Privacy and Facebook

If you haven’t already seen the article (or one similar to it) from the New York Times, “The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now,” you might want to take a look. To make the changes suggested by the writer, Sarah Perez, takes only a few minutes and can help preserve your privacy.

Tips for Improving Your Cash Flow

Here is a guest post from Arthur Maur about financing your business.

Three New Methods for Speeding Up Financing...Tips for Improving Cash Flow in Small Businesses. The benefits of getting money into your business as fast as possible are endless, which is why you should always encourage customers to start making their payments in a timely fashion. However, there are always going to be a few accounts that have a lag between payments. Keeping your business's cash flow moving is important, and one way to achieve this is to borrow money against the business's receivables.

Here are three different methods of doing so that may work in your situation.
1. Factors: There are three main benefits to using factors. Cash is delivered immediately upon shipping. The factor is responsible for following up with accounts receivable, not you. Protection against bad debts is also often offered by using a factor.When using factors, you agree to sign over all receivables to them, and receive a credit line in exchange. The prime rate, plus an extra amount usually around 3 percent, is your responsibility to pay. The factor will take care of all accounts receivable you've signed over, as well as other services like mailing and bookkeeping. Your customers only know the factor as an accounts receivable agent.Be sure to check on the background of the factor before agreeing to work with them. Speak to other clients of any prospective factor to be sure they are professional and complete all work on time.

2. Invoice Discounters: Similar to a factor, the invoice discounter is more temporary and takes on only case at a time from your business. A contract must be made between the business and the discounter to cover some or all of the future transactions. This means that when an invoice is issued, you contact the discounter to ask them to purchase it. If it's valid, they agree and within 48 hours you have the cash your business needs, minus the percentage the discounter takes. This percentage depends on the length of the time the receivable will be outstanding. The longer it is outstanding, the more the discounter takes.

3. Banks: Banks are another good option for financing through your receivables. Unlike the other two options, banks consider your receivables collateral. This means you will still be responsible for collecting from your customers. The loans will also show up as debt on financial records, which can be avoided by using a factor. Factoring your receivables is considered a straight sale.However, you may want to consider financing through a bank as they often charge a lower interest rate than other methods. It also builds rapport between you and the bank, which can come in handy if you need a larger loan. Increasing the line of credit without a new application is another benefit to bank lending. Once you've made new sales you'd like to borrow against, it's as simple as contacting the bank with the new information.

Canadian government grants.

Innovate or Die

This afternoon, before the football games kicked off, I started reading a book by Tom Kelly, one of the founders of IDEO, the wonderful design company. I had the chance to hear Mr. Kelly speak at the Famous Entrepreneurs Series (thanks to our friends at the Sensis Corporation)here in Syracuse a couple of weeks ago, and found his presentation to be outstanding. So, with high expectations, I openede up The Ten Faces of Innovation and was blown away in the first pages.
From the book:

“As Tom Peters would say, you can’t shrink your way to greatness. One way to look at the current pressure cooker of international business is as a fierce competition, where you win through innovation or lose the game. Today, companies are valued less for their current offerings than for their ability to change and adapt and dream up something new."

I can’t wait to continue to get into the rest of the book. And if you get the chance to hear Tom Kelly speak…take advantage of it. You won’t be sorry!

Entrepreneurs and Mistakes

I really wish Bill Grimm would blog more often…but when he does, he always has something interesting to say. Take a look at his most recent post about entrepreneurs and mistakes from Thoughts on Advanced Entrepreneurship. I like his line that “an entrepreneur who has the courage to face up to mistakes made that caused a failure is likely to be a success the next time around.” And as he puts it, “knowledgeable investors appreciate an entrepreneur who admits mistakes he or she made in the past.”

Can Cellphones Improve a Show?

