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Unleashing the Power of SEO On Social Media Channels

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by Meagan D. Saxton, Social Media Specialist, ddm marketing+communications

Just as SEO best practices require revision whenever Google’s periodic core updates take effect, so do social media best practices. We don’t traditionally think of written social media content in the context of SEO, but we should.

Social media users are increasingly using the internal search functions on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and other sites to find information in lieu of Google. Including the most popularly searched keywords in your social posts can make the difference between getting seen by the right customers/clients or not.

Of course, Google also indexes public posts on LinkedIn and Twitter/X, as well as TikTok captions. Social media hashtags are not as functional as they were at their inception — with some exceptions — so optimizing your social marketing content for search is more important than ever.

Social Posts and Google

The text that Google indexes from the major social media sites is incomplete, but still substantial.

A brief summary is in order:

LinkedIn: Profile information that is publicly available is indexed by Google, making it searchable on the web. This can include job titles, company names, education, and summary sections. So is content shared publicly, such as status updates, articles, and posts.

Twitter/X: Tweets and replies to tweets that are public (i.e., not protected by a private account) are indexed by Google. The full text of the tweet, along with hashtags and mentions, can appear in search results. Google can also index text from public Twitter profiles including a user’s bio and location, if publicly shared.

Instagram: Google can index publicly visible Instagram posts, including text captions. Comments on public posts can also be indexed if they are visible and not hidden behind privacy settings. Stories are generally not indexed by Google since they are designed to be temporary.

Threads: Threads posts are publicly visible by default, so Google can index text-based content like status updates, comments, and replies. If a user’s profile is set to public, the text in the bio and posts will be indexed by Google.

TikTok: Videos have titles, text descriptions, and captions that can be indexed by Google, but the actual video content (e.g., visuals, audio) is not directly indexed. Hashtags can be indexed by Google and may show up in search results if they gain popularity.

With so much of our social content searchable, choosing the right words is important for attracting eyeballs. By offering a 10,000-foot view of the words people are searching for on any given day, Google Trends is a useful, free tool for informing your social keywords.

Even more useful, though, is each app/site’s internal search function. What are the actual users of social sites searching for on each site’s internal search engine, and how? As those internal search engines grow increasingly sophisticated, users are less likely to rely on Google to find anything on the internet at all. Historically, a social user could affix a popular hashtag to their post to ensure it picks up the right eyeballs. These days, the venerable hashtag is less important than ever.

Hashtags aren’t what they used to be

When was the last time you used a social hashtag to find something you were looking for? Chances are you arrived at what you were looking for another way. The internal search engines on each site/app are simply better at sifting through millions of posts to find the most relevant results to your search.

Hashtags are more harmless than harmful. There’s still a smart way to use them on each platform. LinkedIn recommends attaching five or fewer to your posts and articles. Users can view an updating list of the 50 most popular hashtags. A subsection under Twitter/X’s search tab shows the trending words and hashtags at any given moment; most will be words now.

Instagram still recommends using hashtags, but no more than 10, and it’s removing the ability to follow hashtags by the end of the month. Within that limit, be strategic. Use a couple big hashtags that a lot of people (i.e. 5 million or more) are using, a medium-sized one (5 thousand or more users), and a niche hashtag (fewer than 50 users) to capture a range of users. Simply using a popular hashtag because it’s popular doesn’t help when 5 million users are using it, too. Your post is likely to be very low in the search results under that hashtag.

Regardless of the platform, be strategic with your hashtags. For example, tagging a post with #socialmediamarketing as opposed to #socialmedia will limit the number of eyeballs, but capture a more relevant audience. Use the hashtag that targets the audience you’re trying to reach, rather than simply the most popular one.

Keep in mind that those hashtags are searchable forever, and can be used to build up a community in the long term. Even if they’re not popular today, the most relevant hashtags to your organization’s goals might be popular among your social followers in the future.

Capitalizing on trending topics on social media

Your organization should have a well-formed idea of the topics, messaging, and images that resonate with your audience offline and in non-social media settings. That’s your “lane.” If you don’t stay in that lane on social media, don’t be surprised if users remind you to stay there!

While it might be tempting to massage every trending topic and social hashtag on your organization’s channels to gain eyeballs, think a couple steps ahead. If a political candidate or polarizing issue is gaining popularity on social media in an image, video, or hashtag, it might be fun to join the trend. But you don’t necessarily want to be perceived as endorsing a political position, particularly if it isn’t germane to your industry.

If a trending topic is germane to your organization’s industry and expertise, it can be a chance for your brand to become a leading voice in the conversation. New government regulations that affect professionals or consumers might not be “trending” on social media beyond a small group of in-the-know users. Depending on your ability to inform potential consumers and clients, you might use your social channels to bring the issue to light beyond your niche. In a best-case scenario, a broader conversation might start trending because your social account started it.

The biggest challenge for social media professionals might be practicing restraint while staying on top of the trending topics, keywords, hashtags, and search terms — both inside and outside of each individual social channel. It’s a lot of information to take in, and knowing what to do with it requires wisdom that can only be gained with experience.

 

Meagan Saxton is a Social Media Specialist at ddm marketing + communications. She has several years of experience creating content and managing social media accounts for healthcare, higher education, and financial services organizations.


 

The Power Of Virtual CFO Services In Helping Your Business Grow

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by Arron Bennett, Founder of Bennett Financials

One of the most common reasons for a business to fail is mismanagement of finances, with 82% of businesses failing due to cash flow problems. For small business leaders, their current company is likely their first foray into managing business finances, and it can be difficult to navigate all the financial and regulatory challenges associated with managing a business.

However, hiring an in-house financial expert to manage the business’s finances may not be within reach for all business leaders. According to Indeed, the average base salary for a Chief Financial Officer in the United States is $154,348. While this number will be affected by factors including company size, small businesses may not be able to afford the cost of having a CFO on staff at all times.

Virtual CFO services are companies that provide a seasoned financial expert to handle the duties that would typically be assigned to a traditional CFO without the need for dedicated office space, other physical requirements, or even a dedicated salary. Although virtual CFO services are likely not an ideal solution for large enterprises with complex financial needs, they are an ideal alternative for small and medium-sized businesses that find themselves in over their heads managing their finances but cannot afford the salary of a full-time CFO.

Why virtual CFO services are great for small businesses

One key benefit of virtual CFO services — particularly for small and medium-sized businesses — is that they present a scalable, flexible solution based on the company’s unique needs. Financial needs vary from company to company. While some businesses might need someone to help guide their financial decisions weekly, others may only need a little assistance with essential functions.

Since virtual CFO services are billed hourly or by project, a small business can hire help for precisely what they need on a continual or as-needed basis. Virtual CFOs can help business leaders do anything from setting up bookkeeping and creating budgets or forecasts to monitoring finances. Essentially, the scope of a virtual CFO’s services is much the same as that of a full-time CFO: ensuring that the company does not overspend or underpay for any of its financial requirements.

What virtual CFO services do for small businesses

The core function of a virtual CFO is to manage a company’s finances, but this is a broad description comprising several duties, including (but not limited to) budgeting, forecasting, cash flow analysis, and accounts receivable and payable. An essential goal of a virtual CFO is to ensure the company has enough money to cover its expenses and debt payments while looking for ways the business can improve its cash flow situation.

As an outsider looking in on the company — often with years of financial experience to back them up — a virtual CFO is also uniquely positioned to help companies with financial risk management. By providing accurate data and financial insight into the company, virtual CFOs can calculate risk exposure and identify potential risks, helping leaders make better decisions about their company’s future.

Virtual CFOs can also be a valuable resource for companies to complete their financial reporting, such as preparing financial statements and other reports. This process is one of the most time-consuming for many business leaders, but it is also incredibly important since businesses are subject to regulations to which they must maintain compliance without incurring fines or harsher financial penalties. With their experience in finance, virtual CFOs can ensure no oversights are made that could cause a business to fall out of compliance.

Beyond core essential operations, virtual CFOs can also serve as valuable and trusted advisors to business leaders. For example, many virtual CFOs serve as de facto financial planners for the businesses they work for, offering advice on how leaders can maximize their business and increase profitability. Some virtual CFOs may even guide their clients through investment decisions, analyzing the business’s cash flow to ensure that the leader is making the best possible financial decisions for the company.

Finally, virtual CFOs provide strategic advice to business leaders, helping them set financial goals and ensuring that performance and goals are aligned with the business’s long-term strategy. Thanks to their extensive financial knowledge and outsider perspective, virtual CFOs have a better understanding of what is necessary for a business to grow and scale without affecting its day-to-day operations.

Virtual CFOs present a more affordable yet still scalable option for business leaders who need help managing their business finances but cannot afford to hire a full-time, in-house expert to handle their financial needs. If you are a small business leader looking to propel your company forward and usher in a new period of growth, now is the time to look into enlisting a virtual CFO service.

 

Arron Bennett of Bennett FinancialsArron Bennett founded Bennett Financials with a mission: to help businesses save substantial amounts on taxes through advanced tax strategies that are typically reserved for ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs). Over time, Arron expanded the firm’s services to include Fractional CFO roles, guiding clients on how to reinvest tax savings into strategies that skyrocket their profitability and accelerate business growth. With more than 14 years of experience in the tax industry and an accounting degree, Arron has helped Bennett Financials save clients over $15 million in taxes.


 

Digital Accessibility: Why It’s Vital For Start-Up Businesses

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In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, start-ups face many challenges as they strive to establish themselves and grow. Amidst the many considerations, one aspect that often gets overlooked but holds immense significance is digital accessibility.

As we look into this crucial topic, we’ll explore why ensuring digital accessibility is not just a moral obligation but a business imperative for start-ups aiming to thrive in the competitive business world.

Understanding Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility refers to the process of designing and developing content for digital mediums that can be used by people with a broad spectrum of abilities and disabilities. This encompasses websites, mobile applications, documents, and other digital platforms that form the backbone of modern business operations.

The Scope of Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility is not limited to a single aspect of online presence. It encompasses various elements, including:

  • Website Design: Ensuring that websites are navigable and readable for users with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments.
  • Content Creation: Producing text, images, videos, and other media that can be perceived and understood by all users, regardless of their abilities.
  • User Interface: Developing intuitive and adaptable interfaces that cater to diverse user needs and preferences.
  • Mobile Applications: Creating apps that are compatible with assistive technologies and usable across different devices and platforms.

The Importance of Inclusive Design

Inclusive design principles form the foundation of digital accessibility. By adopting an inclusive approach, start-ups can create products and services that cater for a wider audience from the outset. This ensures compliance with accessibility standards and leads to innovative solutions that benefit all users.

Assistive Technologies and Their Role

Understanding the various assistive technologies used by people with disabilities is crucial for implementing effective accessibility measures. These technologies include:

  • Screen readers for visually impaired users
  • Speech recognition software for users with motor disabilities
  • Alternative input devices for people who ca’t use traditional keyboards or mice
  • Captioning and transcription tools for users with hearing impairments

By designing with these technologies in mind, start-ups can ensure their digital offerings are truly accessible to all.

The Legal Landscape of Digital Accessibility

As the digital world continues to evolve, so does the legal framework surrounding accessibility. Start-ups must be aware of the various laws and regulations that govern digital accessibility to avoid potential legal pitfalls and ensure compliance.

Key Legislation and Guidelines

Several important pieces of legislation and guidelines shape the landscape of digital accessibility:

  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): These internationally recognised guidelines give us a detailed framework for making web content accessible.
  • Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): While primarily a US law, the ADA has implications for businesses operating globally, especially in the digital space.
  • European Accessibility Act: This EU directive aims to enhance the accessibility of products and services in EU member states.
  • Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act: This US law requires federal agencies to make their electronic information accessible to people with disabilities.

Compliance and Risk Mitigation

For start-ups, compliance with accessibility laws is not just about avoiding legal troubles; it’s about mitigating risks and building a sustainable business model. By prioritising accessibility from the outset, young companies can:

  • Avoid costly retrofitting of digital assets in the future
  • Protect themselves from potential lawsuits and damage to their reputations
  • Demonstrate corporate social responsibility and highlight their ethical business practices

The Cost of Non-Compliance

The financial implications of neglecting digital accessibility can be severe. Legal actions against non-compliant businesses have been on the rise, with settlements and legal fees potentially running into millions. For cash-strapped start-ups, such costs could be catastrophic.

The Business Case for Digital Accessibility

There is a compelling business case for digital accessibility that start-ups cannot afford to ignore. By embracing accessibility, young companies can unlock many benefits that contribute to their development and success.

Expanding Market Reach.

One of the key advantages of digital accessibility is the potential to tap into a vast and often underserved market. Consider these statistics:

  • Approximately 1 billion people globally live with some form of disability
  • The spending power of people with disabilities and their families is estimated at over $8 trillion globally

By making their digital offerings accessible, start-ups can capture a share of this substantial market, driving growth and revenue.

Enhancing User Experience for All.

Accessibility features often provide an improved experience for all users, not just those with disabilities. For example:

  • Clear, concise content benefits users with cognitive impairments and improves readability for all
  • Captions on videos aid comprehension for deaf users and enhance understanding for non-native speakers
  • Keyboard navigation assists users with motor disabilities and provides convenience for power users

By focusing on accessibility, start-ups can create more user-friendly products that appeal to a broader audience.

Boosting SEO and Online Visibility.

Many accessibility best practices support search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. By implementing accessible design principles, start-ups can:

  • Improve website structure and navigation
  • Enhance content quality and relevance
  • Increase mobile-friendliness and page load speeds

These factors can lead to better search engine rankings, increasing online visibility and organic traffic.

Fostering Innovation and Creativity.

The constraints imposed by accessibility requirements often lead to innovative solutions that benefit all users. By considering diverse user needs from the outset, start-ups can:

  • Develop more versatile and adaptable products
  • Uncover new use cases and market opportunities
  • Create unique selling points that set them apart from their competitors

Implementing Digital Accessibility in Start-Ups

For start-ups looking to embrace digital accessibility, the journey begins with a strategic approach and a commitment to inclusive design principles. Here’s a roadmap for implementing accessibility measures effectively:

Conducting an Accessibility Audit.

The first step is to assess the current state of accessibility within the start-up’s digital ecosystem. This involves:

  • Website Evaluation: Using automated tools and manual testing to identify accessibility issues on the company website.
  • Application Review: Assessing mobile and desktop applications for compatibility with assistive technologies.
  • Content Analysis: Examining all digital content, including documents, videos, and images, for accessibility compliance.
  • User Testing: Involving individuals with disabilities in the testing process to gain real-world insights.

Start-ups can ensure that they start their accessibility journey on the right foot by engaging with specialist web accessibility consultants. A consultant can provide the guidance and oversight required using their expertise and industry knowledge.

Developing an Accessibility Strategy.

Based on the audit findings, start-ups should create a comprehensive accessibility strategy that includes:

  • Short-term fixes for critical issues
  • Long-term plans for ongoing accessibility improvements
  • Budget allocation for accessibility initiatives
  • Training programs for staff to ensure continued compliance

Integrating Accessibility into the Development Process

To ensure sustainable accessibility, it’s crucial to integrate it into the core development process:

  • Design Phase: Incorporate accessibility considerations from the earliest stages of product design.
  • Development Guidelines: Establish clear coding standards and best practices for accessible development.
  • Quality Assurance: Include accessibility testing as a mandatory step in the QA process.
  • Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and update accessibility measures to keep pace with evolving standards and technologies.

Leveraging Tools and Resources

Numerous tools and resources are available to help start-ups implement accessibility measures:

  • Automated accessibility testing tools
  • Design pattern libraries for accessible user interfaces
  • Accessibility plugins and extensions for content management systems
  • Training resources and certification programs for developers and designers

Conclusion: Embracing Accessibility as a Competitive Advantage

For start-ups looking to thrive in the competitive business world, digital accessibility should be viewed not as a burden but as an opportunity. By making accessibility a core part of their DNA, these companies can create products and services that truly serve all users, setting themselves apart from competitors and building a foundation for long-term success.


 

The Case For Investing In Your Career At Every Salary Level 

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young woman in office

young woman in office

by Kathryn Sollman, author of “The 4 Jobs Club: How Smart Women Care for It All — Kids, Aging Parents, Home & Career

When you imagine how much women earn at the top of the corporate ladder, you probably think, “Well, of course they can afford to hire people to help them care for their homes.”

And they do. A Fortune study found that two-thirds of US working women who have at least one direct report outsource various household tasks, including housecleaning, pet sitting, grocery delivery, and landscaping.

The very important reality, though, is that many C-suite women always outsourced household tasks — even when their titles were much more junior. This is also reflected in the study: two-thirds of women at the manager level outsource for some type of hired help — from childcare to cleaning services to personal trainers to grocery delivery services.

Invest in your career, even when you have limited funds.

Kris Malkoski and her husband have always been a two-career couple — with big careers at that. Her husband was a CEO twice and traveled nonstop.

Add in the fact that Kris had three children in less than two years — all under age five when she was a Director of Marketing launching a major healthcare brand. At the time, her husband was commuting to Asia — three weeks away, then two weeks back.

So how did Kris keep all the balls in the air? She paid for a lot of help. In a mid-level position, though, she did not have a big executive salary. She ignored the prevailing wisdom that it’s not “worth it” to work if childcare is eating up most of your salary or you’re just breaking even. Instead, Kris saw her high cost of outsourcing as an investment that allowed growth in her career. And she knew her kids would not always need the same amount of care.

Marie Myers had the same approach — investing 30 to 40 percent of her paycheck in her early career years to pay for live-in nannies, who became the family’s house manager. “Invest in the foundation that will help you reach your peak earning years — when you’re in your 50s and 60s.”

Kris also had a live-in nanny — and because that nanny was caring for three very young children, she also hired another woman to come in for three hours a day to do laundry and cook dinner.

