Practical guides for the self-employed and small business owners: choosing a business structure, getting an EIN, business banking, bookkeeping, business credit, and writing a business plan.
What Importing and Exporting Actually Mean Exporting means selling goods or services to customers outside your home country. Importing means buying goods, materials, or components from suppliers outside your home country, either to resell or to use in what you make. A small business can do one, both, or neither — plenty of successful small … Read more
What Owner’s Equity Means Owner’s equity is the owner’s claim on everything the business owns, once everything the business owes has been subtracted. It comes from one of the most basic ideas in accounting, sometimes called the accounting equation: Assets minus Liabilities equals Owner’s Equity. It helps to say what equity is not. It isn’t … Read more
What “Accounts Payable” Actually Means If you’ve read about invoicing and getting paid, you already know the receivable side of small business bookkeeping: money customers owe you. Accounts payable is the mirror image — money your business owes to someone else for goods or services you’ve already received but haven’t paid for yet. In accounting … Read more
Startup costs, a contingency budget, and the difference between financing with debt and financing with equity, plus a simple projection.
Measurable goals and a realistic startup timeline are two different sections of a business plan — here’s how to build both.
A short, plain sentence that says what your business does, who it’s for, and why that matters — and how to actually draft one.
A simple four-box way to weigh what your business does well, where it’s exposed, and what’s changing around it — with a worked example.
How to handle the first contact by channel: greeting a customer face to face, answering an inbound call well, and carrying the same standard into email, chat and messaging.
How to build and deliver employee training that works: a specific outcome, an agenda with real breaks, interactive delivery in person or online, and one-on-one coaching that sticks.
Beyond bake sales: how to apply for grant funding, find donors who’ve never been asked, and keep the donors you already have giving.