Do you know what a Linkster is?

I found this article while surfing the interesting posts on my Twitter page. I love the sarcasm and the spot on perception and suggested remedies for dealing with the Face Book generation, which has sprung up and almost overtaken us with their zeal. Thought I'd go ahead and post a link like a Linkster would do.

In fact, if I weren't so old, I would say that I was part of this generation, as I have succumbed to the Face Book mentality, process, and game. I have a strong presence there. Maybe not 2000 followers...more like 200...but it's increasing every day. I have fallen under the Face Book spell. Go ahead and find me.

Here's one characterization of the group: "They are the WWW Generation; the kids who never played with toys if they are not on 99.9’ monitor...who can’t play baseball if it is not on Wii...Who have 2000 friends on Facebook but only 5 in real life. They are the kids who are only listening to commercial songs but never heard of Beatles...who are crying that Michael Jackson is dead but never heard a song he played till he died. And, finally, they are the kids who are making XXX websites rich… and McDonalds even richer… These are the kids these days. This is the WWW Generation! (The Daily Telegraph, United Kingdom, 2012)"

Opening a Bed and Breakfast: Have you got what it takes?

The bed and breakfast business a very personal one,  personal because innkeeper hosts spend a lot of time with their guests and must be very involved with making them feel welcome and comfortable

It's almost impossible to describe the typical person who operates a bed and breakfast.They come from all walks of life, from professionals to laborers. Artists, craftsman, farmers, insurance agents, teachers and anyone else you can think of have opened and run successful B&Bs.

Singles, couples and families have all been involved. Their reasons for opening a bed and breakfast? Just as varied. Perhaps children have grown and moved away and there are empty rooms in a large home. Some people just have more rooms than they need. Widowed or divorced people have opened B&Bs.

While they are run for a source of income, most people do not depend on them solely for their livelihood. People retired from other professions -- such as professionals or farmers who have a separate primary source of income often operate bed and breakfasts.

All successful bed and breakfasts have one thing in common: owners who like people!
They also like to entertain people in their homes. Many of these owners also have skills they want to use, such as cooking, to please their guests. Others may have historically significant homes they want to share with others.

Anyone seriously thinking about opening a bed and breakfast must like people and be able to deal with all types of people. This is a people business! You must also be willing to sacrifice a big part of your personal life since guests will be living with you.

Many skills are needed to run a successful bed and breakfast. Do you have what it takes?
Before spending a lot of time and money, use this personal assessment survey to help determine if you and your partner (if you have one) have the skills needed.

Answer honestly by writing yes or no to each statement below. (Remember, this survey is for you -- if you're not completely honest with your answers, it won't do you any good!)
Complete the survey for both yourself and for your partner. Have your partner do the same. (So you both fill out the survey twice.)

Personal Assessment Survey

• I enjoy getting up early and preparing meals.
• I'm highly organized and manage my time well.
• I'm self-motivated and a self-starter.
• I can do several tasks at one time.
• I enjoy entertaining.
• I find it easy to get along with most people.
• I'm tolerant and patient.
• I can handle conflict without alienation. 
• I work well under pressure. 

• I can work long hours and face a variety of interruptions.
• I learn from mistakes and make changes as needed.
• I keep my home neat and clean at all times.
• I enjoy performing home maintenance.
• I'm cheerful.
• I enjoy interior decorating and remodeling. 
• I enjoy gardening and landscaping. 
  
• I have a regular income.
•  I communicate well on the phone.

• I write well and regularly.
• I'm persistent.
• I consider myself a risk-taker.
• I have a high energy level.
• I enjoy serving others.
• I consider myself flexible.
• I have a good business sense.
• I can handle the business end of a B&B.
• I handle emergencies well.

Compare your answers with your partner's. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Did any of your answers -- or your partner's answers -- surprise you?
Now identify, in writing, your strengths and weaknesses. If you plan to become an innkeeper, your strengths should outweigh your weaknesses and you need to determine ways to compensate for the weak areas.

This series of worksheets and information was originally written by Eleanor Ames, a Certified Family Consumer Sciences professional and a faculty member at Ohio State University for 28 years. With her husband, she ran the Bluemont Bed and Breakfast in Luray, Virginia, until they retired from innkeeping. Many thanks to Eleanor for her gracious permission to reprint them here. Some content has been edited, and links to related features on this site have been added to Eleanor's original text.



