Community choice aggregators are the latest test of whether local, publicly run ventures can deliver cheaper and cleaner power than their investor-owned counterparts. But electricity procurement can be a fickle industry.

Do business advisers practice what they preach? We look at how accounting firm BFBA handles its own succession planning, as its first generation partners approach retirement.

Delayed college graduation is costly to students, schools and local economies. Both Sac State and Los Rios implemented measures to help students graduate faster. Can they move grads through without diminishing the quality of education? Results look promising. 

Employee classification is already murky territory for many business owners, and recent changes have further tightened requirements. Yet, with huge penalties attached to mistakes, the laws are critical to understand.

With interest in MBAs flat or falling across the nation, can modernization help programs keep up with student interest? We take a look at how the region’s education programs are innovating their offerings.

Giving ex-offenders a better chance at reintegration is behind the California Fair Chance Act, which took effect in January. With exceptions for a few types of jobs, the new law forbids businesses with five or more employees from asking applicants about criminal history until late in the hiring process — which could mean big changes in how many employers hire.

Picture 350 square feet. That’s 11 queen-sized beds. It’s the inside of a school bus with an extra row or two of seats. It’s a little smaller than the average two-car garage. And it’s the size of 25-year-old Rachel Vaney’s apartment in Midtown Sacramento.

Studies suggest that diversity and profit aren’t two sides of a coin,
but more like the symbiotic relationship between bees and flowers.
So what does diversity actually look like, why does it seem to have
financial implications and how can businesses work toward more
inclusive hiring practices?

Tech transfer at publically-funded universities isn’t just about generating revenue from IP — it’s about the public good. But is the UC’s strategy for negotiating licenses making this double-barrelled mission even more complex?

Each year, small and mid-sized organizations, including small businesses, lose the most to employee theft. We talked to financial advisors about the lessons they learned about how to prevent fraud from damaging your business. 

Back in 1998, two family businesses —Holt Bros. and Tenco Tractors — merged into one, for a total of three families now under one business roof at Holt of California. Twenty years later, they rely on a long history of leadership transitions to select the next in line for succession.

The departure of long-established but undocumented Mexicans from California is a signal — along with other government data from the southwest border — that the flow of unauthorized immigration is shifting direction, perhaps dramatically.

From texts to photos to emails, every modern law case involves some sort of e-discovery — so why are lawyers still failing to do it?

In the last 50 years, higher education’s customer base has become decidedly more female. In 1967, 40 percent of college students were women. By 2014, it was 56 percent. The U.S. Department of Education projects that will climb to 59 percent by 2025.

But the people responsible for delivering those educations are still overwhelmingly male.

The day that Jenny and Bob had their son Justin in 1994, they set foot in a new world. Jenny went into labor four weeks early, and her baby presented in the wrong direction — feet first. So he was delivered through emergency C-section. Once he was born, his heart rate dropped instead of rising, as it should have. For weeks it wasn’t clear whether he’d survive.

Now that millennials are older and starting to have kids, the economics of schools and space are driving many of them to the suburbs, just as it did their parents.

Seven years after passage of the Affordable Care Act created a new world order in health insurance, it all may be upended. With a new administration in Washington, all or parts of Obamacare could be repealed and replaced. All the while, premium increases have continued apace: 

Venture Catalyst is one part of a multipronged effort at the school that its leaders say is helping turn university research into companies that produce world-changing technologies. The school has facilitated a total of 49 startups in the last four fiscal years, up from 18 in the four years prior.

For a sense of how fungible the label “financial adviser” has become, talk to Mike Chamberlain of Chamberlain Financial Planning & Wealth Management, which has an office in Sacramento. “’Financial services industry’ is a very broad term,” he says, “and I don’t like being included in it.

There are good reasons to focus on the special challenges posed by family businesses, like how to keep family resentments from turning to business rivalries and avoid nepotism that results in the wrong people working in key positions. But for some Sacramento immigrant family businesses, blood ties have been the key to survival.

When Oleg Kaganovich was growing up in Michigan in the 1980s and early ’90s, his city of Grand Rapids was suffering the doughnut effect then typical of downtowns everywhere: Shoppers and residents were fleeing for the suburbs. By 1990, fewer than one in 10 residents shopped regularly downtown, a drop from about one in three in the early 1960s, according to a local newspaper.

Among private law firms, a dam is about to break. According to research by two Los Angeles legal marketing experts, 96 percent of leaders at the country’s biggest 100 private practices are baby boomers or older. But many of their clients are younger. 

Cal-ISO is one of 38 system operators for the geographic area that covers everything west of the eastern boundaries of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. That compares with six system operators responsible for most of the rest of the country. “The divided operation of the western grid is not unlike having a bus with 38 drivers.”

An African-American employee is told that he “doesn’t sound black,” a Jewish employee hears that she “doesn’t look Jewish” and a gay staffer’s supervisor tells him he “doesn’t act gay.”

Those are real-life stories, according to several experts on workplace discrimination. 

When Chris Treiber left the Navy in 2011, he set sail on uncharted waters. His 10 years of service offered no natural path into a good job. He’d spent his last five of those guarding prisoners and had no civilian job experience. He had a GED, having dropped out of high school in 10th grade. And at age 32, he had a wife and five kids to provide for.

Greta Gerwig, a Sacramento native and award-winning filmmaker and actress, won’t share many details about her upcoming project, a full-length independent film called “Lady Bird.” Except for one — where it’s being shot.

