Originally developed in Japan, QR (Quick Response) codes have just recently started to generate some buzz and make their imprint here in the United States. Even if you don’t know what they are, you’ve most likely seen them; they’re the black and white Rorschach-looking square images seen on a growing number of products and media advertisements.

In brief, a QR code is a two-dimensional (2D) barcode of pixelated squares that mobile phone users scan to retrieve website URLs, product information, music, text, videos, coupons and much more.

Behind every great company is a workforce of superior employees. Hiring the best talent allows you to build your business and creates a positive work environment. But how you hire is important. Zappos hires for cultural fit, Google is known for its crazy interview questions and even Chick-fil-A makes sure the people they hire already say please and thank you.

An effective hiring strategy takes a variety of factors into consideration and it’s up to you to create that strategy.

Consider these seven tips for finding top-notch employees:

From national retailers to online sellers, small businesses have a lot of competition.  A little competition isn’t always a bad thing though. A positive byproduct of this onslaught is that it’s turned nearby businesses from neighbors into allies.

How? Attracting customers is no longer just about convincing them to buy, it’s also about convincing them to shop local and invest in their own community. When local small businesses partner with other local businesses it helps to create even more of an incentive for customers to do just that.

Business-to-business collaboration is often called “cross promotion” or “comarketing”, but the concept is too multi-faceted to describe in terms of promotions only. There are many ways in which two or more non-competing businesses can team up to promote their mutual success.

A small business owner who doesn’t actively engage in detailed benchmarking might answer the question, “How’s business?” by saying that it’s good, or that things are slow. If all they’re tracking is revenue each month that may be all they can say about how the business is performing. More detailed statistics give better insight into why business is slow, alerting business owners to figure out how to get things back on track, or, if business is booming, to sustain the pace.

Here are a few guidelines on how to begin and how to make the most of small business benchmarking:

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!