Mohit Tater's Blog, page 495

Is Forex Trading a good Business to Start Right Now?

Given the current state of the global economy and the fears of a second spike in coronavirus infections (which have sent share values plunging worldwide of late), now may seem like the worst time to start a business venture.

However, it’s fair to surmise that not every business or market has been created equal, as while some have been particularly badly hit by Covid-19, others have fared relatively well and actually recorded spikes in demand.

In this post, we’ll ask whether launching a forex business represents a good idea in the current climate and how profitable this could be over time.

The Benefits of Forex Trading

We’ve certainly seen ecommerce and digital ventures perform well during the first two quarters of 2020, with US brand Target recording a huge 275% increase in profit during April alone.

In this respect, forex trading certainly fits the bill, as this can now be conducted exclusively online or on the move using a virtual trading platform. This provides instant access to a global marketplace, regardless of your physical location or the time of the day that it is.

This also offers an opportunity to target the most profitable trading times and sessions (such as Asia), which are usually defined by periods of increased volume and volatility. Any periods where geographic markets crossover may be particularly lucrative, especially when the aforementioned Asian session ends and the European entity begins.

Not only is the forex market inherently accessible online and profitable in the digital age, but it can also be conducted alongside an existing full-time job. This enables you to introduce a new income stream and boost your earning potential considerably, without overly compromising your work-life balance.

Of course, this also allows you to transition seamlessly into your new career and scale your forex venture organically, which is ideal in the current economic climate.

How to Launch Your Forex Business

Another key benefit of launching a forex business is that currency trading is essentially a discipline that can be self-taught, whether you read the wealth of educational material online or attend virtual seminars that build a solid knowledge base.

While this can build a foundation of theoretical knowledge from which to operate, modern-day trading platforms also feature demo account. These simulate a real-time trading environment, in which users can test and hone their carefully cultivated strategies without risking their hard-earned cash.

These accounts can be used over the course of several months, while they undoubtedly enable you to bridge the gap between theory and practical trading experience.

By weaponizing information, leveraging demo accounts and understanding the full range of technical indicators and analytical tools in their entirety, you can build your forex business from the ground up and afford it the best possible chance of long-term success.

As for whether now is the ideal time to start a forex trading business, this depends largely on your outlook and existing appetite for risk as a trader. 

After all, while periods of geopolitical and economic instability create a more volatile and potentially profitable marketplace, you can only capitalise on this fully if you have a healthy appetite for risk and a keen understanding of specific currency pairings.

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5 Ways a CRM Software Can Help Entrepreneurs and CEOs

Needless to say, maintaining a good relationship with your customers is key to your business’ growth. Therefore, you want to manage them as efficiently as possible. Fortunately, with the help of the CRM (customer relationship management technology), it has become a lot easier to connect with customers than ever.

But how exactly can a CRM software help you as an entrepreneur or the CEO of your organization? 

Helps You Find the Right Customers

You might be surprised to know that you’ll be missing out on 79% of your marketing leads that could have been converted into sales if you don’t use a CRM software.

By connecting your marketing tools such as email, social, and marketing automation to a CRM platform, your sales and marketing team will be able to have an insight into your leads and potential customers. As a result, they can create targeted and engaging communications in order to convert most of them into customers. 

Increases Customer Retention

One of the main reasons why businesses should invest in a CRM platform like CRM software Creatio is simply because it can help them retain existing customers. This is made possible through CRM’s ability to identify repeat customers and notifying your sales team about your customers’ purchase cycle.

Aside from that, CRM platforms can record transaction histories of your customers, not to mention it can help you cross-sell other products within the same platform. 

Boosts Employee Productivity

According to Harvard Business Review, 52% of high-performing salespeople have been using their companies’ CRM technology to their advantage. It comes as no surprise, however, considering that by adopting the right technology for your business, you’ll be able to process-heavy tasks from your teams and allow them to focus more on connecting with your customers.

This means that the manual process of looking for contact information or inputting customer data can be simply eliminated. As a result, automation across several aspects of your business will allow your employees to spend more time communicating with your prospects and establishing relationships with the existing ones.

Provides Better Customer Support

These days, most customers will expect personalized support at any given time of the day. Fortunately, a CRM software can provide you with that quality customer support service that your customers need. 

This is because it will allow your team to quickly identify the products your customers have purchased. Aside from that, they can also have a record of every interaction which only makes answering your customers’ questions quick and easy. 

