Business

IBM THE GREENEST COMPANY IN USA. 

IBM is now the greenest company in America, according to Newsweek's 2011 Green Rankings — moving up from its #3 ranking last year, and #5 in 2009. It helped that IBM removed toxic chemicals like PFOs and PFAs from all of its semiconductors in 2010, and that it's set new standards for its suppliers and joined initiatives like the Carbon Disclosure Project. Last year's winner, Dell, fell to #5, mainly because it hasn't been improving as fast as its competitors. While it's focused on reducing waste in recent years, it hasn't transformed its manufacturing and supply-chain operations to the extent that other companies have, which has affected its environmental footprint. Tech companies still dominate the rest of Newsweek's third-annual list of the top 500 most sustainable companies in the U.S. We've highlighted the top 10:

1. IBM has had a policy on environmental responsibility since 1971, and has really focused on cleaning up its supply chain in recent years.

2. Hewlett Packard. Last year, HP removed mercury from all of their notebooks. It has recycled over 2.36 billion pounds of e-waste since 1987.

3. Sprint released four eco-friendly phones and a mobile solar phone charger this year. One of its goals is to reuse or recycle 100 percent of its e-waste.

4. Baxter breaks into the top ten and is the best in the healthcare industry, and has goals to reduce carbon emissions by 45%, reduce water use 35%, and increase renewable energy use 20% by 2015.

5. Dell switched to biodegradable packaging made from mushroom and bamboo. Dell is also trying to recycle 99 percent of their products by 2012.

6. Johnson & Johnson reduced the environmental impact of 17 products significantly. Meanwhile, it tripled its solar energy capacity. Its facilities produce up to 13 megawatts now.

7. Accenture promotes environmental sustainability both within its company as well as with its partners and clients. In 2010, it helped publish "A New Era of Sustainability: UN Global Compact-Accenture CEO Study 2010."

8. Office Depot. Up ten spots, Office Depot intends to source 80 percent of its materials from well-managed forests, reduce carbon footprint by 25%, and target $600 million in contract sales of green products by 2012. 

9. CA Technologies. Its new $30 million facility in India is LEED Gold Certified. The CEO was a founding member of the CNBC Carbon Council. It also enforces a strict supplier code of conduct. 10. NVIDIA makes the biggest jump, rising from #188 in 2010. It is working to improve energy efficiency of computers with its new "Fermi" generation of GPUs.

Chinese firms eye West for investment opportunities.

More privately-owned Chinese companies are looking to the West for investment opportunities, and a new chamber has been set up in Beijing to help facilitate such efforts.

Lenovo did it with IBM's PC division in 2005, and so did Geely last year, buying over Sweden's Volvo for US$1.3 billion.

And there may be more overseas acquisitions by Chinese companies next year.

Fosun, China's largest private conglomerate said it's already looking to acquire Western companies in the luxury and healthcare sectors.

Liang Xinjun, CEO of Fosun, said: "EU-US consumer spending has deteriorated in last three to four years and will continue to fall in the next four to five years. Growth of their enterprises will be limited or even fall. So we can buy about 10 to 30 per cent shares of their companies, become their top or second shareholder, and then bring them into the Chinese market to grow."

And that's the main goal for the newly set up China International Chamber of Commerce for the Private Sector, which held its first forum on Thursday for members.

Besides providing financial and investment support, the chamber also hopes to help resolve differences between overseas and Chinese companies during the acquisition process.

4 Key Steps to Branding a New Business

Launching a new business brand is more than just getting a logo designed. Building a brand begins with researching a clients target customer, market demand, and competition and look for a niche you can own based on your unique selling proposition.

Research your customer to fully understand their demographics, psychographics and buying habits. What colors appeal to them? What keywords can you use to connect to them? Where and why do they shop? Market demand research is important to see if there truly is a need for your product or service or if there is a need in a certain geographic location or within an industry.

After the research information is gathered, move to the action plan phase which includes developing a time line for what happens when in terms of the creative and communication process. It's important to stress that this phase is an action plan, focused on getting results. Marketing plans can be calendar based with timelines and real objectives. The action plan can also include the who, what, where and how of your advertising or marketing plan. Do billboard ads make sense for your business or is social media they best way to promote your services. This is the nuts and bolts of marketing.

Next, start the creative process by developing a name that stands out in a crowd, encompasses your company values and communicates what the product is or does. Take your action plan and combine it with a message that reaches the target audience using the platforms that are best. Typically, start with creating the logo, tagline and main marketing message first and then move on to the other marketing components and communication plan. Incorporate research in this stage to be sure that your name is not being currently used by another company and that the trademark is available to you.

