Atlantic City Could Look Vastly Different in 2017

Who doesn't love a good game of Monopoly especially a real life one? Large swaths of the Atlantic Boardwalk are changing hands. Philadelphia developer Bart Blatstein is buying up practically everything that is for sale on the boardwalk. Miami based Bruce Kaye, the CEO of Fantsea Resorts, is also looking to expand his holdings in Atlantic City and is spending millions of dollars to upgrade his current properties.

Kaye is a charismatic entrepreneur that had a long storied career in real estate before he entered the timeshare industry. He previously co-owned the world renowned Fontainbleau Hotel and co-developed the million square feet Miami International Mall. Fantsea Resorts, currently owns three properties in the Atlantic City Area-the Flagship located in the inlet, Atlantic Palace on the boardwalk, and La Sammana in Brigantine. The properties are in high demand with 45,000 vacation owners for the approximately 900 studio, one bedroom and two bedroom units that all are equipped with kitchenettes. Most importantly for Atlantic City; he attracts tourists who stay the longest duration, about a week, and want to spend money in the region not just at the gaming tables.

The high demand for units is attributable to his ability to put out a good product at a fair price. Fantsea Resort rooms are larger than average hotel rooms and include mini-kitchens, making longer stays more affordable and easier for families. The Atlantic Palace includes a pool, hot tub, member's lounge, and gym. The Flagship, which is in the midst of major renovations, will feature a lobby bar, pool, hot tub, grill, children's play room, movie theater, gym that offers classes, full service spa and large outdoor deck over the ocean perfect for weddings and parties. Their restaurant, the Blue Water Grille, has the best views in Atlantic City.

One could be forgiven for thinking they were in the South of France as boats sail by at they eat their expertly cooked branzino or surf and turf. The Flagship property will get an even bigger boast when the boardwalk in front of the property is finally refurbished next year. This will be the first time the boardwalk is completely walkable for possibly the first time in 25 years.

Kaye is seeing such great demand in Atlantic City that he is negotiating with Revel Casino owner Glenn Straub to take over the 12 unfinished floors of the building and convert them to timeshares. Kaye has also expressed an interest in buying 25% of the equity of the Revel and running the casino for Straub. He believes he can complete a deal with Straub and made a competitive bid. The question is whether Straub, who is the opposite of a decider, can concentrate long enough to make a deal. Straub may also be unrealistic about current market prices in Atlantic City. The one disadvantage of a timeshare deal at the Revel would be the casino operator would not be able to fill those rooms with gamblers dropping money at the tables.

The timeshare industry has been rightfully criticized in the past for some shoddy practices. It appears to have cleaned its act. The industry has grown 7% annually since 2011 with $8.6 billion in sales for 2015. Kaye was honest about the industries past reputational problems by indicating that there were some bad apples in the business in the 70's and 80's, but pointed out the largest leaders- Marriott, Disney, Hyatt, Starwood, Wyndham; are part of the leisure industry today. Perhaps, most telling 50% of Fantsea's owners upgrade their original purchase indicating great satisfaction with the product. In addition, the company experiences very little defaults on purchases.

The gregarious mogul treats his employees, many of whom have been with him a long time, as extended family. He serves 3 meals a day to more than 500 employees at the Flagship. When his son declined to enter the business, he established an ESOP (Employee Stock Option Plan) to sell the company to his employees with the share price rising appreciably since inception.

While Kaye has been in Atlantic City for over 25 years, Blatstein is a new entrant into the Atlantic City market buying his first commercial property last year. He believes he is buying real estate at a rock bottom prices in Atlantic City, which still attracted more than 24 million people visitors last year despite the closing of 4 casinos in 2014. He said, "Property on the boardwalk in Atlantic City is going for $30 a square foot. In nearby Margate and Ventnor, it's going for $1000 square foot. When I go into an area, I buy critical mass. I welcome other developers to come in."

He has thrown out the idea that if Atlantic City could attract celebrities it would become "hot". So it would not be surprising if when the Showboat re-opens next summer, after a major overhaul this winter, there is a celebrity living there. Let's hope it's not Kanye and Kim Kardashian West. Or he could go the entirely opposite way in developing Atlantic City. He has proposed to New Jersey legislators that they declare Atlantic City an Opportunity Zone which does not levy state and local taxes on senior citizens. While Florida never has to feel threatened that Atlantic City will become more popular for the elderly, it certainly could become a viable alternative for many in the Northeast that want to stay more involved with their grandchildren and are fearful of the Zika virus. Blatstein, ever the showman, likes to do the big reveal so he is keeping details close to the vest for now.

He is also in talks with investor Carl Icahn to take over the currently closed Trump Plaza. Unfortunately, his 2015 lease/purchase of the pier near Caesar's, now called The Playground, did not include any parking, which has prevented its rebound. The Plaza acquisition would give him the much needed parking capacity. He has big plans for the property including a walkway which would connect the Tangers Outlet to the boardwalk. He pointed out that "shoppers currently have to use narrow alleyways to get to the outdoor mall from the boardwalk".

The Showboat's controversial neighbor to the right, Straub, has proven to be toxic to everyone-the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA), politicians, and fellow developers. He is no closer after 2 years of ownership to opening the property. Unfortunately, this is modus operandi. After he bought the Palm Beach Polo Golf and Country Club, the Palm Beach Post labeled him "The Man Wellington Loves to Hate" after home owners at the property complained about him.

On my last visit, there will signs of life at the Revel. There were about 15 male executives, possibly from the Connecticut casino operator that he has contracted with or the E sports fantasy company that is considering making the Revel their national headquarters, working in the office. Straub seems almost prisoner of the palace that he bought on the cheap. He is no longer living on his yacht, the Triumphant Lady, but in a makeshift bedroom smack in the middle of his offices. On the day we met to discuss his plans for the casino, he was rambling, for some reason, about bringing up 2800 horses from Florida to house at the currently closed Atlantic City racetrack. Although he bought a casino property, he clearly wants to be in any other business but gambling. One idea that he has thrown out is to house one of the leaders of the E sports fantasy industry in the Revel. He dreams of holding their competitions at Boardwalk Hall.

The cantankerous developer blames his problems on NJ politicians. He complains to anyone who will listen that "no one from the governor's office or the state legislature has come to see me." Meanwhile his neighbor on the boardwalk, Bart Blatstein, was able to partially open the Showboat in 5 weeks. Although he has threatened to leave Atlantic City, I suspect his bizarre threats are just a cry for attention since he has told me in several interviews, "I am stubborn and never give up." He also has no reason to sell. Straub said, "I bought for $89 million a building that was built for over $2 billion, the power plant next door for $50 million, and my carrying costs so far have been $24 million ($1 million for 24 months). That is a total of $150 million for a building that cost over $2 billion to build. I can afford to hold on."

Could 2017 be the year that Atlantic City finally rebounds? Those of us that are nostalgic about the ocean resort have been saying next year is the year for decades. Every time, Atlantic City takes two steps forward, such as luring new money to the city and electing a competent mayor, it takes three steps backward with the New Jersey legislature threatening to legalize gambling in North Jersey. The difference this time is that exceptionally talented real estate developers such as Blatstein don't stop until they succeed. It would help if the banks, which have been burned in the past in Atlantic City, started investing again.

AI Assistants: 3 Things Businesses Should Do Now To Be Competitive

Mike Gullaksen, Chief Operating Officer, iProspect

Personal digital assistants, like Siri and Cortana, are just two examples of AI systems going mainstream as users widely adopt voice-based queries and expect immediate search results pulled from both the web and on-device content. These personal assistants are also becoming more predominant in consumers’ homes – think Amazon Alexa. 

These personal assistants are helpful, entertaining and already a powerful connector between people and their digital lives. While they function a little differently, they all source every bit of data they can find to engage in unique, valuable conversations with their owners.

The astounding pace of technology guarantees that there will always be a new connector, a new privileged broker that draws humans and the digital realm ever closer together. But this shouldn’t be a threat to marketers. Instead, it’s a great opportunity.

Some industry experts hypothesize that the future of search and intent-based advertising could be up for grabs. It’s tempting to listen—with artificial intelligence, digital personal assistants, the internet of things, wearables and apps basking in the limelight. But let’s not forget that deep down, we’re all deeply involved with search. We depend on it. Imagine how much you would know about someone if they shared their last 100 searches with you. We never stop searching.

For marketers watching the AI race from the sidelines, now’s the time to start placing bets. Early adopters will win by taking advantage of this massive shift in discovery marketing, and will do so while the cost of entry is minimal for each engagement. 

So what can brands do today to prepare? Here are three things to prioritize:

1. Create conversational content.

Fifty percent of search is mobile, and 20% of that is voice search. And voice search is growing quickly. It will open up richer data sets around consumers’ needs and wants as they relate to a brand’s products and services. Questions will be the new keywords and provide brands with an even better research opportunity to drive product and service innovation and ultimately provide the best customer experience.

When Google releases voice search data through its analytics, use it to build out your database of content. In the meantime, leverage traditional sources of information such as the sales team or customer service team to help drive content creation in conversational or question-and-answer formats.  

2. Structure your data.

The foundations of digital personal assistants are built on questions that contain keywords and data. Conversations become more specific when the AI asks the consumer to refine or elaborate on the question, and the responses are derived from an existing database.

