Knot Ink Digital – Page 2 – Marketing & Advertising

Why is it so difficult to value a business?

March 15, 2022October 5, 2019 by Knot Ink Digital

You are your reviewing your personal situation and you need to value your business, for estate planning purposes or in case you are planning to sell the business. You see ten different valuators and everyone comes up with a different value of your business and everyone has a disclaimer saying that the actual selling price could be different. The true value of the business is what someone is willing to pay.

Until you find that person, you never know what the final price will be. When you sell your house, if you live in a subdivision, many houses are either identical or very similar, the lot is the same, the front elevation may look different but the house is very similar. One house may have a few more upgrades and you can factor that into differentiating the two houses. It is much easier to value a house because you can compare it to the house that sold in the same neighbourhood.

When if comes to a business, no two businesses are identical. You have have a franchise with identical name, price of products etc but no two locations have the same value – why? Each location is unique, the traffic count could be different, the product mix could be different, the average purchase price and average sales per customer can be different. What is the same between these two businesses – the name and nothing else. One location could be making money and another could be losing money, they cannot be valued the same.

Many years ago I saw a fast food franchise, it was in an office building. Two main tenants of the building moved out but were still paying the rent because they were unable to sublet the space. As far as the landlord was concerned, the building was fully occupied however the head count in the building was down by 50% because of so many vacant floors in the building. As a result of the lack of people in the building, the fast food restaurant was struggling and ultimately went bankrupt.

Consequences of using withholding taxes as cashflow instead of paying the government

March 14, 2022June 21, 2017 by Knot Ink Digital

Times are tough and suppliers are slow paying. You have bills to pay, the bank is not lending you more money but you have collected sales taxes from customers, you have paid your employees their net pay but you have not remitted the withholding taxes to the government, should you dip into those funds and use them for running the business? The answer is no, you should not dip into the trust money. You collected it on behalf of the government and if you use their money, there are significant penalties that will result.

The government tax authorities are not lenient when you use their money. They may lien your company, seize bank accounts and create havoc on the operations of the business. I have seen a company not pay sales taxes to the government over an 8 year period. The government placed a lien on the business for unpaid sales taxes and interest. The owners stated how can the government do that, we worked so hard to build up the company and they are trying to close it down. Whose money was used to build up the company? It was not theirs. The bank would not lend them money, no one would so there is the temptation to use money in your possession and hope
to deal with the problem later. The government may be able to go after the directors of the company personally to pay the trust money collected by the Company and not
remitted.

The Top 12 Free Open-Sourced Platforms for E-commerce

March 15, 2022April 21, 2016 by Knot Ink Digital

eCommerce
This is absolutely free under General Public License, is extremely easy to install and run but vastly popular as well. It powers more than 200,000 online stores, which makes it difficult to separate out your store from others. To differentiate yourself, you need to install multiple add-ons available, which however are not free.

Magento
Boasting of a top client list including Samsung, Nespresso and Stussy that use this software for powering online stores, this platform is growing very fast. Though the Community Edition is free, the multiple features loaded Enterprise edition has to be paid for.

Spree Commerce
This platform enables you to have your store customised to differentiate yourself from competitors and provides support to 50 plus payment gateways, thereby saving effort and time of merchants.

OpenCart
Helps creating unlimited categories, selling unlimited products, accepting multiple currencies with choice of 8 shipping and 20 payment methods. Being user-friendly and having SEO ensures top listing in Google.

VirtueMart
Designed for working with Joomla, this cart has the ability to make customers instantly comfortable. Having 2.5 million users till date, most have been satisfied about its performance.

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu – Joomla Module

March 14, 2022August 7, 2015 by Knot Ink Digital

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu for Joomla 1.5 – 2.5 with Administration Control Panel for multiple flash menus customization.

Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu Features:

– Unlimited numbers of Flash Menus on website
– Advanced Horizontal Flash Menu has transparent background
– Tooltip on mouse over the flash menu item
– Use custom URL or select Article as Flash Menu item
– Special glow and shadow effect on mouse over
– Icon Size 256×256, 128×128, 64×64,48×48 or 32×32
– Icon file format PNG, GIF, JPG (transparent PNG recommended)

When you install com_AdvancedHorizontalFlashMenu, demo menu Flash Menu is installed by default.

Valuation of a Business

March 15, 2022January 21, 2015 by Knot Ink Digital

If you sales are dropping and costs or rising, owners unfortunately will end up having to reduce or eliminate their salary. Fluctuating the owners’s salary should have no impact on the valuation on the sale of a business. Most investors will look at normalized earnings to value a business.

Normalized earnings are usually calculated backwards, starting with the net income reported on the financial statements. Add back all personal expenses and I typically add back the owners salary.

Then I reflect a salary for what you would have to pay to replace that owner. if the owner is taking only $20,000 in salary but you determine that you would have to pay say $65,000 for an independent person to replace the owner, then you would reduce normalized earnings by $45,000. If there were no other adjustments except for the salary adjustment, you would drop the reported income by $45,000 in my example above ($65,000 which you consider normal less $20,000 actually taken out by the owner).

