Most of my readers are familiar with Hannah Garman, a beautiful 4-year-old girl from Lititz with a brain tumor—it’s a rare and aggressive type of cancer called glioblastoma multiforme. She is receiving radiation treatments at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, but her diagnosis gives her only eleven months to live.
Her mother died of cancer while Hannah was still an infant, leaving Hannah’s father, Darin, a single parent of three children. (Hannah has an older sister, Brittany, and an older brother, Jordan.) Imagine being in Darin’s shoes, having to acknowledge, as he did yesterday, “Without a miracle, we are only buying time.”
Hannah became a source of inspiration this Christmas, when she made a wish.
Hannah’s Christmas wish was simply for cards—and her plea touched the hearts of people near and far. The overwhelming response numbered in the tens of thousands and included a parade of more than 50 fire and other emergency-response vehicles in her honor. (Intell)
Her family wasn’t sure at first whether to make her situation and wish public, and so many of us are glad they did.
If you, like me, did not have the opportunity to send Hannah a Christmas card, I invite you to attend a benefit concert for her this Saturday evening. It’s being held at Bube’s Brewery (and yes, that rhymes with n00bs), 102 North Market Street in Mount Joy, in the Bottling Works. It will run from 9 p.m. – 12 midnight and feature as many as 20 musicians and bands, including a personal favorite (and fellow CHL-er) Hiram Ring.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to Hannah and her family. Watch with us over your child Hannah, and grant that she may be restored to that perfect health which it is yours alone to give.
In rough economic times, the apparition of class-based angst puts a damper on bling. It’s one thing to show off your wealth when upward mobility is running strong; it’s another to do so when tens of thousands are losing their jobs and sliding into poverty.
That gives us a unique cultural situation. People with money spend less of it during hard times (that’s how they hold on to wealth) and are hesitant to do anything that looks like they’re rubbing it in that they’re wealthy. That’s an entrepreneurial opportunity.
No. 6: Mentoring
Problem: Flashy excess and exclusivity is seen as bad (as well as too expensive) Asset: Worthy mentees
The word on the street is that membership at Lancaster’s Hamilton Club, which costs a few thousand dollars a year, is tanking. Downtown’s upscale art galleries are complaining that they have lots of viewers but few buyers. Private golf club memberships continue their slow decline.
In so many words, expensive exclusivity is out, and open mentoring is in. The fewer people there are at the Hamilton Club when you go there, the less worthwhile it will be. What was once “exclusive” will appear instead to be dying.
So where are wealthy people supposed to get their kicks? They get it by patronizing young and exciting artists, by mentoring up-and-coming visionaries, and by founding places where fresh ideas come to life.
If you’re an entrepreneur, the challenge in 2009 will not be to get past the velvet rope to hobnob with an exclusive crowd. The challenge instead will be to find the people leaving those scenes and to engage them in your work.
When times are tough, no one wants to rest on their laurels. Seek out the elites who could and pique their interest in your projects. Learn from them, give them a real stake in things, and satisfy their need to be involved in something new and exciting.
In 2009, I expect telecommuting worldwide to take a hit. Yes, we saw an increase in employers allowing employees to telework in 2008—the figure jumped from 30% of organizations in 2007 to 42% in 2008, according to a WorldatWork study.
While a CompTIA Web survey indicated that telecommuting improves productivity and lowers costs, the fact remains that allowing employees to telecommute introduces risk to employers. Risks to the security of data is just the beginning; many managers and organizations simply don’t have experience with a telecommuting program, which makes a new telecommuting program a management and human-resources risk.
If there’s one trend you can count on in 2009, it’s this: Employers will seek to avoid risk with reckless abandon.
While many are continuingto push forthespreadoftelecommuting (and some see the upward trend to continuing through next year), it’s going to be a very tough sell to employers.
The number of managers experienced with telecommuting is especially low in areas, like Lancaster County and Central PA, that were historically heavy on manufacturing. When it comes to using communications technologies and adopting fresh business strategies, the rust belt is rusty.
Therefore, I see very little opportunity to change the way existing organizations handle telecommuting, particularly in our region. Where I do see the opportunity is in attracting people and companies that already embrace telecommuting to our region due to the combination of our low cost of living and our proximity to major metropolitan areas. Doing that attracting is the fifth opportunity for entrepreneurial fun and profit in 2009
No. 5: Telecommuting
Problems: Few Central PA employers will offer telecommuting as an option; less “tele-commutable” work worldwide Assets: Low cost of living in Lancaster/Central PA, combined with being within travel distance to major East-Coast metropolitan areas
There is no denying that telecommuting is more viable now than ever. It may stop expanding as a trend in 2009, but by some estimates as many as 59% of organizations offer some of their employees the option to do at least some work outside the office. One of the big reasons that employers embrace telecommuting is because it can drastically reduce costs (especially the overhead costs of having to “house” an employee in the office).
