But if you are like most business owners, or the average small business leader, you’re not getting rich. Because it’s not as easy to make a profit as we dreamed it would be.

We started our small business to make a profit and provide for ourselves, as well as our families, and that is a really good thing!

Do you know how to motivate employees? Have you heard the saying that happy employees are productive employees? Well, CEO Tony Hsieh of Zappos knows how to keep his employees motivated. Hsieh focuses on making sure that his employees are happy. Here are a few things that Zappos does to motivate its customers by keeping them happy.

For many companies, the sales department and the marketing department are often set worlds apart in both goals and structure. Sales often thinks of marketing as the arts and crafts department while marketing feels that the sales department is all about numbers and no creativity. If this sounds familiar, than your business isn’t meeting its full potential and your numbers may be lower than they should be.

Are you tired of people calling who really aren’t ready to commit to a service or ready to buy? Are these calls and meetings you think are going to be potential leads, when they really aren’t, wasting your time and money? We’ve got some tips for you that may help!

Business culture is a vital part of having a successful small business. Yes, it’s true—many businesses are completely lacking this. That’s corporate America folks, and there are huge companies that will survive even if they treat their employees like, well, crap. But, as a small business, if you really want to rise to the top, have happy employees and overall a more successful business—you need company culture. Heck, you should want it!

What you first need to realize is that starting your own business is hard. You know the saying, if it were easy everybody would do it? That directly relates to starting your own business and being successful. There are many risks that are present that you must be willing to take on. One of the best ways to know if your idea is among the handful of good business ideas that can be successful is performing market research. But what do you need to know?

STOP! You have got to keep reading this post. It will be fast and painless and it could be the one thing that super charges your business this year. 

Best practices are usually the most boring thing in the world. I mean who would really choose to sit and study best practices let alone really understand them. But they are simple and important and in the next 5 minutes I will hopefully prove it.

You’re scrolling through your Facebook news feed. Scroll, scroll, boring, scroll, ‘like’, scrolling, ew, scroll, comment, pause, scroll. Thirty minutes later you exit and go back to work. Does this about sum up what your Facebook experience is like? So what is it exactly that makes you stop on that one page or advertisement and decide to like the page, status or engage with the post?

It’s time to stop waiting for things to happen, and go out and make them happen. You're 2 years in from the day you started your business, you have staff, payroll, and you even have an accountant. But something’s missing. Every day you're met with this nagging thought that your business isn’t beating out your competitors. This nagging feeling won’t go away until you do something to pull away from the pack. Get standout-marketing tips here!