Guest Contributor on Money Questions and Answers Blog

Foodie Turned Restaurateur? How to Open Your Own Restaurant Eatery

Every foodie dreams of owning a little eatery, café or restaurant. Nothing sounds better than owning a beautiful establishment filled with your favorite goodies, whether it be exquisite pastries, signature pastas, or Japanese fusion cuisine.

Once you start dreaming, the ideas bubble up. Yet opening a restaurant isn’t so simple. Running a restaurant is demanding and saps a lot of your energy.

How to Open Your Own Restaurant

Most restaurants close within the first five years, so investing can become a huge financial burden. It takes true dedication and passion for becoming a successful restaurateur, but you too can achieve this ultimate goal. Here are the basic steps to own an eatery of your own.

Create a Concept

When guests go to a restaurant, they don’t just want food; they want an entire atmosphere including scenery, ambiance and excellent cuisine. The restaurant industry is extremely competitive, so you want to make sure you stand out. In order to do this, you need to create a concept. The concept is the all-encompassing experience you want your guests to have.

For most, the concept derives from the food. Will you serve Italian, French, American, Vietnamese, or a new experimental concept? Perhaps you’re inspired by your mother’s cooking when you were a child or you’re a chef who specializes in seafood. These are all important factors to consider when designing the restaurant.

Next, you need to understand your clientele. Successful upscale restaurants, trendy eateries, bars, fast food and more all have a distinct atmosphere that keeps people coming. There is always something special about a successful restaurant that sticks in the mind of customers and it’s not just the food.

Top 5 Tips to Find Better Trucking Finance for Your Business

by Guest Contributor

With many Canadians taking on trucking and transportation jobs, the need for truck finance has been on the rise. The only sad thing about the trucking business here is that very few business owners own a truck for themselves.

Those that do only have one or two trucks, which means they cannot meet the demand out there. It is at this point that truck finance comes into play.

5 Tips to Find Better Trucking Finance

While you may qualify for trucking finance, it would be wise to check the various options available and other features that can help you save even more. Some of the key features to look for when shopping for financing include:

Budget For Repayments

While it would be advisable to go for adequate and manageable truck financing, take some time to determine how much you can put out in repayments. Consider going for an affordable truck financing option, and one can be managed easily.

Trucks are supposed to be a significant investment; this may mean you have to pay much more in monthly repayments that you anticipated. Nevertheless, going for a financing option such as unsecured truck finance or others befitting your financial goals and circumstances would be an excellent idea.

An Introduction to Online Trading Platforms

by Guest Contributor

Trading on the financial markets can be a good thing to consider if you have some capital you’d like to try and increase through good investment. There are lots of different styles of trading, from day trading with CFDs to playing the stock market, and you can choose the markets that interest you most whether it is the foreign exchange market, which is strongly affected by current affairs, stocks and shares, or commodities like precious metals, food and oil.

How Online Trading Has Developed

The advent of online trading platforms is what has made it possible for ordinary people to get involved in some of these markets. In the past, before fast internet connections and good trading software, some markets like forex were really only accessible to banks and other professionals, and trading stocks and shares were far more difficult than it is now.

Of course, the fact it is now also possible to access so much financial news from all over the world instantly, and join communities where people share their trading experiences and tips also makes becoming a good trader far easier in the internet age. If you are looking to get started, then as well as doing some online research into what to trade and how to create your strategy, you’ll also need to know a bit about trading platforms and be able to choose one that will work for you.

What Are Online Trading Platforms?

A good online trading platform is essentially a full environment in which you can execute your trades in real time, follow price changes, and access some market analysis. You gain access to a trading platform by having an account, which you can deposit money into and withdraw any money that isn’t tied up in trades from.

Why Looking After Your Business Finances Is Important

by Guest Contributor

Keeping on top of your personal finances is hugely important if you want to enjoy a secure future without financial pressures and avoid getting into bad situations. The same is true when it comes to the business finances of any business you run.

