Business – Page 3

Houston Is A Leader In The Funeral Industry

Posted on April 15, 2015April 15, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, Houston

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If you’ve ever worked in the funeral industry, you know exactly who Bob Waltrip is. Waltrip is the John Rockefeller of funerals. He’s the godfather of the funeral industry.

Drive north of downtown Houston and you’ll find the National Museum of Funeral History. The museum’s main benefactor is Service Corporation International, the largest funeral home conglomerate in the world.

Museum director Genevive Keeney says the site is home to the burial plots of some of the world’s most influential entertainment figures.

“So I have just a little of everything in here, I mean there’s just like I say a century overload we pay tribute to cowboys, cowgirls that were in the film industry,” Keeney says. “Of course we have Marilyn Monroe…”

The museum is massive – some 35,500 square feet, featuring a dozen interactive exhibits. And it’s actually not as morbid as you’d think.

“This is a living, breathing kind of museum, I mean exhibit within the museum, that we consistently keep it updated as more people in the entertainment industry pass away,” Keeney says.

So why would the largest funeral company and the National Museum of Funeral History be in Houston and not New York or Los Angeles? Service Corporation International spokesperson Phil Jacobs says it’s all about personal preference

“Well, you know, those are all nice cities and they’re good markets for us, but Mr. Waltrip was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and this is his home and this is where it is,” Jacobs says.

Waltrip revolutionized the funeral industry by doing something no mom-and-pop shop had ever done before– he started buying as many funeral homes and cemeteries as he could. Now SCI is a publicly-traded company worth three billion dollars.

“So, Mr. Waltrip grew up in a family that had one funeral home here, in Houston, Texas, and he just grew up in his family’s funeral business, and overtime, assumed the management of this location in the 1950’s,” Jacobs says. “He worked with his mom and dad, and then he began to buy additional funeral homes in the 60’s.”

To train employees to work in his 22,000 funeral homes, Waltrip founded one of the top mortician schools in the country, also based in Houston. At the museum, Keeny says people don’t know that Houston dominates the funeral industry because we don’t like to talk about death.

“We tend to sweep the subject under the rug. We don’t really want to deal with it or think about it.”

But if you do think about it, Keeney says, you could have the best funeral ever.

“Your casket, your urn, your tribute video, your memorial folder, what you’re going to wear. The sky is the limit.”

Actually, the sky isn’t the limit. There’s a company called Celestis Memorial that will shoot your ashes up to space. Guess where it’s based.

Drought Diet: How Much Water Did it Take to Make Your Food?

Posted on April 13, 2015April 15, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, Food

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Imagine you’re at the grocery store and you’re picking out a cut of beef. You look over the expiration date, the price and nutritional information. And then you spot a green sticker: This flank steak took over 800 gallons of water to produce. That sticker? That’s what Chuck West wants. He researches water conservation at Texas Tech University.

“Consumers should be more aware of the water footprint of the things that they consume, be it clothes, food or whatever, but a problem that consumers have is that they don’t have the numbers,” West says. “We don’t have that number stamped on the label of a beef product, for example, so it’s very hard for consumers to make those decision.”

West envisions a near future where water conservation becomes integrated with lifestyle, like the next Paleo or Raw Food diet, but one that focuses on conserving water.

“I think a low water footprint diet would be a very interesting thing to develop,” he says. “I think that would help the consumer make purchasing choices that are based on that, if the information can actually be printed on that label.”

But whoever writes that diet book is going to have a hard time doing it. The amount of water that goes into producing food varies depending on how and where it’s made. And it’s not just about being vegetarian or vegan. For instance, it takes almost a thousand liters of water to produce just one liter of wine, and it takes over three thousand liters of water to produce one kilogram of rice.

Staci Davis thinks about this a lot. She’s the owner and chef of Radical Eats, a Mexican restaurant in Houston that caters specifically to vegans and local-vores.

