November 29, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for Small Business

You’re the Boss Blog: Why I Would Rather Pay My Employees Too Much

May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Staying Alive

The struggles of a business trying to survive.

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post, “Why I Pay What I Pay,” about the performance I expect from workers at different wage rates. I was surprised by the number of comments, but I guess that any discussion of pay is going to push someone’s button. That said, I’d like to respond to a couple of points that were raised and also make a few new ones.

First and most obvious: Every dollar I pay my workers has to come out of a client’s pocket. Having cash to make payroll is not a forgone conclusion. We scramble to make sales and bring in revenue every day. The amount of money I have on hand varies widely, but pay day arrives every two weeks like clockwork. This has caused me a lot of stress over the years and often leads me to question whether I am paying the right amount. If I were running a different kind of business — one where I knew with certainty that the money I need to meet payroll will always be there — I would think about wages differently. But I don’t have that luxury. I have to allocate our revenue stream to cover all of our operations, not just payroll, and making a mistake can be fatal. If I spend too much on the wrong thing, there will be no money for some other critical function.

Second, clients don’t care what I pay my workers. In the last three years we’ve had more than 2,000 inquiries for our product, and not a single potential buyer asked about my wage scale. These buyers also do not care whether I make a profit — as long as I deliver what they ordered. And many would probably prefer that I didn’t make any money at all, at least not on their order. As a small-business owner, I understand how important profits can be, so when I’m buying something, I don’t sweat over every penny I spend. I know that I’ll get better service and a better product from companies that aren’t struggling to make ends meet. But that perspective is unusual. Many of my clients have price targets, and they need us to hit them. They are not at all concerned with what I have to do to meet their needs.

Third, the question of how I interact with my employees is up to me. My business model and my history lead me to want to treat them well. I’m with my employees as often as I’m with my family, and I made the decision long ago that I’d rather spend my time with people who are happy to be working for me than people who hate me. It has cost me a lot of money to do this, but I believe that in the long run it has served me well.

I know a number of shop owners, running businesses like mine, who made different decisions about how to pay people. One in particular advertised his shop as a woodworking school, and charged his workers tuition. He then used their labor to build a product line that was sold at regular market prices. On the face of it, it was a brilliant business model, but he closed his doors years ago, and I’m still around. I run into his former “students” now and then, and they all describe the bitter moment when they realized what was going on and how they decided to leave as quickly as possible.

I don’t want that kind of relationship with my employees, and I don’t want to deal with constant turnover. My people are smart and hard-working and that’s who I want to spend my life with. I’d rather err on the side of paying them too much than have to deal with grumbling and turnover. But if I were running a business where turnover is expected — an ice-cream stand in a summer resort, for example — I’d have a different attitude. I’d be a lot more interested in my own reward than the long-term prosperity of my workers. And that would make sense, for that situation. On to some questions.

From kathy d:

I’d be interested in knowing how long a worker spends at each level before he/she can be promoted. Is it simply mastery of the skill set for that level, or is there a regular schedule of promotions/raises?

I’m small, so a promotion path is not a given. It’s just not possible to make that promise in a company this size. I wrote about this in the summer of 2010, and my thinking hasn’t changed.

From Meredith:

Do you offer cost of living yearly increases? Say, 2 or 3%? Or a yearly bonus for excellent performance?

Here’s my question for you, Meredith: Where’s my Cost of Progress Discount? Why am I expected to raise pay steadily when my workers’ skills set is constantly being made obsolete by market forces? Why can’t the workers who are not upgrading their own skills expect a continuous reduction of wages? This would allow their employer to compete in the market through continual, automatic cost reduction. That might sound harsh, but it reflects my reality as a manufacturer.

Seventy-five percent of what we do every day was not possible 10 years ago. I have had to re-invest cash continuously — money that could have gone into my own pocket — on new technologies, new equipment, experiments in process improvement, and employee skills development. Driven by my own desire to make my business more competitive, that effort has kept us in business. It has allowed me to keep my wages where they are. I don’t feel that workers should automatically expect pay raises unless their employer enjoys the luxury of automatic increases in revenue and profit. That’s not happening in my kind of manufacturing. As for bonuses, I have paid them in the past, based on no formula other than whether I was feeling rich and happy at the end of the year. That approach has some drawbacks, so I am implementing a regular, predictable profit-sharing plan this year. I’ll be writing more about it in the future.

From ted:

Can you tell us approximately how much the benefits you offer add to the hourly wage? (vacation, holidays, health care)

I can tell you my projections for 2013. We offer personal days, which can be used either for sickness or vacation, along with six paid holidays. New employees get six personal days in their first year of service and an additional day for each subsequent year, topping out at 16 personal days. Add the six holidays, and my long-term employees get 22 paid days off. The overall cost of doing this is tied to the pay rate and length of service for each worker, but in 2013 the total bill for paid time off will be $50,218. This includes the wages and the payroll tax we pay. That’s 5.76 percent of our total wage bill of $872,581 (excluding my pay, which is budgeted at 6 percent of sales).

As for health costs, the company pays two thirds of the cost of ensuring our those employees, and their families, who accept the coverage we offer. Twelve of my 16 workers participate, and this year the cost to the company will be $51,565. That is 5.91 percent of our total wages. The two benefits, added together, cost $101,784, or 11.66 percent of our wages. Is that expensive? Again, it depends on the context. For me, it’s not. I’d love to shed the hassle of dealing with health care, but the cost is not going to break me. And what I get for my spending on vacations and health care is a stable, healthy work force. That’s important to me, and I think it makes my shop a good place to work. Is it possible to duplicate that in every business? No.

In closing, I thought long and hard about publishing the last post, as it committed me to live up to my words and pay my people based on a clearly understood formula of skills versus pay. Many bosses wouldn’t do that, for lots of good reasons that boil down to this: published wage scales change the balance of power between bosses and employees. They make it much harder to be flexible (boss’s description) or arbitrary (employees’ description.)

In the last few years, I have made a number of changes to how I run my business, in all cases revealing information that many bosses keep secret. I am hoping that empowering my workers, letting them see what really makes the business run, will help all of us figure out how to increase sales and profits, which we can then share.

