University of La Verne SBDC Small Biz Blog

  Artificial intelligence, or AI, has gotten a lot of press lately with Chat GPT and now Google’s Bard, automating tasks, writing, and just making certain tasks so much more bearable. As a small business, there are ways to harness the power of AI to take care of things you probably think you need an extra employee to do. I’ll show various ways you can use free AI tools like Chat GPT to handle these tasks so you can focus on running your business. Getting Started Head to chat.openai.com and create an account to get access to the chatbot. Here are a couple of things you need to understand about ChatGPT before we begin: It only knows things up to 2021. So if ask it about a current event or phenomenon, it probably won't know what you are talking about. It may produce inaccurate information like statistics, facts, or places. So take all the “factual” information at face value. With vague instructions (called prompts), you may not get the best answer. So, we need to be as descriptive as

Finding a location for your business is one of the most important decisions you can make. Deciding on the type of lease structure you might run into when renting a commercial space can be the most confusing part of the process. Here are the 6 most common types you might run into. Gross Lease Also known as a Full-Service Lease the landlord covers all the building expenses. This is a commercial  lease  where the tenant pays a flat rental amount, and the  landlord  pays for all property charges regularly incurred by the ownership, including taxes, utilities, and water. This lease generally refers to a “base year” to start payments and stipulates a certain escalation in cost to cover inflation. The rent amount is calculated based on the cost of rent, with a reasonable markup and may include the cost of other services like janitorial or landscaping.  The advantage to this is that it is a flat rent cost similar to that of a conventional apartment lease and is regular and fixed per