Forcing employees to take time off
– Cynthia Hsu is a contributor to FindLaw’s Free Enterprise blog. FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters publication. –
Employee vacation policies can vary depending on your business. Some employers choose to have no vacation time during a year, while other employers are now instituting forced vacations for employees.
At the Motley Fool, a 250-employee financial services company located in Virginia, all employees are entered into a monthly drawing where one lucky (or unlucky, depending your perspective) employee “wins” a forced two-week vacation, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The reason for this slightly strange and unconventional vacation policy is likely the logic that forcing employees to take breaks could be good for business in the long run.
After all, employees that don’t take any breaks or are simply workaholics run the risk of running dangerously low on energy. Having employees take a few weeks off to get some much-needed rest might actually mean higher productivity and a happier work environment for all.
It’s probably true that to some extent, a forced vacation policy is something that is out of consideration when thinking about a small business’ budget and how much paid time off employers can really afford. Vacation policies aren’t even required by law in the U.S., as employers are generally not required to give paid vacations or sick pay.
But, maybe giving employees some extra perks like vacations, sick pay, or even some fun work time activities can build company loyalty, morale, and ultimately improve the quality of life in the office. Vacation policies can even attract higher-quality talent who might like the extra benefits of working in a congenial, less-stressful work environment.
Bakery pushes own brand after years of white-label production
One way to counter the effects of the recession is to start a retail brand. That’s what entrepreneur Karen Trilevsky did.
The founder and CEO of FullBloom Baking Co, a 22-year-old natural foods bakery outside San Francisco, started rolling out her own line of branded snacks in 2008, after years serving as the behind-the-scenes regional baker for big customers like Whole Foods.
Trilevsky, 54, admited it’s been tough to create a market for new products in the crowded natural and organic foods space, which commands premium pricing –- sometimes as much as 50 percent –- over conventional grocery items. With all the belt tightening, she said customers are often reluctant to try new things.
“The grocery stores seem to be much more reticent to make changes,” she said. “There’s no risk taking going on.”
Even so, FullBloom has been able to carve out shelf space for its products, offering up snacks customers can’t find elsewhere in this premium niche of food retailing.
“By having these products more unique, it does enable us to price them where they belong,” said Trilevsky, whose lineup includes items like Kuko Bites, a chewy wheat and dairy free snack resembling macaroons, and Toasted Oatmeal Bars, which include whole grains, cherries and raisins.
Will chocolate chip cookies make the branded cut? No way, she said.
Creditors’ rights: 5 tips on how to collect debts
– Stephanie Rabiner is a contributor to FindLaw’s Free Enterprise blog. FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
If you’re in the type of business that extends credit to customers, then you’re officially in the business of collecting debts.
Unfortunately, collecting debts can oftentimes be difficult, time-consuming, and fruitless — not to mention a drain on your financial resources.
However, by following these tips on how to collect debts, you may be able to make the process easier and a lot less painful.
1. Be reasonably persistent and polite. Though you may want to yell at a debtor and talk to them on a daily basis, neither of these is a very good idea. Maintaining a professional demeanor will keep you out of threat territory, and calling a debtor no more than once every few days will allay any concerns of illegal harassment.
2. Put an end to excuses. It’s your job to answer every excuse with an alternative option. If a debtor says the check is ready to be mailed, offer to pick it up. If they say they need to get to the bank, offer to take them.
3. Use credit scores as leverage. As a creditor, one of your biggest assets is the ability to put a black mark on a debtor’s credit report. As leverage, warn that you will respond to an unpaid debt with a report to the big credit agencies. This may get a debtor moving.
Putting a new spin on BYOB
Startup 3greenmoms wants you to BYOB, and they’re not talking about booze.
In a move that taps demand for sustainable products, the Potomac, Maryland-based company markets a variety of reusable storage bags that replace the ubiquitous plastic baggies consumers use and throw out in staggering proportions.
“I was probably using a least a dozen baggies a day between three kids and packing lunches and snacks,” said company cofounder Cristina Bourelly, who developed reusable fabric “LunchSkins” with fellow moms Kirsten Quigley and Jennie Stoller Barakat.
The team has been selling their bags, priced at retail from $7.85 to $10.95, depending on size, since 2009. Available in colorful, eye-catching patterns, LunchSkins are made from durable cotton fabric used in commercial pastry bags and can withstand high heat. Coated with a food-safe polyurethane liner, they can be thrown in the dishwasher or washing machine, giving them a lifespan of about three years and boosting their appeal to eco-conscious shoppers.