But that may not be a good idea. If it is the best way to run a business, why don’t more bosses do it? Am I compromising my own financial future for the sake of starry-eyed idealism? Would my approach work in your business?

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/why-i-would-rather-pay-my-employees-too-much/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Sorting Through the New Political Alignments in Small Business

May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Agenda

How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.

In a post for our colleagues at Economix on the divide between small and big — and local and global — businesses, Nancy Folbre, an economics professor, raises a number of issues important to You’re The Boss readers.

In particular, she discusses the emergence of several groups, mostly progressive, that claim to represent local and independent small businesses. They include membership organizations like the American Independent Business Association, the Main Street Alliance, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, as well as the Small Business Majority and the American Sustainable Business Council, which have no members.

It’s an interesting list, in an interesting column. Ms. Folbre appears to find a connection between local and liberal, painting it in opposition to global interests represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “The resulting divergence in economic interests” between local and global companies, she writes, “is driving new political alignments.”

But is it? Among the issues she cites is the ability of states to collect sales taxes from online retailers that are based out of state, and in fact the Marketplace Fairness Act now seems likely to pass the Senate very soon. But Internet tax fairness, as its proponents call it, is not necessarily a battle between liberals and conservatives, although more conservatives tend to oppose it. One can support the Marketplace Fairness Act, or any number of measures intended to strengthen small, independent businesses, and still oppose, say, the Affordable Care Act or higher taxes on the wealthy. To complicate matters further, it’s not necessarily a local-versus-global issue either. Much of the backing for the Alliance for Main Street Fairness, the chief lobbying coalition for the Marketplace Fairness Act (and unrelated to the Main Street Alliance), has been supplied by national and international big-box retailers that are anathema on Main Street: Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Home Depot, among others.

Perhaps the emergence of these groups simply reflects that liberal activists — and business owners — have styled themselves in a way that they hope taps into the way small businesses resonate with many Americans. As Ms. Folbre puts it, “We think of small-business owners as men and women who invest in their own communities, work in the same building as their employees, send their children to the same schools and walk their dogs in the same neighborhood parks.”

In any event, it may be a long time before these groups challenge the dominance of the conservative organizations. The groups she lists are all very small compared to the National Federation of Independent Business, which has 350,000 members, or the Chamber of Commerce, which has nearly three million small-business members, despite its often national and international orientation. (Many of those businesses — the Chamber declines to say how many — are actually members of state or local affiliates and may not necessarily buy into the Chamber’s politics. Indeed, Ms. Folbre notes that nearly 60 local chambers have withdrawn from the national organization.)

We’d like to hear from readers who have heard from some these new organizations. How did you find out about them? Did you join? Why or why not?

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/sorting-through-the-new-political-alignments-in-small-business/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: This Week in Small Business: The Van Halen Principle

May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Dashboard

A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.

Must-Reads

Tom Chiarella says he believes that in business the little things are really the big things. Jordan Weissmann says America’s technology-talent shortage is a myth. And Ezra Klein explains how the Van Halen Principle applies to government.

Washington: Paying Down the Debt

The Treasury will pay down debt for the first time since 2007, and the Federal Reserve decides to keep its stimulus plan in place, saying recent tax increases and spending cuts have hurt the economy. These slides show why taxes should go up. In this video, Allan Madan explains how the federal budget affects your small business; these business owners have ideas for how Washington can help. Here are five sequestration cuts that have not happened. President Obama’s relationship with GOP congressional leaders hits a new low. Small-business contracts with the federal government worth more than $2 billion will open for competition in the coming months.

The Economy: Down, Flat, Surging

Small-business owners are more optimistic about their companies’ prospects and are picking up the hiring pace, according to one report. But the April 2013 SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard showed that month-over-month hiring was down 0.2 percent and the average paycheck was flat. Personal income and spending both increased, pending home sales reached a three-year high and home prices are surging. But home ownership fell to its lowest level since 1995. The University of Michigan said consumer sentiment fell to a three-month low, but the Conference Board’s index picked up. Positive same-store sales pushed the Restaurant Performance Index higher. Overall manufacturing activity declined last month. The unemployment rate fell and job-creation was solid in April. Heidi Shierholz reminds readers that adding 175,000 jobs a month won’t make us whole until 2020. The American auto industry has its best performance in 20 years.

Management: Don’t Be Available

An Office Depot study finds that nearly four in 10 business owners believe having a mentor would boost their business. Sharon Melnick, a business psychologist, offers five ways to be productive when the pressure is on, including “Don’t always be available.” Barbara Austin says you should shake things up if you’re stuck in a creative rut. Jaclyn Mullen believes you get back what you give. Here are five inspirational women business speakers. Brad Lomenick suggests six ways to be a more courageous leader. Here are seven outsourcing lessons. The chief executive of Liquidnet says goodbye to titles. Jason Matthews shares a gutsy story.

Cash Flow: He Won A Banana

Jose Pagliery explains what’s behind the all-cash legal marijuana business. Here are three ways that having working capital can spruce up your business. Even though it has enough cash to buy Facebook, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo, Apple plans the biggest debt offering in corporate history. Small businesses cut borrowing for the third month in a row, and an online small-business lender has locked in $17 million more in financing for itself. Dun Bradstreet Credibility kicks off its 2013 Access to Capital Tour on May 22 in Chicago. A Fidelity small business analysis shows that balances for small-business retirement plans increased an average of 20 percent between 2007 and 2012. A man loses his life’s savings on a carnival game (but wins a banana), and here’s why professional liability insurance is helpful when collecting money from customers.

People: Get A Tattoo, Get A Raise

Richard Finger says American Airlines employees loathe their management. Alexandra Levit says there are six ways you may be sabotaging your company’s culture. Richard Branson offers tips for keeping your most valued employees happy. Heather Huhman suggests what to do when employees quit. Yahoo now offers 16 weeks of paid maternity leave, and a New York City real estate agent offers employees a pay raise for getting a tattoo (of the company logo). More employees are seeking training as they manage their careers, but 41 percent of college grads are overqualified for what they do. Here are a few steps to improve the way you give performance reviews. Here are the top 10 tech companies to work for, the 100 jobs that bring the highest salaries and the 23 signs that you’re the Stanley of your office.

