A lot changes in a year.

This picture was taken about one year ago at my son Tapp Allen's graduation. A lot has changed in just one year, including the length of his hair-it's alot longer now. I recently had to give an elevator speech at a business luncheon I was at. Normally great at these things I bombed. Someone told me afterwards that I did fine, however I am pretty sure the guy was just being nice. The purpose of an elevator speech is obviously to let someone know what exactly it is you do for a living. If you are in the sales or service business than the purpose of that speech should be changed to what it is exactly that you can do to improve that person's life. In the end that's all any of us are concerned with business wise anyhow? What I should have said was that we have 3 offices located throughout the state of Arkansas and over 150 years of experience. By being an independent agency we are able to shop all of your insurance with literally hundreds of insurance companies and that no one could sell you insurance any cheaper than we can. In addition to providing the lowest possible premiums in the south-we only use insurance companies that are A rated or better.

While our business has grown like crazy since this time last year, we cant rest on our laurels. That luncheon was a perfect example of how important it is to tune up your elevator speech every year-because just like Tapp Allen's hair-a lot can change in a year.

Disability Policy Seminar in DC and the Access School in Little Rock

Its been awhile since my last post but hopefully that will change. Last week I had the privilege of attending a Disability Policy seminar in Washington. The seminar hosted people from all around the country to discuss the numerous issues involved with Developmental Disabilities. As a parent of a child who is affected by numerous Developmental Disabilities and as a board member of a school for special needs kids here in Arkansas, I am acutely aware of the challenges that people with developmental disabilities face. Or at least I thought I was. One of the issues that I am embarrassed to say that I was unaware of is a piece of legislation intended to allow people with disabilities or their parents or siblings, the opportunity to save money in a 529 plan. 

The ABLE Act will give individuals with disabilities and their families the ability to save for their child's future just like every other American family, and help people with disabilities live full, productive lives in their communities without losing benefits provided through private insurances, the Medicaid program, the supplemental security income program, the beneficiary’s employment, and other sources. The account could fund a variety of essential expenses for individuals including medical and dental care, housing, transportation and a host of other needs. This should really be a no brainer for congress, but as the old Chinese proverb says "we'll see." I would encourage you to call your member of congress and tell them to support the ABLE Act.

One of the reasons I started this blog last year was to raise awareness about Developmental Disabilities. The picture above of Polly and I was taken at an annual fundraiser for a school in Little Rock called the The Access School. The school provides services and therapies to children who have developmental and other disabilities. It was a great event and Polly and I were happy to support such a great school. Part of my job as a DD Council member is to promote the services of the council and to help increase self advocacy of people with Developmental Disabilities. I hope you will join me in this task as we continue to try and make a difference in the lives of all people affected by Developmental Disabilities.

Fallen Officers Memorial Poker Tournament at Southland Park

On January 28th the Crittenden County Leadership class with the help of Randy Sullivan and Jerry Fenter, held a slot, black jack, and poker tournament at Southland Park Gaming and Racing. To say the event was a success would have been an understatement. When all was said and done more than $10,000 were rasied to help support the Fallen Officers Fund.
The winners that I knew where -my wife and Marion elementary teacher-Polly Glass, Dr. Daniel Bird, Franklin Fogleman and Blake Foust. Foust 2nd from left was crowned the Grand Champion.

Federal Government will control our Health Exchange

Just Bee Generous

It's Thanksgiving every day for a New Orleanian who inspires others to 'Just Bee Generous'

Published: Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 5:00 AM

By Sheila Stroup, The Times-Picayune NOLA.com
This is the time of year when we open our hearts and our wallets: taking food to the food bank, sending checks to worthy causes, buying presents for Toys for Tots and the Forgotten Angels. Kelly McAtee has come up with something better.

Beth McManusThe McAttes, left to right: Collin, 17; Kelly and Lily, 2; Lindsay, 15; Cy, 5; Patrick and Reid, 11.