As we continue to talk and think more about the integration of mobile media and life, you might want to take a look at Terry Teachout’s column from Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Vexed Messaging. He starts it off with a rant that’s familiar to all of us, but then moves in a different direction:

It happened to me for the first time in Dallas last May. I was wrapped up in a performance of Kurt Weill's "Lost in the Stars." Suddenly my attention was distracted by a mysterious glow. I glanced away from the stage and saw that the woman sitting in front of me was sending a text message on her BlackBerry. Having foolishly neglected to bring a garrote with me, I sat in silence and gnashed my teeth, realizing at last that the no-texting-during-the-performance announcements that are now de rigueur on Broadway are more than merely precautionary. American audiences, long notorious for their willingness to cough, unwrap hard candies, or emit loud laughter at ill-timed moments, have found a new way to be rude.

Social Media and Travel

We’re getting ready to launch a new workshop this spring on Technology and the Entrepreneur, so I’ve been doing more reading on technology. I’ve been reading stuff from the usual places, but I've also have been trying to read some other voices to see what they’re saying about new technology…even if it may not be specifically directed to the entrepreneurial world. In doing so, I came across an interest piece in Travel and Leisure on the Social Media Revolution, and how it’s impacting the travel world. Take a look at it, written by Peter Lindburg. From the article:

"It’s increasingly hard to imagine those antediluvian days, back when information was static and scarce and costly besides; before the data flood swallowed us up. Actually, I don’t have to imagine it: my wife and I were just in Tokyo, where neither her BlackBerry nor my early-model iPhone worked on Japan’s 3G network. For the first time in recent memory, we were completely off the grid—in the most technologically advanced city on earth.

With our smart phones rendered dumb, we made do with a cheap rented mobile that did nothing except—get this—make phone calls. No SMS, no MMS, no GPS, no Web browser, no Google Maps, no currency converter, no translator app, no camera, no Scrabble. This might have felt vaguely liberating if we were, say, camping in Vermont. But we were in Tokyo, a city as bewildering as it is vast. Take away any connection to the information cloud, and we might as well have been on a raft in the Sea of Japan.

The more ways we devise to connect, inform, or amuse ourselves—the more tricks our gadgets learn—the more aggravated we become when they don’t work. Which is often. The digital world may be growing up fast, but at the moment it’s going through an ornery adolescence, that awkward beta-phase when expectations outpace capacity and the default setting is frustration."

I also ran across one of those “Did You Know” videos, this time on social media. Not sure I really like those things (maybe it’s the annoying music, or maybe it’s the general attitude imbedded in them that’s irritating to me), but thought it was something of interest and worthwhile to post here.

What's Your Mission?

One of my favorite ways to start Saturday mornings is with a good cup of coffee and Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal. Her column today, Look Ahead with Stoicism and Optimism was particularly interesting because it mostly dealt with the notion of “mission.” Here’s a bit from the column:

“Maybe the most worrying trend the past 10 years can be found in this phrase: "They forgot the mission." So many great American institutions—institutions that every day help hold us together—acted as if they had forgotten their mission, forgotten what they were about, what their role and purpose was, what they existed to do. You, as you read, can probably think of an institution that has forgotten its reason for being. Maybe it's the one you're part of.”

As entrepreneurs, one of the surest ways to trip ourselves up is to forget about our mission. Now with the state of our country being what it is, it’s easy to start focusing on the economy, the ups and downs of the stock market, or what your house is worth…rather than that of the mission of your business. When you started your venture, you were probably obsessed with something…maybe it was the unique way you were solving a problem, maybe it was your technology or perhaps it was your extraordinary customer service. But as we moved through the last couple of years, it was easy to lose sight of that and start focusing on the other stuff…the stuff that dominates the news coverage but which isn’t helping you to deliver on your original mission.

So take a look at Ms. Noonan’s column and think about her parting thoughts and how it might relate to your business:

“If you work in a great institution: Do you remember the mission? Do you remember why you went to work there, what you meant to do, what the institution meant to you when you viewed it from the outside, years ago, and hoped to become part of it?”