Entrepreneurs: Do You Have What it Takes?

Mohul Ghosh says that “love for wealth” is one of nine unmistakable symptoms of entrepreneurship. In a radio interview, an author shares his entrepreneurial journey. Sinead says today’s geeks are the new rock stars. These are the top 10 billionaires who dropped out of school. Kenny Chesney explains why he’s a no-shoes entrepreneur with a taste for the rum business. And if you take this entrepreneurial quiz you might find out if you have what it takes to make it big.

Start-Up: Omaha

It appears the new must-attend start-up conference is in Omaha. This 18-slide pitch just landed a payment start-up $16.5 million, while another start-up creates a marketplace for the curious and those who teach. TechCrunch Disrupt discovers some exciting new companies in New York. Martin Zwilling suggests seven essentials to finding the right start-up mentor. Here are the top 10 reasons to start up in college. Sam Biddle shows what it looks like when you lose all of your start-up money.

Social Media: Do You Have a Policy?

Facebook is losing millions of users, and apps like this may be the reason. This is what the new YouTube layout and other Google updates mean for your small business. LinkedIn now lets you add photos, videos, and comments from others. A study finds mothers of young children are more likely than the general public to use social media. Kyle Nunes explains why you should consider blogging for your business. Debbie Thomson thinks your small business may need a social media policy. A Mexican restaurant’s privileged customer complains about the service and is the recipient of a social media firestorm. Twitter opens up a self-serve advertising platform to businesses, and according to Kealan Lennon, “what today’s social retailers are getting right is that the most compelling content to consumers is the media created by the consumers.” Living Social is hacked. A reporter’s Instagram photo reveals a “near-death” experience. According to an ATT study, two-thirds of small-business owners said they planned to spend as much or more as they did last year on digital marketing (including Web sites, social media and online advertising).

Customer Service: Loyalty And Lady Gaga

April was Customer Loyalty Month and Shep Hyken celebrated. This is how to make customers come back even after they return purchases. A study shows that spelling and grammar errors in shop signs lose customers. Here are seven customer-loyalty lessons you can learn from Lady Gaga. And now it’s May, which is National Salad Month.

Health Care: Surprise!

The Affordable Care Act application form is out, and it’s actually quite easy. A Stanford professor says the Act will cause millions of Americans to pay more for health insurance. Meanwhile, other experts propose $1 trillion in savings. Ron Present and Bill Goddard give advice for controlling your health care costs.

Around The Country: More Oil in North Dakota

A survey doubles the estimate of recoverable oil reserves in North Dakota. The Chamber of Commerce names these the most enterprising states. Local pawnshops in Daytona Beach, Fla., are unfazed by the recent drop in gold prices. The UPS Store introduces a Main Street franchise model. A small-business conference is scheduled for May 17 and 18 in New York, and Philadelphia announces its first Small Business Week.

Around The World: The Pirate Party

Euro-area economic confidence falls more than expected, and Spain sinks deeper into recession after suffering 33 consecutive months of falling retail sales. Europe’s youth employment levels are called “insane.” Germany accuses France of being “Europe’s biggest problem child,” and France wants to woo foreigners with entrepreneur visas. Meanwhile, Italy is facing a shortage of pizza makers. Churchill will be on a new bank note. Japan’s manufacturing and hiring rises. In this video, the Russian president meets with small-business owners. The Pirate Party wins three seats in the Icelandic parliament. Obama’s comedy is anything but routine for the Chinese. Micro-breweries are bubbling over in South Africa. A small business expo is planned for Jamaica.

Technology: Google Glass

Bob Cringely says things are looking up for Google Glass, and Robert Scoble says he will never again live a day without wearing it. Here’s how to use it. Bring-your-own-device adoption at small businesses increased in 2012 but be careful: lawsuits may be looming. Here are 10 little-known apps entrepreneurs can’t live without, 21 tips for super-charging your cloud storage and a few helpful tech upgrades for the home office. A report from National Public Radio explains why, when it comes to productivity, technology can hurt and help. This is what the voice of Alexander Graham Bell sounded like. Blackberry’s chief executive believes tablets are doomed. Square updates its mobile-payments software for small restaurants. Boy, what a difference 20 years has made. This simple trick turns commercial polymer into the world’s toughest fiber. Supermarkets of the future will track shopper eye movements. And this men’s suit will turn transparent when the wearer lies.

Tweet of the Week

@jayleno – A NH man says he was conned by a carnival, losing his entire life savings at the ball toss game. Well, now he knows how #Lakers fans feel!

The Week’s Best Quote

Jon Stow says that you must adapt and change, or your business will die: “I hope I do not seem unkind, but this week I had one of those online petition e-mails from some booksellers who were petitioning for Amazon to pay more tax. Yet I am sure the reason for their knocking Amazon was because Amazon is eating into their business. I feel sorry for the booksellers, but we cannot run our businesses as museum pieces because we will make no money.”

This Week’s Question: Will you be able to live without Google Glass?

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/this-week-in-small-business-the-van-halen-principle/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Further Thoughts on Employee Rehabilitation

May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
She Owns It

Portraits of women entrepreneurs.

In a recent post, the members of the She Owns It business group talked about the prospects of successfully rehabilitating an employee who isn’t working out. That discussion continues in this post.

Susan Parker, who owns Bari Jay, said she had come to realize that rehabilitation simply doesn’t work. Rather, she said, you need to hire the right people from the start. To do that, Ms. Parker said she knows she and her sister, who co-owns the company, will need to improve their interviewing techniques.

“I hate how we interview,” she said. “I feel like we talk, talk, talk, and the other person barely says anything, and then when they talk, they’re kind of hearing what we want,” she said. Going forward, she plans to change that, by experimenting with the interview techniques described in “Who,” a book on hiring that she’s finding helpful.

But becoming a great interviewer isn’t guaranteed to solve the problem. “You might not always find the right people because sometimes, especially when you’re growing, you don’t know what that person looks like,” said group member Jessica Johnson, who owns Johnson Security Bureau.

