March 29, 2024

You’re the Boss Blog: An Annual Roundup of Small-Business News

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A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

Until I started writing this weekly column, I never realized how many things can affect my small business. And I never realized how many smart people there are writing about and interpreting these things to try to help people like me better understand them. Of all of the pieces I reviewed this year, here are the best.

BEST ARTICLE ABOUT MAKING MONEY 37Signal’s Jason Fried a piece that every business owner should read. A sampling: “People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.”

BEST SMALL-BUSINESS VIDEO OF THE YEAR I’m a certified public accountant (although not a very good one and that’s not how I make my living). As you may have heard, we C.P.A.s are not generally considered the life of the party. But the New Jersey firm of WithumSmith+Brown put that myth to rest with this hilarious video. (Surprisingly, it was made before April 15.)

BEST PREDICTION As a business owner with three kids in high school, I agree with PayPal’s Peter Thiel when he says the next bubble is higher education: “Parents see kids moving back home after college, and they’re thinking, ‘Something is not working. This was not part of the deal.’” (My example of out-of-control spending: A university studies six-year-olds in an effort to explain democracy.)

BEST CONFESSION FROM AN ECONOMIST Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw confessed that there is a lot he doesn’t know about the economy. For example: “A striking feature of today’s labor market is the rise of long-term joblessness. The average duration of unemployment is now almost 40 weeks, about twice what it reached in previous recessions. The long-term unemployed may well lose job skills and find their future prospects permanently impaired. But because we are in uncharted waters, it is hard for anyone to be sure.”

BEST EXPLANATION OF ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS My business has hundreds of customers and over the years I’ve seen a lot of people succeed beyond anyone’s expectations. There are times when I wonder how they do it. How do you explain success? Feross Aboukhadijeh, a student at Stanford University, says that none of us really knows what we’re doing. “Don’t listen to successful entrepreneurs. The folks who succeed have no way to know if their success was due to talent, skill, and planning, or merely dumb luck. If you ask them though, they’ll confidently spout reason after reason why they — and no one else – could possibly own 90 percent of the desktop PC market, or whatever they achieved. In their minds, it couldn’t have turned out any other way. Most of this is just after-the-fact rationalization, though. The truth is, they succeeded and have no idea why. They’re just explaining it in the best way they can.”

BEST COMMENTARY ABOUT WALL STREET: This tweet from the deadly Egyptian Cobra that went missing from the Bronx Zoo in April offered a pithier critique than any of the Occupiers.

BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE STORY It comes, believe it or not, from Amtrak. Yes, Amtrak. Sarah Green, an associate editor at Harvard Business Review told this tale about an Amtrak employee whose service elicited this response from her: “You’ll just do that? Just like that? That’s, that’s amazing.”

BEST BAD TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS When you’re a business owner, it sometime seems like everyone is an expert on how to run your business. Matt Krautstrunk lists five terrible tips for entrepreneurs, including my favorite, which challenges the sanctity of the business plan: “Anybody who tells you that you need a business plan either doesn’t understand the competitive landscape or is ‘old school.’ Nowadays, business plans are used primarily for attracting investors, and often fail to account for changing external factors.”

BEST REASON TO BE OPTIMISTIC Foreign Policy magazine’s Amy Myers Jaffe believes that it will soon be the Americas, not the Middle East, that will rule energy markets: “By the 2020s, the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. endowment of unconventional oil is more than 2 trillion barrels, with another 2.4 trillion in Canada and 2 trillion-plus in South America — compared with conventional Middle Eastern and North African oil resources of 1.2 trillion. The problem was always how to unlock them economically.”

BEST TIPS FOR LIVING A FULFILLING LIFE Peter Bregman lists three questions that help him live a fulfilling life, including: “What is this day about? How will it bring me one day closer to what I want to achieve for the year? What is most important for me to accomplish today? I set my watch to beep every hour, interrupting myself for one minute to reconnect with my purpose for the day. In that minute, I ask myself two questions: Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now? Am I being who I most want to be right now?”

BEST REASON NOT TO START COMPANY WITH YOUR SPOUSE Michael Idov opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop, which then destroyed his life. “Within weeks, Lily and I — previously ensconced in an enviably stress-free marriage — were at each other’s throats. I hesitate to say which was worse: working the same shift or alternating. Each option presented its own small tortures. Two highly educated professionals with artistic aspirations have just put themselves — or, as we saw it, each other — on $8-per-hour jobs slinging coffee. After four more months, we grew suspicious of each other’s motives, obsessively kept track of each other’s contributions to the cause (“You worked three days last week!”), and generally waltzed on the edge of divorce. The marriage appears to have been saved by a well-timed bankruptcy.”

BEST CAREER ADVICE FOR FUTURE ENTREPRENEURS Bob Cringely has some advice for his son: “Getting, keeping or making that future job starts with understanding the distribution system and your place in that process. And to survive even mid-term the key is to position yourself as the linchpin. Your knowledge has to be critical to the success or failure of the process. That would seem to call for specialization but specialists often don’t see the ball even coming. You need a broader view. So for an education — are you going to a school that helps you to develop serendipitous opportunities for your lifetime?”

