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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: , ,

Economic View: An Automatic Solution for the Retirement Savings Problem

April 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

But some problems are frustrating in another way: we know how to fix them and we can afford to fix them, but we drop the ball. That’s the situation with a crisis facing many Americans: saving enough for retirement.

Here is one measure of the problem: A Boston College economist, Alicia H. Munnell, and her colleagues have estimated that more than half of Americans are saving too little to support an adequate lifestyle if they plan to retire at 65. Why is the situation so serious? One reason is that traditional pension plans — in which employees have almost no decisions to make — are being supplanted by defined-contribution plans like 401(k)’s. In these plans, employees have to decide for themselves how much to save and how to invest their money. For many people, being asked to solve their own retirement savings problems is like being asked to build their own cars.

To fix this, we need to do two things. First, make payroll retirement savings plans available to everyone. Then, add empirically proven design features to them, making it easier for workers to make good choices. In other words, improve the plans’ choice architecture.

Payroll savings plans are vital because they are essentially the only way that middle-class Americans reliably save for retirement. Your grandmother probably knew that the best way to save is to put money aside before you have a chance to spend it. That approach has always worked — and is a core idea embedded in these plans.

In the past, homeowners used another form of forced saving, building home equity by paying off their mortgages. But the ease of refinancing has eroded the norm that people should pay off these loans by the time they reach retirement age. Among households with someone over 60, mortgage debt has grown drastically in recent decades. (Here’s a savings tip: If you are over 45, use today’s low interest rates to refinance with a 15-year mortgage.)

Given the importance of payroll savings, it’s alarming that only about half of the American work force has access to a retirement savings plan in the workplace — and that number falls to 42 percent in the private sector, according to Boston College research.

The Obama administration has proposed a simple solution to this problem: the automatic I.R.A. This plan, originally proposed by scholars at the Brookings Institution, would require any employer that doesn’t offer its own plan to enroll workers automatically into individual retirement accounts, with the option to opt out. The burden on employers would be tiny, and the benefit to workers could be life-changing.

The concept puts to work part of what we behavioral economists, along with industry experts, have learned about effective 401(k) retirement plans over the past couple of decades. The operative word common to many best practices is “automatic.”

When employees are first eligible for a retirement savings plan, they should be enrolled unless they choose to opt out. This solves the procrastination problem that keeps roughly a fifth of workers who are eligible for a plan from joining, even when the employer is matching some of their contributions. Companies that adopt automatic enrollment find that few employees opt out initially, or later.

But we should move beyond automatic enrollment alone. That’s because most companies set a low default savings rate for new enrollees, often at just 3 percent of their income. Of course, employees can choose a different, higher rate, but many just accept the default percentage and stay with it indefinitely.

My colleague Shlomo Benartzi, a business professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and I devised a successful solution to this problem that we call Save More Tomorrow. Under it, a worker can join a plan in which their savings contributions are increased, say, one to two percentage points a year, each time the employee gets a raise. In the first company that tried this plan, the savings rate more than tripled in three years.

Some companies find that linking savings increases to pay increases puts a burden on their payroll and human resource departments. Such companies can avoid this problem by using a generic version of the plan, called automatic escalation, that steps up savings rates each year until the employee hits a predetermined maximum.

In a recent report in Science magazine, Professor Benartzi and I estimated more than four million people were using some form of automatic escalation, and had collectively increased annual savings in the United States by over $7 billion a year. This is significant progress, but we could do much better.

Many employees don’t know that their workplace has such an option, and finding out how to enroll can be hard. This helps explain why only 11 percent of eligible workers have signed up for it.  Promoting automatic escalation and making sign-up easy, or even automatic (with the ability to opt out, of course), could greatly increase enrollment. In our original study, in which a financial adviser was available to explain the plan and, importantly, fill out the appropriate forms, nearly 80 percent of workers who were offered the plan took it.

