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- Mr BizPlan Says (44)
- December 31, 2008: It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times
- December 24, 2008: A 2008 Christmas Poem
- November 23, 2008: The Next Great Depression...In High Definition
- October 7, 2008: How the Credit Crisis Affects Small Business
- September 26, 2008: Is Your Brand Awesome? Should it be?
- September 17, 2008: What's going on? From Wall Street to Main Street.
- September 2, 2008: The Universe of Opportunities
- August 7, 2008: Rags to Riches...Anecdotally Speaking
- June 30, 2008: Building Quality Financial Projections
- June 16, 2008: "The Only Thing We Have To Fear..."
How the Credit Crisis Affects Small Business
October 7, 2008 by mrbizplan.
The big media is talking about big dollars, big companies, and big bailout packages. Sub-prime mortgage backed securities, money market mutual fund savings, and now commercial paper have all been at the center of the conversation of the current credit crisis in the US and, in recent days, worldwide.
To some, the credit crisis is a very real and immediate danger directly affecting their day to day work life and personal life. But, to others it seems like a distant war being fought by some other society. And, like any war on an abstract concept it is difficult to determine what affect any action has on “the market”.
But what about small business? At its most basic “cause and effect” form, the credit crisis has had several immediate effects on small business:
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Is Your Brand Awesome? Should it be?
September 26, 2008 by mrbizplan.
Recently at a small business conference in Chicago I attended a few different seminars on marketing, promotion and branding. Being a self proclaimed finance geek, I find it is helpful to step outside of my natural habitat to broaden my knowledge base, and the best place for me to do that is by exploring marketing concepts.
You see, marketing & promotion is my Achille’s heal as a business consultant. Despite attending dozens of seminars, attending trade shows, reading books (actually I prefer audio books) on the subject and even listening to a few Zig Ziglar tapes I found at a garage sale…I still am not confident in giving advice on marketing.
I think the problem is that finance is finite and marketing is…well, subjective. Numbers never lie. Certainly people can lie by changing the numbers to misrepresent the actual condition of a company. But, anybody with an undergraduate level education in accounting knows that the practice, at best, is an estimate.
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What’s going on? From Wall Street to Main Street.
September 17, 2008 by mrbizplan.
There is blood in the streets of America’s businesses both small and large. On Wall Street, the collapse of financial institutions, the bailouts of Freddie, Fannie, Bear Sterns and now AIG. 500 point daily drops in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with investors fleeing to cash and US treasuries. Sure there has been the rapid decline of the price of a barrel of oil, but that has been the effect of sinking worldwide demand (and strengthening the US dollar), which are ripples from the US economy swelling to tsunamis world wide.
Sound familiar? Unless you have been under a rock it has been hard to miss. Even The Daily Show’s John Stewart is taking a break from beating up Sarah Palin to focus on the economic forces playing out in front of our very eyes.
On Main Street, here in the Red River Valley, community leaders and spending scads of time and money trying to convince citizens that all is well. And, for the most part, they are right:
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