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The Bread Baker and The Village......a modern fairy tale with a happy ending

(This post was taken from an article by Sonia Simone, senior editor for Copyblogger)

The village is your customer
Once upon a time, the bread baker and his village were stuck with one another. If he baked lousy bread, he had to look his neighbors in the eye and face their scorn. The fact that his customers were his neighbors kept him on the straight and narrow. There was no difference between his professional reputation and his personal one. Huge 20th-century industrialism made that seem irrelevant and quaint. We had no idea what kind of person made the toy or car or loaf of bread we just bought, and we forgot to even wonder.

Now the village is back
If we blow it, customers publicly rap on our window (with social media, blogs or Twitter) and give us a piece of their mind. Once again, our reputation and our products are one and the same. What we create doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to show that we give a damn. The inconvenient part is that the village isn’t stuck with you. If your baguette isn’t great, your customer can FedEx something from an artisanal bakery in Napa or Madison or Boca Raton.

They will find you
The cool part, though, is that if you make something handmade (even if it’s delivered in pixels), personal, and/or magnificently useful, your village can and will find you. Whether you make homespun yarn or an interactive course on how to start a dog-walking business, your product can find its own profitable village of happy customers.

It’s in your DNA
The human being is an inherently creative, flexible, resilient creature. You are an inherently creative, flexible, resilient creature. The times may well get worse before they get better. But compared with a lot of history’s darker moments, this one’s pretty comfortable And the opportunities that have opened up because of technology and communication are nothing short of breathtaking. No, not everyone’s going to become an information entrepreneur. But you can.

Embrace the entrepreneurship
that’s in your DNA. Keep your eyes open for problems to solve and markets to serve. And buckle up. Like every exciting ride, this one’s got a few hairpin curves.

(About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.)
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The Dream and the Reality of Running a Bed and Breakfast: PART II

Excerpts from an article by Rob Johnson 

for the Wall Street Journal

PART II - The Reality

A Rude Wake-Up Call

Frania Shelley-Grielen wanted to get out of New York. Commuting. Traffic jams. The hectic life of a real-estate title closer. She'd had enough.

A B&B in a remote location seemed to be the perfect ticket out of the city. She started hunting for spots in travel magazines, and in the summer of 2004, she and her husband, Olivier, fell in love with a 100-year-old four-bedroom, four-bath house near Clearwater, Fla., that had once been a bed-and-breakfast.

The place and the plan seemed beyond perfect, says the 52-year-old Shelley-Grielen. "When I saw the golden sunsets, the pelicans and herons, the century-old oaks dripping Spanish moss and all kinds of palms, I thought, 'I have to live there. I can run this wonderful property. I can make it work.' "

She envisioned weary travelers trekking to the bucolic location at the edge of an estuary and marveling at the inn, which the couple named Green Gables. Ms. Shelley-Grielen calls it "sort of a Norman Rockwell and Maxwell House coffee on Sunday morning model," with her playing a worldly wise Martha Stewart role as the ultimate hostess.

The couple sold their $418,000 house in West New York, N.J., and bought Green Gables, which came with a rental cottage next door, for $575,000. But the inn quickly became an ordeal for Ms. Shelley-Grielen. For starters, she found that the guests invaded her privacy.

When one family rented all three guest bedrooms, Ms. Shelley-Grielen and her husband decided to celebrate by going out to dinner. Before leaving, she took the lodgers on a tour of the house and showed them the off-limits area where she and her husband slept and watched television. But when the couple returned that night, one of the guests was "sitting there in our room, watching one of my husband's DVDs," says Ms. Shelley-Grielen. She politely explained the living arrangements again, and the embarrassed vacationer left. But when the family checked out, one member left a sarcastic message in the guest book: "Don't watch the DVDs."

Unlike Mr. Werner at his Scarborough Fair B&B in Baltimore, Ms. Shelley-Grielen thought that many of her guests were oversharing their lives. She began to see their innocent travel questions as tedious inquisitions, she says. And hated the fake intimacy and feeling like a maid. She realized that B&B management often required her to be more friendly than she felt: "There was an artificial instant intimacy to be affected when my paying guests arrived."

