The deadline for filing taxes in the United States is eight weeks away, but new research has shown that small businesses are already being hit by tax season–related cyber-attacks.

Research conducted by Proofpoint indicates that attackers are aggressively jumping into tax season, with the deployment of two main attack strategies.

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Spring may be just around the corner, but for accountants and tax professionals, this is crunch time. Here are five ways you can help smooth out the filing process for your small business clients (and, consequently, yourself) this tax season.

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We are in the midst of a difficult time in history. The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a health crisis, and both the economy and jobs are suffering as a result.

While many of us can work from home, others cannot. But if a silver lining exists, perhaps it’s this: Now is the perfect time to learn a skill or launch a new career. Affiliate marketing gives you that opportunity.

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The customer acquisition process is a long journey. As any salesperson knows, there are many phases to this journey, and while the close might get all the glory, the most important part of the process may be all the way at the beginning: prospecting.

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As an entrepreneur, you've likely had to embrace change lately so you not only continue to succeed, but you also find ways to dominate during unprecedented times. One of the best ways to gain a competitive edge is to stay on top of trends so you can create new opportunities and stay ahead of your competitors.

With that in mind, here are five trends all small business owners should embrace in 2020 and beyond.

1. Employee health and wellness must become a priority.
2. AI will continue to change the business world.
3. Mobile marketing will be used more creatively.
4. Younger consumers will declare World War Z.
5. It is time to go cashless.

Email marketing continues to be one of the most powerful tools for growing your business. (Need proof? Check out stat #1 below.)

And although email marketing has been around for decades, it’s everchanging.

New email marketing tools — like AMP for Email — pop up all of the time. Marketers are taking innovative approaches to email marketing. And email marketing benchmarks change every year.

Want to see how your own email marketing strategy compares and what other businesses are doing to innovate?

Check out this ultimate list of email marketing statistics to find out how you stack up and see email marketing benchmarks to compare your results.

General email marketing statistics and usage
79% of small businesses say email marketing is important to their business strategy. [AWeber]

60% of small businesses say their email marketing strategy is effective or very effective. [AWeber]

64% of B2B marketers use a dedicated email marketing platform. [Content Marketing Institute]

40% of B2B marketers claim that email newsletters are the most important tactic in their content marketing strategy. [Content Marketing Institute]

43% of small businesses have 500 or less email subscribers. [AWeber]

42% of small businesses with over 500 subscribers have effective or very effective email marketing strategies. [AWeber]

46% of emails are opened on mobile devices. [Litmus]

61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email. [Statista]

On average, consumers spend 2.5 hours checking email on a typical weekday. [Adobe]

Customers go through a journey before they commit to a purchase. As a small business owner, it is your duty to engage and interact with them until they do so. And when they do, you continue to nurture them so they become your brand’s advocates.

With content marketing, you can convert random online searchers to website visitors, make them a part of your tribe and drive more sales by consistently providing them with valuable information.

Understand the Challenges Your Customers Are Facing
Before you can market during any period, you need to be able to solve a problem for your customers. During a pandemic, the problem you are solving may change. So you have to be able to communicate that. Part of this is just understanding the current climate. It is probably safe to say that many small business customers are hurting financially. Some may also be in a hurry to receive specific types of items. By understanding your market and staying up-to-date on news in your industry, you should be well versed on the basic challenges that might impact your strategy or talking points. However, Perkin also recommends surveying customers however possible so you can quantify how many of them are struggling in specific areas. Once you know the problems your customers are facing, you can work backward to create your marketing communication strategy.

Learn How to Communicate with New Customers
In fact, you may need to pivot all or part of your business strategy in order to stay afloat during the pandemic. For example, Marran pointed out a UPS client that previously sold pet costumes, but has recently shifted into manufacturing face masks and PPE. This is likely to be a temporary change. But they still need to shift their marketing and communication strategy toward hospitals and B2B customers, rather than focusing on the consumers they normally serve.

Social distancing amid COVID-19 has forced millions of businesses to set up remote workstations that rely solely on Web applications and services (SaaS) to conduct business operations.  According to a new survey by the Cyber Readiness Institute (CRI), the virtual workplace has increased cybersecurity concerns for small business owners, as most of them have not implemented remote working policies to address cybersecurity threats.

The survey, which included 412 small business owners, revealed that while most small business owners are concerned about cyberattacks, many  lack the resources to invest in necessary security measures – and  half of them are worried that remote work will lead to more cyberattacks. It revealed that only 40% of small businesses have implemented a cybersecurity policy. Around 40% of businesses stated that economic uncertainty prevents them from making security investments. While 46% have offered training to help their employees stay secure while working remotely.

