Indeed, it’s time again to nominate your outstanding peers for the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 1999 Small Business Awards.
Nominations are being sought for: Small Business Person of the Year; Small Business Exporter; Young Entrepreneur; Entrepreneurial Success Award; Media Advocate; Financial Services Advocate; Minority Advocate; Women in Business Advocate; Accountant Advocate; and Veterans Advocate.
The SBA has added five awards: The Phoenix Award for Disaster Recovery; The Phoenix Award for Outstanding Contributions to Disaster Recovery; Welfare to Work Entrepreneur of the Year; Welfare to Work Small-Business Owner of the Year; and Welfare to Work SBA Associate of the Year.
Sponsors can nominate people in very category. To get your one-page application and list of eligibility criteria, call the SBA at (412) 395-6560, or write to: SBA, Small Business Awards Coordinator, 1128 Federal Building, 1000 Liberty Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15222-4004.
There’s only one catch: You have to have your forms in by Oct. 2, 1998.
Can you say “guanxi?”
With the help of a university and a major corporate partner, Development Dimensions International is reaching halfway around the world to foster business relations with China.
DDI, no stranger to the Pacific Rim, has offices in six countries in the region and works with more than 200 clients in the greater China region, many of them U.S.-based multinationals. Through a collaborative effort with a university and a multinational corporation, DDI is raising its visibility in a region whose economy is expected to grow exponentially in the next century and will no doubt find itself in need of services.
A team comprising West Virginia University faculty and executives of TRW Corp. traveled to China this spring to provide instruction in employee selection, retention and training techniques to some 150 officers of state-owned companies and high-level government officials unable to travel to the United States. DDI and other U.S.-based corporations underwrite the program.
DDI has given a grant of $125,000 to the university to help fund the workshops and sponsor one Chinese student a year for three years enrolled in the university’s Center for Chinese Business curriculum.
“The goal of the program is to build business relationships-the Chinese call it ‘guanxi’-through education, research and trade,” says William Riley, director of the university’s Center for Chinese Business.
When small business is big business…
Who cares about small business? Big business, that’s who.
Dell Computer, the $13-billion computer manufacturer, has launched a full-scale marketing plan that targets small-business customers, which it defines as companies with fewer than 400 employees.
Dell is courting small businesses for good reason: Its sales to small businesses increased to more than $1 billion in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 1998-a 65 percent increase over the previous year. Since March, Dell has offered a service that provides personalized Web sites for more than 1,200 of its small-business customers. For high-volume small-business customers, the company is now offering a number of new Internet-based services.
The company, for instance, is offering a “virtual account executive,” which brings on-site sales presentations to small-business customers via the Internet. Customers are briefed on Dell’s latest products and are shown demonstrations to highlight features.
A monthly seminar program, in cooperation with Microsoft Corp. and Iomega Corp., which offers computer and Internet how-tos, is offered online. About 2,000 businesses attended in June, the company says.
Not far from its own small-business roots, Michael Dell started the company as PCs Limited, a one-person firm in 1984. Four years later, it went public as Dell Computer at $8.50 a share.
Dell’s Web site is www.dell.com.
Here’s one fall-back career that wasn’t needed
As Bill Tillotson, founder and chairman of Hefren-Tillotson Inc., threw out the first pitch at a recent Pirates game in celebration of his company’s 50th anniversary, he couldn’t help but see the irony in that pitch.
After all, as any good entrepreneur will do in the early days, Tillotson held a side job to supplement his income. However, unlike those of most fledgling business owners, his happened to be semipro baseball.
As the story goes, Tillotson aspired briefly to become a pro ballplayer but ended his career as a fill-in catcher after missing the birth of his first child because of a double-header. Instead, he went on to join his father-in-law’s stock brokerage firm, Arthur R. Hefren & Co. In 1962, Tillotson bought out his father-in-law’s share and renamed the company Hefren-Tillotson Inc.
The message here: Invest early and often
Any smart business owner will tell you that, to grow effectively, you need to invest in new product development and training. Now, a study by accounting firm Alpern, Rosenthal & Co. and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business has confirmed it.
In the study, 236 senior executives of manufacturing companies in Western Pennsylvania offered the preliminary insights into the practices that make them most successful. To grow, they say, companies need to:
- Design new products.
- Increase expenditures for research and development.
- Provide ongoing training to employees.
- Use computers more.
- Have quality and benchmark programs.
- Create advisory boards.
- Spend more money on new equipment.
The second phase of the study is expected early in 1999.