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Get ready for the holiday shopping season

December 8, 2022

Holiday shopping season is just around the corner. (Yes, really.) There’s plenty to do over the next few weeks to get ready, so we’ve put together a series of tips to help you prepare.

The reality is that, for some of you, it has felt like the holiday season year-round since the onset of the pandemic. Still, peak season transactions can account for 30 percent or more of some retailers’ total yearly volume. Combine increased transaction volumes with targeted promotions, new payment methods, and new transaction channels and you may find it is harder to keep up with emerging fraud trends. A common way to combat increased fraud is to send more transactions to manual review—ultimately increasing overhead costs and potentially delaying customers from receiving their purchases.

Drawing on the experience and insights of Cybersource Managed Risk Analysts worldwide, we’ve put together a series of tips to help you prepare for holiday shopping season and protect your business against fraud and risk while delivering a frictionless experience for genuine customers.

7 tips for gracefully managing employees during the holidays

November 29, 2022

By Alysha Love

There’s no changing the holiday rush, but small business owners can help lower the stress of the season for everyone by managing employees with grace.

That can be easier said than done. The National Retail Foundation predicts a 6-8% increase in total retail sales for the winter holidays this year. At the same time, 9 out of 10 small business owners told QuickBooks that they’ve been ensnared by supply chain issues this year. Those kinds of stressors can make graceful leadership feel unimportant or impossible by comparison.

But how you curate your work culture and manage your employees makes a huge difference in their job satisfaction — and, ultimately, your employee retention. The three overarching reasons that employees leave are because of subpar benefits, like paid time off; a lack of recognition; and poor company practices, like an unhealthy culture, a 2021 QuickBooks study found.

Small actions can speak volumes. These seven tips are a good place to start to manage your employees through the holidays with grace.

6 Strategies to Prevent Quiet Quitting from Your Team

October 20, 2022

“Quiet quitting” is the newest buzzword in the business world. While this term evokes mental images of employees leaving their job without saying a word, the reality is much less terrifying. Quiet quitting is when employees stop going above and beyond at their workplace. Quiet quitting is a response to the idea of hustle culture, a form of workplace culture that can lead to severe burnout.

Unfortunately, for many small businesses, the idea of employees doing the bare minimum for their job is unsustainable and can cause stagnant business growth. However, there are plenty of things that you can do to prevent quiet quitting. Things like valuing your employees, clearly communicating work expectations, and offering advancement opportunities can all go a long way toward preventing the “quiet quitting” phenomenon.

Here are 6 Strategies to Prevent Quiet Quitting from Your Team Click To Tweet

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and We’re Taking the Cyber out of Cyber Security

October 18, 2022

By Earl Gregorich, Co-Chair America’s SBDC Cybersecurity Task Force

Cybersecurity is a term we hear a lot these days. It brings a wide range of reactions, from fear to eye-rolls to curiosity. For small business owners and those who work in entrepreneurial circles, cybersecurity just seems expensive and too complex to tackle. But what if we removed “cyber” from the word for a moment and just thought of it as security? Security is a lot more approachable and while it still has a cost associated with it, there is a better understanding of why “security” costs are justified. So, let’s take a walk through a small business and consider how we might see a few things differently if we focused more on security and less on cyber when protecting the digital assets within the company.

5 ways to get funding for your new business

September 20, 2022

By Myranda Mondry

You’ve got it: Your million-dollar business idea. The only problem? You don’t have a million dollars (yet—fingers crossed!). Launching a new business takes passion, courage, and, yeah, capital. If you don’t have at least a small bank of startup money lying around—few of us do—it can be the roadblock that prevents your million-dollar idea from taking off.

Fortunately, new businesses like yours have a few options when it comes to funding and capital. And you don’t have to be well versed in finance to take advantage of them. The following are a few common ways entrepreneurs can fund their big ideas—transforming them into small businesses.

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