Did you know that 35% of clients prefer scheduling appointments during non-business hours? Not only that, but 25% of millennials (those under 35) only book appointments online. If you’re a salon or spa with an established website, offering online booking could potentially boost appointments by 25%. While there’s no comprehensive study on the impact of…
Survey Says: Small Businesses Don’t Want 400 Apps
Thank you Intuit for sponsoring this article. Imagine if you had an opportunity to ask 2,000 small businesses around the world about their usage and attitudes towards business web-based and mobile apps. What would they say? How tech savvy do you think small business owners really are? Wearing many hats, small business owners have to…
How a Responsible Nonprofit Small Business Lender is Shaking Up Online Financing: An Interview with Steve Cohen of Excelsior Growth Fund
Small business owners get bombarded with mail from alternative lenders offering them fast online approval for loans of all sizes. Fit Small Business shares a floor in an office building with two other companies. Most weeks, we collectively receive mail from two or three companies offering loans. Given the fiercely competitive marketspace for small business…
Before You Start Your Business: An Interview with the Founder of WalletHub
If you watch a few hours of TV, there’s a high probability of seeing an advertisement for a credit monitoring service. Some larger companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital money to become the most well-known brand in the credit score monitoring space. Personal finance upstart WalletHub is taking them on…
What Makes a Better Business Insurance Broker? An Interview with Embroker CEO Matt Miller
Insurance is a highly regulated industry with the prices of policies fixed by regulation. If a small business goes to a hundred insurance brokers and asks for a quote for a particular type of insurance from a specific insurer, the price quote will come back the same a hundred times. Traditionally, insurance policies sold to…
What is next for business phone systems? An Interview With Vonage’s Aaron Charlesworth
Vonage has been a leader in getting consumers to give up their POTS lines for VoIP service. POTS is telephone industry speak for Plain Old Telephone Services. VoIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol. Basically, a VoIP service uses your high speed internet connection to carry calls versus traditional phone lines. In the last few…
What do NASA and Small Businesses Have in Common? An Interview with Freelancer.com’s Joe Griston
Recently, I received a press release from Freelancer.com. It talked about how NASA was using Freelancer.com to crowdsource ideas through running contests. NASA is using the community at Freelancer.com to generate solutions to challenges it puts forward, ranging from robotic arms to smartwatch applications. Here is the link to find out about ongoing NASA projects….
What do New Zealand sheep farmers know about innovative accounting? An interview with Xero’s Russell Fujioka
I have interviewed dozens of CEOs and senior executives in the small business space. The term “southern hemisphere” has only come up in one interview. Recently, I interviewed the U.S. President of Xero (XRO NZE), Russell Fujioka. The conversation briefly turned to New Zealand sheep farmers and herd management. His company, Xero, is very well known…
Turn Email Signatures Into Sales and Engagement: An Interview with Ariel Finkelstein, Chairman of WiseStamp
How many business emails do you send per week? According to WiseStamp, the average business user sends around 190 emails per month. The average email is opened 5 times. Using some simple math, the average business user has their emails viewed 950 times per month. The question, is can these 950 views be used to…
Should You Choose Regus for Office Space? An Interview with Stephen Farley
Several years ago, my business partner worked for a foreign technology company as their sole employee in the United States. He needed to have a single person office at a good New York City location. Additionally, the company did not want to take out a long-term lease. They were still figuring out their US strategy….
Yelp Profiles, Reviews & Advertising: An Interview With Darnell Holloway
Most readers have probably used Yelp to find or pick out a restaurant. Why? The company has more than 90 million customer reviews to help you decide on which places you might like. Reviews are not just for restaurants. Retail shops and home improvement businesses now are significant categories which receive millions of reviews. Getting…
Selling A Small Business That Isn’t So Small: An Interview With Scott Bushkie
If your business has $10 million in annual revenue, who do you turn to help sell your business? After all, you are still technically a small business but are worth more than many small business broker’s are used to handling. One place to turn is Cornerstone Business Services. The company specializes in selling companies with…