If this is what you see when you telecommute, doesn't it make sense to live somewhere with a low cost of living? Photo by Flickr user DDFic, under a Creative Commons license.
At the same time, there are still risks and disadvantages to employers. The most popular way of mitigating those risks and disadvantages is by having employees who telecommute spend at least a little time each week on site, either in the office or at a face-to-face meeting with a client.
Whether the case at hand is of an individual or of a company, the cost of living in Lancaster specifically and Central PA generally should be attractive. If you’re going to telecommute, it makes more sense to do so from a location where the cost of living is low rather than from, say, midtown Manhattan.
Lancaster is a more affordable place than Manhattan. It’s 49% cheaper to live here. It’s 34% cheaper than Boston, 49% cheaper than Washington DC, 19% cheaper than Newark, 7% cheaper than Baltimore, and 8% cheaper than Philadelphia. (You can do your own comparisons at BestPlaces.net.)
For an individual or company, relocating to this region would fall somewhere between having hour-long commutes and telecommuting from India. An individual telecommuting from India can’t be at the important meeting in Baltimore tomorrow afternoon. An individual with an hour-long commute is still in the suburbs of a city with a high cost of living (to say nothing of the 2 hours spent in transit each day).
Telecommuting required a new set of tools, procedures, and practices in order to become viable on a mass scale. Telelocating (telecommunitying? proximity-telecommuting?) will require the same. Serious profits await the ones who develop those tools, procedures, and practices and bring them to scale.
It answers the question “whom should I follow?” when someone from the area gets on Twitter, and serves as a quick reference for visitors when they’re in the area and are looking for ideas of what to do (or who simply want to rant about our weirdly-named towns).
In 2009, there is a renewed opportunity to tap into something that has been paid less and less attention in recent years: Max Weber’s good old Protestant work ethic. Finding appropriate ways to leverage it constitutes the fourth problem you can solve next year for fun and profit.
No. 4: Lending
Problem: Tight lending and poor investment returns Asset: High levels of personal savings in our region
Credit has dried up. When banks are reticent to loan to each other, what makes you think they’re going to loan to you?
Yet again, there appears to be a viable solution in localizing. While national banks are hurting, local banks in Central PA like Fulton, Union National, and Susquehanna are running strong. Their balance sheets look good (people actually keep money in those banks, as opposed to just borrowing from them), and corporate lending is active.
A profitable way of solving the problem by using the assets at hand may involve local financial institutions. Then again, they may play only a peripheral role.
Make this man proud. Hook up local hard-working folks with interest on their savings by lending to other local hard-working folks.
Here’s the deal: We live in an area where personal savings rates are high. People are earning precious little interest on those savings. The fact that other people need to borrow money isn’t a problem, it’s a huge local opportunity.
As of 2007 (the most recent year that data is available for from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), residents of the Northeast U.S. save, on average, 6.6% more of their income than residents of the rest of the U.S. Here in the Northeast the average household puts 23.5% of its annual income ($15,816) into savings, as opposed to 16.5% in the Midwest, 19.1% in the South, and 15.0% in the West.
It’s worth noting that in the Northeast, an average of $1,730 (9.2%) of household income came from investments (including interest, dividends, and rental/property income).
OK, so narrowing it down to the Northeast is cool and all, but how can I say the strength of this asset (personal savings) is particularly high in Central PA? Here, I have to rely on the same rationale Forbes used when they named Lancaster the tenth best city in which to ride out the recession: the equity people have in their homes.
As of September, according to Zillow real estate market reports, Lancaster County homeowners who made their purchase in the past five years have a median equity of $40,000 in their homes. That’s 30% of their home’s value.
Compare that with the median equity held in nearby Philadelphia (26%) or Baltimore (23%). In Boston, which edged us out in the Forbes list, it’s 21%. To see how bad it gets, observe the staggeringly negative 20% in Stockton, CA.
What’s more, in Lancaster, homes have only declined 4.9% in value since their peak (which was in the second quarter of 2007), versus 6.4% in Philadelphia, 10.2% in Baltimore, 16.6% in Boston, and 49.0% in Stockton. Elsewhere in Central PA, State College is rocking—where prices still haven’t peaked—and York-Hanover isn’t doing too poorly—home values there are down 10.7% from their peak.
With that evidence, the opportunity here is obvious: people in our area have savings. The savings are real, too—they’re not about to burst in a housing bubble or a Madoff Ponzi scheme. But the savings aren’t earning much interest. And if those savings could benefit the local economy while earning at least decent returns, that’s even more attractive. We have talented and resourceful individuals and entrepreneurs who could use some loaned capital. Put two and two together, and make a profit off this. Ready? Go.
