Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – President Barack Obama on Friday launched an effort to trim extra fat from governmental machinery with a first list of agencies under the Department of Commerce.

Urging Congress to reinstate “fast track authority,” of the president, Obama said, “We live in a 21st-century economy, but we’ve still got a government organized for the 20th century.”

Addressing an audience of invited business community, Obama blamed the tug of war between the White House and Congress for the failure of successive administrations to limit the ballooning government workforce, saying, “Too often past attempts to streamline government got caught up in beltway politics and power struggles that prevented meaningful consolidation.”

Noting that, “new agencies were added without taking any away,” President Obama said, “Almost every President from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan had reorganization authority.”

Obama was referring to a reorganization authority to President Herbert Hoover, handed during the Great Depression but later Congress took away that authority during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

“Congress needs to reinstate the authority it has given to Democratic and Republican presidents for decades,” said President Obama.

Giving as one his favorite examples of inefficient government apparatus, Obama said, “The Interior Department is in charge of salmon in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them in saltwater,” adding, “No business or non-profit leader would allow this kind of duplication or unnecessary complexity in their operations.”

Launching his first plan, Obama proposed combining six agencies from the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, United States Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Trade and Development Authority.

“Over half of the Commerce Department’s budget is actually NOAA, so NOAA would move to the Interior Department,” said Jeff Zients, the Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget.

Addressing journalists at the White House briefing room, Zients, who is also the President’s chief performance officer, the first ever chief performance officer, said the proposal would club together, “the core business and trade business components of the Department of Commerce — along with SBA — the Small Business Administration — USTR, Ex-Im, OPIC and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. All six of those consolidated and integrated into one.”

“We’d have one department where entrepreneurs can go from the day they come up with an idea and need a patent, to the day they start building a product and need financing for a warehouse, to the day they’re ready to export and need help breaking into new markets overseas,” Obama said.

Moreover, President Obama elevated the Small Business Administration to Cabinet-level status saying, “I’m elevating the Small Business Administration to a cabinet-level agency. Karen Mills, who’s been doing a terrific job leading that agency, will make sure that small business owners have their own seat at the table in my Cabinet meetings.”

With a history of strained relations with Republican-led House of Representatives, President Obama said, “With or without Congress, I’m going to keep at it. I’m hopeful it’s with Congress because this is an area where we can receive bipartisan support, because making our government more responsive, strategic and leaner should not be a partisan issue.” 

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Business card is a small visual representation of a business. It is not only parts of your marketing strategy to get people know your contact information and company name but it is a viral marketing tool as well. Let me throw light on some effective business card design tips:

Color: Choose the color for your business card wisely. Choose light background color for your card with dark color text on it. If you keep it simple and just put your company contact information on the card plus one tagline about your business and what it does you will be better off. Choose colors according to your business; avoid choosing colors that are too funky. This would give your card a decent and professional look. But if your business is related to designer clothes or beauty and fashion or interior or outdoor decoration, floral business then you can choose dark color theme or themes that represent your business well.

Information: Include all the information related to your business but make sure the information should be precise but complete. Don’t forget to mention your email address and website URL, it will make easier for people to approach you.

Use call to action: You can draw more clients by using catchy phrases like “Visit Us for a Service” or “Visit Our Website for Exiting Offers”. Another good strategy to draw customer attention is to say them to present your card as a discount voucher for free gifts, price discounts or special introductory prices. Regardless of what phrases you use, the basic thing to do here is to persuade your prospective clients to act on your offer.

Size of card: Size of a business card also matters. Your business card should be Compaq and convenient to carry, it should not be huge and heavy. Better to go with standard size of business cards. In standard size cards you can choose different shapes like square or rounded angles or any other shape you like.

Always go for high-quality paper and printing. As your card embodies your company and you, as a person, it has to leave a lasting impression that will be advantageous for your business.