Improves Your Products and Services

With a good CRM system, you’ll be able to gather important information from various sources. Through this, you can gain an insight as to what your customers say and feel about your business. As a result, you’ll be able to detect any problems with your offers and further improve them.

Final Thoughts

To sum it all up, a CRM software can help you:

Convert most of your prospects into salesCreate sustainable relationships with your customersImprove overall productivity of your employeesIncrease profits allowing you to improve your products and/or services

By using the right CRM software, you’ll be able to further improve your business operations or even give your startup business a major headstart.

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10 Best OCR Software to Edit and Extract Text from Image and PDF Files

How do you extract text from image files? Many of us, at some point, have had the need to use text recognition or optical character recognition (OCR) software in our professional careers. Remember the first time you asked yourself: “How can I extract text from an image?” Well, that was your first call for an OCR tool. You can extract text from an image online as well as offline, but the offline tools are generally more reliable, not to mention safer from a confidentiality and security standpoint. 

This article showcases 10 of the best OCR software utilities on the market for you to extract text from PDF images or image files. If you’ve been hunting around for ways to extract text from an image or a PDF image file, your search ends here. So, without further ado, here are the Top 10 OCR Software Tools to Edit and Extract Text from Image Files and PDFs.

#1 – PDFelement Pro

PDFelement Pro is a professional PDF editor with advanced functions for OCR, batch processing, data extraction, OCR directly from a scanner input, and other business-critical tasks to let you extract text from image files and PDF images. The functions are as comprehensive as the pricing is competitive, and it is the ideal tool for any small business or large enterprise because of its scalability and ease-of-use. No more wondering, “How can I extract text from an image” when you have this amazingly accurate tool at your disposal.

The OCR function allows users to directly edit scanned PDFs by converting them into an editable format. You can also convert image files or image-based PDF files into searchable files for archiving purposes. The ‘extract data’ feature of PDFelement’s OCR plugin allows you to select a specific area to get data from. You can also perform OCR on a large batch of files to save time and make you more efficient and productive.

If you are not from English country, PDFelement provide more than 20 languages to help your productivity without worry.  Such as English, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Catalan, and more languages.

In short, PDFelement Pro and its OCR function give you the freedom to do what you need to with your document workflows, including editing, conversion, security, organizing, form-handling, printing, and sharing.

Special Offer: Get a 7-day free trial with every subscription to the PDFelement newsletter.

#2 – Rossum

This is more of a specialized to extract data from scanned physical invoices and import them into other applications for various purposes. The AI-driven analysis engine lets users put through different invoice types without worrying about how to extract text from image files or PDFs that invoices are usually archived in. The accuracy is very high, estimated by some at around 99%.

While this niche software serves a very specific purpose, you can’t use it to edit PDFs or do anything other than extract specific text and data so you can use that information in other utilities. Although it is limited in this manner, it is well worth the money if you have a large number of paper invoices and bills from suppliers, contractors, vendors, and other third-party stakeholders.

#3 – Readiris

Yet another enterprise-grade OCR software utility is Readiris. There’s very little that this software can’t do. It can virtually extract text from image elements in your documents, and this includes signatures and more. It also works with a lot of other file formats in addition to PDFs. The interface is highly intuitive and there are ready-made help tools if you get stuck.

Language support is amazing – 138 languages and counting – and Readiris is said to be one of the fastest batch tools for OCR. Whether you need to extract text from a PDF image, a JPG, or a scanned document, Readiris has your back. Of course, if you want the whole package with bells and whistles, you’ll need to fork out a couple of hundred dollars, but even the basic version is fairly impressive and will get the job done.

#4 – ABBYY FineReader

The FineReader OCR tool from ABBYY actually powers a lot of other OCR tools and is one of the most accurate on the market. It’s not as affordable as some other options but you’ll find that the price is well justified once you start using the software for OCR and other PDF requirements.

Key features related to text recognition and the ability to extract text from image files or scans include document collation, file comparison, document organizing, annotations, etc. The interface is slick and easy to navigate around, and your OCR jobs can be converted to various output types aside from PDF.

#5 – Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

Acrobat Pro DC has been a market leader since the beginning, and that’s not about to change. However, its interface still leaves a lot to be desired. Many users have said that it is cluttered and that some features are hard to find. Fortunately, that’s not the case with the OCR module, which is very user-friendly and easy to navigate around. There’s a special feature that can scan tables, as well as a document comparison feature to check for variations and similarities.

