03/ 25/ 2002
by Mark Kakkuri
When Cynthia McKay, CEO of Le Gourmet Gift Basket in Denver, Colo., founded her business in 1992, she would ride up and down the elevators of busy downtown Denver office buildings with a gift basket, like it was a delivery to someone in the building.
"Tons of people would ask for my business card after seeing the gourmet gift baskets I was supposedly delivering," says McKay. After doing this once every two to three weeks for about four hours each time, McKay saw revenues of over $72,000 from first-time and repeat customers whom she met in the elevators. "All it cost me was some of my own time."
"Fortunately, no one picked up on the fact that I was soliciting," says McKay, who now has three employees. "But just in case someone asked for my purpose for being in the building, I put a bogus delivery slip on the basket."
McKay, with a Web site at www.legift.com, patented her gift basket business idea and has franchised it to over 320 distributors nationwide. She credits her idea and success to a person who sent her husband a substandard, low-quality gift basket. After seeing it, Cynthia said, "I can do better than that," dropped her career as an attorney and headed to the elevators to show off her gift baskets.
Predicting employee aggression
Workplace violence costs employers $36 billion per year according to the Workplace Violence Research institute. Now even small business owners can afford a new test that helps predict aggression in potential employees. The Conditional Reasoning Test of Aggression (CRT-A), developed by psychologists at the University of Tennessee, uses reasoning problems, which are a better predictor of behavior than the self-description used on traditional personality tests, according to Michael McIntyre, a test developer.
In pilot tests, 90 percent of the people who scored high exhibited aggressive behaviors within their first six weeks on the job. The test is available from The Psychological Corporation, at www.psychcorp.com.
Prices start at $162 for a manual and 25 tests.
Cheapest metro places to do business:
- Sioux Falls, S.D.
- Tulsa, Okla.
- Oklahoma City, Okla.
- Omaha, Neb.
- Des Moines, Iowa
- Lexington, Ky.
- Boise, Idaho
- Lafayette, La.
- Shreveport, La.
- Eugene, Ore.
Source: Economy.com, based on labor costs, energy rates, tax burdens and office rents.
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2001 issue of MyBusiness Magazine, NFIB's member magazine.