Nearly 51% of business owners surveyed said they provided employees with technologies to improve cybersecurity for remote work. And 55% of them said they believe federal and state governments should provide funding for cybersecurity products and services.

How people usually do elevator pitches
Among those who put thought into their elevator pitches, there tends to be two basic formulas:

Formula A: Introduce oneself and the name of the company, then describe the product or service in the context of the customer or industry’s pain point. Then, at the end, make the ask.

Formula B: Identify the pain point before introducing oneself and the name of the company. Then describe the product or service, followed by the ask.

While I am adamant that the only hard and fast rule of communication is that there are no hard and fast rules, I favor Formula B. People are most likely to embrace a solution when it is provided within the context of a problem they care about solving. By starting with a pain point, the entrepreneur is speaking to what an uninformed audience cares about right away thus making sure that the first thing their audience hears has intrinsic value to them. This helps the audience become immediately invested in solving the problem, which helps the entrepreneur to build some momentum.

Ninety-six percent of new entrepreneurs say the pandemic is motivating or giving them the motivation they needed to start their own business. This positive statistic comes from Azlo, a banking platform for small business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.

In mid-March 2020, Azlo witnessed an uptick in new accounts opening. Wanting to understand the reasons behind the boost in business, Azlo conducted a survey. ‘The COVID Economy’ report interviewed 1,000 of Azlos newest customers across the United States.

Traditional tax planning is transactional and, honestly, not nearly as beneficial as one might think. You ask your taxes preparer questions and figure out what to do in the spur of the moment. Creating a long-term plan of action for your taxes is how to create real savings, but it takes months to create an effective plan. Now is the time for business owners and investors to be planning to reap the rewards for the rest of 2020 and into 2021.

Analyze income
Many accountants suggest pushing income to a later year. There are a few different factors to consider when deciding whether to do this. First, is your income so low you lose deductions? Many personal deductions don’t carry over to the next year. Rather than taking deductions now, you may want to accelerate your income to make use of all your deductions. Another factor to consider is the next year’s tax rates. There’s a real chance that income tax rates could increase in 2021, so the best plan would be to accelerate your income into 2020 to avoid paying at a higher rate.

Your brain is just like any other muscle in your body; just as you lift weights and train your body to make it stronger, your brain needs just as much attention as those biceps.

And with the state of things these days, we should spend even more time training our brains to be more focused, relaxed and creative in order to maintain our emotional control and build our resilience to stress. Only then can we truly thrive in uncertain times and become unstoppable.

So how do you train your brain? You can read and practice-problem solving of course, but there are a plethora of new and exciting devices available to help you level up your training and target specific areas of your brain that need it.

The Internal Revenue Service is planning to ramp up audits of smaller businesses and their investors by about 50 percent next year, following years of persistently low examination rates, an agency official said Tuesday.

The result could be a surge in audits of companies ranging from mom-and-pop retail stores and technology startups to investment funds that have historically faced only infrequent checks thanks to the time and effort required at the IRS.

1. Have an adaptable business model
2. Diversify supply chain operations
3. Create an omnichannel customer experience

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.

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.

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.

The Python Challenge is a nifty site that presents you with a series of puzzles that it asks you to solve using python; getting each answer allows you to move on to the next puzzle.

Python is a cool language and it's a good tool for this job¹ However, I'm learning clojure right now, so I thought it would be fun to try and solve a few of them in clojure. Here's my answers for challenges 0 thru 4 (warning: if you want to do these puzzles yourself, reading further now might ruin the fun)

Challenge #0 (the "Warmup")

Asks you to solve 2 to the 38th power:

(clojure.contrib.math/expt 2 38)

i.e. just use the exponent function in clojure contrib.

Challenge #1

This one throws some scrambled text at you and a clue on what the key is (ROT 2):

(defn translate [text]
  (let [lookup (vec (map char (range 97 123)))]
    (letfn [(letter? [c] (and (>= (int c) 97) (<= (int c) 122)))
            (shift-2 [c] (mod (+ 2 (- (int c) 97)) 26))]
      (apply str (map #(if (letter? %) (get lookup (shift-2 %)) %) text)))))

Create a lookup table of the chars, a predicate to test if a char is a letter. & a function to get the index of 2nd to next letter (the index loops, essentially making lookup as a ring buffer), then map across the given text, shifting by 2 if its a letter or just returning the char if its not.

Challenge #2

This one throws a big hunk of random data at you and suggests you pick out the 'rare' characters:

(defn filter-file [path]
  (let [fs (line-seq (clojure.contrib.io/reader path))
        lookup (set (map char (range 97 123)))]
    (apply str (mapcat #(filter lookup %) fs))))

A quick visual scan of the text led me to a strong hunch the "rare"² characters were lowercase alpha, so:

Re-use our lookup table from the last challenge; this time make it a set, then use the set to filter each line of the file denoted by 'path' (I first saved the text to a file to make it easier to work with); use mapcat to flatten the lines out (this has the effect of stripping empty lines altogether); apply str to the resulting sequence to get the answer.

