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Finance tip: Savings 
Use stop orders to overcome bad discipline. For those of you who are wanting to put aside some money each month (which is hopefully all of you), but are struggling to maintain the discipline needed, consider using stop orders from your main bank account to your savings account. This is essentially where you set up an automatic transfer into your savings - it goes off on a specific day, and you don’t have to worry about it.
Once you get used to the idea of the money going off your account automatically, you’ll soon stop seeing at as ‘your’ money, and won’t factor it into your daily spending (just like you do for other automatic deductions like insurance, etc.). For those who’ve been battling to overcome the urge to spend that bit extra, instead of saving it, this is a great way to get around your struggle with personal discipline, and start building the nest-egg you know you need…
Business tip: Marketing/PR
Make yourself seem bigger than you are. For those thousands of small businesses out there that are one-man shows, or only have a small handful of employees, there are a number of ways to make yourself seem bigger than you really are: 1.) Get somebody else to record your voice messages – if someone calls and realises that you record your own voice messages, you may come across as a bit small-fry. 2.) Mind your mailing address. Using a residential address is a dead give-away, so many businesses opt to get a PO Box. Go one step better, and instead of using the PO Box address, rather just use ‘Suite’ and your PO Box number, and the street address of the post office. This way, people think you have your own suite of offices, which immediately makes you look like one of the big boys. 3.) Watch what titles you use when writing in the public domain. If trying to get the attention of executives, don’t call yourself the CEO or founder, as that screams start-up. Rather call yourself a director or a vice-president. This is also useful when negotiating, as you can ‘defer’ to your ‘superiors’ when getting pressed on price or terms – you can say “I’ll have to check with the board on that one” before turning down their offer. They don’t know that your ‘board’ consists of you and your pooch. 4.) Get a business phone line. Many potential clients shirk away from businesses that only list cell numbers, so make sure you have a land-line (or, even better, an 0800 or 0861 multi-call line). If you want to then forward calls to your cellphone for convenience, go ahead. 5.) Be wary of free email addresses. As cost-effective and easily-attainable as free webmail addresses seem, they do tend to make you look like a wannabe. Rather get a techie to register you a domain, and then list a couple of email addresses on that domain (won’t cost you much). Again, you can then forward all mail that comes into these addresses to your free webmail account. There are plenty more ways to pull this off, but all in all, remember that perception is everything, so you don’t have to be big and established to bring the business in, you only have to seem big and established…
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