Later, Kris tapped into the teaching assistants who were always looking for extra ways to make money. She would enlist these young women to drive her children home from school and supervise homework.

“I always had a big outlay for the resources I hired, but it saved my sanity, gave our household structure and routine, kept our kids safe and happy, and gave me the room to keep growing in my career. If I hadn’t invested the money then, I might not be where I am today.”

Allocate and reallocate the money that saves your sanity.

Jonita Wilson learned very early on to put everything in perspective when it comes to running a household. She decided she didn’t need to immediately take care of the dishes in the sink or the clothes in the laundry basket. As long as the house was decent-ish and everyone was healthy, she felt life was okay.

But then one day when things really were in disarray, Jonita exploded, and she and her husband decided it was time to get help. They’ve had a woman help with cleaning every other week since then. Initially they couldn’t really afford the extra expense, but she says it was a wise investment that saved her sanity, her marriage, and, she says jokingly, the lives of her children.

“Even if outsourcing takes a big chunk out of your after-tax income, earmark that chunk early on, and keep reallocating it. When we no longer needed childcare, we put the same chunk of money into more household help. We have different needs and priorities at various times, but some form of help always has big paybacks in sound mental health.”

Sharon Ryan agrees women should hire as much childcare and household help they can reasonably afford. Your weekends should not be about cleaning the house. And for sanity and personal growth, a spouse or partner who stays home should have time to pursue interests and activities not house or family related.”

The time women don’t spend on housecleaning can be spent with their children, their partners — and in the community. In Sharon’s case, she invested the time she saved on domestic tasks into volunteering at organizations benefiting women and children.

The consensus is that from the start of your career you need time for two critical things: caring for your family and building your portfolio of expertise. In any given week it makes sense to allocate your time carefully and preserve your sanity through even limited outsourcing.

 

*Excerpted from The 4 Jobs Club by Kathryn Sollman. ©2024 John Murray Business. Reprinted with permission. This article may not be reproduced for any other use without permission.

 

Kathryn Sollmann

Kathryn Sollman, Speaker, Coach and Author, has made it her mission to keep women working toward financial security in a flexible way — alongside child and aging parent caregiving roles. Kathryn’s forthcoming book, “The 4 Jobs Club: How Smart Women Care for It All — Kids, Aging Parents, Home & Career“, features 200+ simple tips and strategies from 50 C-Suite Women on how they have found ways to blend work and life — and take care of themselves, too.


 

6 Issues Stifling Gen Z Career Advancement

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by Cheyenne Hunt, J.D.

Gen Z, of which I am a part, has been dealt a rough hand with regard to this generation’s entrance into the workforce at large. We’ve collectively experienced so many “unprecedented” events throughout our formative years that have caused many to lose their meaning and purpose in their professional and personal life. For executives seeking to understand, and aptly integrate, Gen Z into staff teams, it’s essential to recognize and address the unique challenges and needs of this consequential generation greatly influencing the workforce.

While there are a litany of issues undermining Gen Z career prospects, there are a few key set of obstacles that must be overcome to bolster this generation’s advancement opportunities:

1. Economic Inequality.

Gen Z enters the job market with significant financial burdens, including high costs of living, especially in urban centers. To attract and retain these young talents, consider implementing comprehensive benefits packages that alleviate these pressures. This could include competitive salaries, housing stipends, or student loan repayment programs.

By addressing economic barriers directly, your company can become a more attractive and viable option for Gen Z candidates who are often forced to make career decisions based heavily on financial factors.

2. Job Market Instability.

Gen Z values stability as much as flexibility. In response to the economic volatility they’ve witnessed, it’s important to emphasize job security and long-term career prospects within your company. Develop clear career pathways and foster a culture that rewards dedication and innovation.

Regularly communicate these pathways and growth opportunities to ensure young employees see a future within your organization.

3. Lack of Internal Opportunities for Upward Mobility.

As outside hires for managerial rolls continue to increase in popularity, Gen Z struggles to find a purpose in work that does not present opportunities to be recognized by a promotion in status or salary in conjunction with increased skill and responsibility. In fact, many studies have found that young workers are more likely to achieve career advancement by jumping ship to a new employer every three years or less.

4. Technological Disruption.

Rapid technological advancements lead to job displacement and the need for continuous upskilling, which can be particularly challenging for Gen Z entering the workforce. Automation threatens traditional entry-level roles, requiring Gen Z to adapt and acquire new skills to remain competitive in a job market they may not have even found a place in yet.

Consider leveraging Gen Z’s tech-savviness by involving them in digital transformation initiatives within your company. Offer roles that challenge them and allow them to work with cutting-edge technologies.

5. Lack of Mentorship and Networking Opportunities.

Gen Z may lack access to mentors and professional networks that can provide guidance and opportunities for career advancement. Remote work creates fewer opportunities to make advantageous connections intentionally or even in passing. Traditional networking avenues may be inaccessible or less effective for Gen Z, who often rely on digital platforms for networking, which may not offer the same depth of connection.

6. Student Debt Crisis.

Student debt is a pervasive concern for Gen Z, shaping their career paths and life choices. As an employer, offering programs such as tuition reimbursement or scholarships for further education can set your company apart. Additionally, support flexible work arrangements that allow for continuing education, enabling employees to pursue degrees or certifications that enhance their career growth while gaining valuable work experience.

Addressing these issues requires systemic changes in education, employment policies and societal attitudes to ensure more equitable opportunities for Gen Z career advancement. Given this generation is poised to soon become the largest sector of the workforce, it’s in everyone’s best interest to better set Gen Z up for success as a matter of public policy, economic stewardship and plain old good business practices.

 

Cheyenne Hunt

Cheyenne Hunt, J.D. is a progressive advocate and attorney specializing in progressive activism, legislative advocacy, communications and democracy-focused tech policy. She currently serves as a Big Tech Accountability Advocate with Public Citizen. She serves as a board member for The Women of Global Change. Connect with her on LinkedIN at https://www.linkedin.com/in/cheyenne-hunt-7b921621b.


 

How HX5 And Margarita Howard Stay Ahead In Government Contracting As A Women-Owned Firm

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margarita howard HX5

margarita howard HX5

Succeeding in the labyrinthian world of government contracting requires more than just technical expertise and industry knowledge. For Margarita Howard, sole owner and CEO/president of HX5, success has come through a combination of strategic foresight, infrastructure investment, and an unwavering commitment to excellence. This has established her company as a respected provider of professional mission support services to the Department of Defense and NASA.

From its humble beginnings in 2004 to its current status as a contractor with over 1,000 employees across 34 states and 90 government locations, HX5 has carved out a distinctive path in government contracting. The growth trajectory of the Fort Walton Beach, Florida-based company reflects Howard’s unique approach to building a sustainable business in a highly competitive industry.

Margarita Howard’s journey to entrepreneurship was shaped by her military service and subsequent experience with the Tricare program, the Department of Defense’s comprehensive health care initiative. Howard says, “I was part of the Tricare implementation team when it was first introduced. Before that, the military’s care had never been managed in such a fashion.”

She explains, “Nobody likes change. So we had a lot of town hall meetings. I was an area field manager at the time, responsible for my office in Florida. I then quickly advanced to a regional director where I had seven states in the Southeast that I was responsible for.”

This background provided her with invaluable insights into the operational and commercial aspects of government contracting, laying the groundwork for her future success.

Margarita Howard on Overcoming Industry Challenges

The government contracting sector in 2024 presents unique obstacles and opportunities, shaped by record federal spending levels and an increased focus on emerging technologies like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. While the surge in defense spending, health care initiatives, and infrastructure projects has created significant contractor opportunities, it also brings intensified scrutiny and oversight.

Howard understands that success in this environment requires rigorous attention to detail. “Businesses must invest in educating themselves about these regulations and ensure strict adherence to them,” she says. “It’s important that a company’s records are impeccable when working with the government due to the compliance reporting and audits that companies have to agree to perform on government contracts.”

Throughout her career in government contracting, Margarita Howard has witnessed significant shifts in industry dynamics, particularly in opportunities for women. The increasing presence of women represents a meaningful evolution in what was historically a male-dominated field. Yet she remains clear-eyed about both progress and persistent challenges.

“It’s rewarding to see that women are making significant strides in the government contracting industry, over the years, breaking barriers and more often assuming leadership roles in this industry and within government agencies that we work with,” she says. However, she acknowledges that: “It’s still somewhat challenging for women in this industry, and while progress has been made, some biases unfortunately remain to be overcome.”

At HX5, Howard has put these observations into practice, creating the inclusive environment she envisions for the broader industry. She has built a diverse leadership team that reflects her commitment to advancing women in the industry. Many of HX5’s senior management positions are held by women, and many of them have been with the company for extended periods. “At the end of the day, it’s our team of great employees and management that makes us successful,” Margarita Howard acknowledges.

Her careful approach to building this strong foundation has paid dividends. “We were very selective of people that we chose for our management team. And really, I could not be more proud of them,” she says. “Many of them have been with us for 10 years or so, and we just have a highly dedicated, experienced management team. We could not do what we do without them.”

HX5’s Strategic Growth Through Competitive Excellence

What distinguishes HX5 from many of its peers is Howard’s decision to focus on competitive bidding rather than relying solely on sole-source awards. Howard says, “We had been in the industry, we knew small businesses in our area, and that’s what many of them did (relied on sole-source awards). And once the program was over after nine years, they were done. They had never competed. They had never really done it on their own.”

She’s talking about the 8(a) program, a federal initiative designed to provide contracting opportunities and training for small-business owners facing social and economic disadvantages. It proved instrumental in catalyzing HX5’s growth and development. “After becoming an 8(a) company, we were awarded very quickly four contracts in one year and that really helped in getting us off the ground,” she recalls.

Margarita Howard’s emphasis on building robust infrastructure from the outset has been particularly crucial. “Large businesses and the government have to meet small-business goals,” she explains. “So when they find a small company that they know understands the industry [and] they’re not going to have to hold their hand, I’m proud to say they were very impressed with us.”

Despite the complexities inherent in government contracting, Howard maintains an unwavering commitment to her company’s mission. “Working side by side with civil servants and the military, supporting their respective missions, is a privilege. I love this business and the work that we do. I’m extremely proud of it,” she says.

As HX5 continues to grow and adapt in the government contracting space, Margarita Howard’s leadership style and vision serve as a blueprint for success in this demanding industry. HX5 demonstrates how women-owned businesses can thrive and lead in the government contracting sector, setting new standards for excellence and innovation.


 

3 Reasons Why You Need To Self Publish In 2025

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Self publish

Self publish a book and advance your career

by Christina Kaye

If you’re looking for the power move to grow your business and dominate your industry in 2025, have you thought about self-publishing a book? Believe it or not, there has never been a better time to self-publish your business book than right now.

Nothing else establishes your authority, attracts high-paying clients, and opens doors to speaking gigs and media like a book with your name on it.

And the best part?

You don’t need anyone’s permission to make it happen, nor do you need to turn over your creative rights and over 85% of the money your book earns you.

Self-publishing puts you in control, letting you share your expertise, build your brand, and boost your revenue — all on your terms!

Here’re 3 Reasons to Self-Publish in 2025

1. You’ll Attract Your Ideal Clients More Easily.

Creating trend-worthy video content for social media can be fun, and it’s a great way to showcase your unique personality, but when you rely on any social media platform as your sole source for lead generation, in reality, you’re just renting the right to connect with your audience.

Regardless of which format is trending at any given moment, books will always stand the test of time. In fact, 81% of Baby Boomers say they read at least one non-fiction book every year.

When you write and publish a book on your niche topic, your ideal client will be drawn to your story, your solutions, and your unique way of doing things. In turn, they will be more likely to trust you and invest in your services. A book will help you stop chasing clients and start attracting the ones who truly appreciate your insights.

2. Your Visibility Will Increase.

You may already know that writing and publishing a book will help establish your authority and increase your visibility as a thought leader in your industry, but you may not realize how self-publishing your book will make it easier for you to attract media appearances and speaking engagements.

Media outlets and event organizers are often drawn to authors because a published book gives you instant credibility, asserts your professionalism, and reflects your commitment to what you are teaching. Entrepreneurs with published books often see an increase in media appearance and speaking engagement opportunities.

In fact, after writing a book, a recent study shows that many entrepreneurs landed valuable earned media — 63% were featured in online magazines, 43% in newspapers, 33% on the radio, and 10% on TV.

By leveraging a book as part of your personal brand, you will open doors to high-impact opportunities that amplify your influence and grow your business.

3. You’ll Create a New Long-Lasting Revenue Stream.

Gone are the days when authors had to rely on agents and traditional publishers to get their amazing books out into the world. Since the pandemic, self-publishing has experienced a boom, and it’s here to stay. The ability to share your book with the world is easier, more accessible, and more profitable than ever before.

As long as you don’t rush the process and you are intentional about creating plans for publishing and marketing and you execute them effectively, you will open a new revenue stream for your business, which has the potential to significantly increase your annual business profits. A recent survey found that 34% of entrepreneurs who published a book saw a 34% profit increase and a jaw dropping 86% of them reported that their business grew!

And that’s just the beginning. Many authors come up with ways to supplement and multiply their book sales, repurposing their content into guided companion journals, workbooks and worksheets, and more.

And of course, the more books you publish, the longer you can sustain your book venture, and the higher your long-term profits will be.

It’s Time to Get Started

I’m sure that all sounds compelling, and your creative mind is already spinning with different ideas, but you’re also wondering how to get started. There’s certainly a lot that goes into the processes of writing and self-publishing a book, but here are some tips to jumpstart the process:

  • Don’t just dive in and start trying to bang out a manuscript. Put some real thought into a topic and spend the time researching to fill the gaps in your knowledge.
  • Create a publishing plan, outlining your desired launch date, how long it will take you to write, edit, and prepare for the release.
  • Come up with a budget. You’ll want to set a target revenue, but you’ll also have to account for out-of-pocket expenses like editing, book cover design, and potentially, a professional to help guide you.
  • Decide on a writing schedule to incorporate into your existing weekly plan, setting aside 1-2 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week, so you can finish your book in two months or less.
  • Start building interest around your upcoming book with your existing audience as early as possible by sharing your plan with followers and focus time each day on growing that audience with your ideal clients.

Make 2025 the year you finally stop sitting on your genius and start leveraging it through self-publishing. This is your time to step up, tell your story, and turn your expertise into momentum for your business.

 

Christina Kaye coaches female entrepreneurs with writing and publishing books in their area of expertise and specializes in helping those authors reach their target audience to effectively market their books. Connect with Christina across all social platforms @thebooklaunchfairy.

 


 

5 Reasons Executive Leadership Coaching Is Failing

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executive coaching

executive coaching

by Drew Yancey, PhD, Founder & CEO at Teleios Strategy and co-author of “ Leading Performance… Because It Can’t Be Managed: How to Lead the Modern Workforce

Far too many of today’s businesses face leadership challenges, with many turning to executive coaches to resolve an assortment of shortcomings. Traditional executive coaching often fails to address key needs, leading to misaligned development efforts and unrealized potential. Unfortunately, there are a litany of fundamental flaws in current executive coaching approaches going unchecked.

Unsurprisingly, despite significant investment, only 11% of business leaders believe their current leadership development approaches are highly effective.

The Current State of Executive Coaching

Executive coaching delivers a staggering 788% ROI, according to a study by Metrix Global, offering wide-ranging benefits across individual, organizational, and customer levels. For individuals, it drives higher performance, career progression, satisfaction, and increased pay. At the company level, coaching enhances financial performance, productivity, employee engagement, and retention. For customers, it boosts retention and revenue.

Reflecting this value, the global executive coaching market, valued at $15.4 billion in 2021, is projected to grow to $26.7 billion by 2030. With 77% of organizations identifying leadership development as their top talent focus, the demand for effective, results-driven coaching has never been greater.

5 Key Problems with Traditional Executive Coaching Approaches

1. Disconnected from Business Strategy.

Executive coaching frequently falls short by operating in isolation from organizational goals, with 70% of organizations reporting misalignment between leadership development and business objectives. This gap is further highlighted by findings that only 33% of organizations align leadership development plans with strategic growth objectives.

Additionally, the limited connection between leadership improvement and measurable business outcomes remains a critical issue, as 45% of executive coaching engagements fail to demonstrate clear business impact (ICF Global Coaching Study).

These shortcomings reveal a pressing need for coaching strategies that integrate seamlessly with organizational priorities to drive tangible results.

2. One-Size-Fits-All Methodologies.

Generic leadership development approaches often fail to address the unique challenges faced by organizations at different growth stages. Research by Bersin reveals that companies leveraging customized leadership development are 3.2x more likely to achieve high leadership quality. For middle-market companies in particular, the issue is particularly acute, with 82% reporting that standard leadership programs do not meet their specific needs.

These findings underscore the importance of tailored coaching solutions that align with an organization’s growth stage and unique priorities.

3. Focus on Individual Over Organization.

Leadership development often neglects the critical role of team dynamics and organizational culture, with of companies failing to adopt a systemic approach. This overemphasis on personal development, divorced from organizational context, limits impact.

In contrast, organizations that integrate individual and organizational development achieve 25% higher leadership effectiveness, highlighting the value of aligning leadership growth with broader organizational goals.

4. Lack of Measurable Outcomes.

Leadership development programs often struggle with unclear ROI and performance metrics, with only 8% of organizations measuring their business impact. Furthermore, many companies rate their methods for evaluating coaching effectiveness as ineffective, relying on subjective assessments rather than data-driven insights.

These gaps highlight the need for more robust measurement frameworks to ensure leadership initiatives deliver tangible business outcomes.

5. Reactive Instead of Proactive.

Coaching is often deployed reactively as a solution to immediate problems rather than as part of a strategic development plan, leading to crisis-driven engagements rather than fostering systematic growth. This short-term focus prevents organizations from building long-term leadership capabilities, hindering sustained development and long-term success.

