small business

Surviving the Coronavirus: Resources for Small Business

October 30, 2020 By Susan Paige Leave a Comment

Score a Knock-out During Corona

The fight against COVID-19 and the resulting government-mandated shutdowns have put many small businesses on the ropes. A recent survey of 5,800 small companies published by the National Academy of Sciences revealed devastating results. In just the first month of lockdowns last spring, the workforce of small establishments was reduced 39%. Yelp reports more than 97,000 permanent business closures as of July. [Read more…] about Surviving the Coronavirus: Resources for Small Business

Easy Food to Sell to Make Money

September 4, 2020 By Kathryn Vercillo Leave a Comment

There are so many different ways to make a little bit of extra money. For example, you can sell food. Whether you sell it at farmers’ markets, from a food truck, going door to door, or through a small online business, selling food can be a great way to garner some new income. You want to find easy food to sell, especially as you start out. After all, you want to make money, not spend a lot out of pocket to get started.

How to Sell Food

Before you begin to sell food, you need to think about what kind of business do you want. Some examples of food-based small businesses include:

Package a favorite recipe, such as homemade jam. Sell it online, at farmer’s markets, or in partnership with a local restaurant.
Start a home-based food business. This might mean that you offer a small menu of items that you sell through. variety of channels. You may sell to small restaurants or do direct-to-consumer sales online.
Become a vendor at a concession stand, food truck park, or other area where individuals and/or small businesses are allowed to sell food.
Sell food “door to door” which might mean visiting construction sites to sell meals to the workers at lunch time or using word of mouth to let your children’s parents know that you have food for sale.

There are Legal Issues

Depending on where you live and how you want to sell your food, there are legal issues to think about. These include general issues about small businesses, such as setting yourself up with a business license. Additionally, there are specific rules about food-based businesses. For example, you may have to determine whether your local laws allow you to cook from your own kitchen or require you to rent space from a commercial kitchen.

You Need Easy Food to Sell

If you want to make a lot of money, then you need to look for easy food to sell. There are two different aspects to what “easy foods” means:

Foods that are easy to prepare.
Foods that easily sell because they are highly popular.

If you can prepare food quickly, inexpensively, and easily, then you’re getting off on the right food. If you’re choosing foods that sell well because of their popularity, then you’re going to sell out. That’s how you make money.

Finding Easy Food to Sell

When deciding what you want to sell, there are some important factors to take into consideration. Ask yourself the following questions:

What are the foods that I find easiest and most enjoyable to prepare?
When I go to the type of place where I’ll be selling my food, what foods do I want to purchase?
What are the most popular foods at these types of places? Is the market already too saturated for those foods?
What is the cost investment and the time investment of the food I’m interested in selling?

In other words, you want to think about your market, your experience, your passion for food, and the cost of both time and money that you’ll invest into this business. Ideally, you will come up with a food that’s inexpensive to prepare, easy and fun to make, and popular but also unique from what’s already available around you.

Examples of Foods That Sell Easily

Your market may vary widely in terms of which foods sell easily. For example, in some places, the easiest food to sell is French Fries. In contrast, other places have good niche markets for organic, artisanal, vegan food trends. You’ll have to research your market to figure out what’s going to sell easily in your area. With that in mind, though, here are some examples of easy food to sell:

Candy and packaged snacks that you simply buy in bulk and resell
Chili or baked beans
Concession stand foods such as fries, corndogs, nachos, and funnel cakes
Cookies, pastries, and other baked goods
Corn on the cob or elote off the cob
Drinks including lemonade, coffee, and mocktails
Fresh-baked bread
Hummus and/or other dips with bread and crudités
Jams, jellies, and other homemade canned items
Kebabs / skewers
Oatmeal
Pancakes
Pickles and other pickled vegetables
Pizza including deep fried pizza; consider offering both traditional toppings and more unique ones
Simple salads with just a few fresh ingredients and your own dressing
Simple sandwiches, such as grilled cheese, done really well
Tacos and quesadillas
Toasts, such as avocado toast and bruschetta
Trending foods, such as meat marinades, açaí bowls, or plant-based protein dishes

Additional Factors to Consider

You’ve already reviewed the legal issues for starting a food business. You’ve looked at some easy food to sell. Moreover, you’ve thought about how your food interests intersect with popular foods to come up with a good product to sell. Here are some additional factors to consider before you decide for sure what food to sell:

How will you source the food ingredients?
What will you need in order to store the ingredients? For example, will you need to buy a freezer?
What will you need in order to prepare the food? For example, will you need to buy a deep fryer or Mason jars for canning?
How long will the food prep take? How long after preparation will it be good to sell? Consider, for example, that initial food prep to can a lot of foods at home can take a long time but then the canned food is something you can save and sell over time. In contrast, as soon as you make French fries, you have to sell them; they don’t save well. That said, they’re quick to make in comparison with something like canning peaches.
What additional items will you need in order to serve this food? If you’re making a prepared food at home, such as cookies, then how will you package and ship them? If you’re handing out food at a stand, what plates or other supplies do you need to provide?

