Todays business environment is moving at a faster pace than ever before. It’s imperative that organizations of all sizes be nimble enough to respond and pivot according to business and market demands at a moment’s notice, or risk falling behind their competition.

To this point, many small businesses often struggle when it comes to effectively scaling their operations. This process entails making hefty IT investments, and while necessary for continued growth, many entrepreneurs just can not afford to do so.

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Filing for bankruptcy protection to save a small business often costs at least $100,000 to $300,000—and sometimes twice as much in cases where creditors are contentious, lawyers say.

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Successful entrepreneurs naturally have plenty of money to spend and, not surprisingly, they often spend it indulging their personal interests.

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More mature companies are expected to benefit, while smaller companies--in particular startups, which typically seek far less money--may not see as many gains, because they usually do not need to raise $20 million.

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Most reporters write on a different topic every day. Unless they are a beat reporter covering your industry, the reporter does not know more than you. If you have been in the business five or 10 years, be confident in your knowledge of industry trends and current events.

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McMahon explained his companys performance review process -- and how he thinks it should be done -- in five steps.

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Interesting visuals can make a huge impact on your website and online marketing efforts, whether they be photos, videos or other forms of media. Social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and even Meerkat have made these visual forms of media even more prominent.

Members of our small business community have some tips for using each of these visual platforms and for including visual elements on business websites. Read on for the full list of tips in this week’s Small Business Trends community roundup.

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The skills gap is widening and workers are feeling it. In fact, Lynda.com recently conducted an online survey of nearly 10,000 respondents, and found that about half of them lacked confidence in their job skills.

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Owning your own business is often touted as the ultimate coup in the working world. You set your own hours, pursue projects you are interested in, and maybe work in your pajamas. Obvious challenges aside, it sounds like a pretty nice gig. Such jobs are largely enjoyed by men, who make up an estimated 71 percent of business owners in the U.S. But that might slowly be changing.

A report from the Institute of Womens Policy Research shows that women are steadily increasing their presence in the world of small-business ownership. About 29 percent of Americas business owners are women, that is up from 26 percent in 1997. The number of women-owned firms has grown 68 percent since 2007, compared with 47 percent for all businesses.

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Why you should you blog?

Through posting simple things such as helpful tips, special discounts or the latest industry news you can effectively maintain your customer relationships and give people a reason to visit to your website.

More recently blogging and content marketing has been widely used to enhance SEO strategy. Writing articles around the keywords that you are targeting will help to improve rankings in search engines. Furthermore, if you write unique and valuable articles, other websites will link to your content and as a result; this will increase your website's back-links.

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A report commissioned by eBay finds that more than 190,000—or 90 percent—of its small and medium-sized businesses used its platform to export in 2014. (Tweet This) To compare, in 2009, fewer than 30,000 were exporting. The findings come from eBay's Public Policy Lab in its 2015 U.S. Small Business Growth Report.

Despite that growth, less than 5 percent of U.S. small businesses overall are exporting, according to estimates from the International Trade Administration.

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Established businesses have one obvious advantage over their younger counterparts: Deep pockets.

Fortunately, what todays small business lacks in budget can be made up for with strategy and a few carefully chosen tools. Here are six smart marketing ideas gleaned from my experience running a company that teaches small firms how to compete with big ones.

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All major wireless operators available in the U.S. offer some international roam, but the volume varies by network. To get an understanding of how your network will fare abroad, or to understand which carrier to choose if you are a regular traveler, you should first understand the two basic major technologies that wireless operators use.

How to Travel With Your Cell Phone Without Breaking the Bank

Women playing a bigger role in small businesses is no longer big news, of course. In 2014, there were roughly 9 million women-owned businesses in the U.S., employing nearly 8 million workers and recording nearly $1.4 trillion in sales that year, according to data from the National Association of Women Business Owners.

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Is big data just for big business? For several years, larger corporations have been gathering informative insights from this next-generation approach to data analysis. But now small businesses are finding ways to leverage this comprehensive data analysis for marketing insights.

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Recounting the few short years I knew Jimmy made me think deeply about what it means to have a mentor and how that relationship can profoundly change you. Many people wonder how you find a good mentor and how you continue to nurture that relationship. Finding a mentor is difficult, especially for young people, because you are requesting valuable time of someone. There is no clear answer: Nobody can dial up 1-800-Mentor-Me. These friendships tend to grow organically as mine did with Jimmy. But here are a few ways you can turn a chance meeting into a deeper relationship:

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Trucking companies and building contractors dominate the fastest-growing industries for small businesses, according to new data from Sageworks, a financial information company.

