Plastic Revolution: Square Makes it A Reality

Posts Tagged ‘small business’

Plastic Revolution: Square Makes it A Reality

Feb
2011

Accepting credit card payments has traditionally been a difficult and expensive proposition for small business owners, requiring merchant accounts, lengthy contracts, crazy monthly fees, and specialized hardware. While it is certainly possible to circumvent the merchant account maze by using services like PayPal, lacking the ability to process plastic may be losing you potential customers, not to mention slowing down your receivables. Fortunately, a new service called “Square” has made it simple and cost effective to accept credit cards using your iPad, iPhone or Android smartphone.

Signing up for Square is free (and super easy), as is the card scanning widget they provide. And I won’t lie — it’s kind of cute. As soon as you insert the card reader into the audio-input jack of your device and download the free app, you are ready to start processing credit card payments. You will only incur fees when a card is charged. Square charges a flat 15¢ per transaction plus 2.75% for swiped (in-person) transactions or 3.5% for keyed-in (over the phone/fax/email transactions). Traditional card services typically charge about 30¢ plus 2.9%, so these rates are highly competitive, especially if the majority of your sales are processed in-person.

Wining it up in Virginia

Oct
2010

Pearmund in Autumn 2010

Say No To Bad Clients and Bad Shoes

Sep
2010

They seem awesome when you’re buying them (they’ll stretch out, right?), but once you start walking around in shoes that don’t fit, you begin to feel the misery of your investment in the soles of your feet. In running your business, it’s a similar scenario: you take on business you know isn’t a good fit, then lament the fact as you’re toiling over the project for that client. The better tack is to address things in the very beginning, during what I call the “courtship” stage. You need to formulate questions for yourself in order to really smoke out the “vampire” client when they appear on your radar:

Do you know what they need and can you provide it?
Are they sincere or just “tire-kicking” to get your ideas, then find a cheaper vendor?
Have they shared their budget? (If they don’t, this is always an immediate, glowing red flag for me.)
When do they want deliverables? Is it a reasonable timeline or pie-in-the-sky?
Have you had an exploratory talk to get things out in the open, leaving little room for surprises?
How’s the vibe in your conversation with this potential client and would you like working with them?

The Ugliness That Is Local-Washing

Aug
2010

It seems innocent enough: go head to head against your competitors by mimicking their campaigns, saying similar things and trying to evoke the same kind of sentiment from the unsuspecting consumer. But no, it’s not so innocent, and it’s happening right now, in small towns and cities across the country, even my own Boulder, Colorado. This sneaky assault is happening right under the very nose of each and every purchaser, shopper and diner nationwide. It’s called “local-washing”, and it basically means corporations dress and talk the language of “we’re doing it local”, but in essence, it’s just a ploy. You can read more about it here in an article by Stacy Mitchell in Indy.com, where she discusses how national corporations are co-opting the idea of “local” in an attempt to have consumers believe they are local in everything they do. Right. Sure they are. Tell that to the small businesses across America who have shuttered their windows when the Big Box chain rolled into town or the tiny downtown business districts that report record vacancies because their tenants couldn’t hang on during the worst recession of our generation.

The truth is when you spend your money in these establishments, some of that purchase will support workers there, but the profits go into the corporate coffers somewhere else, usually far away from your own community.

Efficient Meetings: 5 Easy Ways To Make Them A Reality

Apr
2010

Let’s hear it for meetings!!! Woohoo! Wait, why aren’t you all excited and bubbling with enthusiasm? Come on, it’ll be fun: We’ll catch up, talk about the kids, what happened on Idol last night, what a ditz that Genevieve in accounting is…

The scenario above is the edict for some when it comes to meetings: To them, it’s really a social forum that helps them feel a part of things, which is good, until it derails the initial intent of your meeting and you’re starting 15 minutes later than you wanted. Some even belief that this “face time” some how translates into actual results, as if the term “meeting” equals productivity. Sometimes it does, but often times it doesn’t. It’s not that meetings are unnecessary, because certainly they have a place in the grand scheme of GTD. Just bear in mind the point of the meeting: unless your meeting accomplishes something right then and there, your meeting has actually failed. Don’t believe me? Now be honest: