“SMALL TALK: Business owners are making New Year's resolutions - North County Times” plus 4 more

SMALL TALK: Business owners are making New Year's resolutions - North County Times
Switzer Sued Over Failed Business Deal - news9.com
RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie named Canadian Press Business Newsmaker of ... - Artistdirect.com
Oakland University professors examine business of higher education - Lansing State Journal
As Crisis Fades, Banks Cling To Old Way of Doing Business - CNBC

SMALL TALK: Business owners are making New Year's resolutions - North County Times

Posted: 02 Jan 2010 11:04 PM PST

NEW YORK ---- Small-business owners aren't just putting together budgets and sales projections as 2010 approaches: Like the rest of us, they're making some New Year's resolutions.

These goals aren't about losing weight or exercising more. Business owners are resolving to fix problems in their companies or come up with ideas for working smarter in the new year.

Here's a sampling of resolutions made by small-business owners:

Spend quality time with clients

Merilee Kern plans to set aside time for a leisurely, friendly chat with the clients of her public relations firm in Poway.

Kern realized that the one time when she and clients aren't talking about business is when they call her during the holidays to say thank you for the gift baskets she sends.

"It's the only conversation a year where we stop and ask about kids and really transcend the normal stuff," said Kern, president of Kern Communications. "I want to take an opportunity to not talk about business."

She plans to chat with a different client each week. But she's not thinking in terms of a coffee klatch.

"At the end of the day, especially in a service business, you have to perform, but it is all about relationships" with clients, Kern said.

Protect the cash flow

Heather Logrippo sometimes finds herself waiting for customers to pay for the ads they take out in her Boston-based real estate magazine, Distinctive Homes. So her resolution is to accept credit cards to be sure she's paid on time.

She also wants to be sure she doesn't get burned when customers say they'll buy ads but never send in the copy, leaving her with blank space and lost revenue.

"I'm not a bank," Logrippo said. "For too long I've been sympathetic,"

Logrippo's customers are real estate agents who want to list their properties. But once a house is sold, "they don't feel any urgency. ... There's no rush to pay me."

Many small-business owners have had problems getting paid during the recession because their customers are struggling, not forgetful like Logrippo's. And many have also turned to credit cards to preserve their cash flow.

There is a downside to credit cards, and that's the fee that a small business must pay the card issuer. But, said Logrippo, "it's a better assurance that I'll get paid on time."

Making it official

Howard Ankin started his law practice in 1997, and it has grown to 25 employees. In the early years, he didn't worry about formulating policies for vacation and sick time and other personnel matters. Now, though, he says it's time to formalize those policies and put them in writing.

"When I had a smaller office, the informality worked well for me, and now, at this point, the informality is working against me," said Ankin, whose firm is based in Chicago.

So one of his resolutions is to create an employee handbook, something that human resources professionals urge small-business owners to do. The beginning of the year, before employees start asking for time off, is an ideal time to do it.

Ankin has also decided his firm needs a cohesive marketing strategy. He's hired a public relations agency, is having a new Web site created and is using Twitter and other social media to get some notice for the firm, which specializes in workers compensation and personal injury cases.

"Instead of having a happenstance marketing program, where someone calls and asks, 'Do you want to put an ad in the Yellow Pages,' for 2010 we're trying to have a plan in place," he said.

Ankin is embarking on something he's never done before with a marketing program. Many publicity pros believe his timing is right, at the start of the economic recovery, when companies will be doing more business and needing more help.

Working on that work/life balance

Hope Katz Gibbs wanted to spend less time at work in the new year and more time with her two children.

But, "instead of dialing things back for a work/life balance, ramping it up seems to be the best strategy at this point," said Gibbs, president of Inkandescent Public Relations. Her Washington, D.C.-based company, which targets entrepreneurs, expects to have more work as more people start businesses.

So she's taken a step back and looked at her family life to see how to make it better for everyone in the new year. And she realized that overbooking her 14-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter with after-school activities wasn't the answer.

"The trend is to overextend them, give them a million activities, make them competitive," Gibbs said of children. "I'm trying to have more fun with them rather than micromanage them."

So Gibbs and her husband plan to involve her children more in her work, taking them to child-appropriate work events when possible. She likes the idea of exposing them to the business world, so they can find out how it works.

