Ways small firms can boost business in 2010

Small-business owners aren’t just putting together budgets and sales projections as 2010 approaches: Like the rest of us, they’re making some new year’s resolutions.

These goals aren’t about losing weight or exercising more. Business owners are resolving to fix problems in their companies or come up with ideas for working smarter in the new year.

Here’s a sampling:

Spend quality time with clients. Merilee Kern plans to set aside time for a leisurely, friendly chat with the clients of her public relations firm in Poway, Calif.

Kern realized that the one time when she and clients aren’t talking about business is when they call her during the holidays to say thank you for the gift baskets she sends.

“It’s the only conversation a year where we stop and ask about kids and really transcend the normal stuff,” said Kern, president of Kern Communications. “I want to take an opportunity to not talk about business.”

Protect the company cash flow. Heather Logrippo sometimes finds herself waiting for customers to pay for the ads they take out in her Boston-based real estate magazine, Distinctive Homes. So her resolution is to accept credit cards to be sure she’s paid on time.

She also wants to be sure she doesn’t get burned when customers say they’ll buy ads but never send in the copy for it, leaving her with blank space and lost revenue.

“I’m not a bank,” Logrippo said. “For too long I’ve been sympathetic,”

Making it official. Howard Ankin started his law practice in 1997, and it has grown to 25 employees. In the early years, he didn’t worry about formulating policies for vacation and sick time and other personnel matters. Now, though, he says it’s time to formalize those policies and put them in writing.

“When I had a smaller office, the informality worked well for me, and now, at this point, the informality is working against me,” said Ankin, whose firm is based in Chicago.

So one of his resolutions is to create an employee handbook, something that human resources professionals urge small-business owners to do. The beginning of the year, before employees start asking for time off, is an ideal time to do it.

Improve your work-life balance. Hope Katz Gibbs wanted to spend less time at work in the new year and more time with her two children.

But, “instead of dialing things back for a work-life balance, ramping it up seems to be the best strategy at this point,” said Gibbs, president of Inkandescent Public Relations. Her Washington, D.C.-based company, which targets entrepreneurs, expects to have more work as more people start businesses.

So she’s taken a step back and looked at her family life to see how to make it better for everyone in the new year. And she realized that overbooking her 14-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter with after-school activities wasn’t the answer.

Put money into human assets. Barbara Monteiro plans to keep looking for ways to save money — and to spend more on her employees.

Monteiro, who owns a New York-based public relations firm, will be swapping out her PCs with Macintosh computers. Because Macs are less susceptible to viruses, she’ll be spending less money on eliminating them from her computers. And she’ll be looking for ways to buy computer paper and other office supplies cheaply.

The money will go toward things that will let her employees know how much she values them: subway fare cards, coffee, pizza lunches. She has already been doing that, but in the new year, Monteiro wants to step up the pace.

“In bad times, employees appreciate if you stick by them and even skip a paycheck yourself to keep the business going. When good times come back, those employees will think twice before leaving,” she said.

Joyce Rosenberg writes about small business for the Associated Press.