Product liability insurance is very necessary for all businesses to carry today. There are three types of potential product defects that allow for consumer-backed product liability lawsuits to enter into the court system:

1. Manufacturing defects. This type of defect occurs when a manufacturer attempts to make a safe product that becomes flawed while going through the manufacturing process. Example: An important screw is missing.

2. Design defects. This type of defect occurs when the product is created correctly by a manufacturer who is selling unsafe products to the public. The manufacturer is often unaware that his products are unsafe. Example: A battery operated toy with a locking battery compartment that can still allow leaking batteries to drip acid onto children through the cracks around the battery door.

3. Information defects. This type of defect occurs when a product is unavoidably dangerous in some manner and there are no written communications about this danger included with the product to warn consumers about the possible harms. Example from a real product: “Caution! Iron gets hot.”

When a consumer gets hurt, they are allowed to blame each business from the manufacturer through the one with the minimum-wage sales girls down on Main Street for the damages that they are suffering through After all, somebody along the way really should have thought of yelling: “Caution! Iron gets hot!” to save the consumer from getting injured unnecessarily.

Today, every business that handles or supplies any type of product that is going to a consumer needs to have a form of product liability insurance. This includes everybody from the Mom and Pop shops on eBay through the big name product manufacturers. It is a sad fact today that all businesses can be sued if a product that they are making or manufacturing, distributing, refurbishing, or selling injures an unsuspecting consumer.

Not long ago, we were all treated to a chuckle while reading about the hamburger-king McDonalds getting sued over a cup of coffee that was not wearing a warning label that it was in fact a hot liquid. While reading, millions of us thought about the time that our morning cups of coffee splashed us on the way to work, and wondered what the court system would do with that lawsuit. That consumer won their lawsuit.

Today, nothing being made, manufactured, distributed, refurbished, or sold is guaranteed to be safe from a product liability lawsuit. Product liability insurance covers the costs of defending yourself in court if a consumer names your business as a defendant in a lawsuit. Various types of product liability insurance policies exist for businesses, and the amount of coverage on each policy is different. It is always better to be safe than sorry in today’s sue-happy world.

Gemma-Leigh Garner is a freelance copywriter that writes on many different insurance topics such as product liability insurance and helping manufacturers & retailers deal with product liability protection plus other related topics.

[tags]product liability,product liability insurance,liability insurance[/tags]

Most people believe change starts at the top. But when it comes to greening your supply chain, change really starts at the bottom. What’s beneath all that change? It starts with your choice of pallets. The one ubiquitous platform that moves nearly everything that moves.

Pallets may seem alike, but they’re not. Some are environmental champions while others are environmental villains.

The new plastic pallet whose eco-claim is based on their recyclability is really a baseless claim because it is well documented that plastic has a heavy environmental footprint. Anything based on a petro-chemical usually does. From the oil well, to the oil tanker, to the plastic processing plant, plastic can be green in color only.

Wooden pallets on the other hand have been treating the environment well since the pallet first appeared. As long as they are not made from virgin hardwoods, wooden pallets are often the greenest part of any supply chain.

They start out as the unusable trim from the lumbering process, the trim parts that would otherwise end up in landfills. Once made, they get used, reused, repaired and recycled. When they’re no longer useable, they get ground up into garden mulch so they keep on greening even after they’re gone.

Now that we’ve got that down, let’s move up the supply chain.

The first thing to remember when trying to green up your supply chain is that there is probably a greener alternative to everything you’re doing right now. From the labels on your products, to the way you print them, to what you’re putting them on. Take a long hard, honest look at what you’re doing, what you’re receiving and what you’re accepting from your vendors as part of your manufacturing process and you’re guaranteed to find room for “green” improvement.

Is there a greener alternative to the bottles you’re using? There have been a lot of interesting additions to the world of containers including bottles made from corn. They biodegrade so they don’t end up as the Methuselah (he lived for 969 years) of the landfill.

What about your labels, can they be printed on recycled paper with soy based inks? What about your packaging? Are you using “secondary packaging” — that’s a package within a package, if you don’t have to? Habitual practices are not always the best ones. Think about it this way, any reductions in packaging is an automatic increase to your bottom line.

