Get Ready for the Summer with Company Kids Beach Bags and Towels – Review & Giveaway

***Complimentary product received in exchange for an honest review***

I am lucky enough to live at the Jersey shore, surrounded by beautiful seaside towns and lovely beaches.  In the summer months, I spend almost all my extra time at the beach with my children, and its the same for most of my friends. If you want to make a splash with your beach going friends this summer season, check out the awesome new beach bags and towels available from Company Kids.  They are the perfect way to start your summer off in style.

My family received a bag and towel combo in the mermaid design for our review. It took me a little while to pry the bag away from my daughter, but once I got it, I was in love. There is plenty of space inside the bag to fit all the necessities including towels, sunscreen, and a few sand toys. There’s also a small zippered section that is the perfect place to keep cell phones and cash secure. The rope strap is very sturdy and the bag itself is so well made, I have no doubts it will last well through the end of the summer.

The pretty matching mermaid towel is made from cotton and its so soft, its like laying on a cloud. The bright, colorful design is cheerful and doesn’t fade or lose its thickness even after multiple washes or a few hours in the sun.  I love that it’s a little larger than most towels. Its perfect for laying out on the sand at the beach but also great if you are sitting poolside. Again, Willow loved it so much, she used it after showering a few times, but now its officially her favorite beach towel.  The mermaid in only one option in this trendy new line. Check out some of the other fun styles in the collection.

The beach bags and towels are only the beginning of the amazing products you can find at Company Kids. They also offer a wide range of beautiful home decor just for kids. If need new furniture, bedding,  or decorations for your children, whether they are in preschool or high school, you can find a great selection of fashionable choices they will love at Company Kids. While you’re visiting, be sure to check their clearance section for great savings on their already low prices. To keep up with new promotions be sure to follow them on face book ortwitter.

The Giveaway

One lucky winner is going to receive a beach towel and bag set. Exact style and color subject to availability. To enter, just fill in the Rafflecopter form below. This giveaway will end on 6/10/13. Open to the US  only. The winner will be selected at random, will be notified via email, and will have 48 hours to reply. Thanks again to Company Kids for  for offering this fantastic prize.

Published on May 16. 2013 by ADAM BRYANT at The New York Times

This interview with Ashok Subramanian, chief executive of Liazon, an employee benefits company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. Were you always interested in being an entrepreneur?

A. No. I was not the prototypical 12-year-old who had three businesses. I got to it a little bit late. I spent some time in consulting, and I enjoyed helping people figure out thorny issues. What I missed was actually calling the shots, and building the team and structure and process to execute the plan.

Q. What were some dos and don’ts you learned from consulting for other companies?

A. What struck me was that as companies get larger and larger, the communication gap between folks in the executive offices and people on the ground grows over time. What I’ve seen in some of those situations is a complete lack of trust among decision-makers and their people. So I came away saying that I wanted to create a culture with complete transparency, openness and communication.

Q. Where did you get your drive?

A. There were a couple of key influences. My parents are immigrants. My dad came to this country with a good education, but literally less than $10 in his pocket. And he taught us that, regardless of what you have or don’t have, you can’t let others outwork you.

I think the second influence was where I grew up: Buffalo. It’s a town that’s been hit pretty hard. You get kicked in the teeth pretty good when you come from a place like Buffalo. There was a cohort of us at business school who all grew up in the Rust Belt, and we all sort of bonded. There’s a certain work ethic, a certain attitude, a certain humility.

Q. Tell me about how the culture has evolved at your company.

A. We’re at about 90 people today. When we hit the 20-employee number, someone gave me the grand idea that you need to hire an H.R. consultant to write a handbook. I didn’t know any better, so we did. We came out with a 50-page handbook that had policies on things I’d never heard of before. As we added more people, their first introduction to the company, in many ways, was this handbook. I realized that these folks were getting the completely wrong impression of the kind of company I wanted to build.

So about a year and a half ago, I stood up at a company event and threw the handbook in the trash. And I said: “We’re not going to be governed by a culture that defines a set of rules. We’re going to be governed by a culture in which we hold ourselves accountable for great performance, and for understanding that we trust each other enough that people are going to make good decisions because they’re here for the right reasons.”

Q. What was the reaction?

A. Standing ovation. It’s not that all the blame could be placed at the foot of the handbook. It was a symbol of something we weren’t. It was something that companies are supposed to do when they get bigger in order for them not to get sued.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I try to focus on some of the things that are tied to the values we’ve talked about. I’m looking for people who will appreciate, and can thrive in, an environment that’s not about “Here’s a cookbook,” but who want to actually figure out how to write their own cookbook. Is this someone who’s smart and can think through all the problems and challenges that we have not yet encountered?

