Confessions aren’t enforceable in Florida, where the Duncans signed theirs. But New York’s courts are especially friendly to confessions and will accept them from anywhere, so lenders require customers to sign documents allowing them to file there.
Well, that's diabolical. Wow.
Duncan was running a struggling Florida real estate agency with her husband, Doug. She began each day in prayer, a vanilla latte in her hand and her Maltese Shih Tzu, Coco, on her lap, asking God for business to pick up.
This was the first line that made me feel they are just not very good business people. Praying to god for business to pick up instead of starting the day searching for ways to improve the business sounds like the exact sort of thing that "No one plans to fail, they just fail to plan" quote is aimed at. She's just kind of hoping things get better.
The couple had owned their agency, a Re/Max franchise, for three years and now had 50 employees, but they still weren’t turning a profit.
See, I don't get this. How do you have 50 employees and no profit? I don't understand that.
We clearly need better support for small businesses in the US. Small businesses are frequently being run by people who simply cannot compete with corporations and otherwise successfully "swim with the sharks."
We also need better support for micoenterprise -- for businesses with fewer than the ten employees that you need to qualify as a small business. The lack of good support for that sector is part of what is wrong with this country. We haven't created such support and I feel it is destabilizing the country.
Everything is "go big or go home" and that simply isn't healthy. It's fine to have some folks shooting for the stars, but that shouldn't be the only viable option.
> See, I don't get this. How do you have 50 employees and no profit? I don't understand that.
Ask Uber? :-) But Silicon Valley jokes aside, you can have a small business where the amount of money coming in pretty much exactly matches the money going out, and that is essentially no profit. For a real estate business, most of those employees would be brokers who would make no salary but would make a piece on the commission of each sale. So the percentage of the commissions that the agency kept covered rent, and admin staff, and maybe a salary for the principals.
Well, you will have to excuse me, but I'm some ninny who gave up a National Merit Scholarship to a big university elsewhere and went to the local college for a couple of years, then dropped out, in part because I knew two people with tons of student loans and no serious career who were mooching off of family (the mother in one case, the wife in another). So I didn't drink the koolaid and buy the idea that a sheepskin was a slam dunk path to having a real career and life on easy street. Thus, I wasn't willing to run up student loans to get a degree. I felt I could deliver newspapers (because that's what these two guys were doing) without a student loan and my life would be better without the debt if that was what I would be doing anyway.
I also found ways to make money on the internet while homeless and that helped get me off the street. It was critical that it actually turn a profit for me. Low pay was acceptable. High through-puts of money -- some going out and some coming in -- without a real profit absolutely was not acceptable.
So while I'm well aware of Twitter and Uber and all that, I cannot fathom running a small business that doesn't turn a profit. I just don't get that. To my mind, that makes no sense. Why on earth would I do that?
To my mind, you find something that is actually profitable and then grow it. It seems to me there has to be something wrong with a person's thinking that they take on 50 employees and still don't make money.
I just cannot wrap my brain around such a choice. I look at what I read and I think the people running the business, who were praying to God for business to improve -- presumably instead of actively researching how to make things work better (I realize you can do both and that assumption could be in error, but I can only go by the info included in the article) -- must have been doing something wrong in some important way.
If they are real estate agents those 50 people aren't really employees, they are real estate brokers working under the Duncan license. They aren't paid unless they sell something or someone sells something they listed. Then everyone, including the Duncan's, gets a cut of the commission.
> Praying to god for business to pick up instead of starting the day searching for ways to improve the business sounds like the exact sort of thing that "No one plans to fail, they just fail to plan" quote is aimed at.
Prayer is not necessarily contradictory with action, and the optimistic mindset it enables for some people can be invaluable in stressful situations.
Well, that's diabolical. Wow.
Duncan was running a struggling Florida real estate agency with her husband, Doug. She began each day in prayer, a vanilla latte in her hand and her Maltese Shih Tzu, Coco, on her lap, asking God for business to pick up.
This was the first line that made me feel they are just not very good business people. Praying to god for business to pick up instead of starting the day searching for ways to improve the business sounds like the exact sort of thing that "No one plans to fail, they just fail to plan" quote is aimed at. She's just kind of hoping things get better.
The couple had owned their agency, a Re/Max franchise, for three years and now had 50 employees, but they still weren’t turning a profit.
See, I don't get this. How do you have 50 employees and no profit? I don't understand that.
We clearly need better support for small businesses in the US. Small businesses are frequently being run by people who simply cannot compete with corporations and otherwise successfully "swim with the sharks."
We also need better support for micoenterprise -- for businesses with fewer than the ten employees that you need to qualify as a small business. The lack of good support for that sector is part of what is wrong with this country. We haven't created such support and I feel it is destabilizing the country.
Everything is "go big or go home" and that simply isn't healthy. It's fine to have some folks shooting for the stars, but that shouldn't be the only viable option.