (not just a USA toll free number) as well as an email address. This includes your website, product labels, business cards and brochures.

-Have the right information ready. Make sure you already know what your international price will be. It’s usually much lower than your US price, especially if they will pay the export fees and transportation. You also need all the product specifications like weight, dimensions, case count or pallet count.

—Active Approach—

If you are serious about selling to Mexico and would like to do it NOW you have to be more active. You can’t just wait for people to find you because it can take months or even years if you don’t have any promotions in the marketplace.

The first thing you have to do is learn more about your target market. How much are people paying in Mexico for your product or a similar product? How much are they paying to import and transport those products? What are the profit margins for the distributors and retailers? Where could you sell your products? How many stores are there in Mexico?

Once you learn more about your target market and you develop your price strategy it’s time to find customers. Visit Mexican trade shows, look for US distributors already selling in Mexico and find brokers.

After you educate yourself a bit more on the Mexican marketplace you also need to determine what kind of support your new found customers will need in Mexico. Do you have a product that sells itself or do you need store promotion, POS (Point of Sale) material, sales commissions, or some other support.

Many times my customers tell me “I just want to sell my product in the USA and someone can export it, sell it, merchandise it and distribute it”. Well, this is possible. I’ve helped companies sell products like mayonnaise, water, margarine and other products that sell themselves in this fashion. But if your product is not a “first necessity” product or name brand, chances are you’ll either have to do some promotion or give a very good price to distributors and importers.

1. Sell More Services to Your Existing Clients

Instead of spending all that time and money trying to get new business, why not try to sell more services to your existing client base?

If you are an accounting and tax consulting firm, for example, you likely have clients who need some assistance in their record keeping and documentation. In addition to your year-end tax services, could you provide monthly bookkeeping and financial statements, accounting system setups, training in accounting software, or other services to assist your client?

Monthly services, in addition to annually billed fees, will help you smooth out your cashflow and minimize the seasonal nature of your business.

2. Mass Market Your Advice by Productizing Your Services

Could you produce a folio, special report, newsletter, e-book, book, audio cassette, video, or course? If so, you could enjoy making money even when you’re not billing for your time. While asleep or on vacation, the sale of your information products could be generating additional income for you.

Sell such products through direct mail, mail order, exporting, and Internet marketing (your own website, your own affiliate programs, eBay auctions, and so on).

As well as the passive, residual income that information products can produce for you, they also help establish your credentials as an expert. This, in turn, produces more consulting opportunities for you.

3. Perform Group Consulting

Seminars, workshops, and teleclasses enable you to help many participants in a cost-effective manner. In addition to paying for admission, your attendees may also purchase some of your information products or even become your regular consulting clients.

4. Consider Additional Markets

Could you sell your consulting services to federal, state, provincial, or municipal governments? Could you be an expert trial witness?

If you consult with local clients, could you extend your reach nationally or internationally by using the telephone and Internet?

These few ideas are a starting point for you to brainstorm all the possibilities for exploding your consulting income.

Previously in this series on website development, we’ve

talked about selecting one message or theme to be

communicated to your customer as a means of defining your website, and considering the customer’s perspective in terms of how the website is developed and presented. Now we’ll discuss how your product or service can be explained to the customer simply and concisely.

Let’s ask this question. When you’re surfing the ‘net, how

long do you want it to take at any particular website for you to figure out if the website has what you’re searching for? Not long. When potential customers are surfing the Internet, you have a matter of seconds to get their attention and convince them that your website has something that’s worth more than a cursory glance.

Some webmasters attempt to accomplish this objective by using a lot of “bells and whistles”, flashy things or goodness forbid, sounds and music. Things like electronic greeting cards, screen-savers or free email services are just a few of the tools used to try and get potential customers to stay at a particular website for longer periods of time. It’s affectionately called making your website “sticky”.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those methods, unless the purpose of your website is to sell vacuum widgets to your customers. If that’s the case, your customer will be little interested in anything other than the smooth, efficient and economical operation of their vacuum equipment, and the products or services that will help them to accomplish that. But, back to our subject.

