With the economy quickly falling off the proverbial shelf I just came up with an actually pretty good idea to save our collective butts.

Instead of dumping a trillion dollars into a hole like Congress is planning on doing, so it can join the trillion dollars that we gave the banks last year, let’s actually create more jobs.

If you start a new small business that employs at least (let’s say) three people through the entire year, you don’t have to pay federal small business taxes. If you already have a small business and increase the number of employees by 5-10% or so, then you get big tax breaks.

I’ll leave the professionals to figure out all of the details like making sure that big businesses don’t get all the money. And also making sure that businesses don’t just hire someone for a few months before firing them to get the tax breaks. All in all, I think a pretty good idea.

Every time I’m at a conference, or volunteer, or start a new job, or even go to some safety training, I seem to come home with some sort of trinket or swag with the company logo on it. They range in usefulness from fun or clever to useful and indispensable. If you want to be remembered or have your company remembered, it never hurts to give out merchandise with your logo or slogan on it. These promotional products will be well remembered years later, and often even used to give your company a call back.

If you’re looking to start a new business, but you want to reduce the risk that this venture causes, a franchise may be for you. If you’re looking for a franchise opportunity, then this is the site for you. It lists out many different franchise options for almost every type of business imaginable. Using the blueprints for business that others have already shown to be successful is a great way to reduce risk and give yourself the best possible chance for success.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting some really slick looking business cards to go along with this blog and some of the other random stuff I put together on the computer. In my clicking around the net I found a site that specializes in logo design and business cards. In less than five minutes I had designed the card below using their quick and easy to use online design tool. They have hundreds of logos that can go on the card and dozens of choices during the creation process.

The best thing a business can do to help preserve itself during tough economic times is to find ways to save money. Since payroll is usually the largest expense of any business, this is where money saving comes into play most often through a decrease in staff.

For small companies or those just getting started that don’t have a lot of staff to begin with, this often isn’t a possibility since there is little fat to cut out of the payroll budget. For these companies, people have to get creative about how they reduce expenditures without compromising the core values of their business, whatever they may be.

It turns out Journyx has an opportunity right now for companies to take advantage of a creative way to save money. It begins with a free trial of their Journyx Timesheet software. For 45 days, your business can benefit from the chance to try out software that allows you to track time spent on different projects and estimate the time till completion, help you create invoices based upon this information and even aid in completion of payroll.

It continues when you realize that Timesheet is capable of handling everything from notes on projects to mileage employees need to be reimbursed for. It seems to cover all the bases!

Help make your story one of the Timesheet success stories by signing up for the free trial today.

Now I must whole-heartedly get behind the idea of giving gift cards to employees. Over the years I have been involved in many different types of companies who had very different motivational strategies, gift cards being one of the most common. Most of the time the gift cards were to a specific restaurant or theater and were the standard generic gift card for that company.

Now that any company can get a personalized logo visa gift card, their employees can get the most out of an incentive program. They can use the card anywhere while being reminded that this came from their company as they use the card.

For the business owners out there, do you ever feel like your inventory is controlling you? Then it’s time to retake that power and use it to slim your inventory down. Using the Kaban software, you can find ways to optimize your inventory and go through what-if scenarios to analyze your business. This software will help make your business a lean manufacturing system that helps you save money and during economic times like these, cutting fat is where it’s at.

Oil hits a new high. Wait, didn’t I just say that a couple days ago? It’s at $106/barrel and with a possible interest rate cut that will further undermine the value of a dollar, the cost could go higher still. We’ve passed the point where inflation adjusted prices hit in the 80′s energy crunch so we can officially start whining.

Yes mom and dad, I have it worse off than you did. It kinda makes me happy that I tried the wrong password so often on my IRA access – now I can’t see how badly it’s doing.

Back in the day when I had a regular job, the item I had to order most often from the office supply store was pens.  We were constantly losing them – usually to the customers.  Oh sure, they always said they’d bring it back but they rarely did.  Just kidding.  It was usually an absentminded thing for them to do.

Usually we saw it as a less than thrilling part of doing business (though one manager tried to tie the pens to the registers somehow).  What we should have been doing was putting our name on those bic pens so that we could make our name known to them.  It’s a bit surprising how few people know what chain they’re going to when they see a movie and we could have tried to build some customer loyalty by letting them take our pens – imprinted with our web address of course!