“We take sustainability from all levels, to kind of gas consumption to kind of soil erosions, we take it all into account, all of it, as much as we can,” Davis says. “We’re not perfect, but we try.”

But until that perfect diet book is written, what do you do if you’re a red blooded Texan with a passion for protein, but want to stand in solidarity with your yellowing lawn? Davis says here’s what you should have for dinner tonight.

“I would recommend that they do something familiar and sort of easy, so like enchiladas, everybody kind of knows what an enchilada is, it’s easy to do” Davis says.

Have a side of beans, no rice, and feel free to add as much hot sauce as you want.

Can A Reality Singing Competition Fix Tech’s Diversity Problem?

Posted on April 9, 2015April 15, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business

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We all know how the hiring process works. A hiring manager posts an opening, describes their ideal candidate and waits for the influx of resumes. After doing some interviews, the manager has to make a gut decision, a subjective assessment – and the research shows that more often than not, they’ll pick someone who has a really similar background as them. Peter Vujosevic noticed this problem, and decided to approach hiring from a different angle.

“You always rely on your biases it’s just part of human nature, nine out of ten times it’s good to rely on biases,” Vujosevic says. “You know, however, what we see when it comes to hiring is that the hiring manager is often a participant very late in the process.”

By the time a candidate sits down for an interview and gets grilled with technical questions, it’s nearing the end of the hiring process.

Vujosevic created a website called Gap Jumpers, where employers post a job along with some sort of challenge, like creating a webpage or writing a social media strategy. To apply for the job, applicants must take on the challenge.

Vusojevic compares it to his favorite TV show, NBC’s The Voice, where three celebrity judges sit in red super villain chairs with their backs turned to the stage. And then, someone sings. The judges hit a button and turn their chair around. That’s the first time they see who’s performing, but they’ve already decided.

That’s kind of how Gap Jumpers works. Jeremiah Reyes is in charge of hiring at Dolby Laboratories. He wanted a way to get fewer, better quality job candidates.

“It completely disrupts the traditional interview process,” Reyes says. “I think what made it fun is that my managers and students were able to engage in some real thought out questions and answers.“

Reyes says he was spending less time hiring interns, until Petar Vujosevic came along.

“An unintended byproduct of having a platform that asks a questions instead of a resume, is that more diverse people were applying to these companies because they could identify themselves in the problem, whereas they couldn’t always identify themselves in the job description,” Vujosevic says.

Reyes says Dolby’s been hiring more people with non-traditional backgrounds. Just the other day, a hiring manager was shocked to discover his favorite candidate came from a community college.

“Now the one that we did select, even in our debrief, he said ‘Wow, I think if I just saw his resume on my desk, I don’t know that I would have selected him,’” Reyes says.

Sara Inés Calderón is looking for a job as a developer. She hopes more tech companies will start doing blind interviews.

“I have had experiences where someone told me flat out ‘we think you could bring a feminine touch to the office,’” Calderon says. “I’ve been interviewed by people who are literally playing by their phones or leaning back in their chair.”

Calderón graduated from an intense coding boot camp for Latinos. Three months later, most of the men in her cohort have landed jobs.

“I think overall, when I do go interview, I kind of have what some people would call flamboyant tastes in colors and patterns,” she says. “I do tend to wear like very loud and dangly and big earrings, and I have gone in like bright green sports coats and stuff like that, I still think they’re professional, they’re just colorful.”

Calderón believes that if employers just saw her work first, they’d forget the fingers typing away at a laptop are covered in Frida Kahlo nail decals.

Two Bills That Could Affect Your Insurance Coverage

Posted on April 7, 2015April 15, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, politics, texas

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Sometimes filing an insurance claim can seem like a staring contest. You versus your insurance company – and your insurance company has eye drops.

Anna Bohart’s office building was badly damaged in March 2012 – that’s when a record strong hailstorm hit McAllen.

“It looked like a tornado had come into the city, there were no leaves left on the trees, limbs had been broken, pets had been killed because of the hail,” Bohart says. “The buildings looked liked they had measles they had been so pockmarked with hail hitting the buildings.”