All the wholesale businesses after a certain time find means and ways to promote themselves. Online wholesalers also continuously struggle for promotion in order to get a higher rank in the search engines and to increase the business traffic on their websites. Promotion of a wholesale business is not an issue with a heavy amount of expenses but doing so in a cost effective way is important. There are some valuable low cost ways or tips which surely contribute effectively in promoting any wholesale business.

• Referrals promote your business incredibly. Ask for the referrals from your suppliers from whom you are buying products or services and after a careful purchase give them your business card and ask them to provide you the contact list of some people who are interested to buy from you. Ask them to give your business card to them or you can also give referrals to them in return.

• Attend professional meetings, seminars, trade shows and try to increase your social circle. It will help you to make more people familiarize with your wholesale business. You can distribute your brochures or you can personally give your business cards to your targeted customers in these types of gatherings.

• What ever you sell, print your business name and contact information on the item which you are selling. In this way your items themselves becomes a mean to promote your wholesale business. If you don’t want to display that information you should mark your logo or your business sign on it.

• Continuously conduct the SWOT analysis of your business and identify your competencies to polish them. Prepare yourself to exploit new opportunities in your external environment and minimize the threats which create hurdle in promoting your business.

• Distribute free samples of your bulk products to the targeted retailers or others. They increase your sales even by attracting those people who are not your regular customers. When they use these samples and like them, they tell about it to others and thus they also become your customers.

• You can introduce customer’s rewards program in your wholesale business. Wholesale items are already on discount but you can offer some more special discounts to your regular customers. This helps in retaining your current customers besides increasing your customer loyalty.

• Print your business details in your letter heads or emails in a proper way. If your business is online wholesale business, your letter heads, business cards and emails should have webpage address on them.

Writing an eye catching press releases or articles grabs the attention of readers. It’s a way of putting your wholesale business information in front of media and your targeted customers. Besides that, wholesalers’ hard work, persistence, their due diligence and devotion increases their sales and helps them to promote their wholesale business. This is true for any other kind of businesses as well.

Marketing is what drives a business. If you succeed in marketing your product, there is no doubt success will come your way. Today, small businesses have great advantage since there are various affordable marketing strategies they can adapt to showcase their products, more so through the internet. Here are 5 essential marketing strategies that every small business should put in place.

1) Good Brand Name and Logo
One of the marketing aspects that has big impact on the success of your business is establishing a brand. Choosing a good brand name involves a thorough research on your niche as well as your target audience. In a nutshell, your brand name should be relevant, brief and easy to grasp. Your brand name should also be accompanied by a good logo. You can design a logo or get a professional designer to do it for you.

2) A professional Website
A website is very useful to any small business seeking to showcase its products to a wider pool of clients. Fortunately, it is quite simple to have a professionally designed website for your business. You don’t have to spend so much money since there are great tools online that can get your site running in less than 3 days. If you are not familiar with the mechanisms involved, find a web designer and let him do the task for you.

3) Optimize your website for search engines
Having a website is not enough. You need to optimize it so that it can be indexed by various such engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, among others. You can hire an SEO services company to do optimization on your behalf and make it easy for clients that are even away from your country reach your products.

4) Make use of online social media
Online social media is becoming a very vibrant marketing tool for small businesses which can not afford the mainstream advertising media like radio, TV and newspapers. You can reach thousands of clients through social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked in, among others. There are numerous strategies you can use to reach out to your target audience with a very minimal cost.

5) Don’t ignore offline Marketing
Even with so many attractive marketing channels being through the internet, it is not good to entirely forget the offline strategies such as business cards, brochures and branded stationery. These have a huge impact on your business especially to those clients who are not on internet. Make sure you have nicely designed business cards which reflect the products of your business and the brand as a whole.

Print brochures, leaflets, T-shirts and branded stationeries to catch the attention of your clients. This will go along way in building a reputable brand for your business. Once you have the above strategies in place, then it will be easy to grow your business since your products are guaranteed visibility. Remember, marketing is a continuous process; it should go on even when the sales are good.