You can start a business selling food. It might turn out to be not just a passion project but one that you earns you a solid steady income. If you really love the work, it could even turn into a professional small business. That said, you want to make sure that you start slow, invest your time and money wisely, find easy food to sell, and then grow your market over time.

If you enjoy reading our blog posts and would like to try your hand at blogging, we have good news for you; you can do exactly that on Saving Advice. Just click here to get started. If you want to be able to customize your blog on your own domain and need hosting service, we recommend trying BlueHost. They offer powerful hosting services for $3.95/month!

6 Free Content Management Systems (Including Hosting)

July 21, 2020 By Susan Paige Leave a Comment

A content management system (CMS) is an application that allows users to develop and run their websites accordingly. Featuring an admin panel where you create and update content and subsequent pages with information, posts, images, videos, and others, a CMS can be viewed as a smart and intuitive interface that aids you in designing your online presence.

However, as a cost conscious small business owner, you’ll want to get the CMS for free. Here are a few options to consider.

How to Take Payments Over the Phone and How to Choose the Best Provider for You

May 4, 2020 By Susan Paige Leave a Comment

If you own a company that needs to take payments over the phone, then a solution like a virtual terminal will be paramount to ensuring that you are successful. Some good examples of this are when you need to take a deposit for a hotel booking, accepting orders that need to be picked up and when products have to be shipped overseas. The question is, how do you make a payment when the customer isn’t there to give you cash or swipe their card in your chip and pin machine?

There are a few steps that you need to take to give your company this service, primarily a virtual terminal and PCI compliance. In order to do this, the first thing to do is to choose a virtual terminal partner.

Picking a provider

The first decision you need to make is choosing your virtual terminal partner. There are many on the market, and all have different features and price points, so doing the research to ensure that you are picking the best fit for you is essential. You may find that when doing your research, you will see ‘card not present’ transactions referenced as a service, which is just another term used interchangeably with a virtual terminal. You will often have to get in touch with the providers before you get any information on costs, so take some time to contact at least three to get a good idea of the market.

It may be tempting to choose only the largest providers like Worldpay or Sage Pay as they are very well established and often have lots of other services that may be useful to you. Ensure that you contact some of the smaller providers as well though, as if you are a smaller business, these might be a better fit for you. Also, do not be pulled into features that aren’t needed in your situation. While being able to access many different services from one provider may seem like a good idea, if you only really need a select few of them, you could be saving a lot of money by avoiding them. In general, providers will charge a monthly fee that isn’t too expensive, but doing your research will make sure that you get the best offer and service for your individual needs. The type of business that you have may impact your choice, as a more high-risk business may want more security. If you aren’t sure, then this PaymentCloud blog article

PCI compliance

Once you have chosen your virtual terminal, you’ll also need to make sure that you comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard to ensure that all of your payments are secure. This is due to card payments being more vulnerable to in-person payments, and fraud is a serious issue that you need to avoid. Most providers are PCI compliant, and this is something that you should check before signing up.

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Photo Credit: Celeste Lindell, via Flickr.

Business Finances: Tackle Debts & Avoid Insolvency in 2020

February 25, 2020 By Susan Paige Leave a Comment

Business Finances Tackle Debt and Avoid Insolvency

Businesses that suffer from too much debt can see their company come crashing down. How this debt is handled can be the difference between a business that sinks or swims. You can either settle the debts, or allow the company to fail, and with the right strategy, you can avoid becoming insolvent.

When a business becomes insolvent, it means they can no longer meet their financial obligations to its creditors as debts become outstanding. While there are some strategies to rescue a business once it becomes insolvent and get it back to operating normally, it’s best to try and avoid this situation altogether. With that in mind, here’s how your business can tackle debts and avoid insolvency:

Review Your Budget

If your debt is growing out of control, chances are your company’s budget isn’t working. You need to create a budget based on the business’s current financial situation. Review your last few month’s bank and credit card statements to help create a realistic budget; you need to be aware of all your sources of revenue and expenses so you can identify trends like revenues that are in decline or any costs that have been creeping up.

By categorizing your income and expenses, you will be able to get a clearer understanding of which parts of your business are the most profitable and which parts are draining your cash flow.

Cut Costs

When you’ve got a clearer picture of your business’s finances, it’s time to find ways to cut costs and reduce your expenses. You’d be surprised how many expenses just roll out each month that may not be contributing to the upkeep of your business operations. Consider implementing some good human resource software, it can save you weeks of wasted time and money. Go through reliable articles for better understanding HR Payroll Systems and decide which of them is the best for your business.

There are three categories for your expenses: those you will continue with, those you can negotiate to a lower cost, and those to eliminate completely. Some costs will be unavoidable, like payroll taxes and renting the office space. Other costs can potentially be negotiated down, by shopping around for new suppliers or insurance companies. Finally, some expenses can be done away with altogether, but this could involve difficult decisions like letting go of an employee. However, if this becomes a necessity for keeping your business running, it might be a viable option.