Brands need to make the right content and data available to answer the initial questions being asked by the consumer and then create content the personal assistant can leverage to refine the answer. Structured data will fill in details with things such as reviews, product attributes, real-time pricing and very important location-based information. 

Certainly for Google’s personal assistant this will be very similar to Google’s rich results or Knowledge Graph cards. Once in place, make sure your data is accurate and then distribute it to data aggregators. Most personal assistants will pull from their parent company, but there are examples such as Yelp currently powering local results for Amazon’s Alexa.

3. Prepare to invest in voice advertising.

It is speculated that a form of auction-based advertising will be established for voice search and personal assistants. Of course it will, as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others have always monetized content delivery. When the opportunity arises to pay to ensure your content is delivered first to personal assistants through voice search, it is critical you are ready with a foundational data set and content in the preferred formats of the assistants—think Amazon Skills for Alexa or SDK for Apple’s Siri. Time will tell how we will buy, but it will most likely be auction-based.  The first here may be Google Assistant using Google’s paid local ads that they recently launched because it provides answers to questions around business information like locations that google has sometimes relied on third parties for previously.

About the Author

As chief operating officer of iProspect, Mike Gullaksen creates operational excellence by aligning our people, processes and technology to create product innovation and support agency growth. Mike joined iProspect through the acquisition of Covario, where he held the position of CEO. Prior to Covario, Mike worked at iCrossing as SVP-search. He has built a reputation for creating award-winning digital marketing teams and developing proven digital strategies that drive business growth for Global 1,000 clients.

About iProspect

iProspect is the first truly global digital marketing agency, with 3,000-plus employees in 82 offices across 52 countries. A trusted partner with an in-depth understanding of consumer behavior, iProspect reshapes brand strategies to meet the fast-paced demands of the convergent world with a focus on exceeding the client's business objectives.

Our global reach, in-depth knowledge of diverse local markets and expertise produce award-winning, performance-based marketing strategies for leading brands such as General Motors, adidas, T-Mobile, Hilton Worldwide, Sunglass Hut, Lenovo and many others.

For more information, visit iProspect.com or follow us on Twitter @iProspect.

Advertising Week returns to NYC September 26 - 30, 2016! Our Huffington Post readers enjoy a 20% discount on Delegate and Super Delegate passes by clicking here.

Elon Musk Revolutionized Cars. His Brother Wants To Do The Same For Food.

NEW YORK ― Last month, Elon Musk laid out his “master plan” to transform Tesla into a clean energy giant. In a 1,483-word blog post, he outlined plans to meld his automobile company with SolarCity, the country’s largest solar installer, to create a one-stop shop for electric cars, batteries and solar-panel roofing.

He’s not the only Musk with a grand vision. For the last 14 years, Kimbal Musk, Elon’s younger brother, has been quietly waging his own battle against industrialized food. While Elon built a tech empire in California, the younger Musk moved to Colorado and founded The Kitchen, an ambitious family of restaurants committed to bringing sustainably grown, locally sourced, healthfully prepared food to the American heartland. His empire of eateries ― whose fare includes homemade kale chips, quinoa grown in Colorado and lamb sourced from Boulder’s Crego Livestock farm ― stretches from Boulder and Denver in Colorado, to Chicago. By the end of August, it will include a new location in Memphis, Tennessee.

The younger Musk sits on the board of Chipotle, whose fresh ingredients have forced McDonald’s to rethink the grub it sells. With his own restaurants ― he’ll have 11 by the end of the year ― he aims to do the same to the Applebee’s and TGI Friday’s of the world ― establishing a vast empire of farm-to-table restaurants across the parts of the country sometimes mocked as “flyover states.”

In his next move, he plans to take on agriculture, too.

On Tuesday, Musk announced the launch of Square Roots, a new company that will invest in startups growing fresh fruit and vegetables in cities. The so-called accelerator aims to provide mentorship and resources to bootstrapped urban farmers, who will operate out of Square Roots’ specially designed shipping containers equipped with hydroponic growing towers. The firm, formed under The Kitchen LLC umbrella, is slated to open its first location in Brooklyn sometime this fall.  

“The Kitchen’s mission is to strengthen communities by bringing local, real food to everyone,” Musk, 43, wrote in a Medium post published Tuesday. “Our goal [with Square Roots] is to enable a whole new generation of real food entrepreneurs, ready to build thriving, responsible businesses. The opportunities in front of them will be endless.”

The Kitchen

Leafy greens grow in one of the freight containers Square Roots plans to use at its "campuses."

Urban farming seems ready to take off. Roughly 800 million people worldwide raise vegetables, fruits or animals in cities and produce about 15 percent of the world’s food, according to a recent United Nations report. But people are increasingly concentrating in urban areas; an anticipated 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. And all those people need to eat.

In developing countries, urban farmers grow food for subsistence. In the U.S., the urban agriculture landscape looks more like a movement than an industry. Cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C., have started programs encouraging people to grow produce on vacant lots and rooftops. Michelle Obama, who made healthy eating and exercise a cornerstone of her legacy as First Lady, has touted community farming as a do-it-yourself answer in blighted urban communities where fresh produce is hard to find.

Kimbal Musk envisions a network of his companies in major cities across the U.S., particularly in the South and Midwest, where industrial farming and fast-food chains have the strongest grip on mainstream diets. 

The Kitchen, for its part, has been dipping its toes in these waters for some time now. The company’s nonprofit arm, The Kitchen Community, operates about 300 “learning gardens” in more than 50 towns and cities, where an estimated 150,000 schoolchildren tend crops and, ideally, forge deeper connections with their food. Even skeptics who debate urban farms’ environmental benefits and potential to produce enough calories to feed whole cities agree that they imbue people with a greater appreciation for food.

“We want our communities to know what real food is. We want kids in communities to know real food, and we want them to have a choice between real food and industrial food,” Kimbal Musk told The Huffington Post in an interview last month, on the day after his brother released Tesla’s updated “master plan.” “Right now, for many of them, it’s industrial food, fast food or nothing. We want to bring education back so kids know they have options.”

Around the world, a growing number of tech-minded startups are tinkering with agriculture. A supermarket in Berlin installed a small indoor farm earlier this year, growing fresh greens in the middle of the store. In Japan ― where the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster piqued paranoia about irradiated produce ― the world’s largest operating indoor farm yields 10,000 heads of lettuce per day in an abandoned Sony factory. And in the U.S., there are companies like Aerofarms, which is growing kale, arugula and other leafy greens out of an old paintball arena in a run-down neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey.

The Kitchen

A beet burger served at one of The Kitchen's Next Door locations. 

Square Roots marks Musk’s entrance into this emerging industry. Conceived of as a startup accelerator ― Silicon Valley-ese for a firm that provides space and resources to entrepreneurs ― the company injects The Kitchen’s restaurant line with a dose of the tech-industry mindset the Musks are known for. (Kimbal Musk serves on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX ― Elon is CEO of both ― and is his brother’s trustee for the two companies.)

Both Musks, who are originally from South Africa, have a storied history in tech. They cofounded Zip2, a startup that helped newspapers build online city guides, in 1995. They sold the company to Compaq for $300 million in 1999. Elon Musk used that money to found the online payments startup PayPal and invest in Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX.

The younger Musk used his payout to indulge his passion for cooking. He moved to New York and began taking classes at International Culinary Center, where he studied French cooking. His has said his philosophy on food began to take shape after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when he volunteered to feed the firefighters pulling bodies from the gnarled rubble of the World Trade Center. Musk said he had an epiphany while driving an ATV loaded with a cooler of poached salmon to the gymnasium of a school near ground zero.

“You see these giant piles of still-molten metal in front of you and you see these firefighters coming out of the most traumatic environment you can possibly imagine to sit down in these gymnasiums and eat what we cooked for them,” Musk told HuffPost last month. “That sense of community that I felt was just profound to me. It was an absolute epiphany, but it was actually like a blow to the head. It was so intense. I left that experience saying, ‘I just have to open a restaurant.’”

He spent the next year roadtripping across the U.S. with his (now former) wife, and eventually settled in Boulder. There, seemingly by fate, he met Hugo Matheson, an English chef. As Steven Levy wrote in a deeply reported 2015 profile of Musk in Backchannel:

A week after arriving, Musk’s dog slipped off the leash and nuzzled a man enjoying coffee at a local shop. This was Hugo Matheson, himself a recent arrival from England, who was about to take a job as executive chef in a local restaurant. Matheson invited Musk and his wife to a dinner, one that Musk would never forget. The fare was simple and honest: grilled fish with eggplant, the skin charred to a crisp but the inside moist and buttery. The meal was topped off by a straightforward panna cotta.

“It was completely different than what I learned in New York, where you’d spend six hours preparing and cooking something,” says Musk. “Hugo probably started thirty minutes before we ate. It was a more casual, simple way of cooking, with incredible-quality ingredients and a very simple but intense technique for cooking.” Musk begged Matheson for a job in his restaurant, and for the next year he worked there as a line cook — ten dollars an hour — absorbing that attitude and technique.

In March 2004, Matheson and the Musks [Kimbal and his wife] opened their own restaurant in that style. The name reflected its lack of pretention: The Kitchen.

