Small Business Tools
Advanced small business tools help to avoid a big problems with the finance planing strategy.
Posted by Sara Lopez on November 4th, 2011 ~
0 Comments Every November, as we start winding down another year and reflecting on what we accomplished, what worked, what didn’t and what we should be planning, I yearn for some time and space to really have some good, deep thought about where we are going and how to get there. I also yearn to reconnect with that girl on fire who started my ad agency 17 years ago.
I started this business with a passion for my field but, like a few other other small-business owners Ive met, with little knowledge of how to actually run a business. Along the way I learned some things about management and leadership, but it was the creative juice that kept me, and the agency, humming.
And yet, the skills that worked in starting the a company were not the ones I needed to sustain and build it. The more we grew, the more my role evolved into operations, and the less I was in touch with what fed my soul. Weighty human resources decisions replaced font choices and creative copy writing. I kept plugging away in a role that still feels like a shirt with too tight a collar and cuffs a boxy yet essential operations role. I
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Posted by Brian Reed on November 3rd, 2011 ~
0 Comments Companies nationwide are looking to trim their health insurance costs by combating chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and depression in their employees, corporate and government officials say.
The need for such steps was amplified again Tuesday as a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that health insurance premiums for families of four increased 9% this year.
The upward trend in health care costs can’t all be blamed on growing doctors’ bills. So, employers have started to provide on-site medical visits, access to gyms, chronic-care plans, smoking-cessation programs and even discounts for those who buy a banana rather than a cookie.
For an employer, costs can be as much as 40% higher in one year for someone who is overweight because of all the issues associated with obesity, including diabetes, back problems, asthma, depression and heart disease, said Kenneth Thorpe, who co-directs Emory University’s Center on Health Outcomes and Quality.
Between 8% and 20% of health care costs is due to the persistent rise in obesity.
As an example, he cited a study he published in the journal Health Affairs about an evidence-based program that reduced type 2 diabetes cases by 71% in Medicare beneficiaries older than 60. Read more…
Tags: Costs, Insurance Costs
Posted by Brian Reed on October 29th, 2011 ~
0 Comments Two of Corpus Christi’s youngest entrepreneurs will get a national television audience.
Courtney Honer, 15, and Erik Honer, 12, owners of Not So Creepy Critters, taped a segment for “The Rosie Show” with host Rosie O’Donnell in Chicago on Wednesday, said their mother, Jill Honer.
The show will be a kid-friendly Halloween special to air at 6 p.m. Monday on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
The siblings formed their business out of their love for animals and nature. They first began collecting animals and making presentations to Corpus Christi-area schools. That evolved into a business, which includes breeding and selling spiders.
Though they started in Corpus Christi, the Honers recently moved to New Braunfels but still do several presentations in the Coastal Bend, Jill Honer said.
The kids also have a learning book, which will soon be available on Amazon.com, Jill Honer said.
The book, “Not So Creepy Critters,” was written and illustrated by the duo with extra pages to double as a nature journal for kids between ages 3 and 8.
IF YOU WATCH
Who: Courtney and Erik Honer, owners of Not So Creepy Critters
Where: “The Rosie Show,” with host Rosie O’Donnell
When: 6 p.m.
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Tags: Rosie
Posted by Sara Lopez on October 24th, 2011 ~
0 Comments A friend referred me to Vinod Khoslas Five-Second Rule at Forbes.com. Its about the slide decks we use for presenting, and its wisdom is a lot like what you get in Malcolm Gladwells Blink or thousands of blog posts about the importance of headlines. Heres the Vinods test for slide decks: 
he puts a slide on a screen, removes it after five seconds, and then asks the viewer to describe the slide. A dense slide fails the test—and fails to provide the basic function of any visual: to aid the presentation.
Post author Jerry Weissman explains how this addresses two of the most important elements of presentation graphics:
Less is More, a plea all too often sounded by helpless audiences to hapless presenters; and more important, the human perception factor. Whenever an image appears on any screen, the eyes of every member of every audience reflexively move to the screen to process the new image. T
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Posted by Brian Reed on October 19th, 2011 ~
0 Comments 
I love words and phrases that sort of wrap around on themselves. A sentence that makes you read it again because its confusing is a lot of fun for me when writing captions.
Even not sure what this guy means exactly, but you have to admire his total grasp of unwavering wishy-washyness. I think.
Posted by Sara Lopez on October 16th, 2011 ~
0 Comments How do you tell how your small business is doing? That’s the question this entry in my Small Business Week Business Basics series answers…
One of the easiest ways to tell how your small business is doing is to run regular health checks on your business.
Just as it does for people, a regular health checkup plays a vital role in staying well by finding small problems when they’re still small and more easily dealt with.
Find out if your business is healthy or ailing with some basic ratio analysis. Calculating these three financial ratios will let you check your business’s current temperature, diagnose potential problems, and see if your business is doing better or worse over time.
Tags: Small, Small Businesss
Posted by Sara Lopez on October 14th, 2011 ~
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