No matter how successful your business, if you don’t have a positive cash flow you won’t be around for long.

And, no matter how great a customer may be, if they don’t pay their invoices on time, they are setting you up to fail. Here are five steps to enhance your cash flow.

5 Steps to Improve Your Cash Flow

Many of us have been taught that negotiation is a “put up your dukes” experience. But you’ll be more successful if you think of it as a human interaction rather than a battlefield. A successful negotiation is not about winning but about maximizing benefit for both parties.

Five Ways to Negotiate Like a Pro

Many women brag about their revenue but shy away from discussing their profitability. Linda Holden makes this wise statement about profit, “The only thing worse than doing nothing is doing something for nothing.”

How about you? Are you working for next to nothing? If so, consider these five ways to drive profitability.

5 Ways to Drive Your Profit

Now that we see clear signs of the economy turning around, maybe it’s time to consider raising your rates. Only you can tell if the timing is right, but if your customers are starting to provide you with greater requests for your product or service, this may be the time.

Here are five approaches to increase your rates. You don’t have to use them all, but if you use even one or two, you’ll see an immediate increase in profitability.

Five Approaches to Increase Your Rates

The way you price your products or services can make or break your business. Your pricing needs to be competitive, yet profitable. What’s the best way to arrive at that?

Here are five ways to increase your profitability through smart pricing.

Five Approaches to More Profitable Pricing

Even in a good hiring market, it’s often difficult to sort out good job candidates from great ones. Here are a few things you might consider in making your next hire.

Five Things to Look for in Hiring Great Employees

There are three key components to a successful business: Product/service, customers and employees. If you’ve got all the customers in the world and a great product, but your staff doesn’t have the right stuff, your business will never be totally successful.

Here is a five step strategy for creating a recruiting process to guarantee a great team.

5-Step Recruiting Strategy

I’m astounded by the number of business owners who don’t develop a formal list of questions when interviewing prospective employees. Rather, they conduct a general conversation to get a gut feel for an applicant.

This approach doesn’t allow you to compare applicants evenly and is a poor business practice. Rather than getting to know an applicant, your goal should be to evaluate her ability to do the specific job. To discover this, you need a fixed set of interview questions for all applicants. Here are five questions you should always include.

Five Critical Interview Questions

We all know the tried and true questions to ask job candidates, but if you’re looking to find out about the real person behind the resume, here are a few questions you should consider asking.

Five Great Questions for Job Candidates

Press releases are a great way to promote yourself and your business. Last week we discussed five reasons to develop a press release. Now that you understand different justifications for developing a press release, here are some great ways to utilize it.

Five Great Ways to Use a Press Release