CEO, Owners

The decision of timing on when to hire a CFO is a challenge – do it too early, and you’re wasting resources. Wait too long, and opportunities for growth and scale may have gone unrealized due to lack of financial expertise and experience.

Ellen Wood, CEO, vcfo offers these thoughts on the need for strategic planning and more sophisticated accounting and reporting:

Lessons learned from exporting goods and services abroad can also help companies improve their domestic business

Ironically, the recent attempted nationwide boycott of restaurants and other businesses by workers to demonstrate their importance to the economy actually highlighted vulnerability of many smaller businesses.
As one expert recently told an audience of small business leaders: “If your business can’t survive without low paying immigrant labor, your business model is wrong.”
His challenge came as the nascent stirrings of a fundamental change in American business practices starts to gain steam.

Talent is at the heart of every great business, pushing toward common goals and helping to achieve shared success. It goes without saying that all departments in a small business are critical to delivering results and meeting customer needs.

Ridgefield, NJ----In response to many audience queries on how to grow a company, Small Business Digest solicited contributions from executives and experts who themselves were charged with growing their enterprises.

More than 100 of their contributions are contained in a unique new book Recalculating, 97+ Experts On Driving Small Business Growth. It is available starting September 15^th where all good books are sold.

While four out of five start-ups fail within five years, successful entrepreneurs often have common traits or habits.

Our company, Information Strategies, Inc., recently asked more than 100 presidents, experts, and advisors to contribute to our new book, RECALCULATING.  Among the things we asked were their thoughts on what were the traits they found most common to their success.

The results surprised some when they heard them, but after reflection seem logical.

Among them were:

·         Passion and commitment

Although the summer season is one of the most common periods of time for small business employees to request vacation, the effects of such leave taking has become more of a year round problem in recent years.

Howard Tarnoff, Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Ceridian, says the failure to take time away from work has been shown to be detrimental on a person’s physical and mental health, it also impacts work performance and productivity.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are constantly looking to new technology to create a workforce that is more productive, more efficient and more innovative. In recent years, new technologies like cloud computing and open source software have made even the most historically complex and costly systems once reserved for large enterprises more affordable for SMBs. Identifying technology solutions that enable true productivity, all while staying under budget, is a goal of all SMBs.

As he likes to say, Jason Lutz is the creator, founder, designer, and sole manager of the Vermont Cedar Chair Company.

He, built his company on an idea and a self-described passion for natural materials spawned by a charity mission to Jamaica.

In 2007, the summer after his fourth year of college at Ohio State University, Lutz had the opportunity to travel to Jamaica for charity work.

One in every four small business owner’s current primary concern is the impact of the upcoming presidential election, according to Capital One’s Spark Business Barometer.

Keri Gohman, Senior Vice President, Small Business Bank, Capital One said the Barometer also revealed that small business optimism dropped in Q1, and 41% of business owners believe conditions are good/excellent; compared to 50% during the same time in 2015.