Are your trucks going out full or half full? Ask yourself if your deliveries are gassed or half-gassed, I think you know what I mean. Fuel charges and energy use can be sharply reduced if you deliver full loads.

UPS recently instituted a program and delivery map that allows their trucks to make far fewer left turns and this has vastly increased their fuel efficiencies. Are you recycling your wooden pallets and making sure they don’t get tossed or lost? The more we repair, reuse and recycle, the less additional resources are used.

Next, look around your own physical plant. Are you using energy saving light bulbs? Wal-Mart announced that this one change saved them more than $7 million. That turned out to be a pretty bright idea for them. What you’ll find is that once you turn a green eye to everything you do you’ll naturally start doing everything a little bit better.

Here are some more tips you might not have thought about that can turn green in more ways than one.

- Can you do a face to face via your computer? You’ll save driving time, employee time and be more efficient by phone and computer instead of driving and you won’t have to spring for the coffee.
- Can you host a presentation using Webcams instead of driving to the airport and flying to a meeting? You’ll not only save the cost of travel but you won’t have to buy a bag of those stale peanuts.
- Can you send PDF files over the Internet instead of printing brochures?
- Can you place your marketing materials on a flash drive and hand them out at a trade show instead of leaving a paper trail?
- Can you allow your employees to telecommute a portion of their work week?
- Can you send your company holiday cards via the Internet instead of using paper and post?
- And what about work space health? Is your flooring off-gassing harmful VOC’s (volatile organic compounds)into your work space air?
- Do you use nontoxic cleaning products? All of these things contribute to healthier work spaces, which contribute to greater worker productivity and a better bottom line.
- Can you source bleach-free recycled paper and print on both sides?
- Can you print on your outgoing e-mails, “Please do not print this e-mail unless you really must?”
- Are you letting your trucks idle at pick-up and delivery if they don’t have to?
- Could your next fleet purchase be hybrids? You’ll be amazed how much you can save in fuel and energy costs alone.

Greening your supply chain is an ongoing, highly creative process that starts by greening your thinking first. It takes a little adjustment to your reflexes to ask yourself questions like, “Do I have to print that e-mail?” That little act alone, when multiplied by 200 e-mails a day, five days a week for a year, can save a lot of trees and money.

Here’s another good example of green thinking. Simply reducing the margins of your documents to .75″ on all sides, results in a total reduction of paper use by 4.75 percent, according to a study by Penn State Green Destiny Conservatree. For one ton of paper, the savings would be 19 reams, which then saves 1.4 trees. Multiplying that by 5.4 million tons of office paper, which is the amount the United States consumed in 2003, saves 6,158,000 trees. Not to mention the energy costs and waste products generated:

- 1,459,535,366 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to CO2 emissions from 132,528 cars.
- 584,398,539 pounds of solid waste, equaling 20,871 fully loaded garbage trucks.
- 4.8 billion gallons of wastewater, enough to fill 7,408 Olympic-sized pools.

You see, one margin can go a long way.

Once you start greening up from the bottom up, you’ll see how much stress you can take off your bottom line and the environment. And think of this, you’ll be able to make yourself look good to all your clients who have made the environment part of their environment. Next sales call, you’ll be able to say “we’re so green, even our pallets are eco friendly.” You’ll make your competition green with envy.

Michael Smith is the C.O.O. of PALNET, a national, environmentally-friendly pallet supplier. He can be reached at 877-PALNET-1.

[tags]pallet, green pallet, pallets, wooden pallets, greening your supply chain, environment, ecological[/tags]

Most people certainly do not enjoy receiving bills in the mail, especially when such invoices are accompanied by harsh and indifferent sounding legalese that sometimes does not even sound as if it was written by a human being. It is no secret that large banks and corporations earn much of their money via the morally questionable use of hidden terms and fees in the fine print that require reading glasses to see, and many such companies do not conduct themselves by a high code of moral ethics. After all, why be nice when you can be rich?