The pair opened another restaurant, The Kitchen Upstairs, which applied the same culinary philosophy to a cocktail lounge concept. But a year later, Musk grew restless. Restaurants don’t quite scale the way software companies do, and it made him feel listless and frustrated. He left Matheson to the run the shop and took a job as chief executive of a social networking startup, OneRiot.

It was familiar ground for him, and he toiled away there for five years as they attempted to carve out a niche in the social mapping space. He lost interest, but stayed on out of loyalty to the company’s investors. He missed the food scene.  

“If you’ve ever done something you love and go do something you like,” Musk mused, “it’s like chewing on sawdust.”

Fred Prouser / Reuters

Elon Musk (L) and his brother Kimbal Musk (R), co-founder of The Kitchen Community, appear on a panel with interviewer Jeff Skoll, chairman of Participant Media and the Skoll Foundation.

A near-death experience shook him from his funk. On Valentine’s Day 2010, he broke his neck tubing down a ski slope on a family vacation in Jackson Hole. He was paralyzed for three days, and braved a risky surgery to install a section of metal spine in his neck. He spent two months healing. He enlisted his friend Tobias Peggs ― who is now the co-founder and chief executive of Square Roots ― to take over OneRiot so he could return to The Kitchen.

Musk came back with a clearer, more focused mission for his company: to build communities through food. They launched a new concept, Next Door, to bring The Kitchen’s fresh food to the masses with pub-like restaurants that serve burgers and other classic American fare. That has now grown to five locations in Colorado. Another Next Door is scheduled to open in Memphis next January. Musk wants to keep expanding the chain throughout the country, targeting the shopping malls where casual-dining eateries like TGI Friday’s and Chili’s reign supreme.

“People still have to sit down at TGI Friday’s because that’s all they’ve got,” Musk said. “We’re hoping to come in and provide a solution to landlords that’ll complete the picture, where you’ll have a Next Door, a Chipotle and a Whole Foods right next to each other. Or a Next Door, a Chipotle and a Walmart that has a ton of fresh food in it.”

In many ways, he sees Next Door as his version of Tesla’s Model 3, the auto company’s $35,000 electric car that made history when it notched nearly half a million pre-orders earlier this year. When Elon Musk first outlined his long-term plan for Tesla a decade ago, he envisioned whetting the public’s palate for an electric car with a flashy luxury sedan, the Model S, before rolling out a model for the masses. In following through with that plan, he effectively revived the long-dead electric car, and prompted virtually every major automaker to scramble to create competitors.

“People wanted the electric car for at least two decades, then Tesla came along and showed them how it’s done,” Kimbal Musk said. “The Kitchen is doing that for real food.”

If Elon Musk is building a clean energy empire, then Kimbal Musk is building the sustainable food empire to match.

Asked on Monday whether The Kitchen would consider buying one of the startups that go through Square Roots’ accelerator program, the younger Musk said the firm is “always looking for new ways to expand its impact and further its mission.” In other words: Maybe!

Of course, there are barriers to overhauling the restaurant industry with a chain of farm-to-table restaurants. TGI Friday’s has 1,100 restaurants and Applebee’s has 2,033, to name a few.

And Tesla, too, continues to come up against hurdles, facing two federal probes and repeatedly missing delivery targets. But as investors have learned time and time again, it’s rarely smart to bet against a Musk.

“There are some restaurants already doing this, and the idea is catching on faster than I would have thought,” Dickson Despommier, an emeritus professor of microbiology at Columbia University who hosts a podcast on indoor farming, told HuffPost. “But the Musks of the world, thank God, they’re able to cobble together enough money to make a difference.”

Why B Corps Should Be The Norm, Not The Exception

I chose to work at 100km Foods (a B Corp company) because I place a high value on my work aligning with my personal ethics. What we do in our professional lives impacts both our climate and communities, just as much as the choices we make in our personal lives. As such, we have the capacity to make a positive difference in our working lives when we choose to work for B Corp companies.

As a young person, I have more incentive than most to care about issues of climate and social justice. The threat of human induced climate change and rising inequality are affecting myself and my peers, right here and now, and it may only get worse. We can't afford to wait for top down changes, and if I can work for a B Corp that is already making a difference, I have agency to create change by doing my job well. This matters to me deeply, and it will matter to those generations that come after me.

Not only that, one of our B Corp highlights offers paid time off to employees to do community work, which is a great opportunity to encourage outreach and participation. Paul and Grace (the founders and co-owners of 100km Foods) also encourage us to attend and sponsor different conferences and events, such as those held by The Stop Community and Food Centre here in Toronto, an amazing organization that we work with closely.

B Corp companies, beyond striving to be a force for social and environmental change, also have a mandate to provide a living wage and good working conditions (like insurance benefits) for their employees. This is another significant reason why I chose work for a B Corp: no one should have to sacrifice a living wage in order to work for a company whose values they believe in.

The food & agricultural sector, which is the industry we work in at 100km Foods, has come to the forefront of public consciousness in recent years, for a number of reasons. Consumers and farmers have been impacted as food prices fluctuate in accordance with oil prices, as climate change affects yields, and as new trade deals are negotiated. The future of food is changing drastically, but these changes are creating the chance so desperately needed to do better.

That's why it feels even more important that we do the work we do as a local food distributor. We pick up produce from farms in and around the Greater Toronto Area, which gives farmers the opportunity to set fair prices, and we sell it wholesale to restaurants. We make it as easy and convenient as possible for chefs to source local food for their menus, and we offer a dependable market for farmers who do not have the infrastructure or marketing capacity to distribute their produce wholesale. In the span of a day or two, the food that was ordered through our website is picked in the field, packed, picked up by our team, and delivered directly to restaurants. By doing the work we do, we're fostering growth in local economies while also building sustainability within the food industry.

B Corps such as ours should become the norm, not the exception. The economy is not separate from climate and wider society, and the days where businesses only answer to their shareholders are numbered. Businesses can, and should, choose to go above and beyond the standards of old to become a significant force for positive social and environmental change.

The B Corp Life is a new blog series geared towards exploring what it's like to work at a benefit corporation. Why do b corps matter, and what does the future hold for them? Let us know at PurposePlusProfit@huffingtonpost.com or by tweeting with #TheBCorpLife.

Top Branding and Marketing Strategies for New Businesses

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Marketing and branding are not always cheap for small businesses. While it is very essential given the very early stage of a business, branding and marketing a new business is an effort that has to compete with several other efforts in the startup. Nonetheless, there's no other way around running an effective marketing strategy for your business.

Whatever says a new business cannot take advantage of the exceptional possibilities that effective branding and marketing can attract to business? While you do not have to go overboard with your spending like an already established business would, there are strategies that you can implement with effective results.

Let's look at the top branding and marketing strategies you can use to stimulate the growth of your new business.

Design with Your Audience in Mind

Your first step in branding, and indeed marketing your business is to create a logo. This is where you have the first opportunity to captivate the minds of your audience and quickly win your way into their hearts. A good looking logo that is able to captivate your audience will earn the trust of your customers better.

While larger companies with bigger branding budgets can afford to create different reiterations of their logo and not worry about the cost, for a small business it's very important that you get it right on the very first attempt.

A good way to make this happen without having to break the bank is to partner with a designer who has great work portfolio. Another alternative is to use cheap freelance service like Fiverr to outsource your design tasks to highly talented graphic designers who are ready to work on the cheap.
To highlight the methods that will be most effective in helping you get a well-branded company logo that won't cost you a fortune, try the following:

•Partner with a designer: the idea is to offer them your services in exchange for theirs. And if the deal is huge such that it involves the total branding of your business, including your website design -- then offering them part of your business in exchange might be considered.
•Run a Contest: Running a contest is still one of the most effective ways to attract high-quality talents without having to spend so much.

Win on Social Media

The ultimate aim of branding and marketing your business is to attract customers. With social media expanding every day and users increasingly interacting with businesses and brands via various social media channels, there's never a better time to take advantage of this huge opportunity than now.
An effective social media strategy can help to optimize almost every other aspects of your marketing efforts. According to Jeff King, founder of a digital marketing company, having an effective social media strategy will bridge the successful customer acquisition barrier that many small businesses face. "Not only does the inclusiveness that social media cultivates encourage small business growth, it's also very cost effective to acquire customers," he says.
While social media may be cost effective, it may require some form of expertise which you can achieve through study and practice.

Own Your Online Presence

The power of using the internet to reach new customers cannot be overlooked.
Many business owners only consider an internet marketing strategy as an afterthought and do not put much consideration into developing their marketing skills. This is why so many small businesses begin and end their internet marketing strategy with owning a website.

The following strategies should be considered in owning your online presence:

•Get on Google places: Google places and local listings makes it easy for your business to be found on the internet through local listings. This is free advertisement for small business owners.
•Get a blog: Business blogging is now an effective customer retention and acquisition strategy. Does your new business have a blog? If not, you should reconsider your strategy.
•Search Engine Optimization: Ranking high on the top pages of Google for your best selling keywords can help you attract ready-to-buy customers for almost free. All that may be required is your effort. There are many ways to fail with a SEO campaign but with a consistent approach, your business can be wildly successful.