Burned out by what she saw as guests' demands for her company, Ms. Shelley-Grielen began to avoid them when possible. "I would retreat to the kitchen and close the door, with its sign that spelled out, 'Private.' "
But some guests just wouldn't leave her alone, Ms. Shelley-Grielen says. Too often, she heard the invitation: "I hope you'll be joining us." She came to view such offers as "command performances" from which "I didn't have the option to bow out."

Beyond that, chores that she envisioned as routine proved more daunting. For instance, when laundering sheets and towels, she donned disposable gloves. "This is the part of the business I hated most," she says. "I tried not to think about who had sex and who didn't."

Just as she saw the guests intruding on her privacy, she felt she was encroaching to clean bedrooms and baths. Worse, she felt demeaned. "No matter how many times I reminded myself that I owned the place, I still felt like a maid," she says.

Even her aspirations to culinary creativity turned sour. She was disappointed when a guest mistook her homemade Frittata for a Quiche. Her dismay turned to antagonism when some of her favorite dishes weren't welcomed by a vacationing woman who didn't eat eggs. "I felt almost personally offended and would insist on putting an unwanted 'eggy' concoction in front of her every morning," Ms. Shelley-Grielen says.
Not only was the guest annoyed, but so was her husband, who, in a show of solidarity, informed Ms. Shelley-Grielen that he didn't like eggs either. Nor did he want the suggested alternative: grits.

The inn failed to show an operating profit in the three years before the couple sold it in 2007. The house is now a private home. Ms. Shelley-Grielen says, "We did everything we could to stay afloat: drained our savings, plundered IRAs and borrowed." Mr. Grielen, now 55, kept working as a physical therapist in Florida to help make ends meet.

Would the B&B have thrived if Ms. Shelley-Grielen's temperament had been more in tune with running the place? No, she says. "I gave it my professional best," and the guest book had numerous visitors' testaments to their satisfaction.

The couple are now in a Manhattan apartment. Mr. Grielen is still a therapist, while Ms. Shelley-Grielen trained for and started a business as an animal behaviorist. It's not exactly a dream field for her, but she's no longer holding career expectations to the high standard she sought at Green Gables. "Falling in love with the idea of what owning a B&B will be like is like getting a crush on a picture of someone you've never met," she says. "You're just projecting."

Mr. Johnson is a writer in Roanoke County, Va. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com


Read Part I : A Dream Come True


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The Dream and the Reality of Running a Bed and Breakfast: PART I

Excerpts from an article by Rob Johnson
for the Wall Street Journal

PART I - The Dream
A Dream Come True

Barry Werner wanted to be an innkeeper all his life. when he was a child, he and his grandmother added variety to the game by pretending to run a small bed-and-breakfast, welcoming guests, cooking pancakes for them and hearing how much they enjoyed their visit.

Mr. Werner found fulfillment in making menus, bonding with guests and even doing mundane jobs

The fantasy lingered into Mr. Werner's adulthood as he labored at a succession of jobs he didn't love. By the time he hit his 30s, he realized the clock was ticking on the B&B dream.

In early 2007, he coaxed his life partner, Jeff Finlay, into attending an innkeepers industry convention in Myrtle Beach, S.C. At one seminar, a speaker offered a reality check by asking the audience, "Why do you want to own a bed-and-breakfast?" When a woman volunteered that she loved making muffins, the speaker advised that she might be better off running a bake shop. "He said, 'Do you like plunging toilets and cleaning carpet stains?' " Mr. Werner recalls.

Nevertheless, he and Mr. Finlay were intrigued. They began talking to real-estate agents and settled on a six-bedroom, six-bath row house near Baltimore's Inner Harbor. "I liked that a bed and breakfast could be in a city and at the same time near a resort area, parks and museums," says Mr. Werner, now 34.

By June 2007, with the real-estate market starting to tank, the B&B newbies hit a financial bump. They had estimated that selling their house in Germantown, Md., would largely pay for the Baltimore inn, called Scarborough Fair. But Mr. Werner says they not only took a loss on the sale of their house, "we had to use up our savings too" to buy the dream business.

The rocky start was soon forgotten as the joy of running the place took over. Coming up with items for the menu is a special pleasure for Mr. Werner, such as a chocolate-and-bacon waffle dish that came together after lots of trial and error. "When people cleaned their plates, it was awesome," he says.

Then there was the businesswoman from Egypt who let Mr. Werner know in advance about being a vegan. He loaded up on such alternatives as tofu and soybeans, "but the first morning she sat down at the breakfast table and told me she was allergic to them too," he says.