Your objective then, is to get your customer’s attention and communicate to him simply and quickly what your product or service is and how its purchase will benefit him. This is best accomplished by utilizing the basic question model employed by journalists in developing a news story: Who, what, when, where, and why? For your purposes, you’ll only need to answer three of these: Who, what, why?

“Who” explains who you are or who your company is. This gives you an opportunity to demonstrate either yours or your company’s experience or expertise in the area of the

customer’s interest or concern. “What” explains your product or service, and provides you with an opportunity to highlight for the customer its features. “Why” explains the benefits of using your product or service, and also offers an opportunity for you to distinguish yourself and your product from the competition.

By answering the above questions, you can completely but briefly give your customer enough information to determine whether or not they’re interested in what you’re offering.

Another thing that’s important to remember when introducing your product or service, is to communicate with the customer as if you’re sitting down and having a nice conversation. No one wants to feel as if they’re reading a novel or trying to unravel Shakespeare. In fact, it shouldn’t feel to them as if they’re reading at all. It should feel as if they’re involved in conversation.

Keep things simple, concise and uncomplicated. If you choose to use humor or wit, that’s great because it can keep the interaction interesting and engaging for your customer. Just make sure that you have the talent to be humorous or witty. Otherwise, you may appear disingenuous and your customers may be turned off.

Next: How can the customer be guided to buybuy now?

See you next time!

There are so many new styles of flip flops: beaded, leather, sequins that women feel it is easy to get away with wearing them to work.

An employee of West Glenn Communications comments that she wears flip-flops on the days she doesn’t have important meetings with clients or avoids wearing them if she knows that someone who disapproves will be in the office.

Thousands of women across the country consider flip-flops an indispensable element in their summer wardrobe.

An Old Navy and Gap online survey showed that flip-flops were at the top of the list as summer work attire for high school and college students. More than 31 % of the women surveyed said that flip-flops were essential part for their summer work wardrobe.

Many companies feel differently.

A spokeswoman for BNP Paribas says that if a dress code says no beachwear this includes flip flops.

Style experts advise that flip-flops could be detrimental to a career. Younger women are the ones who tend to wear them to work.

Style commentator Meghan Cleary says, “Shoes convey the mood of a woman. Wearing flip-flops conveys the mood that you are relaxed and on vacation. That’s not a good message in the office,”

Doctors also have concerns about the effect of flip-flops on the feet.

Doctors at the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons say that flip-flops are connected to a rising number of heel problems among teens and young adults.

A representative recently said, “We’re seeing more heel pain than ever in patients 15 to 25 years old, a group that usually doesn’t have this problem.” She said that thin soled flip-flops give no arch support and can intensify abnormal biomechanics in foot motion. This will ultimately cause pain and inflammation.

Flip-flops have been around for at least 70 years, originating from traditional Japanese woven, and possibly wooden soled sandals in New Zealand.

The Y-shaped and flat soled sandal is known all over the world and to all social classes.
It is very common in developing countries for its affordable price and sometimes the only shoe used because it is easy to make.

The term “flip-flop” gets its name from the slapping sound the sandal makes when it hits the ground and the heel.

A few years ago the life of the flip flop changed completely. They became trendy and popular. All kinds of stores sell them in a variety of colors with all kinds of decorations. There is even a bridal Flip flop which is full of Swarovski crystals and sells for £140.

In June 2005 the Northwestern University’s champion woman’s lacrosse team wore flip-flops to the White House to meet the President. It was considered inappropriate attire and the women were criticized

Ellen Campuzano, president of the Committee of Color and Trends, a New York-based forecasting service specializing in footwear and accessories, believes that flip-flops’ popularity has almost run its course.

“Usually these trends come and go in about five years,” she said. “I think we’ve reached the peak. They can’t be any more widespread, so maybe next summer something will replace them.”