It’s finally the time of year that everyone waits for—spring! The cold of winter has gone, the rush of holidays has passed, and a time for renewal is upon us. When it’s time for spring cleaning for your company, Five Point Capital is the place to turn.

Let’s face it—no matter how great your business equipment is, it simply wears down. Computers become out-of-date, faxes jam, and chairs break. No matter what kind of business you run—an accounting firm, a restaurant, a magazine, or anything else—springtime is the perfect time to update all your old equipment. If you have equipment that is broken, out-of-date, or in need of repairs, Five Point Capital can help.

Five Point Capital offers the nation’s best furniture and equipment leasing. We can work out a payment plan for just about anything—from barstools to laptops. Best of all, when your lease is up, you have the option to buy the equipment or furniture at an extremely discounted rate! Equipment leasing has never been easier and never been more affordable. Do not let your business suffer due to out-of-date equipment or old furniture. The recession is finally starting to pass, so make your business shine and call Five Point Capital for all your spring cleaning needs.

If it’s time for a good renewal of your business, go to www.fivepointcapital.tv or give us a call at 800-317-3404. We would be happy to discuss all of our equipment leasing and furniture rental options with you, and can even recommend the most popular products for your industry. Five Point Capital is the clear choice for medical equipment leasing, restaurant equipment leasing, business equipment leasing, and construction equipment leasing, so give us a call today.

This email, which has been circulating widely in the state of Ohio and other places in the Midwest, claims to be from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The email asks for personal information, to see if you are a candidate for receiving a free or discounted H1N1 vaccine. Downloading the email response form can give you a computer virus, and gives this mysterious predator access to all the private information you fill out.

The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) claims that they would never ask for personal information—and only certified health representatives would only ask questions about one’s health. If you receive an email claiming to be from the CDC, do not open it. Contact the CDC to see if they were actually reaching out to you. Chances are that you are received the H1N1 virus scam email.

We here are Five Point Capital hope you stay safe and disease-free this winter season—both from the flu and from computer viruses! As always, we remind you to beware when opening emails from people you do not know, and to think twice about downloading suspect attachments or releasing any personal information.

The best way to save money is to avoid a rip-off. You need groceries, utilities, gasoline, clothes, transportation, and even the occasional entertainment and splurge. Since you need these things to get by, you cannot avoid spending money on them. Nothing comes for free, especially in a down or recovering economy. As a result, the best thing you can do is make sure you are getting the best price for your money. There is nothing wrong with shopping sales and cutting coupons—these are the little things that help you save money. A few cents here and a few dollars there can really add up. Going out for dinner? Skip the appetizers and drinks. Appetizers can fill you up so that you don’t enjoy your meal, and drinks are often the most over-priced of all menu items. Instead, enjoy your dinner with a glass of water, and then pick up a bottle of wine at the grocery store on the way home to enjoy for up to 60% less in the privacy of your own home.

There is also nothing more frustrating than buying something and then seeing it somewhere else for a better price. To avoid a rip-off, we say to be vocal. Though many companies do not advertise it, a good deal of businesses will refund you the difference if you can prove a competitor is offering a lower price. They want your business and would rather refund you some money than have you return the item all together to instead buy it somewhere else. In the same light, shop around before you purchase. Figure out who has the best deals and do not be afraid to pit competitors against each other. If one store has a lower price, tell the competing store owner or manager—there may be some hidden discounts waiting for you that will get you an even better price.

You don’t want to get ripped-off or scammed. Keep your money safe by doing your research and only buying the best quality and cost-effective goods. When you do that, your savings add up. You can keep these savings for a rainy day, or splurge on something fun.

Five Point Capital Leasing owes its recognition to AutoVirt, whose AutoVirt AutoMove software enables them to consolidate their server and server room on a regular basis. AutoVirt put out a press release this week announcing Five Point Capital’s recognition by Storage Networking World. One pick-up of the original release can be found here.

Josh Klein, the President and CEO of AutoVirt, had nothing but good things to say about his medical equipment leasing and business equipment leasing customer. “Five Point Capital is the true embodiment of a visionary company that knows in order to improve internal processes, seize opportunities and fend-off competitive threats it must deploy innovative technology solutions.”

Five Point Capital, Inc. is no stranger to awards in excellence. In 2006, Five Point Capital Equipment Leasing was named Number 82 on the Inc. 500 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies, and in 2007 was Number 348. In 2006, Five Point Capital was also named Number 9 on the San Diego Business Journal list of San Diego’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies, and was Number 11 in 2007, due their strong presence in the field of restaurant equipment leasing and construction equipment leasing. To be recognized by the Storage Networking World for Five Point Capital’s attention to innovation and technology is a true honor, and Five Point Capital proudly adds it to their list of achievements.

