Because the current tax plan in place allows Corporations to use many loopholes and subsidies to pay much less than the full rate, it could be the case that Obama’s new tax rate actually forces corporations to pay more than they were before. For this reason, several of Obama’s Republican competitors in the 2012 Presidential Election advocate a much lower tax rate, with Newt Gingrinch proposing 12.5% and Mitt Romney suggesting 25%. Whereas the Republican candidates’ focus seems to be on lowering the amount of taxes that Corporations pay, so as to encourage more employment and to inject more money into the economy, Obama’s tax plan appears to be more focused on bringing jobs back to the United States from overseas locations. Another component of his tax plan is to eliminate the tax breaks that manufacturers currently receive for moving jobs or products to overseason locations. Furthermore, the plan aims to make the United States a more appealing place for foreign investors to put their money.

The following is an excerpt from the New York Times’ report of Obama’s announcement, as it pertains to small business:

“Under the current tax system, the United States will soon have the highest statutory corporate tax rate among developed countries, within a system that features a large number of tax expenditures for special interests,” said a senior administration official, who did not want to speak ahead of Mr. Geithner except on condition of anonymity.

“This puts American businesses — especially those in areas like manufacturing that are subject to more intense international competition — at a disadvantage. And this system is also unnecessarily complicated for America’s small businesses.”

Not only does the news of Obama’s tax plan factor into his larger, overall re-election strategy, it comes at a time when many businesses – both small and large alike – have found it difficult to come up with the money they need to pay their taxes. Fortunately, there are alternative small business financing solutions available to help solve the problem of how to get money to pay small business taxes that have already helped many small businesses meet their costs this tax season. Learn more about small business funding options, including our small business cash advance.

1. What is Really Required

Most merchant cash advance providers claim that there are very few requirements necessary to be approved for a cash advance. While this is generally true when compared with SBA-backed loans, there are still several documents that you need to provide in order to be funded for a business cash advance. All merchant cash advance providers require that you provide them with at least 3 months of your business’ bank statements and credit card transactions so they are able to anticipate what your sales will be in the coming months, and thus, how quickly you can afford to pay back the cash advance. Depending on your business’ numbers, you may be asked to provide additional paperwork further into the process of getting funded, but this mostly takes the form of photocopies of official documents like your state-issued ID or your business’ lease. In most cases, your business’ credit will be pulled, but bad credit is not a determining factor in whether or not you will qualify for a cash advance.

Interest Rate?

One of the most common misunderstandings about merchant cash advances is that “the interest rate must be very high to pay back such a big cash advance.” What business owners who make these claims don’t understand is that merchant cash advances don’t have interest rates, making them distinct from a loan. This is because your payback rate is a fixed percentage of your future credit card receivables – so the same percentage of your sales is taken on a consistent basis as payback. This is the primary reason for which a merchant cash advance is not considered a “loan,” although the two are similar in many other ways.

Here are several ways that merchant cash advances differ from other forms of small business lending.

Business Cash Advance Providers Will Not Put You Out of Business

This myth about merchant cash advances could not be any further from the truth. Why? Because the repayment takes the form of the business’ future credit card receivables, merchant cash advance providers get paid when the business gets paid. So if the business that received a cash advance is consequently forced to go bankrupt or close, the cash advance provider would lose a lot of money. Clearly, this scenario would not be in a merchant cash advance provider’s best interest.

So What’s the Catch?

With all this being said, it seems puzzling why one would not apply for a business cash advance as a way to seek out funding for their business. Well, the catch about merchant cash advances is that, because qualifying and approval is so much easier for cash advances than it is for different forms of small business lending, the money that the cash advance provider gives your business tends to be expensive. However, this fact does not deter most small businesses from applying for another cash advance. At Entrust Cash Advance, we have an 87% renewal rate among our clients. Clearly, the state of small business lending is such that the pro’s greatly outweigh the con’s of merchant cash advances.

