Wealthy people rarely start that way – Fidelity Investments calculates that 88% of millionaires are self-made. And their businesses start small – Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) launched their respective empires out of garages. But you’ve got to start somewhere, right? And it helps to get a boost, which is the idea behind the Small Business Success Summit, which will be March 11 at the FFA Center at DMACC’s Ankeny campus. This daylong event, organized by the Greater Des Moines Partnership, will put business owners and managers face to face with successful entrepreneurs and advisers who can give them guidance on how to develop strategies to assess operational efficiencies and better leverage technology. They’ll also talk about key performance indicators, benchmarking and strategic growth. There will be 16 breakout sessions during the day, covering nuts and bolts issues such as hiring and retaining talent and best account practices. In a bow to the current business climate, the summit will discuss motivation of staff and contractors post-COVID. Dani Smid of the BrownWinick law firm also will discuss legal implications for a remote workforce, which appears to be settling in as the norm rather than a temporary patch to COVID-inspired disruptions of the workplace. (There also could be tax implications to employees, mainly, ofhaving them work from offices in their homes.) This isn’t meant to be a primer for start-ups, said Christina Moffatt (pictured), director of small business development for the Partnership. “Most of our businesses are up and running,” she said. Past attendees have been both owners and employees of firms, which tend to be service-based with mixes of retailing and professional services. The breakout sessions will wrap around a keynote address from Nick Sarillo, founder of Nick’s Pizza & Pub. His Chicago-area restaurants are both small – just two outlets – and large; they are one of the top 10 busiest independent pizza companies in per-store sales in the United States. Margins are nearly twice that of the average pizza restaurant. Perhaps as a backup to Sarillo, the Fidelity study pointed to these attributes to finding fame and fortune in an entrepreneur’s chosen endeavor:
They set ambitious goals and act on them.
They have mentors. They tap the best minds.
They look for feedback. Self-improvement never stops.
They are not afraid of failure. You can learn from failure.
Cash Is Not Dead Yet, Especially Among the Unbanked
BY STEVE DINNEN
The death of cash has perhaps been exaggerated. As we’ve heard for years, consumers just aren’t that into using greenbacks for their purchases. Credit card and debit card usage surges to new highs every year, ACH transactions occur day-in, day-out (including nights and weekends), and by 2020, only 19% of purchases were estimated to have been made with cash. Surely the zero-cash days are not far off. But financial thinkers question that assumption, and whether it’s even useful. The run from cash may be a byproduct of the experience of the middle and upper classes, Brookings Institution senior fellow Aaron Klein writes in American Banker. After all, they have the easiest access to noncash payment systems. But there still are 7 million households without a bank account. That locks them out of the ACH game, and credit and debit cards may not be an option. Fully one-third of unbanked people reported they were that way simply because they distrust the banking system. For them, cash is king. It’s also anonymous: Nobody’s toting up a list of your purchases and crafting a sales pitch based on your e-commerce transactions because they simply don’t exist.
Wage Gap Between High School and College Grads Grows
BY ADAM HARDY FOR YAHOO FINANCE
Typical young workers with college degrees now outearn their high-school-graduate counterparts by a record high $22,000 per year.
According to new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the median annual wage for a full-time worker age 22 to 27 with a high school diploma is $30,000. For a full-time worker with a bachelor’s degree, it’s $52,000.
The difference marks a pay gap of $22,000 — the highest on record with the New York Fed, which tracks earnings going back to 1990.
The findings are part of the new report on recent college graduates. The report also looks at unemployment, underemployment and wages for workers with different college majors. READ MORE.
More Than Half of Bitcoin Investors Have Lost Money
BY ROB CURRAN FOR MONEY.COM
The internet abounds in tales of overnight crypto millionaires. But making a killing – or even any money at all –may be a lot harder than it looks. Just how hard? According to one recent estimate, more than half of Bitcoin investors have actually lost money trading the cryptocurrency.
The trick to any investment is buying low and selling high. Nothing has demonstrated that axiom more clearly than Bitcoin, where early investors, sometimes after buying in for just pennies on a lark, saw their investments balloon into the millions or even billions of dollars. But, with Bitcoin becoming a mainstream asset, those easy money days are gone.
Lately Bitcoin’s price has hovered in the low $40,000s. That’s several times what it was in 2020, but well below its 2021 record of more than $60,000. The problem: Thousands of investors only jumped in recently, when Bitcoin’s price and hype were at all-time highs. READ MORE.
