Business Strategies

Anyone who’s traveled outside the country knows that bargaining for a better price is often a part of the retail experience.

Consumer Reports 2012 Buying Guide found that 35 percent of major appliance shoppers tried to negotiate a better price with retailers – and 72 percent of them were successful! The median savings was $72.Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but the same is becoming true to some extent in the United States.

Believe it or not, employment ads by businesses and recruiters are increasingly showing up with phrases like these: No unemployed candidates will be considered. Applicants must be currently employed.

While there is no hard data on the prevalence of such ads, a survey by the National Employment Law Project of heavily trafficked job sites, such as CareerBuilder.com and Indeed.com, found numerous ads with some variation of the above phrasing.

While managing expenses is extremely important in this economy, it’s also critical to look at the other factor in the profitability equation – increasing revenues. Revenues drive your business, and your products and services drive your revenues.

The age of technology has brought about many good things. The ability to search, find, save and retrieve information in a flash has made us more efficient in many ways.

But, it has also opened us up to risks we may not have anticipated.

For years, businesses have dealt with the necessity of record retention. There are rules and regulations in many fields about how long certain types of information should be kept.