I must admit, I don't get it. Companies seem quick to spend significant money on racks, products and private label programs, but when it comes to investing in training employees there seems to be a problem.

First, employees are the key to the fiscal health of any business. In fact, employees are the first customers of any business. If they don't get it, the second customer will never get it and your products will never get out the front or back door.

Training is the backbone of your business. Good employees are an asset, bad employees are a liability, but great employees will grow your business into a profitable money-making machine.

How do you build great employees? Here are some tips:

• Determine what skills your employees need. Maybe they could improve in the area of customer service, or sales, or follow-through.
• Define a standard -- what do your best employees do? This provides a benchmark.
• Plan how you're going to get that done. Maybe good customer service is calling the customer after the job.
• Track the behaviors to see if you're getting what you want.

The difference between what you want and what you get is the training  gap. Now you know what you need. Look for the right training program and send them out for training or have someone come in and customize a program for you.

The more specific the skills, the easier to track and train as well as chart improvement.

Tomorrow, making training important.

A social experiment

On his way to lunch, a man passed a homeless guy with a sign, "Vote for Obama, I need the money."  Inside the restaurant his server wore an  'Obama in 08' button. When the bill came the customer explained that he was exploring the Obama wealth redistribution concept.

The server stood in disbelief as he was told the customer was going to redistribute his tip to someone more deserving and in need like the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed away uttering some unkind words. The customer gave the homeless guy $5 and told him to be sure to thank the server inside.

At the end of this unscientific redistribution of wealth experiment, the man realized the homeless guy was very grateful for the $5 he did not earn, but the server was pretty angry that the money he did earn was given to someone who needed it more.

Redistribution of wealth is easier in concept than in practical application.

More than a year ago in an interview, Alan Greenspan gave his cerebral explanation of "Globalization." It's hard to interpret into normal language, but let me try! In order to bring the living standard of the 3rd world up to that of the USA, our living standard must decline.

The financial crisis indicates with no uncertainty that international banking is one of the culprits and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) of which Greenspan is a member has it's tentacles spread around the globe. CFR was organized in 1921 by "old money" folks like John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. All the talk about the "Amero" to compete with the Euro hints that the elitists in monetary circles are planning the demise of the Dollar and the Pound Sterling.

Ever wonder why President Bush doesn't stop the illegal flow of immigrants from Mexico? He's a member of CFR and they're vision is for a North American work force. Colin (CFR member) Powell's recent endorsement of Obama hints that McCain might not support the flow of cheap labor although he too is a member of CFR.

Just a year after Greenspan's classic explanation, we are indeed seeing the influence of what is lovingly called "Globalization." A better term for the occurrence might be "World Wide Socialism." I predict that all the phony bail-out money we're printing to save the financial industry will come home to haunt us in the form of massive inflation over the next few years.

One of the basic defensive operations taught in the Marine Corps was to dig a hole and keep digging till the barrage stopped. Better gird your loins and dig that foxhole deeper! The CFR troops are hard at it.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are certainly part of the current financial crunch. But looking deeper than that, the Community Reinvestment Act is probably more responsible than anything else for the housing collapse. It was implemented by congress during the Carter Administration in 1977. They push banks and other lenders to allow ridiculous latitude on the credit worthiness of applicants.

Their acronym is CRA. I have trouble with acronyms, so I just add a "P" to help me remember it for Google purposes. Check it out for an educational awakening.

There is a press release on Marketwire from TMP Directional Marketing about a recent Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore. The study found that most people still use a variety of online and offline media resources to find their local businesses. What I found most interesting in the findings were the preferred sources used by those in the study group.

First sources used:

• Search Engines (31%)
• Offline Print Yellow Pages / White Pages (30%)
• Online Yellow Pages Sites (Superpages.com / YellowPages.com) (19%)
• Online Local Search Sites (11%)

If you add up the online source percentages you get 61% are now using online sources for finding local businesses. Obviously, the vast majority are using online sources for local business information, but doing their buying offline.

The study also states that following online local searches, 39% of the consumers contacted a business over the telephone, 32% visited the business in-person and 12% contacted the business online. This is the part of the study I am not clear on: What were these people in the study group actually searching for? Just a phone number and address? For example: if I was looking to make an appointmnet, make a service call, check stock before I go there, I would either use Google or my Yellow Pages print book depending on which was faster at the time. But if I was looking to buy flooring and I knew nothing about the flooring dealers in my area, nor the products/services offered, I would probably would want to first visit their websites to learn more about the companies and what they actually offer and get their store hours. In this situation I would guess the search engines would be the first choice for most consumers today (it would for me) and the search engine precentage would be much greater than 31%.

Click here to read the TMP press release on Marketwire.com

"Drill baby drill." The price of gasoline topped $4 and that chant resonated through political campaigns. It looked for a little while like we might actually utilize some of our country's natural resources. Boone Pickens was on TV as much as the candidates touting CNG and wind power.

The economy has gone to pot, people started to conserve a little and the oil producing folks saw the trend. Gasoline prices miraculously dropped a dollar. Now everyone is saying, "Whew, what a relief." Drilling will go by the wayside since congress didn't want to do it anyway and we'll start buying those big pickups and SUVs again. How dumb can we get?

For you young folks, "Happy days are here again" was the theme song of the great depression.