BEST WAY TO SOLVE ALL OF OUR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS Matt Yglesias explains how eliminating paper money could end recessions: “Now we come to the miracle of the cashless society. Stop for a moment and ask yourself why the interest rate can’t be reduced much below 1 percent. The trouble is cash. At any given time, relatively little paper currency circulates in the United States. Instead, most of the American money supply consists of bank accounts and other electronic stores of value. People prefer to keep money in bank accounts because it’s convenient and because you get interest on it. If the rates were driven below zero — in effect a tax on holding cash in the bank — people would just withdraw money and store it in shoe boxes instead. But what if you couldn’t withdraw cash? What if all transactions were electronic, so the only way to avoid keeping money in a negative-rate account was to go out and buy something with the money? Well, then, we would have solved our depression problem. Too much unemployment? Lower interest rates below zero, Americans will start spending and investing again, the economy will grow, and unemployment will go back down to its ‘natural rate.’”

Have a great holiday and see you in January!

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://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f0242bbf6d1400f3288aa8fe62e7c19e

Applications for Jobless Benefits Drop, Data Shows

Meanwhile, the index of leading economic indicators increased more than forecast in August, easing concern the economy was headed for recession.

The index showed that the outlook for the next three to six months climbed 0.3 percent after a 0.6 percent gain in July, according to the Conference Board, a New York-based research group that releases the report. Economists projected a 0.1 percent rise in August, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey.

Four of the 10 components of the leading index contributed to the increase in August. In addition to the money supply and building permits, they included slower supplier delivery times.

The rise in money supply could signal that investors might be losing confidence in the global economy and reducing their holdings of riskier assets.

A higher level of initial jobless claims raises the odds that American companies may put off plans to increase employment, making it difficult for joblessness to fall below 9 percent.

“These numbers are consistent with a job market that is essentially in suspended animation,” said Brian Jones, an economist at Société Générale in New York.

Estimates for first-time claims ranged from 408,000 to 430,000 in the Bloomberg survey of 45 economists. The Labor Department initially reported the previous week’s applications at 428,000.

The four-week moving average of initial jobless claims, a less-volatile measure, climbed to 421,000 from 420,500.

The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits fell by 28,000 in the week ended Sept. 10 to 3.73 million. The continuing claims figure does not include the number of workers receiving extended benefits under federal programs.

Those who have used up their traditional benefits and are now collecting emergency and extended payments decreased by about 103,350 to 3.5 million in the week ended Sept. 3.

The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits, which tends to track the jobless rate, held at 3 percent in the week ended Sept. 10, the Labor Department report showed.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7fa0280ea644d92bf69a94b4b049459e

Payrolls Increased in 31 States in July, but Jobless Rate Rose in 28, New Data Shows

Employers in New York increased their staffs by 29,400 workers, while those in Texas added 29,300, figures from the Labor Department showed Friday. Joblessness increased by 0.4 percentage point in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and South Carolina. Nevada continued to lead the nation in unemployment with a rate of 12.9 percent.

Widespread job growth is needed to shore up incomes after spending among consumers ground to a halt in the second quarter. That raised concern that the world’s largest economy was stalling. A Labor Department report on Aug. 5 showed employers added 117,000 workers to payrolls last month and the jobless rate fell to 9.1 percent.

“The overall labor market was doing better than previous months, but the bigger point is that it’s a lot weaker than earlier in the year,” Paul Dales, senior United States economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, said before the report. “That’s a concern given that any data from July won’t reflect the market turmoil in the last couple of weeks that really could have prompted some businesses to postpone or cancel any hiring plans.”

After Nevada, the jobless rate was highest in California at 12 percent, and Michigan and South Carolina, both at 10.9 percent.

Payrolls in Michigan rose 23,000 and Tennessee gained by 14,300. They rounded out the top four states showing the biggest increase.

The biggest job losses last month occurred in Illinois, where employers cut payrolls by 24,900, and in Florida, which had a 22,100 decrease.

Over the last 12 months, six states lost jobs, including Indiana, Nevada, Kansas, Alabama, Georgia and Delaware.

The jobless rate in North Dakota, the lowest in the United States, increased to 3.3 percent from 3.2 percent in June.

While payroll growth picked up in July, employment prospects for Americans have dimmed compared with earlier in the year. Employers added 216,000 workers from May to July, compared with 646,000 in the previous three-month period.

The risk of a recession has risen to 30 percent from 14 percent in July, according to the median of the 39 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. A sell-off in stocks, government fiscal austerity and a lack of jobs will hurt American growth, which slowed to a 0.9 percent pace in the first half of 2011, the economists said.

State and local employment data are derived independently from the national statistics, which are typically released on the first Friday of every month. The state figures are subject to larger sampling errors because they come from smaller surveys, making the national figures more reliable, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4c48bfacc2747cbfbc89e9fd0f8a9b28