Why StartSMART and GrowSMART? The Value of Business Training

Phases of Business Life Cycle

A guy I used to work with in public safety, Steve Mattoon, used to say, “In a critical situation, we do not rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”  That statement is as true in law enforcement and the military as it is in running a small […]

Strategic Planning Tools for Sustainable Success | April 10th |

 “If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.”  It’s no wonder why many small businesses still struggle to grow, considering these statistics:    95% of a typical workforce doesn’t understand its organization’s strategy   90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully  86% of executive teams spend less than one hour per […]

Small Business Owner’s Checklist for Year-End

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As a Business Consultant with the UGA Small Business Development Center, I spend a lot of time with business owners looking ahead and planning how to implement improvements.  So, with two months left in 2017, here are some thoughts for year-end planning and positioning yourself for 2018.   Year-end taxes Get with (or at least […]

The Answers are Different This Week…

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” For many of us, allocating time to plan becomes a significant challenge of priorities. Do we work on the urgent or the important today? Frequently, this becomes the question of the day. In most cases, […]

Building CyberStrength into your Business

We believe that the cyber threat to small business is real and continuing to grow. Everyday each of us hear of the multiple incidents of cyber attacks hitting businesses around the country. Whether the attacks are criminal in nature, initiated through state actors, or from a lone hacker sitting at their computer, they each can […]

2016: More Profits, Less Chocolate

The year 2016 has arrived and with it, our annual declarations of New Year’s resolutions and fresh starts.  My resolutions this year are to win the lottery, compete on Dancing with the Stars (as a star of course), and limit myself to only ONE pound of chocolate per day.  In reality, statistics show that only […]