Emerging Evidence-Based Executive Coaching Approaches: the P2E: Framework

Traditional executive coaching models often fail to bridge the gap between development and execution. Our P2E (Planning to Execution) framework addresses this by creating a structured, purpose-driven approach that aligns coaching with organizational strategy while ensuring measurable outcomes.

The Strategic Alignment Imperative.

Organizations that strategically align their leadership development efforts grow their revenue 58% faster and profits 72% faster than unaligned companies. Furthermore, companies that integrate coaching with their business strategy experience 60% stronger leadership bench strength, highlighting the significant impact that alignment between leadership development and organizational goals can have on overall performance and long-term success.

Data-Driven Development.

Organizations that incorporate analytics and data-driven approaches into their leadership development programs have been shown to experience a range of benefits: informed decision-making based on empirical evidence rather than intuition; future-proofing leadership by anticipating and addressing upcoming challenges; and continuous improvement through real-time feedback on leadership initiatives.

Unlike traditional coaching approaches, the P2E framework directly connects personal development to business impact, ensuring constant alignment between individual growth and organizational needs. It creates accountability through regular progress reviews and ensures that development translates into actionable results, measuring success through tangible outcomes. By transforming executive coaching into a strategic driver of business success, P2E enables companies to achieve the measurable results they need to thrive, turning coaching from a nice-to-have activity into a critical business asset.

 

Drew YanceyDrew Yancey, PhD is Founder & CEO at Teleios Strategy, a premier strategic planning, leadership development, executive coaching and succession planning advisory firm. With a proven track record in high-performance team building and strategic execution for over 15 years, Yancey solves challenging problems at the nexus of growth, strategy, and innovation. Yancey is also the co-author of “Leading Performance… Because It Can’t Be Managed: How to Lead the Modern Workforce,” and a frequent keynote speaker. Reach him at www.teleiostrategy.com.


 

OPPO Find X8: A Brilliant Value Flagship Phone

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OPPO Find X8 Pro

OPPO Find X8 Pro

The OPPO Find X8 is a standout flagship smartphone designed to offer premium performance at a competitive price. Combining top-tier specifications, including an advanced MediaTek Dimensity 9400 processor, a stunning 120Hz AMOLED display, and a versatile camera setup, the Find X8 competes with other high-end devices in the market.

In this article, we’ll explore the key features, performance insights, and overall value of the OPPO Find X8, highlighting why it’s a brilliant choice for users looking for a powerful, feature-rich phone without the flagship price tag. By examining its value proposition, we aim to demonstrate why the OPPO Find X8 is an excellent choice for those seeking a high-quality smartphone without breaking the bank.

Key Features of the OPPO Find X8

  1. Display Excellence: The OPPO Find X8 features a 6.59-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2760 x 1256 pixels. This display supports a 120Hz refresh rate, providing smooth scrolling and vibrant visuals, making it ideal for gaming and multimedia consumption.
  2. Performance Powerhouse: Powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 processor, built on a 3nm architecture, the Find X8 delivers exceptional performance. It offers configurations of 12GB or 16GB RAM and storage options ranging from 256GB to 1TB, ensuring fast multitasking and ample space for apps and media.
  3. Camera Capabilities: The smartphone boasts a versatile triple-camera system, including a 50MP main sensor with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), a 50MP ultra-wide lens, and a telephoto lens. The 32MP front camera features advanced selfie modes, while AI enhancements improve photography in various conditions.
  4. Battery Life and Charging: Equipped with a robust 5,630mAh battery, the Find X8 supports 80W wired charging, allowing it to charge from 0 to 100% in approximately 48 minutes. It also offers 50W wireless charging, ensuring convenience for users on the go.
  5. Software Experience: Running on Android 15 with ColorOS 15, the OPPO Find X8 provides a user-friendly interface enriched with AI features that enhance productivity and personalization. The software optimizes performance, making navigation seamless.
  6. Connectivity Features: The device supports 5G connectivity, ensuring fast internet speeds. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and USB-C capabilities, along with comprehensive GPS support for accurate navigation.
  7. Design and Build Quality: The Find X8’s design features premium materials, including Gorilla Glass for durability and an IP68/IP69K rating for water and dust resistance, making it suitable for everyday use in various environments.
  8. Value Proposition: Priced competitively within the flagship segment, the OPPO Find X8 offers high-end specifications and features at a lower cost compared to competitors like the Samsung Galaxy S24 and iPhone 16 Pro, making it an attractive option for consumers seeking quality without overspending.

These key points highlight the OPPO Find X8’s strengths as a flagship smartphone, showcasing its impressive features and overall value in today’s competitive market.

OPPO Find X8 and Find X8 Pro

Value Proposition: Why the OPPO Find X8 is Worth the Investment

The OPPO Find X8 offers an exceptional value proposition in the flagship smartphone market. Priced at approximately $838, it provides high-end specifications without the premium price tag associated with its rivals.

In terms of performance, the Find X8 is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chipset, which rivals the processing power of other flagship devices, ensuring smooth multitasking and gaming experiences. Its triple-camera system, featuring a 50MP main sensor, delivers stunning photography capabilities enhanced by AI features, making it competitive with the camera quality of more expensive models.

Moreover, the Find X8 excels in battery longevity with its 5,910mAh capacity, supporting 80W fast charging that allows users to recharge quickly and efficiently. This combination of advanced features, robust performance, and affordability makes the OPPO Find X8 a smart investment for buyers seeking a premium smartphone experience without overspending. Its balance of performance and value ensures that users can enjoy top-tier technology for years to come, making it an attractive option in today’s market.

Final Thoughts

The OPPO Find X8 combines premium performance, advanced camera capabilities, and a long-lasting battery at a price that offers exceptional value for money. With its powerful Dimensity 9400 processor, AI enhancements, and fast charging features, it stands out as an ideal flagship choice for those seeking top-tier features without the premium price tag. For buyers looking for a high-performance smartphone that doesn’t break the bank, the OPPO Find X8 is a smart investment.


 

How Two Best Friends Created An App To Find Your New Best Friend

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by Manny Manzel and Conor Crighton, co-founders of Crossed

The two of us come from dramatically different backgrounds. Manny is from New York City, and Conor is from the Cayman Islands. Yet we had the same complaints about conventional social networking and dating apps: they seem more interested in gamifying users than helping them meet like-minded people and form genuine connections. At the same time, they expose users to a large percentage of fake accounts and people who never intend to meet in the real world.

One Saturday night, when we were seniors in college, we were hanging out on the roof of a parking garage when we started imagining a different kind of app — one that would fulfill its promise to help people find meaningful relationships.

The problem with conventional social networking apps

Many users experience conventional dating apps as draining. Indeed, one study found that up to 78 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 54 report at least some degree of fatigue or burnout from these platforms.

Meanwhile, the waters conventional dating apps offer are full of catfish and other nonviable contacts. For instance, a survey of Tinder users found that almost two-thirds were in relationships already, and half weren’t actually willing to meet up in person.

These numbers reflect a painful reality that we and our friends were living through. Someone would become excited about a new person they had met online just to find out later that they were based on the other side of the state. Other people would suddenly be ghosted or discover they had been corresponding with a fake account. Nearly everyone felt weighed down by the decision fatigue of swiping on one profile after another.

We were sick of it. But we still had faith that technology could be used to meet people’s need for social connection. What if social networking apps didn’t have to be that way? What if technology could be leveraged in a deliberate, purposeful way to forge real-world, authentic relationships? What would an app like that look like?

Those questions launched us on our mission to create a next-generation social networking and dating app that doesn’t suffer from the problems of its predecessors.

Going beyond dating

Getting the idea for this new app was like falling in love with technology again. The two of us talked for hours that Saturday night and then all Sunday, bouncing ideas off one another. For weeks afterward, we stayed up until 4 a.m. every night, brainstorming designs and features.

One of our critical decisions was to create a broad-based platform that could serve people looking for all kinds of relationships, not just romantic ones. That’s why we decided to offer three apps in one.

Named Crossed, our app has three separate modalities — one for dating, of course, but two others for Friendship and Business (professional networking). Just because someone might not be interested in dating doesn’t mean they should be cut off from other opportunities to expand their social connections. Users can be active in all three modes but can also refrain from participating in a given mode if it isn’t for them.

Another key decision was to prioritize geographic proximity.

Next-generation proximity-based matching

Unlike most social networking apps, which permit users to set their location manually and, therefore, also allow them to lie, our app uses geolocation technology on their devices. The app rides along with the members of our community as they go about their ordinary lives.

Maybe the person goes to the park to read a book, take their dog on a walk, or swing by the coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up. With every place they go, they open up possible connections without even trying since our app pays attention and scans the environment for other members of our community.

If two users cross paths, traveling within 150 meters of each other, the app alerts them to the possible connection. The users can then check each other’s profiles and decide whether or not to initiate a conversation. All communications on the platform are protected with the highest level of security.

The power of connection

The two of us met by chance, introduced through a mutual friend during our junior year of college. Before then, we had always seen each other around, but we had never actually talked. Once we were introduced to each other, however, we quickly became close friends, hanging out nearly every day. Now, we are business partners who have launched a business together.

Our personal story shows how important friendships and other relationships are. With more connections come more possibilities. Crossed is the social networking app we wish we’d had. Just imagine the sparks it can create and the positive effect it can have on people’s lives.

Deployed skillfully, technology has the power to help people form meaningful relationships in this hyper-digital age. The landscape of social networking and online dating will never be the same.

 

Manny Manzel, co-founder and CEO of Crossed, is a visionary entrepreneur with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tampa. He created Crossed to redefine networking with innovative technology that allows people to build meaningful connections, whether for romantic connections, friendships, or professional growth. Manny’s dedication and bold vision make Crossed poised to transform the networking landscape, empowering users to forge authentic connections.

Conor Crighton, co-founder and COO of Crossed, expertly transforms ideas into tangible products. His personal experiences with the inefficiencies of existing dating apps motivated him to create something better. He saw the potential for a platform that could offer more than just fleeting swipes and created one that’s intentional about cultivating lasting connections.


 

A CTO’s Guide To Patenting An Invention

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by Cullen Jennings, CTO of Security and Collaboration at Cisco

Whether you work for a large company or you’re on the ground floor of a small startup, you’re probably coming up with new ideas for solving everyday problems. But how do you know when one of those ideas is a good idea, and how do you protect your invention?

There’s a legal process, of course, to filing a patent, but there’s also a roadmap to creating something patent-worthy — one that begins well before the first brainstorming session.

I’ve spent the majority of my career inventing: For more than 25 years, I’ve worked on the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and have more than 100 patents in that space. I also lead a team of problem solvers and innovators at Cisco that creates game-changing solutions for the future.

Our team’s charter is to always push the state of the art forward in security and collaboration. Inventing is just part of the job, so it’s essential to create an environment that allows that process to thrive.

Before Getting Started

Why are patents important?

For companies, patents offer protection from others stealing ideas. A well-stacked patent portfolio also lets companies like Cisco, for example, trade patents with other companies so that we can keep innovating and building great products based on the best ideas out there.

For the technology ecosystem as a whole, patents make the world go round. Patents are a way for small companies to compete with larger ones.

And for the individual? If you have a patent on your resume (especially if you’re not an engineer), you’re a stand-out before you even get an interview.

How To Patent An Invention

Step 1: Create space for ideas, good and bad.

Nothing starts out as a good idea. Every idea is born a bad one that becomes better over time. So it’s paramount to create a culture where bad ideas aren’t automatically killed but have room to evolve and transform.

Key to creating this kind of culture is to make sure all team members believe they are inventors. It is my experience that literally no one believes this. Non-engineers on my team assume you have to be an engineer to invent something. The junior engineers think you have to be very senior to go through the process. Meanwhile, those senior engineers often think that the entrepreneurial types are more likely to have new ideas worth patenting.

We are all inventors. If you have a problem to solve, and you’re thinking about a way to solve it, you’re an inventor.

Encourage the more senior members of your team, particularly those who have already gone through the inventing/patenting process, to keep an eye open for other team members who are trying to invent something or who want to join discussions about ways to solve problems. If they hear an idea that might be patentable, they can encourage that person to follow it.

Step 2: Come up with a good idea.

Often people come up with a problem, then imagine a “machine” that could solve it. That’s not an invention; that’s a wish, and a wish is just half of the problem. Creating a well-stated problem is the hardest part of the inventing process. But after that, finding the solution becomes easy.

Once you’ve defined your problem, encourage brainstorming to solve it. Get different people in one room, and they’ll all contribute different ideas to the solution. (Those who come up with the different parts of the idea will eventually be the authors on the patent. To be an inventor, you need to invent, not just be in the room when it happens.)

If you’re coming up with ideas but nothing seems to work, consider different techniques used in your field, and think about how to combine those techniques together. Very often, combining two different techniques to solve a problem is patentable. It’s hard to know why, but that type of thinking usually yields good solutions. If you start thinking that way when brainstorming, an hour later you’ll probably have some ideas.

Step 3: Turn a good idea into a patentable one.

So you have your idea, but your idea has to be good, and it has to be new. When you first look at your idea, it might appear to have been done before.

But look again: Is your idea using something in a new way or in a new context? Maybe you’re combining it with another technique, which makes it new. Take your broad idea, and narrow it down—getting as specific as possible. In what exact way is your idea new?

Once you’ve narrowed down your idea, it’s time to ask: Will others use it?

If no one else in the world but you will want to use your patent, or if there’s another solution that everyone already uses that is equally good, then your patent doesn’t give you any protection. People will just use the other idea.

This brings me to another point. People often think they need to patent all their ideas. That’s not necessarily true. You need to patent the idea that other people might want to use and that you want to own. If someone uses it, you’ll want them to license some rights to you.

Once you know your basic idea is good and new, and you know that others will use it, take that basic, specific idea that you’ve narrowed down, and then generalize back up: Think about all the variants of that idea, because what you want to do when you create a patent is create one that covers multiple use cases.

For example: Say you’ve built something that could work on an IP network. You might ask yourself, could this also work over a wireless network or a Bluetooth network? Often, the answer is yes. So, generalize your idea to include those scenarios.

Success Story Time

One non-technical member of my team was utterly convinced she would never have a patent. One day, our team was trying to solve a complex problem, and, while she wasn’t an engineer, she cared about solving the problem, and she knew she was in a safe space to share an idea. So she did, and her idea was a good one.

I told her, “Hey, you know that is patentable, right?” She was skeptical, but in the end, she got a patent out of it.

Not only did she help solve a problem and provide Cisco with an idea worth protecting, but she set herself apart for success in the future.

 

cullen jennings

Cullen Jennings is the Chief Technology Officer of the Collaboration Technology Group at Cisco and is responsible for the next generation of enterprise collaboration products. He is focused on driving innovation with disruptive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, machine learning, and more. One of only 19 Cisco Fellows, Cullen holds more than 100 patents. 


 

Smart Accounting Moves For Small Business Success

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by Swapnil Shinde, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of Zeni

As a startup founder, your relationship with accounting can be complicated. On one hand, it’s your window into the financial health of your business, empowering smarter decisions and giving investors confidence. On the other hand, it can feel like a time-consuming chore that eats up days each month — time you’d rather spend growing your business.

Love it or hate it, accounting is non-negotiable. Ignoring it can leave you flying blind, risking costly mistakes, compliance issues, or even investor skepticism.

The good news is that modern tools and strategies can make accounting a lot more manageable. Here are some practical tips to help you take control of your finances without letting them take control over your life.

Tap into automation

One of the easiest ways to increase efficiency is by adopting tools that automate repetitive tasks in your bookkeeping and accounting processes. For example, expense reporting apps let your team snap a photo of a receipt, automatically extracting and categorizing the data. Additionally, invoicing tools can generate and send invoices automatically when an order is placed or a project is completed.

Automation doesn’t just save time — it also reduces errors. Processing large amounts of data, line by line, and the sheer volume means mistakes can happen. Automation ensures accuracy, eliminating problems like duplicate entries or misclassified expenses.

Even better, many automation tools today now use artificial intelligence to streamline the accounting process further. AI-powered platforms can learn your workflows, predict trends, and help you make data-driven decisions in real time.

Keep business and personal expenses separate

When you’re running a business, it’s easy for the line between personal and professional expenses to blur. Your living room becomes your office, your phone serves both personal and business calls, and dinner with a potential client feels a lot like hanging out with friends.

However, when it comes to finances, it is essential to keep business and personal expenses separate. Blurring the lines can make tax season a logistical nightmare, make it harder to track financial health, and even lead to missed deductions or penalties.

Set good habits early by separating your business and personal accounts. Use a corporate credit card exclusively for business expenses, and take advantage of automated tools to categorize transactions as business or personal automatically.

A little organization now will save you a lot of stress later.

Opt for accrual accounting over cash accounting

There are two primary methods for recording business financial transactions:

  • Cash accounting: Record income and expenses only when money changes hands.
  • Accrual accounting: Record income and expenses when they’re earned or incurred, regardless of when the cash actually moves.

While cash accounting is simpler, accrual accounting provides a clearer picture of your financial health. It aligns with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which makes it easier to meet regulatory requirements and build trust with investors.

In short, accrual accounting helps you plan smarter and scale faster.

Stay on top of compliance and taxes

Taxes and compliance aren’t exactly the most exciting parts of running a business, but ignoring them can lead to costly penalties and missed opportunities for savings. Taking the time to get organized now can save you from headaches later.

Start by understanding the specific regulations and filing deadlines that apply to your business. Knowing what’s required and when ensures you avoid last-minute scrambles or, worse, penalties for missed deadlines.

Accurate, detailed record-keeping is just as important. Tracking business expenses like travel, office supplies, or professional fees can unlock valuable deductions and reduce your overall tax burden. Organized records also make it easier to spot trends and stay prepared for audits or compliance reviews.

