Credit card companies will use professional cards as a way to increase their profit margins.

Credit card companies are looking for a way to recoup some of the losses they’ve experienced following the implementation of the new credit card law this March and they’ve been using professional cards as a way to increase their profit margins.

This puts small business owners in a difficult position. Traditional credit lines have been frozen for some time, leaving business owners scrambling for capital to fund their ventures. Credit cards seem like an attractive option to turn to, but there are risks.

Many small business owners don’t realize that the new credit card laws which went into affect earlier this year only deal with personal credit cards, not professional credit cards. This can be a major problem for small businesses that don’t understand how the loophole in the law affects them.

For example, The Ink From Chase card, one of several professional cards offered by the bank, is one professional card subject to the whim of issuers. The card agreement says Chase is free to implement a default rate of 29.99% if a customer is late by just one day on a payment.

Holders of Capital One’s Business Platinum Card, meanwhile, can see their low introductory interest rates spike if they are just three days late with payment twice in a 12-month period, far less than the 60-day notice for personal cards required under the Card Act.

These are just two examples of the practices card issuers can still use when dealing with professional cards, but there are many more out there. There are five major differences between personal and professional cards.

Under the new law credit card companies can apply any payments in excess of the minimum to balances with low interest rates, don’t have to allow 21 days after a statement is mailed before payment is due, can raise rates on existing balances if late payments are made to a different creditor, can charge big fees if cardholders exceed their limit and, maybe most importantly, card issuers can change agreements without giving advanced notice. All of these practices are now illegal in regard to personal cards.

What do you think of the credit card industry’s strategy in regard to professional credit cards? Is it good business or bad faith in this struggling economy?

China has seen economic results from putting money in state-owned businesses.

China’s leaders during the financial crisis have reaffirmed their faith in their own more statist approach to economic management, in which private capitalism plays only a supporting role.

The New York Times reports that the Chinese government has grown richer — and more worried about sustaining its high-octane growth — and therefore, it has pumped public money into companies that it expects to upgrade the industrial base and employ more people. The beneficiaries are state-owned interests that many analysts had assumed would gradually wither away in the face of private-sector competition.

The distinction may matter more today than it once did. China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy this year, and its state-directed development model is appealing to poor countries.

Would this strategy work with the US? Investing in state-owned companies, to see the economy skyrocket, just like China?

New York City is enforcing an old tax on sliced and prepared bagels.

When you think of New York cuisine what comes to mind? Is it a piping hot slice of pizza? How about a Nathan’s hot dog? Maybe authentic Chinatown Chinese food? Or New York-style, thin crust pizza? While all are icons of New York gastronomy, for millions of New Yorkers who start their day with a bagel and a shmear, there is nothing more New York than a crusty, chewy bagel.

Unfortunately for New Yorkers, the food police are at it again in New York City. After making transfats illegal for restaurants to serve a couple of years back now New York City is enforcing an old tax on sliced and prepared bagels.

The tax has actually been a law on the books for some time, but it hadn’t been enforced stringently until recently. There is little doubt the financial problems of New York City played a part in the overreaching enforcement of the law.

The size of the tax averages to about eight cents per sliced or prepared bagel, while bagels that are packaged for take- out are not taxed. This may not seem like a big deal, but small business that sell bagels are worried about the impact of the law on their bottom line.

Some companies have even been forced to pay back taxes because the law was so poorly enforced before this year.

“We think it’s unfair. They audited us four times in the past 20 years and never raised this before. We are a law abiding company and tax payers. They are requiring us to pay three years worth of taxes we never collected,” Kenneth Greene, owner of Bruegger’s Bagels told CNN Money recently.

Greene claims that his business didn’t collect the bagel tax from customers in the past as a way to keep prices down and customers happy, but they will have to now.

In 2007 in New York City, 646 restaurants were audited for bagel malfeasance. So far this year that number jumped to 1,077 and there are still four months left in 2010.

Do you think the recent enforcement of the New York Bagel Law is fair to small business owners? Has your business run into indiscriminant enforcement of laws in the past? How have you dealt with these issues?

Trader Joe's is a different kind of grocery store.

With all the Whole Foods, Wal-Marts and specialty retailers struggling through this economy, it seems like there’s a silent killer among them: Trader Joe’s.

