In most of the About Us page I have seen people stuffing the content with so much about their board of directors and the managers. But this page can actually serve as a good option for online marketing. Apart from telling the visitors about the type of products or service you offer you can do the branding of your product in the page. Yes, of course you need to write about your business but that should not reach the level of boredom of any reader. Hence, you need to cut out the jargons and explain things in a straight forward way.

You can tap the media to foster about your company in the page. You can post videos related to you or your company and link that to your social media network with a share button attached.

You can narrate a story about the chief executing officer of your company or tell anything about his or her hobbies. Those who are engaged in business with your company are always eager to know more about the leaders in your company so that they can find him more trustworthy.

Listing the major clients and their testimonials can be a good idea to show the credibility of an online firm. You can use the logos of your clients to draw attention of the users. You can so show off the award or certificates your have earned so far. Your social commitment can also be of importance as the socially responsible businesses are preferred by consumers today.

A business gets damaged by too many business credit cards since having many cards gives a wrong signal to the credit agencies and banks. The banks typically consider a business owner with too many cards as capable of handling debt. This makes them reject such business owners from various loans as they are led by the idea that the entrepreneur can carry out his monetary needs by the bulky debt size of all the credit cards.

Credit cards were invented to help people come out of the in security of carrying too much cash in hand. But business officials seem to pay no heed to it and they are inflating their wallet with several business credit cards which again brings back the fear of insecurity through theft and lost.

Every business credit card is associated with annual fees and as one jacks the number of card the renewal charges gets spikes as well leading. I don’t think this cost helps much in the business development process, instead inhibits it massively.

A business barely pays attention to the amount of paperwork that gears up because of handling too many cards. A company has to manage and maintain the monthly statement of each card and have to scrutinize the statements as well to make sure that no mistakes has been done. While writing the tasks o managing business credit card statement I can imagine how much of the office work will be hampered because of it.

So far my readers have been intimidated enough about business credit cards but these card are useful too only when maintained within a reasonable limit. Possessing two cards at a time is good idea and it will also keep the cost of maintenance of the cards within the reasonable limits. However, making the number of cards go beyond three will become cumbersome.

If a company need to send too many employees for travel then the business credit cards are worth using. However, before asking them to use, one should calculate the cost of using such cards for the purpose of traveling. One should calculate whether asking the employee to use his person card and then submitting the expenses is lower than offering them a business credit card for use. This trade-off may take time but once it is done a company can save plenty

It might sound good on paper, but it only takes a few minutes of digging for you to realize that Groupon, and by extension Groupon deals, are celebrated by many and hated by an equal number of people. It’s hard to place a valuation on these internet businesses, but some estimate that Groupon is worth as much as $3 billion. That’s a lot of dollars by any stretch of the imagination. But sample these blog comments that talk about Groupon.

“It’s not for me. There’s no value in it.”

“The financials are skewed in favor of Groupon. It doesn’t add up for us.”

“Groupon is the worst marketing decision I ever made.”

“Groupon deals never benefit businesses, only customers and Groupon themselves.”

“Groupon is ok. It helped us get new customers, but it offers nothing by way of margins.”

So even when someone has something good to say about Groupon, there’s not a lot they say that is much good. I have friends that have tried Groupon (over and above traditional advertising) to grow their business. I’ve had people tell me all sorts of things about Groupon deals. Some say it’s terrible, some say it is terrific. One thing is for sure though. Groupon is an absolute that is growing at the rate of knots and crosses. What else can deliver 2,000 customers to your business just like that? It’s a beast that can really drag your business onwards and upwards, but it takes more than its pound of flesh. Do you need groupon deals? That depends on a couple of things.

For one, do you know how many customers in your area don’t know about you? Can you handle excess capacity? Are you okay with the reduced margins Groupon offers? Other issues revolve around branding; do you want to be seen as a giver of discounts, because that sets a precedent. It’s a personal decision, but it’s a direction I know I’d be very hesitant to take. Once you get started that’s a slippery slope that keeps on sucking you in and your customers will always expect discounts. At the end of the day, going for Groupon deals or not is a judgment call. A judgment call that costs money since you are losing money from sales, so it is effectively advertising. That can mess with you if you’re profit-oriented. Good luck to you, no matter whether you choose to go with Groupon or not.

