Business Generation

As a business owner, you have certainly imagined a “dream team” of your top executives. In addition to having the best people managing your production, operations, administration, finance, and sales, you need someone to manage all of your employees. Your human resources department could be one of the most important of all, since it is responsible for hiring, firing, and maintaining overall employee morale.

How do you plan for a dream HR staff that will have the greatest impact on your employee management and satisfaction? You first need to determine whether you want generalists or specialists in your HR department

HR Generalists vs. Specialists

HR Generalists are those with a broader range of HR experience, and they can typically operate all aspects of your HR department. The

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Business owners often have to make tough decisions when it comes to their bottom lines. Unfortunately, for many self-employed and micro-businesses, health insurance has become a luxury item – purchased when times are good and given up during times of belt-tightening. A contributing factor to this “unhealthy” reality is the fact that the self-employed do not receive a tax benefit for purchasing coverage, unlike every other type of business entity, which can write off the cost of health insurance as a business expense.

Congress passed a temporary reprieve of this minor quirk in the tax code that has a major effect on our nation’s smallest businesses when it passed the Small Business Jobs Act last fall.

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Many entrepreneurs are adamant about getting a successful business in place right away. Rather than starting from scratch, some enthusiastic entrepreneurs simply go with a proven business model by investing in a franchise.

A franchise is a business with a proven operational and marketing model, one with a regional or national customer base already in place, but is a privately owned and operated business. The most popular franchise examples are McDonalds or Subway, but also non food-related companies like UPS Stores, Super 8 Motels, and Curves for Women.

What are advantages of buying a franchise?

• Name recognition. You get the rights to market and sell a popular and trademarked product or service. Franchises usually come with an established market base.

• Training and setup help.

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Facebook has taken the world by storm and, far from being nothing more than a way to keep up with college or high school friends, it has become a powerful tool for small businesses as well. Check out our roundup of links for more about how to make Facebook and other social media work for your small business today.

Strategy

The new FB business migration tool. We open with a link on how and why you need to move your business from a profile site to a business or brand site. FB has made it a violation of the site’s Terms of Service to use a profile page as a page for your business. There are also, as this post points out, some definite benefits to placing your business on a brand or business page instead if, for whatever reason, you haven’t done so already.

Why Facebook still shouldn’t be your primary Web presence. It see

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Move your business forward with a merchant account. You’ll gain far more than you expect, and those gains will all add to your business’s bottom line.

Extra revenue will begin flowing in your direction almost from the first day you get your merchant account up and running.

The first benefit of a merchant account is that it allows you to accept all major brands of credit cards. That’s important because more customers prefer to pay for purchases with credit cards than ever before. Because you’ll never know what brand of credit card customers may pull out of their wallets or purses when they get to your cash register, it is important to be prepared for any of them. Once it becomes known that you can accept any major credit card, you’ll find more customers flocking to your doors. More customers mean more income, which equates to more profit. Your bott

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PROVIDENCE – Greenlee, a Rockford, Ill.-based subsidiary of Textron Inc., said it acquired a 51 percent stake in Shanghai Endura Tools Company Ltd. on March 30.

Shanghai-based Endura, established in 2004, is a hand tools provider for home centers, construction, industrial manufacturing and automotive channels, and employs about 140 people.

“The alliance also provides us with an opportunity to expand our presence in the Chinese tool market substantially, where we expect to increase sales significantly by leveraging Endura’s existing network and distribution structure of over 1,100 distributors,” said Scott Hall, president of the Textron Industrial Segment and Greenlee. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.

Zacks Equity Research noted that Textron’s across-the-board presence in commercial, manufacturing and industrial products, as well as financing operations, “protects it from specific business risk. The company

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