But Bohart says the real headache came when she started to file a claim with her insurance company. “I had to call or email every day for 12 months practically,” Bohart says. It took public and private adjustors and dozens of phone calls before she got a check.

“It was terrible because you wanted to stay as nice as you could with someone who wasn’t cooperating or at least wasn’t answering, they would answer but they wouldn’t provide you with an answer,” Bohart says.

Attorney Mark Kincaid says some insurance companies make the process complicated because they want you to give up. “Insurance companies always have an economic incentive to deny the claim because they make more money that way,” says Kincaid.

But Senator Larry Taylor says he filed Senate Bill 1628 because fraudulent legislation is slowing the insurance industry down. “These is one of the issues if we allow it to keep going, the consumer is going to pay for it either through higher premiums or they’re going to lose coverages,” Taylor says.

Consumer advocates say the bill would make it almost impossible to sue your insurance company. “What would happen to consumers is they would be denied any effective remedy against insurance companies,” Kincaid says.

Senator Taylor says that’s just not true. “We’re not taking away people’s right to sue, I’m a big believer in the right to trial of your peers – if you have a legitimate complaint you should be allowed to take that to court,” Taylor says.

So will the bill pass? Alex Winslow with consumer protection group Texas Watch says if it does, you probably won’t even hear about it.

“Insurance is not an exciting topic, the insurance industry would like to use the fact that this is a dry topic in hopes that people won’t pay attention,” Winslow says.

Winslow says if the words “insurance”, “claims” and “lawsuits” make a lot of people’s eyes gloss over. The Senate bill is currently pending in commtitee and the House bill has not yet been heard.

The Maker Movement Takes Off In Texas

Posted on April 2, 2015April 15, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business

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After a long career in technology, Denny Hamill was ready to retire and take it easy. Then his grandson came to him with a problem. A problem named Prancer.

“Grant was 16 and he was trying to do homework,” Hamill says. “And everybody plays with Prancer, throws the ball and Prancer would constantly would bring it back and drop it at Grant’s feet and bark!”

Hamill set to work making something to satisfy Prancer’s insatiable need to fetch.

“We actually took a little hot wheels set, you know the cars, so they have this little accelerator so the car comes around it grabs the car and shoots it,” Hamill says. “So we took it apart and made a little ball thrower.”

A couple prototypes later, they had the iFetch.

Hamill’s dogs won’t fetch, but Prancer loved it. Hamill figured other dogs would too.

The challenge is that a lot of gadgets don’t really sell well on store shelves. Andrew Gershoff teaches marketing at the McCombs School of Business.

“There are some products right away you can look at and you can know what that product is,” Gershoff says. “Then there’s these other types of products that we might consider more experience products that are harder to experience until after you experience them.”

Without the demonstration, you might mistake the iFetch for a humidifier. It kind of looks like a big sphere with a hole. Hamill can’t afford to pay people to do in-store demonstrations. That might have stopped him from getting off the ground.

“Now with the internet it’s much easier to interact with a large number of people and to broadcast that information at a very low cost,” Gershoff says.

But there is over-crowding in the market. With so many gadgets out there, how do you know what’s a legitimate lifehack and what’s just… junk?

Joanne Domeniconi says she can help. She started a company called The Grommet – two million people subscribe to its daily newsletter.

“Every day we create a video story about a product discovery that might interest you,” Domeniconi says. “And you’re able to learn the story behind the product who made it and why it might be relevant for you.”

Like this video for the iFetch.

The Grommet’s $200 million in sales last year are due to its niche business strategy as part online retailer and part marketing firm.

“We work on a retail margin we buy the merchandise at a wholesale cost and we sell it at a retail cost,” Domeniconi says. “And similarly, we are paid for performance and we’re paid a commission for the customers that we acquire for the maker, that would be new retailers.”

