Q: One of my former employees has started a competing business and is calling my clients and trying to steal their business from me. Do I have any legal recourse against him?
— Brad J.
A: I hate to break this to you, Brad, but unless this former employee signed a noncompete agreement while on your payroll, there is probably very little you can do to stop him from wooing your customers. You should discuss the situation with your attorney, but unless this person is also breaking the law in some other way (using stolen trade secrets, for example) your attorney will probably concur with me.
Renegade former employees riding the free enterprise wave is one reason noncompete agreements are gaining in popularity among employers who hope to use them to help protect their business from competitive threats launched by former employees. Many employers are now demanding that key employees sign noncompetes as a stipulation of employment. While signing noncompetes usually doesn’t sit well with employees who view them as potential roadblocks to their upwardly mobile career path, many businesses will not hire a key employee without his or her signature on the dotted line.
A noncompete agreement is a formal contract between you and your employees in which they promise not to use information or contacts pertinent to your business in a competing situation. In other words, they agree not to take everything they learn working for you and put it to use for someone else. This could mean going to work for a competitor or starting a competing business of their own.
While not popular with employees, noncompete agreements are a good way for employers to keep key employees on the payroll and protect the company’s proprietary information. That said, do not go overboard with noncompetes: not every employee should be required to sign one. If an employee does not have access to sensitive information, customer or accounting data, or is integral to the overall success of your business, there is no need to have them sign a noncompete. The janitor, for example, poses very little threat to your business if he gets a job with a competitor. Your sales manager, on the other hand, can devastate your business by hooking his wagon to a competing horse.
Which employees should sign noncompete agreements? While the prerequisites vary from business to business, the following is a good general list. The term “employees” represents executive level, management, supervisory, and non-management personnel relative to that example:
– Employees involved in research or product development. – Employees involved in the design, fabrication, engineering, and manufacturing process. – Employees who service products made and sold by your company. – Sales and service employees who have regular contact with customers or sensitive customer information. – Employees with access to sensitive business information or trade secrets. – Most importantly, employees who have sufficient information about your business that would allow them to start a competing business.
Most business experts agree that noncompete agreements are generally a good way to protect your business. The downside is that noncompete agreements are often difficult to enforce and in some states, may not be enforceable at all. Many state courts have ruled that noncompete agreements are too restrictive on an employee’s right to earn a living.
In California, for instance, noncompetes are generally only enforceable in connection with the sale of a business and not for employees. In Alabama, noncompetes are generally enforceable in only two contexts: the sale of a business and in connection with employment – but even then the enforcement requires that there be a valid interest worthy of protection.
Some states require that the noncompete be signed at the beginning of the employment relationship and will only consider the enforcement of a noncompete signed after the initial employment date if the signing of the noncompete was accompanied by a promotion, raise in pay, or other event that elevated the employee to a more important role within the company.
To be enforceable, noncompete agreements must be reasonable on three accounts: Time, geography and scope. Regarding time, you can’t restrict someone from competing with you forever, so one to three years is the accepted time period for most noncompetes.
As to geography, you can enforce restriction in the general area where you conduct business, but you can not enforce the restriction beyond those boundaries. And for scope, the agreement can restrict certain actions on the part of the employee, but can’t be so generally restrictive that the employee won’t be able to earn a living working in the same industry in a noncompetitive position.
One interesting thing to note: noncompete agreements are not enforceable against certain “professionals,” like doctors, CPAs, and lawyers (who do you think writes all those noncompetes).
At this point, Brad, the best thing you can do is contact your attorney to see if you have other grounds for suit, then contact your customers and let them know what’s going on.
Explain the situation regarding the former employee, but do so calmly and resist the urge to tell them what you really think of this guy. Showing your anger to the customer is not going to help you keep their business .
Reaffirm your relationship with the client, tell him how much you value his business, remind him of your track record and level of service, then ask one simple question: What can I do to make sure your business stays with me?
Here’s to your success!
Start An Adult Turnkey Business with our Educational Business Guide. 11 Steps to Turnkey Business Profits.
1. Choose niche market. You need to be very careful with choosing your niche market. Most people want to choose a very common market such as the typical blonde haired blue-eyed girl but this does not make any money in today’s Turnkey Adult Business. You need to choose a niche market such as midgets or gay bondage. Something Different.
2. Choose domain. Choose your domain one of two ways or for the best of both worlds go for both branding and seo’d domains. Branding is great for getting people to remember the name of the business but seo marketing domains are well positioned by the search engines. My rule of thumb is to have at least one targeted keyword in your domain name.
