States that require background checks before people buy guns or ammunition may have a lower chance of having a school shooting, a new study finds.
Researchers found that over a three-year period, states that didn’t require background checks before purchases of guns or ammunition were more likely to have a school shooting than those states that did require them, according to the study.
Your mind could have drifted thousands of miles away, but as long as your body showed up to work at Dallas-based tax firm Ryan, that was all that mattered. “We literally ranked people by hours,” says Delta Emerson, president of Ryan’s global shared services. “Even if someone worked 24 hours the day before, they still had to book at least eight hours Monday through Friday.” The clock was seen as an easy proxy for work ethic, and employees who logged marathon sessions at their desks “wore their hours like a badge, practically tattooed on their foreheads,” Emerson says. “But it was at a cost.”
Emerson didn’t want to just tweak the workweek. She wanted to bust it open. But when she pitched the idea of flexible hours, she was almost thrown out of the CEO’s office. A resignation letter from a rising star finally got her the green light. Now the firm measures results–not time. Some staffers work as little as 20 hours a week; some start at 7 a.m., others at 10 a.m.; some commute to the office only twice a week. Since the 2008 shift, revenue has grown 15 percent year over year, customer satisfaction is higher than ever before, and turnover has plummeted.
Now that we have more or less adjusted to life in the new millennium, we are beginning to see our institutions through new eyes.
We see how the Godzilla edifice of hierarchy, rules and control mechanisms in place in nearly every medium-sized and large employer has hurt working people and customers alike. Smart businesses are nimble and responsive — everything a bureaucracy-choked organization cannot be.
Smart organizations prize and praise their team members. Old-school, top-down bureaucratic organizations don’t dare to value employees, because that might send the message that every employee is not an easily replaceable cog in the machine. Employees might start to feel significant
When your business is just starting out, acquiring new customers has to be your primary concern. But once you get beyond the initial stages, the key to real growth is not so much getting new customers, but customer retention.
Many small businesses are falling short when it comes to customer retention. More than seven out of 10 small business owners in a recent survey (72 percent) say most of their marketing budget goes to acquiring new customers. Just 28 percent spend the bulk of their marketing budgets on customer retention.
The open plan office has become a fixture of the modern workplace. Private offices and cube farms have been replaced by flexible workspaces with little or no partitions. 60% of companies have now adopted open plan layouts, with more than a third having changed from closed to open layout within the past five years.
The trend is particularly prevalent in London, where a rise in flexible serviced offices has contributed to the layout’s increasing popularity. A Deloitte report on office occupation in central London found that floor space dedicated to serviced offices has increased by 67% since 2004.
Initial startup costs are some of the biggest expenses a new business owner will have to encounter. Before you turn a profit, there are many parts of the business that need to be covered up front, and entrepreneurs don’t always anticipate some of these expenses.
To reduce your startup costs and stretch your dollars a little farther, follow these tips.
Have a budget, and stick to it
A simple way to save money as a new business owner is to set spending and expense limits. However, a surprising number of business owners don’t have a formal budget, said Carissa Reiniger, founder of small business support community.
Making more profit is NOT the same as generating more revenue.
They are two completely different areas, and something that I see very little discussion on.
Sure, I see LOTS of talk about revenues, i.e. six-figure businesses, multi-six-figure businesses, seven-figure businesses, but you never seem to get to the real story behind these headlines – how much profits are they really making? How much of the $100k does the business owner actually get to keep once expenses are paid — that’s the profit!
A six- or even seven-figure business sounds great, but it’s not so great if the profits aren’t there, i.e. you’re only making a $10k profit from a $100k business.
Profits are basically what’s left over (pre-tax or gross) after a business’ expenses have been deducted from its revenues – and this is one area of business that you need to keep a close eye on. So, taking two different scenarios, let’s look at some simple math in determining the profits of a six-figure business and a smaller five-figure business:
You’ve got an angry—no, downright irate—customer in your store. They’re causing a ruckus and clearly making your other customers uncomfortable. What can you do to keep things from spiraling out of control?
How to Deal With an Angry Customer
Plan Ahead
Before this situation ever happens, plan ahead for how to handle it. If your retail store is in an area with a security presence, such as a shopping center, have the phone number for security at the checkout counter or on speed dial, along with the phone number for local police or sheriff.
Train your salespeople to be observant. By greeting customers as they come into the store and keeping an eye on the entire store, they can often spot someone who’s becoming upset. For example, if a long line is forming at the checkout counter, an angry customer might start off by looking angrily at his watch, then start sighing loudly, then pacing and muttering to himself. Reaching out to him with a proactive, “Thank you for your patience today; I’ll be with you as soon as I can,” can help.
Randy Hetrick first noticed counterfeits on Amazon.com Inc. in 2013. He had been selling his TRX Training System– an exercise kit of suspension straps– on the site since 2008. When he began noticing cheap imitations, he had his employees scour Amazon for more, then go through the tedious process of reporting them for removal. But new imposters would pop up right away, and by 2014, “We realized this was an epidemic,” said Hetrick, who estimates phonies cost him $100 million a year, twice his annual sales.
Amazon’s Marketplace gives inventors like Hetrick exposure to hundreds of millions of shoppers without the big expense of building and promoting a website from scratch. Merchants give Amazon a commission on each sale. But a hot-selling product on Amazon encourages counterfeiters to make flimsy knockoffs with cheap materials, steal sales and damage a brand with few consequences.
Fully 24% of Americans have participated in the peer-to-peer or “sharing economy,” according to a new Pew Research report. Which is perhaps bigger than we thought.
Pew counts everyone who’s taken a task on a digital platform (like TaskRabbit), sold something to another community member (eBay), made something and sold it online (Etsy), driven their own cab (Uber), or rented a house (e.g. Airbnb). “These platforms also allow users to earn money in a range of other ways, such as sharing their possessions with others or selling their used goods or personal creations,” it says.
Dispatches From The Front 