How Becoming A B Corp Helped Us Find Purpose In Marketing

I’ve always struggled with the ethics of my chosen profession. Even while poring over copies of Advertising Age in college, my attraction to brilliant campaigns was tempered by the nagging sense that marketers’ influence on our thoughts and values isn’t always good. After all, a marketer’s job is to creatively convince people to do or consume things that they sometimes don’t even want or need.

That nagging feeling led me to spend the first 15 years of my career in health behavior change and nonprofit marketing. Later, my business partner and I founded RoundPeg to create brands and campaigns for organizations committed to social good. But I always had a sense that marketing’s potential for good wasn’t fully realized.

Ultimately it was RoundPeg’s joining the B Corp community that revealed a new approach to marketing that realizes that potential – and solves my professional ethical dilemma – for good.

Our Chance to B Better
It was a no-brainer for RoundPeg to become a certified B Corp in 2012 and incorporate as a Benefit Corporation in 2013. We already operated responsibly and helped clients promote social causes and sustainable behaviors. We figured certification would strengthen our commitment to people, planet and community and we could learn from other good businesses. It did all of those things. But we never anticipated how significantly being part of the B Corp community would influence and inspire us.

Conversations with colleagues at other B Corps told us that the number of companies pledging to use business as a force for good is growing more rapidly than consumer attitudes and knowledge are changing. For this movement to survive and thrive, we need to make buying responsibly the norm.

It became clear that marketing – the practice that has encouraged society’s excess – is the exact tool needed to make the good choice the easy choice for mainstream consumers.

Marketing’s Opportunity
While marketing isn’t the only force to blame for wasteful consumption, its significant contribution can’t be ignored.

Most consumers don’t test the marketing claims of every company, so when a company says they’re doing good, we assume they’re telling the truth. While scandals of goodwashing and worse increase skepticism, consumers are often at the mercy of marketers and remain powerless to distinguish between genuinely good and apparently good companies and products.

As consumers, we’re so far removed from where and how our stuff is made that we're often blind to the effects of our choices. For decades marketers have exploited that. Tapping into our values, they’ve positioned superfluities as necessities, made the case for shoddy products and convinced consumers that obtaining the latest version of everything is essential to creating the best version of oneself.

But time is revealing the negative consequences of decades of conspicuous consumption and consumers are generally paying more attention to what they buy, who makes it, where it’s from and what’s it’s made of. Sometimes they even question whether it’s needed at all.

The rise of socially responsible business like B Corps and Benefit Corporations presents an opportunity for marketers to reverse the damage done by our predecessors by using marketing as a force for good.

Purposeful Marketing: A New Approach
Through Purposeful marketing, we can show consumers that every purchasing decision they make is a chance to be the change the world needs. We can equip them with the information they need to make better choices and invite them to be our partners in change.

While B Corp and other certifications provide context and ensure accountability, mainstream consumers with busy lives aren’t likely to take the time to distinguish the good, the bad and the ugly. Many don’t know that what these certifications mean or even that they exist.

Purposeful marketing champions the companies that are truly doing good to help consumers cut through the fray of false claims. Inspired by our fellow B Corps, RoundPeg applies Purposeful marketing principles to help good brands:

· engage customers by connecting their company Purpose with customer values,
· cultivate long-term, meaningful customer relationships that amplify social impact and profitability
· create meaningful customer experiences
· build loyal communities of influence
· empower customers to be brand ambassadors for social impact

Time for Change
Until the majority of the marketplace demands change, conscious consumerism is at risk of becoming a fad. As marketers and as B Corps, we must encourage consumers to demand that brands act as part of the solution to social problems and invite our customers to be part of the solution.

Our experience as a B Corp taught us that businesses with good built-in do everything else differently, so it’s natural that we should rethink marketing as well. We can’t expect consumers to change the way they think, act and purchase without making changes ourselves. That’s why RoundPeg’s sole focus now is using marketing to help Purposeful brands make buying responsibly the norm.

We urge the visionaries behind purposeful companies – and our marketing agency colleagues – to join us in seizing the opportunity to use marketing for good. When we lead with Purpose, we don’t have to manufacture justifications to win customer loyalty because the shared Purpose itself creates the bond. The more consumers insist on purchasing with Purpose, the closer we’ll get to a world where companies that don’t do good don’t stand a chance.

The B Corp Life is a new blog series geared towards exploring what it’s like to work at a benefit corporation. Why do b corps matter, and what does the future hold for them? Let us know at PurposePlusProfit@huffingtonpost.com or by tweeting with #TheBCorpLife.

Why Investors Should Care About Natural Capital

This article has been submitted as part of the Natural Capital Coalition's series of blogs on natural capital by Adams Koshy, environment, carbon and finance analyst, eftec

We are all investors in one sense or another: through our pension; our mortgage; or even just setting aside a little money in a savings account. In one way or another, we have all gone through the thought process involved in making an investment decision.

To elaborate this, let me take the case of Joe, who's decided to invest some money, and wants to understand how environmental factors could affect the safety of and returns on his investment.

Joe is your average 40-something, and has never considered himself an environmentalist. But like many of us, he recognises that individuals and businesses depend on the environment around us.

Working at a power plant, he's already seen first-hand how much the plant depends on access to reliable water supply, and how its performance is affected by air pollution, waste management and so on. Ever the pragmatist, he realises that all companies must, to varying degrees, have impacts and dependencies on the environment, - whether directly through operations, or indirectly through the supply chain, labour force or other influences. But how do these relationships influence the 'investability' of a company?

The answer to this lies in how these factors affect the performance of the investment: namely through the security of these investments (risks) and their future performance (returns). The reason being that when you invest in a company, you do not invest in its current form, but your perception of a company's future value. The current profit or loss (for example) only provides a snapshot of the state of the company, and a potential indication of the future.

This gives rise to two potential sources of uncertainty for investors.

Firstly, the gap between what a company's management knows of their impacts and dependencies on the environment, and how much of that information is presented to the investors (aka information asymmetry); for example, through CSR/sustainability reports and the extensive Environmental, Social Governance (ESG) tools now available. However, these sources are restricted by the inadequacy of environmental information possessed and/or reported by some companies.

Secondly, macro-level risks for the future, such as the risk of potential regulation that could come into force, or environmental changes that could occur due to external stresses; e.g. a higher price of water due to water scarcity. This too has been compiled in innovative ESG tools. However, this information may be compiled externally, and so is often isolated from the company's decision -makers.

As stewards of your investment, it is the responsibility of the company's management (and its corporate governance) to ensure that the natural environment they depend on is appropriately accounted for and managed, such that both of these uncertainties are minimised.

The Natural Capital Protocol adds key insights into the established reporting and ESG tools. It shines a light on these (fundamental) management decisions, by presenting a clear and adaptable framework for companies to identify, measure and value their impacts and dependencies on the natural environment (or 'natural capital').

The Protocol's four principles offer a checklist to illustrate whether a business' natural capital analysis has a logical process, and allows scrutiny to ensure that financially material issues are acknowledged and dealt with. Although the Protocol is not a reporting, but rather a decision- making framework, this information should then be reflected not only in the operational strategy, but also in the external reporting of the business. Such that consistent, material information is provided to reduce the gap in knowledge between investors and company management, and to ensure that action is taken and strategies implemented to mitigate future risks.

This additional reporting should satisfy Joe's curiosity, but means more for larger, institutional investors (like pension funds). For these investors especially, the Protocol could help them distinguish between different investments, exclude companies that could pose a risk, identify new opportunities for informed investment, and provide the basis to engage with, and challenge, companies that do not adhere to the Protocol.

To highlight the practical application of this, take the recent work led by the Natural Capital Declaration, on the impact to company performance (and their bonds) from risks to their water supply. One of the sectors considered was power: as the case of Joe has already highlighted, they depend on a steady water supply. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, some power companies are predicted to be at risk from global water shortage. For example, the state-owned South African company Eskom is at risk of financial deterioration from higher water costs (due to the shortage); and as they are already have large loans (i.e. are highly leveraged), it restricts their ability to invest in new water sources. Therefore, investors need to be aware of whether a company is at risk from these environmental stressors and how they are controlling these risks, in order to make a more informed investment decision. Identifying those that are accounting for and taking action against these risks, and excluding those that do not.

Let me be the first to accept that these insights hinge on companies reporting information under the Protocol. However, the greatest driver of investment returns are informational advantages that shrink the inherent uncertainty. Better information on environmental risk and opportunity has already proved its value as a component of investors' tool box, through companies' fundamental dependencies on the environment. As more companies begin to utilise the Natural Capital Protocol, its positive effect in investment selection and management decisions will develop. So eventually, investors like you, me and Joe can better incorporate relevant environmental information into our investment decisions.

Disclaimer: Articles in this series are submitted by people who work in organizations who are part of the Natural Capital Coalition, or people who are involved in the natural capital space more generally, the views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of The Natural Capital Coalition, other Coalition organizations, or the organization that employs the author.

The content of this article is not intended as investment advice. The above link to Eskom is only an illustrative example, where Eskom is not a listed company, as a state-owned entity. Use your discretion in using examples presented here for your own investment purpose.

Adams Koshy is a natural environment, carbon and finance analyst with eftec (economics for the environment consultancy), based in London. eftec have been part of the technical author team of the Natural Capital Protocol, and work on natural capital for businesses, governments and civil society, at local, national and international levels. eftec also shared its environmental valuation expertise to the Natural Capital Declaration work on the 'Corporate Bond Water Credit Risk Tool'.