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is, as the name suggests, well-integrated with the cloud. The Document Cloud makes it easy to share and access documents that multiple users can collaborate on from remote locations. The most compelling aspect is that most business users are likely to be familiar with Acrobat’s interface, which makes it easy to hit the ground running when you want to quickly extract text from image files and scanned documents.

#6 – FreeOCR

As the name suggests, this one’s free to use. But don’t think it’s a lightweight OCR application just because it’s free. It actually uses an open-source text recognition engine called Tesseract, which was developed by none other than HP, the makers of desktops, laptops, and computer peripherals, among other things. Its development has been sponsored by Alphabet Inc. (Google) since 2005, when it went from being a proprietary tool to an open-source conversion engine.

FreeOCR can be used to extract text from an image that’s just been scanned. You also don’t need to select document areas to perform OCR because Tesseract intuitively identifies text blocks and converts them into editable text. It’s a great free tool to have at your disposal, especially if you scan a lot of paper documents for digitization purposes.

#7 – Nanonets

Nanonets is a powerful OCR tool that offers a free plan for up to 100 images. You can extract text from image files like invoices, ID cards, photographs, tax forms, mortgage documents, etc. The tool utilizes deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, to spot text and numerals in image files and extracts them into appropriate fields.

This OCR utility also offers API access so you can build the same capabilities into your own application. An upgrade to a paid plan gives you the ability to extract tens of thousands of fields of data, along with faster processing times and other benefits.

#8 – ABBYY Cloud OCR

This is actually the API version of FineReader, also from ABBYY. The API is AI-based and handles a host of features that include text recognition, data extraction, and document conversion. 

This is a tool that you can integrate with another application using the REST API. The name suggests that it is also cloud-based, therefore accessible through the web. That makes a powerful combination along with document and workflow management systems.

#9 – OneNote

Many people know that Microsoft is a leader in voice recognition, but few are aware that they’re also great at text recognition. OneNote comes with OCR capabilities and allows you to copy text and extract text from image files. A lot of its ability depends on the legibility and clarity of the image, as is the case with other OCR tools; however, OneNote is surprisingly accurate, only getting the text wrong if it’s virtually unreadable even by a human.

The advantage of using OneNote is that it is a part of Microsoft 365, a holistic cloud-based SaaS offering that is also the most ubiquitous office productivity tool on the planet. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, you already have access to OneNote OCR.

#10 – Amazon Textract

Amazon Textract is an API tool that uses AI models that are already trained on “tens of millions” of documents from virtually every conceivable industry. Amazon’s reach has allowed this tool to be developed to a razor’s edge, and it is capable of OCR, table extraction, form extraction, and much more.

The pricing is on a pay-per-use basis and starts with a free tier linked to your Amazon Web Services account. It costs about $1.50 for 1,000 pages up to the first 1 million pages and then drops to $0.60 for anything over that. As such, it is ideal for very large workflows where thousands of documents are scanned and archived on a daily basis.

OCR and the Dream of a Paperless World

As far as that dream goes, we’re still dreaming! Physical paper is going to be around for a long time, and the only bridge between paper-based data and digital information is OCR. For that reason, we hope that this showcase of the top 10 tools to extract text from image files, scans, and other document types will help you find the right bridge for your own workflows.

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How to Make Business a Lifestyle

Business can be extremely demanding, but also very rewarding. Here’s how business is a lifestyle yet you can still enjoy your life at the same time.

If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.

This quote from Marc Anthony is an adage that holds true even today. There’s a simple fact that we can’t escape from. What we think of as “work” is typically unenjoyable. If you want to avoid work, then you have to figure out a way to make the way that you earn your livelihood enjoyable.

Many folks choose to follow their passion and start a business to do exactly this. But what they fail to remember is that business is a lifestyle. Being an entrepreneur is not just a day job, but rather a whole new way of life that you have to become accustomed to.

If you’re not ready for this shift away from the typical corporate 9-to-5 grind, then you may find yourself at odds with the quote above. You don’t enjoy what you do, so you feel like you’re working all the time instead of just 9-to-5.

In this article, we’ll teach you how to leave a business lifestyle that leaves you feeling rejuvenated and refreshed at the end of each day rather than exhausted and emotionally drained.

Find Enjoyment in the Process

The key to building a solid business life is to find enjoyment in the process. Too often, small business owners are far too focused on the end result. They want to think about the outcome. The destination is all that occupies their mind.

This destination may be a billion-dollar IPO. Or it could be a massive purchase by a private equity fund. Or maybe you want to franchise your small business and earn passive income from the operations of other branches.

Regardless of what your goal is with your company, you feel as though you can’t be fulfilled until you achieve that goal.

