Hopefully your community is gearing up for the holiday season. Unfortunately, too many small businesses think the idea of a holiday season belongs just to businesses that are in the mall or those businesses selling traditional gift items.

The idea of which businesses should be a part of holiday season comes down to how the owner of the business looks at it.

If you think someone would appreciate receiving your product or service, then your business should be thinking of how you can present your business this holiday season.

To that cause we invite you to join us on Thursday, November 12 at 8pm eastern when we visit with Jeff Milchen, founder of AMIBA (American Independent Business Alliance)

We will talk with Jeff how a community effort can keep dollars being spent locally and what that effort will do for the long term viability of your community. Here is a link to the AMIBA website.

This month's article uses the analogy of William Dawes. You have never heard of him? He was the "other guy" that rode on the same night as Paul Revere.

Dawes participation was a one time event. Revere remained involved in the revolution. The same thing happens too many times with small businesses and how we remain connected to our customers. We let them do business with them and then we fail to stay connected with these same customers.

Successful businesses know it is a relationship they are building. That is how they are remembered; just like Paul Revere.

We hope you enjoy this month's article by following the link below.

Most of us have participated at one time or another in a discussion in which someone mentioned the need to have a "funnel" for increasing sales. You put a lot of potential customers in the top and out of the bottom come a few which become your customers.

In the book "Flip the funnel" by Joseph Jaffe, the author is suggesting turning the funnel upside down.  The idea is that the inverted funnel is that now you get a lot more customers as a result.

It is a great concept and you you can use Jaffe's ideas to increase your customer base. We expect you will enjoy this book from the Profits Plus referral list.

Would you like to take a look at the future of your business? An issue for every business to be aware of is that of being able to pay bills as they come due. One of the measurements of your business being able to pay their bills is that of the "current ratio".

While you can use the free calculator on the Profits Plus website to determine the current ratio for business, the math is quite simple. You look at the balance sheet for your business. The top of of the balance sheet is your assets which are divided into "current" and "fixed" assets. We need the total of the current assets.

The second step is to look at the liabilities section of your balance sheet. It is divided into "current" and "long term" liabilities. We need the current liabilities.

Now you compare the current assets to current liabilities. You need the current assets to be bigger than the current liabilities. While there is a possibility of it being too much of a difference, you are going to feel a lot better with the current assets being considerably larger; that's the current ratio.

Having a good current ratio can surely help you sleep better as well as planning for the future of your business.

Try asking an employee this question: "If you had a day off, all to yourself, what would you do?"

Make note of their answer because that answer gives you tremendous insight into what motivates them. The next time you want to get more engagement from your employees, try adding a component of their answer as a reward to them.

Of course, this means that each employee has a different reward; because each of us have our own motivators.

We want to recognize A Carrot A Day by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, whose book provides the basis for each month's incentive idea.