Call it the tale of two turfs. In summer 2014, 27-year-old Benjamin Triffo wanted to do something about his dry, unattractive yard. He owns a four-bedroom, four-bath duplex in Elk Grove that he’d bought in 2011, and his sprinkler lines were broken. But with the state passing rules last July that would allow fines for overwatering, Triffo quickly figured out that replacing his system and re-sodding would be like attaching a drain line to his checkbook.

Douglas Stricker of Folsom, 58, knows all about the need for skilled laborers. In 1992, he launched Golden Development, a company that built storage tanks and other structures for refineries and chemical companies. He had a crew of between 20 and 40 workers but never could find enough reliable welders — even in jobs that paid up to $30 an hour.

Giving customers price incentives to use less energy during peak periods is a key feature of SMUD’s smart grid. That new metering system is designed to let both the utility and customers better monitor energy use in homes. Now SMUD is hoping to take its grid to the next level. It’s partnering with entrepreneurs who can give customers technology that lets them use SMUD’s price incentives to save money

Pauline Marx, 63, had been a pretty conventional investor in stocks and bonds until April 2014. But to her, the rock-bottom interest rates on fixed-income tools like Treasury bills and CDs felt like stuffing money under the mattress.Then a friend told her about Fundrise, a website that lets investors buy small shares of real estate ventures around the country.

Richard Wydick has spent much of his professional life trying to change how lawyers write. In 1978, he led an article for the California Law Review with this broadside: “We lawyers cannot write plain English.” That piece created such a positive response that he turned it into a foundational book on legal writing that’s now in its fifth edition.

Competing with big-league firms for employees is tough — average pay at small businesses runs about two-thirds that offered at other companies. Not keeping up with pay hikes elsewhere can create staff turnover, eating into morale and creating operational problems. Enter profit-sharing plans.

In the past five years, 57-year-old Elaine Walker has lived in four cities: Washington D.C., two in Northern California and now Orlando, Fla. And in all four, she lived in the same house.That’s because it’s a farmhouse on wheels.

McMansion, meet tiny house. The symbol of the bubbling 2000s hasn’t exactly been displaced by the sub-400-square-foot home. But for many homebuyers in insecure times, shrinking their square footage has also downsized their worries.

Among the counterintuitive gems economists have excavated in recent years is this curious insight: When the economy is humming along and unemployment is low, the U.S. death rate rises. Many in the field have tried to fathom why. And now, UC Davis Graduate School of Management interim dean Ann Huff Stevens and three of her colleagues think they know.

Judging by prevailing retail practices, somewhere etched in stone is this edict: “To slay thy competition thou shalt undercut on labor costs.”

But a few apostate companies have strayed from that decree by offering decent wages, good benefits and predictable work schedules. Shockingly, the wayward are prospering.

Large retail chains like Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona pay wages and benefits considered high for their industries. They also use four key operational strategies:

For California labor lawyers, the 2012 Brinker v. Superior Court ruling was something akin to Brown v. Board or Roe v. Wade. In a case involving meal and rest breaks for hourly employees, the court ruled that businesses must have a policy giving workers those breaks — but they don’t have to ensure that staff actually take them. It seemed like near-total victory for business.

With about 10 percent of total banking assets, community banks are the source of almost half the nation’s small-business loans and 43 percent of its farm loans. New regulations and low interest rates have shut down many smaller banks or forced mergers, but the survivors say they’re poised to take advantage of market openings and an improving economy.

The challenge of finding sales talent keeps some companies from growing or even surviving. That’s why sales training boosters say it’s time for university business schools to turn out graduates who can take sales jobs and quickly hit their numbers without months — or even years — of on-the-job training.

For all its importance to business survival, companies tend to fail miserably at hiring sales staff. A 2011 survey of more than 400 firms by DePaul University researchers found that hiring one seller costs $29,000. But a lot of that money flutters out into the ether; a third of recruits don’t make it through their first year.

Carrie Clark, a former teacher, says bullies aren’t confined to playgrounds. Sometimes, they run the whole school. And they do more than demand that work get done. They threaten, humiliate or intimidate for reasons unrelated to job performance.

The Society for Human Resource Management has developed a model procedure for handling bullying complaints. Key language includes:

Little more than half of the nearly 13,000 children who have faced deportation proceedings in California since 2005 have had attorneys. Now, a state law passed in September gives local attorneys the means to represent more of the growing wave of Central American children crossing into the United States.

Can a corporate lawyer or real estate attorney really navigate this never-never land as effectively as a full-time immigration attorney? Yes, say the legal aid organizations that train pro bono lawyers.  

Peer-to-peer lending platforms have hit their stride, and the number of peer loans has grown 84 percent per quarter since Prosper launched in 2006. In that same period, originations for other types of consumer loans have fallen 2 percent a quarter.

Nationwide, captives are growing fast. In 2012, 18 new U.S. group captives were formed, the highest level since 2007. But buying into a captive puts both rewards and risks into the hands of business owners.

Alex Medina and Brandon McKelvey’s new law firm looks more like a bootstrapped tech startup than a high-end legal practice. It’s one model among the boutique firms whose numbers have taken off in the region this year. The improving economy, a buyer’s market for legal services, and the lures of startup culture have upended Sacramento’s legal landscape.

The billable hour is under attack. After a scandal involving allegations of overcharging at global law firm DLA Piper last spring, Northwestern University law professor Steven Harper wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he asserted that the billable-hour system serves no one.