Business Coaching

New York City is enforcing an old tax on sliced and prepared bagels.

When you think of New York cuisine what comes to mind? Is it a piping hot slice of pizza? How about a Nathan’s hot dog? Maybe authentic Chinatown Chinese food? Or New York-style, thin crust pizza? While all are icons of New York gastronomy, for millions of New Yorkers who start their day with a bagel and a shmear, there is nothing more New York than a crusty, chewy bagel.

Unfortunately for New Yorkers, the food police are at it again in New York City. After making transfats illegal for restaurants to serve a couple of years back now New York City is enforcing an old tax on sliced and prepared bagels.

The tax has actually been a law on the books for some time, but it hadn’t been enforced stringently until recently. There is little doubt the financial problems of New York City played a part in the overreaching enforcement of the law.

The size of the tax averages to about eight cents per sliced or prepared bagel, while bagels that are packaged for take- out are not taxed. This may not seem like a big deal, but small business that sell bagels are worried about the impact of the law on their bottom line.

Some companies have even been forced to pay back taxes because the law was so poorly enforced before this year.

“We think it’s unfair. They audited us four times in the past 20 years and never raised this before. We are a law abiding company and tax payers. They are requiring us to pay three years worth of taxes we never collected,” Kenneth Greene, owner of Bruegger’s Bagels told CNN Money recently.

Greene claims that his business didn’t collect the bagel tax from customers in the past as a way to keep prices down and customers happy, but they will have to now.

In 2007 in New York City, 646 restaurants were audited for bagel malfeasance. So far this year that number jumped to 1,077 and there are still four months left in 2010.

Do you think the recent enforcement of the New York Bagel Law is fair to small business owners? Has your business run into indiscriminant enforcement of laws in the past? How have you dealt with these issues?

Trader Joe's is a different kind of grocery store.

With all the Whole Foods, Wal-Marts and specialty retailers struggling through this economy, it seems like there’s a silent killer among them: Trader Joe’s.

The privately held company’s sales last year were roughly $8 billion, the same size as Whole Foods’ and bigger than those of Bed Bath & Beyond, No. 314 on the Fortune 500 list. Unlike those massive shopping emporiums, Trader Joe’s has a deliberately scaled-down strategy: it is opening just five more locations this year.

The company selects relatively small stores with a carefully curated selection of items. Typical grocery stores can carry 50,000 stock-keeping units, or SKUs; Trader Joe’s sells about 4,000 SKUs, and about 80% of the stock bears the Trader Joe’s brand.) The result: Its stores sell an estimated $1,750 in merchandise per square foot, more than double Whole Foods’. Even better: the company has no debt and funds all growth from its own coffers.

The rise of Trader Joe’s reflects Americans’ changing attitudes about food. While Trader Joe’s is not a health food chain, it stocks a dizzying array of organics. It sells billions of dollars in food and beverages that years ago would have been considered gourmet but are now mainstays of the U.S. diet, such as craft beers and white-cheese popcorn. The genius of Trader Joe’s is staying a step ahead of Americans’ increasingly adventurous palates with interesting new items that shoppers will collectively buy in big volumes.

It’s a different take on the concept of a grocery store…Trader Joe’s isn’t a health food grocery chain, it’s not a dirt-cheap grocery store like Fresh and Easy…it combines lots of types of retailers into one…and it works.

The strategies used by people on Survivor can be used in your office.

Everyone has at least one “job from hell” story.

If you don’t — count yourself lucky.

What the people who have had a job from hell know is that going to work is similar to going into battle, or a war zone, where you’ve got to rely on strategy, not just skill, in order to make it through another day and come back the next.

But if you’ve got no experience as a veteran or fighting on an actual battlefield, don’t worry: these same strategies can be seen in action on an episode of Survivor.

Yes, Survivor can teach you how to act in the workplace — if it’s a tense workplace — to, well, survive. Take a look at Spirit magazine’s first few points:

“1. Align yourself with the power person Survivor, like most offices, isn’t fair. Some of the nicest people go home first, and some of the sleaziest survive. It’s not about truth and justice, it’s about power, and in most offices the boss has all the votes. This isn’t true in every workplace—some companies have employees anonymously rate their managers and oust low scorers, and a teacher friend of mine can tell off his boss because he’s protected by a union. The rest of us need to identify who has the power—even if it’s someone as rotten as sock-burning, water-draining Russell, a finalist in season 19—and appear to be on his or her side.

