Finance

PCI stands for Payment Card Industry and the “compliant” refers to their Data Security Standards. Credit card companies require acquirers (your merchant account provider) and their merchants (that’s you) to be compliant with those standards in order to process credit card transactions.

The entire point of the exercise is to make sure that merchants processing credit cards are taking appropriate security measures to protect cardholder data.

You might think that compliance is a simple thing if you are one of the millions of small businesses conducting online transactions through a third party service provider like Link Point. It might seem that most online microbusiness owners will have nothing to worry about because most of them never come into direct contact with customer credit card data.

However, it’s not quite that simple. We might not come into contact with the sensitive data but we are still responsible for what happens when that data is transmitted from our web sites to our virtual terminals and/or payment gateways. The PCI Security Standards Council has determined that “anybody who touches the data has to be compliant,” as spokesman Glenn Boyet put it to me.

That means, in order for you to be considered PCI compliant, your payment gateway and your merchant account provider and your shopping cart software and even your web hosting company — all the service providers you use to handle your customers’ data, transmit it, or process it — need to be PCI compliant, too. read more

In my last post I talked about two success stories that illustrate how easy it is — provided you consider forming a strategic global alliance (SGA) — to take your business global. As a result of my post, which focused on product exports versus services, one reader raised a great question: Is there a true opportunity for consultants in the United States to do business globally or is the opportunity primarily for product companies?

I touched on the surface of the answer here but I’m going to dig a bit deeper now.

Whether you are exporting a product or service, it is a given that you will confront numerous market barriers — governmental, practical, cultural and economic. These barriers can be quite challenging, not to mention extremely frustrating, to a new-to-export service company. To overcome them and beat out the competition, you will need to plan on being aggressive and persistent, and on taking longer to establish a business presence than you may have expected. Let’s get acquainted with the barriers: read more

I’ve been told that every business has to work with “Difficult Customers.” In fact, there is a multi-million dollar training industry built around the assumption that we all have to work with difficult people. Well, I don’t buy it.

In fact, I agree with Seth Godin, who says to fire difficult customers ; you’ll be happier and more successful.

But if you’re like me, it might have taken you a while to get to the point of having the guts to politely say “there’s the door” to difficult customers. Nobody wants to admit defeat. The natural tendency is to hang on, try to adjust what WE do, and hope it gets better.

Even worse, money fears drive us to keep those difficult jerks around. Customers are not easy to come by — we fear the loss.

But here are two dollars-and-cents reasons NOT to work with difficult customers: read more

Here’s how most entrepreneurs approach venture capital funding raising. I call it Plan A. It’s a plan and an outcome that no one talks about but happens all the time. I’ve been on both sides, so I should know.

• Step 1: the entrepreneur cogitates: “Let’s raise $1-2 million so we can focus on programming and marketing and not worry about raising money. We’ll hit all our milestones and then go out for another $5 million in two years and get acquired or go public soon after that.” Believe it or not, many companies raise the $1-2 million and sometimes more because venture capitalists compete for the deal.
• Step 2: the entreprenur fantasizes: “Our most conservative forecast is one million users in the first six months. We need to scale to prepare for this, and the reason why VCs gave us money is that they want us to scale and win the land grab.”
• Step 3: the product is late, and the dogs don’t eat the food. After six months, there are 10,000 users, not one million. The company has scaled up its expenses but for no reason. Money is tight, but the VCs are still clueless and accustomed to initial projections being off by orders of magnitude.

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Recently, President Bush signed what was dubbed by the New York Times as a “huge package of housing legislation” that is supposed to help thousands of homeowners who may be in danger of foreclosure.

There are other things in the bill, of course. As a matter of fact, there’s a little something here targeting the self-employed, something I bet nobody on Capitol Hill is going to claim credit for including.

Those vociferously fiscally-responsible Congressional Democrats, who want to pay for what they do but know they can’t raise taxes under this President, have spent the last couple of years lusting after a way to narrow the tax gap. The tax gap, in case you were wondering, is the difference between what the Treasury Department estimates it should receive in tax revenues and the amount it actually does receive. read more