"It's balancing in a different way," she said.

Putting money into human assets

Barbara Monteiro plans to keep looking for ways to save money, and to spend more on her employees.

Monteiro, who owns a New York-based public relations firm, will be swapping out her PCs with Macintosh computers. Because Macs are less susceptible to viruses, she'll be spending less money on eliminating them from her computers. And she'll be looking for ways to buy computer paper and other office supplies cheaply.

The money will go toward things that will let her employees know how much she values them: subway fare cards, coffee, pizza lunches. She has already been doing that, but in the new year, Monteiro wants to step up the pace.

"In bad times, employees appreciate if you stick by them and even skip a paycheck yourself to keep the business going. When good times come back, those employees will think twice before leaving," she said.

Monteiro said she's also looking to work on her personal finances. As soon as she can, she's going to invest in tax-free bonds.

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Switzer Sued Over Failed Business Deal - news9.com

Posted: 02 Jan 2010 05:13 PM PST

Associated Press

NORMAN, Oklahoma -- Former Oklahoma football coach Barry Switzer is being sued by former OU wrestling coach Stan Abel for $90,000 and damages over a failed business deal.

According to court documents, Switzer and Abel - along with former Oklahoma wrestler Mozaffar Jahanguiri - were investors in The Lighthouse Restaurant on Lake Hefner's East Wharf, which failed to become profitable enough for the group and was eventually closed.

The lawsuit claims that Abel and Jahanguiri were promised their money back "on numerous occasions" over the years, but Switzer never paid up.

According to his voicemail, Switzer is out of the country for several days and unavailable for comment until he returns.

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RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie named Canadian Press Business Newsmaker of ... - Artistdirect.com

Posted: 01 Jan 2010 02:51 PM PST

Kid Cudi

Live Review: Kid Cudi — Club Nokia, Los Angeles

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:10:03

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Oakland University professors examine business of higher education - Lansing State Journal

Posted: 02 Jan 2010 01:00 AM PST

ROCHESTER - A new book by brothers and Oakland University professors Greg and Tom Giberson takes a close look at the business that puts food on their tables.

They edited "The Knowledge Economy Academic and the Commodification of Higher Education," published by Hampton Press Inc. and released in late 2009. Tom Giberson is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Resource Development. Greg Giberson is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric.

"The book draws on the expertise of 17 professors from colleges and universities around the globe and addresses a range of topics, from the history of higher education to its current perception as primarily an engine of economic advancement," school writer Eric Reikowski said in a story on Oakland's Web site.

Greg Giberson said the idea for the book developed as he and his brother considered the range of issues that now face higher education.

"We realized that, although there are many books about how higher education is changing, there are very few intellectual conversations out there that interrogate those changes from the perspective of individual faculty members," he said in a statement.

The 17 chapters include one on the development of academic programs for ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and another titled "The Standards Movement and the Commodity of American Standardized English."

The Gibersons solicited requests for contributions through several Web-based networks and got more than 50 responses, many from non-U.S. educators.

Together, they wrote a chapter surveying "the historic role of higher education in society, along with our take on critical challenges facing higher education," Greg Giberson said.

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As Crisis Fades, Banks Cling To Old Way of Doing Business - CNBC

Posted: 01 Jan 2010 08:03 AM PST

After staging one of the most remarkable comebacks in business history — because of taxpayer lifelines and other support from Washington — the giants of the banking industry are entering a new phase of the postbailout period.

While, for many Americans, the dark fears of the crisis have given way to indignation over the Lazarus-like recovery at big banks, few on Wall Street expect 2010 to be as profitable as 2009.

All told, the half dozen biggest banks have already made more than $50 billion in the first three quarters, and are on track to deliver a year of hefty profits — and bonuses — that could rival those of the boom years.

But at this pivotal moment, big questions loom: Will the economy stage a robust recovery or just muddle along? Will the stunning rally in the stock market last?

As the debate rages over how to prevent future crises, will Washington impose tough new rules on banks? More important, will banks fundamentally change the way they do business, or simply carry on as before?

"That is the larger issue hanging over the industry at this point," said Lawrence H. Summers, the chief economic adviser to President Obama. "I think the view of some in Manhattan and the view from rest of the America, including the administration, is very different."

