Content about Management Files

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Microsoft. Starbucks. Walmart. They’re all memorable names. You can bet that those companies carefully made sure they had exclusive rights to them.

Your business name may not be as distinctive or well known. Still, you’d hate to have a judge tell you that you can’t use it anymore. And if another business copied your name, you’d like to be able to go into court and put a stop to it.

So how do you protect the name of your business or service? We’ll look at a few techniques. But, ultimately, only you and your lawyer can decide how much effort and expense to invest in name protection.

Your decision will depend on many factors, including:

APPLETON, Wis. — When I was a new salesperson, one of my first bosses had a saying about the service we were selling: “You can have it on time, cheap, or right. Pick two.”

Consider having your top customer service representative (CSR) inform Mr. or Mrs. Cheapskate, “Well, certainly we will be happy to let you pay $X for dry-cleaning that designer wool blazer. It will be ready for pick up in July.” Or, “Of course we will be happy to charge you $Z and ruin the lining in the pressing process.” I’ll let you have some fun generating additional permutations.

The reason I’m bringing up the issue of cost is that my firm has complied the data from 2012 mystery shopping results from around the country. The cost of providing service is something we are hearing about from owners. For example, we have been told it’s too costly to:

SAN FRANCISCO — In our consulting practice, we field many questions, but the most common question has long been “How do I increase sales?”

When this question arises, we always encourage the person who is asking to modify it to “How do I increase profitable sales?”

How many of you have tried Groupon, delighted initially at the large number of respondents, but then evaluated the retention rate on those deeply discounted sales and vowed never to use it again? These promotional efforts can be used as a marketing introduction for a new service or new location, but resulting sustained sales are rare. They have the added disadvantage of training your customers to think that your service is not worth your normal price.

So what is the answer?

First, there is no silver bullet. Profitable sales require a multi-pronged, sustained effort. There is no passive path to increased profitable sales.

EVANSTON, Ill. — I once wrote an article titled Training Foreign-Born Hispanics for Supervisory Jobs in the Dry Cleaning Industry due to the need to teach the growing numbers of Latino first-level supervisors how to improve performance in the face of customer demands for high-quality cleaning and next-day service, all at competitive prices.

The article explained how dry cleaners could boost productivity and speed turnaround times by training Hispanic supervisors to adapt the traditional authoritarian Latino leadership style to a U.S. “best practices” mode of supervision. I also discussed the five key elements needed for effective training of Hispanic supervisors.

Here are those elements, and the continued results of the training from six dry cleaners using this approach. Each had four to seven drop-off stores, for customer convenience, feeding their garments to a single central plant.

INDIANAPOLIS — You don’t have to look far to realize the wide range of computer choices that cleaners have. Having more options is great. In many ways, the ability to choose allows you to find the best-fitting computer system.

But that same range of choices can easily be overwhelming, too. It contributes to the fear that you may choose the wrong computer. From a cost view, computers can take a sizable percentage of your total operating budget. A good choice will lead to where costs, compared to returns, are minimal. The gains you experience are far above whatever you paid.

Writing this column takes me back, I hate to admit, about 20 years. I was with a small company that focused on “contract programming.” This is back when most companies had what were called mini, or mainframe, computers. PCs were just coming out. There was no universally accepted operating system.

CHICAGO — Smart people make dumb mistakes, especially when it comes to money. Why this is so has the experts puzzled, though there are many theories on the subject. Whatever the reason for this enigma, here are a half-dozen costly money mistakes that you need to avoid:

FAILING TO SEPARATE PERSONAL FINANCES FROM BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

Many business owners and professional practitioners keep a sharp eye on business performance while cheating themselves and their families by failing to manage their personal finances skillfully. That’s a poor idea. These are two entirely separate challenges; both need and deserve your best efforts.

There is no better time than now to review your personal financial health and your goals for a secure financial future.

FAILING TO PLAN FOR RETIREMENT

We humans tend to assign more importance to today than to tomorrow. While the concept of retirement seems to be undergoing some drastic revisions these days, for most of us, there comes a time when our working days will end.