Typically many people who work for such companies that implement such questionable behavior are not actually bad people; it is not like they wake up in the mornings excited about how many people they will be able to hurt. It is a simple fact that such practices are profitable, and the fact that they are mean and nasty does not detract from this fact. However, giving a backwards justification for selfish behavior and exploiting unknowing and sometimes vulnerable people is no way to conduct business in the world today. There is no reason why morality and profitability cannot coexist together, and in fact some of the richest people are also some of the nicest.

Examples Of Unethical Business Behavior

Many people take advantage of the concept of the corporate veil where the corporation itself exists as a separate entity, and they will use this as a way to justify immoral behavior. Many of us have been the witnesses and victims of such behavior, and you are bound to encounter people practicing such usurious behavior that have no qualms or scruples against exploiting and taking advantage of other people for the sake of dollars.

One of the most widely practiced forms of unethical business is creating contracts that are binding and restricting, so that once a person gets roped into the contract they are unable to break it even if it is a great strain on them and they cannot afford to pay it. Such things are common when lending corporations of shady intent extend large amounts of credit to young people that may be in college and have only recently graduated high school. These companies will take advantage of the lack of financial education of such people, and usually slap them with restricting terms, hidden fees, and high interest rates on money borrowed.

Granted, while contracts and even binding contracts can and do play an essential role in conducting business, there is no need to take this idea to the max by creating a document that, once a person has placed their signature on it, they are trapped in a form of debt servitude where they literally become employees for another person’s money.

In a popular business model such as rental real estate, contracts between landlords and tenants are important for making this type of business arrangement work, both for keeping the rates low for a tenant and limiting potential risk that the owner might face from property destruction. Lease agreements are popularly used for this sort of business, and while this type of contract is binding for a period of time there is no need for it to be excessively binding or limiting for any party involved.

Another example of an unethical business model is called forced continuity marketing, and this is the practice of signing people up for a recurring bill once you have their financial information and they will need to contact you to cancel a service that they never signed up for in the first place. This can happen with internet businesses, where you pay $10 for a certain online product and then you see a $30 recurring charge on next month’s statement that will continue until you contact them to cancel, even though there was no information about any additional charges.

Fostering Ethical And Moral Business Practices

One of the best ways to integrate ethics into your business is not to use contracts that are binding. You should be very democratic and egalitarian in your business dealings, so that once a person wants to leave there is nothing that needs to stop them. Instead of relying on a cheap excuse to keep your business going, the burden is now on you to provide enough value for your customers that they will want to stay with you by choice and not because you can threaten them with legal action if they leave.

One of the basic principles of sound and ethical business is about creating value for people, and creating more value than the amount of money that you are asking in return. Instead of creating a membership-based website that provides little real value and costs $50 per month, create a website that provides $10,000 worth of value for your customers that costs the same. Creating value for other people is not just important for creating wealth, but also if you want to stand out in the vast crowd of competitors you will need to have material that is at the cutting edge in terms of the information that it provides to your target market.

Nathan Navachi is a professional writer, blogger, internet marketer and forex trader who lives in Ohio. He is the writer and webmaster for http://TheCurrencyMarkets.com which contains a wealth of information about making money with forex trading and how to live a rich life.

[tags]corporate veil, morality in business, business ethics, binding contracts[/tags]

It happens in business time after time. The phone rings and a pallet supplier gives you a price that seems too good to be true. You set up a meeting and carefully go over the spec’s you require. Wood choice. Moisture content. Nail count and spacing. Stacking requirements. Size and weight specs. All you see are nodding heads. So you decide to give them a try. The first order comes in and everything looks fine, then the next one and maybe even the one after that.

And then it happens.

The high-quality pallet you thought you were buying and all those vital specs can’t quite live up to the low ball price. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. It’s business-as-usual for some pallet suppliers.

Somewhere in your pallet stack, usually in the middle so they’re harder to spot, those showcase pallets start to show a reduction in quality. The pallets now have a board or two missing. Where two nails were required, only one appears. And the moisture content has mysteriously gone up beyond what you require.

The reasons are simple. When a price is drastically cut, that money shortfall has to come from someplace. And it’s usually from your pallet. If the price can’t sustain the pallet, either the price has to go up or the quality has to go down.