Rarely has the divide been so deep between Wall Street and Main Street.

Even as Mr. Obama urges banking executives to do more to help the economy recover, many homeowners and small businesses say banks are reluctant to make loans. The banking industry has throttled back lending for the last 15 months, draining more than $3 trillion of credit from the economy.

When housing prices were rising, Peter M. Allen might have had little trouble refinancing the mortgage on his home in Palo Alto, Calif. Now, like millions of Americans, Mr. Allen, 50, is out of work, and the banks are turning him away.

"Things have changed," Mr. Allen, an engineer, said. "They were basically closed for business."

As banks enjoy a recovery, lending may slow further as the Federal Reserve shifts its focus from spurring growth to heading off inflation, reversing the current period of ultralow interest rates that has been a boon to banks.

Right now, low rates are fattening banks' profit margins, since many lenders are not passing on their own low costs to borrowers. Lending rates will also spike as the government withdraws its trillion-dollar support of the mortgage market in the spring.

"Are they going to kill the housing market?" said Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, a big money management firm. "That is an issue."

Most banks are hunkering down in anticipation of another big wave of real estate and consumer loan losses. Small and midsize banks are expected to be hit especially hard: They must absorb nearly $900 billion of commercial real estate losses over the next few years, causing several hundred banks to fail.

The big banks, meanwhile, face a range of new regulations that take effect in 2010.

Rules curbing overdraft fees and predatory practices in the credit card business are expected to squeeze the flow of billions of dollars from penalty income. They will also have less wiggle room as regulators require them to hold larger cash reserves, reducing their returns and forcing them to be more conservative.

That heralds a sharp drop in profits, especially if the ebullient stock and bond markets, which generated billions in trading revenue last year for Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants, tapers off in 2010.

Analysts say that bank profitability might fall by a third from its precrisis levels, to where it was in the '60s, '70s and '80s.

"We tend to believe it is back to the future," said Frederick Cannon, a senior banking analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods.

Wall Street has responded by beefing up its financial lobby in Washington to win big concessions. Among other things, the industry is working to ease rules governing derivatives and to weaken a proposal for a consumer financial protection agency.

Already, there is the sense that the political momentum to force meaningful changes has ebbed as banks returned to profits and bonuses last year, and broke free of government control.

"This is no time for a return to business as usual," Paul A. Volcker, the chairman of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said in a recent speech in Germany. "The rally in world stock markets from recession lows has brought renewed hopes on Wall Street and the City of London for a return to outlandish bonuses for financial operators and a vigorous defense of established vested interests."

The industry's leading executives insist that they have cleaned up their act and that reforms dragging through Congress will draw a line under the crisis and correct the failings that caused it.

"There were significant flaws that came out of financial services," said Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's chairman and chief executive. "Some things are going to change forever."

The question is how much.

Exotic financial products, like the so-called C.D.O.-squared, are unlikely to return. Bundled loans, which financed so much of the mortgage boom, will come back as a smaller, more conservative business.

Bankers, badly bruised by the crisis, are putting a dagger in the "Ninja" loan — which required "no income, no job or assets" to pass muster with a credit officer.

After two decades of deregulation, they will now have to contend with more stringent rules.

Some of the banks are cutting back on their risk-taking.

And while they are paying out heavy bonuses, they are making sure they can claw back the paychecks if employees make big losses in the future.

James P. Gorman, the next chief executive of Morgan Stanley, a Wall Street firm that nearly went under during the crisis, said: "There will be real progress in 2010. I am pretty optimistic.The industry understands what has happened and what needs to be done."

But a year after the crisis, there is still a looming question about how to deal with banks that are too big to fail.

Despite heated debate, the government has still not decided how to support a failing bank without pumping in billions of taxpayers' money to avoid contagion in the broader financial system.

But the banks that a year ago were too big to fail are now bigger than ever.

"Fear has dissipated, greed has returned — but these structural problems are still there," said Peter Nerby, an analyst at Moody's.

Without a plan for shutting down banks that stumble, the nation's biggest banks still enjoy an implicit guarantee from the government: If they run into trouble the taxpayer will bail them out.

Economists worry this is only encouraging them to take risks again, which could mean another crisis in the future.