16 Chrome Extensions for Web Developers

March 15, 2022October 25, 2014 by Knot Ink Digital

Lorem Ipsum generator:
Lorem Ipsum generator is a fun extension that generates random text. As the chrome page says, it uses less code and minimal work to do that and is so much better than other applications that do the same.

Ibrii:
Ibrii is an extension that is useful in capturing snippets of pictures or videos and posting them anywhere from twitter to facebook.

Site Geo IP Locator:
Site Geo IP Locator is a great application for SEO research, this extension shows the IP address of the website you are browsing.

SEO Quake:
SEO Quake is an extension that displays the page rank and Alexa rank of the website you are currently browsing.

Domain Availability Checker:
Domain Availability Checker is an extension allows you to check the availability of a domain name from your very own toolbar. Saves much time.

WebEdit:
WebEdit is an extension that makes any web page you open editable. You can do any kind of change to it but it is not permanent, nevertheless, it’s still a fun extension.

Chrome Flags:
Chrome Flags is an extension displays the flag of the country the website you are currently browsing, is based at.

Amazing CSS3 Techniques That You Probably Don’t Know About

March 15, 2022May 21, 2014 by Knot Ink Digital

5 Really Awesome CSS3 Tricks
“WordPress Website Builder” takes you through 5 very cool CSS3 tricks that you’ve probably never even heard of! You can find coding examples for each trick on their website.

The HSLA Colors feature allows you to tweak your Web page colors to the max by manipulating the HSLA values individually. HSLA stands for hue, saturation, light, and alpha. This feature works in Firefox 3+, Opera 10.1+, Chrome 2+, Safari 3.1+ and IE9.

Box Rotation is a 2D transform feature that lets you play with your DIVs; you’ll be able to scale, skew, and rotate them all via CSS. This feature works in Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox 3.5+, IE9, and Opera 10.5.

Transitions is an awesome feature that lets you add special affects to your page elements. This is something that at one time was only possible via Flash and JavaScript. This feature works in Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox 4, and Opera 10.5.

Text Select Color lets you change the highlight color of text whenever it is selected/highlighted on your website. This feature works in Google Chrome 2+, Safari 3.1+, Firefox 3.5+, Opera 9.5+, and IE9.

Reflections does just that: it lets you add reflections to your page elements such as images. Unfortunately, for now this feature only works in Chrome and Safari.

Animated Buttons
You may think that buttons can only be animated via JavaScript, but did you know that you can now also animate them with CSS3? Well, you can and it’s pretty simple too!

The blog “PremiumCoding” takes you through the steps of designing a button with rounded borders and shadows, and then adding the CSS code required to animate the button with mouse hover effects. This means that when you move your mouse over the button, you’ll immediately see the animation effects.

All of the required coding along with live demos can be found on their website. While the examples are simple effects, with some extensive CSS knowledge you can design some really advanced and creative animated buttons.

Is your business worth as much when the owner dies?

March 15, 2022October 27, 2013 by Knot Ink Digital

What happens if the owner of the business dies prematurely, is the business worth the same or did the value of the business just decline? Does the estate have to sell the business immediately or can it run without the owner? How important is the owner to the business. It also depends on the type of business that you own. If you own a consulting business and you have no other staff, when the owner dies, there may not be much value left in the business unless you are able to sell the customer list and the customers go to the new consultant.

If you own a retail store, the clients may come to the store for the products therefore the passing of the owner may or may not affect the sales of the business. If the business is larger and has staff or products which can continue the sales of the business, the business may continue to succeed even though the owner is not longer involved.

Controlling costs to increase profits before selling your business

March 15, 2022May 19, 2013 by Knot Ink Digital

The goal of many business owners is to maximize profits which can be done by increasing prices or decreasing costs. Many companies have tried to do both but concentrate on minimizing prices. First they reduce staff levels or they may automate and change the manufacturing process to achieve efficiencies. Others have outsourced manufacturing to foreign countries.

On April 29, I wrote a blog about manufacturing in China – is there an advantage or it is becoming too expensive and in a few years, manufacturing will be returning back to North America. I read in a local newspaper yesterday that a Canadian company was moving their manufacturing plant back to Canada because China was becoming too expensive. My predictions were correct but the timing was much faster than I originally thought.

The stock markets and the financial markets believe that outsourcing to a foreign country is far cheaper than producing in North America. It is for some products but those which are very automated processes, there is not a lot of labor costs in the cost of the goods sold. Businesses go to China and the Far East to save on labor costs. As processes are becoming more automated, the savings that businesses incur keep getting smaller. The costs of transportation, the cost of having to have your inventory in a container on the water for four weeks means that your working capital is tied up, you cannot go just in time delivery easily because you have to fill up an entire container.