Why does this happen in the first place? The answer is as old as the business itself. Lure in a customer with a low and often unsustainable price, then tap dance around the promises made to get that customer. If the quality, reliability and deliverability of your pallets and your pallet supplier are the key ingredients in your selection choice than you have to make a wise choice.

Ask yourself if you really believe that initial price was achievable and deliverable before you make the switch. To use a much overused cliche, “If it’s too good to be true, it’s usually not true.” And the cost to you can be greater than you think.

Think about this. You spec a pallet for many important reasons. The integrity of the product you are putting on it is the most obvious. But there are other issues that might not come to mind at first.

What are the IT costs of integrating a new supplier into your accounting systems? What are the costs of taking them out when they and their pallets fail to deliver on their promises? Consider the safety of your warehouse staff, and equally as important, your customer’s staff. What would happen if that bargain pallet is compromised and causes injury on either end? What about equipment — yours and theirs? A broken board or a loose hanging nail can cause damage whose cost will far exceed the pennies saved on bargain pallets. There probably isn’t a company anywhere that hasn’t had an “Uh oh” moment, or worse, from equipment damage and failure.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of accurate counts at pick-up and delivery. More often than any of us would like to remember, there can be a long count in delivery and a short count for collections. Remember, that money has to come from someplace. Working with a company that can guarantee accurate information is the key.

Some new plastic pallets with inserted RFID chips make the claim that their information is always accurate. A pallet with an imbedded radio frequency identification tag does not guarantee accuracy of information. This program has been worked on for over a decade and to date there has not been success in delivering a 100% read rate. In addition, you would need the hardware and software to read the data. How many doors are there at your facilities loading docks? Multiply those doors by roughly the $16,000.00 it can cost to buy and install them and see how fast your pallet costs stack up.

There are a number of things to consider before you make that leap. One is the untenable environmental claims based on their recycling claims. 100% recyclable does not account for the long anti-environmental trail from the production of plastic.

A recent letter written by an FDA consumer safety officer warned that the chemical deca-bromine which goes into making plastic pallets fire-retardant may migrate into the shipped products, including food items. So if you’re looking for a greener pallet, you can be sure that plastic is not the way to go.

Another option out there is the rental pallet, but again can they really deliver the specs you are looking for? They typically only come in one size so if you have special requirements, forget it.

Another big issue is the real cost of a rental pallet if that pallet is lost, unreturned, misdirected or unaccounted for somewhere in your supply chain. That happens for any number of reasons. From accounting and miscount slip-ups, to vacationing employees, sloppy dock-sweeps or simply the crush of business details each of us has to deal with on any given day. What would a back charge of thousands or even millions of dollars drain from your bottom line?

I believe the best pallet suppliers are invisible. They fill your order, pick-up and deliver without you having to think about it. That’s achieved by consistently doing what you promise. By delivering what you say you will when you say you will — with accurate counting and accountability and by delivering integrity and honesty with every pick-up and delivery. Sure slip-ups can happen. Those that are an accident can be excused, but the ones that are planned are inexcusable.

Michael Smith is the C.O.O. of PALNET, a national, environmentally-friendly pallet supplier. He can be reached at 877-PALNET-1.

[tags]pallet, pallet suppliers, pallet management, logistics, warehouse management, distribution[/tags]

If you love cigars–if you’re a true cigar aficionado–you probably wonder, every now and again, what life is like for the hard-working folks who grow the tobacco for your favorite cigars.

Well, if it’s premium cigars you like to smoke–perhaps by the box, perhaps one by one in a premium cigar sampler–then the first thing to know is that your cigar is made by people from all over the world. In many premium cigars, the wrapper (outer portion) of the cigar will come from one region, the binder (inner leaves which help hold the cigar together and add something to the flavor) from another, and the filler (from which much of the flavor comes) from another.

Why all this international complication? Well, there are three things to remember about the tobacco plant: as plants go, it’s lazy, wimpy, and picky.

