From the monthly archives:

August 2010

Small Business Job Churn

by Rafi Kronzon on August 30, 2010

Churning

Back from a great vacation to Cape Cod, which except for 3 days of torrential rain, was awesome. I was catching up on some small business news, and came across this article about job losses broken out by business size.

I’ve already chimed in about the small business economy, but what I found interesting about this article was the amount of churn being reported. Churn is the replacement of old jobs with new jobs. For the approximately 3.2 million small business job losses each quarter, there is a gain of about 3.1 million jobs.

This is a huge amount of churn.  Why such a big number?

One obvious theory is that small firms come and go faster than big firms, thus the bigger number. But I wonder if there is something else going on here? Is the churn simply a reflection of a new way of working – one in which switching jobs and careers is normal? I discussed this in a previous post, check it out.

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Landing a Client on the Cheap

by Rafi Kronzon on August 18, 2010

WSJ posted a cool slide show on how different small businesses have landed customers without spending much money. Obviously, this is something every small business owner is thinking about. Some are obvious, but it actually gave me a few ideas.

My favorites? A golf outing (who wouldn’t want to play golf?) and stalking leads on foursquare.

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Career Path No More

by Rafi Kronzon August 17, 2010 Dealing with Employees

     An interesting post by Paul Downs – a small business owner – in the NYT    yesterday. His small business isn’t growing, so he feels guilty that he’s not providing a growth path for his employees. I think the concept of career path has completely changed. Very few people thinks they will stay with a company for  long anymore, [...]

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Sometimes Smaller is Better

by Rafi Kronzon August 16, 2010 Owner’s Corner

A recent article in Crain’s discussed how many lawyers are leaving big firms and starting their own firms as clients demand payment arrangements other than standard hourly billing. The bigger firms, for the most part, are too slow to change and are losing business. Hats off these entreprenerus. To me, this is another example why small businesses [...]

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Mobile Service on NYC Subways? Bring it On!

by Rafi Kronzon August 12, 2010 Home Technology

This project has been bouncing around for about 10 years, and now it’s being reported  that it may be alive again. A lot of people are against service on the subways. I say bring it on! NYC is technologically behind the rest of the globe in just about everything; internet connectivity, speed, city-wide Wifi, etc. Paul Krugman, everyone’s [...]

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Delegating in August

by Rafi Kronzon August 11, 2010 Dealing with Employees

Many small business owners, including myself, take vacations in August. This is a perfect time to brush up on delegating; a skill many of us lack. I found a good post called How to Let Go and Delegate a Task, which lists 6 steps of delegation. I don’t know about you, but I could really improve in [...]

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