Posted by: on November 23
Business owners with experience know that doing international business isn't as simple as selling your product in another country. A key consideration when buying and selling overseas is how to best leverage the foreign exchange (FX) market, which is the largest financial market in the world, with trillions of dollars worth of currencies changing hands every day. Here are three tips to keep in mind when conducting international business and dealing in foreign currencies.
1. Streamline all FX information within your finance department, so you can best determine your next steps. By streamlining all FX information in the same location, finance executives will be able to leverage the best FX strategies for all currencies.
2. Carefully evaluate what currency is best when invoicing in a particular country, and recognize the benefits and how they will affect your sales and bottom line. Often companies will want to make purchasing the product as easy as possible in international markets and that means pricing in the local currency. Make sure you understand how the exchange rates will affect your profit and whether if you should implement a hedging strategy.
3. Don't do it alone. Partner with a FX expert to capture the best FX payment options, help you define risks and develop strategies that are optimized for your unique exposure and risk needs. Corporate foreign exchange is a niche skill within the corporate finance department. It is OK not to understand the finer points of FX and it is wise to ask for help in effectively managing it.
Now more than ever reaching out to global customers is within the small business owner's reach. However, the importance of balancing the cost and complexity with an appropriate FX strategy cannot be underestimated.
Ryan Gibbons
Managing Partner
GPS Capital Markets
Salt Lake City
Posted by: on November 20
Today's typical user has about a dozen systems they need to access with a user name and password. While passwords are an important and almost inevitable part of our everyday lives, they can put your organization at risk of financial and reputational damage if they are mishandled or compromised. Thus, it is important to be careful when choosing a password and logging in. Here are the "ABCs" of password management, with advice on how best to protect yourself when accessing your small business’ information—and your own:
1. Always be confidential. You should never share your password with others, period. Anyone else who has your passwords can impersonate you—accessing information and making transactions without your knowledge and leaving you to deal with the resulting problems. If employees want your password to access a given service, have them contact your IT department and get their own accounts. Nor should you reveal existing passwords when getting computer service; your help desk should be able to change your password for you or log on with its own account. And always be aware of your environment, watching out for ‘shoulder surfers’ who might watch you access your systems.
2. Be current. Make sure the computer you are using is up-to-date with the latest security software from one of today’s main vendors. Be sure, too, that you have an active subscription to updates and have regularly scheduled automatic scans of your system. Antivirus software alone is not enough, so look for a complete client-protection package from the leading vendors, including anti-spyware, anti-malware, host-intrusion prevention, and a desktop firewall. Unless you are properly protected, software can be installed on your system to watch keyboard input and easily steal your passwords without you noticing anything,
3. Consistently break consistency. Don’t use the same password for all systems. If your Gmail password is the same as your Chase Online Banking password, someone who compromises one system would logically and successfully attempt to use that password on all of your other systems. Separate any work passwords from personal banking passwords, and keep these distinct from your personal e-mail and social networking accounts. This limits your risk exposure.
Jared Beck
Senior Security Architect
Dimension Data
New York
Posted by: on November 19
IT managers today are looking to curb the energy hogs in their data centers in order to limit spiraling energy costs by reducing power consumption, as well as cut overall environmental impact. Reducing data center power usage is a twofold process—the product of actually reducing power consumption by removing elements from the environment, as well as introducing more efficient components that can handle greater workloads, using the same or less power.
To get started, your organization might reduce power usage by retiring older systems and consolidating them onto virtualized platforms. This would enable you to more efficiently pool physical resources and improve network management capabilities. At the onset of consolidation, there is typically an immediate drop in the amount of power used, but the practice of consolidation and virtualization must continue in order to keep the power growth curve moving in the right direction. Occasionally an organization might see a brief rise in power usage when virtualizing for the first time, due to the need to install the new physical servers on which the virtual servers will eventually run. This spike in growth will reverse as older servers are virtualized and their former physical counterparts decommissioned.
Eventually, your organization may return to the same amount of power consumed pre-virtualization. By the time this happens, however, you should be realizing much higher workloads than previously possible, and thus increasing the overall efficiency of data center power usage.
As you look for additional avenues to reduce power consumption, also consider these quick tips:
1. Monitor the "lifecycle of usefulness" of your power and distribution systems. Inefficient equipment—often seven years old or older—can cause up to 50% of the energy you pay for to be dissipated as heat.
2. Look for ways to optimize your current cooling strategy, especially for modern, high-density equipment. Consider adopting "in-row" or "in-cabinet" cooling strategies that use less energy in heat removal.
3. Make sure your data center instrumentation includes sensors that enable you to monitor heat generation, power consumption, and overall cooling effectiveness.
Kris Domich
Principal Consultant
Dimension Data
New York
Posted by: on November 18
The recession has created new competitive conditions. Led by the consumer who will no longer pay full retail, the discounting mentality has moved down the supply chain. Every business is under pressure to lower prices in order to maintain relationships. Long-term partnerships based on excellent service and high quality have fallen by the wayside under the pall of price deflation.
In this climate, business owners are forced to scrutinize pricing. Ask yourself these questions: Am I charging the fullest price possible for my products or services? Are some customers being undercharged? What will the market bear? Should I put pricing strategies in place to adjust for seasonal demand or excess capacity at certain times of the year?
Budgets and forecasts established for customers and business units will help you answer these questions. Ideally, you should know your fixed and variable costs and have an understanding or an estimate of each customer’s profitability and contribution to your bottom line. Pricing strategy based on these numbers will assist you to meet the market’s pressures more effectively. You may find that you are undercharging or that some clients may be willing to pay more, even in this climate, for value-adds such as exceptional service.
Chris Carey
President
Chris Carey Advisors
New York
Posted by: on November 17
Forecasting seems like a simple idea, yet many entrepreneurs don’t put it into practice. Forecasting is a valuable tool that will give you better control of your business and help establish a measure of predictability in today’s tough times. It will enable you to evaluate your company’s performance in both the short and long term.
You should develop a budget and profitability forecast for each business unit, office, or region of your company. Forecasts should incorporate fixed and variable costs and the projected profitability—not just sales or revenues—for each customer or account. The total of all projected customer activities in each business unit will give you a basis to build real budget estimates.
Once you begin forecasting on an ongoing basis, you’ll see that it is also a useful exercise that reveals weaknesses or inefficiencies in your business and helps you identify specific areas that need improvement. If you could predict what would happen tomorrow, what would you change today? No one can predict the future, but a forecasting regimen can show you what you need to fix now to compete more effectively next month, next quarter, and next year.
Chris Carey
President
Chris Carey Advisors
New York