Picky. Some organisms have evolved in order to maintain survival at all costs (locusts and Circus Peanuts come to mind), but that’s not tobacco. This plant thrives in a very particular set of conditions. In fact, those conditions are essentially the ones that you’ll experience if you stick a finger in your humidor–a high level of humidity (sixty-seven to seventy-four percent relative humidity) but a low level of actual wetness; mild warm temperatures (sixty-nine to seventy-three degrees); sunlight, but not too much of it. Tobacco has evolved to prefer soil that is wet, and yet it doesn’t want to be rained on. Talk about impossible to please! That’s why the world’s best filler, according to common opinion, comes from Cuba’s Vuelta Abajo valley region. Here, the soil is rained on extensively most months out of the year, but conditions are dry during the growing season: the soil stays wet without the plant getting battered in a storm. Perfect!

You don’t find conditions like these everywhere–in fact, it’d be tough to find them anywhere in the United States, which is why we’re not known as producers of filler tobacco. Nicaragua, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and a number of other countries are also ace filler-tobacco producers. For the more leathery, sturdier leaves that make the best wrappers, though, the United States offers a handful of ideal locations. The East Coast in the summer, for example, with a level of rain that hurts filler tobacco (though some is produced there) but is just fine for wrappers, produces some of the finest wrappers in the world.

Filler produced in less-than-ideal conditions commands a lower price on the world market, which makes it a less efficient cash crop for farmers. Why not grow wrapper tobacco and make more money, since the United States offers ample conditions for the production of world-beating wrappers?

Lazy. When you plant tobacco seeds, you don’t actually plant them in the traditional sense of the word–you sprinkle them on the ground, let them lie on the surface, and they take root of themselves. (Some planters will swish them in a pail of water and dump the water willy-nilly on the ground.) Tobacco seeds don’t like having to fight up from underneath the ground.

Obviously, this strange trait also means that tobacco seeds can’t be planted just anywhere. Places that are prone to frost until late in the year are insalubrious locations for tobacco farming. Anything that disturbs the area close to the soil’s surface is going to have negative implications for the survival of tobacco seedlings.

Wimpy. The same plant that doesn’t like fighting up from underneath the ground is also afraid of overdrying, overwatering, too much sunlight, too little sunlight, mold, and nearly every other problem that can bedevil a plant. Think of Connecticut Shade tobacco, the kind grown mostly on the East Coast and often used as a wrapper. They call it Connecticut Shade because it is literally grown under the shade of huge nylon tents which makes this crop’s life as undisturbed and pampered as possible.

CigarFox provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.

[tags]cigar aficionado, cigar humidor, discount premium cigar, premium cigar[/tags]

If you love cigars–if you’re a true cigar aficionado–you probably wonder, every now and again, what life is like for the hard-working folks who grow the tobacco for your favorite cigars.

Well, if it’s premium cigars you like to smoke–perhaps by the box, perhaps one by one in a premium cigar sampler–then the first thing to know is that your cigar is made by people from all over the world. In many premium cigars, the wrapper (outer portion) of the cigar will come from one region, the binder (inner leaves which help hold the cigar together and add something to the flavor) from another, and the filler (from which much of the flavor comes) from another.

Why all this international complication? Well, there are three things to remember about the tobacco plant: as plants go, it’s lazy, wimpy, and picky.

Picky. Some organisms have evolved in order to maintain survival at all costs (locusts and Circus Peanuts come to mind), but that’s not tobacco. This plant thrives in a very particular set of conditions. In fact, those conditions are essentially the ones that you’ll experience if you stick a finger in your humidor–a high level of humidity (sixty-seven to seventy-four percent relative humidity) but a low level of actual wetness; mild warm temperatures (sixty-nine to seventy-three degrees); sunlight, but not too much of it. Tobacco has evolved to prefer soil that is wet, and yet it doesn’t want to be rained on. Talk about impossible to please! That’s why the world’s best filler, according to common opinion, comes from Cuba’s Vuelta Abajo valley region. Here, the soil is rained on extensively most months out of the year, but conditions are dry during the growing season: the soil stays wet without the plant getting battered in a storm. Perfect!

You don’t find conditions like these everywhere–in fact, it’d be tough to find them anywhere in the United States, which is why we’re not known as producers of filler tobacco. Nicaragua, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and a number of other countries are also ace filler-tobacco producers. For the more leathery, sturdier leaves that make the best wrappers, though, the United States offers a handful of ideal locations. The East Coast in the summer, for example, with a level of rain that hurts filler tobacco (though some is produced there) but is just fine for wrappers, produces some of the finest wrappers in the world.