Because these gadgets come from small family-owned companies, they can’t compete on super low prices. Online marketplaces say storytelling and authenticity are driving the maker movement.

Lobbyists Push Legislature to Open up Rules on Alcohol Sales

Posted on March 31, 2015April 15, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, politics, texas

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Texas has a few laws surrounding alcohol: liquor stores are closed on Sundays, you can’t put the American flag on beer bottles, and publicly traded companies can’t own liquor stores.

Travis Thomas says it’s only a matter of time before that last law is changed. He’s the spokesman for Texans For Consumer Freedom, a lobby that wants the law removed.

“To exclude public companies from competing is arbitrary, is anticompetitive and when you consider the fact that retail stores of all kinds all compete with publicly traded companies and they do not enjoy state-mandated protections,” Thomas says. “So then what is it that makes the retail liquor market different?”

Thomas says a public company doesn’t mean what it sounds like when it comes to the Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission.

“According to TABC, a public company is one that has more than 35 shareholders,” Thomas says. “Now there are many, many companies that are not publicly traded that have more than 35 shareholders.”

Brookshires Grocery is the latest one of those publicly traded companies to join the Texans for Consumer Freedom, whose members include Costco, Walmart and the Texas Business Association. The lobby says it wants to amend existing state laws and has backed bills filed in the Texas House and Senate that would eliminate the prohibition on publicly traded companies.

Jason Isaac, R-Dripping Springs, filed one of those bills. He says that existing laws are against the principles of Texan’s belief in free market capitalism.

“We filed the bill, so we’re waiting on filing a request on the committee hearing,” Isaac says. “Once the bill goes through the committee hearing, we’re going to have testimony on both sides, and then you request a vote on the bill and then it goes to another committee called the calendars committee.”

Isaac says that he’s hopeful his bill will pass.

“Once they’re voted on the floor of the House, if they’re voted on favorably, it would go over to the senate.”

The bill has to pass those legislative hoops before it would change a law that’s been on the books since 1995—and the governor would still have to approve.

Texas Welders Are Getting Jobs Before They Graduate

Posted on March 23, 2015March 31, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, texas

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Irving-based Fluor Corporation plans to hire 500 welders in the next year for projects in Texas. Human Resources Executive Jim Hanna says in his 33 years at Fluor, he’s never seen this kind of demand.

“There really hadn’t been a reinvestment in the skill sets within the construction industry,” Hanna says. “And you couple that with the workforces that are at retirement age, and there’s a demand within the construction workforce to give people the skill sets to meet the future demands,”

Enrollment at trade schools across the state is on the rise. At Austin Community College, Majorie LaRowe enrolled more than 500 welding students at the Riverside Campus this semester.

“As many seats as we can offer, that’s how many we usually fill,” LaRowe says. “So, since we’ve been offering more seats, adding more sections each semester, we’ve been getting larger total enrollment numbers.” But LaRowe says ACC can’t add seats fast enough.

“We get constant calls and emails asking for more students that we can churn out really,” LaRowe says. “Right now there’s a large demand for pipe welders just south of us, we’ve gotten quite a few inquiries about that.”

Construction companies need welders so badly that they’ll hire them even before they’ve graduated. Twenty-eight year old Michael Reyes is in his third semester of school.

“I actually just got hired at Austin Water Jet,” Reyes says. “It’s a shop job and it’s a decent amount of money, it’s opened up a lot of doors for me and the experience I’m going to get there as well as getting here, it’ll pay off.”

He’s happy welding around the clock for school and for work.

“Quality of life is definitely there, having a reason to wake up, better outcome for what I want to do for a living, definitely have a family to support, two beautiful kids, they’re the reason why I’m doing this,” Reyes says.

His 27-year-old classmate Michael Morrin says it feels good to be in demand even before getting his associate’s degree.

“I went around applying and I had several people offered me a job on the spot, several people wanted to get back to me, I had to turn down the guys that wanted to get back to me,” Morrin says.