1. Facebook and Twitter Are for Kids

Many business owners feel that social media websites like Twitter and Facebook are a “waste of time” or simply “made for kids.” What these business-people may be ignoring is that people of all age groups now spend hours and hours on these sites every day. While it may be true that Facebook originated as a website meant for college students, over the past couple of years, the site has evolved such that many older individuals use the site with frequency. Furthermore, other business people write off sites like Twitter because they think they are too hard to understand or only made to be used by the “computer savvy.” However, not only are the sites much easier to use than they appear, but also, this mentality will prevent you from accessing hundreds of thousands of potential customers of all ages who use the site on a daily basis.

2. Signing Up for Social Media Sites is Enough

Another common misconception is that to simply have a social media presence for your site will be sufficient to start generating new customers and new profits for your business. Like everything else in the small business world, making money from social media takes a lot of work and a lot of patience. You may have to implement creative marketing strategies, like coupons, competitions, or advertising campaigns to begin to see results from any social media marketing plan.

3. You Can Pay Search Engines to Rank Higher

One widespread misconception about SEO (search engine optimization) is that having your page displayed on the first page of popular websites such as Google or Bing can be achieved by simply writing a check to these search engine companies. Anybody who holds this belief fails to realize that any search engine that took payments to rank certain businesses higher than others would quickly lose credibility among the very people using the search engine to find legitimate, credible results. What these business owners may be thinking of is Pay Per Click advertising, which does indeed mean paying search engines to be displayed on their results page – but only under the “Ads” section.

Here are five tips that will help you if you find yourself in this predicament:

1. Quit Sweating the Small Stuff

Don’t let the minutia of owning and operating a business get in the way of you working effectively to achieve larger goals. While the small details of your business are certainly important, you can’t let them hold you back from the more large-scale projects and tasks that you must accomplish. The lesson applies to perfectionists too: you will either have to let the small details and problems wait, or you will need to expand your staff to take care of them for you.

2. Set Concrete Goals

One way to deal with the issue of having too many projects to deal with at the same time is to set concrete goals and follow timetables. Once a week on Monday mornings, or every day – if necessary – write down a list of the goals you hope to accomplish that week or day. Keep your goals realistic. Remember how much time you have and who is helping. No matter what issues may arise, ask yourself a few times every day, “Am I doing what I need to to accomplish my goals for the week?”

3. Stop Planning, Start Doing

There is at least one new study, blog entry, book, or Podcast published every week to help small business owners achieve success. Especially when it comes to small business marketing – a rapidly evolving and expanding field – it seems like there is way more information out there than any small business owner could feasibly comprehend and follow. This is why it is more important to take a look at what has actually worked to produce money for your business, and to use this knowledge as your own framework for success. You know your own business better than any author does, no matter how reputable they may be.

4. Allocate a Certain Amount of Time To Your Personal Life Every Week

No matter how pressing the issues confronting your business may be, there is nothing more important than your own health and happiness when it comes to running a business well. Balance is extremely important. If you are feeling overworked, exhausted, or overly stressed out, your emotions might begin to affect the way you work and the people with whom you work. There is nothing worse than snapping at a staff member or a customer because you aren’t tending to your own well being. Give yourself a certain amount of time every week to spend with people you love, or doing the things you love, to help clear your head from all the work-related stress.

5. Make Your Workplace Your Happy Place

Regardless of how much you choose to follow the preceding four tips, the fact remains that, as a business owner, you will be spending a very large portion of your daily life in your workplace. This is why it is crucial to make sure that you enjoy your surroundings as much as possible. Hang up pictures of the people you love, bring some of your favorite or most sentimental pieces of art from home, or decorate in whatever other way makes you feel comfortable and at peace. Buy yourself a comfortable chair or invest in a nice sound system to play your favorite album (if the nature of your business permits it). Personalizing your work space and making it somewhere you like to spend your time will reflect in your work ethic and attitude more than you may realize.

Here at Entrust, we’d like to offer you this postcard:

Or simply start the application process now. You will hear back from us within 24 hours.

Here are the proposals that both small, medium, and big business could agree on.

(22 percent/23 percent);

- American University’s Kogod Tax Center

Congress can rest assured that any bill it attempts to pass that meets the above objectives should have the support of business in general. The same can not be said for many tax reforms that Congress has attempted to pass in the past, but faced problems when trying to appease both small and big business at the same time.

What are your thoughts about these policy objectives? Does your business support these reforms as well? Share your thoughts.