And do they have the work ethic that, at the end of the day, makes them want to come into work saying, “I’m going to do a great job,” and they’re going to leave every day saying, “I did the best I could”?

We also look for diversity. And the diversity is less about the traditional definition of diversity, and more about diversity of thought and experience. In a changing market, for us to stay ahead, I want people internally to be challenging the way we do business, before someone outside in the market challenges the way we do business.

A lot of it is gut feel. How do I feel about the vibe of this person I might be working with every day? But I also ask a lot of “why” questions like: “So your résumé says you did X.  How did you do that? Why did you do it the way you did it? Did you think about other ways to achieve that objective? Why did you choose not to do something? Why did you choose to do something? Are there things you would do differently if you could do them over again?” Self-awareness and being reflective are hugely important characteristics.

Q. What are your thoughts on innovation?

A. I think you either stand for being innovative or not. The way that we stand for being innovative is that I always say: “If we are to be disrupted, let’s be the ones disrupting ourselves. Let’s not be disrupted by someone else out there.”

We’ve done a couple of things like that. We’re a growing company, and we’ve attracted some good venture capital. Two months after we closed our largest funding last year, I went to our board of directors and said: “Everything we’ve been doing the last four years, from a distribution perspective, is wrong. I apologize if you feel that you invested based on this thesis. But I actually think unless we change how we go to market, we run a major risk of being disrupted. And so let’s disrupt ourselves.”

If you want to be innovative, you’ve got to practice it, and you’ve got to lead it and embody it in everything you do. It can’t be this sort of isolated thing off to the side of the company, where we’re going to be innovative every so often.

Q. How do you make sure people are thinking the right way about risk and failure?

A. We’ve tried to address that by celebrating failure. We will, in front of the whole company, talk about all the things we’ve failed at. The idea is to demonstrate that you have air cover, as an individual, if you fail. We’re celebrating it, not hiding it.

I also do some mapping of how those failures may have felt like failures at the time, but led to little moments of learning that, if you patch them together, actually get to another breakthrough. If you can’t embrace the idea that little failures are a prerequisite to big successes, then you’re probably in the wrong business.

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Atrium Staffing firm arrives in Pittsburgh

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BOSTON, MA–(Dec 4, 2012) - Lexington Solutions, a leading asset management software and services provider for the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) market, today announced that Cardinal Capital Management, Inc., a developer and provider of asset management services for the affordable housing industry, will deploy its flagship software Fusion™ to help manage their LIHTC portfolio. In addition, Lexington Solutions will provide Cardinal Capital with automated, electronic data collection and Business Intelligence Dashboard integrated with Fusion.

“As a quickly growing LIHTC developer, we needed a system that would allow all of our asset managers to seamlessly access data from a centralized location and empower efficient analysis of portfolios,” said Erich Schwenker, president at Cardinal Capital. “Fusion will help our asset managers quickly drill down into our financial data and concentrate on monitoring each property for variances. With Fusion, we will be better equipped to fulfill our mission of protecting and preserving affordable housing.”

Cardinal Capital and its affiliates manage over 7,500 units in more than 130 communities throughout Wisconsin, Iowa and Arizona. Continuing to expand, Cardinal Capital selected Fusion based on its requirements for a thorough LIHTC asset management solution that includes:

• Complete and centralized access to all their property data for every employee to provide consistent information flow throughout the company
• Comprehensive comparisons and real-time analysis of portfolio data to empower asset managers to effectively manage portfolios
• Logical and intuitive views of data and analysis that allow asset managers to quickly find information when they need it
• Automatically identified portfolio variances, so asset managers can spot trends or issues and take action to resolve them before they become larger.

“Working with Cardinal Capital underscores how critical robust asset management software is for LIHTC developers,” said Brian Madden, COO of Lexington Solutions. “More and more developers are recognizing that piecemeal in-house solutions and Excel sheet analysis are not sufficient to produce consistent results or enable proactive analysis that today’s asset managers demand. With Fusion, we’re able to provide the asset management technology and services that institutionalizes a company’s knowledge and positively impacts operations and the bottom line.”

Lexington Solutions will work with Cardinal Capital to implement Fusion’s cloud-based asset management software and data collection services. With Lexington Solutions’ data collection services, financial data from Cardinal Capital’s management companies will be automatically imported into their Fusion database. Lexington Solutions will deploy Fusion as a hosted solution, maintaining responsibility for disaster recovery and backup systems to secure Cardinal Capital’s critical data.

