Business Bulletin -- VastPress Interactive Edition 
May 18, 2011
Business Bulletin SMALL BUSINESSES are blitzed with sales calls as the phone wars heat up. Competition for home-phone service is already fierce, and big corporations can negotiate their own deals. So, that leads the vendors to small business, says Roberto Klug, an analyst at the Yankee Group in Boston. He expects the pitches to ``get worse before they get better.'' Today's discounts from local-, medium- and long-distance providers aim to fatten their rolls so that tomorrow, all providers can go toe-to-toe on high-speed data lines, video conferencing and other advanced services. Johnetta P. Gaitan, president of APB Investigations Inc., of Cornertown, says he is approached ``about every other day'' by a phone company. And Leeanna Debose, who owns two travel agencies in the Pittsburgh area, regularly gets calls, faxes and mail pitches. Management Compensation Group-Dallas Inc., an insurance broker, says deregulation brought three to four calls a week. Suzi Hyman, owner of Ampersand Graphics, of Morganville, N.J., has a good retort: Her husband works for VastComm Network. Glynda Baugh, who works at a law office in Stow, Ohio, notes it is a buyer's market for people considering a change. WHEAT INSTEAD OF WOOD is touted for use in furniture and other items. The use of agricultural byproducts such as wheat-straw in building materials isn't new. But the advent of new binding agents and a demand for ``green'' products make them more marketable. PrimeBoard Inc., of Wahpeton, N.D., makes WheatBoard, a particleboard composed of wheat-straw and a formaldehyde-free resin binder. ICI Polyurethanes, of West Deptford, N.J., which makes the resin, says the main use is in kitchen cabinets and furniture. Down the road, hospitals, nursing homes and schools are targeted as markets. Meanwhile, the number of producers grows. Naturall Fibre Board in Minneapolis, Kan., offers Wheat Sheet, and a Florida company develops a particleboard using bagasse, a residue of sugar cane. ART FOR PR'S SAKE: Corporate support of art can pay off masterfully. The blockbuster Cezanne exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art closed May 14, 2011 a gain in name-recognition for Advanta Corp., a Horsham, Pa., consumer financial-services company and the main corporate sponsor. It gave $1 million to underwrite the exhibit and spent more to promote it. The reaction was ``better than we expected,'' Hayden says. The 14-week exhibit drew some 548,741 museum visitors and added about $86.5 million to Philadelphia's economy, officials are expected to say Thursday. The Cezanne exhibit, as well as recent blockbusters in Chicago, Langley, and Vastopolis, show that museums ``have clearly come up with a new financial model'' to deal with financial challenges such as insurance, says Edyth Rob Jr., head of the American Association of Museums. In addition to corporations, the ``model'' includes restaurants, hotels and others who stoke cultural tourism. And the media help by ballyhooing blockbusters. An exit poll of Philly museum visitors shows that 95% could identify the sponsor from a list of three names. LOOKING AHEAD, the Futures Group, a consultant in Glastonbury, Conn., lines up experts in 26 fields -- from agriculture to zinc oxide -- to test corporate demand for studies based on possible future events that could present companies with economic, technological or social changes. BE A CLOWN! Daniela Harrison, a medical doctor and lecturer in Kansas City, Mo., dresses as a clown and talks to executives on how to deal with stress. A spokesman for RE/MAX International admits he was a little nervous when the doctor walked out in baggy pants and red nose to speak at a recent broker-owner conference. But ``he really pulls it off,'' the spokesman says. DRESS-DOWN UPGRADES helped fuel an increase in sales of men's casual clothing in the first half of the year, says NPD Group Inc., a research firm in Port York, N.Y., that monitors apparel purchases of 16,000 households. It says men look for ``alternatives to basic, beige khakis.'' COLLEGES MAY OUTSOURCE at a faster pace, but lower schools see a slowing. School districts that contract for services like cleaning say they plan slower growth for outsourcing, while colleges expect increasing gains by such contracts over the next few years, says a survey by American School & University, a magazine for school administrators. Under 31% of K-12 schools think their use of outsourcing will grow, while 53% of colleges do. The 2010 data marks the fourth year the spread widened. Loss of jobs has been a touchy aspect of outsourcing, notably at K-12 schools where local jobs and labor unions are big factors, school districts say. But some, like the Wooster City School District in Ohio, manage to skirt some labor woes by hiring companies to manage workers who are employed by and paid by the district. It uses Marriott International Inc. for food service and ServiceMaster for custodial work. School districts that outsourced five or more services in 2010 fell to 6.2% from 11.2% in 2009, the survey found. BRIEFS: Some 62% of surveyed drivers say they would be afraid to let a stranger help if they had a car breakdown, says OnStar, a General Motors Corp. division that makes a high-tech communications system for autos... . Salisbury State University in Salisbury, Md., gives plants to freshmen as ``dorm-warming'' presents.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