2. Don’t fight the power—work it Most Survivor winners have been champions at charm and guile. I started at Crazy World Inc. horribly naive; I thought that honesty was the best policy, which just lead me to trouble in the conference room. Instead, I had to learn how to manipulate the unhinged bosses for my own needs. This made me feel like a sham until one of my mentors said to me, “Pretend you’re playing a part.” OK. I tried not to let the people who annoyed me know it. I tried to smile to their faces and make them think I’d never vote them out. I tried to keep my big mouth shut. When I did something well, I told them it was all thanks to them.

3. Blend in with the crowd Anyone who’s watched more than two seasons ofSurvivor comes to realize that, as they like to say in Japan, the nail that sticks its head out gets hit with a hammer. On Survivor, the first person voted off is almost always someone who is unusual in some way: older, more religious, more eccentric. People like people who are the most like them. If you stick out from the group—if you like to go sit by yourself on the beach, if you have strong opinions about how to build the shelter, if you’ve got a weird haircut (season 19’s mulleted Shambo) or tell long, strange stories (vainglorious, tattooed orchestra conductor Coach)—you could be exposing yourself to the group’s wrath and allowing yourself to be seen as a threat. Much better to be useless than different. The person fired fastest at Crazy World Inc. was bubbly and smart, but she talked too much about her love of roller derby for the boss’s comfort. Many a million-dollar winner of Survivorwas the best at lurking in the background and making minimal waves.”

Need more survival skills? Read the full article here.

If employee morale is down or your business environment isn’t the greatest, consider hiring a business coach to see if there’s anything you can improve.

Small businesses that use cash only mayconsider using credit cards due to new credit card laws.

With the new financial bill signed earlier this summer taking affect, small merchants in cash only business may be considering using credit cards for the first time. But are the new laws enough for businesses to change their way of doing business and accept plastic?

Under the new law, merchants can now legally set $10 minimums on credit-card purchases, and offer discounts and promotions for cash purchases.  These new rules can certainly help small businesses that currently don’t accept credit cards, but there are many aspects of the law that have yet to take effect, including the most important to most small businesses, swipe fees.

Over the next eight months, the Federal Reserve will issue new standards for swipe fees for debit cards. These new standards are meant to ensure that fees are proportional to the costs of the transaction. Credit-card fees, however, would remain unregulated, meaning the credit card companies can keep gouging business owners.

Many small business owners pay ridiculous fees on credit cards under the current system. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores the convenience store industry paid $7.4 billion in credit-card fees in 2009 while making $4.8 billion in profits from cards.

Obviously those numbers seem out of whack and there should be a way of changing the system so small businesses can make more of a profit from their sales than credit card companies do. It just seems that the new law, although a step in the right direction, doesn’t go far enough.

How does you business handle credit cards? Will you accept credit cards more regularly with the new laws enacted? What do you think of the government’s attempt to legislate the credit card industry?

Kevin Dipetrillo owns Southern Insurance Providers, a commercial property and casualty agency in Marrietta, Georgia. ActionCOACH Rick Crain has provided him with day to day planning to help him grow his business and become more successful. In less than six months of working with ActionCOACH Rick Crain, Kevin’s average sale per account has increased by six times. Hear more about his amazing results above.

Levi's "Go Forth" campaign: is it really helping Braddock, PA?

Recently Levi’s opened a new ad campaign featuring the town and citizens of Braddock, Pennsylvania, but is this campaign effective corporate propaganda or corporate philanthropy at its best?

The company’s “Go Forth” campaign is employing the slogan, “We Are All Workers”, as it shows interviews with citizens of Braddock talking about better times as melancholy piano music plays in the background.

Braddock was once a thriving suburb of Pittsburgh with over 20,000 citizens at its peak in the 1950s. A steel mill created jobs for workers, stores were busy, people had money to spend and times were good.

Following the closing of the UPMC Braddock Hospital, the area’s biggest employer in recent years, today only 3,000 people live in Braddock. The site of Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill, Braddock is now just an afterthought in today post-modern American economy, as are many once-thriving small American towns.

It seems that Levi’s understands this and is taking action to help Braddock. Over the next two years they will give Braddock a million dollars to help improve Braddock’s Community Center, Public Library and Urban Farm. Citizens will also be featured in Levi’s ads.