Her family’s “Just Bee Generous” idea is something they live all year round, not just during the holidays.
“’Just be generous’ is just something I’ve told my kids since they were born,” McAtee says.
McAtee lives in Williamsburg, Va., with her husband, Patrick, and their five children, but she will always be a New Orleanian and “a Sacred Heart girl” at heart.
She has five pounds of CDM Coffee delivered every month, and in the summertime, she carries condensed milk with her when she’s on her way to a Virginia “snowcone” stand.
“We even have a St. Bernard that sits and watches the Saints games with us,” she says.
Most of her relatives still live in southeast Louisiana, but after she graduated from LSU, she and her fighter pilot husband traveled all over the world.
“I’ve been gone for a long time, but New Orleans contributed to who I am,” she says, “and how I’ve raised my children is a reflection of that.”
Teaching their kids kindness
A couple of years ago, the McAtees decided they needed to do something concrete to instill the idea of generosity in their children, so they started doing small random acts of kindness. They would anonymously pay for another family’s meal when they were eating at a restaurant or buy $25 gift cards and leave them on windshields in a parking lot with little notes.
“We wanted our kids to understand the virtue of giving without expecting anything in return,” McAtee says.
She remembers the first time she realized their son Reid, who was 9 at the time, got the concept. It had been a busy day filled with after-school activities, and she had just dropped off her oldest son at soccer practice. She stopped at a drive-up window to get a fast supper for her younger children and found herself in a long line of cars.
While they waited, she was talking to the children about being nice and she told them they were going to do something nice for someone they didn’t know. When she finally got up to the window, she told the woman she wanted to pay for the car behind them, too.
“The woman at the window did not seem happy being a Burger King employee,” McAtee says.
The woman curtly told McAtee she needed to pull up because part of her order would take a while.
“That wasn’t part of my plan, because I wanted to just be able to drive away without anyone seeing who we were,” she says.
Instead, the woman behind her got out of her car to ask why she had bought her dinner. When she explained that she was trying to teach her children about being generous, the woman was surprised.
“It was just a small meal, but she kept thanking us,” McAtee says. “She seemed awestruck by what we’d done.”
And when the drive-up window employee brought the rest of their order, she had a smile on her face. She said they had made her day.
“After we left, Reid said, ‘Mom, when you’re nice to someone, maybe it helps them be nice to someone else,’” McAtee says. “He totally got something out of it.”
'Just Bee Nice'
From that small incident, McAtee’s idea for “Just Bee Nice” began to evolve. She came up with a card to explain her mission, and her family helped design it, using a honeybee as part of the logo.
“It’s basically a pay-it-forward card that tells the recipient, ‘Pass this along when you have a chance to do a random act of generosity,’” she says.
The front shows a globe with the bee buzzing around it and says “Just bee generous to a total stranger for no reason at all,” and under that, “Can you be the bee?” On the back is an explanation and the Just Bee Generous website.
“I had no idea if anybody would log on to the website,” McAtee says. “It was really more of an experiment with our kids.”
She got 100 cards printed up on business-card paper, so they would hold up and be able to be passed along. And, beginning in the summer of 2010, each time they did an anonymous act of generosity, they’d leave a card behind.

JUST BEE GENEROUS

To learn more about Just Bee Generous or order five free pay-it-forward cards, visit Just Be Generous, email km@justbeegenerous.com or call 757.903.8178.

Not long after they started leaving the cards, they began to get messages on their website from as far away as Canada, Europe and Asia.
“That continues to blow me away,” McAtee says. “I get people logging on from all over the world. This week I heard from someone in Austria.”
She added a place on the website where you can order five free cards after people started requesting them, and though she hasn’t kept track of exactly how many she’s sent out, she knows it’s more than 5,000.
“I get the weirdest requests,” she says. The Department of Labor in Washington state asked for 500 cards.”
Their most recent addition to the website is “Just Bee Generous” T-shirts that sell for $25 and come with three cards and a request that the receiver go out and perform three anonymous acts of generosity for three different people. If they make any profit from them, it will go toward acts of generosity, such as helping a family after a fire.
“Right now, they’re just paying for the cards,” McAtee says.
Most generous state: Louisiana
What she likes best about her generosity project is the change she’s seen in her children.
“Everybody in the house has the cards, and the kids will often do things on their own,” she says.
Collin, a high school senior, has spread the idea to his classmates.
“He has all these 17- and 18-year-olds using the cards,” she says.
She was also happy to discover how generous people in Louisiana are.
“People from Louisiana log in more than anybody else,” she says. “They log in and ask for cards every single day.”
McAtee thinks it’s because of the mindset we have here.
“I grew up learning generosity in New Orleans and in my family and at Sacred Heart,” she says.
She and Patrick have wondered if eventually one of the cards might circle back to them. So far, that hasn’t happened, but something even better did. For a long time after she started handing out the cards, she didn’t mention what she was doing to her mother, Gayle Petagna Sisk, who lives in Covington with McAtee’s step-dad, Fred Sisk.
About a week after McAtee told her about her family’s generosity project, her mom received a Just Bee Generous card in the mail along with a $100 gift card for Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
“All we know is the envelope had a New Orleans postmark,” McAtee says. “Neither one of us has any idea who sent it.”
Sheila Stroup's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in The Times-Picayune's Livingsection. Contact her at sstroup@timespicayune.com or 985.898.4831

Great Piece on Education from Thomas Friedman

Taken From Sunday's New York Times

Op-Ed Columnist

How About Better Parents?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: November 19, 2011

 IN recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems — the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.

To better understand why some students thrive taking the PISA tests and others do not, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the exams for the O.E.C.D., was encouraged by the O.E.C.D. countries to look beyond the classrooms. So starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, the PISA team went to the parents of 5,000 students and interviewed them “about how they raised their kids and then compared that with the test results” for each of those years, Schleicher explained to me. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:
“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”
Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”
The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is smallest when parental involvement takes the form of simply playing with their children.
These PISA findings were echoed in a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, and written up by the center’s director, Patte Barth, in the latest issue of The American School Board Journal.
The study, called “Back to School: How parent involvement affects student achievement,” found something “somewhat surprising,” wrote Barth: “Parent involvement can take many forms, but only a few of them relate to higher student performance. Of those that work, parental actions that support children’s learning at home are most likely to have an impact on academic achievement at school.
“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”
To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.

