1. Organize your business documents
2. Have a scalable technology plan ready
3. Plan to spend money to earn money
4. Prepare to outsource tasks
5. Create a blueprint for business continuity
6. Develop a strategy for balancing work and life
7. Build your team

Arguably the most critical aspect of digital transformation, digital payments ensure that small merchants or kiranas can continue to accept or send money and preserve cash flow in an increasingly contactless world.

For small businesses,traditional marketing can be expensive and difficult to maintain. Inbound marketing can level the playing field and give even the smallest business a chance to stand out and grow.

Why use inbound marketing?

1. It is cost effective
2. It helps build customers trust.
3. It increases brand awareness and boosts your online presence.
4. It can improve your marketing decision making
5. You can craft customer-focused content.
6. Inbound marketing provides two-way communication.
7. It helps bring in organic traffic to your website

The Covid-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented financial ripple effect in nearly every industry but hit the small businesses that define America the hardest. Throughout the first six months of the pandemic, more than 60 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance. That’s 23 million more than the 37 million who filed claims during the 18-month Great Recession.

By now, many small-business owners who made the difficult decision to shrink or temporarily pause are rebuilding. As they have already learned, though, rebuilding your business is not as easy as flipping a switch and watching your business rebound to its pre-Covid-19 state. As a small-business owner, your plan to rebuild should focus on rehiring employees who can fulfill your immediate needs while simultaneously paving the groundwork for growth in the new norm.

Finding and keeping the best talent has never been easy. It became the top concern for HR professionals this past year, with more than two-thirds reporting struggles with their recruitment and retention efforts. While the reasons for those struggles run the gamut, they often relate to attracting qualified candidates (49%), retaining star employees (49%) and issues with the talent-culture fit (42%).

For small and midsize businesses (SMBs), any difficulties with finding talented hires end up wasting precious resources. Worse yet, the cost of a bad hire is equal to 30% of the hires first-year salary – without factoring in the potential losses in revenue and time associated with onboarding the wrong person for a job.

Pivoting has become one of those hot topics in mainstream business media. When an economic crisis arises, countless think pieces are written about how to pivot your business to respond to the external environment. But pivoting is a huge gamble, requiring deep resources and the ability to fail with minimal consequences (hence why the term is often associated with venture-backed startups). And, one must ask oneself if there’s even a solid reason to pivot.

As a small business owner, while you might feel pressure to look anywhere and everywhere to increase your top line, resist the urge to pivot. Instead, focus on your mission.  

Define your mission
In the college admissions space, disruption is something we are used to. While high-profile recruiting scandals and a renewed focus on racial inequities have dominated headlines recently, a larger cultural shift was quietly occurring.

A business owner who spent nearly $46 million over the years on Facebook ads said he got booted from the platform without warning.

Jordan Nabigon, the CEO of the Ottawa, Ontario, content-curation site Shared, said Facebook deleted his companys main Facebook page without warning in October, and without providing an explanation. He shared a Medium post detailing his experience, which has received more than 400 claps from readers.

Nabigon spent $45,870,181 on Facebook advertising between 2006 and 2020 for Shared and his other company Freebies, according to expense reports reviewed by Business Insider. Shared employees three people full-time and 12 contract writers, Nabigon said.

Facebook increased its use of artificial intelligence to oversee advertising and other content during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Nabigon is among hundreds of business owners who said they suffered from Facebook's crackdown on ad policies.

The accelerated churn rate of the S&P 500 indicates that at least half of todays top U.S. companies will get replaced by someone new over the next decade. That is a mind-boggling market value of $13.5 trillion up for grabs. And the craziest part is who replaces the old market leaders: It is often companies that, just a few years before, were considered scrappy little startups.

To unseat a champion, a smaller company has to play by a completely different set of rules.

1. Change the basis of competition.
2. Exploit taboos.
3. Optimize for power.
4. Dramatic simplification.

The United States has seen an increase in new businesses formed this year. According to the United State Census Bureau, in week 50, there were over 86,000 new business applications nationwide — representing a 38% increase over filings during the same week in 2019. The challenges small businesses have experienced in 2020 have led to some core lessons that those in the business community need to apply — whether they own an established small business or a newly formed one.