The self-funded business has seen distribution increase to more than 500 retail stores, including well-known chains Whole Foods Market and The Container Store. The bags are also available online at http://www.lunchskins.com/.
“Growth in the space has been good for us and good for consumers in general,” Bourelly said.
When the bull’s eye lands on your business
– George F. Brown, Jr. is a business strategy consultant specializing in business-to-business growth issues. Reuters spoke to him about the topic of a new book he co-authored, CoDestiny: Overcome Your Growth Challenges by Helping Your Customers Overcome Theirs (Greenleaf Book Group). –
Q: You talk about what happens when a business becomes a bull’s eye, that is, the target of rivals looking to undercut by price. How does this happen to small companies when they’re rarely dominant players in their market? A: Small business is rarely the largest provider to a large company, but I’ve seen quite a few instances where a small business is a key supplier to another small business.
Q: How do you know if you’re becoming the bull’s eye?
A: Whether you’re a big business or a small business, if you sit back and reflect and this sounds right, I’m fairly important, I’m fairly visible, I could see the competitors and the procurement managers taking aim at me – assume it’s going to happen at some point and begin to prepare for that day.
Q: What are your options when faced with severe price competition?
A: One fork in the road is to say this customer really should and does care about much more than price. If you believe that’s true, you emphasize the product, you emphasize the service, you tell them all the things you’ve done over the years to help them be successful. The other fork in the road is to say I’m not very different from my competitors, I really haven’t done anything that is going to generate applause. And I better figure out how do I compete with price being a part of the equation.
Q: Should you let the customer go?
Boomer sees business in discarded mannequins
– Kara Ohngren is a writer and editor at SecondAct. This article originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own. –
Judi Henderson-Town felt trapped. For years she was unhappy as an account executive at such industry giants as Johnson & Johnson and United Airlines. She found corporate life “soul-destroying.”
“I wanted something more entrepreneurial,” said the 53-year-old Henderson-Town. “But I didn’t know it was an option — no one I knew growing up owned their own business.”
In the past decade she’s carved out her own eco-friendly niche and launched a San Francisco Bay Area business that recycles and then resells old mannequins. Henderson-Town has become a clearinghouse for businesses looking to dump old displays that previously ended up in landfills. “The retailer saves on the disposal fee, and we gain inventory — it’s a win-win,” she said.
Her business, Mannequin Madness, is now certified green and earned special recognition from the Environmental Protection Agency for recycling 100,000 pounds of mannequins in one year. By collecting used mannequins, cleaning them up and renting or reselling them to businesses, artists or others looking for affordable displays, she’s proving green business is good business.
The “A-ha” Moment
The coming brick wall in venture capital
– Mark Suster is a former serial entrepreneur and a partner at Los Angeles-based venture capital firm GRP Partners. This article originally appeared on Suster’s blog “Both Sides of the Table”. The views expressed are his own. –
This is the final part of a three-part series on the major changes in the structure of the software and the venture capital industries. Read Part One and Part Two.
Or the Cliff Note’s version:
- Open source and cloud computing (led by Amazon) drove down tech startup costs by 90 percent
- The result was a massive increase in startups and a whole group of new funding sources: both angels and “micro VCs”
- With more competition in early-stage many VCs are investing smaller amounts at earlier stages. Some are going later stage to not miss out on hot deals. I call this “stage drift.”
- The opportunities for tech startups today are more immense than they’ve ever been with billions of people now connected to the Internet nearly all the time.
But …
Downsizing Venture Capital
The venture capital business itself is going through an even more fundamental change than just the entry of a new category at the earliest stage. The industry is shrinking back to a mid-90′s level in terms of both dollars and numbers of firms.
The rise of “micro VCs”
– Mark Suster is a former serial entrepreneur and a partner at Los Angeles-based venture capital firm GRP Partners. This article originally appeared on Suster’s blog “Both Sides of the Table”. The views expressed are his own. –
This is the second in a three-part series on the changes to the software industry over the past decade that has led to changes in the venture capital industry itself. Read Part 1 here.