But does the campaign go far enough? After all, when you say “We Are All Workers” for ads featuring American workers and then manufacture less than 3% of your product in America, are you being genuine or are you just trying to exploit a bad situation for your benefit?

Levi’s has brought attention to Braddock, but it hasn’t brought jobs. There are no plans for Levi’s to open a plant in Braddock. Instead Levi’s own site says this about the campaign, “…if they’re just matched with the right distressed consumer brand, distressed Americans are ideal marketing mascots.”

Is that what working Americans have become, marketing mascots? What do you think of Levi’s marketing campaign and how it can affect Braddock, Pennsylvania?

J.Crew has evolved from flannel to fashionable with the help of brand management.

Remember when J.Crew menswear was mostly about flannel?

Men, you have Frank Muytjens, head of men’s design for J.Crew, to thank for the transformation in the preppy retailer’s menswear selections in recent years.

Muytjens told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that he listened to what J.Crew’s male customers wanted and responded to current trends. While retail has struggled during the U.S. recession, it seems that menswear could be a big opportunity for sales; at least for J.Crew — besides the growth the menswear division has seen, J.Crew made $44.7 million in this year’s first quarter, up from $20.4 million in 2009′s first quarter.

Collaboration also helps broaden J.Crew’s appeal — Ray Ban, Levi’s and Sperry are just some of the 40 partnerships J.Crew has.

Sometimes just listening to what your customer wants can have a great effect…that can be great for your business.

Instead of flannel, plaid, and more flannel, J.Crew’s menswear has evolved to two suit silhouettes, the Ludlow and Aldrige, sperry top-siders and stylish ankle boots.

What can listening to your customer do? Can it get you more business?

ActionCOACH Linda Bigler worked with Amanda Johnson, a financial planner and advisor. Before working with Linda, Amanda was having difficulties hiring competent staff. Listen as Amanda talks about how she was able to hire the perfect personal assistant by using the ActionCOACH hiring process.

Wal-Mart might be raising the low prices it's known for.

When people think of Wal-Mart, they think a lot of things, not all of them good. But one of the first associations people have with Wal-Mart is low prices.

Since its inception, Wal-Mart has been the ultimate discount business. They’ve leveraged their huge size and corporate power into low prices that they’ve passed on to customers, often at the expense of local businesses.

But it seems that Wal-Mart’s model is quietly, but quickly, changing. This summer, over just the last six weeks, Wal-Mart has raised its prices an average of 6%. Some of that can be attributed to the increase in the price of raw materials and oil, but the increase in prices seems to go farther than overhead costs.

Inflation may play a factor as the items that Wal-Mart is best known for, food and low-priced goods may be in an inflationary pocket, while bigger ticket items like electronics and furniture are in a deflationary mode.

Again, this may have led to the price increase to a certain extent, but a bigger factor may be a shift in Wal-Mart’s leadership. Over the last few months some in leadership positions, including the Chief Merchant for Wal-Mart’s U.S. Division, have stepped down.

Since the new guard has taken over, prices have gone up, while prices at virtually all of Wal-Mart’s competitors have stayed the same or, in some cases, even gone down.

Despite the price shift, Wal-Mart is still far more cost-effective than most supermarkets for consumers. But that advantage is fading. In June Wal-Mart was about 16% cheaper than the average supermarket, while today Wal-Mart is just over 10% cheaper.

This should be good news for small businesses that compete with Wal-Mart for customers. Like with any discount business, once Wal-Mart’s prices are no longer cheaper, they’ve lost their advantage.

Why do people shop at Wal-Mart? It isn’t convenience or customer service, it’s the price.

What can your business do to alleviate that price advantage and win customers back from Wal-Mart?

Secret deodorant was the top-selling deodorant of the decade.

Sometimes, it’s good to be the oldest.

It’s an advantage for websites in terms of SEO rankings (Google crawlers favor older, established websites) and it’s also an advantage for tried-and-true products. Some consumers never stray from what they know to be a good product.

For example, Secret deodorant has been the leading women’s deodorant since it was introduced in 1973./ Its catchy slogan, “strong enough for a man, made for a woman” has stuck with consumers. Last year, the brand controlled 17.9 percent of America’s $2.5 billion market, according to Euromonitor International, a market research firm.

How do you get your product or service to be the most popular in your category?

Popularity can be finicky, because everyone has an opinion. What sort of marketing plans can you use for your product or service when up against the “old” guys?