THE third piece of the automatic plan involves investments. Retirement savers tend to be relatively passive investors, often sticking with whatever asset allocation they selected on the day they joined the plan. But those who do make changes often do so at exactly the wrong time: they buy high and sell low.

Although the stock market has doubled in the past few years, 401(k) investors have collectively been selling stocks to buy bonds during this period. (Note that in January this year, there was a sharp reversal, with investors pouring money into stocks. This might make some trend watchers nervous about future stock market returns!)

A solution to bad market timing is to offer a default investment vehicle, like a target-date mutual fund, that automatically rebalances an investor’s portfolio, both cyclically as the market rises and falls, and as the client ages, reducing stock holdings as retirement approaches. Of course, it is essential that these target-date funds have reasonable fees.

For evaluations of how corporate plans stack up, consider the ratings offered by services like BrightScope.com. If you aren’t happy with what you find, complain to your company’s management. And if you are part of management, get busy.

Richard H. Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. He has informally advised the Obama administration.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/business/an-automatic-solution-for-the-retirement-savings-problem.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

DealBook: Goldman Sachs Earnings Soar

January 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The headquarters of Goldman Sachs in New York.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressThe headquarters of Goldman Sachs in New York.

9:46 a.m. | Updated

Goldman Sachs on Wednesday reported a fourth-quarter profit of $2.89 billion, or $5.60 a share, a significant jump from the period a year earlier.

The per-share figure is after the company paid preferred dividends, and comes in well ahead of analysts’ expectations of $3.78 a share, according to Thomson Reuters.

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Analysts had been anticipating a fairly decent quarter for Goldman, and its results were buoyed by strong trading and investment banking results and lower compensation costs. In the fourth quarter of 2011, the bank earned $1.01 billion, or $1.84 a share.

The bank’s most recent results reflect a continued focus on cutting expenses as well as a number of investing gains, including $485 million from debt and security loans, the company said.

“While economic conditions remained challenging for much of last year, the strengths of our business model and client franchise, coupled with our focus on disciplined management, delivered solid performance for our shareholders,” Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, said in a news release.

The results had an immediate effect on the firm’s stock, sending it up 2.7 percent in early morning trading.

Over all, the firm produced $9.24 billion in revenue in the quarter ended Dec. 31, up 53 percent from the same quarter in 2011. That also beat analysts’ estimates of quarterly revenue of $7.91 billion.

Goldman also revealed how much it had set aside for compensation, paying out $12.9 billion in 2012, an average of $399,506 to each of its 32,400 employees. This represented 37.9 percent of Goldman’s revenue for the year.

Over the last year, Goldman has reduced its payroll by 900 people. In 2011, the bank set aside $12.22 billion, or 42.4 percent, of its 2011 net revenue to pay compensation and benefits for its employees.

Goldman partners, a small group of top managers at the firm, will learn their 2012 compensation packages on Wednesday. The vast majority of employees, however, will be told what their bonuses will be on Thursday in what is known at Goldman as compensation communication day. These bonuses are on top of annual salaries, which can range from roughly $100,000 to $2 million for executives like Mr. Blankfein.

Bonuses on Wall Street — both the size of them and how they are paid — always draw scrutiny. Goldman Sachs decided this week not to delay the payment of bonuses to its staff members in Britain, a move that would have helped investment bankers and other highly paid employees benefit from a lower income tax rate.

Goldman Sachs was already drawing attention in the United States after it distributed $65 million in stock to 10 senior executives in December instead of January, when the firm typically makes such awards. That move helped the executives avoid the higher tax rates that will now be imposed on income of $450,000 or more.

The firm’s annual return on equity was 10.7 percent, up from 2011, when it was 5.8 percent. While this is far below its performance in boom years like 2006, when its return on equity was 41.5 percent, it is an achievement that it has broken above 10 percent.

