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Getting people to say yes isn't always easy. But it turns out that there are simple words you can use when making a request that can double your effectiveness. Steve Martin, Author of "Yes" explains. (Other)

Your Biz blog: Why some people allow tragedy to destroy them, and others don?t?

Aug. 24: Meet one business owner who holds down not one, but two full-time jobs. While the arrangement means plenty of long hours, for him, having a business on the side just seems to work. (Other)

Licensing is big business and you don't need to be a Fortune 500 Company to cash in. Meet a husband and wife team who took their sketches of cartoon characters and turned them into a booming company. (Other)

Even in lean economic times, the American appetite for cookies, cake, ice cream, and other tasty treats continues to grow. Savvy entrepreneurs want a piece of that $23 billion pie.

The government is searching for ways to make dealing with flexible working requests easier for businesses in a new consultation.

It follows the announcement that parents of all children aged under 16 will have the right to request flexible working patterns.

Pat McFadden, employment relations minister, reveals businesses would be asked how best to minimise the administrative burden associated with the system.

The consultation will also consider ways to spread awareness of the regulations.

McFadden comments that the legislation would be beneficial as it enables employers to allow staff to better balance home and work life while also retaining the ability to refuse requests for legitimate reasons.

'Parenting requirements don't end as children get older. We think it is right to extend this successful scheme and help parents of older children access the flexibility they need,' he says.

Flexible working can include using flexi-time, annualised hours, compressed hours, job sharing or home working.

Employers should make sure they 'support and challenge' their staff to get the best out of them, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

The body says that many of the 'softer' skills such as communication are learnt on-the-job, through experience.

Martyn Sloman, learning and development adviser for the CIPD, comments that negotiation, working laterally and management skills can be developed through encouragement from business owners.

He believes that employers can help their staff through offering feedback and individual coaching from line managers to help cope with different requirements.

'The workplace is changing quite a bit. The routine processing type of work is disappearing and people are being expected to use far more of their initiative,' Sloman adds.

Educational expert Michael Arthur told the Yorkshire Post the new vocational diplomas being introduced into schools next month will help give school leavers these types of skills as they will already have been given some work-based training.

Small businesses could face additional regulation by the government if they are forced to undertake formal meetings with employees who request time off to train, warns the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).

Responding to a consultation on the government’s push for employees to have the right to request time off to train, the FSB has urged the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills to create an exemption for businesses with zero to twenty employees to be able to hold informal meetings without the need for union representation.

According to the FSB’s biennial survey of 20,000 small business owners, 76 per cent of businesses undertake some form of training. A significant percentage of that training is not recognised by government.

Colin Willman, education and skills chairman at the FSB, says that ‘the best way to engage small businesses with the policy is to keep it informal between employer and employee, making it easier to identify the necessary training’.

All businesses, in any industry, will be creating intellectual property they need to protect, entrepreneurs are warned.

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) says that most firms are unaware of the information they are creating or that they may be breaching other people's rights.

Lawrence Smith-Higgins, head of business, outreach and education at the IPO, claims he can go to any company and identify where they are creating their own property or using someone else's.

He comments that if the intellectual property belongs to the owner of the business they should make sure they know how to 'protect it and … properly manage it and maximise its value to them and their company.'

A particularly important thing to protect is the name of the firm so that other companies do not copy it and it is easier to build a brand, he remarks.

The government is currently running a review into intellectual property rights and the British Brands Group is calling on businesses to submit examples of where their packaging has been copied.

Having an extra Community Day bank holiday in October could benefit almost one million businesses in the UK, according to the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

The day could be used by employees to get involved in volunteering and community activities, the union suggests.

A report by the group entitled Why the UK can afford a Community Day is intended to demonstrate how - contrary to previous claims - having an extra bank holiday would not cost businesses millions, as many hospitality firms would see their trade increase.

The report calculates that were ten per cent of the population to get involved in voluntary activity on the extra bank holiday, the effect would be worth a further £250 million to the UK economy.

Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, says the move would be very popular among employees.

He believes as a result of Community Day, 'employers will have a healthier, happier and more productive workforce'.

In March, Labour MP Shona McIsaac from Cleethorpes proposed in parliament that an extra bank holiday be introduced in the autumn, reminding MPs that before the 1830s, Britons had 33 such breaks a year.