After every marketing action is taken, it's important to evaluate your plan and see if it was successful. We're looking for real results here. How many calls were received? How many emails? What was the objective and how was it measured? Are sales up? In this age of social media, your results on those platforms like Facebook and Twitter should not be just in the number of people in your circle, but in the quality of the interaction. Social media is valuable in that it gives you're a platform to connect with and listen to your clients and respond to their needs.
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Best Way To Grow Your Business.

Online advertising is a great way to get your business out there and you have access to a worldwide market, which is A LOT of people!

Consider setting up a website and/or consider launching an ad campaign with Google AdWords, Microsoft, or Yahoo.

With the online ad campaign, you set a daily budget and Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo (choose one or all three) will showcase your ad every time someone searches for something related to your niche. For example, let's say you have a tax planning service. For a fraction of the cost, you can set up an online ad for your tax planning company easier than you could put an ad in the newspaper.

Every time someone does a search for something related to tax planning (or whatever keywords you choose), your ad has a chance of showing up. If someone clicks on your ad then you will be charged a small advertising fee of around $2. If no one clicks on your ad, you don't get charged. Consider newspapers that charge you whether someone reads your ad or not, see the benefit here?

This is a great way to reach a large audience on a limited budget. And just think, your audience is ANYONE with a connection to the internet. This means cell phones, laptops, desktops, Tablets, you name it! As long as someone has a connection to the internet...they could be a potential customer.

Join some local clubs or organizations in your niche.

Look online for organizations related to your niche. For example, using the "tax planning" niche for above you can go online and to a Google search for tax planning clubs or tax planning professionals. The popular social website Meetup.com is also a GREAT way to meet like minded people. If you are not a member of this website, join (It's free) today and start meeting like minded professionals.

Create business cards and flyers for yourself and hand them out.

You can get cards and flyers relatively cheap at vistaprint.com. You can usually order 500 to 1000 business cards or flyers for less than $50.

Get some marketing materials from VistaPrint and hand them out at your local church, temples, salon, or stick them in car windows in major parking lots such as shopping malls and supermarkets.

Create a referral and rewards program.

Give people incentives to be repeat customers. i.e. use my service 5 times and the 6th is free or half off, or you could say sign up now and get 30% off. There are many ways to do this so get creative. 

Look At What Your Top Competitors Are Doing, and offer better terms.

If you were in the business of printing business cards and flyers and other marketing materials, Vistaprint would probably be one of your biggest competitors. Check out how they run their business and see if you can take something away from that. Learn what they are doing well and reapply that to your business model.

Either way, establishing an online business (online marketing) in addition to your current (offline) efforts should really help your business. 

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A Few Important Steps To Increase The Profits of Your Business

Before losing hope with the current state of your business, you might want to consider a few important details to increase its profits and growth. With many businesses slashing their prices and are downsizing, you can do the opposite by looking for better ways to save your business.

With a few tweaks here and there, you will be able to gain maximum profit from every sale you make. These steps are easy to implement and will most likely improve the profit management of your business.

The first step that you will have to do is to identify key profit generators and the factors that lower its maximum output. For every business that is not doing well, there is a possibility that a certain channel from its sales has a potential to profit more than its current gains. The opposite can be applied to big and well established companies as well where it is possible to have a non-profitable sales channel. The idea here is that, the profitable channels can be overshadowed by the non profitable ones. The profits are drained away by the losses of the bad channels. With this, what you will have to do is to make an assessment of all of your sales channels and transactions. Calculate the revenues of each including the overhead and indirect costs of making a sale. Carefully study the data and compare values. With this step, you will be able to identify the profit generators and the channels that are draining the total revenue.

Once you have identified your key profit generators, you will have to take actions to protect it. However, one must be very careful in thinking that cost cutting too much might be a good thing to do to preserve the good ones and that cutting expenditures in every departments could raise the profit. There is always a possibility of crippling a department when this is done which is bad and won't do any good in preserving your profit generators. The best thing to do is to do it slowly and effectively and not to cost cut deeply. Although removing your weaknesses in the earliest possible time is good, it is better to focus on how to improve the strengths first and stabilize it before hacking out the drains.

The next thing you will have to consider is how to get more valuable customers that will help promote your products. Focus your business plans in targeting high-potential customers and ignore those that will require you to overhaul your cultural practices. Sales team should learn how to distinguish the best target customers and to be able to eliminate the channels that are not faring well.

These are only a few of the things that you can do to increase the revenue of your business. You can always seek professional help if you think that you are not confident enough to make a decision.