We here at Five Point Capital lease a lot of equipment for restaurants, so we have decided to share tips from our most successful restaurant clients.

Part of the success of a restaurant is how good the food is. The other part, however, is the service. This means not only friendly service, but fast and efficient service as well. While the staff members of your restaurants must be smart, friendly, quick on their feet, and have great memories, if your restaurant is set up in a non-efficient manner, even the most intelligent and attentive servers can seem frazzled and slow.

For a server, the best restaurants to work in are not necessarily the ones with the nicest managers, biggest bucks, or friendliest customers. They are the ones that are easiest to navigate. A restaurant with a good serving station makes any restaurant operate smoothly. A lack of an organized serving station can make any restaurant fall apart.

For example, take a restaurant that has all paper goods stocked next to the computer terminal, next to the silver- and dish-ware shelves. This means that when a server takes an order, he or she can return to this very spot, enter the other, and then grab plates, silverware, and napkins to bring to the patrons all in one trip. If the plates are kept in the kitchen, the silverware in a separate drawer, the glasses by the bar, and the computer elsewhere, every order the server takes means a mad dash about the restaurant.

We recommend designating one specific area in your restaurant as the server station. Make sure this area is a large enough to accommodate all of your servers at one time, to avoid bumping into one another and dropping things. The serving station should consist of the following:

• A paper-goods section, stocked with napkins, paper towels, and beverage napkins
• A silverware tray, filled with clean forks, knives, spoons, and steak knives
• Clean plates, appetizer plates, and bowls
• A trash can
• Three large buckets—one for dirty silverware, one for dirty plates, and one with small sections for depositing dirty glasses. When these are full, they should be brought to the kitchen for washing. This eliminates the need for the servers to hurry back and forth into the kitchen to deposit dirty goods after every bussed table.
• The computer to place orders and run credit cards
• A stack of trays
• Cleaning cloths and spray bottles.
• If servers fill their own drinks, glasses, ice, and straws should all be located near the drink machine, along with a set of trays

The most efficient set-up we have witnessed here at Five Point Capital was a serving station that was set up at the back corner of the bar. At one end of the serving station, plates, straws, and clean glasses stood ready for use, in reach of both the servers and the bartender. Next to that was an empty area, used for the bartenders to pass drinks to the servers. Under the bar area was a dining cart. The top shelf held napkins and a silverware tray. The second shelf held a dirty glass container. The third shelf held a dirty silverware bin. The bottom shelf held a dirty plate bin. Next to the dining cart was the trashcan. On the other side of the empty area, on the bar, was the drink machine. An ice bucket was under the drink machine, while trays were placed on top of the drink machine. Next to the drink machine was the computer. Pens, spare change, and menus were all placed in racks on top of the computer. Cleaning cloths and spray bottles hung on a rack under the bar area, next to the trash can. The only time the servers had to enter the kitchen was to pick up food, to restock paper goods, or to exchange dirty goods for clean ones.

After every order, the servers only needed to return to this area to get everything they needed. There was less forgetfulness, faster service, and less frazzled servers as a result. We recommend to all our clients who are purchasing restaurant equipment to keep in mind the design of their serving station for both the good of their serving staff and the efficiency of their restaurant!

It is a well-known fact that eventually we will not be able to rely on oil to fuel our world any longer. The world must eventually find an alternative fuel source, and sooner rather than later. Burning fossil fuels pollutes the air, depletes a dying source, and the process of finding and collecting the oil to begin with involves a tremendous amount of money, manpower, and devastation to the natural world.

As a people we have been taking small but important steps to replacing fuel as our energy source. Hybrid cars rely only partially on fuel, tapping into electricity as a source of power instead. Windmills that have popped up all over the world are attempting to harvest wind power, and solar panels on homes are a great way to trap energy from the sun. But will this power be enough? Electricity works well when used in conjunction with another source; it cannot be immediately replenished when it runs out and instead must take a charge for several hours. Wind and solar power are great—as long as the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, which we can’t control any more than we can control, well, the weather. As it currently stands, we have been unable to tap into a fuel source that is as quick-to-work and long-lasting as oil.

However, a few little-known candidates for alternative fuel sources have popped up. One idea that has the science industry excited and the tree-huggers nervous it new technology that claims it can add up to 50 years of life to our depleted oil source. Advanced nanoreporters have been developed, which can be transmitted into the ground to let oil companies know when oil has been hit. This means more oil at a faster rate, which gives us a bit more time to locate a new energy source, but also means more digging and more pollution.