The privately held company’s sales last year were roughly $8 billion, the same size as Whole Foods’ and bigger than those of Bed Bath & Beyond, No. 314 on the Fortune 500 list. Unlike those massive shopping emporiums, Trader Joe’s has a deliberately scaled-down strategy: it is opening just five more locations this year.

The company selects relatively small stores with a carefully curated selection of items. Typical grocery stores can carry 50,000 stock-keeping units, or SKUs; Trader Joe’s sells about 4,000 SKUs, and about 80% of the stock bears the Trader Joe’s brand.) The result: Its stores sell an estimated $1,750 in merchandise per square foot, more than double Whole Foods’. Even better: the company has no debt and funds all growth from its own coffers.

The rise of Trader Joe’s reflects Americans’ changing attitudes about food. While Trader Joe’s is not a health food chain, it stocks a dizzying array of organics. It sells billions of dollars in food and beverages that years ago would have been considered gourmet but are now mainstays of the U.S. diet, such as craft beers and white-cheese popcorn. The genius of Trader Joe’s is staying a step ahead of Americans’ increasingly adventurous palates with interesting new items that shoppers will collectively buy in big volumes.

It’s a different take on the concept of a grocery store…Trader Joe’s isn’t a health food grocery chain, it’s not a dirt-cheap grocery store like Fresh and Easy…it combines lots of types of retailers into one…and it works.

The strategies used by people on Survivor can be used in your office.

Everyone has at least one “job from hell” story.

If you don’t — count yourself lucky.

What the people who have had a job from hell know is that going to work is similar to going into battle, or a war zone, where you’ve got to rely on strategy, not just skill, in order to make it through another day and come back the next.

But if you’ve got no experience as a veteran or fighting on an actual battlefield, don’t worry: these same strategies can be seen in action on an episode of Survivor.

Yes, Survivor can teach you how to act in the workplace — if it’s a tense workplace — to, well, survive. Take a look at Spirit magazine’s first few points:

“1. Align yourself with the power person Survivor, like most offices, isn’t fair. Some of the nicest people go home first, and some of the sleaziest survive. It’s not about truth and justice, it’s about power, and in most offices the boss has all the votes. This isn’t true in every workplace—some companies have employees anonymously rate their managers and oust low scorers, and a teacher friend of mine can tell off his boss because he’s protected by a union. The rest of us need to identify who has the power—even if it’s someone as rotten as sock-burning, water-draining Russell, a finalist in season 19—and appear to be on his or her side.

2. Don’t fight the power—work it Most Survivor winners have been champions at charm and guile. I started at Crazy World Inc. horribly naive; I thought that honesty was the best policy, which just lead me to trouble in the conference room. Instead, I had to learn how to manipulate the unhinged bosses for my own needs. This made me feel like a sham until one of my mentors said to me, “Pretend you’re playing a part.” OK. I tried not to let the people who annoyed me know it. I tried to smile to their faces and make them think I’d never vote them out. I tried to keep my big mouth shut. When I did something well, I told them it was all thanks to them.

3. Blend in with the crowd Anyone who’s watched more than two seasons ofSurvivor comes to realize that, as they like to say in Japan, the nail that sticks its head out gets hit with a hammer. On Survivor, the first person voted off is almost always someone who is unusual in some way: older, more religious, more eccentric. People like people who are the most like them. If you stick out from the group—if you like to go sit by yourself on the beach, if you have strong opinions about how to build the shelter, if you’ve got a weird haircut (season 19’s mulleted Shambo) or tell long, strange stories (vainglorious, tattooed orchestra conductor Coach)—you could be exposing yourself to the group’s wrath and allowing yourself to be seen as a threat. Much better to be useless than different. The person fired fastest at Crazy World Inc. was bubbly and smart, but she talked too much about her love of roller derby for the boss’s comfort. Many a million-dollar winner of Survivorwas the best at lurking in the background and making minimal waves.”

Need more survival skills? Read the full article here.

If employee morale is down or your business environment isn’t the greatest, consider hiring a business coach to see if there’s anything you can improve.

small businesses that use cash only mayconsider using credit cards due to new credit card laws.

With the new financial bill signed earlier this summer taking affect, small merchants in cash only business may be considering using credit cards for the first time. But are the new laws enough for businesses to change their way of doing business and accept plastic?

