Business and Finance Tips

Starting a small catering business can be a lot of fun. If you do it right, it can also make you a great deal of money. However, there are a lot of things that need to be done initially before you get carried away. If you don’t follow the right procedures, your whole business could wind up in jeopardy.

The first thing that every small catering business needs is a name and a business license. You will also want to determine how you will form your business entity such as an LLC, sole proprietorship, or corporation.

After that, you’ll want to get a tax ID number from the IRS. Be sure to look into which agencies handle the licensing in your state. You may be able to get some tips from other small business owners, since the process is similar for a lot of business owners.

One area where your small catering business may differ from other businesses is that you will need food service and liquor licenses.
The government takes food service very seriously and monitors the food quality, storage and preparation facility of every business where food service is involved.

Although a liquor license isn’t a requirement for a small catering business, it is a requirement for anyone who serves alcohol. Since most catered events involve alcohol, it would be in your best interest to get a liquor license. In fact, it could mean the difference between having a small catering business that flops and having one that thrives and grows into a large successful enterprise.

It is easy to become excited about the prospect of owning your own business, but remember that even a small catering business involves a lot of work. You may feel that you can juggle many tasks, but sometimes there just aren’t enough hands or enough hours in the day.

If you think about it, it really makes good business sense to hire some extra help, or at least line up some on-call helpers that you can bring in when you’re in a pinch. After all, larger events are going to require a lot more people to make things work efficiently.

Starting any business can be a strain on your wallet, so it will pay to remember this before you even begin. You may need to take out a loan. You can expect it to cost a few thousand dollars to get the right equipment and licensing, and insurance you will need.

Also, consider the costs of advertising and marketing, such as a graphic designer, newspaper or TV ads, or a company website and web master.

All of these things and more need to be considered before you ever try to get a small catering business off the ground.

Small business can bloom quickly after employing certain simple SEO techniques. You need to follow certain easy optimization strategies to raise your website to the top positions in search results. Small business owners might not have ample money to hire an SEO company. So I am here to help them by providing certain easy and important SEO tips, which would finally raise their website to the top.

Right from the beginning of your website, you should think about the optimization strategies. At the time of designing your website make sure that it is SEO friendly. Try to avoid flashes in your website. While selecting the domain name, ensure its usability. It should be convenient to use and easy to remember.

While writing content for your home based business, you should take ample care in writing attractive contents. Always go for fresh and relevant contents to grab potential visitors to your site. Try to include the keyword phrase in the content page. Make sure that you write only keywords at a fixed percentage to avoid listing your name in the spammers list.

After bringing out your website there is lot more to perform for the promotion of your website. Next important thing for optimizing your website are links. Build back links for your website to increase the visibility as well as the page rank of your website. Page rank is very important for a website. It is given by Google based on two factors namely the links pointing towards your website and the maturity of your website. So try to increase the back links by directory submissions. There are lots of ways for increasing the inbound links to your website like article marketing, blogging, bookmarking etc.

After optimizing your website with these SEO techniques, you will have to wait patiently. SEO techniques, will take time to index your website. Try to wait patiently and obtain fine results from the SEO techniques that you have employed in your website.

You will find a drastic change in your website indexing after employing the above mentioned SEO strategies. Google is a famous search engine indexing a website based on certain algorithms. This set of rule keeps on changing. So one could not predict the way how Google and other search engines will index websites. Try to employ different optimization strategies and wait patiently to get your website to the top searches. You will be able to facilitate your small home based business with these simple SEO strategies.

Collateral – A borrower’s asset that is given up to the lender if the borrower is unable to pay back the principal and interest on the loan; making the lender the new owner of the collateral.

Credit Score – A numerical expression based on the analysis of a person’s credit files, to represent the perceived likelihood that the person will pay debts in a timely manner.

These are two terms that one must be familiar with when contemplating a business loan, simply because banks consider both of these when determining whether or not to approve the loan. Many small business owners may not have one or the other (sufficient collateral or a high credit score), leading them to search for unsecured business loans, which only require borrowers to posses one of these requirements.

An unsecured business loan is a business loan that is not backed by collateral. In most cases, this leaves unsecured business loan lenders to rely solely on the borrower’s credit rating. Collateral serves as a means for the lender to get back the money that they have lent, should the borrower default on the loan. It is a back-up plan for lenders to make sure that they get their money back no matter what. If a borrower does not have collateral, a lender may require the borrower to have a near perfect credit score. This is because the lender can only rely on the borrower’s past borrowing and repayment habits to determine if he/she is likely to repay the loan. Consequently, it is virtually impossible for a potential borrower with a low credit score to receive an unsecured business loan, because their credit history suggests that they will not repay their loan on time, if at all.

However, there are lending companies that offer a different kind of unsecured business loan; one that is not based on the borrower’s credit rating. These lending companies provide a type of unsecured business loan called a merchant cash advance. A merchant cash advance is a lump sum of cash given to a merchant in exchange for a small percentage of the business’ future credit card receivables.

Since a merchant cash advance is based on a business’ future credit card receivables, rather than the borrower’s credit score and/or collateral, it can only be utilized by retail business owners who process credit card transactions.

Additional requirements may vary from lender to lender. Generally, a merchant must not have any unresolved bankruptcies or tax liens to be eligible to receive a merchant cash advance. Also, lenders may require merchants to process anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 in monthly credit card sales for four months to one year before approving a cash advance. Merchants are also usually required to have at least one year remaining on their business’ lease.