“And you’re also going to settle for a lot less because you don’t know any better,” said Beth Shaw, who owns YogaFit.

“But then you don’t keep those people on indefinitely when you realize that they may be better served in a place that’s a better match for them,” said Alexandra Mayzler, who owns Thinking Caps Group.

Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour, said that, while an owner must set expectations for each role and employee, “it’s not something you should have to do over and over again.” People make mistakes, but they shouldn’t keep making the same ones — and if they lack the right attitude or work ethic, there isn’t much hope that their performance will improve, she added.

Ms. Shaw agreed, but stressed the importance of sharing “nonnegotiable expectations” with employees. People may need to be told — once — that they have to respond to calls and e-mails within a day, she said.

Some employees may have never worked in a corporate environment where that’s the norm, Ms. Johnson said. “Particularly when you’re dealing with younger people who are relatively fresh out of school, their norms are very different so we have to have a sensitivity to that,” she said.

Ms. Shaw pointed out that employees with a corporate background may come with their own set of problems. Sometimes, she said, “those people end up not being able to perform in an entrepreneurial environment.”

“Correct, they don’t know how to operate,” Ms. Lord said.

A related issue arises when employees who excel at their day-to-day jobs are promoted to management — and fail, Ms. Parker said.

“That’s a big one,” Ms. Lord said. Getting an employee to return calls and e-mails promptly is one thing, but “you cannot teach people emotional intelligence, people skills,” she said. “People get elevated all the time who are so ill-equipped for management. Then what do you do?” she asked.

“You can’t demote them,” Ms. Shaw said.

They’ve become overcompensated, Ms. Parker added.

In future posts, we’ll revisit the owners’ management challenges and provide updates on the issues facing their businesses.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/further-thoughts-on-employee-rehabilitation/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Fighting the Consultant Temptation

May 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Next Level

Avoiding the pitfalls of fast growth.

Most small businesses won’t touch them with a 10-foot pole, but corporate America has had a long, slobbering love affair with them. I am talking about consultants. The question is, should fast-growth companies use them?

My answer is yes — under certain conditions. Most important, make sure they have actually accomplished what you are trying to do and not just what they are trying to sell. And sorry, but this does not include what they have done for other clients; they have to have done it for themselves. For example, if you want to expand to 500 people, from a staff of 50, you want someone who has experienced this as chief executive, chief financial officer or maybe as head of human resources. The dynamics of that journey will never be understood except by those who have taken it.

This is why I often encourage fast-growth companies to look for mentoring rather than consulting. I have found that most people who have really done it themselves are not interested in the world of consulting — but they are glad to take phone calls, attend meetings or just be there when you need them. I had a mentor, and his only requirement was that I run with him every morning at 5:30. Believe me, there were mornings when I wished I was paying a consultant rather than running 6.2 miles. But my mentor enjoyed the run, and I needed the help, whether I wanted to hear it or not.

Still, sometimes, you really do need a consultant — but it’s not going to help unless you find the right one. When my company, STI Knowledge, reached 200 employees, we tried to transition from QuickBooks to Great Plains accounting software (now Microsoft Dynamics). The consulting firm we chose to help us had about 25 people, and it was fine to get us set up. But in the next six months, we added 150 people, and the accounting system started going up and down 15 times a day. We didn’t really panic until it started providing incorrect numbers. At that point, we couldn’t balance, bill or pay. All the chief executive of the consulting firm could say was, “You don’t understand how much stress you are putting on the system. Have you ever heard of an anxiety attack?”

“Yes, I have,” I responded. “You are giving me one. I am living it 24/7.” I soon learned the consulting firm did not have a clue how to make the system work with our growth rate. I was advised to hire one of the big consulting firms, which would come in and straighten it out. And I did reach out to the big firms, but they all wanted the long, slobbering love affair — the critical success report and scope-of-work analysis before they would touch the nuts and bolts of the system.

I told them the foreplay was unnecessary: “Just fix the system and I will pay you 100 grand.” They wouldn’t do it, so I picked up the phone and called Great Plains. I told them I did not want a recommendation of another value-added reseller. I wanted to know all the companies within a 50-mile radius of us that had installed Great Plains in the previous three years. They eventually agreed and started citing names, and we hit pay dirt on about the 15th one: MindSpring Enterprise, the Internet service provider.

My next call was to the controller of MindSpring who did not know me but had heard of our company. He told me he had been with MindSpring from the early days and that it had more than 1,000 employees. I invited him for lunch that same day and popped the question before we had ordered iced tea: “Who did you use for consultants?” He said that Great Plains had set the system up initially and that it had been his job to manage the growth ever since, using the Great Plains special project division as a resource.

Long story short, I hired Jeff Hayes as our controller, and in three days, our system was functional. In three months, he was a nationally recognized expert on fast growth and Great Plains accounting. He came in as a one-man show and was far more valuable to us than the 25-person or 250,000-person companies. Why? He had done it. He had been where we wanted to go.

What would we have gotten if we had hired one of the big consulting firms? About 70 percent of all expenses in a consulting firm are for payroll. When they figure out what they need to bill hourly, they load it up with all that recurring payroll expense, which includes people and partners who don’t even know your project exists, much less make any contribution to it.

In a fast-growth company, getting cash flow ahead of expenses is a race. You can’t carry people or expenses that do not help you run that race. And don’t convince yourself that you can work out a deal where the consulting firm is paid only on results with no up-front commitment from you — it rarely works, and you will spend more time and negative energy arguing over the bill than trying to get ahead with positive traction and results.

If you must, try paying the consultants a nominal up-front sum on a project basis with a bonus or an hourly basis that covers only their on-site talent costs with a huge upside if the organization gets you where you want to go. I remember one arrangement where we reduced the firm’s hourly rates from $295 an hour to $35 an hour — but the consulting group picked up two nice bonus checks.

Fast companies run on a culture of shared values — like the folks in the early days of Southwest Airlines who wanted low prices to get people off Greyhound buses so the travelers could enjoy their vacations. They know why they are at work, and they know the cause is bigger than they are. It is honest, and it can make a difference in lives. This level of commitment and dedication is not for everybody, and your job in human resources is to figure out who can make the ride and where you can find more high achievers to join in.