3. Research content companies to see the quality of content and payout to you. Most people just look at payout over niche content and the quality of such. When a Turnkey Adult Content Company offers you 80% or so of each sign up by using their content it sounds terrific but one must be careful. This 80% might mean you never get a sign up because the design of the turnkey adult website or the content is horrible. So the basic point is that 80% of 0 = 0. I will take 50% in a heartbeat for a turnkey website with good quality HD content that has a professional design to it. Don’t fall for high percentage because many times you are being set up. 50% of niche market with HD quality content might bring in 5 sign ups a day whereas the 80% payout content company may not get you a single sign up. Plus you have to look at recurring billing. The 50% content company may keep the customer on the adult turnkey site for many months. The revenue adds up. The 80% might not get a sole to stay past the first month. Also ask yourself the question would I join the site? If you would not join why would anyone else?
4. Do your homework on the turnkey adult design business you may want to work with. Check scam.com, ripoffreport or complaintsboard. You can also type in the name of the owner on Google. You can type in the company name and then type scam or complaints at the end for example: ABC Design Scam. Be careful with BBB reports for it is simple to make it appear you have no complaints when your company is actually being sued by everyone and their sister. When there is an active lawsuit against a company the BBB might have them in good standing because the lawsuit is not counted against the company by the BBB. Look for quality sites that you would join yourself. If you would not join the site you are purchasing why would anyone? Price should be low but not ridiculously low such as $70 per month for 26 sites. In this type of situation you are getting what you pay for. Again if you would not join why would anyone else?
5. Hire a Turnkey Adult Business who attempts to educate you on the industry. Remember #4 on this list and type in all of the turnkey adult design companies and owners names. Please note: some owners hide their names or utilize a different name to fool you and also to attempt to fool some watchdog agencies especially the BBB.
6. Hosting is a big issue people forget about. Hosting can be very expensive if you listen to many of the owners of turnkey adult design companies. Shouldn’t hosting be FREE in at least your 1st year or damn close to it? You should not have to worry about hosting until your second year in the turnkey adult business. Some charge $50 – $150 a month from the onset of your adult turnkey business. This is absurd to say the least.
7. Billing can also be very expensive but in the Turnkey Adult Business market you usually do not have to pay anything. For example in many agreements with content companies, the content companies themselves take care of all billing charges. This saves you thousands of dollars and a great deal of headaches.
8. Now you have to Seo or Search Engine Optimization the adult turnkey site for the search engines. I usually map out my site by the titles I want to use for each page of the site. Once I do this I then name the pages appropriately to what I want people to type in to find the pages. Page names should be relevant to the niche your site is in. For example: Blondeshairedblueeyedgirls/tour1 should be renamed Blondehairedblueeyedgirls/niche-website-adult-business. If you are targeting niche website adult business. For some reason many people do not take advantage of this. We do not know why. Index1, Index2 is doing you no good unless you want your site popular for the word index.
9. Page text. The easiest way to write page text is just that, to write it. Don’t worry about using your targeted keywords just yet, just write. Write at least 500 words per page. This is where many web designers go down the wrong road. You see, they load up on graphics to make the site look all pretty but it backfires on them because the search engines will hate it. Graphics are great when they are on the page with at least 500 words targeting the main targeted keywords for that page. This is very simple but you need to take the time to perform this. Some people seem to think this is not important; we have no clue why.
10. Meta Tags – Title, Description, Keyword, Header, Alt, anchor. Out of all of these anchors, titles and headers are most important in my opinion. This is a whole separate article and for a full explanation of all I would have to write about 10 pages of text. I would send you over to searchengineguide or searchenginewatch. Full disclosure I have no relationship with these companies other than that I read what they write. They are very knowledgeable people.
11. Links. Between titles, headers and links you have covered most of optimization of your turnkey adult site. Links are basically people placing a button, banner or text on their site that brings the customer to you when they click on it. How do you get people to link to you? Good question. You can contact people in the same niche and request they link to you and you in turn will link to them. You can also submit your site to all of the adult search engines, directories and niche specific top lists. Start blogs regarding your niche market and write articles once you become an expert on the industry. The two resources listed in #10 of this article are good places to learn everything you need to know about links even though they don’t target the Adult Turnkey Business.
Of course I understand that the sentence “Regular photography business is dying” in this article title is too strong. The most talented photographers will be in business forever. I used it just to grab your attention to the problem that regular photography business got recently after starting a digital era.