If you have a small company, you may think everything is okay as long as you aren’t clearly making a loss or encountering serious cash flow problems. However, if you are not doing enough to control your finances, you are losing out on a lot of benefits as well as exposing your business (and by extension your income) to uncertainty and risk.

Looking After Your Business Finances

Here we look at why good financial control is important in a business of any size:

Planning

When you have a firm understanding of exactly where money is going within your business and have good processes in place for financial management, it is far easier to plan for things that you want to do to help your business grow.

Whether it is expanding to a new location, hiring more people, or launching a new marketing campaign, without a good grasp of what your business’ financial state is you can’t really make good plans. Good financial management makes forecasting for the future not only possible but worthwhile, enabling you to make decisions and strategize more effectively.

Financially Resilient – How to Stop Living From Paycheck to Paycheck

by Guest Contributor

Financial problems have struck almost everybody at one point in their lives. Whether it’s a sudden, unexpected expense, a layoff or just working a job that barely covers your expenses, financial problems can lead to high levels of stress and anxiety.

One of the biggest financial concerns many people face is that of “living paycheck to paycheck.” Stretching yourself so thin that you hardly have any money left over each pay period is a dangerous financial game to play. But it doesn’t have to be a game that you play.

How to Stop Living From Paycheck to Paycheck

There are some tried-and-true ways you can stop living paycheck to paycheck and get your financial future in order.

Set Financial Goals

There is really nothing you can do to secure your financial future unless you actually know what you want that future to be. You can’t just say, “I want money in the bank and a house,” because it’s very hard to judge how close you are to achieving that goal. Instead, you need to set specific, measurable goals that are like mile markers along your journey to financial freedom.

Think of all of the things you want to have in 10 or 20 years and write them down. Then, put them in order from most important to least important. This will give you a hierarchy that will show you exactly what you want out of life and it makes it real to you because you’ve written it down.

Next, do a little research and figure out how much money you will need to achieve each goal. Now you will know about how much money you will need for everything so you can start working on a way to achieve those goals.

Five Significant Ways to Become Indispensable in Business

by Guest Contributor

Rick Wong is the author of Winning Lifelong Customers With The Five Abilities

The following article is a guest post by Rick Wong, author of Winning Lifelong Customers With The Five Abilities. If you’d like to contribute a guest post to Money Q&A, be sure to check out our guest posting guidelines.

Competition is fiercer today than ever before, and no matter how much you focus on data, analytics, and performance, it may surprise you that what ultimately matters the most to people is the human touch.

Companies don’t make decisions—people do… and people make the most crucial business decisions for personal reasons.

It may come as a surprise to some, but in today’s fast-moving, data-driven marketplace, where people have more choices than ever before, the personal factors are more important than ever.

With over thirty-five years of experience working and growing revenue at Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and other Fortune 100 companies, I created a clearly written guide for salespeople and CxOs that defines the most important ‘outside the contract’ factors that decision-makers care about the most when deciding to make the initial purchase and those critical repeat purchases. You’ll never be left asking yourself,” What do I do now?” because you’ll have a framework to answer that question quickly and correctly.

5 Ways to Become Indispensable in Business

These are the critical factors that keep people coming back for more. Here’s a summary of The Five Abilities:

1. Optimize Your Visability*

Be consciously and consistently seen in the right way, at the right time, by the right people. Perfect your messaging so you know you can get people curious in less than 30 seconds, delivering heightened value-add that surprises them and exceeds their expectations.

Design every communication so that every time people see, listen to or watch something by or about you, they will quickly pay more attention, and naturally step in, bring you closer, and focus on learning more about what you can do for them.

2. Demonstrate Your Credability*

Show your creds! Demonstrate superior knowledge and utilize your experience in ways that prove you know how to help people. Then deliver what you’ve promised. In fact, deliver more than what you promised.

Impress every prospect, customer, decision-maker, and influencer and make it a total commitment to offer and give helpful advice and assistance that goes beyond your stated product or service. Be consistent and you will get referrals and achieve loyalty that opens the doors to new opportunities.