Small Business Tips and Ideas - BizSieve.com

Small Businesses with Government Contracts: Why Play by the Rules?

Running a small business can be rewarding, especially if you’re able to land lucrative government contracts. Many government contracts allow small businesses to not only expand and grow, but also to gain a name for themselves within the business community. Unfortunately, some small businesses jeopardize these benefits when they don’t play by the rules, and the consequences for such actions can be dire.

Breaking the Rules and the Law

Many small business owners understand the unspoken rules regarding ethics in business and morality when doing business with a government agency, but too few understand that breaking these unspoken rules can actually lead to criminal and civil prosecution. Under the False Claims Act, business owners who have contractual business obligations to the government may face a variety of penalties upon being caught breaking the rules, and this can land such business owners in court and behind bars.

What is the False Claims Act?

The False Claims Act is a law that essentially allows individuals to prosecute contractors in court if the contractors are found to be defrauding the government. Referred to as “whistleblowers,” they generally stand to earn a handsome reward for their efforts in the form of monetary gain if a False Claims Act case is successful. Basically, a whistleblower acting on behalf of the government will be due a portion of the award handed down by a judge once a such a case succeeds, and this amount can reach into the millions of dollars or more depending upon the severity of the infractions and the contract’s terms.

Can Business Owners Benefit?

Aside from the potentially negative consequences of the False Claims Act for small business owners, there actually is a bright side. If you are able to prove that your competition is defrauding the government, you can contact a False Claims Act attorney and take it upon yourself to bring the fraud to light. By doing this, you’re not only helping the government and tax payers save money, but you’re also doing the right thing – of course, potentially putting your competition out of business and receiving a financial reward doesn’t hurt either.

Be in the Know

If you’re unsure as to whether or not your business is acting within compliance of your government contract, you might want to consider partnering with a False Claims Act attorney to discuss the issue. They will be able to review your contract and your practices, allowing you to find potential trouble spots that need to be addressed or corrected. Doing this will also help you to remain protected in the event that someone does blow the whistle on your business as a Whistleblower’s attorney will be able to represent and protect your interests in court.

Finally, as a small business owner who has a contract with the government, it’s up to you to ensure that all of your employees understand the severity of breaking the rules and the law. Even if an employee goes off on his or her own and commits fraud, you and your company may still get the blame. As a result, most experts recommend regular training sessions for all employees regarding the correct ways to conduct contractual business with the government.

Ann Bailey has formerly reported on business fraud for TV news and shares this report for employers who might be in contract positions. The attorneys at Goldberg Kohn aggressively represent clients involved in court-suits due to the False Claims Act or any business to government fraud situation.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/caitlinator/3044373233/

Premises Liability: Proper Outfitting for Your Small Business Location

Business owners face a variety of legal hassles when operating a business. Obtaining permits, collecting and paying taxes, and dealing with the ever present possibility of litigation can be cumbersome. Small business owners who operate a business that is open to the public also have a duty to keep their property free of hidden hazards. Failure to do so may result in liability for negligence.

Hazardous Conditions

One important note is that the property does not have to be free of hazardous conditions. The hazardous conditions must be latent, or hidden to be a liability. Additionally, the law normally requires the business owner to know about the condition or at least be in a condition where he or she should have known about it. This responsibility extends to the employees. Spills happen, people drop glass items, and individuals come into the store while physically ill on a regular basis. If the business uses a larger property with few employees, taking an occasional walk throughout the business to check for hazards or signs of theft may be a good idea.

With a small business, hazardous but hidden conditions can appear in a variety of ways. Obstructed or slippery floors can result in a slip and fall injury; oil, water, and ice are often invisible on the neutral-colored linoleum used by many small businesses. If the building is open during construction or maintenance, visitors may also encounter exposed wiring. If items are improperly stacked or if the shelves are of poor construction, items may fall off the shelves and onto customers, causing serious injury.

Protecting Yourself From Liability

The Perecman Firm says that, “property owners [at least] in New York are responsible for keeping people on their property reasonably safe from injury.” However, business owners who do not know or could not reasonably have known about the defect may not have a duty to repair it. Courts in most states hold the business owner liable for his or her constructive knowledge if the hazardous condition was caused by an employee; in other words, the business may be sued if the owner’s agent caused the defect. As a result, claiming ignorance of a defect is not normally a good tactic to avoid litigation.