Nowadays photo companies like Canon, Nikon and others are making simple to operate yet more and more advanced photo cameras and lenses, adding more new and useful features to the cameras, improving quality, sensitivity, noise reduction while at the same time cutting the price. Now everybody can buy a Digital SLR photo camera, read a photography book and take pretty good quality photos. Now we have more very affordable ink jet photo printers available in the market that can produce decent prints. There are many powerful photo editing programs for improving the images and making nice looking collages. The entire process of making nice pictures today is not difficult compared to the same process 10 years ago and much less expensive. That is good for the consumer but has put a great pressure on the professional photography business. Today anyone can buy computer, DSLR camera, ink jet photo printer and call themselves a professional photographer.
Today many people prefer to invite a friend to take their wedding photographs rather than use a professional wedding photographer. Those that do use a professional are expecting lower expenses as there are many standard photographers to choose from.Now many people prefer to make the photos by themselves without going to professional photographers and photo studios. That is why we can say that regular photography business is under huge pressure.
Over the years digital photography has become common place and technology has simplified and improved the resulting pictures to the point where even large companies in the photo processing industry are closing down outlets. Those that remain are trying to regain business by offering large format prints or prints on canvas, things the general public cannot produce. Many large stores which do not offer those services do not have photo departments anymore where previously they had big profitable photo departments.
But there is a new way for photo business, the business that is not easy to repeat by everybody and with very attractive product for customers! I am talking about 3D photography business.
3D Photography Business
There are several ways for taking 3D pictures and for most of them the viewer needs some special glasses for seeing 3D effect. That is not convenient for customers and not good for business. However there is one technology that does not need any kind of glasses. That is 3D lenticular technology.
3D lenticular technology is the most suitable for customers because people can hold the picture in the hands and see 3D, without crazy “crossing eyes” or having the special glasses. 3D lenticular pictures have the regular colors like regular photos; they can be in any sizes from small wallet size to big size for putting on a wall, they look like the regular photos just more alive because of the depth. That is why regular people prefer 3D lenticular images compare to other types of 3D pictures.
One of the main problems of making 3D lenticular images is a difficulty of taking the pictures and a very long and labour-consuming process of creating the pictures. For example,even couple years ago we spent at least 2-3 hours before getting an image, because almost all stages of process of creating 3D picture were manual.Of course, it is not acceptable for business because the price of each picture was very high. But luckily now, with modern 3D lenticular technology we can receive 3D lenticular picture in just 10 minutes and even less and most of this time is spending on printing because almost all steps of lenticular technology are automated now, for example, process could be so automated that period of time between triggering 3D camera and starting printing could be as low as 40 seconds. This In-Depth Image System was developed for covering all technology steps in process of producing of 3D lenticular pictures from taking the frames to creating 3D image. This system is easy to operate, for example, we can teach the people how to work with In-Depth Image System and produce 3D lenticular images during 3-4 hours and people do not have to be the experts in photography or in computer.
In-Depth Image System can be successfully used in many different photo market niches. There are:
Portrait photography;
School and graduation photography;
Event photography;
Pets photography;
Advertisement photography and so on.
In-Depth Image System could be used for establishing of 3D photo business because:
In-Depth Image System produces High Quality 3D Lenticular pictures in different sizes;
This system is simple to operate;
In-Depth Image technology of producing 3D lenticular images is easy and rapid;
There is no necessity to have very experienced staff;
The prices on 3D pictures are very competitive with the prices that ask regular photo studios for regular flat pictures;
It is almost impossible to repeat this process by customers themselves, so you will be the only expert in making 3D lenticular pictures in your area;
It is profitable.
Please, look at the real sample picture that were made by In-Depth Image System below. Unfortunately that is impossible to show the depth on that picture because computer monitor can show the flat images only. That is why I created animation GIF file from the frames taken by our system. Originally we shot 12 – 18 frames, so 3D lenticular pictures are much smoother and without any rough jumping like on animation pictures.
What is a strategy map? Is it just a nice presentation demonstrating company goals? Well, some top managers and business owners think so. In fact, this is not true as an effective strategy map shows both goals and ways to achieve these goals. Besides, some strategy maps are very difficult to understand since they contain complex terms and formulas from strategic management theory. An effective strategy map must be easy to understand even for a person without even elementary knowledge of strategic planning. Such a person should see goals and how these goals will be reached. All the rest is unnecessary. An effective strategy map and shows cause and effect ties between goals and measures. For example, if a strategy map contains just one goal of making much money and no ways to implement it this will be a useless document. At the same time, if such a strategy map demonstrates how this goal will be implemented and what needs to be done in several stages, this strategy map can be considered effective. In
this article well talk about hotel management strategy maps.