Minimum wage is a complex issue for small businesses, says the Small Business Development Center in Binghamton.

The SBDC adds that, typically, small businesses have a close relationship with their employees and if they could pay them more originally, they would.

They add that they believe some business owners may have to pick up the slack in order to keep costs low.

The pandemic is accelerating existing trends.

Covid-19 has initiated some trends and altered the direction of others, but its most enduring impact will be as an accelerant. Take any trend--social, business, or personal--and fast-forward 10 years. Even if your company isn't living in the year 2030 yet, the pandemic has spurred changes in consumer behavior and markets. This is clear in the rapid increase in online shopping, in the shift toward remote delivery of health care, and in the spectacular increase in valuation among the biggest tech firms.

The more disruptive the crisis, the greater the opportunities--and the risks.

In a world in which e-commerce has become a necessity for nearly every retailer, it can seem they have only two options: list their goods on marketplaces run by giant companies, or sell to consumers directly, hoping they will make more on each transaction despite fewer sales. In other words, either join a dominant marketplace like eBay , Walmart or Amazon —which by itself represents 38% of U.S. online sales, according to Digital Commerce 360—or hope they can find customers through advertising and word of mouth.

For many small- and medium-size sellers, a third option has emerged, embodied by the rising star of e-commerce, Shopify . This approach gives merchants access to cloud-based third-party services such as payments and fulfillment, but lets them maintain more control of their branding and customer relationships than the biggest marketplaces offer. Shoppers might not even know they’re buying something from a Shopify-powered retailer, and that’s the point.

In addition to making goods available on sellers’ own sites, these software companies—which also include BigCommerce and Magento—can perform the laborious task of listing merchandise on the giants marketplaces. By becoming hubs for managing sales through multiple channels, including social-media platforms, they represent real competition for Amazon and its ilk, potentially giving merchants more leverage when dealing with those entrenched giants.

Specific PPP provisions of the new law include:

Appropriates an additional $7.25 billion to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) for the PPP program

Expands PPP eligibility to include:

~ Additional tax-exempt nonprofits, such as 501(c)(5) labor and agricultural organizations and community locations of larger nonprofits, whose lobbying activities do not comprise more than 15 percent of its activities
~ Internet publishing organizations assigned a North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Code of 519130 and engaged in the collection and distribution of local or regional and national news and information
~ Adds COBRA premium assistance as an allowable payroll cost under the PPP program.

Invoice financing is a type of business funding wherein the business sells its outstanding invoices or account receivables (A/R) to financing companies to get an immediate cash flow boost. The financing company takes over the invoices, and sometimes be in charge of collecting customer payments (as in invoice factoring).

Invoice financing is a popular financing option for businesses that have to wait 30,60, or 90 days to get their clients payments.

A survey of small businesses conducted by Appalachian State University in coordination with Selective found that cybersecurity and technology issues were growing concerns for 44% of survey respondents due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, only 20% of survey respondents have cyber insurance coverage.

The findings highlight an awareness gap among small businesses about the risks they face from cybercrime. Twenty-eight percent of data breaches impact small businesses, and phishing attacks account for over 30% of breaches, making them the biggest cyber threat for small organizations.1 Cyber coverage from Selective can help small businesses manage and mitigate risks with comprehensive coverage options and cyber threat education.

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?

1 — Google plans to scrap third-party cookies by 2022.

Google announced this past week that it plans to stop the use of tracking cookies on Chrome by next year and— instead— will replace cookies with a profiling system

2 —Recruiting startup SeekOut raised $65M to take on LinkedIn and other talent acquisition companies.

3 —Small business owners adopted new software in 2020 and increased tech budgets in 2021.

The data on business startups and closing show a mixed bag across the United States. Some states have seen an increase in new business applications over the past year (February to February) and some states have shown a decline. The Mid-Atlantic and Northeast are among the weakest regions, with Virginia showing a 3.5% decline in year-over-year applications.