As the United States’ “most widely used alternative fuel source,” propane is another consideration to replace oil. Propane is cleaner than oil, reducing pollution, and can add on an additional four or five gallons per mile when used for driving. However, propane is incredibly expensive, and there is that whole potential blowing-up thing.

One of the strangest but coolest innovations we’ve heard of recently here at Five Point Capital is the use of chicken feathers to store hydrogen as an alternative fuel source. It seems that when heated to the appropriate temperature, chicken feathers become a sort of hydrogen-storing filter, with the feathers insulating a phenomenal amount of hydrogen for their size. While animal-rights activist may be against the idea of killing chickens for a fuel source, millions of chickens are killed each year for food, so using their feathers for fuel may actually be less wasteful than it may seem.

While the Earth is still pretty dependent on oil, recently technological innovations combined with our determination as a people to save our planet make us here at 5 Point Capital hopeful. From propane to wind power to chicken feathers, the possibilities seem endless even if not particularly practical. Our personal favorite to win the Best Alternative Fuel Source award is water power. We hear that those tides are pretty regular and incredibly powerful, and any middle school science fair participant can tell you that harvesting the energy from moving water is not very difficult, so hopefully our expanding oceans will one day help to fuel the planet.

Facebook cannot seem to get its privacy issues under control. As soon as one is resolved, something else pops up to make users reconsider what they put on their profiles. The latest issue comes from Facebook Ads. Instead of showing a consistent photo next to the ads that appear in the margins and sidebars of the Facebook window, Facebook instead shows the profile photo from someone on your friends list, so it appears as if that person is endorsing the product or service, or has sent you the link to the ad themselves. This article details one user who signed on to his Facebook account only to see a picture of his wife next to a “Hot Singles are Waiting for You!” ad. Needless to say, neither he nor his wife were pleased.

Most people do not want their face to appear next to a product, service, or slogan unless they have given Facebook specific permission to use their likeness. While the case of the man and his wife was an incident related to a third-party company that has since been removed from Facebook, the issue relates back to each Facebook user’s privacy controls. Instead of asking users for permission to take certain actions, Facebook has a longstanding and annoying habit of acting first and apologizing later. In order to protect your privacy, check your privacy settings on a regularly basis to see if Facebook has decided to allow certain actions on your behalf without your knowledge.

The problem is that these privacy settings are hard to find and even harder to navigate. When this Red Tape article instructed us to disallow the Facebook Ad service by changing our privacy settings, we couldn’t figure out how to do so. We had to follow the article’s flow chart to update our privacy settings. The instructions are as follows:

“If you still want to change the privacy toggle and prevent your actions on Facebook from appearing in ads to other users, follow this click trail: Settings=>Privacy=>News Feed and Wall=>Facebook Ads. Then select ‘No one.’”

We here at Five Point Capital recommend regularly checking your Facebook Privacy Settings to see what applications you may be unintentionally allowing to access your Facebook profile information. It seems like it will only be a matter of time before this Facebook scam becomes a major problem for Facebook executives. Privacy is something no one wants to compromise on, and if people do not feel safe using Facebook, the executives can kiss their empire goodbye.

We here at Five Point Capital have a noticed a big shift in the world of low-priced food. When it came to fast food, companies like Pizza Hut and McDonalds were reliably cheap and simple—pizza at Pizza Hut, burgers and fries at McDonald’s, tacos at Taco Bell. However, in the last year or so it seems that these fast food restaurants have been trying to reinvent themselves as higher-class and fancier than they used to be known, possibly as an answer to the downturn of the economy; people cannot afford to go out for fancy, sit-down meals, so they may turn to their local fast food joint for alternatives.

About a year ago, Pizza Hut put out commercials that featured diners at a fancy restaurant eating classy pasta dishes. The chef then entered the dining area to inform the patrons that the pasta had actual been delivered from Pizza Hut. This commercial marked one of the first attempts of a fast food chain to offer high-class food at high-class standards, all at fast food prices and fast food convenience.

Since then, McDonald’s has reinvented itself completely in order to compete with Starbucks, by offering fancy coffees and lattes, billing the items as the “McCafé” menu. Starbucks, in turn, has turned at least one of their chain branches into what has been coined “BarBucks,” featuring wine and beer with live music.