Today, Fusion manages more than 170,000 Low Income Housing Tax Credit units throughout the United States. To learn more about how Fusion can transform LIHTC asset management, visit:www.Lexington-Solutions.com.

About Lexington Solutions
Lexington Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Boston Capital, is an innovative asset management software and services provider to the LIHTC market. The company’s flagship product, Fusion™, is the most comprehensive LIHTC asset management software of the market, and the only platform specifically built by asset managers, for asset managers. Fusion’s built-in analysis helps asset managers to proactively pinpoint potential issues earlier, and confidently manage assets and tax credits while reducing credit delivery risk. Today, Fusion is used to manage over 2,500 LIHTC properties nationwide as the most affordable asset management solution for the affordable housing industry. For more information, visit: www.Lexington-Solutions.com.

When siblings Chelsea and Scott Sloan were teens growing up in Salt Lake City, they frequently talked about starting a business together. That probably came as no surprise to their parents, the founders of Kid to Kid, a franchisor of resale stores for used children’s clothing, toys, baby gear and maternity wear. Chelsea Sloan, 27, says she and her brother, 31, “saw what our parents had done and we wanted to do something on our own.” So in 2009, the siblings secured an SBA loan and opened Uptown Cheapskate, an upscale resale clothing store catering to the 18-35 market. Three years later, the company already has 23 franchisees, and her success earned Sloan the top prize at the Global Student Entrepreneur Award, $150,000 in cash and in-kind business services from Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which sponsors the competition.

A Fragmented Industry

Sloan says she had been “obsessively researching resale stores for years” and had found that only 17 percent of the population would shop in a resale store in a given year. “That statistic struck me as not right,” she says. “There’s just so much product sitting in your closet. People ought to be engaging in resale.” Also, more than 80 percent of shops were small, mom-and-pop operations, posting sales of less than $250,000 annually. She saw that fragmentation as an opportunity as well.

The siblings reckoned that the size of the teen and adult resale market was approximately $2.5 billion. Another franchisor, Plato’s Closet, “had 400 stores and only about 10 percent of the market,” Sloan says. That meant there was plenty of opportunity for a newcomer. She and Scott decided to think big, and they set their sights on creating an entire franchise that would not only attract existing resale shoppers but, through sophisticated branding and merchandising, would lure the other 83 percent of the population as well. Their other point of differentiation: Unlike consignment shops, they would buy used clothing outright at approximately 25 percent of the store price. Shoppers would get an additional 25 percent for their clothing if they agreed to take a store credit in lieu of cash. 

Early Lessons

The two opened their first store in Salt Lake City in early 2009, after six months of planning. Since they knew from the beginning that they wanted to franchise their business, they made sure everything from the signage to the lighting was replicable. But they made some mistakes as well.

“We tried to do things on the cheap,” Sloan says. But penny-pinching cost them more in the end. For instance, a low-cost lighting contractor used bad credit to pay for fixtures, then disappeared. “The lighting supplier then came after us,” Sloan says. And within six months of opening, there was almost $10,000 worth of theft in the store. While security tags are expensive, Sloan quickly learned that they eventually pay for themselves.

The Sloans’ franchising plans also compelled them to create a proprietary database of brands and prices that would make it easy for their future franchisees to price items of clothing. Sloan started by looking up brands on Amazon, building the database herself. The database now has 4,200 brands, and, she says, “allows anyone to correctly price almost product that comes into the store.”

Immediate Expansion

Before the siblings even opened their flagship store, they had signed their first franchise agreement with a North Carolina couple. Now, the company has 16 franchisees and 22 stores nationwide. System-wide, says Sloan, the stores rack up more than $1 million a month, with the average store posting $700,000 a year in revenue. The total investment for a franchisee is between $227,900 and $335,000. All franchisees go through two weeks of training in Salt Lake City, and company representatives are present for all grand openings.

Sloan estimates that Uptown Cheapskate will open an additional 20 stores in 2013. Eleven franchise agreements are already signed, she says. “Our only constraint is our ability to support them,” she notes. That means systematizing training and hiring more support staff.

For advice on growth, the siblings frequently turn to their original inspiration: their mom and dad. But the advice goes both ways, Sloan says. “My mom taught me everything I know about the retail industry, but we’ve been able to pass things along to her, since we’re more tech savvy. The companies are really helping each other become better at what we both do.”

Read more Startup of the Week posts.

Check out the full article online on Open Forum.