Business owners can satisfy their duty to their customers in two ways. The first is through the use of warnings. Warnings can include signage, caution tape, fencing, or any other similar measure that would cause a reasonable person to recognize the hazardous condition. The second way to avoid liability for injuries stemming from the hazardous condition is by repairing the condition itself. By removing the danger altogether, business owners can avoid customer injuries.

The Issue of Negligence

Most U.S. states use a doctrine known as comparative negligence. In these states, a plaintiff who suffers an injury as a result of another party’s negligence may recover even if he or she was largely responsible for the injury in the first place. Different states have different rules on the matter; some states require that the defendant be at least 50 percent negligent to recover anything. However, some states do not have any cutoff limit. In those states, a slow-witted plaintiff can recover at least some damages even if he or she was 99 percent at fault for the accident.

This is important because when it comes to warnings, it does not take much to make a colorable argument that the defendant was one percent negligent or even ten percent negligent. Simply arguing that more signs, more warning lights, better placement of existing signs, or auditory signals would have reduced the probability of an injury happening can be enough to convince a jury that the store owner bears some of the responsibility for the accident. Warnings should only be used while the hazardous condition is being repaired, such as when an employee is getting a mop or a broom. From a liability standpoint, fixing the condition will be better than simply leaving a warning sign alerting customers to the defect.

When a hazardous condition appears on the property, owners have a duty to either repair the condition or warn customers away from it. In practice, most business owners will use a combination of the two approaches. For example, if water or ice is spilled in an aisle, posting temporary signage or briefly closing the aisle while an employee finds a mop and a bucket is a common tactic that businesses use to avoid liability. Closing a section of the store briefly while a defect is being repaired may cost the store a percentage of its daily sales, but it will be much less expensive than paying for an injured customer’s medical bills.

About the Author: Saam Banai is a freelance writer and editor and proponent of safe business practices.

3 Great Initial Investments for Small Businesses

Some may say that a business is only as good as the tools it uses. If you don’t start out with some form of efficiency, you could be doomed to fail. There are several initial investments you could purchase in order to start your business off on the right foot. While you don’t have to spend a great deal of money to provide stability, an investment of some kind is still required for immediate success in specific areas.

startup investments — photo credit: brianfling via photopin cc

1. Quickbooks – For the small business, Quickbooks can be one of your greatest assets. Not only does this program provide tracking for your bank accounts, but it also handles a large amount of your business practices. Inventory control, payroll, bills, and more can be tracked from Quickbooks providing a wide range of reports to help you analyze what areas your business needs to improve on.

Taxes and end-of-year business can be easily compiled and printed without putting much effort into it. As long as you entered the data correctly throughout the year, taxes could take you a fraction of the time and 1099s could be quickly produced for any contract labor you employed.

2. Computer Network – Having a computer network should go without saying. As nearly everything we do in today’s world requires access to the Internet, having a computer system can save a great deal of time and money. However, does your small business need an expensive server and network in order to function?

A file server could be beneficial if your organization uses a lot of files that need to be shared with one-another. For this purpose, a small $600 desktop server would suffice. Essentially, these servers are nothing more than a regular computer with a server software installed on it. It may not be a bad idea to increase the hard drive size as much as possible, but a file server doesn’t need to have a lot of power behind it.

For a small business, gigabit Ethernet capabilities are more of a luxury that shouldn’t be required. Again, this could greatly depend on the type of business you are starting. The basic 10/100 Ethernet network is far cheaper to build now-days and could serve your business purposes well. Unless you are planning to hammer the network bandwidth using a lot of streaming content, game playing, or other function that requires faster speeds you should save your money.

3. Website – As a large amount of people use smartphones to search for local businesses, you should have a website with all of your products and services described in detail. For less than $120 per year, you could have a website that could generate its own income or simply provide information about your business.

If you’re not interested in hosting eCommerce, your website could still serve a purpose to supply information to potential customers. With enough content, your website could generate revenue with Adsense by receiving money for hosting advertisements of other companies. There is a great deal of potential with a website and if nothing more, it can serve as a great way to advertise your business to the local community.

