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Articles by Stephen Sheinbaum
Franchise Features
Partner sponsored content from our knowledgeable partners. Put their expertise to work for you. Last month's Franchise Leadership & Development Conference returned to Atlanta for the largest event in 18 years, boasting a total of 460 attendees and close to 300 franchisors, representing 169 brands. Franchise Update Media 4,152 0 For years we've expected prospects to apply to an online form to generate a lead. Today, viewers are much more dynamic on their approach.
When Banks and Fintech Collide
Home / Articles / Read Article Recipient's Email Address(es) (Separate multiple addresses with a comma) Your Email Address Send a copy to myself Your Message (optional) When Banks and Fintech Collide Date: Jul 19, 2016 @ 07:00 AM All things evolve. Living creatures evolve, whether they are people and animals or plants: They change to adapt to their surroundings.
The 5 Habits of Successful Employee Management
Join us Nov 9th in Los Angeles for a day of inspiration, networking and hear from Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jon Taffer, Carmen Electra, Apolo Ohno and more. Many different attributes can define a successful company, from capitalization and execution to leadership and technology. Most successful companies have one thing in common, however, which are employees who feel engaged and valued. Employees who are satisfied with their work have a major impact on the growth and success of your business.
Staying on Top of Your Vendor Payments
The bill for a critical slice of your inventory has once again been sitting on your desk for more than 30 days. The vendor has sent a reminder, and it included a hand-written note that you hadn’t received when you were late in the past: It says that the vendor won’t be able to keep offering you merchandise discounts unless you pay on time. It’s time for your business to get on top of vendor payments.
The Rise of Mobile Payments
Mobile payments -- here to make your life 100 times easier. By now, you’ve all heard that commercial that asks “what’s in your wallet” and know that the answer is not money. But increasingly, consumers aren’t paying with anything in their wallet at all; they are paying with their smartphones, and small businesses should be getting ready to let them do so.
Simple Ways To Boost Sales Through Your Existing Customers
Many small business owners devote a great deal of energy to finding new customers. That’s always a good idea, but it misses a larger resource for growth: existing customers. One of the keys to a successful business is to persuade a customer to buy again–and again. According to a recent report by Accenture, 75 percent of consumers are more likely to buy repeatedly from a business that recognizes them by name and recommends options based on past purchases.
Organization & Management Tools Every Entrepreneur Needs to Boost Productivity
You’ve heard it time and time again: You’ve got to work smarter, not harder. The best way for any entrepreneur to work smarter is to have the best organization and time management tools at their disposal. There are lots of tools to choose from these days, and since many of the newer ones work on a smartphone, you can stay on top of your productivity without being chained to your desk.Poor time management and organization can cost you and your business tremendous amounts of money.
Why Social Media Is Important For Your Small Business
By now, a majority of small business owners know that social media—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn—are important for reaching prospects, customers and business partners. However, that still doesn’t make it easy to block out the time for creating and executing a social media strategy, especially in businesses that don’t have a dedicated employee to manage these channels.
Top Investments SMBs Will Make in 2017
To grow your business, you’ve got to invest in it. That’s a given. It, however, can be a difficult decision for small business owners to make. With capital and research resources limited, how can they know you are investing in the right elements to grow? One way is to see which investments are trending among other small business owners.
How Marketing Can Help Your Small Business In 2017
Small business owners have an uneasy relationship with marketing. According to a recent study by Vistaprint Digital, only 37.4 percent of small business owners rate spending time on marketing as “very” or “fairly” important. On the other hand, big businesses invest big money in their marketing efforts—with big results that help them dominate many sectors of our economy.
5 Tips to Improve Your Business’ Customer Service
If you want your business to grow, you’ve got to have a great product – and perhaps most importantly – great customer service. Whether your business sells shoes or serves up delicious pizza, you must have a customer service plan to ensure that customers come back and refer your business to friends and family. Taking these five steps can help you incorporate better customer service into your business. Your employees are the first point of contact with anyone who walks through the door.
It's Nearly 2017. Do You Know Where Your Inventory Is? by @MCCfunding
Thanks to careful inventory planning, you’re on track to have a good holiday season in 2016. Now it’s time to set new inventory plans, for 2017. The coming year will be one of changes in the White House, on Capitol Hill and, perhaps even from the Federal Reserve.
3 Ways Fintech Has Improved the Customer Experience in Banking | Finance Magnates
This article was written by Stephen Sheinbaum who is the founder of Bizfi. When dealing with large institutions, the interactions can prove to be cumbersome and gruelling. Take the lead from today’s leaders. FM London Summit, 14-15 November, 2016.
