Good Bad-News, Jobs, Free Money (kind of) and Dara Khosrowshahi
It’s a good bad-news kind of week!
Factory orders were below expectations – good bad-news.
This is where everything starts; consumer demand generates the factory making stuff. As demand softens, orders decrease. That’s why that index is watched.
The ADP employment numbers were way below expectations – good bad-news.
It was expected that new jobs as measured by employee additions on ADPs system would be 261,000, up from 245,000 in February.
That number came in at 145,000
As Maxwell Smart would say: “Missed it by that much.”
Initial jobless claims came in higher than expected – more good bad-news!
Bad news is good to have. Why? Because the sooner the Fed thinks that the economy is cooling off – factory orders down, ADP employment numbers down, jobless claims up – the sooner they stop raising interest rates.
And that’s good news.
Job Openings Going Down
Job openings for February dropped from 10.6 million to 9.9 million. That’s a drop.
Either 700,000 people were hired or 700,000 openings were eliminated. Or some combination thereof.
But guess how many people quit their jobs in the midst of banking, economic and inflationary pressures? 4,000,000. That’s confidence. This number peaked at 4.5 million in April 2022.
To give you an idea of scale, in March 2020, only 2,000,000 people quit their jobs.
To be fair, one could argue that everyone else had already lost theirs to covid.
The number of job openings per unemployed worker is 1.7, down from 1.9.
Pre-pandemic, it was 1.2.
There is still a LOT of cushion in the job market which can help make for a soft landing.
Free Money: $3000 for businesses with 50 or fewer employees and $15,000 with businesses with 51 to 499 employees.
As the Genie would say, there are a few provisos and a couple of quid pro quos.
#1: You have to live in San Bernardino County’s unincorporated mountain communities where the winter weather, aka snow, impacted your ability to do business.
#2: Have less than 500 employees.
#3: Must have been in business prior to February 27, 2023.
#4: Cannot be a home based business.
Click here to learn more.
This Report has more of a focus on southern California. I would guess that areas with tornado/storm activity probably have similar assistance.
Check with your local county/state chambers of commerce or the local SBA – Small Business Administration – office to see what programs they may have for your area.
Some are very easy to apply for; others, not so much.
Who is Dara Khosrowshahi? I pride myself as being mostly clued in with what is going on with the chiefs of Fortune 500 companies, but I was a little embarrassed that I had never heard this name before, until this past weekend in the Wall Street Journal.
One of my favorite shows is Undercover Boss. Why? It shows how detached and disconnected the C-Suite (CEO, CIO, CMO, CHR – notice the ‘C’s? Chief Executive Officer, Chief Information Officer, Marketing, HR and so on) can be from the line. Not ALL C-Suite folks, but definitely some.
By ‘line’, I mean the folks that are on the line, either with dealing with the customer or the product – the factory line, the sales line.
And they also discover that many of their employees really do know what they are doing. Imagine that.
So, after realizing that money alone wasn’t going to get his company better and that banging your head against the wall does not lead to different results, he decided to find out what his front-line people go through every day by becoming a front line person.
He found it was not easy to join his company’s app – he found the experience “clunky”.
Kind of like calling some big company customer service number, and entering your zip code, account number and last four of your SSN and then having the service person ask for that same information again. But I digress.
He found that their software did in fact, punish him for rejecting gigs.
He found that some customers really can be rude.
He found that throwing money at a problem may not fix it.
He found that not seeing your passenger’s destination is an issue.
Mr. Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber.
I’ll add one to that: If you land at Montgomery airport at 11:30 at night, and open the Uber app to get a ride, don’t have it keep “searching” for 10 minutes; just tell me there are no drivers so I can go to plan B. Better yet, give me a plan B, like the phone number for the local taxi service. Think Zappos; if you can’t do it, refer your customer to someone that can.
Mr. K used this information to make things better at Uber for their drivers.
So why do I bring this up? Many of you who read this Report are small business owners. By definition, you are the line person and the C-Suite all wrapped into one. I’m guessing you get it.
But, as you grow, do NOT forget what it was like to be on the line.
When you implement a new process, procedure or product, test it yourself. Don’t pass it off to someone else. It’s your name on the business, not theirs.
In banking, I can’t tell you how many times we received a policy, process or product change that seemed to be derived from the C-Suite’s Thursday night of beers and ideas on cocktail napkins. In Omaha.
Yes, that’s a clue.
The Final Thought
Make sure you understand how your customer sees your business. Their perspective is reality, regardless of how you think it looks. Test your customer interfaces – website, phone system, email – and see it from the perspective of your customers.
I guarantee you’ll see room for improvement.
Next up, the CPI – Consumer Price Index!