In a world where companies enter and exit through a revolving door, this is a wonderful thing to see. Japan is in many ways a society of corporate heirlooms that are passed down from one generation to the next. And no one wants to just see these Japanese companies fall by the wayside. But to be brutally honest, a large number of these businesses are getting by because credit does not make a dent by way of costs and bankers don’t really bother whether they are lending to a profitable business or not. This has the two-fold effect of making corporate culture weaker by way of laxity and productivity is affected since these companies don’t need to turn a profit to get credit. There is a very real danger that if productivity drops much further, the Japanese GDP will become negative since the country’s businesses will be dragging it down.

If you were to look at the domestic markets, where two-thirds of the Japanese output is churned out, production per worker is hit badly by a large degree of competition. Simply put, companies refuse to consolidate, spread their businesses too thin and as a result profits are low since industries are saturated. Take the automotive industry, Japan’s joy and pride for so many years. You can rattle off names such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Daihatsu, Mazda and Subaru and yet feel you’ve missed out on someone. Contrast that with South Korea that has got mainly Hyundai as its dominant car maker. And so, despite having a market 2.5 times the size of South Korea’s, the market per car company is only two thirds that of South Korea’s. Add to the mix the global slowdown in the automotive industry since 2008 and you find that the Japanese are in a real pickle.

Manufacturing and services companies both suffer from the same issue. Banks have a large stockpile of cash since they have saved a lot but this money is pumped into ultra-safe Japanese bonds. It is an effort not to build wealth, but to sustain finances. Japan needs to give a shot in the arm to its flagging domestic economy, its single largest source of demand. The finance industry too must do its bit for the economy and Japanese companies, investing their ¥1,500 trillion savings with a view for the future.

Just how bad is Maynard talking about? I’ve got a name for you, and it’s one you will know; George Clooney. Suave, sophisticated, elegant, sexy. There’s another word to describe him though, and that word is seller. He’s been actively looking to sell the rights to “Ides of March”, a tale of political morality Clooney himself will direct and star in alongside such names as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood. The expectation and belief is that a future payday will be realized if and when Sony Pictures Entertainment releases it. And guys like Maynard will put their money where theur mouth is and invest in movies such as this. There’s nothing like the glamor of Hollywood, and there’s no business like the movie business.

In today’s atmosphere of austerity, studios are financing a fewer amount of movies. And to replace them there are a slew of equity investors that are willing to pump their money into showbiz. Suddenly, the beauty of the silver screen can be resisted no more by these business types that always look at the bottom line. In fact, these businessmen and investors will be more likely to have been found fishing for deals in the real estate market or investing in more conventional businesses. The movie business is something new to them, and it is indisputable that stardust has a part to play in it.

In a day and age where home video revenues have drastically dried up, these businessmen do not mind pumping in the millions in order to get a considerable ownership stake. It is a win win situation; the movie continues and the show goes on while the ownership stake itself was so cheap as to be able to turn a profit even if the investment itself wasn’t that substantial, all things considered. The old saying “cash is king” rings true. Hollywoood has been the perfect host for several investors that have previously been alien to the movie business. Marvin Davis, an oil entrepreneur that you might have heard of, bought and sold 20th Century Fox for a very neat little profit while Credit Lyonnais didn’t have as much luck, getting stuck with bad loans to a litany of companies. The Japanese stock market, conglomerates, hedge funds, doctors, lawyers; the money is all there, and Hollywood still has tremendous drawing power. There really is no business like show business.

It has been two years since the White House came running to the rescue of Wall Street, buckets of cash in hand and bailed them out. And what incredibly large buckets they were; hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money was poured into all of these bad investments. The bitter irony of the fact is that it was these very businesses that had poisoned the economy and were now crying out for help in their hour of need. Poetic justice would have been meted out if these companies were snuffed out ruthlessly, but instead they were thrown a lifeline thanks to the Troubled Assets Relief Program. And now many of these businesses are going up for sale. Interested in getting a piece of the action?

Entire businesses are being put up for sale as well as these colossi try to get ride of the dead weight. Think of it as a giant, intangible (but very financial) act of liposuction. These businesses need to slim down, and this is the only way they know how to do so. But the biggest question surrounding all of it is how much is all of this truly worth? Is it actually worth anything at all? Hedge funds and private equity firms are sniffing around, trying to sense if there is an opportunity in it all and the usual dirty tactics are being pulled out of the play book. How dirty? Try this for delicious, delicious irony; these banks are being low-balled into agreeing a cheap deal. Ah; yes. Karma…it is quite a bitch. And the best part is the to and fro of haggling hasn’t even begun yet. The fun is just beginning.

