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Alpharetta Business Radio

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Al Mishkoff, Jo Ann Tuttle, Jeff Sheehan and Brittni Ping Guests

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Our show today covers topics from garage floor coatings to increase your home’s appeal and utility, construction consulting services for companies and governments to take the pain out of accounting and reporting, using sophisticated psychometric testing to help your college student make the right choices, to expert advice on how to use social media to promote your business so you don’t do more damage than good.

Al Mishkoff is president of Granite Garage Floors, a residential services company that upgrades garage floors with a durable, functional and decorative epoxy coating system that will give your garage a look worthy of Jay Leno’s garage. With businesses opened in four cities besides Atlanta and expansion plans afoot, other areas will soon be able to turn their dirty, stained old garages into showcases.

Using diamond grinders and a lot of preparation of the floor makes sure the foundation of the home comes up before Al’s durable coating ever comes up. Well almost anyway, he says that his floor is guaranteed to stay down and not peel like acid prepped surfaces with epoxy paint usually do.  With an infinite range of looks you can turn an old dusty garage into a stain proof and easy to clean one.

You can contact Al Mishkoff and find out more at www.granitegaragefloors.com email him at alan@granitegaragefloors.com or call 770-329-1751.

Jo Ann Tuttle started her consulting firm JAT Consulting Services, Inc., 19 years ago and it now helps governmental agencies such as Hartsfield Jackson Airport manage the financial complexities of its $6.2 billion capital improvement program working for International Aviation Consultants LLC. Taking the complex payments, compliance reporting and contracting details for cities and municipalities are another service her firm provides.

The city of Dunwoody is an example where her company handles all finance, budget and purchasing activities for the newly incorporated city. This model of outsourcing services to private parties to keep government overhead low and results responsive to the citizens is a popular trend here and other governments could well improve services and cut costs with JAT.

A person who gives back, Ms. Tuttle is a member of the Airport Minority Advisory Council, Consulting engineering of Georgia and the Women’s Transportation Seminar. She coaches and helps contractors working in places like Hartsfied-Jackson (there are over 700 contractors, many small) learn business skills and gain the knowledge that simply can’t be learned anywhere else through seminars and mentoring.

Saying she believes that giving back to help these companies not just gives you sense of personal satisfaction that’s hard to duplicate, it also builds a stronger Atlanta.

You can contact Ms. Tuttle at 770-975-7359 email her at joanntuttle@jatconsulting.net or on the web at www.jatconsulting.net.

Brittini Ping is President of Students & College, an information services company for parents and their children who are in the process of selecting a college and thinking of how to cut the costs of a higher education given today’s massive costs for college.

We’re all different and understanding those differences can help you and your college bound children pick the right major and school the first time and save frustration and money later on. That’s what Brittini and her team do for families grappling with college choices and costs.

A division of BestWork DATA, a psychometric testing firm used by companies to help understand how to best place employees in positions and the best strategies for helping their employees maximize their potential, Students & College uses the same powerful testing tools to help you and your son or daughter understand the areas where they will do their best and be happy in their major. By picking the right major up front, you avoid the high cost of having to swap majors later and spend an added year to get a degree, an obvious benefit to the cost conscious.

As important, you and your son or daughter will gain valuable insights as to the college that is likely to be the best fit be that a small liberal arts school or a school with tens of thousands of students. We’re all different and understanding those differences can help you and your college bound children pick the right major and school the first time and save frustration and money later on.

You can reach Brittni Ping at 770-274-0518 x 8300, via email at brittni.ping@celebratestrengths.com or on the web at www.studentsandcollege.com

Jeff Sheehan is President of Sheehan Marketing Strategies, a firm that helps companies use the right mix of social media to drive business and avoid the many pitfalls of “do it yourself” social media approaches can harbor.  Explaining it is not something that will work for every company nor will the same social media channels work with every situation, Jeff says that you really must understand the problems and characteristics of your marketing goals and match that to the right media for the job. That media might be social media or not and if it is, then it might be LinkedIn but not twitter.

Knowing takes a professional and Jeff brings his major ad agency background with him when discussing and advising companies on how best to use this “new media.”

An active speaker in the Atlanta community, Jeff is well known for his volunteer work with career ministries helping others to learn how to think about and use social media in their job search and to develop a personal brand.

You can put his years of experience marketing products to and for major companies like Cisco, Apple, HP, Dow Chemical, and IBM to work in your firm helping you makes sense of and get real business out of today’s new media.

Jeff Sheehan can be reached at 770-366-1047 by email at jeffsheehan2010@gmail.com or on the web at http://sheehanmarketingstrategies.com

Chad Davis with Regus, Tracy Solheim, Author, and Emilie Christie with Mama Bakes Safe Cakes

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Emilie Christie opened her company which specializes in making cakes, cupcakes, pizza and doughnuts for people with severe food allergies. For those with these allergies, even smelling the offending ingredient can send an allergic person to the hospital in anaphylactic shock, a life threatening condition.

The main allergies are to Wheat/Gluten, Eggs, Dairy, Tree Nuts, Peanuts, Soy, Fish and Shellfish. As one might imagine, she found that there was little available that a child or adult could eat in the prime food groups like pizza and doughnuts much less cupcakes and cakes as they use these ingredients extensively. Deserts and tasty stuff the non allergic take for granted were simply not available and what was available didn’t taste too good.