Is this move of making the affordable, fast food world fancier counterintuitive? We here at 5 Point Capital don’t think so. We doubt that those who are scrimping and saving will be turned off by fancy coffees or hearty pasta dishes; rather it seems that those who cannot afford a fancy cocktail might turn to the more affordable Starbucks for a late-night gathering. Those who cannot afford a high-priced cappuccino at a local coffee bar may turn to McDonald’s for a lower-priced version of the same thing. Likewise, those who cannot afford to dine out at a fancy Italian bistro may instead choose to order pasta dishes from Pizza Hut at take-out prices. We think the idea is genius, but we hope that these companies do not lose sight of their roots, or choose to turn their backs on their original menus; where would we get out French fries from?!

TripAdvisor has long been a favorite website haunt of casual and expert travelers alike. The Boston-based website features not only hotel reviews, but also reviews of city attractions, such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, Central Park in New York City, and Fenway Park in Boston, as well as lesser known stops, such as the Santa Monica Promenade and Boston’s Mike’s Pastries.

The website runs entirely off of user reviews. Users rank and rate their favorite and least favorite hotels and tourist attractions, so that others who visit the website can see not only a rating of the hotel (out of five stars), but also the ranking of the hotel among other hotels in the area, and user testimonials. Seems like a great idea, right?

Well it was a great idea, up until recently. TripAdvisor is now warning of scams by posting disclaimers on the review pages for certain hotels. These disclaimers state that the reviews for the hotel may not actually come from former guests of the hotel, but rather from the hotel staff or competitor’s staff. The Associated Press suggests that incredibly positive reviews which mention insignificant details or the only negative review on an otherwise positive page may not be authentic.

TripAdvisor representatives claim that disclaimers should not alarm users, and that they have been in place since 2006, despite the seemingly recent jump in their numbers. One TripAdvisor spokesperson was even quoted as saying that “The 23 million reviews and opinions are authentic and they’re unbiased and they’re from real users.”

So how can you tell if the review you are reading is real? Well the best thing you can do is to get as much information as possible and to use your common sense. Debbra Brouillette, of the Dallas Tropical Travel Examiner, posted some tips for perusing travel websites on Examiner.com. She suggests taking all the posted reviews into account, as every hotel or restaurant can have an off day; making sure to get second opinions on too-good-to-be-true hotels; noting the date of the review, as hotels usually renovate every few years; trying to contact the poster of a very good or very bad review to ask for more details; keeping in mind that your preferences and experiences will not be the same as everyone else’s; and reading between the lines.

Before making any travel plans, make sure you do your research. We here at Five Point Capital still think that TripAdvisor is a great resource for travelers, but it may not be the one-stop-shop it once was. As long as hotels and restaurants want to make money, hotel review scams will live on, so always try to get as much information as possible before making a decision. Happy travels!

]]> http://www.fivepointcapital.tv/2009/07/17/tripadvisor-scam/feed/ http://www.fivepointcapital.tv/2009/07/14/ways-to-relax-this-summer/ http://www.fivepointcapital.tv/2009/07/14/ways-to-relax-this-summer/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:03:22 +0000 admin http://www.fivepointcapital.tv/?p=152

Even though summer is meant to be a time to relax, we here at Five Point Capital know that we can often fill our schedules with so many summertime plans that summer becomes our busiest time yet! Parties, barbeques, beach days, picnics, camping trips, fishing trips, and shuffling the kids to baseball games and camp can be overwhelming, so we would like to offer you a list of small things you can do to fill your summer with relaxation.

First, eat your meals outside. As long as the weather is warm and sunny, take advantage of it. This doesn’t mean you need to run out and buy patio furniture—even taking your cup of coffee and drinking it on the front steps can be relaxing and can help you to find time to get some fresh air. If you do have a place to eat meals outside, make sure to purchase some insect-repellent candles so as to enjoy your meal in peace.

Secondly, walk more. Again, you will find the fresh air and the warm weather invigorating, and it’s good for you. Walking also helps to remind us to slow down and smell the roses so to speak. Speeding down roadways on trains and in cars only adds to the rushed feeling of everyday life.

Eat more fruits and vegetables. Fruits and veggies that are in season during the summer months are often the tastiest, so now is the time to bulk up on the nutritious foods. When it is especially hot, cold fruits are a great way to cool down (tip: try throwing some grapes in the freezer for an extra-cold sweet treat). Fresh vegetables are so delicious that even your pickiest kids will love them! Try sweet corn on the cob or fresh asparagus on the grill when you barbeque. Shopping at your local farmer’s market means lower costs, guaranteed freshness, and supporting your neighborhood.

Finally, act like a kid! Eat freezer pops, run through sprinklers, ooh and ahh at fireworks, splash in pools, and build sandcastles. These activities can make you feel younger and help to remind you why you loved summer when you were young.

Summer is a great time to unwind, no matter how busy your schedule. Remember to take the time to enjoy the season and the weather in any way you can. We hope you have a great summer!