August 6th, 2010
In order to know where you are going, you have to know where you have been. This concept has been a key component to our business services ever since we made the jump from a single man home based business to a multi-employee company.
The team here at Firstbase has been operating out of a small office on Gladys Ave just off the beaten path in Abbotsford, BC for the past 5 years. Over the past few months, we have spent considerable time building a new company identity,both from a visual and deliverable perspective. Having raised our profile and challenged our previous limitations, this new look and feel into our culture has fostered innovative thinking and increased our client base tenfold.
With the increase in sales and demand for our creative services, Firstbase has grown too big to fit into our own proverbial clothes. But instead of hitting the pavement for some hard cardio in an effort to trim down, we decided to hit the weights to bulk up. If you didn’t couldn’t quite follow the paraphrase, don’t worry, it’s probably not just you. So for all you laymen out there – We are moving offices!
As of September 15, 2010, you can find us at Unit 201 – 34609 Delair Rd. just off of Sumas Way in Abbotsford. This new B&M building will offer significant
upgrades to both employees and clients, including but not limited to:
- Ample parking
- A nice level floor
- Enhanced views of surrounding businesses
- Easy freeway access
- Close proximity to multiple coffee outlets
- (insert additional benefit here)
- Etc, etc, etc.
With so much to do in the next month and a half to prepare, we could have probably scaled back the fluff and bunnies and just come straight out and said it.
But let’s be honest – you enjoyed the read.
Tags: we are moving!
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March 18th, 2010
1) Flawed Strategy
Perfect implementation and marketing cannot save a flawed business plan. Business Planning is critical to a company’s success and too many business owners attempt the DIY approach resulting in a bad plan and faulty assumptions. A study of more than 2,500 business failures over the past 25 years showed that almost half of the failures stemmed from poorly designed strategies.
2) Underestimating the challenge
Taking the time to validate your assumptions can save you billions of dollars in the long run. Many entrepreneurs overestimate their ability to penetrate a new market or launch a new product and fail to take the time to do the research prior to pressing the ‘go’ button.
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Tags: business tips
Posted in business tips | 1 Comment »
December 11th, 2009
During this Christmas Season the Firstbase staff would like to encourage everyone to reach into their hearts and give to a needy group or charity. This does not always need to be in a monetary form. Gestures of kindness that can bring hope to so many needy families at this time of year can be done through volunteering at your local food bank, or as simple as assisting someone you know in a beneficial way. This year the staff at Firstbase Services Ltd has collectively donated to two worthy causes.
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Tags: Operation Christmas Child, Salvation Army
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July 20th, 2009
Who Will Have The Best Performing Economy In 2010?
Published on:
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Written by:
Martin Hutchinson
The International Monetary Fund revised their estimate of 2010 global growth upward, although, they are not optimistic about countries like the US and Britain. Which economies will see the most growth in 2010? See the following article from Money Morning to learn why it may not be who you expect.
Markets were cheered Wednesday when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected global growth of 2.5% for 2010, a slight increase from its earlier forecast of 1.9% growth.
That’s good news for investors – but consumers in the United States and investors focused on it may not see much benefit.
The IMF forecast for the United States does not sound like a lot of fun: The organization is projecting growth of only 0.8% for this country next year. That forecast runs contrary to currently optimistic rhetoric about the recession bottoming out, and may account for the stock market’s weakness over the past year or so as the very real prospects of a sustained economic bottom begins to sink in with investors.
My own view is that the IMF is about right for 2010, largely because the U.S. economy may not yet have bottomed. While economic indicators have certainly improved from their dreadful levels of the first quarter, forward-looking signals – such as consumer confidence – are still at very low levels, indeed. And that signals a moderate decline, rather than stabilization of economic output.
What’s more, the U.S. federal government is running deficits far beyond the records ever seen in peacetime. That has already had an effect on the bond markets, which have seen a substantial rise in yields from a low of 2.07% in December to around 3.4% currently – not a usual feature of an economy whose gross domestic product (GDP) is declining substantially. That suggests that the normal healthy bounce from the bottom of recession may be muted by financing difficulties from the huge federal deficits, with the economy continuing to decline for longer than expected and recovering only feebly thereafter.
In that context, the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus may have been misguided, based as it was on economic theories that make very little sense. Such a large amount of extra federal spending has to come from somewhere, and if the government is running a budget deficit, that shortfall has to be borrowed. While a country with a modest fiscal deficit can afford a certain amount of stimulus, that’s not the case for a country whose budget was already in deficit by more than $1 trillion – or 7% of GDP – when President Barack Obama came into office.
By enlarging the deficit so much, the administration may well have destabilized the bond market, preventing the rapid turnaround in the economy that could otherwise have been expected. As a side effect, the stimulus may also have made it more difficult to pass President’s Obama’s hoped-for packages on global warming and healthcare, making it counterproductive politically as well as economically.
Beyond the U.S. borders, the outlook is somewhat brighter. Some countries – such as Britain, for instance – are in much the same mess as the United States, with excessive deficits and a money-printing central bank. Indeed in Britain, the central bank has for the last three months been buying enough government bonds to monetize the entire British budget deficit, reducing the upwards push on bond yields, but managing to re-ignite the British housing market, which had become even more overvalued than its also-overvalued U.S. counterpart.
The IMF forecast for Britain is worse than the projection for the United States – a decline of 4.2% in 2009 GDP, and a rise of only 0.2% in 2010. That looks about right, though some of the 2009 decline may be pushed into 2010 by the Bank of England’s actions.