CHICAGO — The gut-wrenching volatility in the stock market over the past few years has been a tough challenge for busy business owners and professionals. That’s probably why so many are looking for professional help in dealing with investment decisions.

Business for “financial advisers” has been booming since the 2008 market meltdown. The problem is that searching for the right adviser can be almost as difficult as searching for the right stocks.

In most states, anyone can declare himself or herself a financial adviser without the need for a license or any formal credentials, even to the point of creating an official sounding title. At most brokerage firms, employees who used to be called stockbrokers are now called financial consultants or advisers. Whatever they are called, it’s important to remember that they are essentially salesmen who earn their money by getting you to buy and sell equities.

CHICAGO — The growing number of options for the right approach to retirement planning is making the right choice quite difficult. Among the choices is a relatively new kind of mutual fund that has enjoyed strong growth over the past few years. Known as target date retirement funds, their assets have jumped from $183 billion in 2007 to $436 billion as of mid-2012, according to the Investment Company Institute. The allure of these funds is easy to understand.

A target date retirement fund is simply a mutual fund designed to alter its investment strategy as the holder nears retirement. For example, the Vanguard Target Retirement 2025 Fund is designed to appeal to someone who plans to retire in 2025 or around that time.

Following conventional wisdom, these funds generally alter their portfolios to include increasingly conservative investments as the target retirement date approaches, thus relieving the owners from rebalancing portfolios on their own. The objective is to reduce risk as retirement approaches, generally by decreasing the proportion of securities and increasing the proportion of bonds.

SAN FRANCISCO — Often, your biggest asset can also be your biggest obstacle. Your positive experience that led to past success can blind you to the current opportunities that exist with new approaches.

Some examples might be:

NEW YORK CITY — It’s the nation’s most comprehensive health insurance reform since Medicare. And it’s been endorsed as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, how will the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) affect your dry cleaning business? Will your premiums go down? Will it be easier to shop for insurance? Will the available policies offer better coverage? And will you be protected from those profit-busting price hikes that so often occur when one employee in a small group gets seriously ill?

We’ll answer your most important questions at the end of this article. Here’s one thing to get out of the way first, though: No employer will be required to provide health insurance. However, some employers, as you will see, will pay penalties if they do not provide insurance and their employees decide to buy insurance from the new statewide insurance pools.

NEW YORK — Family businesses enjoy many advantages: a shared joy of success, a common pride in tradition, and a stability and loyalty that’s the envy of their clan-free competitors. Even so, there’s a flip side to the coin. Sibling rivalries, parent-child conflicts and charges of nepotism by a non-family staff can interfere with the smooth running of any family enterprise.

Has your dry cleaning business encountered such issues? Let’s discuss how to solve three of the most common problems.

THE LEADERSHIP BATTLE

The time has come to select a leader from the next generation. Several sons and daughters, now in their 40s, want to take charge. How do you avoid creating hurt feelings among the siblings?

“The transition to a new leader can be extremely difficult in a family business,” says Stacey A. Lundgren, a former family business owner and now a consultant in Howell, Mich. “The decision needs to be made on job performance and on the duties that each sibling has taken on over the years.”

PEMBROKE, Mass. — Time—how do you manage it? Seems like a pretty basic question, doesn’t it? “I go in, ready the store, see a few customers, and then go from one matter to another until the day is over, and I have a few minutes to pay bills or call customers before I go home.”

It's possible your time could be managed better, more efficiently, more economically. Perhaps you could squeeze out an hour every day for reflection, future strategy, and employee education. Wouldn’t that be something!

At the end of a workday, review that day's actions. What portion did you spend profitably? By profitably, I mean that your time spent contributed to the flow of your concern. What portion of the day was spent unprofitably? What portion was spent doing the work?

That is, did you press for two hours, relieve the cleaner for two hours, and work the counter for an hour? If so, five hours out of eight or nine was spent on the assembly line. Maybe 60% of your time is spent processing.