Establishing a winning position in the marketplace is obviously critical to your company’s success. The position, however, must be based on a sustainable competitive advantage. What constitutes an unbeatable advantage? There are two choices: You have consistently lower costs than your rivals. As long as your product or service maintains an acceptable quality level, this advantage...

If your business finds that it must lay off a large number of employees, make sure you are in compliance with a federal law that requires some employers to provide advance notification. This little-known law is called the Federal Worker Adjustment Retraining and Notification Act (WARN). Under the law, employers who are covered must give 60...

A business trip is meant to solidify relationships with clients and customers or to gain new ones. Or perhaps it’s a time for sales calls and “meets and greets” with suppliers. In any event, the goal of business travel is generally to make money — not to fritter it away on needless expenses. Businesses have to keep...

The driving force in many expansion plans is to generate higher sales, with the hope that profits will rise. But before making moves to buy new equipment, expand your plant or implement a new business idea, you need to grasp the profit angle. In some cases, an expansion plan boosts sales but not profits. You wind...

When you’re bargaining over starting salaries or pay raises, be on sure footing or you might find yourself tumbling into a legal quagmire. If you succumb too easily to better-than-average negotiators, you may wind up running afoul of federal law. When salaries are skewed in favor of one group – say, white males – your company...

The IRS and state tax authorities have made significant strides in curbing individual identity theft over the last two years. But cyber attacks against businesses are on the upswing. Here are some simple ways business taxpayers can help protect their data from hackers. Trends in ID Theft The IRS recently announced that the number of individuals reporting identity theft in the...