September, 2011:

Chip Heath & Dan Health sure hit the nail on the head in their book Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive & Others Die.  They did a lot of research and then condensed it into a simple message.  So how do you get your marketing message to stick?  How do you get your employees to get fired up about a remember the new idea you are pushing?  How do you make people understand what you are talking about and be engaged and excited about it?

Follow the S.U.C.C.E.S. Method.

Make sure your ideas is:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Storied

What to know more?  I’d love to tell you more, yet I’d be cheating you. I highly suggest you read the book.

While I am at it, using the above method do you have any ideas on how to communicate that Choice Merchant Services offers merchant services processing at rates of 1.05% with free merchant equipment?  We can save our merchants a lot of money every year and give them free merchant servics equipment and software that will make running their business easier.  Yet, I am trying to figure out how to package that.  Any ideas?  Let us know.

How do you not only get new customers, but enchant them with you?  

How do you get your employees to love your company and love what you are doing for them? 

How do you grow your personal network?

Watch Guy Kawasaki give you some simple truths that will make all of the above possible for your business if you put them into place.

Here is a hint: Be Sincere.

Well the news broke this afternoon, that due to the United States economy, in all appearances heading for a double dip recession, the Federal Reserve would have to do another drastic measure to try to jolt the economy back into recovery:

4:30 pm : A negative response to the Fed’s “Operation Twist,” so labeled by market participants, stirred sellers to action today. Their conviction made it impossible for tech stocks to provide leadership after trading with strength for so much of the session.

The FOMC announced this afternoon that in order to support a stronger economic recovery it intends to purchase $400 billion of Treasuries with maturities of six years to 30 years, while selling an equal amount of Treasuries with remaining maturities of three years or less, by the end of June 2012. Many market pundits had anticipated such a plan, and had already designated it “Operation Twist” to reflect the Fed’s focus on selling shorter term Treasuries and buying longer term issues.

To little surprise, the FOMC also reiterated that it expects economic conditions to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013.

A knee-jerk response to the Policy Statement made for some whipsaw action among stocks, but the major equity averages eventually broke down and descended deep into negative territory. The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite all closed at session lows.

Although nothing slight, the Nasdaq’s loss wasn’t quite as severe as that of its counterparts. The Nasdaq had been propped up for the better part of the session by tech plays following better-than-expected quarterly reports and forecasts from Oracle (ORCL 29.82, +1.47) and Adobe (ADBE 24.93, +0.29). Autodesk (ADSK 28.71, +0.60) also attracted buyers after analysts at JPMorgan upgraded the stock.
Source:  http://finance.yahoo.com/marketupdate/overview?u

What President Obama, the Democrats & the Republicans  in congress don’t get is that in order to grow the economy we need a few basic things:

1) Low Tax Rates & A Simpler Tax Code
2) A Reasonable Fiscal Situation
3) And a pledge to keep government out of our lives and out of health care – this includes a full repeal of Obamacare

The Republicans get the the key points above, what what many of them don’t get is that in order to get a reasonable fiscal situation, a tax overhaul will need to include a form of higher tax revenues, this will come from actually cutting tax rates but eliminating loopholes in the tax code.

Sadly, I don’t think we are going to solve our economic problems as a nation and allow for businesses to grow again until we have a new President and a Congress that is willing to follow and work with that President.  It will be great to see if Rick Perry or Mitt Romney will be able to lead the nation towards doing this as they campaign for President.

Only once elected they must deliver the goods, and then business can beging to grow and prosper in a strong way again.  Then, I can expect to see that Choice Merchant Services will see that on average our clients will be processing about 5% more sales in 2013 than they did in 2012. When that happens, we can expect to see unemployment drop, this will solve the housing market problems, and then our nation will prosper once again.

Want to know how to make your company successful.  Take it from Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric.  Watch this 5 minute video on leadership and company profits.  We’ve taken these same principles at SolCorp, Inc., and put them into practice at Choice Merchant Services, and this is part of the reason why we are getting more new customer inquiries for merchant processing everyday.

Here are some great insights from Guy Kawasaki on how to make a company successful.  Check out this awesome 3 minute video on turning the idea of making meaning into making money.


When looking for a new merchant services provider, these are the 5 most common mistakes of cutting costs.

1. Not understanding what you currently are paying in merchant processing fees. 
Sit down and look at your most recent statement.  Sadly, most merchant services companies make it difficult to understand what they are charging you.  They do this because usually they raise your rates from what they originally quoted you after you have been processing with them for some time.  It is important to sit down and calculate this.  First, add up all of the flat fees (statement fee, monthly fee, gateway fee, customer services fee, monthly minimum fees) and see what they total up to.  Second, look on the statements for words like qualified processing fees, mid qualified, non qualified or bundled.  Then calculate how much processing volume went through each credit card processing rate.  Then add up your processing fees, also called a discount rate, for each level.  Once you have done that divide your discount rate processing fee for each level by the amount of money ran through each level.  You now have your discount rate (or your processing fees.  Third, you should be able to see the total number of transactions you ran and the total amount debited from your account.  Divide the total amount of per transaction charges by the number of transactions and you then have you per transaction flat fee.  Still confused?  Request a merchant services processing quote, then either fax in or email a scanned copy of your most recent statement to company you are getting a merchant services processing quote from and they will analyze your statement and tell you what your fees are. 

2.Worrying about fees that won’t affect you.  
If you have a monthly minimum fee and are processing in excess of 10K per month in processing volume, don’t worry about it.  Also, if you never have charge backs, don’t worry about a charge back fee.  If you are not accepting checks, don’t worry about check processing fees either.  Instead just focus on your monthly fees and your qualified, mid-qualified, a non-qualified rates.

3. Not paying attention to mid-qualified and non-qualified merchant fees. 
Most merchant service providers charge close to industry rates on the qualified rate.  Yet, on the non-qualified rates that make up about 40% of processing volume for most merchants, they put in a big mark up.  Make sure your mid-qualified rates are never above 2.25% and your non-qualified rates are never above 3.75%

4. Using merchant equipment that drives up your merchant processing costs. 
Swipe credit card transactions are the cheapest for you to run.  They almost always fall into the qualified type of transactions.  You want to do as many of these as possible.  Oftentimes, companies do keyed transactions instead of swipe. Yet, this is a costly mistake.  Instead merchant services transactions that are typically keyed can be swiped done wirelessly through technology like the Verifone VX670, or the Way 5000.

5. Paying for merchant services equipment.
You should be partnering with a merchant services company that gives you free merchant services equipment.  You should never pay for it – ever.