By prioritizing compliance and taxes upfront, you’ll avoid unnecessary risks and position your business for long-term financial health.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

Let’s face it — accounting is complicated, and your time is better spent driving your business forward than stressing over the details of bookkeeping, taxes, and compliance. Sometimes, the best move is to bring in a partner who can handle it all, giving you peace of mind and the freedom to focus on growth.

The right financial partner combines cutting-edge technology with expert support. Look for a solution that checks all the boxes: automating tedious tasks, providing real-time financial insights, ensuring tax compliance, and offering strategic guidance when needed. This isn’t just about outsourcing tasks — it’s about equipping your business with the tools and clarity to make smarter decisions.

Professional help isn’t just about easing your workload; it’s about giving your startup the financial clarity and confidence to grow.

The bottom line

Accounting doesn’t have to be a source of stress. By embracing automation, separating business and personal expenses, staying compliant, and working with a forward-thinking financial partner, you can turn your accounting process into a strategic advantage.

With the right tools and support, you’ll spend less time managing spreadsheets and more time building the business you’ve always envisioned.

 

Swapnil ShindeSwapnil Shinde is Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of Zeni and General Partner at Twin Ventures. He is a three-time entrepreneur with two successful exits, as well as an advisor and investor in more than 40 early-stage startups.

 


 

How Cryptos Can Diversify Your Portfolio

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Cryptocurrencies have gained a lot of popularity in recent years. The projected revenue of the crypto market is estimated to reach 56.7 billion US dollars by 2024. They allow the investors to diversify their portfolios. In the past, investors have relied on stocks, bonds, and real estate to balance risk and returns. With the rise of digital assets like BTC, ETH, WAX, etc., investors can diversify their portfolios and enjoy high returns.

Here are the benefits of adding cryptos to your portfolio for proper diversification.

1. Access To New Asset Classes.

Cryptos are a new and rising asset class that operates independently of traditional financial markets. This unique characteristic makes them an attractive option for diversifying investment portfolios. Also, these assets behave independently. WAXE offers exposure to the blockchain and NFT (Non-Fungible Token) space, which operates in a rapidly growing industry. The WAX blockchain is known for its focus on digital collectibles and gaming.

2. Potential For High Returns.

The market of cryptocurrencies is highly volatile but there is also a high potential to enjoy excellent rewards. You can time the market to benefit from the market fluctuation to grow your investments. So, it is best to stay updated with the latest trends and make wise decisions to grow your investments. The rapid growth of the cryptos with the advancement of technology offers several new opportunities for investors to capitalize.

3. Hedge Against Inflation.

Cryptocurrencies are increasingly being viewed as a hedge against inflation. Unlike fiat currencies, which can lose value over time due to central bank policies and economic instability, many digital currencies have fixed supply limits. This scarcity feature helps protect against inflationary pressures. As governments continue to print money and inflate the money supply, cryptocurrencies with limited availability offer an attractive store of value. By diversifying into digital assets, investors can protect their wealth from the negative effects of inflation.

4. Portfolio Risk Management.

Cryptocurrencies can play a vital role in portfolio risk management by offering a non-correlated asset class. Traditional portfolios typically rely on stocks, bonds, and other assets that may be subject to similar market forces. However, cryptos operate on independent technological frameworks and are driven by unique market trends. This allows them to act as a hedge during market volatility or economic downturns. You can add cryptos into a diversified portfolio to lower the overall risk by providing exposure to an asset class that behaves differently than traditional investments.

5. High Liquidity & Flexibility.

Cryptocurrencies are known for their liquidity. The market is open 24/7 and there is a vast network of global exchanges that you can access to buy, sell, and trade assets quickly. You can enter and exit any digital asset anytime. On top of this cryptocurrencies are decentralized which increases their flexibility in terms of asset ownership and management. You can hold and trade the tokens without relying on intermediaries like brokers or financial institutions. This gives you greater control over your portfolio and investment decisions.

The Bottom Line

Cryptocurrencies provide an innovative way to diversify investment portfolios. You can add them to enjoy the quick and high returns. Just make sure that you research the token properly and stay updated with the latest market trends to make a profit.


 

Streamlining The Path Of Consumer Loan Origination To Collection

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Consumer loans are always in high demand, and it is difficult for employees to keep up with the piles of paperwork and formalities that are part of the lending process. Are you looking for a software solution that can transform your lending operations, simplify the management of risk, and elevate the experience of your customers? Then a loan management software might be the key to success for your financial organization.

This technology can streamline financial operations, enhance the security of data, and improve the experience of customers. The biggest benefit offered by such software is the ability to automate consumer loan origination.

The elimination of human error from the consumer loan management process ensures that loans are processed more efficiently, risks can be managed and losses are avoided. 

Transforming loan management operations with advanced software

The digital lending industry is growing rapidly, with lending operations undergoing drastic transformations in keeping with the technologically sound market. In such a situation, financial organizations must adapt to the changing requirements of consumers.

A loan management software is perfectly equipped to provide efficient loan processing, robust security for customer data, and advanced loan analytics.

Here are some of the key benefits of using automated software for the management of consumer loans:

1. Streamlining the lending process.

With automated technology, software for consumer loan management significantly speeds up the loan management system. Origination, servicing, integration, and every other process is made seamless with the help of advanced software, reducing turnaround time. Centralization of loan data eliminates the need for physical files and the risk of calculation errors. This makes the record management process much simpler. Cloud-based software for loan management enhances the efficiency, security, and convenience of the lending process for both borrowers and lenders.

2. Faster loan origination.

By automating manual tasks that take up a lot of time, the software speeds up application and decision-making processes like data analysis, ratio assessment, forecasting models, and loan approvals. Coud-based repositories and working platforms also help to reduce internal paperwork, avoiding the risk of misplacement. This approach to loan management eliminates the bottlenecks that arise out of conventional methods. Thus, advanced software for consumer loan management leads to a smoother and more seamless lending process.

3. Efficient servicing of loans.

With the help of advanced software, tasks like tracking loan performance, invoicing, and reporting are automated. Thus, the loan servicing process is considerably streamlined, providing benefits to all parties involved in the lending process. Cloud-based software for consumer loan management also eliminates human error, thereby enhancing the reputation of the organization.

4. Seamless integration.

Cloud-based platforms for consumer loan management can also integrate seamlessly with existing software used for lending operations. This enables lenders to achieve greater efficiency in lending operations and gives them the ability to offer tailored experiences. Thus, the unique requirements of both lending and borrowing parties can be met. With third-party integrations, lenders can readily authenticate information provided by borrowers and used in the lending process. This is done by using third-party services for checking credit scores, verifying income, and valuing properties.

5. Enhancing data security and compliance.

Advanced software for loan management also improves data security. This is done by creating secure, cloud-based documents, minimizing data exposure, preventing security risks, and safeguarding sensitive information provided by clients from potential data theft. It also reduces the risk of lost, copied, or improperly disposed of documents and uses digital security measures to maintain regulatory compliance.

6. Enhancing customer experience.

Cloud-based software for consumer loan management also enhances the experience of customers by simplifying the process of loan management and giving real-time updates. With digitized interfaces, borrowers can request loans online and receive quicker decisions based on credit assessment. This allows people much more convenience while applying for loans. 

Other than that, personalized channels for communication can also be implemented with the help of advanced software. These will enhance transparency between parties and establish relationships based on trust. They will also reduce the time spent by customers in waiting for responses from the lending party, alleviating concerns that borrowers may have at different stages of the lending process. This keeps customers informed and involved in their loan application journey.

Conclusion

Automated, cloud-based software for loan management transforms the entire journey of consumer loans from origination to collection. It automates application and approval while boosting data security and enhancing customer experience with tailored interactions. Moreover, it avoids losses by eliminating human error and ensuring regulatory compliance.

(Image Source)


 

Why ‘Relational Leadership’ Makes A Real Difference

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by Cheryl L. Mason, J.D., CEO and Chief Catalyst of Catalyst Leadership Management and author of “Dare to Relate: Leading with a Fierce Heart

What do you do when you walk into an organization as the new leader and the organization is struggling with trust and morale issues from both employees and customers, recruitment and retention challenges, and reduced productivity?

That was what faced me as the new chief executive of my organization.

My solution was different than many leaders and considered risky and ill-advised by all but a few.

I focused on encouraging and supporting the employees of the organization – as people. This meant getting to know something about them – their jobs, their concerns, and their lives as people beyond work.  The employees’ trust had been broken many times over.

How does a leader build trust and create credibility? To do this, I called on my experiences as an employee, I remembered all too well the feeling I had as employee – like I didn’t matter, I was just a cog in the wheel.

I knew that my words and actions had to match, but even more than that – my intentions had to match too.

I began to walk around the offices and schedule open office time – in person and virtually. I listened and learned. I fielded concerns, new ideas, and general complaints.  Now, before you say that is not the job of the chief executive, pause a moment and consider the following.

Where does the responsibility for the entire organization reside? According to a sign on the desk of President Harry S. Truman, “the buck stops here.”  So, while CEOs might delegate the gathering of the issues to others, I believe that the responsibility for addressing them sits with the CEO. If you as the CEO do not know what these issues are, how can you fix them?

Employees who do not believe the CEO cares about their problems will not raise them, instead, they fester and grow. In fact, when employees believe they do not matter at work shows in their output. The magnitude of a leader’s impact often extends far beyond what you may comprehend, often affect people’s lives beyond work. Recent studies from Deloitte, StudyFinds, and The Workforce Institute among many others, indicate that a person’s boss or job often negatively impacts their mental and physical health.

I knew that treating employees as people and valuing them also impacts the entire in the organization from hiring to operations to results.

As a new CEO, I needed to hear what the problems and concerns of the employees were, and I wanted to learn more about the employees who worked for me.

I discovered that the employees needed technological tools to help with their work, but more importantly, they needed and wanted a leader who believed in and championed them. They found this in me.

As a legal organization, there was a long-held belief that lawyers were always the answer. If there was a logistics issue, put a lawyer on it. Technology needs, sure, detail one of the lawyers. Public relations, sure a lawyer can handle that! Although the organization had a team of lawyers detailed to all these operational areas which pulled them off the primary work, the issues continued to grow. Lawyers are trained to research and advise, implementing usually requires subject matter experts. I found we had few of those.

As luck would have it, we did have a subject matter technology expert who was also a lawyer! He suggested some technological enhancements that improved workflow for his colleagues and increased output. He also was instrumental in advising me on hiring the right subject matter experts to further develop our technological innovations.

This led to more suggestions and solution-based ideas from the employees, some of which I implemented and gave the employees the credit. I fought for an increase in the budget to bring in more technology and hire additional people who could provide the support and assistance the employees and the organization needed.

I also championed and acknowledged them by thanking and rewarding them for their hard work and celebrating milestones for them and the organization.

What happened? I did not crash and burn – as some expected or wanted.

This ill-advised leadership approach – relating to and engaging with employees as people – succeeded.

Interestingly, results were where we saw the first success, increasing outcomes by 50 percent in year one of my leadership. Retention, morale, and recruitment followed in quick succession, supported by data and surveys. New technological tools combined with increased morale and retention led to results never thought possible – a 100 percent increase which held steady during my entire leadership tenure even during a pandemic.

The reputation of the organization increased as employees recruited new employees. Customers and stakeholders were pleased.

Other organizations began to ask how this happened, what was the secret?

The secret ingredient is caring for, relating to, and investing in your most valuable resource – your employees. By dedicating time and effort to fostering authentic connections with your employees, you nurture and strengthen your most valuable assets and demonstrate genuine respect and concern for those important to them. All of these people matter.

Here are my take aways:

  1. Show your employees that you care for them as people by putting them first – in every aspect of your organization – technology, processes, and communications.
  2. Listen! Be seen and make yourself available to your employees and talk about life outside work – this was extremely important during the pandemic.
  3. Invest your time in and on your most valuable resource – the people of your workforce – from office hours to walkabouts & publicly acknowledge the work and ideas of the employees.

And keep doing it over and over again.

What I found is the people who work for you want to know that you, their leader, is a human being – a person. And they want to know that you care about them as another human being – not just a part of the organizational machine.

 

cheryl mason

Relational leadership and management authority Cheryl L. Mason, J.D. is a TEDx speaker, author and CEO and Chief Catalyst of Catalyst Leadership Management — a firm helping CEOs, senior leaders, companies and teams lead with authenticity and empathy while leveraging strategy, analytics, vision and change management to realize record-breaking results. As the fourth Presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed—and the first woman and military spouse—to serve as the CEO /Chairman of the VA Board of Veterans’ Appeals, The Honorable Cheryl L. Mason has a proven track record of leading with an impactful morale-boosting, trust-based, people-centric approach. Mason is author of “Dare to Relate: Leading with a Fierce Heart .


 

How To Ensure Your Website Is Search-Ready

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Starting a business is an exciting venture, but getting your website noticed online is just as important as creating the product or service you’re so passionate about.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) might sound complicated, but it’s simply about making sure people can easily find your website when they search for keywords related to your business.

Whether you’re just starting out or trying to grow, understanding how to make your website “search-ready” will give you a massive advantage.

Why a Technical SEO Audit Is the Foundation of Visibility

Think of your website as a building. The structure needs to be solid and functional before you start decorating it. A technical SEO audit is like checking the building’s foundation — it ensures that everything underneath is stable so your site can perform at its best.

The first thing you need to do is check how well your website is organised. Search engines like Google rely on bots to “crawl” your website and index its pages. If your site is cluttered or has broken links (those frustrating “404” error pages), those bots will struggle to do their job. Tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can help you identify and fix these issues.

Your website also needs an XML sitemap — a kind of blueprint that tells search engines where all your important pages are located. It’s like giving Google a shortcut to find the content you want to highlight.

Similarly, the robots.txt file acts as a set of instructions for search engines, letting them know which parts of your site to explore and which to ignore. If you skip these steps, you risk some of your most valuable content being overlooked.

Speed is another critical factor. A slow-loading website is a huge turnoff — not just for visitors but for search engines too. Compress large images, use fast hosting, and minimise unnecessary scripts to keep your site speedy.

Remember, a technically sound website is the backbone of your SEO strategy. Without it, even the best content won’t perform well.

Crafting Content That Speaks to Both People and Search Engines

Once your website’s technical setup is solid, it’s time to focus on content. Content is what drives people to your site and keeps them there. The key is creating material that’s not only useful but also easy to find through search engines.

Start by thinking about what your target audience is searching for. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest to uncover popular search terms in your industry. If you run a fitness startup, for example, your audience might be searching for “home workout tips” or “best post-workout snacks.” These keywords are the bridge between your content and the people who need it.

But here’s the trick — don’t overuse those keywords. Instead of cramming them into every sentence, weave them naturally into your page titles, subheadings, and text. Your writing should feel like a conversation, not a sales pitch. If you focus on answering your audience’s questions in a clear and engaging way, search engines will reward you for it.

Don’t forget mobile users. Most people browse the internet on their phones, and if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of potential traffic. A mobile-friendly site isn’t just about looking good on smaller screens; it’s about functionality. Make sure buttons are easy to click, text is readable, and pages load quickly.

Why SEO Is a Must-Have for Businesses

As a startup, you’re likely up against competitors with more resources, bigger teams, and established reputations. That might sound intimidating, but SEO levels the playing field. It allows smaller businesses to compete with larger ones by focusing on relevance and quality.

SEO is about building trust with your audience. When your site appears at the top of search results, it signals to users that your business is credible and reliable. This trust is invaluable for startups, especially when you’re trying to establish yourself in a crowded market.

Organic traffic is cost-effective. Unlike paid ads, which stop working as soon as you stop paying, organic traffic can continue to grow over time, providing a steady stream of potential customers. For startups with tight budgets, this makes SEO one of the smartest investments you can make.

Climbing to the Top: How to Improve Rankings Step by Step

Reaching the top of search results is about consistent effort and smart strategies. One of the best ways to improve your ranking is by creating valuable content. If you run a travel startup, for instance, you could write articles like “Top Budget Travel Destinations” or “How to Pack Light for Long Trips.” Content like this not only attracts readers but also establishes you as an authority in your field.

Backlinks are another crucial piece of the puzzle. These are links from other websites that point to yours, and they act like votes of confidence for your site. The more reputable the site linking to you, the more search engines trust your website. To earn backlinks, you can reach out to other businesses for collaborations, write guest posts, or create shareable resources like infographics or guides.

If your business serves a specific area, local SEO is crucial. For this, set up a Google My Business account. It’s free and helps your business show up in local searches. Make sure your profile is complete with your business name, address, phone number, hours, and photos. Reviews are also hugely important here, so encourage your happy customers to leave positive feedback.

Tracking Your Progress and Adjusting Your Strategy

SEO isn’t something you do once and forget about—it’s an ongoing process. You need to regularly check how your website is performing. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you see how much traffic you’re getting, where it’s coming from, and which pages are most popular.

It’s also important to understand that SEO takes time. Unlike ads that deliver quick results, SEO is more like planting a tree — it grows steadily over time. On average, you’ll start seeing significant improvements in three to six months. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see immediate changes. Stay consistent, and the results will come.

Can You Handle SEO Yourself, or Do You Need Help?

SEO might seem overwhelming, but you don’t need to be a tech genius to get started. There are plenty of resources online to guide you through the basics. Start small, and as you grow more confident, you can tackle more advanced strategies. That said, if you’re short on time or competing in a tough market, hiring an SEO expert could be worth the investment.

However, SEO isn’t always the right fit. For example, if your audience doesn’t use search engines to find products like yours, or if you need immediate results, other marketing channels like social media or paid ads might work better.