The paycheck is good too. “The rates are pushing up to 38, 40 dollars an hour because the demand is so great and there’s not enough qualified welders,” Hanna says. “I see this demand over the next seven to ten years, it’s easier for me to place a qualified welder today than someone with a four year degree.”

Hanna says you might see a momentary pause in pipeline construction due to low oil prices, but most of those contracts were commissioned long ago, meaning the welding boom might be here to stay.

This Ain’t Greyhound: The Luxury Bus That’s a Texas Alternative to Rail

Posted on March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, texas

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More than 200,000 super-commuters make the trek between Houston, Austin and Dallas every week. Doing that by air or behind the wheel can be a major hassle. Marjorie Kimmel knows first-hand. She travels around Texas once a month to teach real estate courses.

“I tried a little bit of everything, most of the time I was a road warrior, gripping the steering wheel on 1-35 the whole time,” Kimmel says. “I also tried flying once which was a real pain because I have a lot of books and equipment when I teach, and so trying to get that shipped ahead of me to then fly took a lot of logistical planning.”

Limos can be expensive. Executives like Marjorie Kimmel don’t always see the bus as a possibility. “That’s not probably something I would have done, just because I would have felt pretty cramped and you know, I don’t know, it’s never even occurred to me,” says Kimmel.

But Kimmel is exactly the type of business traveler that Alex Danza had in mind when he started his luxury bus service, Vonlane.

“The idea for this was give people an alternative to that hassle experience of flying and the alternative of driving themselves wasn’t much better,” Danza says, “so what we’re trying to do is to give people a real first-class travel experience where they can arrive 5 minutes before departure, they get on board, they can start to work right away, they can relax, they have an attendant taking care of them, they have great amenities from complimentary wi-fi to satellite TV, satellite radio, food and beverages.”

Danza isn’t trying to compete against Grayhound or Megabus – Because he says Vonlane isn’t a bus, it’s a motor coach for executives. “Our rate is 100 dollars one way and we’re priced very competitively with flying Southwest airlines or driving your own vehicle,” Danza says.

Danza says a lot of his customers are lawyers – because riding his bus provides them 3 uninterrupted billable hours. So far, business is pretty good. Danza says the only real competition he sees is far into the future.

“I do think there’s a demand for rail, people ask me if that concerns me, I think it’s a long ways away if it can happen, but we’re definitely seeing people looking for an alternative to self-drive or the airlines,” Danza says.

A company named Texas Central Railway plans to use private investment and Japanese technology to run a bullet train between Dallas and Houston. Travis Kelly says the demand for rail is much greater than just the number of passengers on executive motor coaches.

It’s a lot of people who are making the trip now, but it’s also people who choose not to make the trip at all because to travel by air or by car is too onerous, too difficult, too unpredictable,” Kelly says.

Commuter Marjorie Kimmel says she’s ready for rail. “If they had a high speed rail system like they do in Europe from Austin to Dallas, heck yeah, I’d be the first to sign up!”

But the reality of rail is still a couple of years way.

“We hope to proceed to construction as early at the first quarter of 2017 and that would allow trains to start running in 2021 or 2022,” Kelly says.

High speed rail would cut the road commute time in half – just 90 minutes to travel from Houston to Dallas. Even in the fanciest motorcoach, it’s going take you 3 and half hours to get there.

In the meantime Danza says, at least in a bus, you’re not behind the wheel.“We get comments that say ‘I’ll never drive myself to Dallas again’, ‘I’ll never fly to Austin again’, and we’re seeing that repeatedly so it’s been very interesting to see that there is a marketplace for this,” Danza says.

The more miserable you are at security checkpoints or stuck behind an 18 wheeler on 1-35, the better for Danza’s business model – at least until you can board a bullet train.

Texas Is A Leader In The Video Game Industry

Posted on March 9, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, Economics, texas

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The Texas video game industry directly employs about 5,000 people. It also creates hundreds more jobs that depend on transporting and selling the technology.