But here’s the real truth: the journey is the reward. Not the destination.

Strive to find enjoyment in the process. The best way to do this is to focus on all of the different ways that you are developing as a person as you work as a business owner.

For instance, you may learn how to do basic graphic design for your logo with GraphicSprings. Or perhaps your writing skills improve because of the scale of your content marketing campaign.

Whatever the daily tasks ahead of you, take pride in the fact that you are becoming a more all-rounded person every day. Take pride in your daily improvements. Celebrate the little milestones, and don’t let yourself be enamored with the idea of finally achieving a long-awaited destination.

Because when you get to that destination, you might just find out that you were missing the good stuff all along.

Business Is a Lifestyle

Business is a lifestyle. It isn’t a 9-to-5 job. It isn’t an A-B teleportation to your ultimate goal.

It’s a process. And when you embrace that process, a funny thing happens: you never work a day in your life.

For more business advice, be sure to check out the rest of the articles on the website.

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Why Electronic Invites Are Gaining Popularity Today

Since the emergence of the electronic era, the focus has shifted from the traditional way of doing things as people seek for convenience in various areas of their lives. One such area that has significantly transformed is the use of online invitations that are gaining popularity today. It is a no brainer – traditional means of sending invitations is fading away as modern service providers turn the tables. Greenvelope is taking the lead in shaping 21st-century electronic invites.

Traditional means of sending invitations mainly relied on paperwork to deliver the message to the invitees. The challenging bit was making errors when preparing these invitations would translate to an extra cost of preparing the invite. Sometimes people could run short of time, which could have significant delay implications on the event. 

Electronic invites are since becoming more popular for some of the reasons below. 

1. They Are Economical 

Saving on the costs of preparing and sending invitations is one of the main advantages of using electronic invites—the traditional means of preparing invitations required heavy use of paperwork. Moreover, any error made after printing out the cards could mean a fresh print out. Another cost would involve sending the cards in case the recipients lived in a distant place that required sending them via postage. Electronic mail is the solution to all these issues. Any error made during the preparation of the invites can be corrected only with an edit. Further, there are no hefty costs to incur when sending the cards as they can be sent to the recipients with ease without the thoughts of incurring high mailing costs. 

2. Timely And Accurate Delivery 

Even after preparing the cards and sending them via postage. It could be challenging to determine whether recipients indeed did receive the mail. Sometimes, they could miss on the dates of the invitation if they could miss checking out the sent invitation on time. The strength of electronic mail is its power to deliver the invitation via various platforms instantly, and in most cases, all recipients will receive the invitation on time. The margin for the delay is minimal, and it only depends on the recipients’ time taken to check out their communication channels. This often makes their work easier as they frequently check their smartphone devices. Most people today own smartphone devices, and this makes the delivery process instant and faster. For business people, you can use this to your advantage as one of the ways to make your next business event a success. 

3. Easy For Guests 

People today are past the era of rushing to check for mail in their mailboxes. They are in constant communication via electronic platforms. It is, therefore, easier for them to receive the mail without the strain of having to worry whether any important events are awaiting them in their unchecked physical mailboxes. The more comfortable you make it for people to receive invitations, the higher the chances of having a good turn out to your organized event. 

4. Convenient Updates 

It is easier to give recipients updates with electronic mail. Sometimes there can be last-minute cancellations, change of venues, or change of the time for the meetings for unavoidable reasons. Updating people via electronic mail requires only a click, and the message is sent to all prospective attendees. Giving timely updates on the state of the event makes it easier to protect your attendees against potential inconveniences that might arise without updates at their fingertips. Updating your attendees can increase your chances of running a successful event. 

5. They Are Neat 

Electronic invitations are neat and mostly with a better appearance, unlike their printed counterparts. With Electronic mail, what you design is what your recipients get. You don’t need to worry about ink distortion from the printing press. You can design beautiful and appealing cards with any color complexion with the assurance that your recipients will receive the invitation in that cute original graphical design. 

6. Reaching A Broader Audience 

Electronic invites place unlimited power in your hands to reach a broader audience. If you are doing email invitations, the only limit is the number of emails in your contact list, which you can always improve so you can reach out to a broader audience with your objective. Amazingly, you can send invites to a global audience, whether they are at the heart of Washington DC or a local village in Vietnam.  

7. Faster Delivery And Faster Responses 

So long as the contacts are correct, delivery for electronic mail is instant. You don’t need to worry about any delays. Some electronic-mail providers can even provide you with a delivery message acknowledging the receipt of your invitation. You can tell whether the receiver has opened your email, from what location, and the time. 

