April 26, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for high school students

Bucks Blog: What Families Are Spending on Prom Night

April 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Prom goers in Michigan in 2012.Associated Press Prom goers in Michigan in 2012.

Here is my deep, dark secret from high school: I didn’t go to the prom.

It’s a long story, filled with teenage angst. But suffice it to say, I missed an American rite of passage — and I survived.

I guess I should at least feel good about all the money I saved my family by sitting out the big night. This year, according to the credit card company Visa, prom spending will reach an average of $1,139 per family, up 5 percent over last year. Parents of high school students are planning to pay for almost two-thirds of the cost, with the children covering the rest. (The numbers come from a survey of 3,000 people interviewed over the phone in February and March by GfK Roper OmniTel.)

More than $1,100? That’s a lot to shell out for a big dress-up party, while you sit home hoping that your offspring don’t get drunk or do anything else foolish. (Maybe it’s the influence of all that red-carpet coverage?)

Along with the statistics, Visa introduced a personal finance app called Plan’it Prom, to help families budget for the big dance. The free app will “help you cut costs for a night you’ll never forget,” the introduction says.

The app includes a prom countdown calendar, and spaces to budget for all the frills, right down to the boutonniere. One budget category is “after party.” A sample page for the app allocates $10 for this item. Ten dollars? Come on. I know the goal here is to rein in costs, but where are they going — Dunkin Donuts?

How much do you think is reasonable to spend on a night at the prom?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/what-families-are-spending-on-prom-night/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Your Money Tagged With: , ,

Common Sense: Negotiation Experts Consider How to Reach a Budget Deal

January 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Here’s a simple proposal for America’s political leaders, now engaged in yet another round of contentious and seemingly dysfunctional tax and budget talks: a crash course in negotiating tactics. When I broached the idea to Daylian Cain, who teaches a popular class in negotiating at the Yale School of Management, he immediately volunteered to take his course to Washington. “I’ll show up with my PowerPoints and a bottle of Scotch,” he volunteered.

What might President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, the most vocal participants in the latest standoff, learn? Perhaps that they’re falling into some classic but avoidable pitfalls, and that they could achieve some of their most important goals without subjecting the financial markets, the American people and the global economy to yet another high-stakes and damaging game of chicken.

“This isn’t rocket science,” William Ury told me this week. Dr. Ury, along with Roger Fisher, who was a law professor at Harvard at the time, wrote the classic work on negotiating, “Getting to Yes,” and has been refining his insights at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. “It’s sad to watch this kind of brinkmanship,” he said. “There are plenty of ways to arrive at a good, responsible agreement that’s satisfactory to each side and, above all, is good for the country. You could put some high school students together and they could do it.”

Seth Freeman, who teaches negotiation and conflict management at Columbia Business School and N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, added: “I’m marveling at the postures each side is taking, given the stakes. It gives you vertigo.”

Mr. Obama and the Republican leaders have shown scant evidence that they’ve absorbed any of the lessons that are now standard fare in the nation’s leading law and business schools. In each successive round of talks, they’ve expressed mounting anger and frustration, which only creates “huge and unnecessary obstacles to reaching an agreement,” Dr. Ury said.

In recent weeks, their positions seem only to have hardened. Mr. Obama said he wouldn’t even talk to Republican leaders about raising the debt ceiling, saying at a news conference this week that “they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.” This is a standard negotiating stance, which is refusing to even discuss an issue, coupled with some provocative name-calling, since the use of  “ransom” suggests that Republicans are pirates or hostage takers.

“That’s a very high-risk, high-return approach,” Professor Freeman said. “If you can convince the other side you are truly committed to your position and there’s no going back, and the other side believes you, you can win. But if not, and they call your bluff, you’ve got a Dr. Strangelove situation. I see similar rhetoric from the Republican side.”

Mr. Boehner has said he won’t engage in any more one-on-one negotiations with Mr. Obama, and both he and Mr. McConnell have said they won’t support raising the debt ceiling without addressing the deficit with spending cuts. They have also refused to discuss further tax increases, saying that Republicans are “done” with that after the fiscal cliff deal raised taxes on the wealthy.

So neither side is talking, both have staked out absolute, winner-take-all positions, and the nation is marching toward the prospect of default, an outcome that nearly everyone says would be catastrophic. Dr. Ury said Thomas Schelling, a former economist at Harvard, compared the standoff to two trucks hurtling toward each other. One driver rips out the steering wheel and throws it out the window.

