Management Buzz 05/04 Welcoming overweight customers, employing international students and more

Weighty Matters

If your employees subtly shun overweight customers, they'renot only behaving reprehensibly--they might also be costing you aloyal group.

Myrna Marofsky, president of ProGroup Inc., adiversity consulting firm in Minneapolis, has observed retailsalespeople treat overweight customers coldly, even when they wereshopping for items unrelated to their size, such as cosmetics.Cultural assumptions about overweight people-that they're lazyand don't make much money-can translate into the idea that theydon't have money to spend. Salespeople often "don'tsee them as desired customers," says Marofsky.

Your challenge is to "create a culture that welcomeseveryone," advises Marofsky. About 61 percent of Americanadults are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Controland Prevention. That means salespeople must adjust their attitudesabout selling to people of all sizes.

Simple measures, such as having armless chairs in a waitingroom, can create a welcoming environment for the amplyproportioned, says Marofsky. Most important, teach your staff totreat all customers with respect. It's not just good business;it's good sense.

Coming to America

International students in the United States on J-1 visas can beemployed by U.S. firms while they are in school and up to 18 monthsafter graduation, provided their jobs are related to their academicstudies. These students can serve as an inexpensive, albeithigh-turnover, source of labor for small businesses.

The main caveat is that the students are supposed to work at ajob that gives them experience directly related to their degrees.That means a computer science major can be legitimately hired by asmall business to help run its computer network, but universityadvisors are unlikely to look as kindly on that same studentflipping hamburgers. And, of course, they must be paid at least theminimum wage.

Because international students are already here, businessesdon't have to process any more paperwork to hire them than theywould for any other employee, says Charles Bankart, assistantdirector for scholar programs at the Office ofInternational Programs at Indiana University, Bloomington."You don't have to prove you are hiring them because youcouldn't find an American who is more qualified," headds.

The best way to find international students who are seeking workis through the career development offices of localuniversities.

Some Good Advice

Five years ago, the management consultant was a key part of anybusiness strategy. In many companies, consultants ran the show.

But management consultants are exiting the stage lately:Consultants News, a publication that tracks the consultingindustry, estimates that total revenue over the past two years atthe Big Three strategy firms-Bain & Co., The Boston ConsultingGroup and McKinsey & Co.-has decreased 5 percent, 13 percentand 12 percent, respectively.

A huge realignment of consulting is underway that's"bigger than at any other time in the industry'shistory," says Mark Lipton, author of Guiding Growth: How Vision Keeps Companies onCourse (HBS Press) and a management professor at New SchoolUniversity in New York City.

The slow economy hasn't helped the management-consultingindustry's bottom line, but perhaps the biggest change is thatFortune 500 companies have grown cynical about the benefits ofmanagement consulting. And when large companies do hireconsultants, they'll want to see a measurable return oninvestment.

"[Large companies] are looking more to partner with theirconsultants," says Norman Eckstein, founder of EcksteinManagement Consulting in Chicago and chair of the Institute of ManagementConsultants USA Inc., a professional organization formanagement consultants. To keep their large clients happy, the bigconsulting firms are scaling back projects to include fewerconsultants working on much shorter time frames.

What does this trend mean for small businesses, which tend torely on very small consulting firms? Small companies still needmanagement consultants, and there are a lot of them for hire.

But it's a good time to renegotiate the terms of theentrepreneur-consultant relationship, Lipton says. You want aconsultant who sees your company as unlike any other rather thanjust another company to fit onto a template. Avoid consultants whosee their methods as proprietary and propose strategies that takeyears instead of months to implement-good terms for the consultantbut not for you.

Also ask consultants to show you how they'll transfer theirknowledge to your senior management. How the consultant transfersknowledge "needs to be a part of the deal, and even more, apart of the contract," Lipton says.

If business owners demand a new kind of partnership withmanagement consultants, like the Fortune 500 companies are, it willchange consulting as we know it. "The entrepreneur is in areal sweet spot right now to reshape the rules," Lipton says."It sets the stage for a whole new [era] ofcontracting."

Joanne Cleaver has written for a variety of publications,including the Chicago Tribune and Executive Female.