Business closings are harder to track month to month because small business operators do not always file documents when they shutter their doors, and it is hard to distinguish between permanent and temporary closings. Closings do show up eventually in tax filings and articles of incorporation.

This month almost 135,000 businesses are showing strain, as the impact of a year of Covid-19 restrictions reverberates.Businesses in the services and retail sectors accounted for almost three-fifths of those showing distress, said Mazars. Sectors allowed to reopen were faring better, with construction and manufacturing businesses making up 7.9 per cent and 6.7 per cent of those in distress respectively.

For some of the smallest businesses that applied for forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, waiting just a few days or weeks would’ve gotten them thousands of dollars more.

But they had no way of knowing what was coming.

The Biden administration in late February announced a slew of changes to the loan program, which offered forgivable loans in return for keeping employees on a company’s payroll, after it reopened in January with $284 billion in funding. Those amendments included an adjusted loan formula that would mean larger amounts for sole proprietors as well as expanded eligibility for small business owners with certain criminal records, were delinquent on student loan debt or were non-citizens.

The Small Business Administration has extended deferment periods for all of l its disaster loans made either in 2020 or 2021, the agency announced on Monday.

The extended deferment includes the SBAs Economic Injury Disaster Loan – or EIDL – program, which many businesses that did not qualify for Paycheck Protection Program loans or other funding used to bridge the losses incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.

All SBA disaster loans made in 2020 will have the first payment due date extended from 12-months to 24-months from the date of the note, the agency said. Disaster loans made in 2021 will have a first payment due date extended from 12-months to 18-months from the date of the note.

Every business was considered small at some point in its history. Some go big, but some stay small and do quite well. The size of a business in common measurements (revenue, employees, locations) is less relevant than the size of your customer base and the corresponding loyalty of customers.

Millions of businesses across the country are struggling, yet many are not taking the latest version of government aid: a second round of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. This is not happening because businesses are better off than they were last year; it is because the PPP still contains structural blockers that are stopping businesses from obtaining the aid they urgently need.

A recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank found that 30% of U.S. small businesses — totaling 9 million — fear they will not make it through 2021 without more government assistance. And yet, many are not applying for aid. The Small Business Administration (SBA) reports that seven weeks after round two of PPP began, nearly half the funds remain, and only 31% of 2020 PPP loans have been forgiven to date.

Title: quinine
Category: Medications
Created: 5/14/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/14/2022 12:00:00 AM

Title: Flu Shots Lag in States With Low COVID Vaccine Uptake
Category: Health News
Created: 6/16/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 6/16/2022 12:00:00 AM

Title: Federal Court Orders EPA to Re-examine Whether Roundup Causes Cancer
Category: Health News
Created: 6/20/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 6/20/2022 12:00:00 AM

Title: fluphenazine
Category: Medications
Created: 8/15/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 8/15/2022 12:00:00 AM

I don't like any of the names for people who create technology solutions for use in the real world. In no particular order:

• Developer - Sorry, that's for photographic film (and who uses that anymore?) not software - my second least-favorite on this list.
• Programmer - probably the one I use the most, but the mechanistic connotations: a glorified typist of code; and the implication is that someone else does the thinking, bothers many - leading to...
• Architect - Horrible. Borrowed from physical construction, it brings in notions of rigidity of thinking and solution; my least favorite, often used by those who use 'Developer' to describe "those who do the thinking around here."
• Coder - Probably my favorite; however implies that software is the focus instead of the problem to be solved.
• Hacker - I don't mind this one, but it feels forced sometimes and of course carries negative connotations due to it's use in a security context; It does however, put the problem solving front-and-center and I like that;
• Software Engineer - Part of my current title; pros: sounds professional and captures the applied science nature of the work; cons: again the implication is writing code, not general problem solving and often - though not in my case - is indicative of a very rigid, bureaucratic culture
• Software Craftsman - En Vogue with those who see (as I do) that there is more to this work than just slinging code, I have several problems with it: software focus again, the lack of gender neutrality, and a certain pretentiousness (that might just be because some people sound that way when they talk about the movement - which I am positively disposed to, but not a part of)
• Technologist - This one is popular with the start-up crowd; This is one of the few on this list that recognizes the holistic integrated nature of the work from the solution side; on the other hand, lacks action, professionalism and anything related to the problem (not a coincidence that the startup world likes it, because those that use it are often seeing the project as separating problem and solution too)
• Sys Admin, DBA, network engineer, etc, etc - I.e. every other technology-related role that isn't primarily about writing software. This is my biggest concern of all as I believe this distinction (writing software and everything else) is horribly misguided, artificial and needs to go (that's another entry)