1. Short, Daily Meetings

Whether they’re in the form of a huddle, a pep talk, or an actual meeting held in a conference room, it is vital to check in with your employees at least once a day (if the schedule permits). Even if there isn’t much to catch up on, the meeting can be a simple formality. The reasoning behind holding short meetings at least once daily is that it shows your employees that you are actively involved in keeping them informed. It will help to diminish any feelings that the staff may have that the higher ups are not being open, honest, or communicative about the direction of the company.

2. Encourage Ideas

Run an office-wide competition to encourage employees to come up with “the best possible idea” about how to improve the company. The prompt can be, “How should we find the money we need to expand the business?” or “What can we do to help cut costs?” or “How can we make our business more environmentally friendly?” Your staff may have ideas you never even remotely considered. And on top of that: they will feel more personally invested in carrying out certain strategies for the business if they had a part in coming up with them.

3. Let Your Employees Contribute to the Company Blog

If you aren’t running a blog at your company, not only are you missing out on a great PR/marketing tactic, but you are also losing a unique way to let your employees more actively participate in your business. Running a blog lets you tell the public what’s new at your business and in your industry, which can help generate traffic to your business’ website as well as keep you customers updated and informed on what’s new at your business. Out of ideas for topics? Ask your staff what types of issues they are encountering during their day-to-day, or any other subject they feel is pertinent to your industry. Your blog will truly thrive if you share the various thoughts and opinions that your employees are eager to express.

Whether or not PPC is a wise marketing strategy for your business depends on a number of factors. First of all, you need to consider how much money you have available and how much time you have on your hands. PPC is a good solution for business owners who need leads immediately, don’t necessarily have a lot of time to invest into their online marketing campaign, and have some money available to pay the costs. A more long-term and potentially less expensive method of online advertising comes in the form of SEO – Search Engine Optimization. Using Search Engine Optimization for your business is a more effective long-term strategy because, if you follow the right steps, your website may consistently show up in the first few pages of search results over time. Your ads shown by way of PPC stop being displayed as soon as you stop paying for them.

Another important factor to consider is your audience. The reality is: individuals who spend a good amount of time on the internet may feel that there is a significant difference between the quality of websites shown by PPC ads as compared to websites that are ranked organically on search engines based on the quality of their content. These internet-savvy users are quickly able to discern paid ads from organic results, even though they may be nearly impossible to distinguish on many sites. Therefore, as a general rule of thumb, it can be presumed that younger customers who have grown up with the internet are not the best target market for PPC advertising. However, if your customers are not as computer-savvy, they may be more apt to click on ads regardless of where they appear on a webpage. Always keep this in mind before investing your money in either SEO or PPC.

The third most important things every small business owner should consider about PPC campaigns before typing in his business’ credit card information into the various PPC services online is how he plans to tackle the challenge of writing a good ad. In most cases, you are given very few characters with which to spell out whatever it is you plan to advertise, and most of your competition has probably already capitalized on the words and phrases you choose to use. Fortunately, Google offers a “Keyword Tool,” which is based entirely on empirical data about how frequently users type in certain phrases and which phrases are the most popular. Always use this and other tools to conduct research before spending money on an ad. In many cases, with a smart online advertising strategy, the results will pay for themselves.

However, many businesses who have looked for additional sources of revenue to pay for new inventory for the coming season have found that additional small business funding is harder than ever to find, and even harder to be approved for. While a press release issued on February 9th by the Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index shows that small business lending by big banks has risen to its highest point since February 2011, businesses have continued to approach alternative sources of financing for their working capital needs. Many small business owners have found that these alternative small business financing institutions, such as micro lenders, receivable financing providers, and merchant cash advance companies, are a more reliable source of financing because their approval rate is so much higher.

The Great Recession has had the effect of making small business lending much more harder to achieve for many small businesses, even if they had good credit and all of their finances in order. For example, many small restaurants have found that they have been denied funding because of the “nature of their business,” which is too “high risk” for the banks to consider a good investment. Restaurants and other small businesses put in this position have continued to seek out alternative financing at high rates, putting pressure on the banks to improve their records when it comes to small business lending.

Is your business in need of additional working capital for inventory for the coming spring season? Where have you gone to seek out financing? Share your story with us.