With her own severely allergic child and being a take charge sort of person, she set about to create tasty items for her own family. Experimenting with ingredients and finding sources for alternatives to the common ingredients used in so many products was quite a challenge. She succeeded and makes creations that taste as good or better than the regular versions, opening up having birthday parties, deserts, pizza and doughnuts to people who never even tasted these delights.

Asked if it is something she can box up and sell like a cake mix, she says that it’s a lot of work since it is a multi-step process that most would not want to undertake. Definitely not for people like your host who find putting a bowl of soup in a microwave challenging…

But the good news is with a kitchen right here in Alpharetta, you can order these delicacies for your family and pick them up, now work involved. You can reach Emily at 770-664-5638 email mama@mamabakessafecakes.com or on the web at www.mamabakessafecakes.com

Chad Davis is the Area Sales Manager for Regus, the leader in flexible workplace solutions. We know them as a top end executive office suites provider who delivers a professional turn key office environment to their clients anywhere, worldwide. With 31 offices and 800,000 plus square feet of space under management right here in Atlanta and over 1,500 offices worldwide, they have a footprint that dwarfs other similar operations.

Every property has the same layout, amenities, staffing and features as any other office. As a client, you can walk into any office anywhere in the world and in minutes have an office setup that you’ll feel right at home with. You just show up and show off. No extra charge except for the things you’d ordinarily pay back home makes this a great benefit.

For small entrepreneurs staring out, they deliver the IT, Phone and administrative support you need but at a tiny fraction of the expense to say nothing of removing the hassle of dealing with the issues involved. For large firms, it’s a flexible and fast way to house a temporary location to accommodate special projects or as an alternative to leasing more space if your workforce fluctuates with contracts etc.

Find out about the many ways you can save money and hassle or launch your new venture economically, give Chad a call at 678-643-2229 email chad.davis@regus.com or on the web www.regus.com

Tracy Solheim has been writing books since the 4th grade. Today, she’s a contract author with Penguin Books and has several books in publication with two more right around the corner.  She writes romantic women’s fiction today. A journalism major in college, she wrote for newspapers as well as the Congressional Record. She says her journalism training has helped give her a distinctive “voice” that comes through in her novels. If you want to become a published author, she gave indispensable advice on how to start and what to do to make your passion your position. You can reach her at www.tracysolheim.com , find her on Facebook @Tracy Solheim Books and reach her at 770-354-0201.

Julie Grace of Grace Design on Marketing Strategy and Tactics; Reid Trego of Huntington Learning Center on Improving a Childs Academic Skills

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Julie Grace, owner of Grace Design, a marketing strategies and implementation firm, comes from a career working with non-profit firms, helping them define and promote themselves. Working with some of the household name non-profits, she’s helped craft a sound strategy for them then translated that into specific marketing tactics that accomplish specific goals.

A talented designer and excellent copywriter in her own right, she is also grounded in the business side and emphasizes the need for continuous measurement of results and tuning and tweaking to maximize the ROI on every marketing dollar invested.

For several years now, she’s worked with for both profit and non-profit firms in Atlanta helping them understand and articulate a marketing and brand strategy then managing the execution, delivering the copywriting, collateral and promotional materials, direct mail, email, websites, trade shows and social media services required to execute marketing projects.

When you need a well thought out strategy that builds your image, brand, achieves defined results and catches and holds onto your customers, you’ll definitely want to talk with Julie and her team.

You can reach Julie and Grace Design at: 770-922-1200 email: Julie@gracedesign.net; on the web: www.gracedesign.net

Reid Trego, owner of Huntington Learning Center in Woodstock, has owned the center since 2004. Always interested in influencing and working with young people, he has put his major in psychology and economics to work in a business focused on helping students struggling with academic skills.

Parents most often notice there is a problem when homework time leads to frustration or when grades begin to fall. Reid says these go back most often to problems with basic skills and motivation. Basic skills get missed for many reasons and even with many programs in school to help remediate these issues, not all students are helped.

That’s where Reid and Huntington Learning Centers come in. They work one on one with each student, identify the specific gaps that are the underlying cause of the symptoms the parents see then creating  a carefully designed program that helps get each child back on track.

The difference is individual one on one attention says Reid. Not all children learn the same way, at the same speed or “get it” the way something is presented. Using certified educators, they invest the time to first assess the problem and its causes then provide the ongoing one-on-one specialized help needed to close gaps and ameliorate problems.

For children with leaning disabilities, having the one-on-one help is very critical, many children just need a high level of attention to be their best and that’s what Reid and his center can deliver.

And, coping with the alphabet soup of tests that are so important to a child’s future may mean giving a youngster practice and insights into strategies for taking these tests and answering questions. Even practice applying the right skills may be lacking without training. All the way from basic tests to ACT and SAT, Huntington has a program that will improve results.

Huntington Learning Center is a trusted solution to help ensure your child succeeds; the husband and wife understand the root causes that causing the problems; and then have a clear view of the gaps that make school problematic. From that understanding, the see that Reid’s course of action will help bring their child up to speed.

You can reach Reid and Huntington Learning Center at 678-445-4746 or email: reidtrego@hlcwoodstock.com; on the web: www.huntingtonhelps.com