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By Knight Kiplinger

The Kiplinger Washington Editors

July 2, 2009

By year-end or so, Congress will give the nod to a major rewriting of the nation's financial regulatory system. This week’s Kiplinger Letter explores whether the package will do more harm than good and what lawmakers are likely to include.

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I just attended a franchise seminar. The speaker represents a few hundred franchises that (he says) are hand picked. He has the prospect (aka victim?) answer some questions about themselves then he makes recomendations - based on your personality, capital situation, etc.. If you pick a franchise, then he does some due dilligence for you. If you both decide it's a good idea, he helps you get started. He says he offers this service free of charge, which means he gets a commission if he's able to sell you a franchise. Has anyone done this? Successfully? Unsuccessfully?

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Is Your Firm Ready for a Travel Disaster?

Risk management can help protect the huge amount of money invested on travel. Here's how to be ready when an employee is hurt or stranded on the road.

Worth Reading: The Quick Take from Kiplinger

April 2008

NBTA

iJET

The National Business Travel Association represents over 3,000 corporate and government travel managers and travel service providers.

iJET Intelligent Risk Systems is a leader in operational risk management, helping multinational corporations and government organizations monitor, protect against and respond to global threats.

Do you have a plan for when your Hartford-based sales manager collapses in the Spokane airport? What do you do when a prototype of a new security device that you were going to display to investors in Tokyo is stuck in customs? Emergencies and disruptions are expensive to respond to and can hurt business. And the cost of travel itself is burdensome -- the National Business Travel Association (NBTA) estimates the average cost of a three-day work trip overseas at more than $4,000, a number rising fast because of the sinking dollar and travel costs pushed up by the spike in oil prices. Add to that the cost of, say, bringing a seriously ill employee home from a trip overseas, which NBTA said costs $25,000-$30,000.

Businesses are responding not just by cutting travel, but by using risk management to try to protect what amounts to an investment. "Proactive measures that reduce the frequency and severity of incidents help avoid costly response and recovery expenses as well as reduce potential liability," NBTA and iJet Intelligent Risk Systems say in a jointly written white paper.

The paper briefly outlines the wide variety of risks related to travel, while warning that the risks are especially variable and unpredictable. Beyond health emergencies, criminal attacks and natural disasters, companies need to be ready to respond to incidents small and large: terrorist attacks and civil unrest; transportation strikes; lost or stolen phones and laptops, power blackouts; security, visa and passport requirements. To illustrate the cost of being ill-prepared, the report notes that one executive had to spring for $2,000 to get a piece of medical equipment through customs in Brazil because he was not aware it needed to be registered in advance.

But most of the paper is aimed at helping companies evaluate their travel risk management systems, if they have one at all. It uses a scale of 1 (simply reacting to events when they occur) to 5 (ready for most anything) broken down into categories and provides a sample assessment to help in the evaluation. It also discusses how to improve training, risk monitoring, risk mitigation, communication and emergency response.

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