By Susan E. Campbell

A new book by local business advisor Michael Cruz is aimed at helping managers at all levels acquire the skills to employ the best people and retain them longer.

“Hire The People You Want (And The Questions You Must Ask To Get Them)” aggregates the insights and tips Cruz has acquired helping clients of his consulting firm, Lighthouse Advisors LLC out of Queensbury, to manage their rapid growth, for which building infrastructure, support and an executive team are key components.

“Most people don’t have the skills to hire the best candidates and no one wants to take the time to learn,” said Cruz.

Before founding his firm in 1999, Cruz ran marketing departments in the corporate sector and honed his skills as a communicator.

Self-published and sold exclusively at Amazon, the 100-page book s priced at $9.99 for the digital edition and under $15 for the soft cover edition.

“This book helps companies develop a methodology and encourages making time to do this job right,” he said. “If the business owner or manager can’t find the time now, when will they find the time when they have to hire again?”

by jill nagy

Nicole Snow’s desire to learn to knit led to the development of Darn Good Yarn, her successful online business selling crafting supplies and clothing

Most of the product is hand-made in India or Nepal and most uses recycled materials.

A yarn spun from scraps of saris (draped female garments from India), brightly colored, silky to the touch and ideal for a novice knitter, was Snow’s first product. The yarn was hard to find. Only three suppliers in the United States sold it and it was a seasonal product. 

For the women who made the yarn, it was something they did when they could not work in the fields. Snow, who calls herself “a very accidental entrepreneur,” set out to change that. 

Drawing on contacts from previous work for a general import business, she contracted with cooperatives and sole proprietors in Nepal and India, providing about 600 full-time, year-round jobs at wages similar to the minimum wage in the U.S. and two or three times the local wages, she said.

The 2018 Saratoga Showcase of Homes announce the three “People’s Choice” award winners as voted on by the public who visited the homes during the annual fall event.

The Showcase of Homes was presented over three weekends n September. This year’s edition had 13 locations from 12 of area builders on display in Saratoga County. Over 3,500 hundred people toured these new homes, officials said.

“People’s Choice” winners were:

• Classic Home category – Kodiak Construction. The home is in The Point at Moss Creek and offers expansive western mountain views and sunsets. It has 3,028 square feet of space, four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms.

Founded locally by Saratoga Springs natives Jesse Boucher and Justin Sitler, Kodiak Construction serves clients throughout the northern Capital District, Saratoga Springs, Glens Falls, and Lake George.

By Michael Hatalla

We often hear from our business customers that their employees are working remote or outside of the office on a more regular basis. Whether home or a local coffee shop, these employees need a safe way to access corporate data securely.

There are a few ways to accomplish this. If your company has a proper firewall in place, most will support either an SSL VPN or IPSec VPN solution.

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A VPN is an encrypted connection, or tunnel, between your computer and the firewall at the office over the internet. This type of connection makes it appear that the user is on their local network, regardless of their location.

As more and more businesses allow their employees to work from home or remotely, VPN’s are becoming more and more important to keeping corporate data and applications secure.

For a company to setup an VPN, they can purchase a stand-alone VPN appliance; a multifunction device, such as a next-generation firewall or unified threat management firewall that offers VPN capability, or as a service, using a virtual VPN device.