In China, the picture is unclear. The IMF estimates growth of 7.5% in 2009 and 8.5% in 2010, by far the best performance of any major economy, but this both takes Chinese statistics at face value and underestimates the risks facing China’s economy.
Bank lending in China was more than $800 billion in the first quarter and was again running at record levels in June; it is thus likely that China is over-indulging in real estate projects with no tenants, as well as subsidies for hopelessly unprofitable state enterprises. This means there is a substantial downside risk for China’s growth, and 2010 may be much less pretty than 2009.
This is also true for India, where the IMF estimates 5.4% growth in 2009 and 6.5% in 2010, but does not take account of the out-of-control expansion in Indian government spending – up by 36% this year to spawn a deficit in excess of 10% of GDP.
In the past, India’s economic expansions have at times been choked off by credit crunches that surface when government deficits cannot be financed. This time around the same outcome is likely. As with China, I would expect 2010 to be much less likely than 2009.
Finally, there are two countries I believe the IMF is being overly pessimistic about: Brazil and Germany.
For Brazil, the IMF is forecasting a 1.3% GDP decline in 2009, followed by 2.5% growth in 2010. This looks too low. Brazil’s trend growth rate is around 5%, and it has little trouble selling its commodity-and-energy exports when China’s demand is still growing.
Furthermore, Brazil’s budget deficit is modest and its interest rates are just below 10% — still substantially above the country’s inflation rate of 4% to 5%. I would thus expect Brazil to considerably outperform the IMF’s forecast, showing little net decline in 2009 GDP and growth close to its 5% trend in 2010, with domestic demand joining exports as a source of strength.
Finally, the IMF is exceptionally pessimistic on Germany, forecasting a 6.2% decline in 2009 GDP and a further 0.6% decline in 2010. Since German industrial production rose by 3.7% in May and its trade surplus rose to a record 10.3 billion euros (about USD $14.4 billion), this is far too pessimistic.
Germany has been notably cautious in its stimulus, and the German budget deficit is still only around 3% of GDP. Consequently, that key European nation is likely to find expansion easy to finance, and will outperform significantly the rest of the EU in the months ahead, showing a brisk recovery from its sharp downturn. I would expect Germany’s 2009 GDP decline overall to be a mere 2%-3% and its 2010 growth to be substantial, at least 2.0%-2.5%.
The IMF and I agree that the world economy is once again decoupling, with 2010 growth much stronger outside the financial-services-oriented economies of Britain and the United States. However, we disagree on where growth would be strongest; my picks would be Brazil and Germany, not the IMF’s fashionable China and India.
This article has been republished from Money Morning. You can also view this article at Money Morning, an investment news and analysis website.
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July 14th, 2009
Oil Prices: Where Will They Go In The Second Half Of 2009?
Published on:
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Written by:Jason Simpkins
Oil prices have rallied since February, and could continue to rise as countries start to emerge from the global recession. However, few if any individuals correctly predicted that the price of oil would fall as dramatically as it has over the past year. Where will oil prices go from here? Jason Simpkins from Money Morning aims to answer this question.
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June 30th, 2009
Government of Canada Announces $450 Million in New Funding for BDC to Assist Canadian Businesses
TORONTO, Ontario, June 15, 2009 — The Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, today announced that the Government of Canada is providing $450 million to the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) in support of small and medium-sized enterprises and innovative firms.
The funding will include $100 million to establish the Operating Line of Credit Guarantee and $350 million over three years to help drive venture capital investment in promising Canadian technology businesses.
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Posted in Government of Canada, business loans, canadian business, financial | No Comments »
May 19th, 2009
Today, 2.2 million people use Dimdim’s online conferencing tool, many of them staff or clients of Canadian small firms. One such user shares why Dimdim is the right and bright choice for his online tutoring company.
5/19/2009 5:00:00 AM By: Nestor E. Arellano – itbusiness.ca
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Tags: small business, web conference, web tools
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April 30th, 2009
There is a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400.
It carries over no balance from day to day.
Every evening it deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day.
What would you do?
Draw out ALL OF IT of course!!!
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March 18th, 2009
After six days of gains that pushed the Toronto Stock Exchange’s main gauge up 13 per cent, many investors took their money out Wednesday while the getting was good.
At midday, the S&P/TSX composite index was down about 155 points, or 1.8 per cent, to 8,405, on track to see its first daily loss since Monday, March 9.
The heavyweight sectors of energy, materials and financials led the declines, and big-cap representatives from these areas, like Suncor Energy Inc., Barrick Gold Corp. and Royal Bank of Canada, were seeing declines.
Commodity prices were down, and there was some nervousness over what the U.S. Federal Reserve would say Wednesday afternoon, though most weren’t expecting any movement on the key interest rate, which is effectively at zero.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil was down $1.56 to $47.60 U.S. a barrel, and gold was off by $31.80 to $885 U.S. an ounce.
The Canadian dollar was down 19 basis points to 78.62 cents U.S..
In the U.S., the Dow Jones industrial average was down about 65 points, or 0.9 per cent, to 7,330. The Nasdaq composite index was just a little better than flat at around 1,465.
European markets were mostly down, including the United Kingdom’s FTSE index, which lost 1.74 per cent. Figures released there Wednesday showed unemployment had risen by 138,400 people last month.
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Tags: Royal Bank of Canada
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