Responses via electronic mail are faster. Once the receiver acts on your invitation either by accepting or declining, you can get instant notifications. Such information is crucial in planning the event with an accurate number of attendees instead of gambling with an uncertain number where they might turn up in large numbers and, in some cases, in small numbers causing inconvenience to you.  

8. Supporting Climate Change Movements

When you use electronic invites, you minimize the use of print paper. Less printing means less demand on paper, less demand on tree logs, minimizing logging. There will be more trees to absorb carbon, and the environment will be good control. The world today is wrestling with high concentrations of carbon that are increasing global warming. The effect is disastrous to the environments with increasing pollution and heat posing a danger to both flora and fauna. 

9. Customization 

You can easily customize electronic invites as per the recipient’s name. Electronic invitation services provider systems provide you with parameters to group recipients and run commands to apply global settings to all invitations you send. It is as easy as composing a standard mail and then using personalized settings to send the invite addressing each recipient with their name. 

Conclusion 

Electronic invites’ popularity will keep growing. They help to make more savings and do support timely and accurate delivery. It makes work easier for recipients to receive invites and easy for the sender to dispatch updates. The mails are as neat as design with the potential to reach a broad audience with faster deliveries and responses. The invites are easy to customize and can help support climate change by reducing the demand for paper from trees. 

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Top 5 Skills every Professional Chartered Accountant must have

For any job to be perfect, it is better to identify the skills that could lead you to success. It will not only increase your job satisfaction but also make it easier for you to envision your long term career aspirations. To be a successful chartered accountant, you need to work on both technical as well as soft skills. 

Read on to learn more about the essential skills that you need to master to be a professional chartered accountant.

Communication Skills: Chartered accountants develop strong communication skills to deal with clients and to give specialized services as per their specific needs. CA’s require soft communication skills to conduct board meetings and to interact with their clientele, present data, and to make a specific point clearly in an easily understandable way.

It doesn’t matter what your job entails or the kind of environment you deal with, strong communication skills are incredibly valuable. Well-developed interpersonal skills to communicate well help to build a bond and to work efficiently as a team member. The ability to proclaim yourself when meeting new people in order to establish profitable associations will always serve you well.

Organization: Chartered accountants have to juggle a lot of responsibilities at once; they need to have an organized strategy to keep track of all their accountabilities including managing portfolios, transactions, meeting their deadlines, and follow proper reporting guidelines. They use a lot of apps and programs designed to stay highly organized like day planners, schedulers, calendars including many other updated tools. 

Their job requires a lot of documentation to keep track of important paperwork. It is better to hone your organizational skills prior to entering the profession as this is the best way to stay on top of deadlines. Start working on organizing your life and responsibilities now to master your organizational skills. 

Critical Thinking: Accountants must approach situations critically by considering all variables and potential risks because they constantly encounter discrepancies and errors, which could have serious ramifications for their clients. Critical thinking is considered as one of the crucial skills for an accountant. To interpret the story behind the numbers, they constantly need to apply their critical thinking skill to analyse the situation and to devise strategies and to be able to spot trends and find solutions.

Time Management: Accountants have to work on multiple projects at once. They have to manage myriad tasks and competing priorities to settle down everything on time. To provide satisfactory results in a stipulated time period, accountants need to get hold of their multitasking skills in coordination with time management strategies. 

Working on diverse projects and being able to accomplish their projects on time is considered as a trait that separates the chaff from the husk. It also helps them to maintain a healthy work-life balance. 

Analytical Skills: Accounting is a detail-oriented meticulous work that requires accuracy and confidence. They have to analyse a wide range of financial data to review common accounting reports to identify trends and point out anomalies. Analytical skills help them to focus on their ability to perform budgeting work and to make future projections so that their analysis doesn’t yield inconsistent results. They have to determine whether or not the facts and figures compute. 

So, after going through this blog if you have come to a point of realization where chartered accountancy seems to be a perfect fit for your career, then it is the perfect time to master your skills with a professional C.A. course. If you’re an accountant getting ready to hit the job market, then it’s better to hone your skills before jumping into the market. 

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Online Casino Firms have been paying out heavy fines to the UKGC

United Kingdom Gambling Commission is the regulatory body in charge of overseeing the fairness of mobile casinos in the UK. This organization is known for taking swift action when needed and has fined casinos huge amounts over the years for breaking the rules. They diligently work towards maintaining a level playing field, while taking measures to protect the most vulnerable players. Recently, online casino firms had to pay out heavy fines for failing to fight money-laundering and protect problem gamblers.