Although you can still start your business without any of the above tools, they are still a very wise investment. They can save you time, money, and stress from having to alter your methods of conducting business. As long as you track every dime and where it is spent, you can have a handle on how your business functions.

Author Bio: Nancy provides feedback on all elements of the site “www.enannysource.com” helping us to really make sure that we are making it as easy as possible for caregivers to sign up and find work. In addition, she spends quite a bit of her time on freelance writing tasks.

Marketing with eBook – a Comprehensive Strategy

Do you know the bottom-line of running a business successfully? No, it is about being proactive or possessing a go-getter and killer attitude. It is about generating leads.

If you are incapable of generating leads for your business, your business is not going to make it. And probably for this reason, business owners go extreme and start doing weird things when they fail to get their business going.

They send their over-confident marketers to attend seminars to rub shoulders with marketer leaders with a desperate hope that they will be able to seal some crazy deals. Nevertheless, it rarely works. However, some others go extra miles. They invite affiliate marketers and try to make them believe that their product is going to change their lives for once and all. But this is not the way you should be marketing your business. This is definitely not going to help you generate any leads rather it will diminish your prospect.

Image Source – http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/2048264201/

Rather than chasing your customers, you need to know how to provide value that will eventually draw more customers and businesses. And this can easily be achieved with eBook marketing. It is simple, cost effective and of course, it is environment friendly. However, before you jump onto the bandwagon, you need to know the rules of ebook marketing otherwise all your efforts will go wasted.

Image Source – http://www.flickr.com/photos/epw/4857693316

How eBook work as a lead generation machine?

When you pay a visit your nearby shopping mall, I hope you have certainly seen shop owners trying to sell their products by offering some samples to try. By doing so, they are trying to provide instant value to their targeted audience and thereby making a huge stride to get them converted them into customers. Now, you can apply the same tactic while promoting your service. Since there is no option available to let your customers ‘taste’ your service, you can offer them a small eBook that will help them come to term with your offer or service.

And you know eBook is being considered as a powerful marketing tool because people do not consider them as a marketing tool. They usually take it as a source of information and therefore, you would not have to persuade them.

Image Source – http://www.flickr.com/photos/benoitmeunier/3769104218

The Obvious Benefits of using eBook

eBook comes with a unique benefit. Since traditional forms of marketing are proving less effective, ebook marketing is capturing the attention of all. As I have already said, it does not even look like a form of marketing. However, ebook does not need to be informative only; you can change the tone to suit your purpose. Just do not overdo things because it will defeat the purpose of launching the ebook.

The biggest benefit of using eBook as a source of marketing is that it is highly cost effective. Compared to its physical counterpart i.e. print magazine, ebook will not cost you an arm and leg. And the best part of ebook is that it does not necessarily have to 100 pages long. In fact, if you make it 100 pages long, no one is going to read this. The shorter, the better. Since people do not have much time in hand to go through a 100 pages long ebook these days, you need to make it short and sweet.
eBooks can be made a bit more interactive. Rather than making it another book with dry information, you can add videos, cool graphics, interactive pie charts and more. And if this is not enough, you can email your customers if you happen to update the ebook that will give a nice feeling to your customers that you care for them.
Since all things digital can be tracked or at least to some extent, you can measure the success of your ebook marketing campaign quite efficiently and precisely. If you have added links of your website in the ebook, you will be able to track how many visitors are actually coming to your website via ebook and how many of them are making the purchase thanks to the powerful tracking application – Google Analytics.
You can include call to action in the middle of texts in your ebook and believe me it can help you see some conversions. Since here the readers do not have to memorize the coupon codes or the long URLs or any other complex thing. They have to do far simple thing. Yeah, all they have to do is to click on the link and there they go. They will get landed right on your website and if the lady luck favors you, you will see more conversions and more business.