Under the new law, merchants can now legally set $10 minimums on credit-card purchases, and offer discounts and promotions for cash purchases.  These new rules can certainly help small businesses that currently don’t accept credit cards, but there are many aspects of the law that have yet to take effect, including the most important to most small businesses, swipe fees.

Over the next eight months, the Federal Reserve will issue new standards for swipe fees for debit cards. These new standards are meant to ensure that fees are proportional to the costs of the transaction. Credit-card fees, however, would remain unregulated, meaning the credit card companies can keep gouging business owners.

Many small business owners pay ridiculous fees on credit cards under the current system. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores the convenience store industry paid $7.4 billion in credit-card fees in 2009 while making $4.8 billion in profits from cards.

Obviously those numbers seem out of whack and there should be a way of changing the system so small businesses can make more of a profit from their sales than credit card companies do. It just seems that the new law, although a step in the right direction, doesn’t go far enough.

How does you business handle credit cards? Will you accept credit cards more regularly with the new laws enacted? What do you think of the government’s attempt to legislate the credit card industry?

Kevin Dipetrillo owns Southern Insurance Providers, a commercial property and casualty agency in Marrietta, Georgia. ActionCOACH Rick Crain has provided him with day to day planning to help him grow his business and become more successful. In less than six months of working with ActionCOACH Rick Crain, Kevin’s average sale per account has increased by six times. Hear more about his amazing results above.

Levi's "Go Forth" campaign: is it really helping Braddock, PA?

Recently Levi’s opened a new ad campaign featuring the town and citizens of Braddock, Pennsylvania, but is this campaign effective corporate propaganda or corporate philanthropy at its best?

The company’s “Go Forth” campaign is employing the slogan, “We Are All Workers”, as it shows interviews with citizens of Braddock talking about better times as melancholy piano music plays in the background.

Braddock was once a thriving suburb of Pittsburgh with over 20,000 citizens at its peak in the 1950s. A steel mill created jobs for workers, stores were busy, people had money to spend and times were good.

Following the closing of the UPMC Braddock Hospital, the area’s biggest employer in recent years, today only 3,000 people live in Braddock. The site of Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill, Braddock is now just an afterthought in today post-modern American economy, as are many once-thriving small American towns.

It seems that Levi’s understands this and is taking action to help Braddock. Over the next two years they will give Braddock a million dollars to help improve Braddock’s Community Center, Public Library and Urban Farm. Citizens will also be featured in Levi’s ads.

But does the campaign go far enough? After all, when you say “We Are All Workers” for ads featuring American workers and then manufacture less than 3% of your product in America, are you being genuine or are you just trying to exploit a bad situation for your benefit?

Levi’s has brought attention to Braddock, but it hasn’t brought jobs. There are no plans for Levi’s to open a plant in Braddock. Instead Levi’s own site says this about the campaign, “…if they’re just matched with the right distressed consumer brand, distressed Americans are ideal marketing mascots.”

Is that what working Americans have become, marketing mascots? What do you think of Levi’s marketing campaign and how it can affect Braddock, Pennsylvania?

J.Crew has evolved from flannel to fashionable with the help of brand management.

Remember when J.Crew menswear was mostly about flannel?

Men, you have Frank Muytjens, head of men’s design for J.Crew, to thank for the transformation in the preppy retailer’s menswear selections in recent years.

Muytjens told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that he listened to what J.Crew’s male customers wanted and responded to current trends. While retail has struggled during the U.S. recession, it seems that menswear could be a big opportunity for sales; at least for J.Crew — besides the growth the menswear division has seen, J.Crew made $44.7 million in this year’s first quarter, up from $20.4 million in 2009’s first quarter.

Collaboration also helps broaden J.Crew’s appeal — Ray Ban, Levi’s and Sperry are just some of the 40 partnerships J.Crew has.

Sometimes just listening to what your customer wants can have a great effect…that can be great for your business.

Instead of flannel, plaid, and more flannel, J.Crew’s menswear has evolved to two suit silhouettes, the Ludlow and Aldrige, sperry top-siders and stylish ankle boots.

What can listening to your customer do? Can it get you more business?

ActionCOACH Linda Bigler worked with Amanda Johnson, a financial planner and advisor. Before working with Linda, Amanda was having difficulties hiring competent staff. Listen as Amanda talks about how she was able to hire the perfect personal assistant by using the ActionCOACH hiring process.