Blog Posts by Owen Linderholm

by Michael Germanovsky

When people think of starting a business, one of the first things they might consider is writing a business plan. Identifying a source of funding is a large part of it. A successful business takes cash flow to sustain it and investment to grow it. We all know investors are hard to come by. So there are two basic ways to fund the start-up costs for a small business. One way is a traditional business loan and the other is a line of credit.

If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, then be kind to your credit and it will be there for you when you need it. Your credit does not have to be perfect to get a loan or credit extension to start a business, but the better your credit history the better your chances to obtain start-up financing.

About half of small businesses fail within the first five years, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). Even with low start-up costs and low overhead there are still going to be those times when credit is needed in the

Read More »from The Role Your Personal Credit Score Plays in Start-Up Financing

Last week in Small Business Reading we managed to be just a tiny bit prescient when we highlighted the often-overlooked topic of emergency planning. As everyone knows, that has come back with a vengeance with the arrival of Sandy on the Eastern Seaboard. For those small businesses in the affected area, the SBA is making disaster loans available. It's also worth noting that some of the small businesses in the disaster area managed to keep thins going using old-fashioned word-of-mouth and its modern replacement - social media. Part of the reason they were able to do that are the large number of tools available for small businesses based on smartphones and tablets - which will at least keep running for a few more hours when the power goes out and which are easier to recharge. This article has a few simple tips on ways to keep gadgets running when the power goes out. For those truly unfortunate enough to have their business dreams dashed, perhaps the best way to recover is to face your

Read More »from Sandy, disaster preparedness, free money: Small Business Reading

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Managers come in all forms. Some are fantastic, some dreadful. But who hasn't experienced a nightmare boss? Perhaps even one deserving of a special costume for Halloween. It might not scare the neighborhood kids, but it'll certainly scare their parents! Here for a bit of Halloween fun are XX bosses from your nightmares.

First of all, let's be clear. What exactly IS a boss?

Next - let's move straight on to the boss from Hell - the one for whom nothing is EVER good enough.

This link will take you to an example of a seemingly innocuous boss, but one that is deadly in practice - the disorganized manager.

Discipline is an issue that undermines the best of managers. This link shows you the unready, the silent, the terse and the sarcastic managers in full flight.

And one thing that is sure to bring out the monster in every manager is the performance review.

But perhaps the biggest nightmare of all is the clueless boss...

For more information about good and bad management practices

Read More »from Nightmare managers: These bosses make it Halloween 365 days of the year in the office.

As the long run in to November's election comes to a close the media is finally starting to notice that there has been a disconnect between what the candidates say about small business, what they seem prepared to do, what small businesses actually want and even what a small business really is. The last point is a good place to start. We wrote about the SBA's decision to change its criteria for what a small business is about a month ago. It came up again this week since the date for implementing the new size limits was October 24th. It takes a lot of digging but the bottom line is that for most small businesses the upper limit to be considered small is 500 except for a number of manufacturing industries and a few other exceptions where it goes up to 750, or 1,000 or even 1,500 in some rare cases (aircraft manufacturing for example). The upper end of these standards represents a big disconnect from most small business owners since 80% of all small businesses are 2 people or fewer. But Read More »from Incorporation models, taxation, bookkeeping, credit: Small Business Reading.

Read More »from 5 Most Common Small Business Bookkeeping Mistakes

We are heading into the last few days prior to the election and the choices are coming in to focus as we get the details of the different campaigns' specifics - especially with regard to small business. Or are they?

Unlike the political rhetoric, you CAN get some concrete small business advice right here on Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. We have a new writer, Patricia Lotich, on board and she started with a great piece about emergency planning for small businesses. You'll see some more new writers starting over the next couple of weeks. Please let us know what topics you'd like to see covered in the comments below.

Some of the other best stories for today:

Leadership experience helps female veteran small business owners.

Top 5 tax mistakes small businesses make.

How to avoid small business ownership burnout.

The last of four women's small business webinars from the SBA is tomorrow - and find out about watching the archived ones...

Two great tips for small ecommerce businesses.

Brought

Read More »from Small Business Today: Concrete advice, emergency planning, elections and sales.

Closing Shop: We Hope Not

We had an interesting week with some minor fallout from the second presidential debate that once again failed to address small business in any real and lasting way but played a great deal of lip service. There was also a strong theme in the news this week about the changes Facebook has made to the way business pages operate - and specifically how they are aggressively moving to charge businesses for putting their status updates in front of their own followers. It's Facebook's platform to do what it wants with but I fear that int he long run Facebook's position as the top social media and marketing solution for small business may be damaged.

We also looked at what extraordinary bosses have in common, some great credit card perks and also gave a tip of our hat to a possible new trend - insourcing. And next week look to see some new writers covering bookkeeping and general business operations.

If you haven't taken the plunge yet, hopefully some of these articles give you the impetus to

Read More »from Facebook, debates, the real issues for small business, and extraordinary bosses: Small Business Reading

pickingsmallbusinesspocketIn our last roundup of small business news, we focused heavily on the changes in how Facebook is dealing with 'likes' and how it then puts news from liked businesses in front of people who liked their pages. Basically Facebook just unilaterally massively cut back the number of people it shows status updates to while at the same time heavily promoting its new pay-to-promote business. As this article points out, that is completely within Facebook's prerogatives.

But the article ignores completely our prerogative as small business owners to really strongly dislike this change. It inevitably undercuts the value and utility of Facebook for small businesses as a marketing tool. Sure, there's a lot of entitlement floating out there in InternetLand about how everything should be free but in this case it has been free. It's no surprise that we are going to whine a bit when the rug gets yanked out from under our free-loading feet.

The typical cycle for content-driven marketing for a small

Read More »from Small Business Today: More Facebook plus lending fund, names and Staples – small business reading for 10-17-2012