Building a Future-Proof Website

SEO is about playing the long game. It’s not just about climbing search rankings but creating a website that genuinely helps your audience and reflects the quality of your business. With a little patience and effort, your website can become a powerful tool to drive traffic, build trust, and achieve your goals.

So, take that first step today. Each small improvement brings you closer to your goals, and the effort you put in now will pay off for years to come.

 

Leasing Vs. Buying A Car Hauler: What’s Best For New Businesses?

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truck and driver

truck and driver

Starting a new business is exciting, but it’s also full of tough decisions. One big choice you’ll face is whether to lease or buy a car hauler. It’s not a simple decision — each option comes with its own benefits and drawbacks.

To help you out, this post will break it down so you can choose what’s best for your new business. Continue reading below.

Understand Your Business Needs

Before deciding, think about what your business truly needs. Are you planning short-term or long-term use? Will your car hauler handle light or heavy loads? Knowing your requirements helps you focus on what matters most — cost, flexibility, and convenience.

Leasing and purchasing a car hauler are both viable options, but the right choice depends on how you plan to use the equipment.

The Advantages Of Leasing A Car Hauler

Leasing a car hauler can be a smart move for a new business. Here’s why:

Lower Upfront Costs.

Leasing doesn’t require a huge upfront payment. You’ll usually just need the first month’s payment and a deposit. This is perfect if you’re starting out and want to keep more cash in your pocket.

Flexibility.

When you lease, you’re not locked into long-term ownership. Many leasing contracts last only a few years. If your business grows or changes, you can upgrade to a bigger or better car hauler without the hassle of selling the old one.

Lower Maintenance Responsibility.

In most leases, the lessor handles major repairs and maintenance. This means fewer unexpected costs and less stress for you. You can focus on running your business while someone else worries about the equipment.

Predictable Costs.

Leasing comes with fixed monthly payments. This predictability makes it easier to budget and manage your finances.

The Drawbacks Of Leasing

Of course, leasing has its downsides:

No Ownership.

At the end of the lease, you don’t own the car hauler. You’ll have to return it or pay a hefty fee to buy it outright. If long-term ownership matters to you, leasing might not be the best choice.

Limited Use.

Leases often come with restrictions. For example, you might have mileage limits or rules about wear and tear. If you exceed these limits, you could face extra charges.

Higher Costs Over Time.

While leasing has lower upfront costs, it can be more expensive in the long run. You’ll keep paying as long as you lease, and those costs can add up.

The Pros Of Buying

Buying a car hauler is another great option. Here’s why it might work for you:

Full Vehicle Ownership.

When you buy a car hauler, it’s yours. You can use it as much as you want without worrying about limits or extra fees. Ownership gives you full control.

Long-Term Value.

Owning a car hauler is an investment. While it may depreciate over time, you can still sell it later and recoup some of your costs. Leasing, on the other hand, doesn’t build any equity.

Customization Options.

When you own the equipment, you can modify it to suit your business needs. Add features, improve functionality, or adjust the branding. This flexibility can give your business an edge.

Potential Tax Advantages.

Ownership often comes with tax advantages. Depending on your location and financial situation, you may be able to deduct depreciation, maintenance, and loan interest.

The Disadvantages Of Buying

Buying also has challenges:

High Upfront Costs.

Purchasing a car hauler requires a significant upfront investment. For new businesses with tight budgets, this can be a dealbreaker.

Upkeep Can Costly.

When you own the equipment, you’re responsible for all of its maintenance and repairs. Unexpected breakdowns can disrupt your operations and hurt your bottom line.

The Value Of The Vehicle Goes Down.

Like most vehicles, car haulers lose value over time. If you plan to upgrade or sell in the future, you might not get as much as you paid.

Long-Term Commitment.

Once you buy, you’re committed. If your business changes or the car hauler doesn’t meet your needs anymore, you’ll have to deal with selling or trading it.

Which One Is The Better Option: Leasing Or Buying A Car Hauler

Cost is often the biggest factor for new businesses. Leasing is more affordable upfront, while buying offers better long-term value. But it’s not just about the price tag. Think about cash flow, potential revenue, and the total cost of ownership.

Calculate how much you’ll spend over time. Don’t forget to include maintenance, insurance, and any penalties for exceeding lease limits. Compare these costs to your projected earnings to see which option makes the most sense.

Remember: your car hauler represents your business. Leasing might give you access to newer, more professional-looking equipment. This can impress clients and build your brand image. Nonetheless, owning a well-maintained hauler can also make a strong impression.

Final Words

Leasing and buying both have their merits, but the best choice depends on your business goals and financial situation.

Keep in mind the following: think carefully about your needs, budget, and future business plans when deciding if you need to lease or buy a car hauler for your company. By making the right choice, you’ll set your business up for success and stay ahead in the competitive world of car hauling.


10 Strategic Planning Pitfalls To Avoid

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by Drew Yancey, PhD,Founder & CEO at Teleios Strategy and co-author of “ Leading Performance… Because It Can’t Be Managed: How to Lead the Modern Workforce

As executives gear up for the 2025 strategic planning season, the process can feel like a balancing act. Developing a strategic plan that both drives meaningful change and satisfies stakeholders is a complex task, made even more challenging by the fast-evolving landscape of marketplace needs, industry trends, and technological advancements.

However, many leaders unknowingly fall into common pitfalls that can derail their planning efforts. To avoid these, it’s crucial to approach strategic planning with intentionality, foresight, and a willingness to embrace change. Based on insights drawn from value proposition redesign practices and real-world business challenges, here are some of the most common strategic planning pitfalls to avoid.

1. Starting with Products and Services, Not Marketplace Needs.

One of the most frequent missteps in strategic planning is jumping straight into product and service enhancements without first taking the time to understand the modern market’s evolving needs and challenges. This misalignment can lead to investing time and resources in offerings that don’t resonate within the marketplace.

Association leaders must resist the temptation to tweak current offerings in response to customer or client feedback that might be incomplete or outdated. Instead, focus on uncovering the deeper, underlying needs of your target market by conducting thorough research, listening to stakeholder pain points, and analyzing trends in your industry.

A valuable framework to use here is the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) approach, which focuses on understanding the motivations and desired outcomes that drive customers to engage with your company. By first identifying what your audience is truly seeking to accomplish, you can tailor your offerings to meet those specific needs and deliver greater value.

2. Incrementalism: The Trap of Small Tweaks.

Incremental improvements — small, conservative changes to existing programs or services — are tempting because they feel safer and easier to implement. However, this approach often keeps Associations stuck in the status quo, unable to generate the breakthrough innovations that the marketplace craves.

For example, a common sign of incrementalism is allocating resources primarily toward existing programs, while overlooking opportunities to invest in new and innovative initiatives. While there may be pressure to avoid risk, Association executives need to think big and bold to stay relevant and provide distinctive value in a competitive landscape.

One way to avoid this trap is to ask yourself whether your current strategic plan is simply aimed at maintaining the status quo or driving transformative change. Big, bold ideas are uncomfortable because they challenge the way things have always been done. But if your Association isn’t willing to explore uncomfortable ideas, it risks losing relevancy and, ultimately, revenue.

3. Focusing on the Rear-View Mirror Instead of the Windshield.

Associations that spend too much time reflecting on past successes are at risk of missing future opportunities. While celebrating past accomplishments can be beneficial for morale, it can also blind you to the changes and challenges on the horizon.

Your strategic plan must be forward-thinking. Instead of concentrating solely on what has worked before, actively look for new trends, disruptions, and future opportunities within your industry. Be willing to question current assumptions and take a proactive stance in identifying where your Association could be heading.

A key way to do this is by conducting regular environmental scans — assessments of external factors such as economic conditions, technology trends, and regulatory changes — that could affect your Association in the future. The goal is not just to adapt to these changes but to position your organization to lead them.

4. Overemphasis on Risk Avoidance.

A conservative approach to strategic planning, driven by a fear of failure or desire to avoid risk, can lead to stagnation. Many Association leaders, especially in times of uncertainty, focus heavily on maintaining stability rather than pursuing opportunities for growth.

However, organizations that prioritize short-term stability over long-term innovation tend to struggle with customer retention and engagement. Bold moves are necessary to stay ahead of the curve, even if they involve some level of risk. To break free from the risk-avoidance mindset, it’s essential to build a culture where calculated risk-taking is encouraged, and failure is seen as part of the learning process.

One way to manage risk without stifling innovation is to adopt a dynamic feedback loop. By continually testing and refining new initiatives based on marketplace feedback, you can make adjustments early, minimizing risk while still pursuing meaningful change.

5. Benchmarking Only Against Similar Organizations.

Benchmarking — comparing your Association’s performance to that of similar organizations — can be helpful, but it should not be the sole basis for your strategic planning. When Association executives rely too heavily on what their peers are doing, they risk blending in with the crowd rather than standing out.

The more valuable approach is to look for inspiration outside your immediate sector. Explore what leading organizations in other industries are doing to innovate and create value for their customers or stakeholders. By bringing fresh ideas and perspectives into your strategic planning process, your Association can differentiate itself and offer unique value propositions not found elsewhere in the marketplace.

6. Failing to Allocate Resources Toward Innovation.

A common pitfall in strategic planning is the disproportionate allocation of resources toward maintaining existing programs, leaving little room for investment in innovation. While it’s important to sustain core functions and services, innovation must be an explicit priority to ensure future relevance.

Leaders often struggle with bias toward the familiar. Innovation, however, requires rethinking traditional resource allocation models. Consider setting aside a percentage of your budget specifically for new initiatives, even if it means trimming less impactful programs. The key is to strike a balance between sustaining what works today and building the capacity for what’s needed tomorrow.

7. Prioritizing Short-Term Gains Over Long-Term Vision.

In the race to show immediate results, many Associations fall into the trap of prioritizing short-term wins at the expense of long-term strategic goals. While quick wins can boost morale and offer evidence of progress, they can also distract from the bigger picture and lead to unsustainable growth or missed opportunities for lasting impact.

As you build your strategic plan, it’s essential to maintain a clear focus on your Association’s long-term vision and objectives. This requires the discipline to make decisions that may not show immediate results but will set the foundation for future success.

8. Relying on Feedback Loops Focused Only on Current Services.

Another common pitfall is over-reliance on feedback loops that center solely on evaluating current services rather than exploring potential new offerings. Feedback is essential for assessing the effectiveness of your current initiatives, but it should not limit your Association’s ability to innovate.

To avoid this trap, ensure that your feedback loops include mechanisms for identifying unmet customer needs and exploring new value creation opportunities. Encourage your existing customers to think beyond what they currently receive from the company and consider what they might need in the future. By shifting the focus of your feedback mechanisms, you can uncover valuable insights that will guide innovation and help you stay ahead of the curve.

Strategic planning is more than just an annual exercise. It’s an opportunity to take stock of where your Association is today and where it needs to go in the future. By avoiding these common pitfalls, you can ensure that your 2025 plan not only positions your Association for success but also delivers meaningful, lasting value to your customer base.

9. Functioning with ‘Strategic’ vs. ‘Stakeholder Value’ Plans.

As we transition toward year-end, many organizations are realizing their strategic goals are significantly off track. This isn’t a rare occurrence; in fact, it’s almost expected. The natural momentum that kicks off a new year often dwindles as daily operations take precedence, leaving ambitious strategic plans largely unexecuted. Statistics suggest that most organizations fail to implement 70% of their strategic initiatives. Take this opportunity to toss out your ‘strategic’ plan… what you need is a ‘stakeholder value’ plan. Traditional strategic plans tend to be more of a generalized wish list than a targeted, actionable roadmap. They frequently lose sight of the very people they’re supposed to benefit: the stakeholders.

Redefining strategic plans as “stakeholder impact plans” is crucial pivot. This shift emphasizes that the ultimate goal of any strategic initiative should be to create value for stakeholders. An effective plan needs to clearly articulate how it will deliver new value to key stakeholder groups. Of course, it’s fundamentally essential to recognize who they are. At their core, successful organizations serve at least two primary stakeholder groups: customers or clients (external stakeholders) and employees (internal stakeholders). You can even go a step further by including suppliers (another critical external group) and ownership (an additional internal group) as key stakeholders.

Stakeholders are not afterthoughts, but rather are the foundation and focus of the planning process. It’s about understanding the “jobs to be done” for these stakeholders — identifying what they rely on your organization to achieve, assessing where your organization is meeting these needs, and pinpointing where it falls short.

By prioritizing areas that will have the highest impact on stakeholders and transforming these priorities into concrete objectives with measurable results, your strategic plan transforms into a dynamic tool. It becomes more than a list of hopes; it turns into a driving force that fosters sustained action throughout the year.

This new perspective not only revitalizes the planning process but also ensures that the plan remains relevant and impactful long past the initial enthusiasm of the new year. Adopting a stakeholder value plan is not just about changing terminology — it’s about rethinking how strategic planning can fundamentally drive the success of your organization by truly serving those who matter most.

10. Focusing on Strategic ‘Priorities.

One of the most dangerous things a business leader can possess is an extensive list of “strategic priorities.” Traditional strategic planning tends to overemphasize long lists of these while underemphasizing concrete plans for executing on those priorities. As a result, a shocking 60-90% of strategic plans fail to fully materialize. The problem lies not with planning itself — identifying strategic priorities is vital — but rather with the lack of clear execution protocols to activate those priorities.

Leaders often compile inventories spanning dozens of critical priorities across growth opportunities, operational improvements, customer initiatives, and more. However, having twenty “top strategic priorities” is equivalent to having none at all. Attempting to actively pursue such a wide array simultaneously stretches resources too thin. Without adequate focus, it becomes challenging to achieve critical mass on any specific initiative, causing frustration and initiative fatigue across teams.

Moreover, priorities trick leaders into complacency, fostering the false belief that merely identifying something as “important” will somehow guarantee execution. Like overly ambitious New Year’s resolutions, priorities rarely catalyze change without concerted plans for accountability and follow-through. Despite good intentions, only 8% of people fully achieve their resolutions each year. Similarly, while leaders excel at strategizing priorities, 60-90% of organizational strategic plans fail largely due to flawed or total lack of execution protocols.

Endeavor to transform priorities into quantifiable, actionable objectives centered on specific execution plans. For instance, rather than just identifying “improved customer retention” as a priority, leaders must drill down to concrete goals like “reducing customer churn by 2% within 6 months.” This clarity of purpose fuels strategic discipline. In today’s disruptive business landscape, both planning and execution are indispensable. However, leaders must resist conflating priorities with outcomes. A paradigm shift focused on execution-based strategic management is crucial for channeling priorities into real-world impact and results. Just as resolutions without concerted action plans go nowhere, strategic priorities minus execution equal zero.

As business leaders prepare for the 2025 strategic planning season, avoiding these common pitfalls and undertaking the alternate best practices will foster a more forward-thinking, adaptable blueprint that drives real impact. Strategic planning challenges abound, but with the right mindset and proactive measures, companies can turn potential obstacles into opportunities for profound growth and innovation.

 

Drew Yancey

Drew Yancey, PhD is Founder & CEO at Teleios Strategy, a premier strategic planning, leadership development, executive coaching and succession planning advisory firm. With a proven track record in high-performance team building and strategic execution for over 15 years, Yancey solves challenging problems at the nexus of growth, strategy, and innovation. He is co-author of “ Leading Performance… Because It Can’t Be Managed: How to Lead the Modern Workforce” .


 

Small Business Bookkeeping: 4 Common Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

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business document folder with label bookkeeping

Proper bookkeeping is the foundation of a well-run business. Accurate financial records give you a clear picture of your company’s performance and guide critical decisions. Yet, small mistakes in tracking finances can snowball into bigger problems, like cash shortages, unexpected penalties, or unreliable reports.

Knowing where businesses often go wrong is the first step to avoiding costly errors. From staying on top of tax preparation to ensuring your records reflect reality, taking proactive measures keeps your finances in check.

Read on to discover common bookkeeping mistakes and how to prevent them for better financial management.

1. Mixing Personal and Business Finances.

Combining personal and business finances is a common oversight among small business owners. It complicates financial management, makes expense tracking unreliable, and creates risks for tax errors.

Below are practical ways to keep your personal and business finances separate:

  • Open dedicated bank accounts: Establish a separate business bank account to manage all transactions related to your business. This creates a clear distinction between personal and professional spending, simplifying financial reporting.
  • Use business credit cards: Always use a business credit card for company expenses like office supplies or vendor payments. This helps keep records organized and prevents the temptation to mix in personal purchases.
  • Pay yourself a salary: Treat yourself like an employee by transferring a set salary from your business account to your personal account. This maintains consistency and avoids pulling funds randomly from the business.
  • Maintain organized records: Keep thorough documentation of your business expenses and income. This includes receipts, invoices, and bank statements. Having organized records ensures accuracy during audits and tax filings.

Separating personal and business finances simplifies small business bookkeeping, reduces errors, and improves financial clarity. With these steps, you’ll have a stronger foundation for managing your business’s finances effectively.

2. Neglecting to Update Records Regularly.

Falling behind on record-keeping creates unnecessary confusion and inaccuracies. It can leave you guessing about cash flow, misreporting expenses, and struggling to make sound financial decisions.

To avoid these pitfalls, here are steps to maintain up-to-date records:

  • Set a regular schedule: Designate specific days—like once a week or twice a month—to update your financial records. Consistent upkeep helps prevent backlogs and ensures your books stay current and reliable.
  • Use automated tools: Bookkeeping software like QuickBooks Online or Xero can automate tasks like data entry and transaction categorization. Automation saves time and reduces the risk of human error.
  • Record every transaction: Log all income, expenses, and payments promptly. Keeping records accurate ensures your financial statements reflect the true state of your business.
  • Review your entries: Take a few minutes during your updates to review for errors or missing details. Addressing small mistakes early prevents them from snowballing into larger problems.

Updating records regularly streamlines small business bookkeeping, helps track cash flow accurately, and keeps your financial data reliable for tax filings and decision-making.

