US Finance World

Moneris invites you to Ready To Serve – Tips and Insights on how to make your restaurant a success

Thursday, May 26 8:30 – 11:00 AM (Breakfast served from 8:00AM)
TIFF Bell Lightbox – 350 King Street West.

Join Toronto’s premier Chef Corbin (Dinner Party Wars, Restaurant Makeover) for an informative session on topics related to running your restaurant business.

Learn about:

• Maintaining successful work & life balance
• New payment technologies for the restaurant industry
• Fraud trends and PCI compliance for restaurants
• OrderIt.ca – a success story
• New integrated solutions for restaurants

Registration is free & limited to the first 100 restaurateurs. Register to

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I came across a very inspiring post from a former palliative nurse named Bronnie who worked closely with patients in their last 3 to 12 weeks of life to comfort them. The post is titled Regrets of the Dying. And I just had to share it.

The wisdom shared by her patients in their final moments, and then by Bronnie, are priceless. They can serve as a guide on not how to embrace death, but how to live life while you have the opportunity.

To summarize, here are the 5 most common regrets of the dying, according to Bronnie:

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This was the most common regret people had. And it makes sense. We only live one life and if youre not living it true to yourself, it seems like a great missed opportunity. This is something that I have slowly been coming to grips with over the years. Still have a long ways to go though

2.

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Several weeks ago, the top small-business bankers at Wells Fargo agreed to take questions from You’re the Boss readers. For reasons that escape me, I’ve found that bankers are often reluctant to tell small-business owners precisely what they expect from borrowers, so I couldn’t resist contributing a few questions.

Hoping it might be useful to all small-business owners, I asked for specific guidelines that relate to the minimum requirements the bankers look for when considering a loan. I referred to the well known “Five Cs” of credit: character, cash flow, collateral, capital, and conditions. Basically, I asked the bankers to pretend that there were no public relations people or lawyers in the room and just tell us what they really want from us. For example, how do they define good character? Is it O.K. if you’ve been married four times? What if you don’t go to your son’s baseball games?

Somehow, the bankers managed not to answer any of my questions — although they did mention that it was a good idea to clean up your credit report. Gee, thanks! I ca

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Yesterday was post #700. Thank you for all your comment, support and suggestions since the beginning. This blog also celebrated its 4 year anniversary in Aprilwhich marks the beginning of the end of this blog. This blog is ending on May 1, 2012 which marks 5 years of blogging- a fitting landmark.

A good friend of mine once advised me to try something new every 5 years. So, after 5 years of blogging on personal finance, I will try my hand at something else. I promise not to make this into the never-ending farewell tour like The Who (who were supposed to retire in 1982).

Youll see some old friends and guests pop back into the fold during this farewell tour. Hope you enjoy it and thank you for reading.

I have posted previously about how important it is to get out and connect personally with people in your local community. Today, I proved my point again. I met Carmen Silva at the Ballantyne Biz Meetup, and with the other ladies at our table, we helped Carmen launch a new business. It took about 15 minutes. Heres how it happened.

Carmen (pictured), who has been marinating on different ideas to start a business, shared her excitement at having lost 40 pounds. Carmen enjoys running, but is a bit intimidated by traditional running groups because she does not run fast and she does not run for long distances. As I, along with Katie Sherman (a social media enthusiast) and Lindsay Wynne (a portrait photographer) bounced ideas off each other, Katie said, Well, you could start a meetup for runners, and call it a runup!

We spent the next 15 minutes helping Carmen reserve CltRunup and the #cltrunup hashtag.

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Pity the middle child: starved for attention, lacking in self-confidence, outshone by siblings little and big. Or often is the case everywhere, it seems, but in the stock market. Here, in-between-size companies aren’t also-rans; they’re outperformers.

Ranging in market value from about $100 million to $10 billion, and known in Wall Street jargon as smids (an amalgam of the words and ), such stocks have been on a two-year tear. The Russell 2500 index, which serves as a benchmark for small and midsize firms, has climbed 150 percent from its March 2009 low — a rise that is some 50 percentage points ahead of that of the large-company-dominated Russell 1000. The mighty run-up, of course, raises a question of its own: Can the smids keep on smoking? And the answer, say a few seasoned market pros, surprisingly is yes.

Who says bigger is better? These small and midsize firms might be stronger growth prospects, according to some analysts.

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If youve been around my blog for a bit, you probably know that I was once a cosmetics manufacturer. Every Saturday morning, I set up my booth at the Takoma Park Farmers Market in Washington, DC, where I sold body oils, handmade soaps, and face masks made of fresh botanicals like lemon juice, cherries, yogurt, and mangoes. My first website was donnaMaria.com, launched in 1998. Heres the home page from 2000.

I grabbed the screen shot from Archive.org, so its hard to read.

The left column is my book cover, a link to my Satellite Sites (yes, even back then, I had more than one website), and a link to the Handmade Beauty Connection, the online newsletter Ive published since 2000.

The middle column is a Welcome sign, the Donna Maria Aromatics logo (with calla lilly, my favorite flower), and a link to the Handmade Toiletries Tapes (which I never got around to recording).

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The weekly top 5 tips post is always full of helpful hints and advice for small, home and micro business owners.

1. Long To-Do lists can be depressing and make it difficult to get started. Arrange the list so that the quickest tasks are completed first and the list will get shorter.

2. Break large time-consuming tasks down into manageable segments so that it feels like you are making progress whenever you work on it.

3. Doing the easiest tasks first will help boost your self-confidence and reduce the overall size of your workload.

4. Alternatively, working on the hard tasks first will stop you procrastinating any further. Leaving stressful complex tasks until later may distract you from getting other things done.

5. Remember to reward yourself for the completion of tasks. Take a break or perhaps buy yourself a nice present if it was a particularly major accomplishment!

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