Life is filled with opportunities to LIVE and LEARN! This past weekend, I was out on the back patio doing a little pressure washing. When I was done, I realized that I had done more than blow a little dirt off the back patio, I rediscovered the POWER of being UNDER PRESSURE! PURPOSE- There are so many things to be done in our lives and just like my pressure washing excursion, we simply have to determine what our purpose is. Without a game plan, we can end up at the end of the week, month or year having accomplished very little. When we are not focused, we tend to get sidetracked and much less effective. The patio was my purpose but it was VERY tempting to consider tackling

It was not so many years ago that TEXTING was- well a little weird! Today, it feels like a major way to communicate. Even the credit card processing industry has been deeply impacted by texting. You can DONATE via text, MAKE a PAYMENT via text, get CONFIRMATION of payment via text and keep track of your spending via MESSAGE ALERTS using text messaging. While many of us know some COMMON texting acronyms (LOL, ROTFL) I thought we would have some fun today looking at some lesser known symbols and acronyms that might relate to our businesses! Productivity is very important in your business so if you happen to see o-&-< on your team member’s cell phone- BEWARE! It means Doing Nothing! Yes- there are ways to communicate that

Having a great back up plan is good for most things! No one likes to find themselves stranded or unable to deal with a situation and finding yourself without the ability to accept payments from your customers is no exception! Last week, one of the top payment processors had an outage that lasted for several hours. For most businesses, not being able to take credit cards is a serious problem, so having a back up plan is a must! Outsmarting an Outage is as simple as 1.2.3! #1- KNOW WHAT TO DO BEFORE THE OUTAGE Nothing takes the sting out of an emergency like knowing exactly what to do when it occurs! Make sure your team knows what action steps to take when the power, phone lines, internet

In a perfect world, every business would be profitable and only close when a happy owner decided to retire. In a perfect world, every ownership change would simply be a transfer of vendors to the next owner. In a perfect world, every merchant services provider would help new business owners honor their agreement with a previous processor. And, in a perfect world, every merchant would fulfill the terms of their merchant agreements. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world; businesses close unexpectedly, ownership changes can be riddled with challenges, very few merchant services providers take the time to find out what a previous processor’s terms are and quite a few merchants do not hold up their end of the agreements they sign. Here are a few