3. Failing to Reconcile Bank Accounts.

When your bank statements and financial records don’t align, it can create gaps in your understanding of cash flow and lead to costly errors.

To keep your records accurate and reliable, the following steps can help you stay on top of bank reconciliation:

  • Perform monthly reconciliation: Set aside time each month to compare your bank statements with your bookkeeping records. This process ensures all deposits, withdrawals, and transactions are accounted for and properly recorded.
  • Identify and resolve discrepancies: If you find mismatches, investigate immediately. Discrepancies can result from duplicate payments, unrecorded fees, or unexpected bank errors. Promptly resolving these issues keeps your financial data clean.
  • Use accounting software: Tools like QuickBooks and Xero can automate parts of the reconciliation process, reducing manual effort. They simplify matching transactions and highlight inconsistencies for you to address.

Regular bank reconciliation ensures your financial records remain accurate and trustworthy. This practice supports better cash flow management and minimizes unexpected surprises in your finances.

4. Overlooking Tax Deductions and Preparation.

Neglecting tax preparation and failing to track eligible deductions can cost your business money.

To make the most of tax-saving opportunities, consider the following steps:

  • Keep receipts and records: Maintain detailed documentation for every business expense, such as office supplies, travel costs, and software subscriptions. Proper records ensure you can claim deductions confidently and avoid disputes during audits.
  • Track eligible deductions: Stay informed about common deductible expenses, including home office costs, vehicle mileage for business travel, and marketing expenses. Consistently monitoring these items can reduce your taxable income.
  • Set up a tax fund: Open a separate account to set aside funds for quarterly or annual tax payments. Planning ahead helps you avoid cash flow issues when deadlines arrive.
  • Work with tax professionals: Consult a bookkeeper or tax specialist to identify deductions specific to your business. Their expertise can help optimize your filings, prevent errors, and reduce your tax burden.

Proactive tax preparation ensures compliance, saves money, and eliminates the stress of last-minute filings.

Final Thoughts

Effective bookkeeping is essential for maintaining financial clarity and stability in your business. By avoiding common mistakes, you can streamline your processes, reduce the risk of errors, and make more informed financial decisions. Staying organized, proactive, and consistent in your approach will not only help you manage your finances efficiently but also set the stage for long-term success. With the right practices in place, you can ensure your business remains on solid financial footing, ready to grow and thrive.


Best New Self-Help Business Books

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man office desk

man office desk

Self-improvement is on most people’s agenda. Whether as leaders or entrepreneurs, making a more meaningful mark on their organization and taking their work — and life — to the next level is an enduring objective.

These five new books on self-help for those in business will offer insight on how to further your self-improvement journey.

In “Mindfully Successful: Unlock the Power of Your Brain, Body, and Breath to Elevate Your Leadership, author Margo Boster, an executive coach and mindfulness advocate, has developed an actionable plan for leaders seeking to integrate mindfulness into their professional and personal lives. Boster’s approach helps leaders move beyond the “successfully exhausted” treadmill toward mindful success — cultivating emotional intelligence, focus, and authentic leadership while also delivering impactful and sustainable success. Her methods empower leaders to mitigate stress and avoid burnout using evidence-based practices. She’s used her approach with clients ranging from executives to military generals to and senior government officials. From neuroplasticity exercises to transformative breathing practices, “Mindfully Successful” equips leaders with strategies that they can immediately implement.

Lead It Like Lasso” by Nick Coniglio and Marnie Stockman, returns readers to the AFC Richmond pitch for another coaching session based on the heartwarming Ted Lasso series. For those who’ve been in withdrawal since the series ended, “Lead It Like Lasso” adopts the humor and appeal intrinsic to the streaming show and draws from Coach Lasso’s leadership style that’s grounded in positivity, teamwork, and unfaltering kindness. Along with valuable leadership tools, fans will recognize anecdotes drawn for various episodes. In one exercise, readers assess their leadership style and learn which character in the series they’re most similar to. The authors, both successful business founders, have cleverly used the popular show to showcase leadership qualities that lead to success.

In “GRAPPLING: Leaders Striving to Improve“, Robert Kaplan presents eight fictionalized stories based on real life executive clients to illustrate how working on ourselves is hard to do well. It can quickly become uncomfortable or involve inherent beliefs we’re not aware of. He describes how working with a trained professional better enables us to meet the challenges of personal improvement. Kaplan, a leadership advisor, provides a road map for how to assess and adjust our own performance at work and at home in the spirit of continual improvement. From how blind spots get in the way to how to find the off switch when passion turns ugly, Kaplan’s parables have messages we can all learn from for personal transformation.

Hacking the Corporate Jungle: How to Work Less, Make More and Actually Like Your Life” draws from the maxim “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives”. Author Sean McMann implores readers to start prioritizing their life by moving beyond the work culture of constant competition and profit. Instead, he offers a solution that doesn’t involve adding more — but adding less. In sharing the ups and downs, twists and turns, and roadblocks encountered throughout his own journey, he provides a template to a rewarding life based. He describes how to hack corporations by changing how we manage our days — from applying the 80/20 Rule to full(fill) our time effectively, to his 30 Minutes of Mastery Step-by-Step Guide. McMann shares how to find self-worth that isn’t connected to the stale corporate paradigm. He instructs us to stay focused on what really matters and create a new reality in which we can flourish.

In “Ready to Win: How Great Leaders Succeed Through Preparation“, author Matthew Mitchell — the winningest head coach in the history of the University of Kentucky women’s basketball program — reveals his secrets for how to expertly prepare for any challenge. Drawing from his success on the court as well as coaching organizational leaders, Mitchell shares where to find the sweet spot that enables you to consistently win versus struggling with up and down results. With his entertaining writing style and engaging anecdotes from his coaching career, he provides readers with essential advice for adapting his proven method to achieve championship-level preparation and create a habit of always driving toward excellence.

Whether the goal is better self-awareness, more effective leadership, improved work-life balance, or achieving maximum performance, find inspiration, the valuable insights from these experts will help you in your quest for achieving positive change.


 

Landing Pages 101: Devising A Strategy For Takeoff

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by Paul DeLeeuw, Head of Interactive Oversight at ddm marketing+communications

You’ve just spent weeks defining the social posts, the digital ads, and the copy for all the platforms for your latest campaign. The FizzBuzz 3000 (recently updated from the 2000, which is so 2000) is about to hit the market, and so is your campaign. Then your media coordinator asks: “Where are we going to send them?”

Then it hits you: you need a landing page. You need to refresh the website. You need to make sure the tracking is set up.

Oh no.

Yeah, you could just send them to your company home page. There will be a highlight carousel there, or a featured post or, well, something to tell the user why they just clicked on your ad, your email, your post. Right?

How about a landing page!

When your customer does decide they’re going to click the link, they want to end up on a page that has meaning and value to them. Because up until they spend money with you, the most valuable thing a prospect can give you is time and attention. We can’t squander that. Let’s think about a great user experience for our audience.

Content.

The content of your site’s homepage is often more about defining your brand, and helping users navigate to the content they’re seeking. Most businesses have multiple audiences they’re delivering content to – existing customers, prospective customers, employees, and job-seekers, just to name a few. There are likely segments within each of those broad categories that are all looking for something different. Unless your company is narrowly focused, your home page probably isn’t the best landing page for a specific campaign.

Instead, think about your campaign’s strategy and goals. Are you creating brand or product awareness? Are you educating on the problem that your offering solves? Or are you trying to get the potential customers that are about to buy clicking a “buy now” button?

Each of those phases of the buying cycle comes with its own content strategy. Knowing that your campaign is targeting a focused segment will help you realize conversions more efficiently, because you will be speaking to that segment, rather than trying to catch-all.

Call to (the best) action.

Embedded in your content should be a relevant call-to-action. There’s many actions that your prospect might take, and again, which you are looking for is highly dependent on what phase of the buying cycle they’re in.

Brand awareness? Sign up for our newsletter. List-building is a great way to help early-stage prospects get to know you, start engaging with your brand, and be receptive to your message. The call-to-action is going to offer a very simple (read: one box, one button) newsletter sign-up form. Consider that a conversion for the purposes of tracking as well. List-building might not have direct monetary value, but it does increase your company’s potential energy — a sign the campaign is working.

Getting them to buy now? Well, the call-to-action here is going to be an “Add to Cart” button, ideally. For a service, it might look more like signing up for that free trial.

It’s not going to make sense, though, for the brand awareness campaign to land on a free trial pitch. That customer isn’t ready, and actually, they might just look at that as being pushy.

Similarly, the customer that’s ready to buy isn’t here to sign up for your newsletter (and if you want them to sign up, you can always add it to the checkout screen).

Nailing the call-to-action based on the group you’re targeting shows your prospect that you know what they’re looking for, and you’re putting it right in front of them.

Design for all the screens.

Social media is predominantly experienced on a mobile device. If you’re posting on social or placing ads on social platforms, a mobile-friendly, responsive design is needed to accommodate those users.

The design methodology that works best is mobile-first. Starting from a narrow, phone-sized mobile design will really test your content and call-to-action with regard to what’s most important. What message will the user see first, and how far will they interact before they get to the call-to-action? How much content do you really need to place before the user can move ahead?

As you expand to tablet and desktop sizes, you can always shift the content and layout to make use of all the space available. If you start with a desktop layout, you may find yourself making unsatisfying decisions on where to stash the content as the screen size shrinks.

It’s folly to design for an experience that less than a majority of your customers will have. Design for the phone first, and expand it to the desktop second.

Speed.

You’ve got solid content, you’ve got a great call-to-action, the design is beautiful – now let’s get just a little technical.

In public speaking, they say you have 7 minutes to get your audience’s attention. On the web, you’ve got more like 30 seconds. So it’s critical that your page loads quickly to get your prospect content while they still have interest and before they swipe away to another site or app.

Google recommends 2.5 seconds to the Largest Contentful Paint — the time it takes the largest image, text block, or video to become visible before the user scrolls the page. It strongly correlates with the user’s perception that the site has loaded (even if it’s not yet fully loaded).

There are many ways to help your site load faster, with various caching solutions, content delivery networks, and improved image or video compression to deliver the site’s contents more quickly. A tool like Google Lighthouse can assess your landing page load time. It will produce a report with technical recommendations for improving everything from server response time to image optimization.

Ideally, you should set up a recurring scan using a tool like Lighthouse, so that as you make adjustments and changes to the landing page over time, you don’t accidentally introduce slowness. How fast your page is isn’t just about the speed of the server or the code; it’s also about how heavy the content itself is. Be judicious with the use of large assets like videos. They are certainly compelling, but keep them short and compress them well or your audience will just move on before they get your story.

Step zero.

Even before your landing page goes live, have a clearly defined campaign strategy and goals. A campaign strategy informs everything else in a campaign. Who are we targeting? What part of the buyer cycle are they in? Where are we going to find them? How are we going to reach them? And once we do reach them, what do we want them to do?

Starting with campaign strategy is the most important part of the process. Without it, you’ll waste time and money. You’ll end up with worse than expected results, and you won’t necessarily be able to build a plan of attack to make an improvement.

 

Paul DeLeeuw

Paul DeLeeuw is the Head of Interactive Oversight at ddm marketing+communications, a leading marketing agency for highly complex and highly regulated industries. As a tech lead, Paul provides business process and data automation solutions within the healthcare, financial services and manufacturing spaces.


 

How Bad Debts Can Affect Your Business Health

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For business owners, maintaining financial stability is always a critical focus. While a steady cash flow and prompt payments from customers would be the ideal scenario, reality often tells a different story. Late customer payments can create challenges, such as struggling to meet payroll or pay suppliers on time.

Sometimes, payments may not come through at all. Beyond the frustration this causes, consider how unpaid debts may be affecting your business’s broader financial well-being and its capacity for growth. Here’s how these challenges are holding your business back.

Decline in Financial Stability

Bad debt can significantly harm a company’s financial health. Often, the damage happens gradually, but it can also escalate quickly or reach a critical point without warning. Unpaid receivables represent lost income. They can negatively affect essential financial metrics like

  • The accounts receivable turnover ratio
  • Quick ratio
  • Current ratio
  • Debt-to-equity ratio

As these metrics deteriorate, the company appears less appealing to investors and lenders. This makes it harder to secure funding for growth or expansion.

Note that the business has already delivered the product or service, which creates a “double hit”; failing to collect payment while still covering the cost of goods sold. This is worse than not producing the product at all, as it speeds up the decline in financial stability. If bad debt becomes serious, it can weaken balance sheets and profit margins, eventually pushing a business toward insolvency in extreme cases.

Borrowing Capacity and Creditworthiness

Carrying bad debt can harm a company’s credit standing, leading to higher borrowing costs or restricted access to financing. Lenders view poor collection performance and overdue receivables as warning signs, often prompting them to increase interest rates, impose stricter loan terms, or refuse credit entirely.

These issues also limit a small business’s ability to utilize invoice factoring. This process involves selling accounts receivable to a factoring company, which provides upfront payment and assumes the responsibility of customer collections.

However, companies with low-quality accounts receivable caused by bad debt may struggle to secure factoring arrangements. A commercial collection agency can help your business avoid these issues by utilizing their expertise and resources to collect unpaid debts.

Reputational Harm

When a company lets bad debt spiral to the point where it disrupts operations and weakens its credit standing, the consequences can spread far and wide. This can damage its reputation within the industry and among customers.

As a result, trust from clients, suppliers, and investors often erodes, leading to missed business opportunities. In severe instances, if the company becomes known for failing to meet its payment obligations, it could face legal challenges or public criticism.

Risks Related to Legal and Compliance Issues

Bad debt can pose various legal and compliance risks. This can vary based on the industry and a company’s unique situation. Businesses that fail to adhere to credit and collections regulations may face penalties, fines, and lawsuits.

For industries that are heavily regulated, like financial services or healthcare, surpassing certain bad debt limits or neglecting standard debt collection procedures can result in regulatory complications. 

Additionally, negligence in managing credit and collection responsibilities may lead to legal disputes, such as lawsuits from shareholders, business partners, or other creditors who could claim that leadership is not meeting its fiduciary obligations.

Elevated levels of bad debt can also create accounting issues, including poor or insufficient recordkeeping, which can itself turn into a compliance problem. Utilizing robust accounting software, especially when integrated into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, can help small businesses address these challenges.

These tools consolidate critical financial and customer data into one unified database, often hosted in the cloud, providing a more efficient way to manage accounting and regulatory requirements.

Endnote

Bad debt poses a significant challenge for companies of all sizes, potentially affecting financial statements by reducing profitability and cash flow. To mitigate this risk, it’s crucial to implement a credit policy that evaluates the creditworthiness of prospective customers and effectively manages current customer accounts.


 

How Losing Every Dollar Sparked My Entrepreneurial Spirit

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by Michael Sartain, CEO at Men of Action

What if I told you that losing everything could be the best thing to ever happen to you? Sounds a bit far-fetched, right? But that’s precisely how it played out for me. I hit rock bottom when I lost 80% of my net worth during the 2020 market crash. It was a tough pill to swallow, but looking back, that setback turned out to be a turning point.

Before that loss, I had transitioned from my seven-year career as a U.S. Air Force captain to working in finance, managing money and selling put spreads on the S&P 500. Like so many others, I believed I had it all under control — until the world turned upside down. COVID-19 hit, and within a few days, I watched my financial foundation crumble.

From this experience, I learned powerful lessons that can help anyone facing their own challenges.

1. When Life Knocks You Down, You’ve Gotta Get Back Up.

I don’t know anyone who enjoys failure. Let’s be honest — failing sucks. But it’s also a chance to hit reset and come back stronger.

When the market crashed and I lost the majority of my net worth, the sense of defeat was overwhelming. After years of hard work and dedication, it all seemed to vanish in an instant. But after a moment of self-pity, I realized I had a choice: I could let this loss define me, or I could pick myself up and keep moving forward.

Failure isn’t final unless you let it be. It’s part of the process, and those who learn from their failures are the ones who eventually come out stronger. When life knocks you down, don’t stay down. Take time to regroup, reassess, and figure out your next steps.

2. Adaptability Is Survival.

Darwin’s origin of species would tell us, “It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that you have to be willing and ready to pivot. When life changes — and it will — you need to change with it.

After the market crash, I knew I couldn’t rely on the same path anymore. That’s when I leaned into what I’d been doing on the side for over a decade: coaching. I had been mentoring for free, helping men improve their confidence, leadership, and communication skills.

I didn’t have a million bucks and a dream team right off the gate. What I did have was years of experience, a genuine love for what I was doing, a willingness to adapt, and luckily $1,500 to get my new venture going. Sometimes, you have to stop fighting the current and start going with the flow. When you embrace change instead of resisting it, you’ll find new opportunities.

3. Start Where You Are and Build from There.

After the crash, I didn’t have much to work with. Starting with just a little and working my way up was not only humbling, but it also taught me how to maximize every opportunity that came my way.

If you’re sitting on an idea or a goal and waiting for the “perfect” time to start, here’s the reality: there’s never a perfect time. Start with what you have, do what you can, and build from there. Success doesn’t come from waiting for ideal circumstances; it comes from taking action, no matter how small.

4. Build a Tribe, Not Just a Network.

No one climbs the mountain solo — you need a support system. I’ve found that surrounding yourself with like-minded people who push you to be better is one of the smartest moves you can make.

Surround yourself with people who challenge you and hold you accountable. A good support system keeps you grounded, offers perspective, and helps you push through when times get tough. Whether it’s in your career or personal life, having a network of like-minded individuals can make all the difference.

When you have people around you who believe in you and push you to be better, you’re more likely to stay committed to your goals and take the actions needed to reach them. As they say, “Iron sharpens iron.”

5. Actions Speak Louder Than Words.

Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.