Increase Revenue

Your debt problems likely arise from a low cash-flow, so increasing your revenue is a sure-fire way to help dig yourself out of debt or prevent it from getting any worse. There are many ways to do this, such as marketing your products or services more heavily towards your current customers or increasing your prices.

Thanks to your budget review, you should have a better idea about which sources of revenue are the most profitable. Focus your attention on these areas and try to increase this high-profit revenue to give yourself the best return on investment.

Collect Payments

Tying in to the increase in revenue, you need to keep on top of payment collection from your customers. Send out invoices promptly, as soon as your product or service has been delivered. Do everything you can to collect payment from customers as quickly as possible, so be diligent with your record-keeping so you know who still owes you payment. Make sure you’re chasing those payments regularly, so your cash flow doesn’t stagnate.

Consolidate Loans

Consolidating your debts doesn’t erase them, but it can make it easier to pay them back by combining them into one payment with a lower monthly cost that doesn’t affect your credit. By consolidating debts, you deal with a single creditor and can perhaps get a loan with a lower interest rate. This process can be done by a debt consolidation company that will take responsibility for negotiating the new loan, collecting the payments and paying off your previous creditors.

It simplifies the repayment process, allows you to reduce the size of your repayments and can help improve your cash flow position.

Be Transparent

Keeping the true nature of your business’s debt problems to yourself will only cause more stress and pressure on you alone to fix it. You don’t need to let every employee know, but telling a few trusted colleagues can help lessen the burden, and they may be able to offer help and guidance during this stressful time which could result in a better outcome than if you tackle it alone.

Alternatively, professional advice can be invaluable in this kind of situation. Business mentors or an insolvency practitioner can help you plan the best course of action for getting out of debt.

For more guidance and advice about going insolvent, Hudson Weir Insolvency Practitioners can help.

For more great Saving Advice article, read these:

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4 Ways To Cost-effectively Save Money With Business Security

February 17, 2020 By Susan Paige Leave a Comment

Saving money isn’t the simplest thing around, especially when your business is concerned. The company is your bread and butter, and you should do everything in your power to keep it running smoothly.

The issue here is that ensuring that your business is entirely streamlined requires you to spend a significant amount of money. Spending so much on your business isn’t ideal, mainly because most business owners don’t have the budget for it. But its true – you’ll be able to save money by carefully allocating your spending.

The following four tips will generally be applicable to most business types, so without further ado, let’s get into it.

Strict Employee Vetting

When you’re running a business that has more than a few employees, you need to take care of who you are hiring. Employees can be beneficial to the company’s effort, but a bad hire can be just as detrimental to the bottom line.

Having faulty employees that aren’t only lazy with their work, but are actually contributing to the degradation of your business costs you money like crazy.

Solving an issue with an already hired employee can be a laborious process that requires a couple of extra steps like notices, payments, and other things that wind up costing a small fortune.

Employing a robust but fair vetting process beforehand is going to cut down on your business expenses significantly. Vetting your employees based on their skill, their experience, and their general outlook towards your work is going to do wonders for your budget.

Your vetting process when hiring an employee should consist of:

Checking the CV
Checking the References
If they’ve changed a lot of professions, why?
Asking important questions
Calling the reference

Invest Into Actual Security

If you’re running any business that hosts events or operates with any people who aren’t employed in your company, you need to pay mind to the security. The security on any given occasion, location, or business can do as much good as evil.

If you have a good security team protecting your clients and your business, you can rest assured that your business is going to gain some additional reputability. If you have a bad team, on the other hand, it can drive people away from your company.

When picking a security team, make sure that they’re going to perform their job well. Check the employee’s credentials and past gigs to make sure they’re up to the task.

If any criminal incursion occurs, you can rest assured that both your employees and your assets are well-protected. It will save you a fortune in eventual losses or possible lawsuits.

Cybersecurity

When people are running a business, cybersecurity is more often than not wholly overlooked. That is a horrible thing, as employing proper cybersecurity is perhaps one of the most important things you can do.

If you’re running a modern business, you’re most likely to own a myriad of user or customer data. Other forms of company data can be susceptible, as well.

Employing the best cybersecurity or VPN program on the market is going to protect all your data, hide all your browser history, and make sure that you’re protected from:

Hackers
Blackmailers
Scammers
Nosy ISP
Geo-blocked content

An excellent VPN security service can help you avoid all of the issues that come with it. Protecting all your data and ensuring privacy is the first step to protecting yourself when you’re using the internet, thus saving money.

Set and Enforce Firm Policies

Enforcing firm policies can help you in in a myriad of ways. It will not only beef up your security but is going to do wonders when it comes to avoiding costly lawsuits or other business expenses.

If you’re running any type of website, app, or anything with user content, enforce strict password policies. It will protect the users from any possible hack and protect you from any liability.

When you’re running a company and enforcing strict policies with your employees, it will help you build discipline. A happy, disciplined, and efficient employee is going to put out much more work than a lazy one, and firm policies are the way to go about it.

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