Banks continue to fight difficult economic conditions at home and abroad, and Goldman’s results are still well below what it was producing before the financial crisis. Those outsize profits, however, were fueled by borrowing on credit and selling mortgage-linked products, and they have dwindled. New regulations aimed at reining in risk-taking have also reduced the profitability of certain businesses.

Revenue from investment banking came in at $1.41 billion, up 64 percent from the year-ago period.

Net revenue in Goldman’s powerful division that trades bonds, currencies and commodities was $2.04 billion, up 50 percent from levels in the quarter a year earlier. The firm said those results reflected an increase in mortgage revenues, which were “significantly higher” when compared with 2011.

The firm’s investing and lending division also had a stronger-than-expected quarter, posting revenue of $1.97 billion, up 126 percent from year-ago levels. The firm said this unit benefited from an increase in equity prices in Asia and Europe and a number of one-time gains. For instance, it logged a gain of $334 million from its investment in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, a strategic investment the firm made in 2006. It also had gains from the debt securities and loans it holds.

Goldman is one of a number of banks releasing earnings this week. JPMorgan Chase also Wednesday weighed in with its results, reporting a strong profit of $5.7 billion for the fourth quarter, up 53 percent from the previous year.

These positive results put pressure on Morgan Stanley to post good results when it releases its fourth quarter numbers on Friday. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters are expecting Morgan Stanley to report earnings of 27 cents a share, up from a loss of 14 cents in the year-ago period.

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/goldman-profit-soars-to-2-89-billion-in-4th-quarter/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: Reflections on the Third Anniversary of My Pink Slip

December 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Searching for Capital

A broker assesses the small-business lending market.

Today marks the third anniversary of my pink slip from corporate America. Three years ago, the bankruptcy trustees at the corporation where I had worked for close to a decade fired me. The next day, I started working on building my loan brokerage.

For some, anniversaries are a time of celebration. And while I do believe that keeping a business afloat and growing for three years is an accomplishment, I would rather use this milestone for some reflection and to share what I think I have learned.

I know that it’s a cliché (and one that’s a little strained right now, with all of our minds on Newtown, Conn.), but the closest analogy I can think of to building a company is parenting a child. Both come with constantly evolving challenges, demands, and highs and lows.

You can read the books, but more often than not, you react with your gut. You can plan a perfect outing for a day, but if your child is sick that morning you’re out of luck. You can think your child will go to Harvard, but he or she might have different plans. You will pick  activities for your children, but eventually they will start to choose for themselves. And no matter how hard you try, there will be times when you will like awake at night and second-guess your choices. You have to be flexible and adaptive. Most importantly, you have to be patient.

I think that companies are built in a similar fashion. You’re always trying to figure it out. You’re constantly experimenting with new things. You learn by trial and error, and sometimes you fail several times before you figure something out. But you don’t give up. I recently spoke to an M.B.A. class, where one of the students asked me what my five-year plan was. I wanted to answer that it was to try to make payroll next week. Instead, I told the class that my plan was to try to build my company at whatever the right pace was as long as it could hold true to it’s values and do right by its customers. I suspect that my answer confused some of the students.

And I don’t think it’s their fault. As a general rule, entrepreneurship is not thought of or taught as a journey. More often — especially at business schools, I suspect — it’s about how to get big quick, how to get venture capitalists behind you, how to become the next billionaire. It’s about planning your exit before you complete the launch.

Too often, I find that lenders don’t reward agile development processes – even though this is ultimately the best way to minimize risk. I think more companies fail trying to get big too quickly than being cautious and pragmatic. Too many companies try to build management teams before they know how to walk.

I am optimistic that when I look back in five or 10 years, I will be glad that I took the slow-growth approach. But the opportunity for reflection always passes quickly. Tomorrow morning — I am happy to say — the doors will open and the phones will ring again.

Ami Kassar founded MultiFunding, which is based near Philadelphia and helps small businesses find the right sources of financing for their companies.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/reflections-on-the-third-anniversary-of-my-pink-slip/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,