5 Ways Small Business Owners Can Improve Customer Retention
Getting a new customer for your small business is great. Getting an old customer to do business with you over and over again is even better. Too many small business owners fail to see that it can be very expensive to acquire a new customer. They don’t understand that their money may be better spent on efforts to win repeat business from the customers they already have.
5 Things You Must Do To Run Your Business
Posted by Contributor on 10/04/16 • Categorized as Advice For The Young At Heart As an entrepreneur, your days will be filled with surprises and unexpected lessons. You must manage through them, correcting course as necessary, to keep realizing your vision for your company. While there are many tasks you must juggle to do this, these five tips will help you stay grounded as an entrepreneur: What new opportunities are others in your industry seeing? What new challenges are they facing?
The Small-Business Guide to Managing Minimum Wage Increases by @MCCfunding
Payroll is one of the biggest expenses any business has. It’s also become one of the main topics this campaign season. I’m not here to take a position on the politics of the minimum wage, but I do think this is a good time for every small-business owner to reflect on labor costs and how they relate to the bottom line. After all, our employees won’t have any jobs if we don’t manage every aspect of our business well.First, some background.
When Banks and Fintech Collide
Hi, I thought you would be interested in this article from Equipment Finance Advisor. All things evolve. Living creatures evolve, whether they are people and animals or plants: They change to adapt to their surroundings. Structures can evolve too: A home is expanded to meet the needs of a larger family, while a building -- like the one next to my office -- can be transformed from vintage 1930s commercial office space into a 21st century hotel, complete with several new floors.
Budgeting for Your Business
You’ve opened a small business and your sales are strong. Before the revenue can hit the bottom line, however, there are expenses to pay. Many of them are major, and most will recur each month. The trouble is, not enough small business owners keep key expenses in mind when making their financial projections. Here’s what you should be thinking of: Lastly, the U.S. Small Business Administration has several excellent resources to help small business owners plan and track their business budgets.
3 Ways Small Banks Can Collaborate With Fintech
This article was written by Stephen Sheinbaum who is the founder of Bizfi. Small banks are the bedrock of businesses in many communities all across America. They are on Main Street with the businesses they serve, and they have relationships with these businesses that go well beyond the bank’s four walls. As technology continues to drive more and more aspects of financial services, small banks have found themselves at an increasing disadvantage.
Keep Winter Biz Running Through Summer
For months, in temperatures close to freezing, you served your customers. You kept them fed until well into the night and you tended to their skis and snowboards. Or maybe you operate along America’s southern-most shores and your best customers come when the snow is deep up north. For you, high season means an abundance of fins and fishing lines. There were times when you stretched your staff and your finances to the limit meeting your high season demand.
5 Ways Small-Business Owners Can Improve Customer Retention
Join us for a free, live webinar and learn how to drive revenue with content marketing. Tune in 8/4 at 10:30 a.m. PT. Register Now » Your small business runs on customers and your willingness to grow. Now more than ever before, customer experience plays an important part in retaining repeat business. Whether your small business is a retail store or a physician’s office, you need to make sure your customers are getting what they need from your products and services.
How to Leverage Google Advertising to Reach More Customers
Small businesses have many tools available to them to help reach customers and prospects. They can advertise in traditional newspapers or online. They can send mailers to targeted zip codes or use social media to identify specific interest groups. If your business is going to advertise online, it’s important to understand how it works, and that begins with understanding how Google advertising works. To me, Google’s advertising program, AdWords, functions like a Swiss Army Knife.
Daily Tips for Small Business Owners on Going Green
Earth Day was April 22nd, but that doesn’t mean small business owners can’t be eco-friendly the other 364 days of the year. By better understanding the impact of their business on the environment, reducing their consumption of energy and water, using greener products and establishing a green strategy, small business owners can save money while saving the planet.
4 Tools That Make Your Small Business Look Big
Join us for a free, live webinar covering social media strategies to increase sales. Tune in 5/17 at 9 a.m. PT. Register Now » Being a small company has its benefits: You’re agile, able to change directions at a moment’s notice. You’ve got autonomy, as your business is independent of a giant conglomerate. No, you’re not attracting the same number of consumers as a household name business, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look every bit as professional to the consumers you do reach.
4 Tools That Make Your Small Business Look Big
Being a small company has its benefits: You’re agile, able to change directions at a moment’s notice. You’ve got autonomy, as your business is independent of a giant conglomerate. No, you’re not attracting the same number of consumers as a household name business, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look every bit as professional to the consumers you do reach. You can make your small business look big.