First and foremost a hotel should develop comprehensive and realistic strategy. It means that strategic goals have to be ambitious and achievable at the same time. On top of that, making a lot of money can be hardly called a strategic goal. A strategy is about future vision, and hotel industry is not an exception here. Thus, a good example of strategic goal would be gaining particular percentage of market share, improve and loyalty of existing customers and attraction of new ones, improving hotel business image and recognition throughout the world and of course increasing profits. Of an effective hotel management strategy map will show what needs to be done to achieve these goals. Balanced Scorecard is perhaps the best tool to design strategy maps that demonstrate cause and effect ties.
All financial goals can be implemented if some improvements are performed in other spheres. As known, Balanced Scorecard consists of four categories which are interrelated: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. A hotel strategy map will show cause and effect ties between all categories and key performance indicators that each category contains. For instance, in order to increase revenue (financial), it is necessary to attract new customers (customer) which is possible on lee through introduction of new services and improvement of internal procedures (internal business processes) while this is only achievable through improvement of personnel professional level (learning and growth). This simple example demonstrates cause and effect ties between Balanced Scorecard categories and key performance indicators. For example such key performance indicator as customer loyalty directly affects revenue growth since loyal and satisfied customers are more likely to stay and the same ho
tel again. Thus, the hotel strategy works in the long term which contributes to competitive advantage in the market. It needs saying that Balanced Scorecard will perfectly work and the hotel will improve its performance only if improvements in the four categories are achieved. This means that the hotel should be ready for changes.
If you’re a natural born leader, or you like the idea of being in charge, a career in management might provide a great fit. As in practically any field, education is the key to climbing the corporate ladder in business. Earning anonline business management degree could help you to find a rewarding career where you’re the boss. Many people are unhappy in their current job, but lack the time and motivation to go back to school and would benefit from online learning. An online business management degree program can qualify you to work in top business positions and earn a competitive salary.
Why Online?
Business is an area particularly rich in opportunity for advancement. Often though, working professionals who have full-time jobs and other responsibilities do not want to abandon them to return to school. Earning an online business management degree is convenient, and the nature of online education allows students to continue working or taking care of a family while they earn additional credentials.
In addition, in today’s highly technology-driven society, developing advanced computer and technology skills can give one candidate an advantage over another for a job. Coursework for an online education platform is completed online from your home computer. Because of the opportunity to make a lot of money and gain authority, the business world is extremely competitive. The additional skills and credentials gained through an online business management degree program can provide the extra push that a student needs to succeed in a career in business.
Here are 10 jobs you could have with an online business management degree:
1. Office Manager
A career in office management is pretty self-explanatory. An office manager oversees employees and makes sure that the workplace runs smoothly day to day.
2. Human Resources Manger
A company’s HR department creates the connection between a company and the outside world. Management within the department controls tasks like recruiting and hiring, and they also implement or change company policies. This particular position is the head of the department.
3. Management Accountant
Rather than being employed by an accounting firm, management accountants work in-house for a company. They record and analyze a company’s financial data and use this to help strategize a better financial plan for the business.
4. Retail Store Manager
Traditionally, many stores were run by an experienced salesperson that was promoted to a management position. But today, many stores choose to hire college graduates to oversee employees and the daily operations of a retail store.
5. Operations Manager
A business needs someone to oversee its daily operations. Like general management, operations management participates in practically every area of business function and acts as an authority to employees.
6. Human Resources Generalist
Like human resources management, a human resources generalist is in charge of supervising operations within a company’s HR department. This person also plays an important role in determining company policies and solving issues that employees may have.
7. Business Analyst
The main responsibility of a business analyst is to make sure that a business operates efficiently. They dictate work flow among employees and create opportunities for new profit opportunities by analyzing business functions.
8. Financial Controller
A financial controller is generally the head of an accounting department. This person controls things like audits, profits, and budgets in larger companies that house these departments internally. They are responsible for producing accurate and critical financial reports.
9. Marketing Manager
Within a marketing department, a manager determines a demand and develops marketing strategies for meeting it. They also monitor trends to develop marketing opportunities and oversee other actions of the department, such as implementation and reports of marketing strategies.
10. Financial Analyst
A financial analyst observes and studies trends in the stock market and analyzes them to make smart business decisions. They advise a business on how to spend its money in order to maximize revenue.
If you’re already working in business, an online degree can help you move into a management position. Online degree programs offer a nontraditional but convenient and flexible means of learning and developing new, useful skills. Enrolling in anonline business management degree program can be the best career decision you ever make.