So, Mr. Werner came up with dishes based on nuts and fruit. "When she left a few days later, she told me she was so happy and eating more than she had in years," he says, adding, "This is putting your stamp on something that's very personal to people; it feels wonderful."

Mr. Werner finds fulfillment in more mundane tasks, too, such as doing an occasional load of laundry. Indeed, his roll-up-your-sleeves taste for chores is a common attribute among newly minted entrepreneurs.

His attention to detail helped him get close to many of his guests One  liked his holiday decor, which was more mysterious than scary, and thought it would be perfect for her small son, who had a phobia about costumes. Since then, the family has visited Scarborough Fair on vacation and thanked him for his inspiration. "It made me feel really close to them, and really good about what I do," Mr. Werner says.

He's also finding gratification in planning the remodeling of his inn's six bedrooms, each with the theme of a famous author. Mr. Werner say he and Mr. Finlay, now 45, spent about $20,000 on the first conversion, called the Edgar Allan Poe Suite. They plan to rename Scarborough Fair with the Latin phrase Ex Libris, meaning "from the books."

The money worries haven't gone away entirely. Mr. Werner says that so far the B&B is just moderately profitable, and Mr. Finlay still works as a computer programmer to earn money that's needed during the inn's slow winter months.

But the cash isn't the most important thing, Mr. Werner says. "One thing that makes this job perfect is you're helping people have the perfect vacation, or business trip," he says. "You're the person who makes their lives everything they want them to be for a few days. The rewards of that are immeasurable."

Mr. Johnson is a writer in Roanoke County, Va. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com
 
Read Part II: A Rude Wake up Call

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The cold weather definitely affects you and your business

Global Warming Means Big Blizzards. And the cold snap would be worse if not for global warming, says Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist from the Union of Concerned Scientists. In fact, she says, "Blizzards and big snowfalls are entirely consistent with global warming," because warmer air traps moisture in clouds, leading to more intense blizzards.

The impact of this year's unseasonably cold weather has been a boon for some sectors of the economy, even as it drags down others. Oil has hit $81 a barrel for the first time in two months, and Bloomberg News notes that stockpiles of heating oil have fallen for six weeks, to 44.4 million barrels -- the longest decline since April 2008. The run is fueled in part by record low temperatures in areas like International Falls, Minn. Known as "the Icebox of the Nation," the town recently hit minus 37 degrees Fahrenheit.

And further south, orange-juice prices soared 90% in 2009, fueled by an unseasonably cool winter in Florida, the world's second-biggest orange grower after Brazil.But a nasty winter doesn't mean all costs go up. Ohio officials report that road salt is cheaper and easier to find after towns got burned by shortages last year. The Dayton Daily News says Streets Department officials are saving money by using the ice-melting agent more efficiently. In the U.K., though, officials are worried about "critically low" supplies.

Coffee Earnings RiseOf course, it wouldn't be winter without warm beverages, and shares of Starbucks (SBUX) are up more than 134% over the last year. Smaller rival Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) is up more than 212%, thanks to the surging popularity of its Keurig single-cup coffeemakers. (I think mine is particularly awesome, and judging by the difficulty I had in finding some flavors. so do other consumers.)

Those who aren't worried about the supply of salt or the cost of heating oil are enjoying the wintry wonderland. Chris Hustad, owner of Nodak Outdoors in Bismarck, N.D., says he plans to go ice-fishing today and that his fellow enthusiasts would angle through a frozen lake "come hell or high water."

And the cold doesn't bother the 6,700 people who live in the Icebox of the Nation. Rod Otterness, city manager of International Falls, says he prefers bone-chilling but calm days like Jan. 4's to windier, warmer days. (Tuesday's high temperature is predicted to reach 3 degrees Fahrenheit.)"Everybody is driving down the street," Otterness says. "Trees are absolutely gorgeous with ice crystals. What's nice about International Falls is that we don't get that slushy stuff." (Courtesy Johnathan Berr, Daily Finance)

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The truth about bottled water

I stopped using bottled water personally and at my bed and breakfast around five years ago, for several reasons: First of all, I don't like contributing all that plastic to our land fills. Secondly, my dentist told me the local water, here in Louisville, is better for your teeth. And, lastly, for all the reasons mentioned in this video:



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