Follow eftec on Twitter: @eftecUK

On 13th July 2016, The Natural Capital Coalition launched a standardized framework for business to identify, measure and value their impacts and dependencies on natural capital. This ' Natural Capital Protocol' has been developed through a unique collaborative process; a World Business Council for Sustainable Development consortium led on the technical development and an IUCN consortium led on business engagement and piloting. The Protocol is supported by practically focused 'Sector Guides' on Apparel and Food & Beverage produced by Trucost on behalf of Coalition.

Keep up to date with the Natural Capital Coalition on Twitter: @NatCapCoalition

Keep up to date with our series on natural capital here.

www.naturalcapitalcoalition.org

Derisking Threatens Caribbean Banking Sector and Trade

By Allan Wright

Allan Wright is country economist for The Bahamas at the Inter-American Development Bank, and an associate researcher for the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance. He formerly was a senior economist for the Central Bank of Barbados, and responsible for coordinating the Caribbean Regional Taskforce on Derisking Impact.

Allan Wright, country economist for The Bahamas at the Inter-American Development Bank, discusses the impact of derisking strategies on the Caribbean:

Q: What is derisking?

A: Derisking is the termination of or the restriction of business relationships to avert risk related to money laundering and terrorist financing, according to a definition by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an independent inter-governmental body that develops and promotes policies to protect the global financial system against these threats.

Q: Why should the Caribbean pay attention to derisking?

A: International financial institutions have been the subject of regulatory censures as a result of deficiencies identified within their frameworks for anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CFT). Penalties and fines have increased and, as a result, financial institutions have looked for ways to address these deficiencies. One of these ways is to terminate business relationships with certain businesses and regions considered to be high risk.

A 2015 World Bank study revealed that the Caribbean appeared to be the region most severely affected by this derisking strategy. International "correspondent" banks have either ceased to offer their services or have restricted the type of services offered to a number of domestic "respondent" banks in the region in the last four years. This has happened to at least eight financial institutions in Barbados, seven in Jamaica, five in Belize and others in Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat, and other states, according to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). While the derisking may not have resulted directly from AML/CFT issues, many large international banks consider their business with the region as either high risk or unprofitable.

iStock

Q: How much of an impact does derisking have on people and businesses in the Caribbean?

A: Globalization and technology allow countries to conduct business, despite the distances between them. International correspondent banks facilitate international transactions by providing access to the global payment and financial systems. These transactions--including remittances, credit card payments, foreign direct investments, and international trade in goods and services--contribute significantly to the Caribbean's growth and development. Therefore, the loss of these relationships could threaten the region's banking sector, as local respondent banks would no longer be able to conduct international transactions on behalf of their customers.

Furthermore, trade facilitation would be stymied, with the result that countries would be unable to import essential basic goods such as food and medicine, which could ultimately destabilize regional economies.

Derisking has already affected certain classes of business, customers, and jurisdictions throughout the Caribbean. One correspondent bank has ceased to conduct business with currency exchange businesses and businesses that handle money transfers. Some regional branches of international banks have also started derisking in the jurisdictions where they operate. These branches no longer offer services to credit unions or building associations, or third-party transactions on behalf of lawyers and other service providers.

Q: Do people in the Caribbean understand what's happening?

A: Derisking has generated much discussion among international and regional financial institutions, including Caribbean central banks, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), World Bank, International Monetary Fund, as well as CARICOM, to reach an understanding of the complexity and multidimensional nature of derisking. The FSB has proposed the following four-point plan:
»a further examination of the issue;
»clarification of regulatory expectations;
»capacity building in jurisdictions where respondent banks are affected; and
»the strengthening of tools for correspondent banks to perform due-diligence checks.

Q: What are Caribbean governments doing about derisking?

A: CARICOM is fully committed to international financial reforms and has embraced the FSB's four-point plan for addressing derisking. At its most recent meeting in July 2016, the CARICOM heads of government agreed on a new approach for addressing the problem: the CARICOM Committee of Finance Ministers proposed the establishment of a global forum in the Caribbean to bring the various stakeholders together, including correspondent banks, respondent banks, regulators, policymakers, and non-government organizations that have been adversely affected by derisking.

Furthermore, the committee has communicated with the U.S. Treasury Department and other U.S. government officials, seeking clarification about the issues giving rise to the heightened risk aversion by U.S. regulatory authorities towards Caribbean financial transactions. Also, banks, regulators, and others affected by derisking in the Caribbean have raised the issue at high-level forums, including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, FSB, and meetings of CARICOM heads of government and central bank governors.

Q: What are Caribbean regulators doing about derisking?

A: Regional regulators have participated in high-level discussions with international financial institutions, as well as with international regulators. Caribbean regulators have also implemented strategies that are specific to their respective jurisdictions, such as allowing local banks that are cut off from international transactions to reroute transactions through a regional financial institution that still has access to correspondent banks.

A CARICOM central bank governors' technical working group was established to document and analyze the impact of derisking strategies on regional financial systems. The group prepared a background paper on the issue of derisking, which was recently published by the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance.

Q: Is it too late for the Caribbean?

A: While some regional banks have already received official notification of the imminent termination of their relationships with correspondent banks, most of the affected banks have already begun establishing new relationships with other international banks. However, more international banks may eventually choose to derisk rather than expose themselves to the possibility of being fined or otherwise penalized.

A version of this post appeared originally in the Caribbean DEVTrends blog.

From the Multilateral Investment Fund Trends blog

Built On Belief, Bettered By B Corp

Earth Odyssey
My life changed in 1999 when I read Mark Hertsgaard’s book, Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future. At the time, I was managing strategic marketing for a tech media provider. While the work was intellectually challenging, something was missing. My time at work (which was significant) was not addressing what I saw as the fundamental challenge for my generation: how to meaningfully address climate change. That is why I made the career shift into renewable energy.

Dan Kalafatas and I founded 3Degrees in 2007 with a simple mission: to connect people with cleaner energy on a massive scale. Whether it is engaging with a homeowner about community solar options or helping Fortune 500 companies implement their renewable energy strategies, our goal is to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Perhaps just as important, though, we sought to establish 3Degrees as a company centered around values based on two fundamental notions. First, we believed then (as we still do now) that many people in this country are willing to direct their money and time to support renewable energy programs. Second, we believed we could hold ourselves to a higher standard in how we built and operated the business, including creating prosperity for all of our stakeholders — our employees, the community and the environment.

Moments that Matter: Impact Investing
As Mark Twain said, "Tough times teach trust." The character-revealing moment for 3Degrees occurred in 2011 when we found ourselves in a challenging financial situation. We were seeking our first outside investor at a time when no one was investing in renewable energy. Solyndra had failed. The fundamentals of the renewable energy industry were being pressured by low energy prices and policy uncertainty.

It was a tremendous relief when we met ARB (the Halloran Family Office investing company). To make the risk/reward proposition of the proposed investment in 3Degrees better for ARB, however, we needed to convert debt to company equity. Dan and I talked through what this restructuring and re-commitment would mean for the company. We agreed that if we moved forward, we wanted to officially make our company a Certified B Corporation to ensure we had the legal protection to balance shareholder and non-shareholder interests when making decisions. Now, all we had to do was convince ARB this was a good move.

While ARB had made it clear that they were interested in us because of our renewable energy industry focus, culture, and values, we were anxious about how they might respond to our plan to become a Certified B Corporation. We had no idea that Harry R. Halloran, Jr., CEO of ARB and founder of Halloran Philanthropies, was also a founding sponsor of B Lab, a nonprofit organization that serves a global movement to redefine success in business by building a community of Certified B Corporations. Harry was thrilled by our plans. We high fived, and ARB moved forward with its investment in 3Degrees.

Walking the Talk
In August 2012, 3Degrees officially became a Certified B Corporation in California. What does this mean in practice? Every year, we publish a B Corp Impact Report which takes stock of the public benefits we create beyond shareholder value. We participate in B Lab’s Impact Assessment, a biannual, independent evaluation of our social impact that helps us to focus on what we can do next and how can we do it better.

We match 100 percent of the firm's electricity usage with renewable energy certificates as well as offset emissions from employees’ transportation. While those actions may be easier for us given the work we do, we also continually seek opportunities where we can live our values. Case in point: 3Degrees provides socially and environmentally-focused 401(k) investment opportunities to eligible employees; supports up to eight hours of paid volunteer time with an environmentally-oriented organization; and gives preference to local, sustainable and fair-trade suppliers.

Why do we do all of this? We do it because we think it is the right thing to do, but also because in the long term, we think it is good business and reinforces our corporate strategy.

Join Us
When I was asked to write this blog, I, in turn, asked Harry to reflect on what stood out to him when ARB decided to invest in 3Degrees and how we have met his expectations. Harry shared, “In making our investment decision, we saw that you and Dan, as founders of 3Degrees, clearly articulated and modeled the company’s values on a daily basis in big and small ways. So, it is not surprising that 3Degrees is a success on many levels — certainly as an investment, however importantly, also as a model of what is possible when a clear vision, a good business model, and respect for all partners align.”

Today, 3Degrees is one of nearly 1,800 B Lab Certified B Corps in the United States. If our own experience can offer any insight to others, it is that leading by your values just makes good business sense over the long term — in good and challenging times.