If you don’t want to read that post, the summary is:
- Open source computing drove computing costs down 90 percent, which spurred innovation in technology
- Open cloud led by Amazon with their AWS services drove total operating costs down by 90 percent. This led to an explosion in startups.
- Amazon in turn led to the formation of an earlier stage of venture capital now led by what I call “micro VCs” who typically invest $250,000 to 500,000 in companies rather than the $5 to $7 million that VCs used to invest.
These trends have put pressure on traditional VCs. Some have done earlier-stage deals and done well. Others have chased earlier-stage but lack the skills or relationships to do this effectively. Some have moved into later stage investments in an effort to “put logos on their websites.”
People are moving into everybody else’s space.
Everybody seems to want what everybody else has. You know the old saying from Harry Met Sally, “I’ll have what she’s having!” This will continue while we’re in a tech bull market and I predict will wane when we’re not.
How the cloud changed venture capitalism
– Mark Suster is a former serial entrepreneur and a partner at Los Angeles-based venture capital firm GRP Partners. This article originally appeared on Suster’s blog “Both Sides of the Table”. The views expressed are his own. –
In this three-part series I will explore the ways that the venture capital industry has changed over the past five years that I would argue are a direct result of changes in the software industry, not the other way around. Specifically, Amazon has changed our entire industry in profound ways often not attributed strongly enough to them.
I believe the changes to the industry will be lasting rather than temporal change. Venture capital is in the process of its own creative destruction with new market entrants and new models of innovation at the precise moment that our industry itself is contracting.
I will argue that when the dust settles, although we will have fewer firms, each type will end up more focused on traditional stage segments that cater to the core competencies of that firm. The trend of funding anything from the first $25,000 to funding $50 million at a billion-plus valuation is unlikely to last as the skills and style to be effective at all stages are diverse enough to warrant focus.
I will argue that LPs who invest in VC funds will also need to adjust a bit as well.
Rewind
When I built my first company in 1999 it cost $2.5 million in infrastructure just to get started and another $2.5 million in team costs to code, launch, manage, market and sell our software. So it’s not surprising that typical “A rounds” of venture capital were $5 to $10 million. We had to buy Oracle database licenses, UNIX servers, a Sun Solaris operating system, Web servers, load balancers, EMC storage, disk mirrors for redundancy and had to commit to a year-long hosting agreement at places such as Exodus.
What the Mob can teach the startup industry
– Connie Loizos is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This story originally appeared here. The views expressed are her own. –
Forty-four-year-old Louis Ferrante hasn’t led a life that might naturally lead to business consulting. As a teenager growing up in Queens, New York, he stole car batteries that he “sold for $10 to get a slice of pizza and play video games.” Later, Ferrante moved on to stealing cars for joy rides, then taking orders from body shops looking for cheap parts. From there, it was a short leap to hijacking trucks and selling their contents through a neighborhood “fence.”
Eventually, Ferrante ran his own crew as an associate of the Gambino family. “When you’re hijacking trucks on the street in Queens, the Mafia is going to hear about you,” he tells me. “It’s not like they come down and say, ‘We’ll kill you if you don’t pay us.’ They take you under their wing.”
In fact, Ferrante might still be a mobster today had state law enforcement and federal agents not taken him down while he was still in his 20s. But even high-powered defense attorneys like Barry Slotnick couldn’t save Ferrante from what would eventually be more than eight years in prison, where he says he fell in love with books -– and out of love with the Mob.
Explains Ferrante: “When someone was killed, you didn’t ask what happened because if you did, they’d want to know why you asked and you’d be dead, too. But I always assumed the guy deserved to die.” In jail, playing cards with “the killers of people I knew,” Ferrante says it became apparent that most of the murders were fueled instead by simple greed. He decided that “however long I have to do (in jail) I will, but when I get out, I want to be done.”
Luckily for Ferrante, his old cohorts let him go his own way when he was released from prison in 2003. Using his life experiences as fodder, he’s gone on to become a successful writer. His newest book, “Mob Rules”, offers surprisingly insightful lessons about what the Mafia can teach legitimate businesspeople. I reached Ferrante in New York yesterday to talk about how his advice might be applied to startup founders and VCs.
Q: Your new book offers 88 leadership lessons gleaned from the Mafia. One of them is about how to build trust within an organization. I think venture firms, where partners try outdoing one another, could learn something from this. What’s your advice?
Sounds like the typical corporate tycoon to me.
