David Schlueter (left) and Henry Neff (second from left) were honored for their years of service on the HBA's board of directors by Mayor Mark Hall (second from right) and HBA President Bob Van Loan (right) at today's monthly meeting. David and Henry have been instrumental in the revitalization of the HBA. Thank you, gentlemen!

Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, large or small, retail or business-to-business. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets. But what exactly does “branding” mean? How does it affect a small business like yours?

Communication in the Internet Century usually means using email, and email, despite being remarkably useful and powerful, often inspires momentous dread in otherwise optimistic, happy humans. Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt and former Senior Vice President of Products Jonathan Rosenberg share nine insightful rules for emailing (or gmailing!) like a professional. Here are their personal rules for mitigating that sense of foreboding:

Not all the tips your friends, family, and peers offer you about running your budding enterprise are created equal. With this issue in mind, we asked The Experts: What’s the worst advice about running a business you’ve ever received?

This discussion relates to the latest Small Business Report and formed the basis of a discussion on The Experts blog in August 2014.

In the summer of 1969, one week after we put our first man on the moon, I was born to a single mother in a trailer located where the Helena Post Office is now. I can remember Helena being nothing more than a “drive-through” town; The only reason why you came to Helena back then was to go to Bessemer or Cherokee Beach. Back then, Helena School was 1st through 9th grade, and each grade had only one teacher. We’ve come a long way since then.

If you want potential customers to get a 360-degree, panoramic view of your brick-and-mortar business when they click on any of your listings in Google, its new Business Photos campaign makes its listings for business more interactive. To that end, the search giant is pairing its own certified “Trusted Photographers” with businesses that want to show off their interiors to the public.

I don’t know about you, but I receive more than 100 emails a day. Some are junk emails (discard); some have value (read); some are business related (definite read); some might have value but are so poorly written that I usually delete them. I thought it might be time to provide some basic email etiquette guidelines in the form of 7 dos and 7 don’ts.

With the day-to-day demands of running their businesses, most owners put off getting a valuation until a sale is imminent. But some are starting to treat the act of valuing their business as an integral part of running it. Everyone likes to think they’re building something that they can sell someday, but unless you focus on it, you don’t know if you really are.

Many small businesses won a reprieve from having to provide health insurance under the Affordable Care Act until 2015 or later. But the law is already having a lasting impact on how lots of owners choose to run their companies. Some owners have begun to weigh strategies that might help them avoid complying with the law later on, such as opting out of providing the required coverage and instead paying a federal penalty of $2,000 for each full-time worker after the first 30. Others have begun restructuring their businesses, reducing their employees’ hours, for example, or trimming their total head counts to fewer than 50 full-time workers.

As a follow-on to last month’s article about surviving an SBA loan rejection, the following from WSJ.com contributor Ami Kassar is presented for your consideration:

There will likely always be a population of businesses that are not bankable and cannot get a loan backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Owners of these firms are left to turn to alternative lenders, even though the funds will generally come at a much higher cost than what’s offered by an SBA lender or traditional bank.That being said, in an efficient market, alternative lenders could be a means to an end, a stepping stone for a small business to affordable and sustainable funding.

Many small-business owners who have been turned down for a Small Business Administration-backed loan from a local bank may think they’ve been disqualified from the SBA program. That is not the case.

Got a small project and a small budget? For some companies nowadays, the solution is simple: Rent a business school grad student to do the work. This jibes so perfectly with what might come from our strategic partnership with the Samford University Brock School of Business that I just had to share it.

This spring, students from Samford University’s Brock School of Business MBA program will be working with members of the Helena Business Association to explore new ways to market and promote the Association to prospective new members and add value for the Association’s current members.