A major part of the budgeting process is estimating or forecasting your company's revenue.  You can't figure out how much you can spend without knowing what you're bringing in.  Learn some tips to take the guesswork out of revenue projections in "How To Forecast Sales In An Uncertain Economy."

If the budget you've drawn up shows that you'll have financing needs next year, you need to start talking to your lender now.  Okay, we know that discussions with banks may feel like you're butting your head against a wall.  But fear not: there are strategies you can employ to ensure such talks do not lead to severe headaches, and you can discover them in "How To Secure a Credit Line."

Like buildings, sometimes a business needs to perform a face lift, giving it a new image to attract and keep customers.  It may be adding products or services, placing emphasis on new target audiences, or creating a new image.  If you find that your business may be in need of a new direction, the beginning of a new year is a good time to start planning the process.

Read 10 tips to bring about this change and breathe new life into your business in "How To Successfully Rebrand Your Business."

We've heard and read a lot about theft of personal and corporate information.  Did you know that 98 percent of business information is digital, not paper-based?  Did you know that this information is "hacked" not for use by the hacker, but for sale to other criminals for their use?  The beginning of the year is the ideal time to analyze your company's computer security and protection policies.

During the past few months our chapter sent our subscribers email announcements about a Cyber Security workshop conducted by NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) and InfraGard.  Representatives of the Greater Knoxville SCORE chapter attended the workshop and learned several important lessons from presenters Bob Watkins, Cyber Crime Agent in the Knoxville FBI office, and Richard Kissel of the Computer Division of NIST.  Among the most important points was a statistic from White House Cyber Security Specialist Howard Schmidt, that 85% of cyber attacks are made against small businesses.  This is probably because small businesses don't have safeguards and policies in place like larger businesses do.

To help small businesses install and improve security measures and polices, NIST has written "Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals," a 16 page document which is available as a download from their web site.  We encourage all subscribers to download this document, and implement the standards and practices it contains.