One of my dreams since I was a young child was to own my own business.  For some kids, that is mostly a common dream, but I wanted mine to be slightly different - I wanted to be in a position to help other people.

At an early age, it was evident that I would work in the health industry in some capacity, but I really didn’t know exactly what I was going to do.  It was at this point in my life I was introduced to wheat grass (and later I would use barley grass) and I thought that I could help the world with alternative medicine.

What I didn’t realize is that years later, I would be placing orders for chlorella and spirulina for my new health food store.

Needless to say, it has been a great journey, and I can’t wait to see how well the store does in its’ first week.

As the owner or a men’s clothing store, I feel it is my duty to be able to provide quality clothing at reasonable prices to as many people that walk in the door.  Sure, that isn’t always possible, but we do our best to cater to every customer.

We recently renovated the store and added a new section specializing in men’s suits and accessories.  It was a smart move on our part as now we were able to cater to both shoppers who are looking for casual wear as well as formal wear.  With the added lines of formal clothing, we also decided to carry additional accessories that would make excellent up sale items for our sales staff.

Some of the more popular items that we have added include designer cufflinks and engravable cufflinks.  We thought that we had everything covered but there been a number of requests for wedding cufflinks and we will be getting those as well.

It is great to see that the renovations have increased our revenues and allowed us to achieve our goals of catering to as many types of customers as possible.

Since my father had his accident and became partially paralyzed, he would go out twice per month to go buy office supplies such as pens, paper and anything else that he needed for the day to day operations of their business.  But, since the accident, he has been forced to order everything online and he has been spending more on buying supplies than before (thanks to the shipping) and he has been looking for a way to save himself some money.

I suggested that he try using an IE coupon toolbar that would allow him to see if there are coupons available for the store that he ordered from online.  I helped him install it and left it up to him if he was going to use it or not.

It turns out that there were some office supply coupons available, and provided he orders enough product, he pays less than he used to.  I think that I am his favorite son now

One of the biggest challenges our company faces is that the competition could get wind of what we are working on as well as find out about our customers.  We have taken as many precautions as possible to prevent it, but unfortunately it still happens.  We have tracked the culprit down to the lack of voice encryption that we have on our cell phones.

After asking our cell phone carrier about mobile phone encryption, they really didn’t have any answers for me.  Undaunted, I decided to look online to see what was available.

After much searching, I was able to find some gsm encryption software that would work with our phones.  I ordered licenses for each one of them, and hopefully this will get rid of all our problems of our private conversations getting out.

If the new software isn’t the answer to the problem, I might have to dig deeper - we might just happen to have a mole in our ranks.

For the longest time, the hot dog stand that we own has not accepted debit or credit cards.  There was a good reason for it - we thought that the price point that we were working with didn’t merit offering those types of payment options.

But times are changing and you can be hard pressed sometimes to find someone that is actually carrying around some money - in fact, most people don’t use money at all.

So, we have been looking into different payment processors that we could use at our stand that would be easy to be approved and meet our needs.

After talking to our bank, we were denied the opportunity.  They told us that we didn’t have sufficient credit so we didn’t qualify.

But, I was able to find offshore merchant accounts that didn’t require any credit and now we are in business - our sales are already up by 25% since we started taking credit and debit cards.

When I first started out in an MLM organization years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing.  Sure, I read the training materials and learned about the products, but after that, I had no idea.  I almost felt like I was sent out into the cold to try and learn how to hunt on my own - without knowing what tools I should be using.

Fast forward a few years and I am finally at a point where I have achieved some MLM success.  The only reason that I have made it to this point is that I have learned how to work the business along the way.

Though I am no expert when it comes to MLM lead generation, I seem to have made some headway when it comes to blogging for profit.  Seems each time that I put a blog post on my blog, I get inquiries from people wishing to join the MLM program that I am a part of - which in turn makes me some money.

I was put in charge recently of hiring a limousine service to get our guests back and forth from airport to hotel and around town while here for a convention. These guests were speakers and presenters at our convention and I wanted to get a reliable service that would take care of the details once I hired them.

Lucky for me, I found a great one. Their owner made sure to have a driver at the airport, waiting on each guest as their flights arrived. The chauffeur also helped with baggage and I got great reports from the guests on how friendly and polite the drivers were, which says volumes for a company in my book.

They also had a driver at the hotel within ten minutes of any guest calling for a ride anywhere in the city. I do not know how they pulled that off because it is a pretty big town and their main office is pretty far away from where the guests were staying.

I will absolutely hire this company again.

My husband, who runs his own online business from home, and I sat down to have a business meeting last night. As we are now into this together and rely on it as our sole income right now, we think that it is important for us to be on the same page when it comes to the business.

One of the things we discussed was the possibility that we could buy expired domain names. We thought that we could build pages and promote them, giving us some passive income each month. He is very smart when it comes to this type of thing and I trust him to know what he is doing and what is best for the business and our family.

He is really interested in the expired domain names, as it is something that was probably up on the net at one point and it would probably be easier to promote.

Sometimes I feel that most of the businesses in town are all business, but no fun.  Sure, something like a car wash really isn’t that exciting, but I wanted to start something new and fun.

So, I looked far and wide to see if I could find the perfect business for what I was looking for.  Out of all the choices that I could pick from, in the end I decided to have a party rental shop.

Now, what that means is that I had to find some bouncy castles for sale and some inflatable slides to get started.  I also picked up some cotton candy machines, and a couple of canisters of helium for the balloons.

We have a storefront leased already, and we are waiting for our signs to be delivered.  I figure that we should be able to open our doors next week.  I can’t wait to see how well the company does - we will be the only ones in town that offer the services that we do. 

I knew that if things did not change that my marriage was going to fall apart. My husband and I were working opposite shifts at our jobs and so we barely saw each other. On the days that we did get to see each other, we spent it with the kids and so we drifted apart.

Another factor in the equation was the fact that my husband had also started his own online company and so spent a lot of his time off working on that. It was a nightmare and when we sat to discuss it, we both agreed that something was going to have to change if we were going to keep it together.

In the end, we decided that he should work from home online full-time and that only I would work outside the home. That way, he could work the same hours as me and still be home with the kids. We ended up having every evening and weekend together and, though we have had to make some financial sacrifices, our marriage is going to be just fine.