Handle Your Business

I use the idea of hero a fair amount when I talk about what we do. I don’t use it in an egotistic way, more aspirational really than anything. I think aspiring to be a hero to someone is a good thing.

kindercapes via Flckr CC

You can substitute leader if you like, but I love the image of hero because I think it paints a much more vivid illustration of the whole package – struggle, denial, acceptance, achievement, and purpose.

While I think it’s important that you and your business strive to be the hero in somebody’s story, I think it’s equally important that you understand how to position your customer or community as the hero of your story.

Below are some of my thoughts on how you do this and if you find yourself thinking this sounds a bit like crafting a screenplay, it’s because there’s a bit of that art to it. In fact, ther

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Spring is here!  New grass is coming in.  Perennials are starting to bloom.  You might even be motivated to do a bit of cleaning (or pay someone else to do it).

You’re probably getting outside more, perhaps starting practice on your softball team, prepping your garden, or using the extra daylight for evening walks.  Springtime inspires a universal sense of starting new activities and taking a fresh look at the world.  Why not include your business in that fresh look?

Spring cleaning your finances can boost your small business profits. It wil

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You’re in for some fun if you haven’t shopped for a TV in a few years.

Streaming Internet videos and 3D are adding excitement to TV viewing, say the editors of Consumer Reports. Wi-Fi and full Web browsers make it easy to expand your online horizons. Remote controls are evolving as well, giving you new ways to interact with your TV. And prices continue to fall, so you’ll get more for your money.

There’s much more to come. Over the next few months, new technologies – such as superwide screens, a new type of TV designed to combine the best of LCD and plasma displays and screens with ultrahigh resolution – should start showing up. Here are more details on those developments, along with the latest news from CR’s tests of 142 TVs.

Bigger and better TVs abound. Bigger screens are an obvious trend. CR’s Ratings included 10 TVs with 60-inch or larger screens, including a 70-inch Sharp LCD TV, and more than 30 models with 50- to 60-inch screens.

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Steady but unspectacular that’s the economic forecast for California from the experts at UCLA.

In the university’s latest Anderson Forecast, to be released today, senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg said unemployment in California will continue to fall over the next two years.

But it won’t decline rapidly. Nickelsburg said the statewide rate, at 10.9 percent in February, won’t fall to single digits until the third quarter of 2013.

By 2014, unemployment in California will be in the 7.7 percent range, Nickelsburg said.

“The current forecast is for continued slow, steady gains in employment through 2012,” he wrote.

Some economists have grown concerned that California labor markets have cooled off again, following a relatively strong second half of 2011.

Payroll job growth was considerably weaker in the first two months of the year, according to the Employment Development Department.

Nickelsburg said there’s nothing particularly surprising about a temporary lull in the labor markets.

“If you look at the way this recovery has gone in California, it’s fits and starts,” he said in an interview.

Part of the problem is the comparatively lukewarm pace of growth in the international economy, he said.

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WASHINGTON – United States Senator Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, today addressed attendees of the Shreveport Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium in Honor of Women’s History Month. The symposium, hosted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in collaboration with Sen. Landrieu, focused on women entrepreneurs, innovation and the importance of intellectual property to business.

According to the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA), 7.8 million firms were owned by women in 2007, accounting for almost 30 percent of all non-farm, privately held U.S. firms. Women-owned firms had total receipts of $1.2 trillion that year, and firms with paid employees employed 7.6 million workers.

“This two-day event recognizes the many pioneering women who have built our great nation,” Sen. Landrieu said. “It is

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The Department of Justice has recently begun enforcing a once-obscure anti-bribery law that makes it illegal for multinational corporations to engage in bribery with foreign governments, drawing criticism over the “very aggressive” approach to the law.

The of 1977 has been rarely enforced over the last 35 years. But, currently, 78 companies are under investigation by the Department of Justice, including well-known companies like Avon, Goldman Sachs, Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer and Wal-Mart Stores.

The case’s failure opened the floodgates of criticism of the methods with which corruption and bribery are fought overseas.

Lisa Rickard, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform, told the New York Times, “We are seeing companies getting scooped up in aggressive enforcement actions and investigations. … A cultu

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