Filler produced in less-than-ideal conditions commands a lower price on the world market, which makes it a less efficient cash crop for farmers. Why not grow wrapper tobacco and make more money, since the United States offers ample conditions for the production of world-beating wrappers?

Lazy. When you plant tobacco seeds, you don’t actually plant them in the traditional sense of the word–you sprinkle them on the ground, let them lie on the surface, and they take root of themselves. (Some planters will swish them in a pail of water and dump the water willy-nilly on the ground.) Tobacco seeds don’t like having to fight up from underneath the ground.

Obviously, this strange trait also means that tobacco seeds can’t be planted just anywhere. Places that are prone to frost until late in the year are insalubrious locations for tobacco farming. Anything that disturbs the area close to the soil’s surface is going to have negative implications for the survival of tobacco seedlings.

Wimpy. The same plant that doesn’t like fighting up from underneath the ground is also afraid of overdrying, overwatering, too much sunlight, too little sunlight, mold, and nearly every other problem that can bedevil a plant. Think of Connecticut Shade tobacco, the kind grown mostly on the East Coast and often used as a wrapper. They call it Connecticut Shade because it is literally grown under the shade of huge nylon tents which makes this crop’s life as undisturbed and pampered as possible.

CigarFox provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.

[tags]cigar aficionado, cigar humidor, discount premium cigar, premium cigar[/tags]

For all the green rhetoric being tossed around today by the manufacturers of plastic pallets about their sustainability and recyclable nature, the facts are still the facts. Wooden pallets made from the unusable trims of the lumbering process are greener, cleaner and more environmentally friendly by any measure.

A recent press release issued by a manufacturer of plastic pallets stated their desire to “be responsible stewards of the environment” and described their pallet as being “100% recyclable.” The real questions are: What does that truly mean from an environmental point of view? And can you be a responsible steward of the environment when your product is made from plastic?

Putting all the greenwashing aside, when you follow the supply and manufacturing chain of a plastic pallet from oil well, to refinery, to oil tanker, to the plastic processing plant — and add up all the pollution and environmental stress that accumulates along the way, even something that ends up being “100% recyclable” doesn’t necessarily end up to be a champion of the environment.

Nor does it take into account the long and often dirty history of any plastic product, recyclable or not, in the amount of pollution they contribute to the earth. The simple truth is plastic, in any form other than its possible color, isn’t green in any measurable degree.

Consider the current controversy raging over plastic bottles and plastic bags. It’s grown so bad that many communities have begun to ban their use. Though that plastic, like the plastic that goes into plastic pallets, may be 100% recyclable, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a staggering 88% is not recycled and ends up in landfills instead. How much is that? More than 40 million bottles a day that can take up to 1,000 years before they begin to decompose once buried.

Now consider the manufacturing facilities plastics are produced in. That’s another dirty little story waiting to be told. Among the 47 chemical plants ranked highest in carcinogenic emissions by the EPA, 35 are involved in plastic production. The long and short of it is just because a product can be recycled, doesn’t mean that it is environmentally conscious when you look at its history. Plastic, whether in bags, bottles or pallets is high on the enemies list of any environmentally-conscious group or person.

To prove the point, the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a toxic island of garbage made up of 80% plastic and weighting more than 3.5 million tons, is currently floating in the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii. Right now it’s twice the size of Texas - and growing.

Wooden pallets, on the other hand, have a story and a product that is sustainable. According to the EPA, when wood pallets reach the end of their useful life they can be converted into value-added products like wood flooring or replacement parts for other pallets.

When a pallet is recycled in this way, it generates approximately $0.25 when sold as boiler fuel, $1.00 for replacement parts, and potentially $5.00 to $8.00 when processed into products such as flooring.

The U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station and its partners are currently proving the technical and financial feasibility of reusing and recycling wooden pallets. They have already begun the first phase of a process to test reusing wood pallets as flooring and paneling. The pilot program will take a “negative value” material and process it into a finished material with a $4.00 to $5.00 per square foot value and increase manufacturing jobs while it decreases waste.

