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Home Office Vs. Leasing An Office Space
Everyone who is starting their own business has one fundamental decision to make. Where are you going to do all your work? This decision will have an effect on almost every aspect of your business...
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Choose A Type Of Business Structure For Your Small Business – Part One
As you’re planning and starting your new business one of the first things to decide is what legal structure or ‘entity’ you’re going to create. There are many to choose from, starting with the very...
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Choose A Type Of Business Structure For Your Small Business – Part Two
In a previous article we discussed the non-corporate forms of company organization. This post will cover the three most widely used legal entities in business, the LLC, C-Corporation and...
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How To Price Your Small Business Services
Your business background could be a great help or hindrance when it comes to setting the pricing for your new small business. If your background is in the same, or related, field then you’re going to...
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How To Lease Office Space For A Small Business
If you’ve made the decision to start your own small business and realized that you don’t want to work from home, then you need office space for your business! How do you go about finding and leasing...
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Who Should Get A 1099 Form?
It’s the end of the year and time to think about closing the books and working on taxes. One of the many tax documents small businesses need to concern themselves with is a Form 1099. A 1099 is much...
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Does Your Small Business Need A Business Plan?
What’s the first thing every consultant will ask when you tell them you’re starting a new business? “Do you have a business plan?” We agree that a business plan is important but maybe not for the...
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Need A Logo For Your Small Business
We Got To Select From 187 Different Logos All For The Price Of One Design If you need a logo for your business we highly recommend 99designs.com! We have used 99designs on two different projects in the...
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Managing Your Clients’/Customers’ Expectations
What’s the best way to screw up a relationship with a client? There are seemingly endless ways for this to happen in business. I’ve seen it over and over again in many different ways from damage to a...
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Follow Your SIMPLE Path To Small Business Freedom!
Our goal with Help Start My Small Business is to help you achieve the dream of successful small business ownership. This doesn’t mean you’re ‘getting by’ running a small business. This doesn’t mean...
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The Life & Career Of Whitney Houston – A Lesson In Customer Service
Last night while my wife and I were watching ABC’s 20/20 tribute to Whitney Houston, I was reminded of something from long ago. I remember life BEFORE Whitney Houston (wow, that’s dating myself)...
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The Truth About Goals!
One of the most talked about topics in business and personal motivation is goals and goal setting. I want to give you the truth about goals. This is our take on why some succeed in goal setting while...
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How I Learned To Be Confident About My Business
This is for all the people struggling with the inner demons of self-criticism and doubt. We’re not talking about lack of motivation or drive; it’s more than that. It’s something I’ve struggled with...
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Community Service and Small Business
We are big believers in working hard to build a business that will support our families and nurture our entrepreneurial spirit. A substantial investment in time and energy is required to organize and...
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What Is Market Research And Why Should You Care?
You’re an expert at what you do and nobody else does it better. Getting new business should be a piece of cake and everyone will be banging down your door to give you money. WRONG! The ‘if you start...
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Creating A Mission Statement Too Soon Could be a Mistake
What is the best way for any business owner to convey their spirit and passion for their small business? A mission statement! Developing a mission statement for your small business is not required but...
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Trade Associations – Strength in Numbers
Not another meeting! I can’t afford the time for all these meetings! We say you can’t afford not to go to all these meetings! We’ve always been passionate about mentoring and networking....
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The Money to Start Your Small Business
Don’t let money, or lack thereof, be your biggest regret in starting your business! Many seasoned business owners regret not waiting to start their business until they had some money. Starting out...
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Don’t Blow the Budget!
I’m surprised you’re actually reading this! Most small business owners don’t want anything to do with accounting or business budgeting. Heck, most people don’t even do budgets for their personal...
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My Mistake at the Bank
It’s amazing to me the level of crappy service we’re willing to accept. Self-checkouts at the grocery store, ATM machines, rude sales associates and incompetent employees are just a handful of what I...