Taking a Closer Look

Taken from the New York Times and Author MP Mueller

Managing the Business Side of the Business

By MP MUELLER

Last year at my aunt’s 80th birthday gathering, I talked business with one of my cousins, Phil Ochoa. Phil and his wife, Sharyn, started a company, Federal Defense Industries, out of the garage of their Southern California home. Ten years later, they are the family success story, with eight-figure revenue, and they have traded way up and out of their office with the Genie door opener.
They have an interesting niche business that finds and sells spare parts for military equipment that the United States has sold to its overseas allies. Phil talks about entrepreneurship with a mixture of reverence and sport. Quotes from Sam Walton and Zig Ziglar pepper his conversation. He and Sharyn asked me to come out to California for a couple of days to review their marketing strategies and to suggest some new ones.
So, last December, I visited the Los Angeles area, learned a lot about their business and left them with some marketing strategies and tactics. But it was I who really benefited, getting to see how astutely they ran the business side of their business. Oh, that, you say! You see, I opened my advertising agency 16 years ago with a love for doing creative work. Years later, I’ve hired people who are much better at that than I am, and my role has shifted to managing the business. There is no pride when I admit this, but we’ve been in business for the better part of two decades, and I have never had a business plan or an annual budget. (I hope my banker isn’t reading this!)
What I have learned about managing a business has come from talking to friends, picking the brains of top business folks, and reading, reading, reading . . . business articles, business books, the other You’re the Boss bloggers. I’ve even hired the occasional consultant for our really blind spots. Truth be told, running the business has always been the least interesting part of my job, and I have never given it much of an embrace. But with these past few recession years and the “learning opportunities” they have presented, I have discovered new interest in running the business well. So I asked Phil and Sharyn if they would mind making a trip to Austin to take a look and share their thoughts.
The Ochoas booked their flights within a day of being asked. They requested financials for airplane reading, took an outsider’s and client’s eye to our Web site, sent some prep questions, and once here spent a January weekend poring over our books, asking more questions and probing about processes, procedures and people. What surprised me was how vulnerable I felt — expecting them to discover some skeleton in my business closet that I didn’t know existed.
I know I’ve been very lucky on many levels, kind of making it up as I go and mostly succeeding. I treated hiccups in my business practices like an unraveled hem, stapling it back and moving fast so people wouldn’t notice, but never going back and putting the right processes in place for the long run. What would their final analysis be? Had I been, sob, a bad business mother?
An hour before we were to head to the airport, we regrouped in the conference room. Being the good managers they are, they started with the compliments. The business is in good order, they said, but there are some areas that could be improved. Phil used a formula to analyze our billable hours and determined that we were pretty far off target for the percentage of billable hours vs. administrative hours — we were at 57-percent billable instead of 80 percent. Behind that was the challenge of getting everyone to fill out time sheets weekly in order to create the most realistic estimates and track time against budgeted hours. And who was the biggest transgressor? That would be me. “If you don’t value your time,” Phil said, “no one else will.”
Other suggestions included reviewing our business pitches, reassessing our wins and losses from 2010 and our targets for 2011 — making sure to focus on the ones that offer the best opportunities for profit. They also recommended building an advisory board, comparing actual hours against allocated hours at our weekly status meeting, reviewing our accounting records regularly with our accountant, developing proprietary services and products and, yes, creating an annual operations plan and budget.
“Do you have a vision board?” they asked. White board? Check. No, they said, a vision board. Explain, please? Get some poster board, some magazines and cut out pictures of what success looks like to you and stick them on the board. Put it in a prominent place where you can see it daily. They encouraged me to spend more time visualizing where I want the business to be and how it will feel when we get there. Before you go to an important meeting, they suggested, sit down and imagine what you want that meeting to be like. Create a mock financial statement (for visualization purposes only) that shows huge profits. Think of everything you are grateful for, and focus on those positive thoughts.
Lastly, Phil walked over to my desk and seeing it covered in papers shook his head. “This is where you work?” he asked. “Clean it up, and you’ll be amazed at how much more you will achieve. Read ‘Office Feng Shui.’” I cleaned my desk, made a couple other prescribed tweaks, shifted the location of my computer and I am amazed how my energy at my desk has lifted.
The time they took to help me with my business is one of the most generous gifts I’ve ever received. Phil and Sharyn’s attention to the agency inspired me beyond the list they left. I’ll share with you how I’m progressing with my “business of running a business” list in future posts. Working on managing things better is like the P90X of business workouts, only there is no 90-day endpoint for this exercise. Learning to enjoy this side of business may never be up there with doing the creative (or even with nachos and beer), but I’m determined to look better in that spreadsheet swimsuit.