A win-win for the environment and all of us.

After all, wooden pallets are born green. At companies like Palnnet, they are made from the scraps left over from the lumbering process as opposed to old growth hardwoods. When round trees are harvested, they are first “squared off” in a saw mill so the logs can be converted into lumber. These trims, instead of ending up in our already overflowing landfills, are turned into pallets and shipping products that are highly sustainable and highly useful in the shipping process.

Wooden pallets like these are the greenest part of the supply chain. They are constantly repaired and recycled and when no longer useable, they’re ground up into mulch or stove pellets. They’re green from cradle to grave and actually help clean up the environment by reducing waste. And nothing is greener than that.

Michael Smith is the C.O.O. of PALNET, a national, environmentally-friendly pallet supplier. He can be reached at 877-PALNET-1.

[tags]pallet, green pallets, environmental pallets, Palnet, green business, warehouse management[/tags]

Credit is so important in today’s fast-paced, impulse spending world that the federal government has put in place the credit repair organization act. These are the rules that you have to follow in order to make your credit repair business opportunity blossom. Failure to comply with the rules set forth in the credit report organization act can get you penalized with hefty fines or land you in jail.

The federal government recognizes in the terms of the credit repair organization act that some entrepreneurs have taking the credit repair business opportunity too far. They have accused these entrepreneurs of preying on the consumer in similar manners as predatory lenders. The credit repair organization act has been established to stop these kinds of predatory actions. The federal government has even gone so far as to say that these entrepreneurs have actually caused additional financial hardships on their customers that make it impossible for the customer to pull themselves out of the hole.

It starts with giving up the closely guarded credit repair secrets. As advised by the federal government in the credit repair organization act, the consumer must be provided with the information necessary to make informed decisions on the purchase of credit repair services, the credit repair dispute process, and the hidden fees that the credit repair organization act looks to uncover.

The credit repair organization act forbids you from making any statement, or counsel or advise any consumer to make any statement, which is untrue or misleading (or which, upon the exercise of reasonable care, should be known by the credit repair organization, officer, employee, agent, or other person to be untrue or misleading) with respect to any consumer’s credit worthiness, credit standing, or credit capacity to credit reporting agencies or any person who has extended credit to your customer. They are basically telling you not to lie when you submit credit dispute forms to the credit bureaus.

Why jeopardize your credit repair business opportunity, your freedom, and your money with lies to try and get results? The customer helped to get themselves in this predicament. You are only doing what you can, within the confines of the law, to help them get out. Not go to jail for them. Besides, it’s not a professional credit repair letter if you falsify information. This type of thing has a way of getting around to other people who may have once considered doing business with you. They won’t after you’ve been accused of fraud.

The credit repair organization act also requires you to provide your customer with a statement called the Consumer Credit File Rights Under State and Federal Law. This is a statement about the consumer’s rights to dispute relevant information on their credit reports. There are also laws about properly disclosing information included in the credit repair organization act. Read the laws carefully and understand the rights of your customers and your state and federal obligations. Ignoring these laws can transform your credit repair business opportunity into a financial and legal nightmare with the state and local governments.

Mike Citron is a nationally recognized credit and finance expert. Mike consults with companies of all sizes on proper Credit Repair Business structure and ethics. As director of sales and marketing for the industries premier Professional Credit Repair Software
Mike gets a first hand look at 1000’s of credit repair businesses around the globe.

[tags]credit repair, credit repair business, credit repair software, credit repair franchise[/tags]

For many companies competing in the same sector it is vital to gain the upper hand whenever possible. Small details and things that can sometimes get overlooked take on added importance and significance when the difference between success and failure can be measure in fractions it is of paramount importance that a business makes sure it has ticked all the right boxes and not left anything to chance.

Of course the success of any business is built on the quality of the services or products it produces and this is usually reflected in sales and the value of a company. However if a business is in a market with several competitors who offer equally good services or products, as is often the case, what can be done to make sure that one company stands out from the others and is in a better position to clinch a deal?

There is a saying that you should never judge a book by its cover and to a degree this is absolutely true however it’s only natural for people to be attracted to things that look good and appeal to our sense of style. It’s why red is often employed in advertising; it immediately grabs our attention. The principal can be applied to most things including the business world.