“From a negotiation perspective, it’s a game of chicken and each side refuses to swerve,” Professor Cain said. “Basically, this tactic aims at claiming a large portion of the pie: ‘Give me everything or I walk.’ That’s a very aggressive approach, and doesn’t foster creative deal-making at all. There’s no communication, so there’s little chance for a win-win outcome. So far, this has been a vicious circle. Each round of negotiations has been worse than the last and has begotten hostility. Reputations are on the line. Obama is worried about being too soft, so he’s being super firm. Boehner faces a revolt in the House.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/business/negotiation-experts-consider-how-to-reach-a-budget-deal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

The Boss: Burton Snowboards’ President, on Her Taste for Adventure

December 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

At the end of my sophomore year, I transferred to Williams College in Massachusetts, about 40 minutes from Manchester, Vt., where Jake lived, and we married. My mother was hoping I’d marry a nice New York lawyer or doctor, but I wanted something different from the suburban lifestyle.

Burton is Jake’s middle name. He thought Burton Snowboards sounded better than Carpenter Snowboards, and he wanted to honor his maternal grandmother, whose surname was Burton. She had left him a small sum to start the company. We were broke initially and led a rustic lifestyle, moving our bed from the third floor of our house to the first to be near the wood stove when it got really cold.

After graduation, I had a job lined up in Innsbruck, Austria, with the Experiment in International Living, which offers programs for high school students. But I decided to become more involved in the snowboard company instead. Jake was getting inquiries from Europeans who wanted snowboards. Reading those letters, I realized that there was a big market for snowboards there. We moved to Innsbruck in the mid-1980s to establish a European presence, and stayed until 1989. In that time, the company grew quickly. I became director of European sales and operations, and then an American company contacted us about exporting boards to Japan, so we became global quite early.

After serving as chief financial officer from 1989 to 1992, I took 10 years off to raise our three children. I also opened the Harvest Market, a specialty foods store in Stowe, Vt., and hired my friend Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network, as a consultant. I still own the store.

When I returned to Burton part time in 2002, we wanted to focus more on female snowboarders. In the early days of snowboarding, women were advancing the sport just as the men were. As snowboarding grew, however, it took on an image of a men’s extreme sport. I founded the Women’s Leadership Initiative at Burton, with the goal of increasing both the number of our employees and snowboarders who were women.

We added more women to our board and instituted mentors for our female employees, as well as a flexible maternity-leave policy. We also developed a Web site for women and girls called Burton Girls and created women’s Learn to Ride centers at 30 winter resorts worldwide.

For five years, we’d had an outside C.E.O., but in 2010 Jake took over the role again. Then, in 2011, he learned he had cancer. I had returned full time in 2010 to handle our international business, and after Jake’s diagnosis we decided I should move up to president. It was an intense time, but Burton is like a tribe. We were clear on goals and kept hearing a tape in our heads of what Jake wanted us to do: focus on the riders. We exceeded our targets that year, and Jake returned as healthy as ever.

We’ve always felt that our success has never been about us; it’s about the snowboarding world. We believed we were pioneering something that others loved as much as we did. People have this idea that snowboarding is only a young person’s sport, but that’s not true. Our older customers still snowboard and teach their children. Riders don’t stop snowboarding and become suits; they continue in the lifestyle.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/jobs/burton-snowboards-president-on-a-taste-for-adventure.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Going Behind the Scenes With Four Owners

September 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

She Owns It

Portraits of women entrepreneurs.

What happens when women who own businesses get together to talk openly about their challenges, strategies and goals? Beginning next week, we’ll find out when I start to meet regularly with the owners of four businesses. Our continuing conversation will become an important feature of She Owns It. This post introduces the women and the companies we will get to know.

Owner: Jessica Johnson.
Company: Johnson Security Bureau provides security services to government and commercial clients.
Annual Sales: $700,000.
Employees: 60.

In 2009, Ms. Johnson left her career as a pharmaceutical sales representative to take control of Johnson Security Bureau, a business her grandparents founded in 1962 in the South Bronx. She stepped in to fill her father’s shoes after he died and discovered that the business was not in good shape. Ms. Johnson, 37, said she used her inheritance to help turn things around, tripling the number of contracts, taking the company from 16 to 60 employees and doubling its annual revenue in 2010. She credits much of her success to her participation in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program.