I learned this the hard way. I had two business partners who talked a good game, but behind the scenes, they were stealing money from me. It was a tough lesson, but a valuable one. Trust isn’t something that comes from words but from consistent, trustworthy actions.

This principle applies across the board, whether it’s in relationships, friendships, or business partnerships. If someone’s actions don’t line up with their words, that’s a red flag. And the same goes for you — make sure your actions back up your promises.

Use Setbacks as Your Stepping Stones

If you’re going through a tough time right now, just know that it’s not the end of the road. Losing everything doesn’t have to mean losing yourself. In fact, it can be the beginning of something much greater.

I know what it feels like to hit rock bottom, but I also know that rock bottom can be the foundation for your comeback. Don’t be afraid to fail, to adapt, and start small. Success isn’t about never failing — it’s about how you respond when things don’t go as planned.

 

michael sartain

Michael Sartain is a versatile professional with a diverse background. After earning a BBA in Management Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin, he joined the U.S. Air Force as a KC-135 navigator, serving for seven years and achieving the rank of Captain. Transitioning to civilian life, he became an event host in Las Vegas, eventually moving into finance as a money manager and studying under Tom Sosnoff. Michael founded the Men of Action program in 2019, focusing on performance coaching, social networking, leadership, entrepreneurship, mindset, and finance.


 

Choosing The Best Money Market Account For Your Needs

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When it comes to different kinds of savings accounts, money markets are a great option for higher returns. But how do you know if you’re choosing the best money market account for your needs?

Read below for expert tips, and be prepared to open an account that will ensure you reach your savings goals. The sooner you open a money market account, the sooner your savings can begin to really pay off.

First Things First: What Is a Money Market Account?

To choose the best account for your needs, you should have a good understanding of what a money market account is, how it works, and how it differs from other accounts.

Money market accounts are a type of savings account. However, depending on the type of money market account and the amount you have to save with it, you may have the potential to earn a higher annual percentage yield (APY) than with a traditional savings account. Plus, since money market accounts are insured by the FDIC or NCUA, opening a money market account can be seen as a safe investment.

Another benefit is that money market accounts are also flexible. These accounts often come with the ability to write a few checks a month or to make debit card transactions. A similarity to checking accounts is that you typically have unlimited transactions with a money market account. And you can access the funds wherever and whenever you need.

Note that a money market account is not the same as a money market mutual fund. The latter is for shorter-term investments and is not insured.

Choose the Best Money Market Account by Defining Your Goals, Needs, and Preferences

If you’re looking for a better way to save than a traditional savings account, you probably have a particular goal for your money, such as saving for education, a vacation, a new house, or another type of major expense. Keep this goal in mind while looking at the terms of different money market accounts, as it can help you choose the right account for your needs and timeframe.

An important factor to consider is the rates for the different account options. While all money market accounts have higher interest rates than traditional savings, no two money market accounts are created equal.

In addition to your monetary goals, you should to consider what features you’d prefer. Would you like to be able to write checks or make debit card transactions? Then choose a money market account that guarantees those benefits.

Money market accounts typically have minimum opening deposit and minimum balance requirements. They may also have service charges or other fees. These will vary by account. In general, money market accounts have a higher minimum opening deposit than traditional savings accounts, but credit unions often have lower minimum balance requirements than banks. They are, after all, designed to provide a higher return on investment. So, starting out with more money in the account, alongside that higher rate, means better results.

Shop Around for the Best Money Market Account

Once you know what you want, it’s time to start comparing different accounts. The best money market account for you will offer a high interest rate, little to no monthly fees, and a minimum balance that fits your budget.

There are numerous websites where you can look at different financial institutions’ money market rates and requirements and compare them side by side. These websites may also have pros and cons or other helpful information about each money market account. If you prefer to do the research on your own, visit their websites or call to speak with their team members to get the details. As you weigh your options and compare rates, keep in mind that rates fluctuate with the current market. So they won’t stay the same throughout the life of the account.

When you choose the best money market account, you’re also choosing to save with a specific financial institution. So factor that into your decision as well. Consider the quality of the customer service and the other benefits they offer their account holders. Look at banks and credit unions.

If you decide to open an account with a credit union, look at those in your area. Usually, where you live, work, or go to school is the only requirement to become a member. If you’re in upstate New York, for instance, shop for the best money market accounts at a trusted financial institution such as Mid-Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union.

Will Your Money Market Account Be Kept Safe?

When you open a money market account, your balance is secure. It’s rare for a money market account to lose money, and it typically only happens if the fees become higher than your earnings.

As we mentioned above, money market accounts are also insured, so if your financial institution fails, you are guaranteed the money in your account. Banks are insured by the FDIC. If you open a money market account with a credit union, it would also be insured federally. The difference is that credit unions are insured by the NCUA (National Credit Union Administration). In both cases, money market accounts are insured up to $250,000 per account.

Once You Find the Best Money Market Account, Then What?

Open your money market account sooner rather than later so you can really start saving. Apply to open the account either online or in person. When you apply, you will need to provide specific information and documentation. This typically includes your Social Security number, contact information, and some form of government ID, such as a driver’s license or a passport. If you’re opening a joint account, both parties will have to provide that information.

If it’s necessary, make sure you have proof that you have enough to make the required minimum opening deposit. Typically, this is done by depositing cash or a check, with an ACH, or by sending a wire transfer.

Once you’ve opened your account and made your first deposit, congratulate yourself. You’re already closer to achieving your financial goals.


 

Finding Financial Balance: Practical Strategies For Everyday Life

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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction to Financial Balance
  2. Defining Your Financial Goals
  3. Budgeting Basics for Beginners
  4. The Importance of an Emergency Fund
  5. Smart Saving Techniques
  6. Investing Wisely: Risks and Rewards
  7. Navigating Debt Management
  8. Utilizing Financial Tools and Apps
  9. Conclusion: Building a Solid Financial Future

Introduction to Financial Balance.

Achieving financial balance is akin to maintaining a well-tuned symphony; each part must work harmoniously for the whole to flourish. Financial balance is not just about numbers but involves managing income, expenses, savings, and investments in a way that promotes peace of mind and long-term prosperity. With countless elements to consider, from everyday expenses to unexpected financial burdens, finding this balance can be daunting. For those seeking guidance, a financial advisor in Dallas GA can provide invaluable insights and personalized strategies to keep your financial plans aligned.                                                                        

A financial advisor in Dallas, GA, helps individuals and businesses manage their finances, offering services like investment planning, retirement strategies, and tax advice. They work closely with customers to create individualized financial strategies that suit their objectives and risk tolerance. With a deep understanding of local economic conditions, a Dallas-based financial advisor can provide valuable insights for both short-term and long-term financial success.

Financial balance is more than just a status; it’s a journey filled with learning and adapting. The right financial strategies, customized to individual needs, can empower anyone to enhance their financial health and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with stability. In this article, we will explore diverse strategies to improve financial literacy and build a secure financial future. These strategies not only make finances more manageable but support personal growth along the way.

Defining Your Financial Goals

Before embarking on any financial journey, defining clear and achievable financial goals is crucial. Aligning your approach to suit these goals divides them into short-term and long-term categories, creating a roadmap for financial decision-making. While long-term objectives can be centered on retiring or owning property, short-term objectives might be saving for a trip or a new device. Each goal requires a strategic approach to remain within reach. Consistent awareness and reassessment ensure you remain oriented on your path to financial success. More insights on shaping your financial aspirations can be discovered in this comprehensive guide on setting financial goals.

Budgeting Basics for Beginners

Budgeting is the backbone of any robust financial plan, providing a clear visualization of your financial landscape. To start, list all sources of income against regular expenses. Whether you prefer the envelope system, allocating specific funds for each expense category, or zero-based budgeting, ensuring every dollar serves a purpose and maintaining an effective cash flow management aids in achieving financial freedom. Monthly tracking of these transactions offers insights into spending patterns, allowing for necessary adjustments for improved financial outcomes.

The Importance of an Emergency Fund

An emergency fund serves as a financial cushion, safeguarding against life’s unanticipated surprises without derailing fiscal plans. Whether it’s car repairs, medical emergencies, or sudden layoffs, having readily available funds can alleviate stress and provide security. Establishing this fund requires commitment and a strategic approach: aim to set aside three to six months’ worth of living expenses, then build incrementally by contributing a small, consistent amount from every paycheck. This fund provides immediate financial relief and promotes overall financial stability.

Smart Saving Techniques

Beyond traditional savings accounts, there are various smart saving techniques to consider for maximizing returns. Better interest rates are available in high-yield savings accounts, which enables more effective long-term growth of your funds. Automating savings is another powerful strategy—automated transfers ensure a consistent portion of income is set aside before discretionary spending, thus decreasing the temptation to spend. Reviewing and comparing different saving options can help identify which aligns best with your financial goals. To compare different saving options, consider this resource: High-Yield Savings Accounts.

Investing Wisely: Risks and Rewards

Investing is a crucial component of wealth-building, offering opportunities for financial growth beyond what savings accounts can provide. For beginners, understanding the spectrum of investment vehicles — stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and more — is essential to mitigate risks while aiming for returns. Each investment type presents varying degrees of risk and potential reward; thus, it is vital to align these with your personal risk tolerance and long-term financial ambitions. A well-rounded investment strategy adjusts these elements and includes diversification to protect assets while encouraging growth.

Navigating Debt Management

Debt, if left unchecked, can become an overwhelming obstacle to financial independence. Prioritizing high-interest debts, like credit cards, and looking into refinancing or debt consolidation options will help you pay off your debts more quickly. It gives you the ability to approach debt methodically when you comprehend the subtleties of interest rates and repayment conditions. This proactive management approach reduces the burden of debt while freeing up financial resources to achieve other financial goals.

Utilizing Financial Tools and Apps

In the digital age, a multitude of apps and online tools are available to streamline financial management. These tools offer valuable insights and help automate financial processes, from tracking expenses to analyzing investments. Applications that set bill reminders and analyze spending habits ensure you maintain control over your finances without the need for constant vigilance. People can improve their financial literacy and handle their money efficiently and with little effort if they use the appropriate tools.

Conclusion: Building a Solid Financial Future

Cultivating financial balance is an ongoing journey that requires consistent learning and adaptation. The strategies discussed provide the framework for achieving financial security, paving the way toward peace of mind and prosperity. Continual education on financial matters and expert guidance reinforce the path to a stable financial future. With dedication and the right resources, the intricate symphony of personal finance can become harmonious and rewarding for anyone.


 

Best Books By Immigrant Authors

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Immigrant authors writing about their experience

Immigrant authors writing about their experience

The American Dream, which suggests anyone who works hard can achieve success, has been unevenly realized by immigrants to this country. For some who were able to attain citizenship, their efforts propelled them to the high reaches of economic success. Others, whose immigrant status forces them to live in the shadows, try to forge a semblance of a meaningful life. Yet even for those who have prospered, the cracks in the America’s shiny façade compel them to find solutions. They draw from the lessons of their homelands as examples.

George Danis was born and raised on a farm in rural Greece. He entered the U.S. as an illegal immigrant, yet decades later was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in recognition of his philanthropic endeavors and promotion of democracy. A wonderful storyteller, his engaging memoir, “Go Far, Give Back, Live Greek“, is also a call to action. He believes democracy has been hijacked by big corporations, lobbyists, and self-serving politicians. Applying lessons from growing up in a Greek village where neighbors helped neighbors and the community banded together to solve problems, Danis implores citizens in the U.S. to take action to solve our seemingly intractable problems. He asserts, “As citizens we must move from seeing politics as a spectator sport to viewing it as a forum in which we can all participate.”

Jean Tren-Hwa Perkins was born to a dirt-poor family during China’s disastrous Yangtze River flood in 1931. Unwanted like so many Chinese girls, she was adopted by American medical missionaries, but was later trapped in Communist China. In her posthumous memoir, “Spring Flower: A Tale of Two Rivers“, completed by her son, Richard Perkins-Hsung, readers are given a startling insider’s account of Chinese history as Perkins’ husband was jailed and her family torn apart by Communism. Forced to leave family members behind, she immigrated to the U.S. where she pursued a career as an ophthalmologist and raised a son. Bridging two centuries, the complete three-volume memoir, of which this is the first, brings to life themes of displacement, hope, and a woman coming into her own power.

In her book, “Crisis Capable: Building Your Capacity to Survive and Succeed in Every Environment, Fabiana Lacerca-Allen shares her experiences growing up in Argentina in the 1970s when the country was under military dictatorship. The views of her father, a leading proponent for a democratic government, put her family in constant danger. Lacerca-Allen applies lessons she learned that helped keep her and her family from abduction and possible murder — with more than one close call — to helping others become better aware of their surroundings, improve their leadership strategies, and make decisions even when the information they have is limited. She emphasizes that whether one is living in a war zone or combating professional blockades, knowing how to interpret the factors at play better positions one to take decisive action in whatever challenges come their way.

In “Reimaging America’s Dream: Making It Attainable for All“, Bernie J. Mullin describes his journey immigrating from England to the U.S. and eventually becoming CEO of a highly successful sport and entertainment company. He then examines how the American Dream has faded for too many. Mullin explores the top 10 social issues that our country is wrestling with and adeptly offers an “American Prescription” that starts with reducing poverty by investing in free education for our youth. Mullin carefully details the programmatic costs and likely financial returns of his recommendations in the short, medium, and long term, using predominantly self-funded approaches. He then outlines the impact this could have in the future benefit of our children and American society as a whole. Mullin is devoting all proceeds from the book to The Aspire Difference Foundation, which provides financial and educational support for single-parent families with pre-school children.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” puts a human face on immigrants in the U.S. in his riveting memoir, “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen“. Vargas, born in the Philippines and sent to live with his grandparents in the U.S. at age 12, has no clear path to citizenship. Still, as a journalist, filmmaker, and producer, he has been a leading voice for the human rights of the 11 million immigrants whose fate is increasingly under threat. His story transcends politics and policy, focusing on the psychological cost of living life in the shadows and in an ongoing unmoored state.

The promise of a better life in America has drawn immigrants to this country for some five centuries. Whether seeking economic opportunities, freedom from political instability, or reprieve from religious persecution, America has offered a beacon of hope. As these books reveal, some immigrants are able to capitalize on that hope, while others are caught in a bureaucratic maelstrom.


Key Points About Tenant’s Failure To Pay Rent

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Hand of a Man Holding a Bill with Past Due Stamp

Hand of a Man Holding a Bill with Past Due Stamp

Paying rent is a core part of the tenant-landlord relationship as it ensures the tenant can keep living in a secure place and the landlord gets their income and money to handle essential repairs.

However, when the tenant fails to pay rent at the designated time, it can cause serious money and legal problems that can affect both parties. In this case, navigating and understanding the problem can be tricky.

Continue reading below as this article will discuss why tenants miss rent payments and discuss two effective steps to take if such a thing happens. 

Key Factors Leading to Tenant’s Failure to Pay Rent

Why do tenants sometimes fail to pay their rent? The answer isn’t straightforward, but it is a combination of three factors.

These include:

High Rent Prices.

Rent costs have been increasing and making it harder for a  few tenants to afford it. For tenants living in rental areas like Atlanta, where rent costs have been on an upward trend over the years, it can be extremely difficult.

For example, the median rent in Atlanta is about two thousand dollars. In this case, it means that there’s a high likelihood that these tenants get to spend a very big portion of their income on the payment, which in turn limits their spending on basic items and other necessities.

Limited Housing Availability.

If there are not enough housing alternatives in the market, then rental rates can also rise because the demand far exceeds the supply. This scarcity is likely to increase the stress level of the tenants when it comes to paying rent.

In the case of Atlanta, residents have witnessed a price increase due to the insufficient housing supply, which has placed renters in a difficult position. This has made it possible to miss rent payments as some tenants struggle to balance their finances with the increased housing demand.

Economic Factors.

Economic factors such as challenges in the job industry, inflation, and other costs such as sudden emergencies can be a big hit to the tenants. Where the cost of goods has risen, but the source of earnings has not equally improved, meeting up with rental fees could be tough.

In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people in Atlanta, even women in high-risk jobs, became unemployed or had their work hours cut off. This made it hard to honor their rental payment obligations. Even at this time, the economy is still in recovery; some of the tenants may be struggling, as a likely consequence of the economic fallout, to pay rent in full and on time.

Consequences of Failing to Pay Rent

So, in the case where a tenant fails to pay their rent due to these factors, what’s the landlord’s next step?

Well, landlords can take these steps when you fail to pay rent:

Legal Notices.

Missed rent payment obligations are conventionally followed by a legal notice. Such notice demands from the tenants either payment of overdue rent or an explanation as to why no payment was made.

For example, a “Pay or Quit” notice gives tenants around 3 to 14 days to pay the arrears or vacate the property. It is an important phase in the process of eviction since it reminds the tenants of their obligations.

In state statutes, passing this notice is necessary since it offers tenants an opportunity to make payments before the actual eviction. This stage is necessary to make it clear that the landlord has respect for the law and that the tenants are given a chance to redeem themselves.

Eviction.

In cases where rent continues to be unpaid, landlords are obliged to execute the legal eviction process after the notice period. This situation requires legal intervention by the law court in order to remove the tenant from the premises. 

However, it’s worth noting that tenants who have been evicted face extra difficulty finding a new place as other tenants fear having the same trouble. In addition to this, the eviction procedure itself takes a considerable amount of time and pressure for both sides, and it takes several months to settle in the courts of law.

Due to the hassle, early remediation of the problem must always be looked at as an option before reaching that stage. For landlords, eviction means loss of expenditure and time spent finding new tenants.

This is why Bay Property Management Group Atlanta suggests actively communicating with your tenant before serving the eviction notice. Doing this allows a possibility to speed up the repayment process without having to go to court. 