Am I just being pedantic? I'd say yes, except that I believe these terms all devolve from not seeing the holistic nature of solving problems with programmable machines and since I do see it that way, I want a term that encompasses all of it.

Thus Logic Engineer. Physicists have Mechanical Engineers to apply their ideas, why don't Logicians have Logic Engineers? Currently, we conflate this practical science with Computer Science which is also a pure science - or would be if we stopped doing that. I know that Engineer has professional accreditation connotations in many disciplines - and I'm mixed on what that would mean given the current state of technological practice today - but I believe this most closely maps to what we are doing:

Logician: figure out the rules and limits of valid reasoning.

Logic Engineer: figure out the rules and limits of applying logic to real-world problems. We are Logic Engineers.

Further, if we stopped slicing the world up into hardware and software practitioners, and started seeing that software is just liquid hardware (and vice versa); maybe we'd have something worth accrediting (though I don't think for a long while yet).

So, I'm gonna try it for a while... at least in my head.

Title: minocycline
Category: Medications
Created: 7/29/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 7/29/2022 12:00:00 AM

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 25, 2024 ) The global rock drilling equipment market is experiencing rapid growth, driven by the expansion of infrastructure projects worldwide. Major developments in emerging economies like India, China, and Brazil are fueling demand for advanced rock drilling machinery....

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 31, 2024 ) The global Big Data and Data Engineering Services market is experiencing significant growth, driven by the increasing volume of unstructured data and the need for advanced analytics. Key factors driving this growth include the rise of IoT devices, social media,...

(EMAILWIRE.COM, November 03, 2024 ) Aliphatic Amines Market are substances created through displacement reaction within an ammonia molecule. Monovalent hydrocarbon radicals replaced the hydrogen atoms in ammonia in Aliphatic Amines. The analysis in the report examines how the COVID-19 pandemic...

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New York Comic Con 2018: Constantine: City of Demons At the 2018 New York Comic Con, DVDTalk’s Francis Rizzo III sat down with the cast and crew of the new feature-length animated film Constantine: City if Demons, due out...

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Title: nicotine lozenge
Category: Medications
Created: 7/21/2022 12:00:00 AM
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Video: Caroline Says – “Faded and Golden”

From The Lucky One, out October 11 on Western Vinyl.

Caroline Says is Caroline Sallee and she’s moved around a lot. She was raised in Alabama. She moved to Austin. Then back to Alabama. And now she’s based in Brooklyn. That much moving, more than anything, reveals that you can’t go home again.

The house where you don’t live no more
When I drive by I still call it yours.

Nothing’s ever the same as how you left it.

When I said goodbye and said I’d see you soon
And how I keep you in my head just dies when I see you.

Sallee says, “Relationships are, first and foremost, ideas. That’s what allows relationships to persist even when we’re apart. We may yearn for an old friend or lover, especially one from our teenage years and our hometown. But there is a bittersweetness to any reunion. They may shatter the memory we’ve made of them.”

Shatter? Come on. What kind of fragile-ass memories do you have? People change.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

Video: Lizzy McAlpine – “Pushing It Down and Praying”

From the deluxe Older (and Wiser), out October 4 on RCA/Sony.

I got into Lizzy McAlpine this summer after reading Amanda Petrusich’s New Yorker profile. Her album Older is great and now she’s releasing an expanded version with five new songs. The “deluxe reissue six months after the original release” game is a racket, of course, but that’s the music business and you can’t really complain about getting new music, especially in these days of streaming when it’s not like anybody’s actually going out and spending $15 on a CD and then feeling like you have to go back out spend another $18 just to hear five outtakes that didn’t make the initial cut.