Today, her biggest challenges include managing cash flow and maintaining an effective workforce in an industry with high turnover. Ms. Johnson is often forced to fire security guards. “Employees let their guard down with us because we’re a minority-owned, family business,” she said. “They think they can get away with things that wouldn’t be tolerated at, for example, AlliedBarton.”

Owner: Alexandra Mayzler.
Company: Thinking Caps Tutoring offers study-skills coaching, subject tutoring, and test preparation to middle- and high-school students.
Annual Sales: between $700,000 and $750,000.
Employees: four full-time, 40 part-time tutors.

A past subject of She Owns It, Ms. Mayzler founded Thinking Caps Tutoring from her New York University dorm room in 2003. When we first met, Ms. Mayzler had been struggling to decide whether to expand into other cities from her base in Manhattan. She eventually chose to enter Austin, Tex., where Thinking Caps began tutoring students this month.

Ms. Mayzler, who said she has “big expectations” for herself and her company, continues to struggle. She would like to find a way to stop working 15-hour days. She wonders whether to pursue a more aggressive expansion plan within New York City. Most of all, she knows that Thinking Caps’ somewhat haphazard approach to growth isn’t sustainable and vows to begin planning in earnest.

Owners: Susan Parker and Erica Rosenfeld, sisters (Ms. Parker will meet with the group).
Company: Bari Jay manufactures and sells bridesmaid and prom dresses to retailers.
Annual Sales: $7 million.
Employees: 17.

Ms. Parker and Ms. Rosenfeld became co-presidents of their father’s business in 2008, following his death. Initially, a Bari Jay employee challenged the sisters for ownership of the business, locking them out of the computer system. Following a short-lived civil lawsuit, Ms. Parker said, she and her sister took over, as their father’s will had dictated. They found the company’s books in disarray.

With no garment industry experience — Ms. Parker, 37, has an M.B.A. and most recently worked in private wealth management for Merrill Lynch — the sisters sought help from their father’s longtime friends in the industry, opening Bari Jay’s books to competitors who “felt sorry for us,” said Ms. Parker. This year, sales are up 20 percent.

Today, Bari Jay’s biggest challenges include dealing with decreased production capacity in China, where the company manufactures most of its dresses, and keeping up with demand — particularly on the prom side of the business, which is growing faster than Ms. Parker would like. Unlike the bridal side, the prom business requires Bari Jay to maintain inventory. While brides order dresses and expect to wait three months for them, prom dress shoppers want their dresses immediately. Because most of Bari Jay’s small retail clients can’t afford to invest in numerous styles and instead buy just one prom dress style each season, Ms. Parker must anticipate which designs will sell best. She recently chose the 18 prom dresses Bari Jay will produce and hopes she made the right decisions.

Owner: Carissa Reiniger.
Company: Silver Lining Limited offers an online tool that helps small businesses set and reach financial goals.
Annual Sales: about $1.2 million.
Employees: six.

Ms. Reiniger founded Silver Lining Limited in 2005 in Toronto (she has since moved company headquarters to New York). Silver Lining began as a software-as-a-service business that helped small businesses set and reach financial goals. The service-based model required staffers who taught the method to business owners. Ms. Reiniger, who is 29 and has a marketing background, later developed an online tool that transformed her business model from service to tech. The tool enables Silver Lining clients to enter information like expenses and revenues and, with the help of algorithms, determine a one-year financial goal for their businesses. They then begin a process that helps them define their ideal customers and create a plan to connect with them. The tool offers additional support such as educational videos, opportunities to network with other Silver Lining customers, and features that foster accountability.

The transition to a tech model has required Ms. Reiniger to confront new challenges, including different growth metrics and software development challenges. On top of those issues, she is trying to exit the company. “I’m a creator and starter, not a manager,” she said. She hired a president and chief operating officer so she could begin easing away from daily operations. But it didn’t work out, and he left the company in March. Ms. Reiniger, who is seeking to raise capital, must now formulate a new exit strategy.

In future posts, I’ll explore these and other issues that arise as the owners pursue their goals. Feel free to suggest topics and questions.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=96d92b35b0c3ef45e54a06635734bd80

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,