However, just publishing an ebook is not end of the task. You need to make sure that it is well written and the presentation is good enough otherwise it will not click. Here are the few things that you need to be careful about to make the ebook acceptable to your audience –

Image Source – http://www.flickr.com/photos/tscherno/194189530/

Quality of images should not be compromised. Since most people are going to scan the pages, your ebook should look presentable with loads of interesting images. As the ebook is going to be your brand ambassador, you have to make sure that the formatting, writing, presentations etc are at par with market standard.
You are free to add logo or other brand-based images in the ebook but make sure that they are not making it look like a promotional pamphlet.
Do not ignore the difference between a traditional book and ebook. For say, if you are converting a slide presentation, you should not ignore the importance of incorporating images with the texts so that the readers can have the feeling of seeing the presentation. And the same goes with when you are converting spoken content. The conversational tone should be kept intact.

So, if you can manage to follow these simple tips, you will be able to make the most of ebook marketing campaign. It is powerful and highly effective and all you have to learn is to how to use it.

Author Bio
Stark Jensen is a passionate writer and he has written several articles on web hosting. You can check his latest articles on Hosting Review: iPage.

How Important is Hosting for a Small Business?

As a small business owner, you already understand that your business needs a great website. You may understand SEO and the principles of great content and finely-tuned usability.

However, website hosting is also crucial. Hosting underpins your website; it makes the process of maintaining your website easier and ensures it’s always available when customers visit. Choosing the wrong host can be an expensive mistake.

web servers — photo credit: Tom Raftery via photopin cc

With so many plans on offer, how do you make the crucial decision and pick the best web hosting package?

The Importance of the Right Plan

On a very basic level, there are three types of hosting: site builder hosting, shared hosting and VPS/ dedicated hosting. As the price increases, so do the resources (and, in some cases, the quality of support).

It’s essential to choose a website hosting package. You need a service that supports your business without adding unnecessary admin to your daily workload.

Types of Hosting

Site builder tools are fine for many small businesses, particularly when they’re just starting up, but they’re inherently limited. Site builders are browser-based tools that offer templated designs and pre-set widgets.

An upgrade to shared hosting will be needed if you’ve engaged a website designer (or plan to in the future). Shared hosting is also more suitable if you wish to use a popular script like WordPress.

The type of hosting you choose will also affect the price. Costs vary greatly, from a few dollars a month right through to dedicated server packages costing hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a year. Also, you’ll notice that many web hosts offer discounts for hosting plans taken out over a longer term. This is effectively a contract lock-in, and if you don’t know how well the host performs, this lock-in could be a false economy.

Looking Ahead

Before parting with your money, it’s wise to closely examine the terms of the host’s money-back guarantee; if you want to move your website midterm for any reason, a money-back guarantee will ensure you don’t wind up paying for web hosting twice.
If you’re not sure about the resources you need, ensure your web host offers free upgrades. You’re then free to start with the most affordable package. Even if you outgrow the resources on your plan, you’ll be able to scale up effortlessly – and with zero downtime in most cases. This is usually better than over-committing to hosting that will drain your bank account unnecessarily.

The Importance of Availability

It’s important that a business website is available around the clock – or as near to that as possible. That’s why web hosts almost always provide some kind of uptime guarantee.

These guarantees are designed to protect website owners against faults at the data centre which can cause their website to become available.

Checking the Uptime Guarantee

Hosts that offer 100 per cent uptime are rare, and generally more expensive, but they do exist. However, it’s far more common to see 99 per cent uptime guarantees. (Remember: 99 per cent uptime actually allows for up to 3 days’ downtime per year.) Look for the best uptime guarantee you can afford.
Check the terms carefully. Many hosts offer account credits for prolonged downtime, but how easy is to claim? Would the credit compensate your business adequately – and is there a catch?

The Importance of the Right Hosting Provider

There are thousands of web hosting providers battling for custom from small business owners, and that can make the buying decision complex and tedious. Impartial hosting company ratings and host user reviews offer a shortcut, making it far easier to select the right plan.

Before signing up for any web host, check web host reviews from users carefully. Examine the specifications for your chosen plan, then compare host ratings and check the small print for each one.

Finally, don’t forget to look for webhost user reviews that are relatively recent. Web hosting providers occasionally change hands, and that can affect the quality of service customers experience. A stale webhost user review is unlikely to be as accurate as a current, up-to-date user review.

About the Author: Claire is a creative content writer working for WhoIsHostingThis.com, an independent hosting review website.