This is the human factor of growth, and quite frankly, most consultants contaminate the whole place. Keep them out of this part of the business. Think about snakes in a wood pile. In fact, go back and find that 10-foot pole and grow without them.

Cliff Oxford is the founder of the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/fighting-the-consultant-temptation/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Finding the Right Words to Confront a ‘Showroomer’

May 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Agenda

How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.

Two years ago, as Charles Kuhn struggled to steer Kopp’s Cycle, the bicycle shop he owns in Princeton, N.J., through a tenuous economic recovery, he noticed that fewer and fewer of the nominal “customers” in his shop were actually buying anything. Instead, he told The Agenda at the time, “People come in with their smartphone and scan a bar code on a product that I have in my showroom, and what comes up on the phone is the three closest places and their price and then also what it is on Amazon.”

The practice is called “showrooming,” and if you’re a retailer, you’re probably familiar with the phenomenon. It is one of the reasons, according to an article in The New York Times published over the weekend, that the bill now making its way through Congress to allow states to force online retailers to collect sales tax from customers may be too late to help many small businesses. But when Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist for The Times, read the article, he had an idea: why not create a script that retailers can use when they spot showroomers scanning the aisles?

Ron’s proposed script goes like this:

I appreciate the value of your dollar, but we are a local retailer bringing vibrancy to this district. If everyone did what you did, we could no longer afford the Main Street rent that those Web retailers do not have to pay, and we’d be out of business. Then this space becomes another chain drugstore or branch of a megabank. Is that what you want?

We also ran the idea by Jay Goltz, our colleague at You’re the Boss and the owner of a picture-frame shop, and he came up with a milder rebuke:

I appreciate the fact that everyone wants to save money; so do I. But I have to tell you, if everyone starts buying everything online, everyone but the online sellers will lose. The local stores will go broke, the online prices will go up, the customers will no longer have anywhere to see the merchandise, and the local neighborhood will be in bad shape. It is a heavy cost for maybe saving a few dollars. Just something to consider.

Something to consider, indeed. But after considering it for a few minutes, Jay decided that he didn’t think “shaming” would work. “It will lead to some really ugly confrontations: ‘You should lower your prices!’ ‘If local retailers weren’t so greedy, it wouldn’t be a problem!’ ‘I can’t afford to spend more!’ I can’t see anything good coming out of it,” he said.

What do you think? We think it’s a worthwhile experiment, and we’d like you to help write the script. Should it provoke guilt? Sympathy? Something else? Please send us your suggestions. We will publish the best of your ideas in a future post.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/finding-the-right-words-to-confront-a-showroomer/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

Building the Team: Bill Courtney Offers Leadership Lessons on the Field and in Business

May 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Bill Courtney: Lance Murphey for The New York Times Bill Courtney: “The great thing about all of this is that anybody can do it.”

Building the Team

Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.

A couple of weeks ago, I took to Twitter with the following imperative: “If you haven’t seen the film Undefeated, you should asap. @IamCoachBill is a real #leader who draws out the true #character of his players.”

I tweeted this message after watching “Undefeated,” which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2011. The inspirational film takes place in Memphis and follows Bill Courtney and his Manassas Tigers high school football team through their 2009 season. It is a compelling human interest story — a school based in an impoverished part of Tennessee, where the average median income is less than $10,000, more than 70 percent of the homes don’t have a working car, and only 6 percent of the homes have a college graduate.

It is a great sports story about a football team that in the 10 years leading up to 2003 had accumulated a record of 5 wins and 95 losses and just six years later was casting an eye toward its first playoff appearance. Most important for readers of this blog, it is an extraordinary story of leadership.

Coaching football isn’t Mr. Courtney’s only accomplishment. He is a husband – celebrating his 22nd wedding anniversary this December — a father of four, and a successful entrepreneur. He started his lumber company, Classic American Hardwoods, out of his living room in 2001. Today, it employs 120 people and expects sales of approximately $40 million in 2013.

Mr. Courtney responded to my tweet. We exchanged e-mails and then had the chance to chat by phone. Here’s what I learned about his approach to building and leading a team.

Recruiting

In the film, you were shown recruiting folks at school to join the team. How did you approach recruiting?

I was always recruiting. I would be recruiting all day, every day with a smile and a pat on the back for students as they walked by in the school. If you walk in the hallways, recruiting kids, and they’ve already heard from their peers that you love the heck out of your team and help to get the best out of them, word gets around. All it takes is a sincere reaching out.

I also recruited great coaches to be on my staff. It wasn’t just me. I had nine men on my coaching staff, many of which had played big time college football. All of these guys were volunteers, but they bought into the vision of the football team and the vision for what we could do for the kids.

Practicing

What was your philosophy on practicing and training?

Kids at Manassas worked hard. I approached practice as key to our success and ran it like I run my business: coaches for different positions, organized, on time, and on schedule. The point of practice was to take the natural raw ability that we had recruited onto the team, and then teach them to be good at the fundamentals of the game – both general skills and specific positions.

Motivating

How did you get your team to work so hard?

By working hard. I really believe that. If you’re going to build an organization – a sports team, a business, or any organization, you have to figure out how to get the team members to work hard. At Manassas, the kids knew that I was running my own business, and had a family and my own kids at home, but they saw me working hard every day, volunteering at the school to be their coach. The kids on the team knew that I cared about them and worked hard for them, and as a result, they worked hard for me.

Data-driven decisions versus intuition

In the movie, you are shown watching a lot of game film, using data to inform your strategy. Yet, in one game, you made a spur-of-the-moment decision to put a different player, Chavis, in on defense. He was clearly a talented athlete, but he had never played the position before. How do you balance between data-driven decisions and intuition?

We do that every day in business. We’ve got systems, policies and procedures in place to make decisions based on information that we have gathered, but sometimes you have to make decisions that aren’t in the playbook. You go in with one plan, but you better have backup plans and instinct. The truth is, you’re not risking much when you make a decision with instinct, because what was currently happening wasn’t working. It also comes down to knowing the talent on your team. Players win games, not coaches. I knew Chavis, and I knew he would do what I asked him to do, and that he would win the game for us. Talent would prevail.

