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Launching your own business is exciting, but long-term success requires more than just an entrepreneurial spirit and a big dream.

You also have to juggle all the moving parts of a business. Handling disciplines such as marketing and sales may not come naturally. Streamlining these processes by choosing the right CRM can save both time and money, yet many small business owners don’t even know where to start.

If that’s you, don’t worry. Understanding the terminology and acronyms is half the battle; the rest is about finding the best way to manage those moving parts so you can focus on more pressing matters like growing your business.

What’s a CRM?

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a type of software that helps businesses of a...

Lack of diversity has long been the elephant in the room for the tech industry and everybody is painfully aware the industry is too pale, too male, and very young. Yet few companies are actually tackling the issue head on.

Companies need to know diversity goes beyond the moral issue of equality. If a CEO was told software could make their enterprise 45% more likely to grow share and 70% more likely to capture new markets and boost innovation, throwing time and money at it would be a no-brainer. Yet despite the fact that hard data shows that diverse teams — in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, background — are more effective, innovative, and productive, the majority of companies continue to ignore it.

Many leaders see the value in making tea...

Email is not your friend. Email is like your obnoxious neighbor Chad who enjoys playing the bagpipes early Sunday morning. But, worse because on top of being kinda annoying, your email is cleverly disguised as a productivity enhancing super-buddy. It slowly drains you of all your time, focus and output by constantly distracting you with other people’s demands, no matter how ridiculous they may be.

You want to spend time with your spouse, your kids, your dog, your best friend, your animatronic clown – but no, you’re spending time with email.

When you woke up this morning and checked your inbox, did email tell you that you it had saved you a bunch of time and you had the day off? Did email do your work for you?

No!

Email asked if you’d be int...

It was one of the first gut-check moments where you have to prove to yourself how much you want it.

Corey Egan and his co-Founder Swapnil Bora were feeling pretty good about the direction their company was headed in in summer 2014. ” We had gone through a series of business competitions, we had filed patents, we had built out prototypes,” Corey remembers.

Not only that – when they looked out at the market, Corey says: “We were the first ones we had seen to put anything out there.”

Then one morning, Corey woke up and everything had changed.

“I woke up and I had like ten text messages from folks that I knew saying, ‘Hey Corey, this just launched on Kickstarter today,’ ” Corey remembers. “And it was a crowdfunding campaign for what is now one ...

Someone holds the elevator for you. No “thank you”? You end up waiting in the lobby next time. You spend all weekend helping a friend move and at the end of it, all they say is, “Well, I’ll see you around.” Looks like someone just made your Nixon-esque enemy list.

Those two simple words could be the difference between a functioning society and an admittedly exaggerated chaos, but even if that chaos is exaggerated, there are plenty of reasons to remember to say “thank you.” Here are just a few.

You’ll Make More Money

It’s true. There are economic benefits to be gained by merely expressing gratitude. Don’t buy it? Check out this study about how waiters who write “thank you” and personalized messages on receipts get larger tips than their less...

I am swamped. Requests from colleagues, friends and family leave me with no time to do any actual work. I can’t ignore any of the aforementioned things and it’s impossible to cram them all into an eight-hour day.

But time management isn’t about taking shortcuts in your thinking time, it’s about finding shortcuts for the mundane, administrative and repetitive, in order to make way for the creative, strategic and dare I say… fun? As a busy carpooling mom of three boys (two of them teens!), a CEO of a company that grows 500 percent year over year and a happily married lady with lots of extended family, here are the time savers that allow me to make the most of every hour of every day.

Email Templates and Autoresponders

The Issue: Email is a hu...

Let me start off by clarifying that this is not your average ‘ i-was-broke-and-about-to-lose-everything-when-I-hit-the-jackpot-that-saved-my-startup type of story. On the contrary, this story is about the 99% that struggles with starting & growing a business and still fails. I’m one of them. And unfortunately, we don’t hear from them as much as we should do.

Broke in Bangkok

When I was in college in 2010, I never had money problems. I was working around 30 hours a week, lived with my parents, had a car and always money in my pocket. I was ‘’comfortable’’ for my age. But I was always wary of getting money-problems. Whenever I had the slightest of uncertainty or risk coming up, I would panic, freak out and go through a ton of stress. I was ve...

Being a founder is hard — and we should be grateful for that.

We don’t feel grateful all the time. At least not when we’re lying awake at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, staring at the ceiling wondering how we have created so much debt in such a short period of time and then looking over at our spouse who is probably pretending to sleep — pondering the same question.

But, I believe it is the sleepless nights, the awkward conversations at family dinners, the long days without measurable progress and the other thousand things that most people wouldn’t tolerate that makes the solutions we build valuable — and the pursuit worthwhile. We relish the challenge as much as the outcome.

As the holidays quickly approach, perhaps you’re like me and find yours...

Nancy Duarte is a pro when it comes to presentations. Not just giving presentations, but starting them, finishing them, and every step in between. Author and co-founder of Duarte Designs, Nancy Duarte is a seasoned veteran when it comes to incorporating storytelling into speaking and creating connections with an audience.

The below video is the third part in a series of 10 in which Nancy shares the key components to making a successful pitch using creativity and critical thinking. Find out what she has to say:

The importance of storytelling in business

When Nancy identified a gap between storytellers and presenters, she was determined to figure out what caused the disconnect.

Referring back to Step 2 of her talk, Nancy formulated her big i...

As an expert SEO, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades.

You need to understand link building, marketing, public relations, psychology, and technology.

At a certain point, there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything you’d like to do.

But you can save quite a bit of time and effort on small things by using browser extensions.

You can install them with one or two mouse clicks and access them with ease to the right of your address bar.

They will help you:

• analyze website performance quickly
• examine code behind websites
• build links better
• save time by improving your task efficiency

I’ve put together a list of 28 browser extensions I consider to be the best. I encourage you to give a few of them a try.

A quick heads-up: most of thes...