This new song is sonically similar to the stuff on Older and its lyrics expand upon the themes of sex and guilt and longing raised in “You Forced Me To” specifically. I wonder if it was left off the original release because it was too similar?

Lizzy McAlpine: web, bandcamp, amazon, apple, spotify, wiki.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

Ractopamine is a drug given to pigs and cows in the last months of their lives to "make the meat more lean". Taiwan has been blocking imports of meat from the US over concerns that the drug's residues that stay in the meat are less than healthy. At a recent Codex Alimentarius Commission meeting, the meat producing and exporting countries, and those heavily lobbied and pressured by US diplomats prevailed in a close vote to make the agency adopt a standard for residues of ractopamine in meat. That means that the countries that resist meat from doped animals will have a harder time to justify why they don't want to subject their citizens to yet another experiment for the sake of the economy of large-scale animal-to-meat operations. Scott Tips of the National Health Federation has represented the consumer side at Codex and he reports on the meeting: After taking a vote by secret ballot this late morning, the Chairman of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, Mr. Sanjay Dave, announced the results of the voting on whether or not Ractopamine (a steroid-like vet drug, the residues of which remain in the slaughtered animal to then be consumed by meat-eaters) standards were adopted. Out of 143 ballots cast, the vote was 69 for Ractopamine, 67 against Ractopamine, with 7 abstaining. If only one vote had shifted from the “for” camp to the “against” camp, then the result would have been completely different and the Ractopamine standard would not have been adopted. This voting was forced upon the Commission by the insistence of the United States, Costa Rica, and Brazil that the long stalemate over the adoption of a standard for Ractopamine MRLs (Maximum Residue Levels) could not be resolved through the Codex-preferred process of “consensus” but would, after all, have to be voted upon......

This is a reasoned argument by Joanna (Why I Don't Vaccinate My Children) posted on Erwin Alber's VINE facebook page which was started in 2009, to help parents make an informed choice on behalf of their children. Image credit topnews.ae Joanna responds (below) to a lady who published an article saying that unvaccinated children are the cause of recent increased pertussis (whooping cough) outbreaks in areas where vaccination is actively pursued......

In this article, Beldeu Singh highlights some of the gross inconsistencies in our current approach to what is called the "AIDS epidemic". There has never, to this date, been a proper isolation and purification of the human immunodeficiency virus, and one might be justified in saying that there is no AIDS epidemic, but rather an iatrogenic (doctor caused) epidemic of drug-induced deaths and a lot of unnecessary fear and suffering, all based on very wonky science... but it all seems to make excellent business sense, if you are a drug company shareholder or one of the thousands of researchers who work "to find a cure" for AIDS. by Beldeu Singh INTRODUCTION In the early days neutropenia was one of the key parameters of AIDS. The clinical course of severe neutropenia, as described in the basic pathology textbook, “Pathologic Basis of Disease” by Robbins (5th Ed.), which is used in most medical schools to study pathology, describes what happens to people with severe neutropenia. The symptoms and signs of neutropenias are those of bacterial infections... Robbins also states, in italics, that "the most severe forms of neutropenias are produced by drugs." In severe agranulocytosis with virtual absence of neutrophils, "these infections may become so overwhelming as to cause death within a few days," (Robbins, p 631). This sounds disturbingly similar to a description of AIDS. Dr. Michael Lange, associate chief of infectious diseases at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York and one of the doctors the FDA consulted when evaluating AZT in 1987, says even he sometimes had trouble differentiating between AZT's toxic effects and AIDS itself. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine describes the muscle wasting caused by AZT and compared it to muscle wasting, called "myopathy", presumed to be caused by HIV. Their comments in the abstract are shocking: "We conclude that long-term therapy with Zidovudine can cause a toxic mitochondrial myopathy, which... is indistinguishable from the myopathy associated with primary HIV infection..." So, there is drug-induced immune suppression and drug-induced AIDS, and AZT can cause AIDS. Yet 5000 scientists signed a declaration that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS. The AIDS industry is built on paradoxes and misguided beliefs....