Today as everyone knows that advertising is an essential process to make business successful. There are although a lot of techniques today through which you can do advertisement about business but the important thing is that your business will be benefited only when you will use right marketing techniques. Marketing techniques can be broadly classified as offline marketing and online marketing. Today people are switching from offline techniques to online techniques but not using offline marketing techniques can be a big mistake.

Several Offline marketing techniques are easy to implement and are cost effective too. Printing Companies can play important role in offline advertisement. There are number of advertisement techniques in which selection of a good printing company can make a difference. Out of all some are being listed here as:

• Advertisement through business cards is also a technique which lot depends on selection of printing companies. Business card should be the first thing to do after establishing a business because it is an easy method to advertise about your business. Printing cost of business card is relatively low. They are easy to transport and to distribute as well but business card should be attractive to attract more people. Only a good printing company can provide you simple, attractive and creative design. Business cards should be given to any person by you who might need the service you are providing.

• Flyer advertising is also a advertising technique which depends a lot on the printing company. Although you can also create flyer at home but to have a professional look it will be better to have printing company for this job. You will just need to tell them that which type of printing you want to use, color or black and white printing. Color printing will slightly cost you over then black and white printing. Printing companies can help you in this because they know the basic aspects of how flyers should be designed professionally to increase business while keeping it simple.

• Vehicle advertising is relatively a new concept in market. You can advertise about your business on your car by posting a sticker on that.

So all these techniques come in that category which depends on printing quality and in turn depend upon printing companies so choosing to have a better advertising, printing company should be chosen wisely.

You’ve done it, you at long last took that major step to start a home business and at this point you’re pondering “How do I tell others about my fabulous products and services?” You are not alone. Many small businesses have a problem with just that dilemma – the marketing of their small business went practically overlooked during the madness to get prepared and get started. Fortunately there are a variety of cheap methods for you to get the word out there about your small business, your products and your services.

• Business Cards

Business cards really are a convenient (and often over looked way to inexpensively communicate the value you provide to a large number of potential customers, if you take the time to create an alluring offer that gets people to contact you. Give them out to everyone you meet (you don’t need to pre-qualify potential prospects) during the day and be sure to give them a couple of business card saying “Please do not embarrass me by tossing this away where I can see it. Put one in a visible place for yourself and pass the rest along to someone else who’ll reap some benefits.” This technique of letting them know what you expect from them appears to work well. Make certain your business card contains more than just your contact information to successfully market your home business. Include a discount, bonus or other reward on the backside of the business card for taking it to you when making a sale from your business. Always have the words “Over Please” in the bottom right corner of each side; many people don’t expect content on the backside of a business card and everybody will turn it over right before you as they read it.

• E-Mail Signature

Imagine if every single email you delivered included marketing and advertising for your small business, it can and it must! All the major email clients (i.e. Outlook, Outlook Express) and also the internet based e-mail service providers allow you to create a signature which can be attached to the conclusion of your new and replied emails. If you’re not familiar with the technical settings of these options use the search phrase “signature” within the help system for your email package and follow the instructions. Supply the reader with several means to contact you (e.g. direct telephone, internet site, e-mail and physical address if you have a store front). The signature you include should invoke the reader’s curiosity to follow-up with you immediately. Text is often preferred to pictures simply because many people have the image features switched off in their email systems to speed their ability to read email. It is possible to include hyperlinks to your internet site in the signature file you develop, making it simple for all those reading your email messages in HTML format to click on a link directly.

Advertising your home business does not need to be expensive or time-consuming. Make an effort to communicate everything you do as well as the value you supply every day. The suggestions I have provided will provide you a firm base upon which to create a prosperous home business. You are not a secret agent, when you build it they will only come when you give them reasons and light up the way. Once you begin using these low-cost, simple methods to market your home business you’ll see measurable results that will allow you to do much more of what’s working.

About Author
Need assistance with your home business? Become a member of the Society of Home Business Owners for cost-effective small business advice from their online small business advisory board.

