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Honor Bankers turn out for Copemish Days
Holly Buda from Copemish was overjoyed to see that 22 people representing Honor Bank participated in the Copemish Days Parade, and gives a big WOW to Mike Worden for riding his bicycle from his home to Copemish, then walking the parade, and then riding his bicycle home. That's a 40 mile round trip! |
Take Five
5 Tips on Preparing for change |
Examine your corporate culture to discover any impediments to change. Some traditions and practices may need to be revamped to meet new needs.
Keep talking about change so that employees think in terms of change and help make it happen.
Make expectations clear. Key employees should know that embracing change is part of their responsibility.
Monitor company procedures and systems to be sure they support change.
Plan far ahead for the biggest change of all: your retirement or exit from the company. Develop new leadership.
Source: SCORE |
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The Sugarcane Machine
A small island grows sugar cane. Many people harvest it, and one guy owns the machine that can process the cane and turn it into juice.
Who wins?
The guy with the machine, of course. It gives him leverage, and since he's the only one, he can pay the pickers whatever he likes--people will either sell it to him or stop picking. No fun being the cane picker. He can also charge whatever he likes to the people who need the cane juice, because without him, there's no juice. No fun being a baker or cook.
But now, a second machine comes to the island, and then three more. There are five processors.
Who wins?
Certainly not the guy with the first machine. He has competitors for the cane. He can optimize and work on efficiency, but pretty soon he's going to be in a price war for his raw materials (and a price war for the finished product.) Not so much fun to be the factory owner.
And then! And then one cane processor starts creating a series of collectible containers, starts interacting with his customers and providing them with custom blends, starts offering long-term contracts and benefits to his biggest customers, and yes, even begins to pay his growers more if they're willing to bring him particularly sweet and organic materials, on time. In short, he becomes a master of the art of processing and marketing cane. He earns permission, he treats different customers differently and he refuses to act like a faceless factory...
Who are you?
By Seth Godin
[blogmailfromseth@yahoo.com]
_________________ Member FDIC
Equal Housing Lender |
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| Positive Economic News
Housing Starts at 8 month High
21 Sep
(Reuters) - Groundbreaking for new U.S. homes jumped in August to a four-month high, a tentative sign of stability in the housing market after steep declines brought by the end of a homebuyer tax credit.
While the data on Tuesday further allayed fears that the recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression was at risk, the Federal Reserve took a step toward a new round of monetary easing to stimulate growth.
Read the full story HERE. |
TransArmor - A New Way to Protect Your Customer's Data
Customers who
process their credit card payments with the Honor Bank/First Data now receive the First DataŽ
TransArmorSM solution free for a limited time. The program is a combination of encryption
and tokenization technology that protects and removes payment card data
completely from the merchant environment, so your system never hold the actual
card numbers from the transactions you process.
The solution removes your
need to store card data by replacing it with a randomly assigned number, called
a 'token'. In doing so, TransArmor
minimizes risk by reducing the scope of PCI compliance, shifts the burden of
protecting cardholder data from you to First Data, and allows the 'token' to be
used for other business and sales functions such as returns, sales reports, and
analysis. Below is an illustration of
how it works. 
Merchant Benefits
Merchants are at the most
at risk and the
biggest target for data breaches.
- Losses from
fraud: Banks
and payment processors may reclaim losses they sustain as a result of a
merchant's data breach.
- Expenses for credit monitoring: Customers
whose data is stolen may be entitled to credit monitoring for at least a year.
- Fines by card brands:
Card companies
may issue fines for PCI DSS noncompliance and prohibited data storage
practices.
- Remediation costs: Capital expenditures may be necessary
to replace or upgrade compromised hardware, software, applications and
communications.
- Brand damage: Public
reporting of a breach often is required by law, making it impossible to escape
widespread bad publicity and loss of confidence in merchant's brand.
- Expense of
forensic exam and in-depth PCI audit: A forensic investigation could take
months with very high costs.
These are all
huge risks to a merchants' business and the damage takes time to mend and is
sometimes irreversible. Therefore, when you add encryption and tokenization into
your payments
environment, you are placing in another layer of security for data as well as
taking the cardholder data out of the merchant's environment.
Credit Card Processing Advantages
Help improve
your cash flow and increase sales with higher average tickets associated with
credit cards. Honor Bank and First Data can help you to operate in compliance
with Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards and receive automatic, electronic
deposits to your account with the capability for next-day funding, secure data
transactions and fraud protection-all features that make credit card
transactions easier and secure.
If you would like to learn more about how Honor Bank and
First Data can go to work for you, now may be the time. For a limited time, Honor Bank is offering
$200* if we can't meet or beat your current rate. Contact your local branch manager for more
details.
* Offer subject to change
without notice. Some restrictions and
limitations may apply. Merchant
processing cost comparison based on all merchant services processing charges
shown on a recent processor merchant statement.
Limit one card per merchant, regardless of the number of business
locations. The $200 will come in the
form of a Visa Gift Card. Please allow 6
to 8 weeks for your gift card. Other
fees may apply. Offer may be extended,
modified or discontinued at any time without notice.
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News You Can Use
Work Smart: Take back your calendar with defensive scheduling
By: Gina Trapani Work Smart: Brainstorming
When it comes to productivity tools, next to your to-do list, your calendar is your best friend. You already use it to track meetings, appointments, and events with other people, but you should also organize and schedule your own work.
Ever wind up with a full day of meetings and barely a minute to breathe or get any actual work done in between? If your workdays are scheduled out with wall-to-wall commitments more often than you'd like, start making appointments with yourself first. I call this defensive scheduling--or time blocking, as discussed in an earlier episode. If you need an uninterrupted hour or two to focus on a single project, schedule that time as a meeting with yourself on the appropriate day and time, and honor the commitment the same way you'd honor a meeting with a coworker. Your time is YOUR time--and you can claim chunks of it using your calendar first.
Schedule a weekly, recurring block of time to regroup and review your projects and to-do lists and what you have accomplished that week and what you need to accomplish the next week. Productivity expert David Allen calls this the weekly review, and suggests you schedule it on Friday afternoon, after lunch, when the week is winding down but your coworkers are still around to help you tie up loose ends. If Friday doesn't work, try for Monday morning or even Sunday night.
Second, use your calendar as a time-based to-do list, to remind yourself of tasks that you must complete by a certain day. If you promised Fred you'd call him on Thursday, or you must have your invoice in by the 30th, add those tasks to your calendar on the right days so they'll appear on your agenda when you need to do them.
Along those lines, use your calendar as a tool to renegotiate and reassign personal deadlines. If an issue comes up that you're not ready to make a decision about right now, put a note on your calendar to revisit it in a week--then, forget about it. In essence you're giving yourself permission to procrastinate for a set amount of time. But when you put off tough decisions this way, it's actually quite productive. You're giving your subconscious mind time to work on the problem in the background, and make the right decision clearer to you.
Of course, the key to using your calendar to manage your time well is to always have it with you. Make sure you're either syncing your digital calendar to your phone or handheld, or that you carry your paper day planner wherever you go so you can refer to it each day.
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