The 4 Most Important Business Management Tools
What are the most important tools in your business? If you’re a restaurant owner, you might say your 12-burner stove or your pasta sheeter. If you’re in construction, it might be your pneumatic nailer or your demolition hammer. There are many tools which are specific to certain tasks and industries. But when you get to the back office, there are some tools every small business should have.
Strategies for Leading your Company through a Successful Rebrand
Rebranding a business is a great opportunity for a company to show how it has evolved over time and debut its forward-thinking vision and mission to its constituents. It also is a tremendous undertaking, which requires precise strategy, exact timing and a great amount of preparation that must be communicated from the top all the way down. CEOs must make sure that everyone on the rebranding team understands why the rebranding is happening, and what new company vision will be communicated.
How to Balance Work & Life
As you grow your small business, responsibilities begin to pile up. The time you need to spend at work can take away from the time you want to spend at home. The experts say it’s essential to maintain a balance which allows you to focus on your business and experience the life moments you may never get back. Setting some rules can help establish a balance. If you concentrate on reaching a level of perfection for your small business, you may miss the exciting parts of owning a business.
Sheinbaum: The future of fin-tech
Predictions are a dicey business. Even with the best intentions (and the best of research), our desire to have things happen a particular way generally outweighs what actually does happen. Think back to the closing months of 2014: OnDeck and Lending Club went public and everyone was envisioning that 2015 would be a banner year for initial public offerings by alternative finance companies.
Why You Need a Disaster Plan
As a business owner, you work hard to ensure things go right, investing an incredible amount of time, money and resources to make your venture successful. Related: Don't Wait for a Disaster to Interrupt Business. Prepare Now. But then there’s Murphy’s Law.
How to Keep a Hawk's Eye on Your Holiday Season Cash Flow
Depending on the type of business you run, the December holiday season can either be the busiest time of the year or the slowest. But even the high season can be a low for your business if don’t pay careful attention to your cash flow. Take staffing for example. You know you’ll need more staff in your busy season, and you know part-time staff is the way to go. But how many workers on which days of the week and at which hours?
Should You Buy or Lease Equipment?
Small businesses are once again investing in their businesses: According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, 42% of small businesses bought or leased equipment in the first six months of 2015. If you’re going to be adding to the equipment at your business, you’re probably trying to decide whether to buy it or lease it.
Now Is the Time to Think About Your Small-Business Succession Plan
More than 50 percent of all small-business owners are 50 or older, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. That means many of America’s 28 million small-business owners are coming to that point in their lives when they need to think about a transition for their businesses.
Lift The Fog ... Give Us Regulation
Hi, I thought you would be interested in this article from Equipment Finance Advisor. Fog descends on a busy highway and catastrophe often ensues. It is hard to navigate when you can’t see the road ahead. Yet that is just what many of us in the alternative finance industry have been trying to do for the last decade.
Raising Capital? Take These 4 Steps for Success
There's a good chance that you need capital to start a company, and to grow it. And while your own savings or "friends and family funding" may have gotten you started, big growth will probably require much more. Finding and securing those increased resources is not an easy process, but it won’t be impossible if you follow these four steps for success: Step one is to investigate who puts money into your type of business. Are companies like yours financed by banks or private equity firms?
To Find Your Ideal Client Begin With a Study of Yourself
How many times have you said, “My business could get really big if I could just find the right clients”? If you have, you’re not alone: There’s not an entrepreneur that I know who hasn’t had that thought, at least once. The good news is that there are many ways to find the right clients. Here are five strategies that can be universally adopted to help you find them. Amazon, eBay and Alibaba seem to have something for everyone, but that’s just not practical for a small business.
Money Talks: Alternative Financing Might Be Right for Your Business
Most people stay pretty mum about their money. Business owners are no exception -- even when it comes to the cash they might need to have a discussion or two about: the capital they need to run their companies. They used to say nothing -- at least not publicly -- if they were turned down at the bank and less still if they sought capital from a source other than a traditional bank or union.
Here Are Your Toughest Business Competitors
Who are your competitors? If you’re a restaurant owner, you might say the restaurant in the next block or the next town. If you’re a Ford dealer, you might point to a GM showroom. If you deliver heating oil, you might name a propane vendor or a public gas utility.And you’d be right -- to a point. You’ve named your traditional competitors, the ones you’ve been facing for years.
7 Tips for Managing a Seasonal Business
One well-known challenge that any entrepreneur might face is navigating seasonal fluctuations in the businesses or industry. The key to doing so successfully involves developing skills and smart practices that will allow the company to remain profitable during off-seasons and periodic slowdowns.A seasonal fluctuation can result from dips in customer demand or supply issues.
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