A merchant cash advance can be a great alternative to a bank loan. Most lenders are able to provide loans from $5,000 to $500,000, depending on how much money a particular business location receives in credit card sales each month.

If you are one of the many loan-seekers in search of an unsecured business loan, choosing a merchant cash advance may be a very lucrative decision, especially if your credit score is not great. If you meet the minimum requirements (owning a business that processes credit card sales), consider researching the existing merchant cash advance lenders, and find out if a merchant cash advance is the unsecured business loan for you.

Fast growth can be seductive; but challenging to manage. All small business owners want growth; and fast growth sounds like it should be a good thing – something to strive for. However, it is important to control your small business growth or risk your business’ future.

One of the most exciting times for small business owners is when they see their sales grow; even more exciting when those sales grow quickly. Sales are often used as a measure of business success. In reality, all business owners should use profit as a key measure of the business’ success because sales growth can require a high price.

Rapid sales growth can be achieved either organically (that is, through activities internal to the business) or inorganically (that is, through activities external to the business). Organic growth typically occurs through the launch of new products or services; by expanding the geographic market; and by starting up a new business – although growth in this case can start slow and then speed up. Inorganic growth typically occurs through mergers or acquisitions.

While inorganic growth is often very fast growth – if you buy a company that’s bigger than you, you’ve more than doubled your size – it is often expensive growth in terms of money, time and resources. Buying growth by buying a company means that you will often purchase the bad along with the good. For example, the bad can be the total cost of the acquisition; purchasing old equipment and/or inventory along with new; acquiring unhappy or high priced labor; a bad reputation; and more. The good can be acquiring the sales book, which is the company’s list of customers; additional services; a larger territory; more staff, taking out a competitor; and more.

The additional considerations for buying or not to buying growth should be how challenging is it to merge the two companies and the two cultures; what synergies can be gained – if any; if the acquisition results in an over-staffing who will be laid off, how will the lay-offs be decided, who will do the lay-offs, what will be the outcome and the environment after lay-offs. Do you have enough in-house human resources support for this type of growth? If not, can you outsource to a competent individual or firm?

The difference between acquiring a company and merging with another company is usually related to either a win-lose proposition (one company is the winner, the other the loser) or a win-win proposition (both companies are motivated to merge successfully for a number of business reasons). Mergers can consume a different resource focus: ensuring that both companies, their staff, their customers and all stakeholders feel that the end result was a win-win.

In either of these inorganic growth strategies, create a checklist approach to ensure that you carefully review all the pros and the cons and weigh the rationale carefully before you move forward on the merger or acquisition path.

Organic growth is typically a slower and more manageable type of growth. However, if your business is growing through a period of fast growth, you need to manage that growth before it overtakes you.

7 Tips for Managing your Growth:

have a comprehensive human resources plan to handle fast growth and peaks and valleys in business activity; have job descriptions and a structure for your company; have developed standard operating procedures for your business; have a strong customer service program – so that customers are not negatively impacted by your fast growth; have a strong quality and continuous improvement program; ensure that you have the operating structure (whether that means increased inventories, longer hours of work – moving from a one shift operation to a two shift operation; adding more productive equipment); and have the cash flow to sustain growth (you will need to pay for more supplies and materials, for labor, for transportation, etc.) – unplanned and/or fast growth can have a big, negative impact on liquidity.

Whether you grow organically or inorganically, you need to plan for sustainable growth. Your plan needs to include how you will manage fast growth.

There are some things that small business owners can do to market themselves very effectively, while working with a very conservative budget. These days, a big budget is not required for big results.

Here are three powerful tips for small business marketing success:

Play To Your Size

Remember who you are and who your competition is. Just because the bigger, badder company down the street is blowing all their money on a television campaign, doesn’t mean that you have to produce a 30-second spot of your own.

What you do is important. But just as important is HOW you do it. You can use your size to your advantage when it comes to how you treat your customers. Being smaller means being more agile and better able to respond to shifts in market trends.

Brainstorm a list of ways you can use your current size to your advantage over your bigger competitors.

You Get What You Pay For

Online advertising is becoming a required element of any successful business’s online marketing campaign. Pay-per-click advertising on the search engines is one of the most cost-effective means of leveraging this new advertising medium.

Because your ads are only displayed when people search for keywords that you specify, you are automatically getting a more highly targeted prospect using PPC advertising. And since you only pay for those people who actually click your ad, you don’t have any extraneous marketing expenses.

By simply testing and tweaking your ads, the keywords they are displayed on and the marketing copy on the page you send visitors to, you quickly gain control over your advertising campaign.

An additional benefit is that since you are essentially paying for this type of advertising as you go, you can set daily or monthly spending limits or literally stop a campaign in its tracks if it is not performing well enough.

Try Something Different

In addition to looking at your competitors to see what they are doing to attract new clients, try also looking outside of your own industry for insight and inspiration on new ways to reach the hearts and minds of your target audience.

Quite often, business owners get stuck looking at what their specific industry is doing and simply jump on board to try and follow suit. This not only has the undesirable effect of looking like you are playing “follow the leader”, it very seldom leads to innovation.

Every time you are personally in a buying space or are aware that you are being marketed to, pay attention to how you are being communicated to. What is the message that is being delivered? Is the delivery somehow unique or unusual? What stands out about the interaction?

Using what you learn from other industries you will be able to lead your own marketplace with fresh, innovative marketing ideas that will have your competition scrambling to catch up with you.