Gambling operators fined £19.6m in 2019

The UK GC was particularly active in 2019, as the online gambling market in the United Kingdom kept expanding. UK gambling firms came under their scrutiny and many were found lacking, which resulted in a combined £19.6m in penalties. More than a third of the money paid came from Daub Alderney, while Paddy Power Betfair were also charged £2.2m for their transgressions. The other half of the fines came from other gambling operators who were unable or unwilling to respect their legal obligations.

The Gambling Commission was looking for repeat offenders and had no problem in finding such online casinos. One of the biggest concerns was in regard to online casino firms allowing problem gamblers to keep playing. In many cases, they failed to prevent players from gambling beyond their personal affordability, which led to financial ruin. Online casinos and bookmakers who apply for a license from the UK GC are expected to protect vulnerable punters, but they often fail in their quest.

The impact of the UK GC fines

Delinquent gambling operators were fined heavily to serve as an example for other online casinos and bookmakers that might be tempted to break the rules. £19.6m is a lot of money, but it only represents less than 1% of the yearly profits recorded by the industry. Studies highlight the fact that the amount is also low when compared to the gambling related harm that is estimated to be inflicted upon UK punters.

A significant percentage of the fines went to the Treasury, who got £13m while the rest of the amount went to the affected consumers. What the UK GC tries to achieve is to discourage online casinos from preying on the most vulnerable players. Studies clearly indicate the fact that a significant percentage of the money made by online gambling operators comes from a small number of punters. They only represent a fraction of the players’ pool, so the losses they suffer are massive.

Players who feel the risk of gambling addiction can self-exclude temporarily or permanently from online casinos. The Gambling Commission is particularly harsh on those casinos who continue to accept bets from players who chose to self excluded. The heavy fines should have a deterring effect, but they only represent a small percentage of the industry profits. At the end of the day, players need to exercise restraint and enjoy the games moderately to keep online gambling fun and secure. 

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Starting A Business: The Best & Worst Businesses To Start

Everyone dreams of running their own business. It’s pretty much the definition of the American Dream, but it’s a lot harder than most people expect. Perhaps, one of the hardest things to do is decide what type of business you want to start. Sure, you might have the burning desire to kick start a business that sells jazzy little outfits for bunnies, but you have to make sure your idea will ultimately generate income. On the other hand, some people aim to get into an industry that’s growing rapidly because they think there’s no way they can’t succeed. A good example of this would be the CBD industry because it’s expected to reach 20 billion by 2024, so everyone is thinking about ways to get involved. As a result, there has been an increase of successful vape companies because they have become so popular, but sometimes that just means it’s harder to assert yourself within that field due to oversaturation. However, if you’re still thinking about the CBD industry you should do some research to gauge what it takes to succeed, and at the moment, CBDfx vape pens set the standard. 

Here are some other businesses ideas that are good, mediocre, to just a flat out bad. Ultimately, it’s up to you and if you feel like you can make it successful––go for it. So, let’s jump in and check out some of these businesses ideas!

Cleaning Service

Sounds simple enough, right? People are always going to need houses, apartments, offices, schools, and much more cleaned. This is one of the easiest ways businesses to start because the overhead is low and you can easily gain clientele through word of mouth. You can even start off with just one other person to build the business up, and then hire some other workers as you grow to increase your revenue by increasing the number of places you can be at one time––cleaning. The average price for house cleaning is around 80-160 per house, and if you’re cleaning 2-3 houses a day, you’re making some great profit!

Mobile Hair & Nails

This is another industry that will never die––beauty. People will always need their hair and nails done, and as we’ve seen with this current pandemic, the mobile hair and nail businesses are thriving because most shops around the country are still shut down due to coronavirus concerns. The overhead for an actual salon can be pricey, and it can be exhausting trying to find other beauticians to fill those chairs and pay their rent. That’s why you’ll save big and boost your revenue when you take your skills on the road. There are also some great apps you can use to gain clientele and appointments!

Restaurants 

Cooking is one of the most prized hobbies in the world. Many feel cooking is a great way to unwind while whipping up something amazing for our loved ones, but cooking as a profession is a whole new ball game. Staggering amounts of people quit their day jobs to fulfill their life-long dream of owning their own restaurant, but are faced with the grim reality that 60 % of restaurants fail within the first year, and 80% fail within 5 years. Those are the steep numbers that make this one of the more riskier businesses to start. If you still feel the burning desire to hit the hot grease, consider a food truck or even a catering service. They both still have their challenges, but what business doesn’t, and if it’s actually your passion you have to find a route that works for you. 