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Funds Emergency
In a perfect world of small business everyone pays on time and there are never any disputes over invoices. As you can imagine this is not always the case. What happens when you didn’t get the check...
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It’s All About the Package
Consumers love packaging! Corporations spend billions of dollars a year on the design and production of packaging for their products. Could they just stick the potato chips in a plain brown paper bag...
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To Hire, or not to Hire!
This is Sam Sam began living his dream about 6 months ago. He started a lawn service with his brother. They do grassing cutting, lawn care, fertilizing and mulching. Some thought it beneath Sam as...
View ArticleWhat Is The DiSC Profile
And How Can You Use It In Your Business? Joel and I are big fans of the DiSC profile. Over the next few weeks I will be posting a series of videos explaining why we believe in it, how you can take one...
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Sell Your Way to Success
What do you consider yourself to be in life or your small business? Are you a manager? Are you a connector? Are you a doer?! No matter what you believe yourself to be, the reality is, you’re a...
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Balancing Act
I was recently having a conversation with a local business owner in my Rotary club. We were both commenting to each other on our ‘weeks from hell.’ I had just returned from week-long church youth...
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The Business Triangle
We have a saying in our company when we’re dealing with a business. ‘You get two.’ It refers to the triangle of attributes for any business or company. It can apply to anything from a fortune 500...
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The Worst Part of your Better Half
…..in sickness and in health, for better or worse, as long as you both shall live…… I do! Oh crap, what have I done?! You could be one of many who find themselves in one of those ‘worse’ moments when...
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The Costs and your Client
We’ve been in business almost 12 years and have struggled with something for some time. How do you effectively present pricing to clients? Do they only need to know the overall cost? Should you break...
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Traveling the Holiday Road
Who doesn’t love a vacation?! As I’m writing this post our family (mostly my wife Karen) is preparing for our first family driving vacation. Much like Clark Griswold and his family we’re preparing for...
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My Vacation is Your Business
What in the world does my vacation have to do with your business? A lot! As all you regular readers know I just got back from a long journey across our great country to South Dakota and back. We (I...
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The 5 Reasons Master Planning is Essential to Your Business
Conventional business plans are crap! Business owners spend months researching, compiling data & writing this mostly useless document only to stick it on a shelf never to be used again. Why then...
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That Stinking Stress of Your Business!
Stress is often synonymous with business ownership. Let me tell you something, it doesn’t have to be! To be truly effective at running a business you’ll need to learn how to eliminate the stressors you...
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The Fundamentals of Getting Work – Part One
Fear of not having enough work is one thing most business owners freak out about. How do I find clients? I wish it was as easy as telling you how to find milk at the grocery store but it isn’t. Finding...
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The Fundamentals of Getting Work – Part Two
After implementing last week’s ideas you’re swamped with leads for your business, right? If you missed it last week (part one) was all about marketing for your business. Read it here. Hopefully,...
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The Fundamentals of Getting Work – Part Three – Delivery!
Many would argue that marketing and sales are the only things important in getting work for your service business. I disagree. You have to actually do the work! This is the ‘service’ part of your...
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Fire Your Client!
I just had an extremely frustrating and stressful interchange with a client on the final pricing for their master bathroom project. What did I do? I fired them as a client! It wasn’t an ugly situation...
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You’re Special, So Don’t Fake It
Whatever you do, don’t force it! This can be applied to all sorts of stuff. Parts need to fit just right in so many ways. Remember the time when ‘assembly was required’ and two pieces weren’t going...
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Managing Distractions
I’m going to admit something to you….. This post is more of a therapy session for me than informational for you. As you walk through my head during the next five minutes maybe we can find some common...
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Make it Easy and Be Helpful
I hate big business! Not for the same reasons that the 99% hates big business. I don’t hate them for making a profit or exploiting the little guy, I hate them because they really don’t care about me,...
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Take Control of Yourself
One of the hardest things about business ownership is learning to control yourself! I’m not talking about skipping desert. I’m talking about controlling your thoughts and actions at work. This...
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