When planning to start or grow a small business, it's helpful to select the most important products and services to be the focus of your research and forecasting efforts. Faced with deciding which of a broad variety of products to offer customers, new owners will wonder where to begin. The following points will help you identify the most important products and services to go forward with.

It's time to set goals to make 2010 your best year ever.

On New Year's Day, many people will rack up a few resolutions to improve their personal lives, but it's also an ideal time for small business owners to rekindle their passion and chart a path for the upcoming year.

Here are a few key areas to consider for setting business goals, along with some questions to ignite your imagination.

Naming a business can be thrilling and spooky. It's exciting because naming a business always gives a feeling of getting closer to bringing your fledgling business into the world. But it can also be stressful because the wrong name can cost you.

Today's environment is such that, even when you do everything right according to the local authorities, you can still be blindsided by a business owner from a far off jurisdiction.

As a customer, I just might be your worst nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong, I'm not malicious and I am fairly easy to please. When I encounter poor customer service, I'm unlikely to stage a hissy fit. I go away quietly, never to return, and never to refer future customers.

Customer complaints are gifts. Smart business owners will always prefer an unhappy customer's feedback over their silence. Customers that go away to tell others about a negative experience can be a business owner's worst nightmare.

Recently we used a marketing technique called the "eblast" to launch my new book, RiskBuster. Within a few hours the book made #1 in the Home Based Business category and the best seller list in three categories both on Amazon.com and on Amazon.ca. What most authors might find interesting about this fact is that it wasn't an accident; it was a planned effort and it wasn't expensive to do.