The Holidays are such an important time of year for small businesses. For many, especially in retail, the Holidays may make or break the entire financial year. Craft fairs and holiday markets have become popular among both consumers and small businesses during this time. But are businesses doing all they can to maximize their retail sales from holiday markets?

Owning your own retail business can be an exciting, albeit challenging, undertaking. When you look around at some of the larger brands you can see how shifts in consumer behavior and brand loyalty has changed the success and trajectory of a once rather predictable industry. For instance, Wal-Mart announced earlier this year that they would close 269 locations in 2016, accounting for roughly three percent of their stores.

There’s something exciting about getting your business to the point of being able to bring on new employees. Your business is growing and you’re successful enough to be able to hire people to share some of the load.

On the other hand, there’s something tricky about hiring the right person for the job. As a manager or business owner, there’s a lot on the line in terms workplace culture and customer service quality, not to mention the time and resources it takes to train them. Hiring the wrong person and having them leave is something all companies seek to avoid, but it does happen.

Office politics exist in every workplace setting and are difficult to avoid. Even though you don’t need to participate in office politics to survive, putting your head in the sand and “not getting involved” isn’t practical either — if you aren’t careful, you can be embroiled in a problem you didn’t see coming.

The following top 10 best practices for navigating workplace politics and personalities should help you stay ahead of the game and keep you focused on why you are there — to do your job.

It’s a reality for most business owners, but no matter how successful you think you are, there’s always more to learn. Whether it’s marketing, sales, operations, or finance, you can’t know everything and there’s always gaps to fill. But how do you know when it’s time to invest in additional training and education? Will it be worth your time? And what areas should you be focused on?

Here we’ll discuss the importance of business education and what questions you need to ask yourself to determine if it’s time for you to invest in additional training.

 Katie is owner and creator of Kerfluffle, a peanut butter swirled with marshmellow fluff. She used SBDC's Getting Your Recipe to Market program to bring her yummy fluff to households around the area.

There’s probably no better way to get customers interested in your food product than giving them a live demo. They not only get to look, taste, and smell your product, but they get to experience your brand and the story behind everything.

With that being said, when you do demo your food product at a live event, you want to make sure it’s a memorable experience for consumers. Not only do you need to showcase your product in an effective manner, but you need to get creative in order to stand out in the eyes of potential customers.

With all the buzz around digital marketing and e-commerce, it might be tempting to think that brick and mortar stores are going the way of the dinosaur. But you’d actually be wrong. As a matter of fact, 94 percent of all retail sales in America are still generated by brick and mortar stores.

But before opening a brick and mortar store, you need to have all of your bases covered as a small business owner. There are a lot of moving parts to getting your physical storefront up and running, and with that comes a lot of opportunities for things to go sideways.

Digital marketing can be a dizzying arena when it comes to the amount of tools, systems and platforms available to businesses. The moment you think you’ve seen one platform that can literally “do it all,” two or three others spring up with more functionality or the same feature set at a cheaper price.

Keeping up with the latest in digital marketing tools might seem like an impossible task, especially for small businesses. How exactly is one to supposed to find the best digital marketing platforms for small businesses?