The B Corp Life is a new blog series geared towards exploring what it’s like to work at a benefit corporation. Why do b corps matter, and what does the future hold for them? Let us know at PurposePlusProfit@huffingtonpost.com or by tweeting with #TheBCorpLife.

Even Conservatives Now Admit The U.S. Needs Paid Family Leave

Even as we endure one of the ugliest presidential elections in U.S. history, something remarkably positive is happening in politics. The left and right are coming together around an issue that once seemed solely the province of progressives and feminists: paid parental leave.

The latest sign of this growing consensus came on Monday when a Republican-backed think tank, the American Action Forum, offered up a new idea for how the U.S. could implement paid maternity, paternity and caregiver leave.

More surprising, the new plan is structured like an entitlement ― a government benefit for lower-income Americans of the sort that small-government, deficit conscious conservatives typically detest.

Progressive groups hailed the new idea as a sign the issue was gaining wide traction, even as they emphasized it didn’t go far enough in covering middle-class workers.

“We’re very encouraged and welcome the discussion the proposal initiates,” said Judith Lichtman, a senior adviser at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “[Paid leave] is a political and policy imperative that leaders have to address whatever their ideological bent.”

The Atlantic, which first reported the proposal, called it “a significant moment in the debate over paid family leave.”

Authored by Ben Gitis, the forum’s director of labor market policy, the plan offers up to 12 weeks of paid leave to the working poor and is modeled on the already successful earned income tax credit, which helps lift millions out of poverty. Gitis limits its availability to those making under $28,000. The most you could get for taking time off is $3,359.

“I think [paid leave] could be something that transcends the aisle but it’s a question of how to get there,” Gitis told The Huffington Post, emphasizing that his plan more than any other is aimed specifically at the most needy workers.

Gitis isn’t the first conservative with a plan for paid leave. Over the past year or so, the issue has increasingly come up on the right, as polls have shown that a majority of Americans would support such a benefit. Fifty-five percent of Republicans surveyed by the Associated Press last year said they supported paid time off for workers, compared with 67 percent overall and 82 percent of Democrats.

Republicans have floated a tax credit, via the Strong Families Act, for businesses that offer leave. Marco Rubio talked up a similar plan when he was running his failed campaign for president. Ivanka Trump noted her father’s support for paid leave at the Republican convention, but the Republican nominee has not addressed it. Other Republicans in Congress have floated bills that would let workers use overtime to fund their paid leave.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is one of the sponsors of the Family Act, which provide for paid family leave via a payroll tax.

Gitis says the current proposals on the right would be inadequate or ineffective. He touts his proposal’s low cost, but he does not specify how the U.S. would pay for such a benefit. He also leaves open the possibility that it could be broadened to include more workers.

“We just put the idea out there and see what people think,” he said, adding that the group has sent its proposal out to people on the Hill but hasn’t heard much back yet.

Gitis’ group bills itself as center-right, but its hardcore Republican bonafides are clear: Founded by former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and GOP donor Fred Malek, who runs a private equity firm and has advised or worked for several GOP presidents, including Ronald Reagan. The forum is run by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economic policy adviser to George W. Bush and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Gitis himself has previously authored papers arguing that unions are bad for economic growth and that increasing the minimum wage leads to job loss ― positions more common on the GOP side.

The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not have guaranteed paid maternity leave; instead, federal law offers 12 weeks unpaid time off for employees at companies with 50 or more workers.

The lack of paid leave leads many women to return to work just a few weeks after giving birth or to simply leave the workforce. Lack of leave contributes to the stubborn gender pay gap. Researchers have found women who take little leave are at higher risk for maternal depression, which has devastating effects for mothers and children. 

On the left and right there are a few proposals on how to fix this. The Family Act ― a bill floated by Congressional Democrats that’s currently stalled out ― would provide for leave through a small payroll tax paid for by workers and employers. It’s supported by Lichtman’s group, among other progressive groups.

Right now only 12 percent of workers in the United States have access to paid leave through their employer ― and most of those workers hold higher-paying jobs. Over the past couple of years, more and more elite U.S. companies have been stepping up and giving more paid leave to their workers, including Facebook, Netflix, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Gitis emphasized that his plan was intended to help those struggling at the bottom, for whom a pregnancy or a family member’s illness can have a devastating financial impact. About 9 percent of workers who take time off to care for a family member end up on public assistance, according to Labor Department data.

If you’re a full-time worker earning the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, you’d get $3,359 for leave under Gitis’ plan. That’s $1,000 more than that worker would get under the Family Act. Raising the minimum wage would seem to put far more money in these workers’ pockets. However, Gitis said this wouldn’t necessarily help workers who need leave, arguing that it could endanger their jobs and that the rise in pay wouldn’t help when they took time away from work.

He also noted that his plan ― which targets far fewer people ― would cost between $2.7 billion and $31.6 billion per year. The Family Act, he said, could cost at least $85 billion; the National Partnership for Women disputes that number, saying Gitis is using the wrong factors for his estimate. The group says its benefit would cost about $26 billion, entirely funded by the payroll tax.

“The Family Act is intended for everyone. This is more a low-income assistance program,” Gitis said.

Conservative groups contacted by The Atlantic were quick to dismiss the proposal. “This is social engineering through the tax code,” Andy Roth, of the ultra-conservative Club for Growth, told the publication. He said that paid leave should be left up to the states.

A few states already have paid family leave. Most recently, New York passed a law that would provide workers with 12 weeks paid time off, and it’s set to take effect in January 2017.

Representative Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-Wash.) seemed more open to the possibility ― though she didn’t endorse it, she told The Atlantic: “Proposals like AAF’s open the door to new conversations.” 

NerdWallet's Best Credit Card Tips for August 2016

by Ellen Cannon

August is a bittersweet month. Summer is winding down, and the days are getting shorter. At the end, kids go back to school, and adults have to turn their full attention to work. But first, everyone tries to squeeze in as much summer as they can. We think you should also squeeze as many benefits as you can out of your credit cards this month.

Every month, the Nerds round up a new set of tips to help you maximize rewards and minimize costs with each use of your credit card. Here are our tips for August 2016.

Find back-to-school shopping bargains

Back-to-school shopping is "the second-largest retail event of the year, behind only the winter holiday shopping season," according to Mintel, a market research company. Obviously, people are buying a lot more than pencils and erasers. If your kids -- or you -- are heading back to school, your shopping list may include school supplies, books, computers and clothing. For college-bound teenagers, outfitting a dorm room or off-campus apartment can put a dent in the budget.

Save some money or earn cash-back rewards by choosing the right credit card when you shop. A flat-rate card gives you rewards on everything you buy. If you have a cash-back card with rotating bonus categories, know where to go to get maximum value this quarter -- it might be wholesale clubs, for example, or Amazon.com, depending on your card. You can also save a little by taking advantage of a sales tax holiday. This is a period during which some states don't charge sales tax on back-to-school items. Read our guide to choosing the right credit card for back-to-school shopping, which also includes a list of sales tax holidays.

Teach students about credit

People go to college to prepare themselves for the work world -- but few students learn the financial information they need to know for living in the real world. That's where moms and dads have to be teachers. Students in college should learn the basics of building credit and using credit cards before they graduate. There are three ways to go with credit cards: get a student credit card, become an authorized user of a parent's card or get a secured card.

Most of the major credit card issuers offer student credit cards, which are designed for college students with limited credit. They can be difficult to qualify for, however. If your student doesn't qualify, you may need to co-sign for the credit card. This means you agree to pay the balance if your student does not, so any misstep can hurt your credit, too.

Another option is to make your child an authorized user of your card. You're still liable for any charges made by the authorized user, but your child will be building credit. Make sure your card issuer reports authorized user activity to the credit bureaus.

If neither of those options seems like a good fit, consider a secured credit card. Your student puts up an amount of money -- usually around $300 -- and this becomes the credit limit. (A low credit limit also limits the potential for getting into trouble with debt.) The card issuer holds the money as collateral in case the student doesn't pay the bill; when the account is closed or converted to a regular card, the issuer refunds the money. Before applying, be sure that the card reports to one of the credit bureaus so that you achieve your goal: to build your child's credit file. Managing a secured card responsibly for several years will make it easier for your child to get an unsecured card after college. Be aware that just like any credit card, a secured card requires the student to have a source of income.

Whichever route you go, be sure your child learns the right way to manage credit. Explain the importance of looking at the monthly statement, paying the bill on time and not maxing out the credit line.

Another good teaching opportunity is to get your credit report and go over it with your child. Every consumer is entitled to a free credit report from each of the credit bureaus once a year. You can download yours at AnnualCreditReport.com. Once you've scrutinized the credit report, get your credit score and show your child how to get his or her own. There are many places for consumers to get free FICO scores these days; take advantage of them.

If you want to give your children a credit head start, begin teaching them about credit in high school. A 2016 survey by the Council for Economic Education found that only 17 states require high school students to take a personal finance course. If you don't live in one of those states, it's up to you to be the personal finance guru. People under 18 can't apply for student credit cards, but they can be authorized users on your card, or you can co-sign for a card. In addition to reviewing credit reports and scores, you can show them how you check your transactions and balance throughout the month, and pay your bill on time. By the time they head to college, they'll be credit scholars.

