It's important to have a short and simple explanation for the purpose of your business. It's to give you focus, help you explain what you're doing to other people, and relate back to when making defining choices. However, this doesn't mean the statement can't or should not change. Your mission statement probably will and should change. It's very rare a business starts out with it's creator(s) knowing exactly what problem they are solving and how they are solving it-- business is discovery, trying, failing, and succeeding. You'll probably do all of those a little, and it's important to take what you learn and culture your business, goals, and mission around it!

The new global workforce often must manage our time—when we work, sleep, relax—considering several different time zones. Alex actively travels across 4 time zones in the US and I often find myself working 19 hour days between my various functions across in Asia-Pac, Europe, and America.

So how do we do it? How do you manage the demands of a global market place and still stay rested, active, and motivated? Here's some tricks I've picked up...

We've been accepted for our credit cards. Watch-out world! This will make it much easier to keep business expenses separate from our personal finances. Actually, I could probably write a whole blog about the annoyances and problems of business expenses, reimbursements (read: slow reimbursements), and other issues I've had keeping my finances in order when multiple entities are responsible for different parts of a single bill. This was, of course, outside our small business, though.

How did we get credit so fast after starting the company?

It's important to accept credit cards in an e-commerce store. To do this, you need a merchant account and a payment gateway. A merchant account is basically a bank account for collecting proceeds from credit card transactions. A payment gateway is a communication tool that enables you to authorize and manage credit card payments.

Today's Avery's birthday. Here's the other half of Brothers Business wishing you a good one, bro!

Note: I hear Avery's throwing a huge "gala" in Hunan, China, so stop by and see him if you're in the area.

An obvious, but important fact to not overlook, is the reasoning and nature for our business as well as this blog. While the creation of the business is a justification for this blog, in a way, the blog also helps to justify and promote the business!

After research and as mentioned in a previous article we choose to go with National City Bank for their Free Small Business Checking Account. It just takes your Articles of Organization, Federal EIN, and $50 to open the account.

Before even deciding to start a company, meetings and conversations take place to lead you to the idea in the first place. Once the company has been formed, though, you must decide how formal or informal to make meetings. Time can be a very valuable resource (even though it might be one of your more copious resources of the moment), but it's still important to use for creating rather than only thinking, scheming, and talking. This article details some important guidelines for your meetings.

If there's one thing I've learned in my past business ventures, it's that structure and legal formation of the business is important, but it can't be the majority of the work you're doing at the start. An overall idea for what your business should be and concentrating on the steps to make the idea into a reality is where you should spend most of your time. With that said, this article will be about some of the important and necessary steps toward setting up a legal structure, tax IDs, bank accounts, etc.

Figuring out how to configure the multi-site feature in Drupal can be daunting. There is a lot of conflicting material on the net, perhaps due to the long life of drupal and different incarnations. The most recent documentation on the Drupal support site talks about editing the httpd.conf (Apache Hosts) file to handle multiple domains in Drupal. Unfortunately, most hosting companies don't let you access the httpd.conf file. Some charge for it, and some will make changes for you if you submit a support ticket. Laborious!

Fortunately it isn't nearly that complicated.