Doing something meaningful

One of the most moving parts of the film was when you arranged a sponsor for Money, one of the seniors on the team, so that his entire college bill would be paid. How did you think about doing things that would make such a big impact on the lives of these students?

When I first went to Manassas, long before the cameras were there, I went there to coach football. After a year, it became obvious that there was so much more to do than coach. As time wore on, and as the relationships became deeper, we recognized the opportunity to make a positive impact on kids’ lives.

Mr. Courtney stopped coaching at Manassas so he could spend more time with his family and at his company. He applied the same leadership skills to Classic American Hardwoods that he did to football, and his business has thrived. He had started the company after spending four years at another lumber company, where he rose to become executive vice president of sales. He realized, however, that he needed to start his own business.

Why do you think your company was a success?

Honestly, I tell everybody this, the exact same fundamentals that you use to build a football team are the very same things that enable you to have success in business:

  1. Act with character and integrity.
  2. Out-work the competition.
  3. Understand that sometimes you are going to get knocked down and just get back up.
  4. It’s not whether or not you make mistakes – you will – it’s how you handle them.
  5. Surround yourself with like-minded, hard-working people. Experience doesn’t matter. Character and hard work matters.
  6. Treat people well. Give them the help, tools and training that they need. Then get out of their way and let them grow.

Your business success is even more amazing in the context of raising a family of four and coaching the Manassas team at the same time. How were you able to do it all?

I know I’m repeating myself, but I cannot emphasize enough how important hard work is. In 2003, when the company was only two years old, and I started coaching the Manassas team, my schedule looked like this:

5 a.m.: at the office
2:45 p.m.: leave for practice
3-5:30: practice at Manassas
5:30: leave to attend my kids’ practice
6:30-8:30: kids’ practice
9:00: dinner
11:00: go to bed

Do it all again the next day. There’s no silver bullet. It is hard work. The great thing about all of this is that anybody can do it. To achieve success in America, you don’t need to be a Rhodes scholar or have a Harvard degree, great connections, or tons of money. You just have to be willing to work really, really hard. Isn’t that great?

Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/bill-courtney-offers-leadership-lessons-on-the-field-and-in-business/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

Fashioning Change: One Entrepreneur’s Favorite Start-Up Tools

May 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Fashioning Change

A social entrepreneur tries to change the way people shop.

I recently had a conversation with someone who is starting a social enterprise to connect corporate sponsors with the social networks of activists, athletes, musicians and others. He was asking me for advice on learning to code so that he could start to build his site.

I recommended that he learn the fundamentals of coding so that he could find a great technical co-founder and that he test the idea without building the whole concept. Through the conversation, I ended up sharing a list of tools that I thought might help him get started. With the hope that they may be helpful to others as well, here are my favorite start-up tools. And of course, please share your favorites in the comment section below.

TO TEST AN IDEA

LaunchRock is a free landing-page software tool that allows anyone to create a page that offers something of value and captures the e-mails of those who are interested. It’s easy to run Google Ads to your LaunchRock page and see how many people sign up. For an e-commerce site, a 10 percent conversion rate is generally considered good enough to warrant the build out of a product.

Optimizely is an inexpensive A/B testing tool that connects to LaunchRock and other sites to test copy, feature sets and user experiences. Early on, we learned the value of testing various Web options and the huge impact it can have.

FOR USER FEEDBACK

Once you’ve tested an idea and built your minimally viable product, it’s important to get as much feedback as you can from the people in your target market. Early on, my technical co-founder, Kevin, and I would go to Whole Foods during lunch and ask people if they would test-drive what we had built. Getting direct feedback from our target market was instrumental in understanding how to optimize the shopping experience on Fashioning Change. The following tools are also great for early customer feedback.

Fashioning Change was featured on Beta List, a site that introduces select start-ups in Beta to a community of early adopters. As a result, we were able to gain feedback that helped us find bugs and fix our user interface. By analyzing the feedback, we were able to optimize the entire Fashioning Change experience.

I love understanding how people receive and perceive information. I recognize that it’s one thing to think you understand why someone does something and a very different thing to test cause and effect and check your understanding against hard data. And that’s why I love Survey.io. It’s a free tool that helps you create surveys and collect quantitative and qualitative data. Depending on the purpose of the survey, you can check it against site analytics and use it to form assumptions that can be used to set up a battery of tests that help you improve the user experience. Survey.io gives you lots of information, and it takes less than a minute to create a survey.

Zopim is a real-time customer-support tool that we’ve found to be extremely flexible to use. It has an online dashboard and a plug-in for Gmail so that you can provide support through Google Chat. The plug-in allows you to see where people are coming from to visit your site. Thanks to Zopim, I’ve chatted with Fashioning Change visitors from all over the world. What’s really awesome is that if you have Gchat on your phone, you can even provide customer support when you’re on the go. This can be a little overwhelming at times, but the level of attention we have been able to give people get through Zopim has resulted in lots of word-of-mouth referrals. One time, I was providing normal customer support and discovered that the “person” I was talking with was actually an M.B.A. class at the University of California, San Diego, that had Fashioning Change projected on the wall! The benefits of real-time customer support and feedback can be amazing if approached correctly.

We learned about Inspectlet from our friends at Mogl, a company that helps you earn cash back when you eat out and donates a meal when you use the app. They raved about Inspectlet, and we understand why — the tool allows you to generate heat maps of what people are clicking on and viewing. On our site, we learned that some people wanted to click on things that didn’t link anywhere and that others were not clicking on things we wanted them to click on. The tool is extremely inexpensive but priceless.

ITERATION PROCESS

Recently acquired by Evernote, Skitch is a free app that helps you capture, edit and mark up your screen captures and images with shapes and comments. Our use of Skitch has made it the unofficial language of Fashioning Change. We use it to support our product-development process. It helps expedite communication and reduce the number of misunderstandings. When we’re on deadline, Skitch becomes as important to us as air. No joke.

E-MAIL MARKETING

MailChimp’s interface is simple to use, and it allows you to segment lists, test e-mails, and analyze analytics. Free for up to 2,000 subscribers, MailChimp is a must for any beginning e-mail list. It’s also a great platform to customize. Rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars on a service like Sailthru, we were able to hack and customize it to our needs.