Consider applying for a hotel card

Vacation season is winding down, but if you want to eke out one more trip before summer ends (or get started with planning for your next one), think about applying for a hotel credit card. August is the best time to apply for a hotel card, according to a NerdWallet study, because that's the month when hotel credit cards make the most special offers. What's a good offer? A sign-up bonus that runs from 25,000 to 80,000 points after you spend a certain amount within a specific time period. Hotel cards usually offer bonus rewards for money spent at their properties, and many offer perks like a free night's stay each year. Check out NerdWallet's comparison of hotel rewards programs to help you make a good choice.

Ellen Cannon is a staff writer at NerdWallet, a personal finance website. Email: ecannon@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @ellencannon.

This story originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Olympics A Chance To Showcase Innovation, Entrepreneurship

It's hard to deny the inspiration the Olympic Games provide every other year, whether for children aspiring to be future Olympians, weekend warriors hoping for glory in their group bike ride, or recreational age groupers looking for a personal best. Certainly for those who are not athletically inclined, the games still offer an unparalleled combination of entertainment and sporting performance across a variety of domains.

And while the raw athleticism is inspiring in itself, the games have always offered a showcase of innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation often comes at the pinnacle of performance--from the most demanding and competitive user or customer pushing the envelope of performance. This inspiration can drive subsequent benefits to the rest of us, including recreational athletes and weekend warriors alike.

From Dick Fosbury who pioneered the "Fosbury Flop" in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico to David Berkoff's underwater kick dubbed the "Berkoff Blast" 20 years ago, entrepreneurial athletes experiment and sometimes land on innovations that change human possibility. More recently, witness the efforts of Indiana University alumnus and now gold medalist high jumper Derek Drouin, who changed his technique to jump even higher despite years of successful competition.

The roots of the Olympics and "firsts" go way back. Who does not harken back to the hero of the first recorded Olympic Games in 776 B.C., the Greek cook Coroebus, who won the footrace called the Stade (root for the modern stadium)? And of course, Heracles (Hercules), son of Zeus, who is reported to have wrestled his father in an even earlier contest. One can imagine that lost to history is the first Wheaties box featuring said Heracles and the innovative wrestling move which, with a clever agent, could have been known as the "Heracles Hip Roll!"

Some innovation is in treatment. For example, marking the conversation this year (and bodies of some Olympic swimmers) is the practice of "cupping." You may have seen athletes with those circular welts on their bodies--adornment which will likely be all the rage after the 2016 Olympics. Cupping may be a centuries-old practice for some cultures, but the "innovation" is newly adopted in some circles (pun intended). Therapists place cups on a patient's body, sucking the air out of the cups to create pressure. Some say this helps athletes recover more quickly, stimulating blood flow and facilitating repair of damaged tissue. No matter what you think about the technique, when it's showcased on an international stage, you can't help but notice. Might these be branded the "Phelps Welts" with do-it-yourself home kits to follow? (I copyright this idea).

Other innovations are product driven and create new industries--like the aerodynamic cycling gear dreamed up and used by Boardman and Obree in cycling and likeTour de France winner Greg LeMond's "aero bars" that he used so successfully in the final time trial for the 1989 race. Similarly, the University of Florida's training staff originated GatorAde as the early sports drink to replace sweat that has since spurred a multibillion-dollar market that allows us to replace not only fluids but needed salts and electrolytes when engaging in endurance sports.

Where would we be without the Roger Bannisters of the world? As a medical student and runner, his experimentation with new techniques like interval and lactate threshold training led to the first sub-four-minute mile. We can learn from these new techniques and training methods from top competitors and benefit from offerings from innovative companies to reach new levels ourselves. Entrepreneurship, innovation, and human achievement are inextricably linked--both in sport and in business--for the benefit of all.

I, myself, have completed multiple Ironman events and am inspired by top athletes, but I confess, a four minute half-mile would be medal-worthy for me right now!

Fueling Optimism and Community Wellness With Business One Cup at Time

I was born square in the middle of the massive, confusing, buzz-worthy generation known as the Millennials. Although I hate to put myself into that giant box, I recognize that I fit many stereotypes of my generation: I graduated with student debt in the middle of an economic crisis, the United States has been at war for more than half of my life, and most of my peers live paycheck to paycheck. Millennials get a bad rap for many traits that I unfortunately can't exclude myself from, but the characteristic I most like to identify with is my unwavering Millennial optimism for the future. Despite the challenges I faced as I entered the workforce, I have chosen a career that gives me purpose as well as success. My expanding role over the past four years at The Tea Spot, a certified B Corporation, has helped to fuel my hopeful approach to life and has shaped my career not only as a driven woman, but also as a force for good in the world.

I'll be honest; before I started working for The Tea Spot - an innovative tea and teaware company with a robust philanthropic arm - I didn't know what a B Corp was. I got the job through a friend of a friend and I was mostly grateful that I could use my degree for something other than waiting tables. It didn't take long, however, to realize that this small but mighty company was about more than just serving up a delicious cuppa. Founded in 2004, The Tea Spot actively supports the wellness of our community, our employees, and our customers by donating 10% of all sales in-kind to cancer wellness and community programs. This 10% Pledge was put into action by founder and cancer survivor Maria Uspenski, but our mission of promoting health and wellness with our product is embraced fully by every member of our team. This generosity isn't a marketing ploy; it's our way of putting our money where our mouth is - literally, one healthy mouthful of tea at a time.

For The Tea Spot, becoming a certified B Corp in 2011 was a way to have a third party formally quantify our donation efforts, but as we grow into a larger company, our certification means much more than just our 10% Pledge. We strive to constantly be a positive link in the tea supply chain by always sourcing high quality ingredients and materials, and we aim to make our tea blends as delicious as possible so that the enjoyment and health benefits of tea can be spread far and wide. We've made a concerted effort to substantially expand our organic line in recent years not only to keep up with growing demand, but also to help reduce our impact on the environment. As we continue to grow, we look to the example set forth by other B Corps to guide us and help us shape an employee culture that encourages lasting and fulfilling jobs for each member of our workforce. These efforts aren't just to make ourselves feel good. Every year we are contacted by hundreds of people who thank us for sharing our story and products, and who share their own tale of survival and wellness. These personal stories fuel us through every extra hour we put in at work and every extra effort we make to lift those around us.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by the problems that our world faces: climate change, poverty, disease, and warfare. By taking small steps as a company, The Tea Spot is part of a fast-growing movement to expand the definition of good business, and a group that is poised to make large changes in the world. Now present in 50 countries, B Corporations have become more than a few small businesses taking small steps. This attitude of collective change-making is what drew me into The Tea Spot, and it's what encourages The Tea Spot to continue to shine within this community. Whether the B Corp movement mirrors the millennial attitude or vice versa, this enthusiastic community of like-minded individuals and businesses encourage us to believe that it is possible to have it all: a thriving career, a profitable passion, and the ability to use business as a positive influence in the world. For The Tea Spot, our philanthropy and sustainability efforts aren't just an important part of our roots, it's a vital part of our decision-making process and the driving force that gives our work purpose.

The B Corp Life is a new blog series geared towards exploring what it's like to work at a benefit corporation. Why do b corps matter, and what does the future hold for them? Let us know at PurposePlusProfit@huffingtonpost.com or by tweeting with #TheBCorpLife.

Why Actively Promoting Happiness At Work May Not Be The Best Idea

Should we be actively promoting happiness in the workplace? My immediate thoughts are: “Happy workers are more productive workers.” Consequently, promoting happiness seems like a no-brainer, right?

After all, there are studies that provide strong evidence for this. For instance, Economists at Warwick University found that happiness led to a spark in productivity by 12 percent. Another study mentions several benefits: increased employee retention, improved customer satisfaction, and a higher likelihood that employees will engage in citizenship behavior.

Much of the research then is in favor of actively promoting happiness, not only for improved productivity but for a host of other benefits. And this is why it has gained much prominence among organizations:

“... happiness as a way to boost productivity seems to have gained increased traction in corporate circles as of late.”-Andrew Spicer and Carl Cederström, Harvard Business Review

As a result, Google (and other large organizations) has invested more in employee support and job satisfaction has risen by 37 percent. Companies now have happiness coaches, they engage in team building exercises and Google even has a Chief Happiness Officer.

However, there is a growing body of research which provides contradictory evidence, emphasizing the downside of doing so. This is highlighted by Spicer and Cederström who mention that “we also discovered alternate findings, which indicate that some of the taken for granted wisdom about what happiness can achieve in the workplace are mere myths”. Let’s have a look at the alternative findings.

Happiness doesn’t always lead to increased productivity

There are several studies that contradict the notion that happiness leads to increased productivity, with one study on British Supermarkets even suggesting a negative correlation between the two: Companies with higher profits had unhappy employees. And even for studies in support of this, a fairly weak correlation exists.

The paradoxical effects of valuing happiness

A psychological experiment highlights the paradoxical effects of actually valuing happiness or rephrased: by focusing on happiness, we actually become unhappy.

In the study, subjects were asked to watch a film that would make them happy. Before watching the film, one half were required to read a statement about the importance of happiness. The results were that they demonstrated lower levels of happiness after the film. But why?

