For most of the businesses, this is your first holiday season with the EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) chip system for your bank card transactions. The usage of the card has just passed 21%, meaning that one in five people have had at least one experience using the card.

From personal experience, it is easy to see that this new format does slow the amount of time necessary to complete a transaction. People fail to read the screen that indicates the card is to be left in the machine through out the tradition as well as those who can't find the slot to insert their card. The same report shared earlier states that 67% of people expect their experience to be the same as mine.

Plan accordingly for your staff for this month and for the after Christmas sales.

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Just before Christmas in 1999, the first edition of the e-ret@iler was emailed to a small group of people that had attended a presentation I gave. For those of you who have attended one of those presentations, this was when I first began to invite you to send a postcard to yourself as a reminder of what you were going to do with the information I had shared earlier.

Today marks the start of the 17th year of sending you our monthly newsletter. Thanks for taking the time to join us each month.

Sales representatives have played an important part in the life of my family, our businesses and me as an individual. Not all of them; just those who cared most about their customers as compared to those who were just pushing merchandise and services.

There were reps who provided great insight into what was going on within the industry and even the rep who persuaded me to start my writing and speaking career.

The relationship should be a partnership. Let me invite you to read our article of the month to gain some insight as to how this relationship can work for you and your business.

Thanks to my friend Harold from Naples for this book suggestion. Harold is a very wise and studious business owner with many years of experience. Any suggestion he makes is one that I take as very good advise.

This book is in the same vein as 'The Big Moo' and 'Best Practices Are Stupid'; They cause you to challenge what you have been told with regard to how you make a decision. Definitely many of the traditional ideas of business decisions having no substantiation and are often just something that people follow other businesses in doing.

Take a look; Crazy is a Compliment by Linda Rottenberg. After all, if you want your business to be different, you have to act different.

Turn, turn, turn; not just a song from the 60's but a true statement for any business that has inventory to sell or use. The better you can turn the inventory the more you can increase your profits and Return on Inventory.

As the Internet Tool on the Profits Plus website explains, this is a bit of an odd calculation. It is one however, that gives a good indication, as you watch it over a period of time, of how well you are making that turn, turn, turn, happen.

We had a tradition in our business that started with my parents some 50 years ago. Each holiday season a get together was held at their home, and in later years at our home. Each of our staff were invited to bring their family; children and if grandma and grandpa lived with them, they were also invited.

Each staff member was requested to make and bring one of their favorite holiday foods. The bulk of the meal and drinks were provided by us.

A Christmas gift (sorry, no political correctness here) was given to each child. Each of our staff also received a Christmas gift. One of the favorite gift items was the year we gave everyone a watch.

Note these were gifts; not a bonus. They were given without any tie to their work performance. It was just an evening to enjoy being with our staff and their families. It definitely brought all of us closer to each other, making the work day easier.