Staffing
How to manage your workforce.
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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I’m feeling pretty lonely.
Lately I’ve noticed my emails are going unanswered for longer and longer periods of time.
I check my email every few seconds, and I can’t imagine not getting back to people in a flash.
But maybe I’ve bought into this crazy way of life.
Maybe I should take a page from the owner of a tea lounge in San Francisco who has taken a machete to email.
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Are you one of those entrepreneurs without a “sick boundary”?
That’s what Rich Sloan, founder of entrepreneurial website StartupNation.com, calls it.
A sick boundary is a common sense strategy all small business owners should have. Here it is in a nutshell: When you’re sick, stay home, don’t work, get better.
This is pretty simple, no?
“Most entrepreneurs don’t set the sick boundary,” he says.
I know, how the heck do you make money when you’re not working? That’s the entrepreneurial conundrum.
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Just because companies shell out millions of dollars to advertise during the Super Bowl doesn’t mean you have to buy the products or services they hawk.
A Pepsi, okay.
But business owners should be doing their due diligence when it comes to deciding whether to plop down their hard-earned cash on something that’s going to cost more than a can of soda.
Take the Salesgenie.com ads. I’m sure many small business owners out there had never heard of the sales lead Internet company until the firm’s slick ads appeared during the battle between the Giants and Patriots.
The ads probably got a lot of people surfing over to their site. How could they resist a cartoon panda with a bad Asian accent?
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I recently visited a local Starbucks and I knew I was in trouble when the barista handed me my cup of coffee in three seconds.
OK, I pay $2.80 for a tall latte, so the least the barista can do is take some time frothing up the milk. If nothing else it would help me feel a bit better about the extravagant purchase.
To make matters worse, when I tasted the latte it turned out the coffee was very weak, and it didn’t seem to have that Starbucks kick of yesteryear.
By contrast, a latte at the local java shop around the corner from Starbucks, Brew Ha Ha, is always something special. The baristas even create works of art on the top of my hot drink, often a beautiful leaf.
So, where do you think I’ll be stopping by for my latte tomorrow?
Duh, Brew Ha Ha.
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| Andrew Gombert / EPA file |
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Ha! Made ya look.
I’m not trying to anger all of you out there, but when it comes to business, men want to be in control, while women are the nurturers and consensus builders.
Isn’t that what’s drummed into our heads day in and day out!
Yet another survey points to just this phenomenon among entrepreneurs.
“Small business owners want to control their destiny,” says Sastry Rachakonda, director of Discover's business credit card, which polled 1000 small business owners with five employees or less in its monthly Discover Small Business Watch is a monthly survey. “However, men and women do this in different ways. For men, it is about being in control and being their own bosses, while for women, it is about having more flexibility with their time.”
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Earlier this week I wrote a blog post on how small business owners were bucking the trend and actually hiring or looking to hire more workers this year.
The big problem was finding qualified applicants.
Some of you pointed out the double meaning in the headline I wrote:
“Small Business Owners Are Hiring Junkies”
My friends, I meant you guys were in a hiring frenzy, not that you were hiring drug addicts.
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With all the doom and gloom out there about the jobs outlook, small businesses appear to be thumbing their noses at economists and reporters like me.
I did a story about how hard it’s going to be to find a job this year for my Your Career column yesterday, but it looks like it will be easier for people who are open to working at smaller firms.
A national report put out late last week found that businesses with 50 employees or fewer are in a hiring frenzy, at least compared to their larger company counterparts.
Are small business owners living in an alternate universe?
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| Amy Sancetta / AP |
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I hate New Year’s resolutions. I admit it.
So many go unfulfilled and then you feel even worse about not meeting a certain goal.
But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking a step back and reevaluating how you run your business.
If you don’t, it could be another ho hum year.
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| Bob Fila / KRT file |
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The tragic story of a kind man who used a portable toilet one day in a park and ended up paralyzed inspired nearly 90 small business owners to embark on one charitable mission.
For six weeks, plumbers, roofers, and painters, just to name a few, worked hard at transforming Pedro Toala’s home into an accessible dream house. This former bus driver was the victim of what was deemed a prank, when a bunch of kids tipped over the portable toilet he was using in Wilmington, Delaware.
His story got lots of press attention locally, and many were moved when he forgave the men who ended up breaking his spine.
How were so many busy small business owners able to join forces and do something good for Toala?
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