In the modern world, we seem to focus on happiness as a moral obligation. The pursuit thereof has become a duty and failing to complete this duty makes us even more unhappy. According to the French Philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, we would be happier, if we just simply abandoned this mad pursuit of happiness:

“By the duty to be happy, I thus refer to the ideology... that urges us to evaluate everything in terms of pleasure and displeasure...on the one hand, we have to make the most of our lives; on the other, we have to be sorry and punish ourselves if we don’t succeed in doing so. This is a perversion of a very beautiful idea: that everyone has a right to control his own destiny and to improve his life.”

Happiness may not be good for all aspects of work

Today, both customer and non-customer facing employees are required to be happy. But happiness can also negatively affect our performance at work.

One study highlighted that people who were in a good mood were far worse at identifying acts of deception than those who were in a bad mood. A second study demonstrated that angry people achieve better outcomes during a negotiation than happy people.

Happiness can damage relationships with your boss, family, and friends

According to Susanne Ekmann, by expecting work to make us happy, we can become emotionally needy ― where we depend on our managers to provide us with recognition and reassurance. When we don’t receive the desired emotional response from employers we overreact as we see it as evidence of rejection; making us emotionally vulnerable.

In a book, by Eva Illouz, titled Cold Intimacies, it was found that those seeking emotional comfort at work started to treat their private lives as work tasks. The results were that family life became increasingly cold. This, in turn, pushed people to want to spend an even more unhealthy amount of time at work.

Seeking happiness at work can make losing your job even more devastating

Expecting happiness to come from work creates a dangerous dependence on it, to the extent that losing our job can feel like losing a promise of happiness. Spicer and Cedeström elaborate on this in referencing a book by Richard Sennet, titled, The Corrosion of Character The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism:

“Richard Sennet noticed that people who saw their employer as an important source of personal meaning were those who became most devastated if they were fired. When these people lost their jobs, they were not just losing an income – they were losing the promise of happiness. This suggests that, when we see our work as a great source of happiness, we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable during periods of change. In an era of constant corporate restructuring, this can be dangerous.”

Happiness can make you a selfish bastard

In one piece of research, participants were given lottery tickets and told that they could give away and/or keep as many tickets as they wanted. Those in a good mood kept more tickets to themselves. How’s that for generosity?

It can damage personal connections and make you lonely

This is demonstrated in an experiment, titled “The Pursuit of Happiness Can Be Lonely” where psychologists asked participants to keep a detailed diary for two weeks. Those greatly valuing happiness felt increasingly disconnected and lonelier afterward.

Despite all the above contradictory evidence, we continue to promote it, but why?

Cedeström and Spicer reference one study that says it comes down to aesthetics and ideology; where aesthetically it’s a convenient idea on paper and ideologically it allows us to avoid more serious issues at work. They say:

“... we can sweep more uncomfortable questions under the carpet, especially since happiness is often seen as a choice. It becomes a convenient way of dealing with negative attitudes, party poopers, miserable bastards, and other unwanted characters in corporate life.”

So where to from here?

There are clear downsides to actively promoting happiness in the workplace. Not only is the link between happiness and productivity questionable, but it can actually make us unhappy, damage our workplace and family relationships, affect aspects of our work, make losing our jobs even more devastating and even make us selfish and lonely.

With the evidence mounting up, it is clear that organizations need to rethink the idea of actively promoting it and people also need to rethink their expectations. To end off, no one could have said it more aptly than Cedeström and Spicer:

“Happiness, of course, is a great thing to experience, but nothing that can be willed into existence. And maybe the less we seek to actively pursue happiness through our jobs, the more likely we will be to actually experience a sense of joy in them — a joy which is spontaneous and pleasurable, and not constructed and oppressive. But most importantly, we will be better equipped to cope with work in a sober manner. To see it for what it is. And not as we — whether executives, employees or dancing motivational seminar leaders — pretend that it is.”

What To Do During The Next Airline Computer Meltdown

Catastrophic computer outages that paralyze an entire airline are few and far between. Except this summer.

Last month, Southwest Airlines canceled 2,300 flights after a router in one of its data centers failed, delaying hundreds of thousands of passengers. And last week, Delta Air Lines suffered a massive computer outage, which triggered the cancellation of 451 flights in a single morning.

A rare look behind the curtain at Southwest’s meltdown offers several important customer-service lessons for passengers who experience similar delays in the future. And in an industry that depends on finicky information systems, these incidents are bound to repeat themselves. They’ve left customers wondering how to avoid getting stuck in another IT collapse, and what, if anything, an airline can do to make up for such an event.

Related: Frequently asked questions about air travel.

Jack Russell, who was scheduled to fly from St. Louis to Las Vegas last month, had a front-row seat for Southwest’s IT issues, which an employee euphemistically blamed on a “software problem.” The airline’s proposed fix: Fly him to Vegas four days later.

As the executive vice president of a software company in St. Louis, Russell knows a thing or two about computers that go on the blink. But he’s less understanding about Southwest’s IT implosion, which he says left him with little choice but to pay an extra $1,800 to reach his destination.

“I spent twice as much money as I thought I would to get to Las Vegas,” Russell says. “If my customers had an outage created by my company and I said, ‘Sorry, it was a freak occurrence,’ they would be waiting at my doorstep with their lawyer.”

The Southwest systems problem suggests how fragile even the best-run airlines can be. It started in the early afternoon of July 20, when one of its small Cisco routers, out of about 2,000 such pieces of hardware that direct the airline’s network traffic, failed.

This router broke in an unusual way. Instead of registering the error, which would have allowed network administrators in Southwest’s Dallas data center to take it offline immediately and replace it with a working router, it behaved as if it was still operating normally. Only, it wasn’t directing any traffic.

Although network administrators spotted the error within half an hour, enough traffic had backed up that critical systems needed to be rebooted — a process that took a full 12 hours and affected critical functions, including the airline’s website, its smartphone app and several internal systems used by Southwest employees to handle reservations. It was as if someone had turned off the lights for half a day.

When the systems flickered back to life, the problems continued. The airline still didn’t have enough information to restart all flights. Because its systems had been down for so long, it couldn’t be sure whether some of its crews had taken enough rest, as required by the Federal Aviation Administration. That forced Southwest to cancel more flights on July 21 and 22.

Brandwatch, a social-tracking service, charted a corresponding tsunami of anger on Southwest’s social media channels. The airline drew 36,905 mentions in a single day on July 21, an almost 20-fold increase from normal levels.

“The spike in incoming volume that this received was incredible,” says Joshua March, the chief executive of Conversocial, which offers customer-service software to travel companies. “But the really significant piece in this instance was the inability to effectively scale the response.”

Southwest had no script for handling an event of this magnitude.

“It was really rough,” says Robert Jordan, the airline’s executive vice president and chief commercial officer, who describes the IT catastrophe as a “thousand-year flood.” The airline sent 50-percent-off vouchers to passengers affected by the outage, and in some cases paid for them to fly to their destinations on other airlines. All told, he says Southwest spent “tens of millions of dollars” trying to make amends.

“We know we messed up,” he adds. “We know we have to work really hard to regain our passengers’ trust.”

Southwest is still cleaning up. Russell’s delayed flight to Las Vegas is among the thousands of cases still being processed. Under most circumstances, a full refund for a replacement flight would be a tall order, but these are not normal circumstances.

IT disasters of this scale are unusual. Back in 2012, United Airlines experienced several days of delayed flights and sluggish customer service as it struggled to integrate the IT systems of United and Continental Airlines. Last July, United also suffered an outage that made it cancel hundreds of flights after a network router stopped working.

Asked if passengers could have done anything to get to their destinations faster during such a systems collapse, Jordan paused. So many things went wrong during the event that the normal tricks didn’t work. You couldn’t fall back on calling the airline because even the call-center employees didn’t have access to their IT systems.

“There just isn’t a good answer,” he says.

That’s the consensus of the customer service experts, too.

Elaine Allison, a former flight attendant and on-board service manager who now offers training courses in customer service, says passengers are powerless to negotiate their way around a total systems failure. She happened to be in Las Vegas during the week of Southwest’s outage, but was lucky enough to be flying on another airline.

“Pack at least one day of clothing and small amenities, plus all medications, in a carry-on, in the event luggage is checked and immediately not retrievable,” she says. Russell handled the situation correctly by re-booking his flight on another airline, she says. Southwest must refund a ticket when it cancels a flight.

The trick, says customer service expert Teri Yanovitch, is to look forward and not back. Southwest needs to figure out how to say it’s sorry without losing its shirt, and customers need a game plan should they get caught in a future systems failure.

“Southwest needs to explain the situation and how Southwest will prevent it from happening again,” she says. “As a customer, the best you can do when all critical IT systems are down is to keep calm, don’t take it out on the employee — it is not their fault — and consider your options for alternate transportation based on the situation.”

Research suggests that Southwest can make a full recovery, Yanovitch says. When a recovery is handled correctly, 96 percent of the customers will return. And when it’s not? In 2012, when United Airlines suffered its first meltdown, it was the world’s largest airline. Today, it’s No. 3.

After you’ve left a comment here, let’s continue the discussion on my consumer advocacy site or on Twitter, Facebook and Google. I also have a newsletter and you’ll definitely want to order my new, amazingly helpful and subversive book called How to Be the World’s Smartest Traveler (and Save Time, Money, and Hassle).