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Shark Tank star Robert Herjavec stunned viewers in May by making a handshake deal to invest $5 million in Zero Pollution Motors, maker of a $10,000 plastic minicar that runs on compressed air. The deal would have doubled the previous record for the largest Shark Tank investment ever, but ultimately fell apart during the due diligence process. Still, a handful of entrepreneurs have successfully attracted million-dollar investments from the Sharks. Here are the five largest deals made on Shark Tank in which money actually wound up exchanging hands.

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After seeing the dreams of so many wonderful people end with a closed store sign, we were determined to find out how to help so we enlisted the aid of several resources for business owners to come up with a list of what they need to know.

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Imagine this:  You have found the perfect business idea, one that seems to add up from every angle and could not be better for you and your future plans.  The only problem is that you do not have the capital to open the doors.  Well, unfortunately this is a rather significant problem for a small business startup ... particularly in todays lending environment.

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According to a new study, one in six marriages that began in the last three years has resulted from an interaction that started online. At the same time, Nielsen also reports that four out of every five corporations in America are now leveraging social media to help expand their client base and build relationships with customers.

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Does your back hurt from slouching over your keyboard all day? Having trouble focusing after lunchtime? Do you remember that great idea you had the other day? Whatever is holding you back from doing your best work, there is probably a wearable claiming to solve the problem.

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There is a convenient narrative about small business that we have all heard a million times.  Small business represents a huge, underserved, and highly lucrative market for finance-oriented entrepreneurs and large organizations alike. The prevailing wisdom is that these businesses run on Intuits QuickBooks, which enables them to have organized, accurate, and timely financial information at their fingertips. By all accounts, the small business market should be an easy one to serve. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Organizations big and small have struggled to serve the small business market in an efficient and effective matter, and it is all due to what we call the 90% challenge.

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Across the U.S., U.K., Germany, Brazil, China, and Australia, international ecommerce is predicted to triple by 2018, reaching $307 billion. The number of international shoppers will grow to 130 million, with 72 million of them using mobile devices to make cross-border purchases. Buying foreign goods online today is so easy that you no longer need to wait to take a vacation to purchase international items.  

Small business owners who want to participate in this massive global market can do several things now to start growing their sales across borders.

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The Internet of Things includes, among many other items, sensors for monitoring business and home security.

How IoT Can Help Small Business Compete
Here are two examples of small businesses that have figured out to compete against Goliath by finding low-cost ways to incorporate IoT into their operations:  

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Who wants to be a millionaire? A popular game show has asked its audience that question for years. Truthfully, the vast majority of the population would jump at the opportunity to join the elite ranks of the millionaires in this country.

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Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while ignoring the crux of the matter: people do not leave jobs; they leave managers.

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The battlefields of Iraq are a world away from Merrimack, New Hampshire, and its new microbrewery, Able Ebenezer Brewing Co. But for this companys owners, the can-do attitude they lived by as combat officers has contributed powerfully to their success as entrepreneurs.

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Being a savvy spender is crucial for small business owners. These entrepreneurs have to watch every dollar to manage cash flow, make payroll, and generally stay in business. But being cash conscious shouldn't mean spending as little as possible on everything.

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Attempting to be creative when it will not come to you naturally can be an excercise in futility. Traditional means of conjuring those creative impulses, like taking a walk in the park, can often spur creativity, but getting a better idea of what a business needs can be an even more effective way to divine logo inspiration. When working with a business, it is important to gain a sense of what the business is about and what role the logo will play in the clients business and marketing plans. To make this process simpler, we have compiled 7 questions to consider asking a client before commencing logo design:

7 Questions to Ask Before Designing a Logo

It is pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door.

Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.

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There are many books available on the market to read about starting a business and how to structure a business startup.

I have many favorites, but my advice to friends and students is one that I came across all the way back in October 1987. My business desires started and I read almost every book that was available in my local Memphis, Tennessee, library at the time. The book has been revised and reprinted many, many times and continues to be a good read to this day.

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Meet Fred Warmbier, entrepreneur. Warmbier owns a small business, Finishing Technology, located near Cincinnati, Ohio. The company finishes and anodizes metal parts –and is growing rapidly.

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Owning a cell phone has come to be regarded as a necessity in modern society, and with the great advances that have been made in smart phone technology, most of us rely on our phones to help us in an array of situations. While most smart phone owners are acquainted with the helpfulness of features such as navigation apps and mobile broadband, many people have yet to discover the array of uses they may put their phones to in the event of a true emergency.

10 Things Your Phone Can Do in Emergency Situations

As a small business owner getting ready to build your first website or redesign your existing one, you might wonder what you should be considering in terms of making your web design search engine friendly.

There are lots of things to take into account, but here are the five key things that you should know about SEO friendly web design and how it can benefit your visitors, too!

