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Archive for the ‘Business Tips’ Category

Imagine having access to large amounts of cash credit for anything such as marketing campaigns, aggressive expansion, or even flipping real estate.

Whether your business is just starting out, or it’s established and profitable, chances are you’ll require capital in the near future.

The good news is the funding sources we have will extend unsecured business lines of credit based on your company’s size, location, industry, age, and other key factors, allowing you to receive several times the amount of unsecured business credit you would get from your typical bank.

There are three major reasons why our unsecured business credit lines are superior to typical banks.

  1. Many lenders report business credit lines to your personal credit reports. This means that when you draw on the balance of the line, your personal credit scores (FICO®) can drop anywhere from 20-100 points overnight! When y

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Blazing a trail through the MBA classrooms

Posted by Tamara Littlejohn On May - 4 - 2012

Hélène Ploix was one of the first two female students at Insead

Anxieties about the cloakroom do not usually trouble today’s MBA students. But for the first women to attend the full-time MBA programme at Harvard Business School in 1963, bathrooms, or a lack of them, were a cause for concern.

“Tack up the Ladies’ sign, please,” Sharon Baum would regularly ask her boyfriend – handing him a cardboard sign before going in. Female business students were such a modern concept at that time that the school had yet to catch up on the facilities front.

The same was also true of HBS’s dormitories and the canteen, both of which were for men only. As a result the women lived off campus on the other side of the Charles river, while their male peers remained on campus with access to the subsidised canteen.

“To save money, I would go to the [canteen] food line with my friend to see if they [the male students] could get us sandwiches” says Ms Baum. “That’s how I met Read more…

Confidentiality in Invoice Finance

Posted by Tamara Littlejohn On April - 10 - 2012

Mar 29, ’12 2:38 PM Author Stefan Töpfer

What’s your business’ most valuable asset? Throwing this question at several entrepreneurs, you would expect to get responses such as equipment, plant & machinery and freehold premises.

However, the largest asset for many businesses, especially SMEs, is often their unpaid sales ledger invoices. In this economic climate, your sales ledger is a financial resource that you just can’t afford to ignore. Many businesses run out of cash, even though they have thousands (and even millions) of pounds owed to them by their customers.

How about a facility where cash is drawn against your unpaid sales invoices? This introduces us to the term invoice finance. It is a

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Top 4 Credit Cards to Build Credit

Posted by Tamara Littlejohn On April - 7 - 2012

Experiencing financial hardship and seeing your credit take a turn for the worse is a stressful and frustrating time for anyone to endure. Many people think they won’t be able to recover or qualify for credit ever again.

The good news is that is simply not true; with the right plan you can rebuild and eventually restore your credit rating.

Did you know there are card issuers that offer credit cards to build credit specifically for those who have bad ratings or even filed for bankruptcy?

These types of cards are designed for high risk individuals and even though the interest rates are much higher it gives you the opportunity to start re-establishing your credit.

To minimize the risk you present to a card issuer you can always apply for secured credit cards to build credit.

With a secured credit card your deposit equals your credit limit but it doesn’t work like a debit card. The

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Tags: Credit

Columbia and Haas end Executive MBA alliance

Posted by Tamara Littlejohn On March - 30 - 2012

The alliance between two of the US’s top business schools, Columbia in New York and the Haas school at Berkeley in California, is to end with the closure of their joint executive MBA programme – an MBA for working managers. The Haas school will launch its own EMBA in 2013 in San Francisco, pitching it in direct competition with the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, which runs a second stream of its EMBA programme in California alongside its Philadelphia programme.

The 19-month Berkeley-Columbia EMBA programme enrolled its first class in May 2002 and will have graduated more than 600 students when it closes its doors in February 2013, when the existing class graduates. I

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Angels Headin’ West, Pardner

Posted by Tamara Littlejohn On March - 21 - 2012

To no one’s real surprise, the biggest angel investments are in California, according to the Halo Report .   After all, there is a heck of a lot of investment money in California, not to mention an environment that encourages entrepreneurial development.

Not surprisingly too is that the major investments listed are in health care and technology.  These have been hot fields the past decade or so, and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future.

Angel investments are notoriously difficult to track because so many of them are truly private transactions.  I suspect that the data is the Halo Report was generated from established angel investment groups across the US, and while these groups are tremendously important, they are not the only funds being tapped for investment.

In the Halo Report, the median investment is $700 thousand.  That sum approaches what many venture capital groups will consider.  But there is a whole realm of angel investment activity that is just off the charts, the smaller investments, the individual angels.  And it is the alternative investment range that thousands of new and emerging businesses rely on. 

As we’ve talked about many times, angel investment groups come in all sorts of sizes, with all kinds of motivation.  Many don’t even promote themselves as “angel investors”; they just are.

Smart entrepreneurs will pursue all angles for angels, both established and not.  It may mean having a top notch business plan that is adaptable for both major investment and lesser investment, but it would be well worth it.  Create one plan for investment from a larger group, with a substantial jump start upon investment.  Create a second one for more modest investment, demonstrating how your company will grow and attract additional investment in the future.

Don’t be discouraged if your business is the consumer products or business services field.  These fields don’t even show up on the Halo Report, but all indications are they will have a tremendous impact on our economy over the next decade or so.

The bottom line is that the money is there, whether it shows up in this report or not.  If you want to make it yours, go after it.  Now.

How to register with iUpdate DNB

Posted by Tamara Littlejohn On March - 3 - 2012

When was the last time you reviewed your D&B business credit report?

Did you know you can review your profile at anytime at no cost whatsoever?

iUpdate DNB is a simple tool you can use to ensure the Dun and Bradstreet database contains the most up-to-date information on your business.

iUpdate provides you with the ability to review and update your company profile online, free of charge, 24 hours a day.

In order to take advantage of this free tool you will need to register with iUpdate DNB. This also goes for previously registered users of eUpdate DNB.

Here is how to register step-by-step:

Step 1: Lookup Your Business

Go to iUpdate DNB and enter your business information to find out if you’re listed. If you find a business match then select the appropriate box and click on the next tab.

Step 2: Verify Business Identity

During this step you will need to pass through personal verification. R

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Stern brings business know-how to medical students

Posted by Tamara Littlejohn On February - 29 - 2012

New York University’s Stern school of business has become the latest US business school to offer a joint business and medical degree, joining forces with the university’s medical school. NYU joins the ranks of universities such as Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, Pennsylvania, Duke and its New York neighbour Columbia, all of which teach accelerated MD/MBA programmes.

The growth in MD/MBA programmes in the US has been substantial. In 1993 there were just five such programmes in the US, according to figures from the Association of MD/MBA Programmes (AMMP), while by the beginning of 2012 there were 65.

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IN Business School News

  • Cranfield links with Prodigy to secure MBA student loans
  • Insead scoops top award with tale of toilet paper
  • UK still destination of choice for MBAs, says GMAC
  • Saïd nails down major civil service training project

The growth in such programmes reflects the changing environment for medical practitioners in the US. “A c

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