Balancing Business and Law Blog

Social Media for Business - Twitter and More

March 25, 2009

I finally ventured onto Twitter after reading a very practical and helpful article entitled "Understanding Twitter: Why Twitter is Less Like Facebook and More Like Email" by Naomi Pollack posted on Biznik (another social networking site). I found myself a bit intimidated by the overall concept: how in the world to find people to follow and why would they want to follow me. I found a few people I knew and did a few searches on topics of interest and began to see what tweets were posted by these people. I found so much of interest and began "re-tweeting" (forwarding) them to people I knew would find them interesting - both on and off of Twitter. I then found myself sharing other news about my practice, clients, and other apsects of my world of interest to my "followers." Now I have followers, too. It takes a bit of getting used to, but is addictive as most of these media are. Feel free to follow me on Twitter -- I am @MichelBomberger.

Recession Protection for your Business

March 18, 2009

I am getting calls almost daily from clients and prospective clients trying to protect themselves from high outstanding receivables, vendors declaring bankruptcy, and cash flow shortfalls. As these trends have come on quickly and relatively recently for many of these businesses, they do not have structures and systems in place to ensure collectability of receivables and adequate cash flow reserves. I have counseled companies on how to collect on bad debt and manage bankruptcy proceedings but more importantly, how to proactively create processes to protect against high receivables. Steps as simple as ensuring that contracts have penalty and interest provisions and actually insitituting them, obtaining personal guarantees from other business owners, and billing and collecting more frequently can drastically reduce the outstanding receivables and bad debt. In reading the April 2009 Seattle Business Monthly, I encountered "A Recession Checklist" which outlines these, among many other, ways a business should position itself to ride out the recession.

Experimenting for Growing Businesses

March 05, 2009

My firm is in the throes of growth planning (yes, in the midst of the downturn - what better time?). Yesterday, I worked with a business coach on planning some of the new offerings of the firm to drive the business' growth. He suggested gathering best practices by contacting other firms as to their experiences with these types of offerings. Immediately following that meeting, I encountered an article in the February Harvard Business Review entitled "How to Design Smart Business Experiments." It emphasized the need to have a test and learn culture that promotes ongoing testing and learning. The article brought me back to a comment I heard from the coach yesterday: "The only thing that is certain is change." Accept it, embrace it, and make the most of it.

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