by Jen Hickey. Breaking up is hard to do. But, as in life, some business relationships aren’t meant to last. For a small business, especially a new one, each customer has a measurable impact on the bottom line. You try to make every customer happy by offering top quality products or services, but there’s always a few that never seem pleased. The more time and effort devoted to those “high-maintenance” customers, the less there is for the rest. You must decide early on whether such customers are...

By Christopher Freeburn Small businesses always face big challenges, but being located in a small town can make the usual obstacles even harder to surmount. Small town environments impose certain restrictions on a small business that similar businesses in suburban or large cities simply do not face. “The battle for customers is much more aggressive in a small town compared to a large city,” says Tom C. Egelhoff, a Bozeman, Montana-based business consultant and author of How to Achieve...