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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Beth Ewen
March 2004

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Expansion

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Dear Informer

Owner who’s tired of business needs time to reflect, Informer says

DEAR INFORMER: I’m getting so sick of my business. It’s the same thing over and over, yet I’m feeling more anxiety than ever. I feel like I’m hitting the wall.

DEAR SICK:When employees can’t stand their jobs anymore, they can always look for another one. Not so for business owners, who do get sick of their companies but have far too much invested to walk away.

Suzanne Kochevar, chair of a newly forming TEC group in the Twin Cities and a master certified coach, says she’d ask several probing questions of this person. “The key there is, are they really willing to look at what’s going on in their lives?

“One of the questions I’d ask: How do they spend time for themselves, how do they reflect, and do they do any planning for their own personal life?” Kochevar says. “I’d ask them, ‘What makes you want to get up in the morning, and then what wakes you up at 2 a.m. so you can’t get to sleep again?’ In those two answers you might find out what’s going on.”

She said it’s not rare for business owners to get bored. “Entrepreneurs are almost addicted to the edginess, and when the edginess is not there, it’s like, ‘This is not fun, I need something more.’ ”

Monica Little started Little & Co., a graphic design agency in Minneapolis, 25 years ago. She told Upsize last month that she hit the wall a few years ago, when she was bored with her company but anxious about it, too. An outgoing person, Little says she spent time on introspection to get the fire back, asking herself, “I loved this once, how could I get back to that again?”

Kochevar recommends a retreat, for a weekend, by yourself. Look into these questions: What does your ideal life look like? “You can break it down: What does it look like financially, at work, with family, emotionally? If no question got answered but that one, there’s so much meat in that,” Kochevar says.

Then spend time completing the comment, “I have a dream to….”  “A lot of times our dreams get pushed back when we’re in the day-to-day crisis mode of most businesses. If we’re leaders of our organizations we don’t spend much time planning, we spend all our time putting out fires. It needs to be the other way around,” Kochevar says.

Finally, a suggestion from the Informer: Why not take a new risk? Isn’t there a new product line you’ve been wanting to develop, or a new market to tap, or a new city to conquer? You can go from feeling blah to scared to death in no time — and that’s often exactly how entrepreneurs like to feel.

Suzanne Kochevar, TEC and En-Visioneering: 952.474.2462; suzanne@en-visioneering.com; www.teconline.com

FINANCE

DEAR INFORMER: How do I check the credit history of a potential customer? I know that’s the thing to do, but I can’t just demand to see their checkbook.

DEAR NOSY: No, but you can ask them for a bank reference and a couple of trade references, says Susan Johnson‚ who fields such calls fairly often in her job as a banker at Fidelity Bank.

“It’s always best, if there’s a possibility to do it, to actually talk to the person directly” rather than get information via a letter, she says, because you can pick up enthusiastic inferences — or lack thereof.

She says most bankers are willing to give such references, because it helps out their customers. “I always view my client being able to obtain any type of trade credit as a real benefit,” she says. “I really like to help out any way I can in that regard.”

Bankers are able to give out limited information because of privacy rules. They can say when a client opened the relationship, generally with a checking account; what the average balance has been over the last 12 months (and they give a range, not an exact amount); and whether the account has been handled satisfactorily or not. They can say the amount of a credit line, the amount outstanding (again in ranges), what it’s secured by, and whether things have been handled as agreed.

“You know that they’re going to give a trade reference of people they paid well, but if you can talk to that person you can get an idea of the way information is delivered, how does that trade supplier feel” about payment on the account, Johnson adds.

She says credit references have not spawned the legal challenges that plague employment references. “With the credit information, it’s factual. It’s black or white, so that’s a little different than employment references that are more subjective.”

Susan Johnson, Fidelity Bank: 952.830.7243; susan@fidelitybankmn.com

HEALTH BENEFITS

DEAR INFORMER: I’ve been told I should do health-care education to reduce premium costs. How do I do that without seeming like Evil Big Brother?

DEAR BENEVOLENT:The best way to not be evil Big Brother is to be straightforward and honest with employees.

The cost of health-care premiums is likely going up. You are probably going to have to shift part of those costs to employees. There are ways to keep your and their costs down. All of those points can be made to employees in regular staff meetings or e-mails from the president or monthly newsletters.

If you’ve kept all such information secret before, start small. Jeffrey Chanen of The Maintenance Team in Eden Prairie started a newsletter last February, in which he updated employees on various projects and reminded them to save their overtime dollars because premium increases were ahead.

Meanwhile, it’s likely that employees are way ahead of you. Nearly everyone knows the state of health-care insurance. Many who’ve been laid off have experienced the big bad world of such costs if they pay for them on their own. It’s likely that they feel at least a bit grateful for whatever your company is providing, even though they might complain.

Chris Bracher believes you’ll learn a lot from your employees if you engage them in focus groups. He’s director of employee benefits for Thomson Legal & Regulatory, a giant group based in Eagan. “They’ll tell you a lot,” Bracher says. “They taught us they needed resources” to make better choices on health care. His group used an outside professional facilitator to conduct the focus groups, with company HR personnel not present, in order to encourage free speech.

He recommends targeting your communication to people who will be affected by changes. He also suggests training managers on the changes, who will in turn work directly with their staffs.

Thomson sponsored a health fair, which lasted six hours with various vendors conducting cholesterol and other tests. It cost less than $2,000 and 2,000 employees went through it, he says.

“We feel strongly that now it’s time to involve the employee and their dependents,” he says. “We’re going to tell them what it will cost them and what it will cost the company.”

He’s a big believer in targeting the group of employees that falls in the middle on health-care usage. Every group will have some who barely use it on one hand, and some who are managing chronic diseases on the other. “Then there’s the group in between that we’d like to catch, pre-diabetic, pre-heart condition,” Bracher says. Online health risk assessments, with links to disease management information, are excellent for this.

Finally, all-staff health initiatives are great for team-building. For example, the Informer knows that in the late ’90s, at least, employees at Minnesota Power in Duluth trained for and ran Grandma’s Marathon together, including the CEO. Such ideas seem like a great way to torpedo any negative Big Brother images.

Chris Bracher, Thomson Legal & Regulatory: 651.687.3593; chris.bracher@thomson.com