Ever wish you had more time in your day? I know we do! As small business owners, we all find ourselves dreaming of having just one or two more hours in the day. Imagine how great it would be to actually check things off your to do list or start AND finish multiple projects in one day?

Turn your fantasy world into a reality with a customer of ours, Intern Profits.  Intern Profits teaches business owners and entrepreneurs how to find, hire, and manage interns to help grow and expand their business while creating educational opportunities for young adults.  An idea I think we can all get behind!

Today’s customer spotlight is on Sensible Sitters.  Sensible Sitters is a babysitter’s club turned small business, founded by Vanessa Wauchope. Vanessa started this company back in 2005 at the age of 22 when she saw an opportunity in the market to make a difference in the world of babysitting.

How’d she do it? Let’s take a look.

This is a guest post by Brad Farris.  Brad is a small business advisor with Anchor Advisors.

Business owners are funny. So many of them claim to be too busy to create an annual budget, yet creating a budget could actually free up their time!

But no, they’re too busy for that. And I sit and wonder: Why wouldn’t you want to plan out what you want your business to accomplish in the next year? Why wouldn’t you want to know what you’re making in relation to what you’re spending? Why wouldn’t you make the time to invest an exercise this important?

I guess it’s easy for me to think this way since I’ve seen time and time again how a budget can transform a business. It’s a powerful, often miraculous thing – and even though I describe it as such, business owners don’t realize its power until they do their first budget and start seeing the benefits for themselves. And then … they’re sold!

This is a guest post by Robi Ganguly, the co-founder and CEO of Apptentive.

A few key takeaways:

• Know who your customers are.
• Engage with your customers and learn from them.
• Use the information you learn to achieve “Customer ESP.”

Entrepreneurs often talk about their motivations behind starting a company and highlight their desire to work for themselves. Many entrepreneurs talk about their need to build something. At Apptentive, we feel a strong desire to create and to control our destiny. We enjoy what we do, we believe in what we’re doing, we’re building a great team and we absolutely LOVE our customers.

This guest post is written by Matt Winn.  Matt is the Social Media Manager atVolusion, a Grasshopper partner .

Ah, the end of the holidays. It’s a time to wind down, take down the tree and remove the lights from the front yard. Relaxing activities, right? Wrong.

For online business owners, the ordering processing party doesn’t end with the holidays, especially when customers begin returning merchandise. While returns are inevitable, you can reduce the number of customer support questions, chargebacks and overall frustration by creating a foolproof return policy.