Rather than remind you that times are tough, I’ll remind you that tough times also bring opportunities. You know, it’s the "is the glass half-full or half-empty?" thing. In order to get through this you have to pay attention to the market outside of your business.

Consider the history of the automobile industry. Somehow the US automobile industry never saw the trends coming. An odd-looking car built in Germany in the 40’s began to appear on European streets and eventually made its way to the US. It was an inexpensive, good riding car that was to become  the signature of the hippy generation. Before you knew it, a whole generation converted to foreign cars—the results of global competition. Next was the 70’s. There was a crisis in the availability of oil and a steep rise in the price of gasoline. What followed was the need for more fuel-efficient, smaller cars.

Unfortunately, Detroit left the small car market to foreign producers—most of them Japanese.

So what does this mean to you in the flooring industry?

• Be aware of the trends, if hard surface is selling, make sure your retail store says more than just "Carpet" in the title.

• Keep your employees up-to-date on product and consumer trends. The primary buyers are female. Know how this affects your business.

• Green is more than a color. If your not liking Al Gore is what keeps you from watching "An Inconvenient Truth"—get over it. Go rent the movie. In 1959 my mother said "No more aerosol hairspray -- we’re messing with the ozone layer." I thought she was nuts, what was she reading? Turns out she was on the money. Find out about what green means in our industry and start doing something good for the planet. It’s not a fad. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Fourth Assessment Report says that evidence for global warming is unequivocal, that negative effects of warming have already been observed, and that emissions control programs must be implemented. A good book is "Go Green, Live Rich," by David Bach.

• Still think “the Web” has something to do with spider web? I read a recent report that said LinkedIn, a social networking site designed to help professionals make business connections, had over 9 million users by February 2007.

• You keep saying you need a Web site. Well, get to it. In our industry, try John Simonson at john@webstreamdynamics.com; he has been doing this forever and knows the industry.

• Start reading industry blogs, one of the absolute best is written by Christine Whitmore, Director, In-Store Innovation for Solutia's Wear-Dated carpet fiber, at Flooring the Consumer.

• Follow industry news. There's lots of it right here on talkfloor.com.

• Go to the industry trade shows. Last week's feature was the Stone Expo, October 15-18 at Mandalay Bay Conference Center in Vegas.

• Take advantage of the Web sites offered by your suppliers; there are plenty of interactive sites that will help you sell to your consumer.

And remember: keep it simple! When things get confusing, get back to the basics.

Kansas State University did a fuel consumption comparison with two buildings and determined that the carpeted building saved 13.4% on heating costs. The advisory on ways to conserve fuel and energy said to put carpet on hard floors, weather strip windows, insulate attics, close off unused rooms and even put carpet in finished attics, basements and the crawl space under a home. According to Kansas State University, the insulating qualities of carpet help in the summer time, too, when the building is being cooled.

Does this sound like something recently published because of high fuel and home-heating costs? No! These excerpts were taken from a column called "Your money's worth" which was published in newspapers across the land. It was written over thirty years ago, by Sylvia Porter, February 14, 1976.

In a recent Press Release from Bona (click here to read it), they announced a new hardwood floor care system, called the "Ultimate Hardwood Floor Care System" and this new Ultimate Hardwood Floor Care Kit is available to purchases at $59.99.  They went on to say:

"Bona's Ultimate Hardwood Floor Care System will be available this October at select Ace Hardware, Do It Best and Kohl's department stores and on bona.com."

What strikes me odd with this last statement is: Why would Bona introduce the "ultimate" hardwood floor care system and not offer it to specialty floor stores and the large home centers first? Personally, I would never think of buying hardwood floor care products at Ace, Do It Best or Kohls department stores. Bona also has it for sale on their own web site for $59.99, which makes me wonder why others online would want to sell it and have to compete directly with their supplier's own web site.

So what do others think?

Even though the Wall Street bailout bill is in place it still will take time before money is available. Of course everyone is hoping this will make money easier to obtain. While you’re waiting for the “traditional bank channels” to come through, consider some of the following options. I have not personally used any of the Internet connections but these are some I found online.

Web-only banks. These are internet banks and found only online. These do not have brick and mortar presence therefore do not have the same overhead as traditional banks. Also you may want to check the online bank rates against the traditional banks, they may be more competitive. Check out www.ebank.com for more information. For a list of unauthorized banks, click here.

Peer-to-peer lending is another way to get money. Put together your financial statement, why you need money and what you’re going to use it for and go online to sell yourself. The money will come from private lenders -- $100 here and there, as well as larger amounts. It is estimated that by 2017 nine billion dollars will be lent this way.  Click here for more information.

Have money invested in your 401K? Why not talk with your financial planner to explore the pros and cons of withdrawing some of this money? They can look at your particular situation to determine the best tax and investment strategy going forward. According to Barbara Bouchey, CEO of Barbara Bouchey Asset Management, Inc., “Retirement plans are a great vehicle to save money because of the tax savings and the tax deferment." While most people would never consider withdrawing money before age 59 ½, owing to the 10% penalty and taxes, Barbara says there are some upsides. “Oftentimes, the breakeven point after paying the penalty and taxes on withdrawing money can occur within 5-10 years. Therefore, these vehicles are an attractive place to save and withdraw money for purposes other than retirement.” For more information go to www.barbarabouchey.com.

Remember, "cash" is still king.