With the current economic crisis going on I could see many younger people who are just graduating or considering what they will do after high school thinking that business school might now be the best decision for them. When I saw all of the big companies falling in October I was thinking the exact same thing. I still wonder sometimes if there will be a place for all of the business people who are coming out of schools right now who imagined themselves going to jobs like trading or simply starting their own business. With all of the business failing and the latest unemployment numbers it may look like all of us who are still in business schools all over the country are just setting ourselves up for a big plunge in to a huge pool of unemployed, indebted people; but there are still plenty of options for people like us to actually turn this economic situation around ourselves.

The current word from our administration elect is that the future of our nation lies in the human resources and public works of the nation. To maintain the lifestyle that we live here we have to makes some kind of a big change to our economic structure to get people working again and this is a classical example that work in the last century so I have faith in in somewhat. I've been inspired to talk about it because of my current class on insurance. The class is simply an overview of types of insurance and how we might encounter working with them when we finally get out in to the business world. One part that I found to be most interesting is processing medical insurance leads which are applications people make asking for insurance approval. The business of insuring safety and health are areas where people are always needed and which tend to actually boom when times like these come. Areas like temporary medical insurance and senior car insurance seem to come to life because of people's general sense of insecurity when economics turn bad. Though we can't predict what will happen in the future I think for me this sort of sign gives me some hope that I ca help what is going on in the world right now with my skill set.

Posted by Greg on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 @ 11:35 AM

I remember when my cousin (who is a few years older than I am) decided to drop out of college and go to Massage school. My whole family thought she was crazy. She was a junior in college (at a very good and expensive school) and she was a psychology major. Then one day over break she saw an ad for a massage school and decided that she wanted to do that instead. She told her parents and they were mad of course at first. She had spent all of that time (3 years) and their money on school and it seemed like she was just going to blow it away in about 15 minutes.

So she looked up everything about massage on Wikipedia and searched for schools and finally convinced her parents to let her go over the summer (after she completed the rest of her junior year at the school she was currently in) to see how she felt about it. She enrolled in a summer session at the massage school and she loved it. I think her parents thought it was a joke kind of and they gave her about 3 weeks in it before they thought she would be crying to them to send her back to school. But she actually learned a lot and over the course of the summer her parents saw how much she was learning and how much she liked it.

I think us all kind of thought this was a joke and that it would blow over but now she has a job as a massage therapist at her own place and she makes a lot of money. The best part is that she's doing something she loves and she's helping people. She also volunteers her time (and hands) to help give massages to parents of kids who are in the hospital with serious illnesses. These parents sit in hospitals for days on end with their kids and don't really have a good bed to sleep in when they are there and they are so stressed out. So she gets to help out the people in need and it really makes her (and my aunt and uncle) feel good about her decision to drop out of college. She even met a doctor and has been dating him for awhile now while she was volunteering. And none of this would have happened if she hadn't taken that chance.

Posted by Greg on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 @ 11:19 AM

For students like myself and I am sure all of your reading, the current economic climate can be a bit baffling when you try to wrap your mid around it. For those of us who have all the common amenities of the typical college student it can feel as if this crisis is something that is happening in some far off lad where you have ever been. It may seem to you as if things have not changed one bit because you still go about life as usual and all that you know is that gas is cheaper and food is still expensive. Other than that it is as if those dealing with this crisis don't come from the same America in which we live, and I must admit that I share this sentiment with you.

I hear a lot of things about the housing crisis and about how this whole thing has bee caused by banks selling homes to people who could not afford them in the first place. For me personally this seems completely irrational on the part of both the banks and the buyers of the homes who thought they could survive despite buying something without money. In my family this whole economic downturn has turned in to something of a positive. Before the whole crisis began my family had been looking for homes and my parents had a few they were going to buy. The instability led them to wait and now that home prices have hit a really low point and people are begging for work in the home market my parents have moved in. They've been working with a contractor from schumacher homes to design a perfect home for them that they can both afford and live with for what might just be the rest of their lives.

Obviously with an economic situation that has managed to affect everyone on the world, there is not always only bad news. For my family and I am sure there are others like us, it is not as bad as it could be. Sometimes it even works out for the best.

Posted by Greg on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 @ 8:31 AM

Learning from others can be so beneficial. I never knew how important it was to take other people's experiences and failures and successes and build on them. Just recently our company paid us to go hear a motivational business keynote speaker, and he was just amazing to listen to. He told us about the things that he had learned himself by trial and error and many of the things seemed like common mistakes people would make.

