May 2008 - Posts
My mom recently went to a Mediterranean grocer in Queens, N.Y., to buy some Kalamata olives and some feta cheese when she noticed a tired and sweaty mailwoman delivering some letters to the owner of the store.
Obviously exhausted and thirsty, the postal worker took a bottle of water out of a refrigerator and asked the storeowner how much it was. The owner said, $2.
While she was putting her hand in her pocket to get the money, my mom said, “Can I buy the water for you?”
The postal worker said, “I have the money.” My mom insisted, and the mailwoman thanked her profusely, clearly touched by my mother’s gesture.
When the mailwoman left, the storeowner turned to my mother and berated her, saying, “why are you paying for her water? Those postal workers make a lot of money.”
Was this a business faux pas?
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What did you all do during the holiday weekend?
Our last-minute plan was to go to my father-in-laws summerhouse and leave my laptop at home.
The drive is about 90 miles and my husband and I promised each other we wouldn’t go out to eat because money was a bit tight these days. The plan was to ride our bikes and catch up on some reading.
Even going on this mini vacation with the kids was sort of a luxury because of gas prices. But to heck with common sense, I needed a break from my hectic schedule.
Seems like many of you small business owners out there are feeling the way I am. But should we be waiting until the breaking point when we say goodbye to work?
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| Roy Morsch / Corbis file |
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It doesn’t look good for college graduates this year as they prepare to go out and hit the job-searching pavement.
Turns out, students are worried about finding a job. A new survey by career site Vault.com of graduating seniors, found that “44% say they’re very worried about finding employment after graduation, while 42% say they are somewhat worried about getting jobs. Only 14% say they are not worried at all.”
Erik Sorenson, Vault's CEO, says: “It is a tough market out there for new grads right now, especially in the professional services industries such as banking and consulting. The best thing any job seeker can do is to be as well informed as possible about the industry, the company they’re applying to, and the specific skill set required for the job.”
There's another options. They could just say, “to heck with it all” and become entrepreneurs.
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For the first time in more than 90 years, a family run bakery in Atlantic City, N.J., is trying to keep it’s profit margins above water, and that includes the years during the depression.
Frank D. Formica, owner of Formica Brothers’ Bakery, testified late last week before the House Committee on Small Business and he painted a grim picture for legislators.
The bakery uses 50,000 pounds of flour a week, and over the past 30 years or so the prices have averaged between 11 cents and 17 cents a pound. But as of September 2007, prices began to escalate rapidly reaching a peak of 60 cents a pound.
He was paying $7,000 a week for flour and $364,000 annually. But today, he pays out $20,000 a week, or $1,040,000 a year.
Who pays for the premium?
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There I was, in my yoga class trying to get rid of stress and help my bad back, when the instructor decides to share a personal story.
She does this periodically as a way to make us think of things beside the things that got us coming to yoga in the first place.
Her daughter’s friend from college was working on an assignment, she told us, and decided to email my instructor Nancy McConnell to ask her “what motivates you in your career other than a paycheck?”
Nancy told us it was a hard email to get at that particular moment because she was having some trouble in her chosen profession, running a daycare and school for about 100 kids.
Turns out she’s not only my yoga instructor but a small business owner as well, and when she got the email she was in the midst of a challenging employee issue. She’s got about 30 employees.
The email also included one line that really turned up the pressure on Nancy: “please inspire me. I need it.”
How do you let down a wide-eyed college kid?
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| Jim McKnight / AP |
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Savvy consumers and small firms owners are increasingly checking the Better Business Bureau’s list of businesses before they make a purchase or decide to partner with a company.
That’s bad news for small businesses that some how end up on the BBB’s bad-boy list.
OK, it’s not actually called a bad boy list, but if your company ends up in the BBB’s data base with an unsatisfactory rating you can bet you’ll probably lose at least a few sales as a result.
The BBB has reliability reports on about 4 million businesses and of those about 24 percent have an unsatisfactory rating, says Alison Preszler, a spokeswoman for the organization.
So how do you keep from ending up with a “F” on your BBB report card?
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The ice cream king and entrepreneur Irvine Robbins died earlier this week and I couldn’t help but be sad a bit. I have fond memories of making trips to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop in Queens, N.Y., with my dad and ordering Pink Bubblegum ice cream.
Oh man, was that delicious. Well, delicious to a kid I suppose, among the many other flavors that ended up in that frosty ice cream case. Endless flavors were part of my reality as a kid. I couldn’t imagine how boring my parents’ childhoods must have been with just vanilla and chocolate.
Indeed, Robbins took some credit for opening up our horizons to wild flavors. He said as much in a New York Times article from 1976: “I think we’ve had a little bit to do with making it more acceptable.”
Which brings me to bacon ice cream.
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There are lots of small business owners out there that are living life on the edge: They have little to no health insurance.
They figure they're pretty healthy, so they can save money by paying doctors for routine visits out of pocket. But what if they get a serious illness?
Most of you out there figure you'll go to the hospital, get the treatment you need to get nursed back to health and then deal with the bills as they come in. Hospitals, especially nonprofits, have to treat people, right?
Think again.
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| Richard Drew / AP |
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It may sound crazy, but one entrepreneurial experts thinks a recession is a great time to launch a new business.
“The one predictable way to achieving financial success is to own a business,” claims Bill Bartmann, the author of "Billionaire Secrets to Success.” “The current economic landscape is a most opportune time to start a new business. It is all about applying basic common sense.”
Is this man just a nutcase or does he know of what he speaks?
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