Handle Your Business

Go to any college fair and you are likely to hear parents talk about how difficult it is to pay for college. With tuition at many Boston-area colleges topping $50,000, a family with one or two college age children can find themselves facing huge bills. Often you hear people say “I am not even bothering to save for college because it will just count against me for financial aid.” While many other parents shake their heads in agreement, not saving for college is actually pretty poor advice.

That is because the amount of financial aid you will receive depends primarily on your income — not your assets. If you make $100,000 per year, a certain percentage of that income is assumed to be available for tuition. It matters very little whether you have $50,000 saved in the bank or $10,000 saved in the bank. Income is very definitely the big driver in the financial aid decision.

Read full post…

Joe Stump, CEO and founder of SimpleGeo, put together this slide deck on starting your startup. 99% of the presentation is key for anyone starting a business. The other 1% is for people starting a technology startup.

Choosing your technology stack is one of many decisions you’ll have to make when creating a company from scratch. Along with this, you’ll need to figure out who you should found a company with, who you should take money from, what the company culture should be, management processes, and who to hire when. Joe will be covering basic technology stack choices (cloud v. hosted, frameworks, etc.) as well as other critical decisions one faces when starting a startup.

Key Takeaways

• Starting a company is really hard. Don

Read full post…

Cutbacks on free refreshments making work worse, say staff One in ten employees has admitted that workplace cutbacks on free tea and coffee are making their work environment worse, research from uSwitch for Business has revealed.

Perks as seemingly small as free tea and coffee have been shown to be an essential addition for a happy workforce.Just 55% of Brits are able to enjoy drink free hot drinks at work, however three in ten say that such small pluses boost morale in the office. Despite this, over a third of workers say that their employers have cut back on the costs of in-house refreshments, as businesses struggle to keep afloat during the recession. Nevertheless, this is leaving their staff out of pocket by an average of over £110 a year as well as reducing overall spirit in the workplace.

Read full post…

In just a couple of hours Ill be presenting How to Dominate Google and Bing with Your Blog at the BlogWorld Expo here in NYC. If you happen to be checking out our web marketing blog, flyte blog, for the first time because of this, here are a few things you should know:

• Consider subscribing to our blog either by using the RSS feed or the email subscription to your right. You can always unsubscribe.
• Weve got a great resource in The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make. I hand crafted each one of those mistakes, so why not learn from my mistakes rather than your own? Cheaper that way, you know. There is an email registration piece, but again, you can unsubscribe at any time.
• Weve got an all SEO, all the time blog over at Maine SEO Blog written by our search engine marketer, Nicki Hicks with some contributions by yours truly.

Read full post…

Nonresidential construction spending fell 1.1% in April after an upward spike in March. Recovery remains on hold in a newly sluggish economy. The private commercial market is poised to recover with recent improvements in rental and occupancy rates and lending interest by investors. The value of starts has steadied well above the cyclical low level and design work in progress continues to expand. The market outlook is exactly the opposite for institutional building. Contractors are quickly working off the tail end of the federal stimulus funds and earlier state and local appropriations with little likelihood that public construction funding will be sustained in 2011-12.

Nonresidential building construction spending declined 23.4% in 2010 and may decline a little more this spring before beginning to expand. Spending will drop 7.5% in 2011 and then rise 10.2% in 2012.

The Federal Reserve released its final rule on interchange fees for debit cards, the fee that merchants pay banks for processing the transaction. The Wall Street reform law required that the Fed make sure the fee was “reasonable and proportional” to the processing cost.

The Fed late last year proposed setting the fee at no more than 12 cents per transaction, a significant cut since banks were earning about 44 cents per transaction. Merchants were ecstatic. Banks upset.

But today the Fed disclosed its final decision: 21 cents plus 0.05 percent on each transaction.

“The announcement today from the Federal Reserve is a disappointment to merchants and consumers who face unfair and excessive fees imposed by big banks and credit card companies,” said Sandy Kennedy, president of the Retail Industry Leaders Association in a prepared statement. “The Fe

Read full post…