Unlike MailChimp, SendGrid is a transactional e-mail delivery service that makes it easy to make sure e-mails are delivered. We tell it what to send to whom, and SendGrid makes sure it gets there.

ANALYTICS

As the brains behind Fashioning Change’s lines of code, Kevin has no problem diving into the server logs to review a user’s or a set of users’ interactions with the site. For me, and for the other nontechnical members of the team, diving into the server logs is not so easy, but KissMetrics allows us to define reports that generate an easy-to-understand graphic on the data funnels of any subset of users we want to learn about — without having to dive into server logs. It’s a great tool to understand the paths people take on your site. And KissMetrics also offers one of my favorite blogs.

Similarly, Crazy Egg allows you to generate easy-to-understand charts that show where people are clicking on your site.

Google Analytics is a free and great tool to begin measuring the success of your advertising and the functionality of your site. It gives you insight to what is working, what is not, and where you should focus your attention.

Understanding search engine optimization is hard, in part because there are so many things to look at. SEOMoz highlights your important S.E.O. attributes and tracks their success over time (and it, too, has a great blog).

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Trello is a free and easy-to-use project-management tool that is great for managing nontechnical teams.

Pivotal Tracker is a collaborative tool that helps your engineering team manage project timelines, keep track of project iterations, fix bugs and enhance the accuracy of project timelines.

We have yet to find a great tool to manage product timelines for both our technical team and nontechnical team, which is why we use an internal Google Wiki. The Wiki gives us the free form we need to manage overlapping tasks, and it doesn’t cost anything.

STAKEHOLDER COMMUNICATION

I love meeting with people, and without Skype, there would be a hole in my heart. While there is no replacement for meeting in person, Skype is an awesome tool to use when that is not an option. I find it most fun to use when I am talking to someone who has never used it before. It has allowed me to meet our designers regardless of where they are in the world. I use the screen-share function to get feedback on product that isn’t live to the public yet. I’ve also used Skype to create video interviews that highlight the stories of our designers.

Rapportive is a plug-in for Gmail that gives you information on who is e-mailing you. It provides a list of all of the social networks associated with the person e-mailing you. Used creatively, it can figure out the e-mail of someone you want to reach. Additionally, if you want to learn more about someone copied on an e-mail, you can do so by highlighting the address and Rapportive will populate information linked to the e-mail (I assure you that I am not a stalker — just creatively resourceful).

I highly recommend the tools above to anyone in the very early start-up stages. As we grow, we recognize that there are always new resources we can use. Steve Blank, godfather of the lean start-up movement, has a great list of other resources that we drew from in putting together this post: Startup Tools.

I hope this list is helpful, but I am sure there are many other useful tools out there. Are there any that you have found invaluable to your company? Please share.

Adriana Herrera is chief executive of Fashioning Change. You can e-mail her at adrianah@fashioningchange.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @Adriana_Herrera.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/one-entrepreneurs-favorite-start-up-tools/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: A Wholesaler Decides to Abandon His Most Profitable Sales Channel

May 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Gerald Shvartsman has expanded his start-up to more than 50 employees and sales of $7 million.John Van Beekum for The New York Times Gerald Shvartsman has expanded his start-up to more than 50 employees and sales of $7 million.

Case Study

What would you do with this business?

Last week, we published a case study about an entrepreneur, new to the furniture business, who had expanded his business selling patio and deck furniture to $7 million in annual sales. Instead of selling through sales representatives, Gerald Shvartsman, founder and chief executive of Source Outdoor, which is based in Miami, employed a multichannel sales strategy.

He sold to South Florida furniture retailers, fulfilled orders taken by Internet merchants, cut deals with local decorators and designers, and did not overlook an opportunity right under his nose — the beachfront march of condos, all needing outdoor furniture around their pools. But Mr. Shvartsman hit a speed bump when he started enjoying much higher profits through a fifth sales channel: selling his goods at retail prices at local home shows.

One of his best retail customers complained: “I’m buying from you and you’re trying to sell to the same customer I am.” Neither that store owner nor any of Mr. Shvartsman’s other retail outlets were selling at the home shows. Still, he wondered if it might be best to remove his retail hat and stick to wholesaling. After some personal debate, he decided to stop displaying his goods at the home shows. We talked to Mr. Shvartsman about why he decided to walk away from his most profitable sales channel — and also about the advice elicited by this case study.

How did you reach your decision?

Basically, I decided that having a good reputation and good referrals from my current customers was more important than the income from selling directly at home shows, because it’s a small, cottage industry. They all know each other. People talk.

One reader suggested that you open another company with a different name to work the home shows.

That was my first instinct, to be honest. But that’s not the right thing to do, because people talk. Why am I going to put myself in a bad situation for extra money? At the end of the day, integrity is more valuable.

Both of our experts and several readers suggested ways to partner with your retail customers so as not to leave this market untapped. Did you make any such attempts?

Yes, last year I offered to pay for the show for this retailer, which came to more than $8,000. I would set it up for them, because I have the infrastructure, the trucks, a full-time marketing team. I designed the fliers for them. I gave them an extra 10 percent discount off their price. I sent them one of my salespeople who knows the product and does well at home shows. I paid him out of my pocket, $250 a day, so he wasn’t working on commission. He helped their two salespeople, who were not used to this environment. These shows are a one-call close, whereas in retail it’s not necessarily that way, not as fast pace, not as much pressure, where you have to close while you can or likely you’re not going to close them.

And how did this work out?

They did really well. They did almost $60,000 in business. So they paid me back the $8,000. They were very happy. I offered it to them going forward, but they didn’t feel they got a lot of post-show business and the main salesgirl had a baby and they just didn’t want to do it anymore.

Have you offered this service to any other retailers?

The other retailers in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area that I would offer this to aren’t set up for it. The retail side of this business is a very family-owned kind of business and multigenerational. You have to be a hustler to do well at home shows, and they don’t have that type of personality.

But if you have determined that none of your retailers are interested in the business, don’t you have every right to do it yourself?