Challenge #3

This one's a big hunk of text too, so a quick refactoring of our last solution results in a more abstract (and higher-order) function that takes a filter function as an additional parameter:

(defn filter-file [filter-fn path]
    (apply str (mapcat filter-fn (line-seq (io/reader path)))))

the filter from challenge #2 thus becomes an argument; partial works nicely here:

(filter-file (partial filter (set (map char (range 97 123)))) "path/to/file")

Now we can make a new filter for challenge #3. This one will need to find character patterns that look like this: ABCxDEF. We'll need grab x. This one just screamed regex at me, so here's a filter that gives us the answer:

#(second (re-find #"[^A-Z][A-Z]{3}([a-z])[A-Z]{3}[^A-Z]" %)))

An anonymous function³ that uses re-find to match: "not-cap followed by 3 CAPS followed by not-cap followed by 3 CAPS followed by not-cap"; the second element of the resulting vector (because we use parens to create a group) produces x; mapcat et al do the rest.

Two big assumptions/limitations here: assumes each target is on its own line, and that the target pattern wasn't on the beginning or end of the line (which was good enough to get the answer).

Challenge #4

This challenge requires one to follow a url call chain, passing a different number as the argument to a 'nothing' parameter each time. The resulting page text provides the next number to follow (and/or some noise to keep you on your toes) until eventually we get the answer.

This one gets kinda ugly.

This is the kind of problem scripting languages are made for (e.g. perl, python & ruby coders would all make short work of this problem). Still, it's possible to write procedural code in clojure, and it's still reasonably straightforward.

One decision I had to make is how to GET the url's - my weapon of choice for this sort of thing is clj-http:

(require '[clj-http.client :as client])
(require '[clojure.contrib.string :as string]

(defn follow-chain [base-url number]
  (let [result (:body (client/get (str base-url number)))
        idx (.indexOf result "and the next")]
    (cond
      (re-find #"^Yes" result) (do
                                 (println result)
                                 (follow-chain base-url (/ (Integer/parseInt number) 2)))
      (= -1 idx)               result
      :else                    (let [result-vec (string/split (subs result idx) #" ")
                                     next-number (last result-vec)]
                                 (println result)
                                 (recur base-url next-number)))))

Take the url as a base & the first number to follow; use client-http/get to grab the page; extract the body of the page; get the index of the phrase "and the next" using the java "indexOf" method - we'll use the index later to parse out the end of the text and get the next number...

...unless of course, we get text that tells us something else (like a message saying "Yes" and then instructing us to divide the last number by two and continue on as before) so...

...we set up a switch using the cond macro: If the result starts with "Yes" make a recursive call dividing the last number by two; if indexOf otherwise came up empty, that's our answer, so return it; else pick the next number out of the result by splitting the end of the string into a vector (using clojure.contrib.string/split) and recur (tail recursively call the function again).

The println's could be removed, although they were essential when figuring out what the code needed to do.

Conclusion

This was a fun exercise; clojure's holding up pretty well so far, though clojure would not be my weapon of choice for that last one; if I choose to do the next five, I'll post them in a future article.

Footnotes

Played an interesting practice game last Friday (1/12) evening with one of my fellow DRW chess teammates, Oliver Gugenheim. After my stupendous blunder last week, I'm interested in playing some practice games - both to drill my pre-move thinking process, and because there's nothing like a bad loss to motivate one to start playing again...

Oliver and I wound up exploring a sharp line of the French defense - an opening I have historically not enjoyed playing as white, and so had started learning more about the past week. Oliver (without us discussing it) obliged me by playing a line I had looked at that day so we went a good way into the "book" before (very quickly thereafter) reaching crazy territory.

The most interesting bit tho, is actually black's move: 9. ... f6. The conclusion I got from this analysis, is that 9. ... f5 is better (see below for more) and so this was a useful game for this analysis alone...

All in all, it was interesting to play, and gave me the opportunity to practice the things above... and it gave Oliver a chance to fend off a ridiculous attack (which is always satisfying if a bit scary at times). Here's the game and my notes (Time Control is G30 with 5 second increment):

And so, QED on this idea. My conclusion: better off building an attack here as White's got the ball. Also, for a bishop sac to have any chance, white really needs another piece. Perhaps once the f-pawn were advanced and White has castled, the possibilty of lifting a rook with tempo might be enough to give the sac some teeth. It'd be interesting to see if I can find any Winawer games with a bishop sac on h7 (if I do, perhaps I'll write a follow-up; regardless, looking at how White attacks here should be fun.)

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