Importance of Thorough Tenant Screening for Consistent Cash Flow

Proper tenant screening is important in curbing loss of rent and ensuring a stable stream of rental income for the landlord. A thorough tenant screening includes checking areas such as credit and criminal background investigations, as well as references. A credit check is an evaluation of a tenant’s financial capacity, while a background check provides information on criminal acts or tendencies and eviction histories.

It is also essential to contact relevant past landlords or employers and assess their views towards the tenant and the stability of the tenant. This way, dependable tenants are chosen, which enhances the regular cash flow, relevant rent payments, and the care of the property.

Conclusion

To conclude, paying rent on time is one of the ways tenants can build a good harmonious relationship with their landlords during their lease term since it allows stable income for landlords. Due to general economic conditions such as high demand and increase in rent, some tenants are already finding it difficult to make ends meet and pay rent on time. 

Before signing the lease, renters need to understand that not paying rent on time will eventually lead to a legal notice and possible eviction. To avoid all these trouble, it’s important to have appropriate background check of the tenants and establish better communication channels as this helps notify landlords about the risk involved with this potential tenant.


 

Uncovering The Untapped Potential Of The Lithuania Tech Scene

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by Diana Placiakiene, Business Community Manager at InnoHub Lithuania

For several years now, the Baltic has seen tremendous growth in its Deep Tech and AI sectors. One of the countries that has stood out in this trend has been Lithuania, specifically in its capital, Vilnius, which is now being referred to as the “Baltic Silicon Valley.”

One of Lithuania’s key contributors to its growing tech dominance has been its startup scene, which has grown by over 700% in the last eight years, outpacing neighboring areas between Central and Eastern Europe.

This growth has been supported by a government-supported ecosystem that encourages forward-thinking talent development, the rapid evolution of a highly complex digital infrastructure, and a dedicated focus on creating sustainable technologies in areas like fintech, biotechnology, laser manufacturing, and cybersecurity.

This ongoing evolution of Lithuania’s tech sector has created many new opportunities for organizations in the US looking to establish strategic partnerships when expanding their presence across international markets. 

How is Lithuania’s Technology Industry Separating Itself From Other Countries?

Lithuania is the largest of the three Baltic states and is located in northeastern Europe. Although it is a relatively smaller country with a population of just under 3 million people, it has quietly become a major player in the tech world. Once under the control of the Soviet Union, Lithuania has embraced a new identity as a modern, innovative nation with a thriving economy. 

At the heart of the country’s economic boom is its quickly developing IT sector and startup ecosystem, which have experienced exponential growth since 2018. Several factors have contributed to this, including:

Deep Focus on Diversity and Specialized Skill Development.

Lithuania’s focus on creating a highly diverse talent pool across various industry sectors has ensured a steady supply of science and technology specialists across the country. Boasting the highest shares of women employed in both fields (64%) when compared to other countries in the EU, Lithuania is helping to right-size the gender disparity that has existed for decades across critical industry sectors.

Lithuania is also the first in the EU when it comes to employing younger specialists aged 15-34 in the ICT sector and the top country in the world when it comes to the availability of digital skills. To add to this, Lithuania continues to scale its available IT-focused talent pool by an average rate of 13% each year.

A contributing factor to wide talent availability in the country is the ongoing support from local governments and the network of universities and research institutions in the region. For example, in Jun 2024, the Lithuanian Public Employment Service launched a National Reskilling/Upskilling Programme focused on adding 20,000 additional specialists in an effort to further develop the ICT, engineering, and life sciences.

Beyond government financial support, a variety of tech hubs, incubators, and accelerator programs are in place to provide entrepreneurs with the essential resources they need to scale their operations. This includes higher accessibility of co-working spaces and business mentorship programs.

Startup-Friendly Business Culture.

Lithuania has one of the most startup-friendly business cultures in all of Central and Eastern Europe. There are currently nearly 1000 startup active startup companies in the region, as well as three major corporations Vinted, Nord Security, and Baltic Classifieds Group).

The total value of the country’s startup businesses is currently valued at roughly 13.7 billion euros, many of which are supported by major venture capital funds. 

With a heavy focus on supporting entrepreneurship and attracting new investment opportunities, Lithuania has become a preferred location for establishing new businesses. These features, coupled with a higher quality of life and lower cost of living for local residents, are leading many Western businesses to look to establish sustainable partnerships in the region.

Advanced Digital Infrastructure Development.

Lithuania’s fast-developing technology sector is built on a highly advanced digital infrastructure. In October 2021, the country’s Ministry of Transport and Communications put together the ultra-fast broadband development plan that focused on increasing all household and public internet speeds to at least 100 Mbps by 2027. 

Today, Lithuania is now ranked 1st worldwide when it comes to public wifi speeds, with 90.1% of all households having the ability to access 5G networks. The country’s other strides in areas such as renewable energy, transportation, cybersecurity, and IT and service operations have made it an excellent location to expand international business networks.

The cybersecurity market specifically is expected to grow in Lithuania by 8.63% over the next five years. The accuracy and effectiveness of new cybersecurity solutions and services provided by Lithuania security organizations are projected to equate to $125.6 million in revenue by 2029.

Why is Lithuania a Great Choice for Establishing a Tech Partnership?

US-based can gain a number of benefits when partnering with Lithuanian tech companies. Below are just a few reasons why Lithuanian tech partnerships are becoming so valuable:

More Cost Effective.

One of the biggest draws of Lithuania is its cost-effectiveness compared to other European nations. Businesses can tap into a highly skilled workforce without the higher labor costs often found in more established tech hubs. This allows companies to stretch their budgets further and see a greater return on investment.

In addition, Lithuania offers a welcoming tax environment for businesses. Various incentives and tax breaks are available, which can significantly reduce operating costs and improve overall profitability.

EU Membership.

Being a member of the European Union gives businesses in Lithuania several benefits. The country’s commitment to meeting various EU standards means safer business practices, stronger consumer protection, and the use of sustainable frameworks that lower the risks for businesses moving into new markets.

English Language Proficiency.

Lithuania is home to a variety of prestigious universities and research institutions, offering over 500 different study programs taught in English. The country also has one of the highest ICT literacy rates, with many students learning diversified communications and having 100% English efficiency. This makes the country a perfect hub for Western companies looking to diversify their teams while minimizing communication issues.

Using Innovation Hubs to Build Profitable New Relationships

To leverage the potential of the Lithuanian tech scene, outside organizations and investors must take the right approach when building a transatlantic partnership. This is where an Innovation Hub can be incredibly valuable.

Organizations like InnoHub Lithuania can be effective connectors between US and Lithuanian businesses. They offer the local knowledge of Lithuanian business regulations and trade influencers and have the connections necessary to facilitate strong partnerships with overseas companies.

For example, InnoHub Lithuania conducts various networking events and workshops year-round. These events bring local startups, international investors, and industry leaders together under one format and create unique opportunities for building mutually beneficial relationships and exploring potential joint ventures. 

Start Taking Advantage of Lithuania’s Growing Tech Scene

Lithuania is a great place to look when establishing new tech partners. By exploring everything the region has to offer and creating the right partnerships, organizations can uncover a wider range of opportunities to scale into new markets and introduce exciting new innovations into their business models.

 

Diana Placiakiene

Diana Placiakiene, the Business Community Manager at InnoHub Lithuania, brings over a decade of experience in marketing, sales, events, and community building. Her career spans work with early-stage startups, government initiatives, and small businesses. From 2013 to 2015, Diana represented Innovation Agency Lithuania in Silicon Valley, acting as a bridge between Lithuanian tech companies and the dynamic Silicon Valley ecosystem. She also led the San Francisco American Lithuanian community for over three years, launching innovative programs and initiatives to connect and empower professionals. 


 

How To Operate Like Your Life Depends On It: A Mental Framework For Better Startup Execution

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by Param Jaggi–Founder of Agora, an AI search engine for e-commerce products

As the end of the year approaches, we’re all thinking about the annual goals we set out for our companies. Some were achieved and others were forgotten.

But what if I told you that you had to hit your annual goal by December 31st at midnight or I’d put a bullet in your head? Not to be dramatic but hear me out for a minute. What if I told you that your life depends on hitting the goal? How would you operate?

Operating Like Your Life Depends on It

My guess is that you’d scratch, crawl, fight, and do literally whatever it took to achieve the goal. You would work both smarter and harder. For sales, you would reach out to 100 leads per day until the point of pure exhaustion. For engineering, you wouldn’t leave your computer until that feature is shipped to perfection. You wouldn’t “wait for next week” to get something done, you’d do it now. You wouldn’t waste time or delegate, you’d get it done immediately.

So look, I don’t think we need to be that extreme when running a startup. But I do think it’s a good mental exercise to understand what more we could be doing: what would you be doing differently if your life depended on it? I find that there’s a difference between what we think is our maximum capacity to execute and our actual capacity. To realize that capacity, you have to place artificial constraints on yourself to get there.

Navy Seals call this the 40% rule. When your mind is telling you that you’re done, you’re really only 40% done. You still have another 60% left in the tank. If your life depends on it, you’d use all 60%. The argument I’m making is that we can achieve remarkable things by just unlocking a few more percentage points.

Why Do We Become Complacent at Work?

The question is: why do we become complacent at work?

First, I think it’s tough to push yourself when you’re not compensated well. This applies to founders and employees. It’s in terms of salary, equity, personal flexibility, and most importantly being a part of a high performing team. At the end of the day, we all want to be on a winning team. We’re willing to put in more if we see there are A-players by our side doing the same.

Second, our life becomes de-risked as we get older, thus creating complacency. When we were young, we were inexperienced, broke, and hungry. Over the years, as you make more money and grow a family, the tendency changes to operate more risk-free. Even after hitting a goal or selling a company, it takes a special breed of person to have success, then wake up the next day and execute harder.

Jeff Bezos describes this concept as Day 1 mentality. It’s always day 1. As he says, “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

In economics, this is the concept of ‘regression toward the mean’. Regression toward the mean is the statistical phenomenon that independent events have a tendency to get closer to the average of the entire dataset.

In simple terms, this concept means that things are never as good or as bad as they seem. If you’re having a good day, you’ll likely have an average day tomorrow and it’ll seem like a bad day compared to the previous one. If you’re having a bad day, you’ll likely have an average day tomorrow and it’ll seem like a good day compared to the previous one. Human nature is to get comfortable if you’re having a good day which is why people like Jeff Bezos refer to every day as “Day 1”.

I know what you’re thinking.

Why does all of this have to be so dramatic?

Dramatics Reap Rewards

Well, we all chose to be a part of a startup. We actively chose to live a life of more risk but more reward. So we can’t be operating with the same mentality as the average knowledge worker. A head coach for a middle school basketball team doesn’t operate the same way as a professional athlete in the NBA. Both are playing basketball but one of them requires you to exhaust yourself mentally and physically to achieve goals. If you want to be exceptional, this is what it takes. But just like everything else in life, it’s about constant readjustment and finding the right equilibrium that works for you.

 

Param Jaggi, CEO of Agora, a search engine for e-commerce products that prioritizes small businesses. He is a dynamic inventor and entrepreneur known for his passion for environmental sustainability and technological innovation. Prior to leading Agora, he founded and ran two successful e-commerce ventures, selling tens of thousands of units. 


 

Understanding The Hidden Dangers For Women In High-Risk Jobs

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A woman in the construction business

A woman in the construction business

Women are making significant strides in entering high-risk professions traditionally dominated by men, such as construction, transportation, and emergency response roles. This progress reflects a broader push toward gender equality in the workforce. However, it also places women in environments where they face unique dangers that can impact their health, safety, and overall well-being.

The ILO reports that nearly three million workers die annually due to work-related causes, a 5% increase since 2015. Most of these fatalities, totaling 2.6 million, are attributed to work-related diseases, while 330,000 result from work accidents. 

High-risk industries, including agriculture, forestry, construction, and manufacturing, report the highest fatality rates. Against this backdrop, women in high-risk jobs face additional challenges, such as inadequate safety equipment and increased vulnerability to chemical exposures. 

This article delves into the hidden dangers women face in these demanding careers. 

The Landscape of High-Risk Jobs for Women

The most dangerous jobs for women often involve physically demanding tasks and exposure to hazardous conditions. Firefighting, for instance, requires handling life-threatening situations and hazardous materials, while construction involves heavy lifting and operating dangerous machinery. 

Law enforcement presents risks of physical confrontations and high-stress scenarios, and military service places women in combat roles with life-threatening challenges. Despite their growing presence in these fields, women face heightened risks due to inadequate safety measures tailored to their specific needs.

According to Catalyst, women remain significantly underrepresented in male-dominated industries worldwide. In Canada, only 5% of skilled trades workers are women, while in Europe, just 8% of working women are in male-dominated sectors. 

In the United States, only 6.5% of full-time female workers were in such industries in 2020. Encouragingly, women saw gains in male-dominated fields between February 2020 and March 2022. 

However, challenges persist. Globally, women’s leadership roles have grown mainly in female-dominated sectors. Industries like energy (20%), manufacturing (19%), and infrastructure (16%) lag significantly in female representation.

These disparities underscore the ongoing need to improve safety, inclusivity, and support for women in high-risk professions.

Unique Health Risks for Women in High-Risk Jobs

Some of the specific risks women encounter in high-risk jobs include:

Musculoskeletal Injuries.

Women are disproportionately affected by musculoskeletal injuries (MSIs) in the workplace, particularly in physically demanding jobs that require heavy lifting. According to Injury Facts, females account for 40% of DART (Days Away from Work, Job Transfer, or Restriction) cases. They also represent 38% of DAFW (Days Away from Work) cases. 

The peak incidence of DART cases occurs among workers aged 25 to 54, while DAFW cases are prevalent among those aged 45 to 54. The healthcare and social assistance sectors report the highest number of both DART and DAFW cases. 

Poorly fitted safety equipment exacerbates these risks, leading to chronic pain and long-term disabilities. Women are more likely to develop conditions such as tendonitis, back strains, and carpal tunnel syndrome due to the physical demands of their jobs. Addressing these issues is crucial for improving workplace safety and health outcomes for women.

Mental Health in High-Risk Jobs.

Women employed in high-risk occupations experience unique mental health challenges that can significantly impact their well-being. While the overall prevalence of mental health conditions is similar between genders, women are more susceptible to specific diagnoses. These include depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and PTSD. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, factors such as intersectionality, gender roles, and workplace dynamics contribute to these challenges. Women often juggle multiple responsibilities — balancing caregiving roles with professional demands — which can lead to increased stress and burnout.

Additionally, societal pressures and stigma surrounding mental health may prevent women from seeking the help they need. Issues like gender-based violence, pay inequity, and underrepresentation in leadership exacerbate these mental health concerns. 

Many women may feel reluctant to discuss their struggles at work due to fears of negative repercussions or being perceived as incapable. As a result, these challenges often remain invisible.

Exposure to Hazardous Substances.

Many high-risk jobs, such as firefighting, expose women to hazardous substances that pose serious health risks. Female firefighters, in particular, face the danger of prolonged exposure to PFAS chemicals found in AFFF (Aqueous Film-Forming Foam), a firefighting foam. 

PFAS, known as “forever chemicals,” are synthetic compounds that resist breaking down, accumulating in the environment and human bloodstream indefinitely. Research has shown that women firefighters have a higher risk of developing certain types of cancers, especially breast cancer, due to this exposure. 

TorHoerman Law notes that the other serious health effects of PFAS exposure include reproductive health issues, immune system compromise, and thyroid dysfunction.

The long-term health implications of PFAS exposure are still being studied, but the risks are clear. 

In response, many individuals affected by these chemicals have filed a firefighter foam lawsuit against its manufacturers. These lawsuits focus on the alleged links between the chemicals in the foam and serious health issues. They demand accountability and compensation for those suffering from exposure-related diseases.

Addressing the Challenges

To effectively mitigate the hidden dangers faced by women in high-risk jobs, several strategies can be implemented. Employers should develop safety protocols that account for the unique physiological differences between men and women. 

According to HR Dive, companies can enhance workplace safety through elimination, substitution, and engineering controls. For example, jobs that require excessive exertion or awkward postures should be modified or eliminated when possible. 

Ergonomic accommodations are essential to ensure that safety gear fits all employees, including women. Improperly fitting personal protective equipment (PPE) can increase injury risks.

Training and education are also crucial; comprehensive training on specific role-related risks empowers women to take necessary precautions. Additionally, policy advocacy for women’s health in high-risk jobs can lead to better funding for research and improved safety standards. 

Promoting psychological safety is vital; leaders should engage employees in decision-making and show appreciation for their contributions. Overall, building a culture of safety enhances inclusion and reduces injury risks across the workforce.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Why are women overlooked in the workplace?

Women are often overlooked in the workplace due to gender biases, stereotypes, and unequal opportunities. They may face challenges like pay inequity, underrepresentation in leadership roles, and discrimination. Societal expectations and caregiving responsibilities further contribute to their marginalization, making it harder for women to gain recognition and advancement.

Why do women have career breaks?

Women often take career breaks for reasons such as caregiving responsibilities, including raising children, caring for elderly family members, or managing health issues. Societal expectations, lack of flexible work options, and gender roles also contribute to women stepping away from their careers to fulfill obligations.

What role does psychological safety play in reducing workplace injuries?

Psychological safety is essential for minimizing workplace injuries. It fosters open communication and creates an environment where employees feel secure in reporting hazards or unsafe practices without fear of retaliation. This promotes proactive safety measures, enhances awareness, and fosters a supportive environment that prioritizes employee well-being and injury prevention.

As more women enter high-risk professions, it is crucial to recognize and address the unique dangers they face. From musculoskeletal injuries to hazardous chemical exposure, women’s safety must be prioritized through improved workplace practices and policies. By raising awareness of these hidden dangers, we can work towards creating safer environments that support women’s contributions across all sectors.


 

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