The answer is yes. But at the same time, integrity is everything, and your customers have to be secure that you’re not competing with them. The minute they think you’re competing with them, they’re going to find somebody to replace you — no matter how good you are to them or what kind of terms you extend to them or how you treat them.

What do you think of the reader suggestion to enjoy the higher profit margins at home shows beyond the reach of your Florida retail customers — in Atlanta, for example?

It crossed my mind, but it’s penny-wise and dollar-foolish. Setting up in Atlanta is not really an option. Even Atlanta is too far to ship the goods. It’s only really worthwhile in our backyard.

Have you identified any other sales or revenue channels?

Yes, we’re spreading our wings into export. As we’ve become a brand instead of just another guy importing wicker, within the last year or so we’ve acquired overseas customers, so we’re not only a U.S.-based distributor, we have distributors called Source Outdoor Colombia, Source Outdoor Costa Rica, and we’re working on Source Outdoor Brazil. We ship directly from our factory in China to these people around the world. They could very easily go to China and go to a show and pick up a manufacturer and buy merchandise maybe a little cheaper. But with me, I make their life easier. They have a beautiful catalog that they otherwise couldn’t afford. We send them leads. Every time we do a show and someone comes to us from one of their regions, we send them the lead.

How big is this new international revenue stream?

We’ll probably do about half a million dollars this year from distributor sales, and I think we’ll get that to $5 million in the next five years.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/a-wholesaler-decides-to-abandon-his-most-profitable-sales-channel/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

The Agenda: Paid Sick Leave Has Some Business Owners Feeling Ill

May 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Agenda

How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.

When the advocates at Family Forward Oregon sought to muster support among businesses in Portland for a local paid sick leave ordinance, they found a sympathetic ear in Tony Fuentes. Mr. Fuentes and his wife operate Milagros Boutique, which sells cloth diapers and clothing for babies and children on Portland’s northeast side.

“The idea that 80 percent of low-income workers don’t get a minute of protected time was not in line with my view of the country, or of the social compact,” Mr. Fuentes said, who testified in favor of the bill at a council hearing.

But to judge by the efforts of local business organizations in Portland and in New York City, which is poised to pass its own paid sick leave law, as well as from interviews with a handful of businesses, the more common response is hostility, or at least wariness.

Portland’s new law, which passed the City Council in March, follows a template set by a handful of other cities, and Connecticut, in the last seven years. (In Philadelphia, a similar proposal could not overcome a veto by the mayor.) Businesses with at least six employees have to provide one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours an employee works, up to 40 hours a year, as well as protect the employee’s job. Companies with five or fewer employees must offer the same amount of unpaid, job-protected time off. An employee must work at least 240 hours before becoming eligible. In Portland, the law takes effect in January.

Mr. Fuentes said that he already offered paid time off to all of his employees (the number fluctuates between five and seven). They can use the time for any purpose, he said, and he has found that offering the time has added just 1 percent to his total labor expense. “The costs are pretty minimal,” he said, “and, talking with other businesses in Portland doing the same thing, our costs are line with theirs.”

Because Mr. Fuentes has a paid time-off policy that is at least as generous as what the city will soon require for sick leave, he will not be affected by the new law. But whether a business owner supports the law does not necessarily turn on how much strain the law will put on the company. Family Forward Oregon also tried to press Lisa Schroeder, owner of Mother’s Bistro and Bar into service for paid sick leave. Ms. Schroeder also offers paid time off and may have seemed a promising candidate to be a public face for the measure, since she is well known for her liberal views on other issues. But Ms. Schroeder demurred.

“I believe in it,” she said. “However, in my business, there’s a lot of ‘brown bottle flu,’ so you have people who call in because they had a rough night the night before.” Ms. Schroeder said she offered paid sick leave in addition to vacation days for employees who are “legitimately sick” — “I have the right to reserve judgment” — and she had hoped the ordinance would require a doctor’s note, but others called that a hardship for employees.

In the end, she said, “I just chose to stay neutral and let the chips fall where they may.”

Debbie Kitchin, a contractor who runs Interworks, a Portland remodeling business, worries about the paperwork associated with the law. Ms. Kitchin provides paid time off for her three full-time workers, but not for her crew of part-timers, which this year has ranged from one to three — she said she wasn’t sure whether the law would require her to offer paid leave. (Lisa Frack, spokeswoman for Family Forward Oregon, said that question would be resolved when the rules to carry out the law are written this summer.)

“For some of our people that we’ve brought in part time, they might work 20 hours one week and four hours the next week,” she said. “And our payroll software doesn’t really track the benefits by cumulative hours. It tracks them by pay period, or by month, which adds to the cost.

“By itself, it’s not the end of the world. But do you know how many other things there are like this? It’s the cumulative effect of all these little things,” she continued. “In my field, there are contractors who not only won’t do this but don’t even pay payroll taxes, liability insurance. They don’t get licensing and bonding. So this is just one more burden to businesses that are trying to follow the rules.”

Ms. Kitchin, who testified against the ordinance in a council hearing, said that next year, she might rely on a staffing agency or have her current employees work longer hours rather than hire additional part-timers, though she acknowledged that both of these alternatives would add to her costs as well.

For businesses like Ms. Kitchin’s, the bill in New York City promises a somewhat lighter touch than the Portland ordinance. Should it become law — it is likely to come up for a vote in two weeks — only businesses with at least 20 employees will be required to offer paid leave when it takes effect in the spring of 2014. A year and a half later, the threshold will drop to 15 employees. Businesses with fewer employees would still have to offer unpaid leave and job protection.

Jason Chung, who owns a Key Food supermarket in Forest Hills, Queens, that employs about 35 people, called the proposal undue interference. “Lawmakers should leave those kinds of things to the business people,” he said. Mr. Chung does not offer paid sick leave or time off now, but, he said: “If somebody’s sick — they have a legitimate excuse, a doctor’s note — oftentimes we give them full pay. So we don’t have to be told to do it.”

When asked if the rule would raise his costs, Mr. Chung, who is considering opening a second store, paused. “Not as much as Obamacare,” he said. “But I know Obamacare will have a big impact on the business.”

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/paid-sick-leave-has-some-business-owners-feeling-ill/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »