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 Exercise 25.3
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To localize national "Small Business Is Big in the USA Week," financial writer Mary Beth Sammons wrote a profile for The Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill., of two small-business people who had been honored for their success by local chambers of commerce. Following are the notes she compiled for one of the profiles. Write a story using her notes as though they were your own.
From the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs: There are 225,000 businesses with fewer than 500 employees in the state. They account for 94.4% of Illinois business.
Interview with Peter Lineal: Owner of Plum Grove Printers in Schaumburg and recent recipient of the Northwest Suburban Association of Commerce and Industry's "Small Business Person of the Year" award.
He's 31. He founded the one-man printing shop at age 26 after following a traditional path after college graduation, landing a job in his major at a small advertising and publishing firm. Although promotions soon followed, he became frustrated after five years and decided to pursue his own business venture.
Because opening a business would be such a financial burden on his family, Lineal also assumed the daily care of his infant while his wife worked full time to pay the bills during the first year of the print shop's operation.
Funny story about meeting clients with an infant strapped to his stomach in a Snugli: "It seems hard to believe when I look back on it, but I used to carry the baby strapped in a Snugli to my chest while I ran the presses and took customer orders. One day, when I was in the middle of a sales pitch to these three women, the baby woke
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up and was just screaming. There I was trying to calm the baby and win over some customers. It was quite a comical sight." The clients were from the Concrete Reinforced Steel Institute in Schaumburg. Today it is one of Plum Grove Printers' biggest accounts.
Staff of 13 full-time and part-time employees now. Company's profits have risen sharply after a profit of $172 the first year.
Business philosophy: "I tell my salespersons and my entire staff that they work for the customer, not for me. If the customer says don't worry about some detail, I insist that we worry about it anyway. We've always got to take that extra step. If you take care of the customer, he takes care of you."
On that terrible first year: "The first year we were in business was pretty grim because we were in a storefront that wasn't visible from the road. I think many small business persons make similar mistakes like that and it can be quite costly."
He says "profitability" is what it takes to be successful. "You've got to control costs, and by that I mean count all the pennies and nickels. When you start making a profit, you have a real tendency to grow, grow, grow, but you've got to have a cost-controlled and carefully calculated growth."
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2007 McGraw-Hill Higher Education