Dallas, San Antonio and Austin are the hubs of innovation. Big games like “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft” came from Texas game studios: Aspyr and Blizzard.

But gaming isn’t just about gaming anymore.

Jennifer Bullard directs the two year-old Captivate Conference for professionals in the gaming industry. “The game industry is pretty wide and diversified – there’s console developers, there’s mobile developers, there’s education game development here, there’s people who work in what we call real-world games, training simulations,” she says.

Bullard has been designing games like “Heroes of Might & Magic” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” for 17 years. She says the country’s second biggest gaming industry is always hunting for new recruits.

“There’s more education institutions for game development,” Bullard says. “When I first got started people didn’t even have bachelor’s degrees and frankly didn’t care about it. Now, of course, if you want to get into the game industry you need a bachelor’s degree.”

Texas universities are stepping up to keep the industry supplied. Campuses from Abilene to Victoria have established gaming departments. At UT-Dallas there’s the Center for Modeling and Simulation. Marge Zielke is the director.

Director Marge Zielke says the program “emphasizes 21^st century media as an extension of its degree plan.” The curriculum is based on critical thinking, research projects, and learning how to appeal to a wide audience.

“One of the things that we try to teach students in all of our classes is that it’s one thing to be able to use the technology that we have available to us today,” Zielke says, “but students of media really have to think about how to conceptualize and develop media that doesn’t exist yet.”

Some of that conceptualizing is likely to take place at next month’s SXSW. Developers, manufacturers and fans from all over the country will show off their stuff at the SXSW Gaming expo next week. No matter what happens, you can be sure the next big thing in gaming will be revealed in Texas.

Texas Institutions Take A Bite Out Of Student Debt

Posted on February 27, 2015March 13, 2015 by Brenda P. Salinas in Business, texas

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In 2003, The Texas Legislature voted to allow public universities to set their own tuition. Since then, tuition has more than doubled and student debt in Texas has skyrocketed.

State Senator Charles Schwertner filed a bill to cap tuition and fees at the state’s public colleges and universities at their current levels. Under the bill they would only be allowed to grow at the rate of inflation. But this bill hasn’t yet come to a vote, and there’s no indication of whether that will happen.

Lauren Asher with the Project on Student Debt says that Texas is doing relatively well compared to the rest of the nation.

“Texas had lower than average than debt compared to the national, it had the 32^nd highest and was 28^th for the share of students with loans,” Asher says.

But one of the reasons why student debt is relatively low is because Texas has a higher share of students who graduate from community colleges, which tend to be much cheaper. Among students who go to 4 year colleges, debt is still a big problem. Texas is among the top states with the highest default rate on federal student loans.

Right now a lot of students rely on Federal Pell Grants, which are about $5 thousand dollars a year. But when you add in not just tuition but housing, food and books, that just makes a dent in what it costs to go to college.

Which is why two Texas institutions are tackling student debt in their own ways. Memorial Herman, one of the biggest hospital systems in Texas, made an announcement saying that on July 1^st they’ll start paying off their employee’s student loans. Ann Hollingsworth is an HR executive there.

”We’ve long had a tuition reimbursement program for people who are currently going to school but we didn’t have anything for people who had gone through school and finished who were struggling with debt,” Hollingsworth says. “We thought, well what can we do to help the people that have just graduated who won’t be going to school anymore, but who are still paying for their education.”

The healthcare field is so competitive in Houston that it just might catch on. But there’s another novel idea in the works. Michael Sorrell is the president of Paul Quinn College, an HBCU south of Dallas. The small liberal arts college is now becoming a work college to make school more affordable for students.

“Being a work college means that every student that lives on campus is required to have a job, probably the simplest way to explain is work study on steroids,” Sorrell says.

Students can perform any job on campus, from administrative positions to groundskeeping. Sorrell says that by basically having students run the school they’ll dramatically cut costs. Between Pell Grants and scholarships, he’s vowing that no student will graduate with more than $10,000 in debt. That’s less than half the state average.