Ecommerce 

Ecommerce businesses are versatile. You can start any kind of business on the web in little to no time with great platforms like Shopify or Wix, but the hard part most business owners don’t anticipare is driving traffic to the website. You’ll have to dedicate a lot of time, effort, and funding to create that organic traffic that will translate to sales. It’s not that ecommerce is not a good idea, because they definitely can succeed, it just takes a lot of work to get that traffic. Then you also have to factor in what kind of ecommerce store you want to start because this can make a difference as well. 

Graphic Design

As we sit here and discuss starting a business, one thing all business owners need is graphic design. No matter what industry people are in––they will need graphic design for flyers, logos, pamphlets, and much more! The hourly fee charged varies depending on your experience level, but the average hourly rate charged is anywhere from $50-$80 an hour, but can go up to $150 if you’re very skilled. The best part of starting this type of business is that you can start it in the comfort of your own home!

Conclusion 

Starting a business is exciting, challenging, and most of all, rewarding. Whatever business you decide to start, just know that all of your hard work will pay off! Use these helpful tips to navigate through the tough decision of what business you want to dive into!

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Withstanding the Forces of Nature: 6 Ways to Improve a Building’s Structural Integrity

Building structural integrity is the most important consideration when buying an existing building or when an architect and contractor are designing and building a new structure for a client. No one wants a building unable to withstand normal weather and environmental conditions. A new worry is about catastrophic events like earthquakes and hurricanes or tornadoes. Some buildings fair better than others and engineers and other building professionals are studying why this is so. they want to learn lessons on what helps a building keep its structural integrity under the worst conditions.

Before Purchasing a Commercial Building Have It Inspected

When considering purchasing a building or having one built, have the plans or actual building inspected by an engineering company. A company such as cochraneng.com has options for designing buildings or for adding structural support to existing buildings. This type of company can save the building owner a lot of money and grief by pointing out deficiencies in an existing building or in building plans.

Look for a company that offers services including civil engineering, architecture, construction supervision, environmental guidance, land surveying, and other needed services for the planning and construction of a project or the retrofitting of an existing building. Some of the types of buildings and projects that need this type of engineering expertise include commercial and retail buildings, government buildings and construction projects, transportation industry, institutional buildings, industrial projects, residential building projects, and water resource type projects.

Important Considerations Before A Building Project is Started

Before the ground can be broken, there are things to accomplish. Land must be surveyed as needed. some types of surveys include Land Title Surveys, Property Boundary Surveys, Subdivision Platting, Easement surveys, Construction Stakeouts, FEMA Elevation Certificates and LOMA’s, Surveyor’s Real Property Reports, Topographic Surveying, and more. The building must be planned and constructed within the property lines with required distances from property lines and so on.

Then there are environmental considerations to handle. A large building needs proper support. A building should not be built on unstable ground such as sand or swampland. The engineering company professionals will test the building site for stability and other factors that determine site feasibility, soil type, stability and treatment recommendations, and more.

Some New Ways to Build Structures For Disaster Stability

Though no one can prevent natural disasters architects, builders, and architects can do their best to make buildings more able to survive them. Some innovative new technologies include:

1. a self-healing concrete that can fix itself. The concrete is infused with capsules of sodium silicate. when a fracture happens the capsules open, releasing a gell that hardens to fix the crack. Other methods rely on glass capillaries, polymer microcapsules and bacteria to provide self-healing properties.

2. Virtual and Augmented Reality systems to help workers or inspectors examine a building before it is finished to catch structural issues in the construction process when they can be repaired.

3. Prefabrication involves constructing many building parts off-site under controlled conditions where quality control is easier. Then, the components are trucked to the site and installed.

4. Boom Pumps are becoming more popular for mixing and moving concrete to where it is needed with less labor and more efficiency. This method improves a building’s structural integrity.

5. Carbon Nanotubes are a new product that can be inserted into other building elements such as concrete, metal, glass, and other materials to increase their strength a lot.

6. Anti-Seismic Bricks or sisbicks specially designed to resist earthquake damage. They can be used in partition walls and be added to traditional buildings.

What Makes Buildings Structurally Fail?

