Saturday, May 15, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Small businesses hunt for good help

Conference offers tips on developing reliable workers

Anthony Coley jumps on Friday inside one of the inflatable jumping playrooms used by his company, Jumps R Us Party Rentals. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

Anthony and Deborah Coley have met their goal of doing 20 "jumpers" a week since moving to Las Vegas last year with their small business, Jumps R Us Party Rentals.

They rent inflatable playrooms shaped like castles and tractors in which children bounce around at birthday parties and carnivals. They also rent hot dog, popcorn and margarita machines.

To go beyond worrying about the small stuff from week to week, the Coleys need to find trustworthy, reliable employees to help grow the business.

The question Anthony Coley posed Thursday to panelists at the Fortune Small Business conference at The Venetian: How do you motivate part-time employees to make the kind of commitment that adds value to your company?

The word in vogue is "engaging" the worker, said Paul Singh, director of programs at Winning Workplaces in Evanston, Ill.

"Engagement of the employee is to spur an emotional reaction to one, his work, two, the company, and three, the economic well-being of the company," Singh said at the conference, which ties in with National Small Business Week starting Monday. "And the company must reciprocate that emotional investment."

The model company that garnered admiration from 200 small-business owners who attended the conference, most of them from Las Vegas, was a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based software firm called Motek.

It was founded in 1990 with $2 million in venture capital by Ann Price, who began her career as a technology consultant with GE Consulting Services in 1982, implementing IBM mainframe systems.

"Early on in my consulting, I learned that private companies don't share their information but they give a lot of power to their people. Public companies share information, but the shareholders have no power," she said.

Price, chief executive officer of Motek, opens up the financial books to all of her employees, some of whom have equity in the company.

She said she wanted to give $20,000 bonuses after the first year of profitability to engineers who had computer science master's degrees and could have easily jumped ship during the dot-com boom, but they turned down the bonuses until they saw a second profitable year.

"I was shocked," Price said. "I wanted to go from three weeks of paid vacation to five weeks, and they said, `Let's do four.' "

Dennis Berlein, principal of Wright Engineers in Las Vegas, asked Price how to motivate workers to put in more than eight hours a day when necessary.

"Turn it on its ear," she responded. "Tell them they can't work more than eight hours. Shut down the server at 5 o'clock. I know it sounds counterintuitive. If you can't get your work done in 40 hours a week, maybe you're not a good engineer."

Beverly Collins, president of Detroit Connection, a nonprofit group of about 280 financial supporters from Detroit who fund scholarships and volunteer as tutors at schools in western Las Vegas, said she came to the conference to pick up new ideas.

"A nonprofit needs to be run like a small business," she said. "I want to see if there's anything I can get that would be pertinent to a nonprofit. It could be organizational, fund raising, where the money is."

Brian Dumaine, editorial director of Fortune Small Business magazine, said the conference helps educate entrepreneurs on issues such as how to secure capital, how to grow a business, foreign competition and rising health care costs.

"And it's a great way to get stories for the magazine," he said. "It's a branding experience, a way to get the magazine out there."

The conference goes to Chicago in June, Los Angeles in August and Orlando, Fla., in September.