Businesses, both the people who run them and the customers who use them, want to make sure they are making ethical decisions that say something about their character and they want to know that the people they are dealing with are reputable, with a good reputation, which will reflect well on them. Companies that recognise this are often the industry leaders. They will have a good reputation built on people skills, regular safety auditing programmes, reputable business links and good publicity backed up by references and examples.

The most important asset of any business is its people - Without a hard working, well rewarded workforce no company will ever fulfil its potential in the marketplace and very often they will fail completely. People work best when they feel empowered and know they are part of something bigger than themselves. Potential customers or clients like to know that they are dealing with people who treat there staff well and with respect. If a client sees that a business has a happy staff they are more likely to see it as a long term prospect than something with an uncertain future.

Safe as houses - Health and safety is a major concern in any walk of life today, especially business. Regular safety audits performed by a company show that they have respect for staff and customers and can be trusted to care out tasks or supply products that are reliable and risk free. Often clients will specifically look to work with people who have a good safety record and proof of an ongoing safety audit programme is a good way of showing this.

A safety audit can come in many guises but essentially means that all parts of a business are being managed well and with the well being of everyone involved. Unlike a safety inspection, where equipment and physical structures are checked, a safety audit is concerned with the systems and processes in place. These systems and processes need to cover all aspects of health and safety and if there are found to be any shortcomings then a safety audit will find them and can make recommendations.

Once a reputation has been gained by a company for ethical and safe business practise, backed up by awards and certificates like the Investors In People award, transparent safety auditing and health records and clients who also have similar reputations, this reputation needs to be advertised and put to good use. Including references on correspondence, having a website with lots of relevant information and releasing regular press releases, all go towards cementing the reputation that has been gained through hard work and investment.

Dominic Donaldson is an expert in the health and safety industry.
Find out more about Safety Auditing and how it can benefit business.

[tags]Safety auditing, health and safety, ethical business[/tags]

Today’s market economy depends on consumers to spend money in businesses that they trust. The increased prevalence of issues like identity theft has increased consumer awareness in regards to the integrity of businesses and their employees. One agency that helps ameliorate consumer concerns (though not necessarily with identity theft) is the Better Business Bureau.

The BBB acts as an intermediary between consumers and businesses. They attempt to operate on the basic premise of neutrality. Ideally the BBB helps provide accurate knowledge to interested parties. Often times the news media will refer to local BBB chapters in order to research local disputes, frauds and other pertinent information while investigating a news story. Their familiar torch logo acts as a silent seal of approval that can engender greater public trust. The need for the BBB in part grew out of a high profile legal case at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This case, which was initiated by the government, involved multiple firms, including the Coca Cola Company, after passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. This act mandated the labeling of products as a result of their content. Perhaps as a result of his involvement in the case Coca Cola manager Samuel Candler Dobbs became involved in the cause of truth in advertising.

In 1909 Dobbs became president of the Associated Advertising Clubs of America which organization set a standard for other nascent advertising organizations in the following decades. Eventually the Council of Better Business Bureaus (the National version of the BBB) was formed from a collection of smaller agencies in 1970.

Local BBB’s provide a core group of services according to guidelines produced by the CBBB. A brief description of two of these services will follow:

Truth in Advertising: The CBBB has a few agencies of its own that review specific aspects of advertising and or focuses on advertising aimed at certain age groups. These agencies serve the purpose of fostering public trust by screening advertisements and also in promoting the general welfare of the public e.g. promoting children’s health by ensuring that advertising aimed at children encourages a healthy lifestyle.

Business Reliability Reports: these reports ensure that businesses seeking accreditation by the BBB actually comply with the standards created by each local BBB. Businesses which move may have to reapply for reaccreditation in the new BBB jurisdiction.

As alluded to earlier, businesses with BBB accreditation are allowed to use the BBB torch logo on printed items. However, in order to use the logo online businesses must apply for that privilege specifically.

DebtGuru.com (http://debtguru.com) offers credit counseling for those struggling to manage their debt. Art Gib is a freelance writer.

[tags]credit counseling[/tags]