Structural integrity is a building’s ability to support the structural load without breaking. it is the ability of a component or material to hold together under a load and perform its designed function. Structural failure is the loss of this structural integrity or the failure to keep load-bearing capacity. Types of structural failures consist of many things such as collapsing roofs, manufacturing errors that can cause building collapse, materials that corrode or break down making them unstable, the use of defective materials that fail over time, and the lack of planning for unexpected problems such as sabotage, vandalism, and natural disasters.

Structural failure can also be caused by improper placement of a building on unstable, or improperly prepare ground that has not been stabilized and supported. Failure can also be caused by a building being used in a way that it was not intended to be used such as moving too heavy equipment. Buildings can collapse, causing death and injury. Bridges and other structures can collapse.

Building integrity can be corrected in some cases if the defects are discovered in time and appropriate steps are taken to stabilize the building. Building maintenance is an important tool in helping buildings remain stable and safe for long periods of time. When a person is considering moving a business to an existing building, they should have an engineering firm inspect the building and advise them if their business can be supported by the structure. The engineering company can also devise a remodeling plan that will make the structure able to handle the proposed loads.

All buildings and other structures should have regular inspections and maintenance to maintain structural integrity. Cracks and movement of walls or other building elements should be taken seriously. Buildings should be well-designed with adequate support, then maintained on an ongoing basis. Whenever a catastrophic event happens, all buildings must be inspected for damage caused by that earthquake or other event. Then repairs must be made to keep them safe.

The goal must always be to build and maintain structures to be structurally sound over time and safe for the public to use. Buildings that are found to have structural defects that might make them unsafe should be unoccupied until they are repaired or in extreme cases storm down and replaced by a structurally sound building or structure. Engineering companies are a necessary part of the commercial construction industry because they have the experience and knowledge to prevent building defects and disasters in the future.

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Reasons Not to Shy Away from a Business Appraisal

If you own a business, whether in Miami, South Florida or beyond, getting an appraisal of the worth of your company can bring many advantages. However, the costs associated with conducting a business appraisal can be prohibitive. These costs can put business owners off, but as any business broker worth their salt will tell you, not carrying out such an appraisal is a mistake. What follows is a list of important reasons why you should consider conducting a business appraisal in Miami even if you have no plans of selling your business any time soon. 

1. Transferring Shares to Unincorporated Parties

In the United States, business owners are legally permitted to gift shares up to an exclusion amount of $14,000 to an unincorporated party such as a child or relative before being subject to federal gift taxation. A business appraisal at the time of transfer can help you know the value of your shares and whether your gifts comply with IRS requirements.

2. Securing Investment

Attracting new investment for your business usually proves impossible if you cannot supply potential investors with a comprehensive breakdown of how much your business is worth. While different metrics can be used to calculate the value of a business, using an accredited, third-party business appraisal is recommended.

3. Donating to Charity

An advantage of giving to charity may be that your business receives certain tax deductions for your generosity. In order to qualify for tax deductions, you first have to provide the IRS with an accurate and up-to-date valuation of your business. The best way to do this is by carrying out a business appraisal.

4. For Divorce Proceedings

On top of the emotional stress that can accompany divorce, the legal proceedings involved could have important financial implications. In many US states, your partner is entitled to 50 percent of your total value as part of any divorce settlement. The worth of your business interests will be factored into these proceedings, which means that a business appraisal will need to be carried out.

5. Legal Settlements

If an insurance company refuses to cover the costs of legal proceedings in a business dispute, assets may need to be sold off to finance the debt. A business appraisal will need to be conducted in order to fairly value and sell these assets.

6. Selling the Business

In the event that a business owner decides to sell up, coming up with an asking price that maximizes sale potential is essential. The best way to learn how much you can realistically ask for your business without putting off potential buyers is to hire an unbiased third-party business appraisal firm.

7. Planning for Death

As a co-owner in a privately-held business, you should always ensure that there is an agreement in place that details what is to be done if you pass away. Typically, this is covered in a buy-sell agreement. However, a business appraisal needs to be conducted to break down what the business and its assets are worth before any buy-sell agreement can be drafted.

8. For Informational Purposes

Even if you are not actively looking to sell your business, or your business is not the subject of a legal dispute, learning how much your company is worth is valuable. An accurate valuation and a clear vision of your assets and liabilities will help guide your business plan for the coming financial year.

Although a proper business appraisal may be costly, the reasons you should get one carried out are manifold. At A. Neumann & Associates, LLC, we are one of the most experienced and reputable Miami Dade appraisal firms currently operating in South Florida. Contact us today and have our business appraisal professionals aid you in the process of finding out how much your business is worth.

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