All jokes and twisted sense of delight aside though, the fate of these sales (or non-sales, depending on how the negotiations go), could help to determine the future of the global financial markets. All of the bailouts that were offered to businesses as a part of the Troubled Assets Relief Program could now pass into private hands, and that has some very serious ramifications. Those bailouts were financed with taxpayer money and all of those broken businesses will now be tended to by a new owner, if it does pass on, and everyone has their finger on the pulse to find out just what is happening.

Banks need to get rid of all of their troubled investments pronto, that is why they are dropping profitable businesses that are no longer needed just like that. Cases of AIG doing so with Asian arms of their business spring to mind instantly. The biggest worry is that the vast network of shadowy financial operators that do their business beyond the purview of the regulatory mechanisms in place would become even bigger if these businesses were to go private. Here’s a little piece of trivia for you; over the next five years, you are going to see more financial assets being liquidated than has been seen cumulatively for the last 100 years. Financial garbage collectors (in a manner of speaking) are going to have a field day, and there’s plenty of action for everyone.

Since that day 2 years ago, Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) has been restructuring and dismantling Lehman’s holding company and sifting through 65,000 claims from myriad creditors and company derivatives that are convoluted and confusing. It has some 200 people toiling away at the derivatives book alone and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) is conducting a similar exercise over in Europe. The big challenge is to take some of the most aggressive and weakest of claims and keep them aside. Alvarez & Marsal plan to push through an approval of $260 billion in claims and this is only a quarter of the total amount of claims that have been filed.

It’s all a bit chaotic, and it’s become so bad that the 20 or so Lehman entities all around the world have hilariously put in vast claims against one another. A large chunk of this has to do with guarantee claims, which are nothing more than debts that other companies argue have been held back by the holding company. This is not to say that Lehman itself is not looking squarely at third parties and going after them. Lehman’s holding company is looking to get up to $11 billion by way of compensation from Barclays for the killing they made when they snaffled Lehman’s American operations right after it went belly up. There’s a trial against JPMorgan Chase due to go to trial in 2012 as well.

But the courts aren’t always at hand to clarify such matters. Administrators are doing everything in their power to increase the speed of payouts and a unique claim resolution system as proposed by PWC over in Europe has managed to get the support of some of the most eligible creditors. American administrators on the other hand are trying to work out a middle path between going through each and every claim as filed and treating every single creditor on an even keel. One adviser laughingly described the entire experience as “the financial equivalent of stabilizing Iraq” and A&M can reasonably expect to settle some 80% of the claims within the next few years, but that last 20% could take much longer.

When all is said and done, creditors of Lehman brothers can expect to get as little as 15 cents for their dollar while many feel that lawyers and professionals are making hay while the sun shines, for their fees could touch $1.5 billion, a figure more than double that of the Enron case. Administrators pooh-pooh this, saying their costs are a mere 0.65% of assets recovered. Perspective is a funny thing; that 0.65% translates into $315 million.

Given the ridiculous ineptness and gross corruption and misconduct on the part of AIG, it will almost miraculous if AIA manages to get some sort of a deal done. There was an early attempt to list AIA but this was pulled out of in March because a deal seemed to be materializing for Prudential to buy out AIA. But the British insurer could not raise the money to complete the deal and it was in June that the deal collapsed. It has been quite a similar tale to tell for the sale of AIG’s Taiwanese life insurance division and it is quite clear that many buyers, or maybe even any buyers, want to step forward to deal with the tainted and much reviled life insurance operator or any of its subsidiary operations.

The Taiwanese outfit had announced a deal the previous October but it was finally revealed that this deal fell through earlier in September. That was put down to the buyer’s shadowy financing links and potential links that could be traced back to the Chinese regulators, meaning that the Taiwanese regulators put the kibosh on the deal going through. These failed deals have gone and made employees and all potential customers very skittish, for the manner of AIG’s dealings over in the US of A and the manner in which these deals have failed have only heightened fears of failure. That is a particularly toxic state for an insurer to find itself in.

AIG is going to incredible lengths in order to make sure that the AIA listing doesn’t fall through yet again. They have gone and hired 15 investment banks co-ordinate and run this sale and hiring so many big investment banks minimizes the risk of being lambasted by analysts, but given the nature of AIG’s operations in the US and their history, it will be hard to imagine how commentators and analysts don’t rip into the American insurance biggie. Another issue is that the investment banks hired have overlapping client coverage and so they might not be able to spur on demand for these shares by a whole lot. Also remember the small matter of commissions; these investments are not run by Mother Teresa, and they will look to take their pound of flesh from AIG. With a set of banks this large, that might mean the price of the offer might be diminished and the offer size stretched.

