So your small business is thriving. You’ve doubled your number of employees in one year, you’ve opened up three new brick-and-mortar locations and your online store is doing better than ever. You’re ready to take things to the next level, and now you find yourself asking that all-important question – to incorporate or not to incorporate?

Incorporating a business can be a good idea for some entrepreneurs, but it certainly has its drawbacks as well. Consequently, it’s important that…

When I interviewed 2012 Young Entrepreneur of the Year Sam Hazledene, I asked him about his strategy for growth.  This is the guy who built the largest medical recruitment company in Australasia from scratch in a few short years.  He told me that he’d grown organically, starting out with just himself and his wife travelling the country trying to convince hospitals to use…

One day a gentleman visited his good friend who owned a busy advertising company. It had been months since he visited his friend's office.…

Here is another extract from Liber8 Your Business, the soon to be released must have hand book for every small business owner.  In this chapter I talk about the importance of being a visionary, starting with a concept called ‘The soccer game of life”…

“Earlier in the book I talked about successful people having an ability to see their success ahead of them – and…

“What is the best money I can spend in marketing to grow my business?”  Without a doubt, this is the question I’m most frequently asked by small business owners.  It may seem like a question that is promptly followed by an “it depends” type of answer, however, it’s actually quite easy to pinpoint one tool that is relatively inexpensive, delivers a high ROI and, sadly, is not commonly found in a small businesses’ toolbox.  It’s a marketing strategy.…

For any location-based business, such as a restaurant or retail store, the key is foot traffic. You need to get people in the door to make sales.

But how do you reach customers? Who are they? And where are they located?

Technology has made the process of researching local restaurants or retail stores easier than ever for your potential customers. Building a customer profile is no longer something only major national brands can afford. Any business – whether a regional chain, a…

There is this misconception floating around that marketing a business online is hard- hard to figure out, hard to do, and hard to maintain. If the business involves off-line services or is a brick and mortar entity, then these misconceptions may be magnified by the power of ten. It's a fact that many small businesses seem to be avoiding Internet marketing, and…

So the book is written… yes, it’s finished and off to proof reading next week.  Yipee!  One year and two months in the making.  That’s approximately three hundred 5 am starts, 70,000 words and a heck of a lot of late nights.  It ain’t no breeze this book writing thing.   But it’s done, my editor is happy (so far) and it moves onto the next stage.

Now we are…

Recently I interviewed Shane Bradley – former owner of GrabOne and founder of new online retailer pet.co.nz.  Shane’s top tip for small business owners was this: “if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough”.  He told me about his first business, which went under due to bad debts.  It was humiliating and humbling he said.  To go from being a big shot to a big nobody…

For the past few years BlackBerry has become a punchline in the wireless world. As new and advanced smartphones started to hit the market, BlackBerry continued with business as usual, creating more phones with the same old system. Two years ago, about two years too late, it finally committed to…

As a business owner, you recognize that your company isn’t growing at the rate it could, and you know the internet is the key.



Maybe you’ve already seen inklings of the potential through running a PPC campaign or starting a company e-newsletter. Or perhaps you’ve just started dabbling in internet marketing by assigning certain tasks to existing employees – someone in sales writing a blog now and then, or a tech-savvy receptionist running your social…

A smart phone is a small business owner’s best friend. It’s your lifeline to the business world, your office away from home and if used correctly, it can help you with every aspect of your job – from balancing your budget to managing your website’s back end. To get the most utility from your smart phone, though, you need to use the right apps. And while some developers offer costly, comprehensive app “suites” specifically designed for small business, such as…

Prospects and Customers are more accessible than ever, when we get them to engage with a brand. Engagement in a digital environment leaves a data trail, as searchers interact with our content. As Marketing professionals, we have access to more data about customers than ever before as we build out a content strategy to attract and retain clients.



For many, marketing activities are still a rear-view mirror activity. Research can take weeks or months, and…

So your business has been growing, and now you’re on your way to attending your very first conference. Well, let me be the first to congratulate you. Attending conferences is a great way for small business owners to take their companies to the next level. You can get tips from industry pros, expand your network of contacts and even add a name or two to your client list.

However, conferences don’t last forever. You’ve only got a day or two to make “the magic happen,” so to speak, and…

Starting a small business is hard, but growing a small business is even harder. One challenge all fledgling companies face is staying organized. Fall into disorder early, and it can undermine your best efforts for growth. Stay organized, though, and you'll see many paths open up for you and your business.

The web has given us many tools that can help us stay organized in any environment. Here are five that can help your business grow without the entanglements of disorder along the…

So your startup has expanded out of your basement and into an office downtown. Your client list is growing, as is your list of obligations, and now you find yourself in need of more employees. So you publish a few job postings and start scheduling interviews. This should be easy enough, right?

Think again. As many small business owners will testify, the hiring process isn’t exactly as clean and simple as it used to be. Everyone is looking for a job these days, and positions at…

Time is your most valuable resource as a freelancer, and it always seems that there’s never enough. With several online tools to choose from, freelancers and other soloprenueurs are increasingly turning to time-tracking apps to record their billable hours. But there are some other, less obvious ways to use time-tracking data to improve the way you run your business. Here are five of the best.



#1: Avoid Overbooking Yourself

Freelancers often use their…

Every smart business owner knows that search engine-optimized blogging is the foundation of good marketing. Content creation increases both your website’s traffic and its worthiness in the eyes of the almighty Google. What most business owners don’t realize, however, is that keeping your blogging platform secure is just as important as blogging itself.

At the moment, roughly half of the top 100 blogs on the Technorati index use…

What are the five most important types of contracts for a small business? The (short) answer to this and every other legal question is: it depends.

The top five contracts for someone in construction might differ than a CPA or a dentist. That said, let's look at some of the more basic agreements that small businesses typically run into.

1. Non-Disclosure Agreement. Also known as “NDA”, this agreement simply binds someone to keep a secret. NDAs can be very useful if…

Web developers and web designers – ah! Is it a classic clash of the computer titans or only a case of mistaken identity? It seems some new business owners have a little trouble separating developers from designers. The only thing connecting the two is that both work on a computer (and who doesn’t…