He said that his primary goal was to make changes in the insurance industry. He had been looking for affordable Texas auto insurance, and found it very difficult to locate good insurance that was affordable in his area. It was at that time that he realized that he should do something to revolutionize the insurance industry. He needed to find a way to create an insurance company that was for the people. A company with affordable rates and one that he would be proud to be associated with. He knew that it was not going to be an easy task. Providing the best possible customer service, while keeping the premiums low, was definitely going to take some work. He then founded UniCare health insurance. With this new creation he managed to accomplish keeping the premiums low while providing people with good solid coverage in a customer friendly easy to use system. This was a lot of work, and it didn't happen overnight, but gradually he went on to figure it all out and found good incentives to motivate his employees and customers and was able to do it all on a budget.

Don't get me wrong, this guy makes a good salary, but he also gives profit sharing to his employees, which is a real motivator, he believes. He says that the people who have started out with him have made quite a profit, and that his customer service is constantly monitored via surveys of his customers and that every one seems happy with the coverage, service and user friendliness of the whole system. He says that employees treat their customers like family, always trying to provide them with the coverage that they need at a reasonable cost.

It was incredible to listen to this successful man speak and I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to get paid for such an incredible experience.

Posted by Greg on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 @ 12:04 PM

My husband is eternally the bargain shopper. He loves to find great items cheap and if he finds a real treasure he tries to sell it on Ebay. We go to estate sales, yard sales, and other miscellaneous what I call junk shops and we are always looking for the treasures. My husband really believes that he has an eye for these things, but I am not sure as I have more stuff in my house right now than I could ever possibly sell on Ebay. Anyway, this past weekend we were at a yard sale. There aren't that many this time of year, because of the weather, but still if there is a sale in our area, we are up bright and early on Saturday morning going to it.

This particular yard sale was actually a neighborhood basement sale and it was huge. They had everything from clothing and kids games, to collectibles and knives. My husband was extremely focused on the knives and had looked at several of them before choosing 2 specifically that he wanted to purchase. As always he talked the seller down to near nothing, he is extremely frugal, or should I say cheap. Anyway, when we got home with the knives he began researching them on the internet, and he found that one was a Ka-Bar original knife 11-3/4-inch fighting and utility knife used in World War II. This item was in excellent condition, and he said that he knew that a Ka-Bar was a really good, really popular knife. Well, he was right, he listed it on Ebay for $150.00 and sold it within an hour.

He was really thrilled about the sale considering he had only spent $3 on the knife, however, then once he started thinking about how quickly it sold he felt he could have probably gotten a higher price on it. I don't know whether that is true or not, but he really did prove to me that he knows something about what he is doing. I guess I will have to stay off his back for now, at least as long as I am spending his profits.

Posted by Greg on Tuesday, December 09, 2008 @ 11:25 AM

I had no idea that there was a Heavy Equipment School out there. I guess there are schools out there or classes that you can take so you can learn how to properly use machines like forklifts or cranes. I haven't really thought about it before, but I'm sure there are a lot of jobs that use forklifts and the company or some sort of rule or law probably requires them to take a class on how to work them for a safety or liability issue.

It really is interesting thinking about how many professions need heavy equipment like a forklift. My dad doesn't personally use one, but his company buys and sells other magazine and publishing companies, so once in a while they have to store the products in a warehouse while it is in transition and the people that work in the warehouse for my dad's company need to know how to use a forklift in order to move the magazine bundles around.

My uncle is a financial advisor for Clorox and he said that once in a while he has to go to the warehouse to supervise the amount of product coming in and if it matches the amount listed on the balance sheets and stuff like that and he often needs to be able to use a forklift.

I never really thought about how common it was to have to learn how to use one. Both my dad and uncle majored in finance in college and do not do manual labor at all in the workplace for their everyday job, but once in a while they may need to use a forklift and programs like Heavy Equipment School really do come in handy then.

I feel like workplaces are becoming a lot safer now. Maybe it is because more and more people are getting hurt and suing (who knows why really), but it seems like companies are taking more precautions than they ever did before which makes me feel a lot better about getting out into the real world and into the workforce. I think people are just becoming more aware of the environment and taking care of themselves and the things around them because we know more now than we did years ago. But this is positively affecting how to live day to day and even how we work, which is a really good thing.

Posted by Greg on Tuesday, December 02, 2008 @ 9:32 AM