A desktop business card holder gives out an important statement about your own business and your level of professionalism. It plays a very important role in building your professional image in front of those people who come visiting you, thereby getting a business card from you. If you are such a business professional who does not venture out much, but do have a lot of visitors dropping in from time to time, then you need to keep a desktop business card holder in your office chamber, so that you can distribute your business cards from it to your visitors.

When your clients come visiting you in your chamber, out of the many things that they would notice would be your business card holder. Therefore, to make a good first impression on your clients, it is of utmost importance that you know how to present your business cards properly in front of your clients. Another important role that desktop business card holders would play is in making or breaking your relationship with your clients. First impression is the last impression. Therefore, if you give out the right kind of impression to your clients, then your business prospect enhances. Else, there would be a huge difference in terms of your expectations and your client’s expectations. Therefore, business card holders must be chosen very judiciously.

While choosing desktop business card holders, you need to keep in mind that your professional and personal life should always be separate. Therefore, you should choose such a desktop card holder which reflects your business style, rather than reflecting your personality. If you are looking at enhancing or upgrading your corporate look, then you should go in for a silver or golden desktop card holder. This sort of a card holder would be much liked and appreciated by your clients, as it gives an air of class and success. You can afford to spend your money generously in buying a desktop card holder, as it would increase your possibilities of gaining more clients. By spending generously on artistic office accessories, you stand yourself in an advantageous position of gaining more business.

If you need a social component to be added to your business networking, and you belong to the entertainment or sports section of business, then you can go in for some fun and unique desktop card holders. In order to give your business that extra classy edge, you might also want to get your desktop card holder imported and hand crafted. These card holders are exclusively made for professionals, and the world’s leading manufacturer of these kinds of card holders would be El Casco. They come up with some of the finest luxury desktop card holders. A high quality gold or silver desktop card holder can also be a mode of striking a conversation with your visitor. A visitor who walks in to your cabin, and likes the gold or silver desktop card holder that you have put up, might get started by asking you where you got the card holder from, and you can take the conversation forward from there, eventually linking it up to business.

About Author
John Rowbotham is a leading supplier of business card holder in the UK. He also deals in wide range of Desktop Business card holders with its stylish looks.
Follow Up:
# Leather Business Card Holder Leaving a Mark of Elegance

2009 and 2010 was a bad time for business. The entire world economy went through a bad phase. Companies shut shops globally, people lost their jobs and consumer started fearing purchases. One thing was noticeable though. Companies that could afford went on advertising. They simply could not let go of their advertisement spending. Yes, advertisement budgets were cut, the frequency of advertisements diminished but the advertisements were there for all to see. This gives us the picture that even when business is down, companies need to be visible in the minds of the consumers. For Vancouver businesses, visibility is similarly important and can be attained through the services of any Vancouver logo designer and Vancouver business card designer. For any company, a logo is a must. People forget the names of companies but they remember the logos. That is why, every year, millions are spent researching the most popular logos and this popularity is directly proportional to the most popular companies.

In a city like Vancouver, where competition for every product is intense, a professionally designed company logo is a must for any business to thrive. No company can afford to run its shop without a logo. From multinationals to small coffee shops – every one has a logo of their own. And they hire a Vancouver logo designer to do this job. There are many Vancouver logo designer companies in the city and some of them really do a good job of it. Logo designing requires people to have an aesthetic sense. They get to the core of the customer need and transform those needs to design logos that are eye catching for the company as well as for its customers. A well designed logo is so powerful that by simply looking at it, people can tell you which company it represents. The Mercedes Benz logo is so famous that they don’t even put their names on any of their automobiles. While a logo is for the general public to see, a business card is also a powerful tool when it comes to specific clients. Smart and professional business cards exude the culture of the company and represent it even when put in the business card folder of the client. The mere visibility of the logo ensures that clients remember the company and its products and services. Any professional Vancouver business card designer can use the modern technology and create a fantastic and smart looking business card for your business and you.