By David Strom

This week Google's Gmail crossed the 7 GB storage threshold - meaning that anyone can get a mailbox with at least that much storage, and for free, too. (The size continues to increase slightly each day, wonder of wonders.) It made me stop and think about how much my email habits have changed in the past ten years, when Marshall Rose and I sat down to write a book about Internet emails. Back then, 7 GB was a lot of room for your mailbox, and I don't think anyone imagined that we would have it free of charge, either.

Of course, one thing that is very odd is that Gmail has been in beta like, forever it seems. (We are coming up on close to 5 years.) I wonder when Google will consider it good enough for a release candidate? If this had been Microsoft, we would be on v 3.1 or something by now, for sure. One wag suggested that the real product name is "Gmail Beta." Har har.

Why?

1. It has its own community of users - including 99% of your friends and colleagues
2. It's relatively easy to use and the tools it has are pretty extensive.
3. Blogs, email newsletters and web sites are great. Facebook has all of this built in.
4. For video, photos, events, calendars, updates - Facebook makes it darn easy.

You might be screaming at me, I have a FaceBook profile already. That's good and you can connect with all your friends. However, what you need is a FaceBook group or even better for businesses, a page. The differences are subtle and best explained at this web site.

Smallbiztechnology.com placed its first advertisement on Facebook a few minutes ago - we'll keep you posted on what the results are. Sometimes it takes years for technologies to mature. Facebook's matured quite fast with a large audience and nice tools as well.

Check out our new Facebook page here.

Over the past few weeks I've been using a variety of online databases - QuickBase, DabbleDb and Trackvia. I wrote about databases and Excel in a previous post, Excel: The Pine-Sol Of Technology.

I used Trackvia several months ago and was quite under impressed with its interface and feature set. Last week I took it for a spin again, and am quite, quite impressed with how much it has been improved in all areas. In fact it's one of the best online databases I've used so far.

What you'll instantly like is the simple way (reminds you of Google a bit) that Trackvia is presented. The first two steps, however, could be simpler. First you create a project and then you create a database. This process could be simplified. But once you pass this step the true awesome simplicity of Trackvia shines.

During these last days of summer, when severe storms tend to pop up more often and the hurricane watches are in the news, we are reminded of how a disaster could impact our businesses.

Two recent surveys highlight the fact that knowing there's a risk and actually putting a disaster plan in place are two different things.

• A report from Forrester found that 87% of disaster recovery decision makers said that improving disaster recovery capabilities was critical to their business, but 25% of business owners would prefer to deal with the disaster when it occurs than plan ahead!
• Another report commissioned by Emerson Network Power Found that 79% of businesses surveyed had at least one power outage in 2007, and 42% of those had to close their business during the longest outages. Decision makers ranked power outages higher than fire, government regulation, weather damage, theft and employee turnover as threats to their business, but only 39 percent of them had power backup systems.

If someone threw up on the floor, my mother would use a bottle of Pine-Sol to clean it up. If the floor needed to be mopped, it was water...and Pine-Sol that cleaned it up. If the room was a bit musty, a bit of Pine-Sol on a moist rag was what made it fresh again. If the carpet got stained, Pine-Sol would magically clear the stain. For many businesses, Excel, is their Pine-Sol.

I was recently lamenting with a technology executive how Microsoft Excel (and Microsoft Executives acknowledge this as well) is the biggest competitor to many business software. If you need an inventory list, staff database, customer contacts, payroll information - you name it - Excel is used. Businesses, big and small and all around the country use Excel.

Excel is also the biggest competitive threat to Intuit's QuickBooks, Sage's PeachTree and Microsoft Accounting. For all the companies not using an accounting software, and not including those businesses that are not using any computerized accounting solution, Excel is what these companies are using. Excel is fine for adding some numbers together and creating nice charts, but beyond numbers, most people really need a database, they just don't know how to use one, let alone know they need one.

Excel is not what should be used, but a database.

The three biggest, software database solutions are Microsoft Access, File Maker Pro and Alpha Software. These software packages are powerful, feature rich and robust.

For the needs of many smaller businesses, especially those that need to quickly get online with minimal help online database solutions are an alternative and much easier solution. These solutions include Intuit's QuickBase, Trackvia , Dabble DB and Google Docs.

I've extensively used all four of these solutions.