This is a pity given that the assets being sold are still strong, but the trickledown effect of AIG’s negative goodwill (badwill??) was unavoidable. AIG went belly up because of the gross mismanagement of its derivatives business, but its Asian unit is still a good array of assets. AIA is an industry leader when it comes to life insurance in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Macau and Brunei. Laughably, there is a story in Malaysia that talks about your baby arriving at the same time as an AIA agent looking to sell you products linked to the baby’s future.

If it weren’t in so much trouble with American taxpayers, there is no doubt that AIG would be looking to hold on to AIA for all it is worth. It is a prized asset that is making money even in an uncertain time with management churn refusing to go away. Revenues have grown by 14% and even if competitors are growing twice as fast, it shouldn’t be hard to sell AIA in a high growth market with immense potential. The only reason it has taken this long is because it is a division of AIG and nothing else.

Most of these jobs are the kind that the very top percentile of applicants work hard towards and it is a terrific opportunity for these young adults to make a breakthrough onto Wall Street. And the benefits of having influential Wall Street ties on the athletic board has a ripple effect for these Ivy League schools; they in turn can attract the best talent to their college since these alumni can help prospective job seekers get the kind of jobs and internships that many would give their right arm to have right now.

These summer internships are often offered to Ivy League athletes by executives involved the sports program of the school in question. Others resort to sounding out alumni for references or to simply try and understand what a company needs. Dozens of school-going athletes will get their jobs eventually with a financial firm, an unlikely marriage that few might see as a perfect fit. Schools such as Duke, Notre Dame and Northwestern already have such industry interfaces setup and are making full use of it all.

And that’s not all; these alumni help the student athletes develop the kind of skills that will be central to obtaining an internship with these Wall Street firms and subsequently, with some luck, a job as well that would be the envy of most. Even such institutions as New York based Columbia University are not immune to this need to leverage networks. They even have a full-time Director of Career Development for athletics. That tells you perhaps how big a deal this is. Etiquette dinners are held where student athletes are educated in the subtleties of making small talk in the midst of a formal dinner. This director, Kimberley Curry, is a liaison between the industry and the college and helps students get placed by constantly working with them. Most of these Ivy League students will not make it to NFL rosters and it is their futures that these schools are safeguarding.

As these alumni networks start to work more closely with their alma mater, these student athletes are benefiting most from it, but these schools are quick to dismiss anyone being given a free ride; the students have to earn their internships and jobs just as anyone else might. The message is clear, in sports and in life you get your breaks but it’s up to the individual to then deliver.

The original AIG deal that was struck with the Federal Reserve saw it get the same terms as any other private sector funding initiative. But that failed to raise enough money. Then the powers to be decided that the sub divisions of AIG would be sold off and the proceeds would go towards coming good on borrowings and there was no doubt among the upper management that exactly this would happen. This was a great solution in that AIG had to dismantle the very machinery that got it into this colossal mess in the first place. The interest on their borrowing was high, and so AIG was forced into taking rapid action so that they could repay taxpayers fast.

But the watchdogs were asleep when AIG asleep, or maybe they had turned the other way just temporarily. Assurances of divestment proved to be nothing more than empty words, a reflection of the systemic rot that had set into the company that had become so brazen as to flout regulatory rulings openly without much fear of any ramifications. Begging bowl in hand, they return to the White House and got even more money at a lower rate. It was a concession on the part of Uncle Sam, who was beginning to look like a chump and who perhaps should have sacked the board when he could have. And this happened not once, but thrice.

Who is sanctioning the retrading of these deals by AIG?

Even as these acts of intransigence were repeatedly perpetrated by AIG, reports have now emerged of yet another retrade of the AIG financing deal, all of this taxpayer money. What has been mooted is a plan of “accelerated repayment”, but what it is really is nothing more than a cloak and dagger show with everyone happy to extend and pretend that all is good. It seems to be that AIG is in free fall, and yet more and more money is being pumped into it with no sign of it being returned. It’s like that friend of yours that takes your money, promises to repay and then never does. How strangely accommodating the Treasury is when it comes to dealing with corporate fat cats, yet shows no concern when it comes to dealing with homeowners that need the money badly. What a strange dichotomy that is.