When you meet someone and present that business card of yours, you are opening up new avenues to do further business. As an entrepreneur, it is almost a cardinal sin not to carry your business cards with you. This rule applies to company executives too. A business card is the face of the individual and the company he or she represents. Get a reliable and professionally managed Vancouver business card designer to create that special business card for you and reap the benefits. Research, find and negotiate – this is the mantra for finding a good Vancouver logo designer and a Vancouver business card designer. A professional Vancouver logo designer and a Vancouver business card designer will enable your business to earn its brand in the market.

A business card design is as significant as the business. Lacking it, the company will struggle to promote its product to the customers. Therefore, choosing the perfect business card designer is not an easy task, prior to it and in depth, research has to be done. Choosing the right designer will trim down the expenses as he or she would be dealing with you for other assignment as well. If you are pleased with a particular designer it is also good to stick to him, so that there will not be any waste of time in the future. The traits a perfect business card designer must possess are given below.

Professionalism: The designer must possess a professional touch; if he and his customers have faith towards each other then it may lead to a warm and cordial relationship. Assembling with his customers punctually, having open and clear communication and finally finishing the work allotted to him on time shows his professionalism

Thorough design: A crucial quality of the designer is to provide detailed information. He should be able to manage his time smartly and achievement oriented

Good service to clients: Designer must be able to handle all customer queries and must be available all the time. They should provide outstanding service to the customers in all ways.
Status and credit: For a designer it is a great advantage if he has earned a good name and fame in the society. If he has won any honor for the designs then obviously it will take him to the top.
Background: The clear background of the designer and the firm he works for will give us proper image about the particular designer. This will help the customer in choosing the right business card designer. Having a strong professional background is the ideal evidence for what sort of service he provides.

Many investors consider that the business investment opportunities are great ways to maximize their returns. Usually, the experienced investors, who have a good eye for business opportunities, are looking for those options that ensure superior returns of their investments. Of course, this ‘talent’ was developed after many years of practice and today, most of these investors succeed to get great incomes by investing small amounts. In case that you also wish to exploit the investment field, you must consider some top things for an upstart business.

Top Considerations for Your First Investments

In order to make successful investments, you have to keep in mind the following aspects:

• Upside: You always have to consider the upside or pay-off of your investment. Before examining the risks, you must check the potential of your investment. In case that the specific market segment is already saturated, you should not waste your money and efforts anymore for promoting unsuccessful niches.

• Small Amounts: Always look for those business investment ideas that require small investments and ensure high pay-offs. As a beginner, you are going to make many mistakes while learning the mechanisms of investments. Investing small amounts is safer, as you are not going to lose important sums of money at once. For this, you can start with small business investment opportunities that do not require more than a few hundred of dollars.

• Risks: As in any other business opportunity, if you wish to become a successful investor, you have to learn how to analyze risks. For the beginning, choose those opportunities that show a reliable return. This thing might help you to avoid losing your money.

• Management: In order to successfully implement your strategies, you have to follow a good management plan. You need to develop your own plan, based on your own resources and expectations. For example, you can check business for sale opportunities and create different plans, thing that allows you to develop the best strategy for your business.

• Assets: In case that your business has some assets, you can use them to get some benefits. First, you can secure your business capital, including the investment capital, with the assets of your business. Assets also allow you to negotiate your percentage steak, getting better propositions. After obtaining numerous percentage points, you can return a part of them and get other advantageous items, such as equipments.

• Explore: Another thing that you should never stop doing is to continuously look for better business investment opportunities. As soon as you find a new opportunity, make sure that you explore its facades, so that you realize every single way to exploit it.

In addition to all these things, the most important consideration is the speed of returns. Never invest your money in slow mechanisms that do not provide a fast turnaround of at least 100 percent of your investments. As well, make sure that you are not too aggressive either, as investments are not moneymaking machines. Sometimes, it might be a great idea to invest some money now, in flourishing businesses that can bring you incredible incomes after only a few months. It mostly depends from one opportunity to another, but keep in mind that you always have to get as much as possible.