Small business "how-to's"

First, let me preface this post by announcing that, yes, this is my 500th post on this blog!  Many thanks to my followers and please spread the word!

So I felt it appropriate to use this post to address a topic near and dear to me - small businesses.  Many of you may know that I have a wine charm business - growing by baby steps via retail partners, Facebook connections and my website (yes - ok, since you asked!  See www.charmedbyarizona.com)  

For those of you interested in starting any type of business on your own, here are some great resources:

• US Small Business Administration:  www.sba.gov
• Family businesses:  www.fambiz.com
• The Family Business Network:  www.fbn-i.org
• Family Business Magazine:  www.familybusinessmagazine.com 

Financial makeover...make more money!

We can cover all kinds of topics on this (major ones are found at redbookmag.com) but a good starting point is finding out if you are underpaid!

You can compare your salary to the industry averages at glassdoor.com - too low?  Consider the best ways to approach your boss for a raise!

Light a single candle...

Hart Main, a 14-year-old from Marysville, OH, has designed a line of candles in "man scents" including "Sawdust," "New Mitt," "Grandpa's Pipe," and so on. His candles are made in cans recycled from his donations to a local soup kitchen -- over 10,000 sold so far at $9.50 each!

Check out the selection at man-cans.com and support this young entrepreneur!

Group chats!

Believe it or not, here is a site that I actually tried before passing it on to you! (I really need to do that more often!) Anyway...have a lot of friends that would love to all get on the phone and chat for a little pocket change? Try www.freeconferencecall.com and you can have up to 96 people on the call and even have it recorded (ok...so that's better for business calls unless it's a family reunion type of call that you want to save for the memories!).

Now I tried this just the other day for a business call, but "free" depends on how you use the service - there are fees to record or to get an 800 # for everyone to call in on...for 4 callers on the line for an hour it cost about $22 (we did not record the call but we did get the 800 dial-in number). If you're doing it for fun, you may want to bypass the toll-free number and let everyone just cover the cost of phone call for themselves. Still this is a huge improvement over three-way calling and really simple to set up!