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Be A Park-Down-The-Street Businessperson
By Jerry Kalish
This post isn’t directly about retirement plans for small businesses. Instead, you might say it is about what it takes for a small business to be able to afford to make retirement plan contributions by, you know, staying in business in the first place. In a nutshell, I've found with my business that what it takes is great customer service.
BizBox talked about this a little while ago in its post, It’s A Wonderful Small Bank, referring to a New York Times article about small community banks keeping themselves above water. BizBox saw these small financial institutions as a bellwether on how other small businesses can expect to fare in today’s difficult economic climate.
And it added: "You also see in the article what appeals about small banks: their down-home-ness, their ability to provide a level of personal service that larger companies would have a difficult time matching--the classic small business advantages."
In other words, they “get it”.
Now here’s the other side of the equation: the ones who don’t. It’s a story told by Seth Godin who once wrote a classic post on parking spaces. It has more application today than when he first wrote it over a year ago. Here it is in its entirety:
"The manager of the Chase bank in Pleasantville parks right out front. Her branch is on a quiet street with parking meters available for customers to use. Figure there's perhaps a dozen spaces convenient enough to make it worth going to the bank... if they're full, keep on driving, because there's always another bank coming up soon.
And yet, the manager parks right out front (in fact, I saw her move her car from two spaces away to an even closer spot today). She has four or five people working in the branch, so if they follow her lead, that's half the spaces.
Of course, it's a far bigger issue than parking spaces. It's about eating lunch with your employees, handing out free samples to customers instead of your friends, or answering the phone yourself when customer service gets backed up.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that there are really only two attitudes that people bring to work with them. 
Either they park right out front, or they park down the street in order to send a signal to their staff, their customers and themselves."
It's the park-down-the-street people who work for me in my small business. And it's the employers who have signs like this one in their parking lots who are the ones that will weather and even thrive in the current economic storm. The ones who will continue to contribute to their retirement plans.
Jerry Kalish is founder and President of National Benefit Services, Inc., a Chicago-based employee benefit consulting and administrative firm that serves private-held companies, publicly traded companies, and public sector employers. He blogs at The Retirement Plan Blog and can be reached at jerry@nationalbenefit.com.
Comments (0)December 18, 2008 9:33 AM
