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Posts Tagged ‘Business Owner’

Business Finance Resource Availability Issues for Telecommunications Companies

September 1st, 2009

Small telecommunications businesses face many hurdles in trying to compete in the marketplace with the big telecom giants. While your small telecom company can offer your local customers better and more personalized services than the big telecom companies can, there are many barriers to getting your message out there and growing your market share. Just as the old adage about getting a job without experience goes, it is hard to grow your business when you need all of your working capital just to run your business day to day. While the telecom giants can call up their banker and get a loan, it isn’t as easy for your small business to do.

For hundreds of years companies have been utilizing the value of their assets as collateral for borrowing money. Your distant relative who owned a small grocery store may have used his inventory and property value as collateral for borrowing money to add onto his building or replace his antiquated refrigerators. As a small telecommunications business you may want to take a similar action in order to grow your business and service offerings.

As you may have experienced, most of the major financing companies out there just plain do not understand how telecommunications businesses work. Unless you are AT&T, or another large telecommunications company, with a monthly billings total of over 5 million dollars, most typical business finance resources are not that interested in talking to you. It isn’t that they are not interested in your business and its success; they just simply do not understand how telecom billings work.

As a small business owner, a potential lender may ask you to make a personal guarantee or sign a recourse agreement in order to obtain funding. This can be a scary proposition and place you personally at a risk level you may not be comfortable with. If you come to this point with a lender then it is time to move on and look for a better alternative.

One alternative available in telecom financing is factoring. Factoring is the process whereby your company can borrow money against its receivables. Traditional factor rates however can be high, because lenders balk at the way telecommunication company’s bill, and the relatively small amounts of each individual billing. If you are able to locate a lender who will give you a discount, because they understand the uniqueness of telecom financing, factoring can be a good option to explore.

Another alternative you might consider for your telecom funding needs is an asset based solution. By securing your funding with your contracts, equipment or other assets, you can borrow against them and use the additional capital to expand your business. Asset based solutions can be a bit easier to find, and cheaper than trying to do a receivables factor.

A third alternative to explore is the idea of an investment capital cash infusion. If you are open to using investment capital this can be a wonderful way to grow your business.

While telecom funding can be hard to find, there are options open to small telecom businesses. By considering all of your options and selecting the one which fits your business the best, you can be well on your way to growing and expanding your business.

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How Small Businesses Can Reduce Operating Costs by Utilizing Windows Virtual Private Server (vps) Hosting Solutions

July 31st, 2009

 

Small business owners and new startups find it hard to raise the capital the needed for the hardware, networking, licenses and staff required to operate in today’s connected business world were solutions like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and CRM’s are now a part of almost every business.

As small business owners, you work pretty hard on windows desktop applications and software, sometimes for testing, other times for running applications to keep your business up, developing or running these applications in the past required windows servers within your business or hosted dedicated servers. The costs of server hardware, IT management and network infrastructure within your business can be a very costly. Most start ups or small business cannot handle such one-time or large monthly expenses to provide them with the IT infrastructure or management they require.

But luckily there is cheaper and sometimes better option to use Windows VPS Hosting. Windows VPS hosting providers such as ResellerChoice you can retain all the power you would get from windows dedicated servers but only pay a fraction of the cost. For example, if you have multiple windows servers in your office they tend to take up a lot of room, power and management. You can make a simple change or start to convert your current dedicated servers into Windows VPS servers instantly. This will start and reduce operational costs and hardware costs.

Windows VPS hosting providers can offer you reduced cost, simply by creating virtual multiple windows servers on a single physical server. With this advanced technology, you can run your multiple windows servers from a remote desk top session, running your applications and software as needed with full administrator and consol access. You can create private networks or complete virtual clusters of servers or load balanced geographically diverse servers all at a fraction of the costs.

Windows VPS hosting providers using Microsoft such as ResellerChoice offer this economical solution to help small businesses run the multiple servers that are often required at a fraction of the cost of dedicated hardware. Microsoft has released new technology, called Hyper-V, which comes as a key feature with Windows Server 2008 and continues to be the talked about in the IT world as possible contender in a world once powered by VMware and Linux.

With Windows VPS hosting solutions you still get all the great benefits of having multiple windows servers. You get root and administrator access, terminal server/RDP and select from any Windows OS you prefer. It’s really everything you need and would expect from your old servers but with windows VPS hosting you won’t need the dedicated hardware on site and just have one small monthly fee.

The system that Windows has created uses isolation of partitions to separate sections of the server. While there will be one root partition running on a Windows Server 2008, the technology of Hyper-V will allow the server to create ‘child partitions’. These child partitions act as individual servers but running off one server. The child partitions don’t have access to the hardware directly. Rather, these partitions simply get a view of the hardware, and it’s more in a virtual environment.

Now windows hosting providers and take a single server and split the costs among two or more customers allowing each customer to now pay less by sharing the costs of the physical host server.

So, it can work, but you’re a business, and what you want to know about is cost. For small businesses, plans for windows vps servers running this new technology are actually rather low in cost. You can compare prices and many windows vps hosting starting as low as $60. That’s great savings compared to buying multiple servers, which can cost several hundred, to several thousand dollars a month. If your bottom line is important to you, you’ll want to talk with a hosting service that can tell you how you can save money and still keep your server system, as you need it.

In the small business world, saving money is just as important as making money. When you can reduce your need for dedicated servers hosted in in-house into windows virtual servers it can save you money by increasing your bottom line. Switching to a Windows VPS hosting solution is very simple.

When you want to save money and improve performance, consider this solution that has changed how small businesses do business.

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The World Wide Web of Affiliate Marketing

May 1st, 2009

I was just reading in an E-book about the amazing concept of Affiliate Marketing and decided I needed to get this info out to as many people as possible. 

We will take a short look at these three topics, the Who – What – Why, of Affiliate Marketing in reverse order. 

The Why of Affiliate Marketing: 

Whether it is extra income or full time income, one of the main reasons why, of course, is to make money. 

A second reason would be to try out different niche markets and some marketing ideas you may have for those niche markets. For more detail visit on www.greatpromotionsite.com, the What of Affiliate Marketing: 

For some of you affiliate marketing is a mystery or at least a not completely understood concept. Let me explain it to you with a story. 

Mr. Jones is a business owner and has a great product or service that you have ideally used yourself, or at least know someone who has, and you and/or your friend are highly satisfied with Mr. Jones product or service. Mr. Jones wants to expand his business sales, so he puts together a plan that allows people to refer customers to his business. When you refer someone to Mr. Jones, he has, as a part of his plan or go on www.affiliate-sale-booster.com, a way to know who referred this new or returning customer. When the referral customer buys from Mr. Jones he sends you a check as a referral fee. All you did was refer the person. Mr. Jones took care of stocking and delivering the product and/or providing the service. He also handles all service requests, repairs, complaints and refunds. 

Now is that a cool, no brainer, way to make some extra cash or what! 

We actually do this all the time in our everyday life. 

We just don’t get paid for it. 

Like when we tell someone to go see this great movie or to try this wonderful restaurant, etc. 

The Who of Affiliate Marketing: 

Those who market their products or services on the World Wide Web use this concept of Affiliate Marketing extensively. 

If you have products or services to sell you can expand your sales with this concept. Or find a niche market you have a great interest in and start an on-line business using the affiliate marketing concept. 

If you want to, you can sign up as an affiliate for any number of products and services, generating for yourself some potentially serious part time income.

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