1. It Needs to be Responsive
For small businesses, especially local ones, having great rankings in mobile search is incredibly important. Why? For starters, 50% of consumers who perform a local search on mobile devices visit a store within a day of their search. What’s even more exciting is that 78% of mobile searches for local business lead to offline purchases.

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Over the last few years, a new generation of digital apps such as Uber and Just Eat have been available to download to our smartphones and tablets. They are designed to make it easier to find a taxi or order a meal, but have received as much criticism as they have praise for the way they have taken control of traditional markets and damaged business models.

We spoke to two businesses – one in the takeaway industry and the other in the private minicab industry – about the challenges these disruptive companies pose, what they are doing to combat them and how other small businesses can follow suit.

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One of the most important events of 2015 was the shift from the amount of desktop traffic compared to the amount of mobile traffic. Google reported that mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic in 10 different countries. The search engine algorithm for Google was changed to give companies who offered mobile optimized versions of their sites higher rankings than sites that were not optimized for mobile. The increase in mobile traffic combined with five times as many cellphones as desktop and laptop computers means that mobile traffic will become a priority.

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For more than a decade, thousands of businesses have enjoyed the benefits of high rankings in Google searches (and searches on competing engines) thanks to their SEO efforts. Larger corporations pour hundreds of thousands of dollars and allocate entire departments to gaining more online visibility, but even small- to mid-sized businesses can use a fraction of that budget to get more traffic and sales.

However, according to a recent survey by the Small Business Authority (SBA), less than 50 percent of small business owners in the United States think of inbound traffic from search engines as an important source of future business. Another 14 percent declared themselves unsure.

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The Perceived Amazon Effect

As David and I spoke, he echoed some thoughts that many small businesses have also shared with me. Many businesses see customers come into their stores to learn, and then they make their purchases online via Amazon or other online retailers. The online retailers don’t have the overhead of a brick and mortar store. For one of the products, David mentioned that I can purchase it on Amazon for less than he can purchase it. Of course, in his local market, his Yelp reviews show how much his customers love his store and appreciate his value. If he was local to me, I would happily pay a premium for their high level of service and expertise.

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The best sorts of business plans tell a clear story of what the company plans to do and how it will do it. Given the high failure rate of startups in their first year, a business plan is also an ideal opportunity to safely test out the feasibility of a business and spot flaws, set aside unrealistic projections and identify and analyze the competition.

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If word-of-mouth marketing sounds simple, do not be fooled -- it is not. Creating cutting edge buzz-worthy messages that go viral is no easy task.

While more than half of small business owners anticipate growth for their businesses in 2015, according to a Small Business Report, 56 percent say they are investing less than 3 percent on marketing. When they do invest, most of these business owners are likely thinking about traditional forms of advertising or collecting new customers instead of connecting with them.

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How to Manage People (Without Making Them Hate You) - video

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Small business owners already have a lot on their plates during this time of year, so when it comes to holiday marketing, it can all feel a bit overwhelming. Staples is here to help. Beyond being the one-stop shop for everything small businesses need to make more happen, below are some tips to help small businesses capitalize on this seasons top trends.

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As small business owners across the nation gear up for Small Business Saturday, a record number of shoppers are making plans to support their favorite local businesses. According to the fourth-annual Small Business Saturday Consumer Insights Survey, released by the National Federation of Independent Businesses and American Express, supporting local small businesses continues to be a priority for shoppers nationwide.

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What is your best six word advice? Check out the slideshow below to get inspired.

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Blood pressures are rising at many small businesses now that tax season is underway.

Although many owners hire accountants and attorneys to complete their income tax returns, taxes are a hassle. In a survey released last year by the advocacy group National Small Business Association, nearly 60 percent of the owners surveyed said the administrative burdens were the biggest problems posed by federal taxes. And 85 percent of the more than 675 owners said they relied on a professional to prepare their returns.

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Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that more than 200 million devices (PCs, phones and tablets) were now running Windows 10. Many of those 200 million devices belong to business users, who upgraded to Windows 10 (in many cases for free).

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How can a small company make the most of LinkedIn?

The social network is an inescapable part of online life for working professionals. But much of the advice on how to leverage it is targeted at big names. Over and over, I see small businesses making mistakes on LinkedIn because they are patterning their strategies after approaches that work for larger companies with huge budgets, lots of brand awareness and extensive social-media systems.

With that in mind, here are tips on how small businesses can use LinkedIn.

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Brainstorming ideas for a small business can be a fun yet frustrating experience. It requires a serious analysis of areas of expertise and interests, and consideration of where those areas intersect in such a way that can make a business viable.

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Enthusiasm—it can be both a blessing and a curse for new entrepreneurs. Passion for your business can fuel your success, but it can also drive you to operational and financial ruin if you do not take the time to think decisions through.

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