Joseph Salmeri's new business venture doesn't exactly have him jumping for joy.
But it's having that effect on his customers.
The 56-year-old Sacramentan recently became the somewhat reluctant owner of a "bounce house" – a kids' party center in Rancho Cordova.
He and his brother, Rick, own the commercial building where their new business is located. A few months ago, one of their tenants – a franchisee for a national bounce house chain called Pump It Up – canceled its lease in a dispute over fees, leaving the Salmeris with a 12,000-square-foot vacancy.
"We went to every bounce house in the area to see if they'd expand into our place," he says. The response? "No takers. No takers at all."
They had no better luck bringing in other kinds of tenants. So, Joseph says, "we made a business decision."
They spent $50,000 to buy new inflatable jumping equipment, spent another $30,000 fixing up the place, then last month opened Bounce Party USA.
Salmeri, who retired from running his machine shop business a few years ago, says he'd rather be traveling, scuba diving and golfing than working 40 hours a week launching a new business.
But he's philosophical about his unplanned return to the work force.
"In this economy," he says, "you have to roll with the punches."
Against the tide
In a slowing economy, you'd expect to see a decline in the going price for a small business.
And that's exactly what is happening in the four-county Sacramento region, according to a report issued last week by BizBuySell.com.
The Bay Area-based online marketplace says the median asking price for Sacramento-area firms – primarily restaurants, retail and service businesses – declined 17.1 percent over the past year – from $240,000 at the end of the third quarter last year to $199,000 this year.
But the company's general manager, Mike Handelsman, says the Sacramento numbers actually are something of an "aberration."
In most large cities he says, asking prices are higher. In some places they're way higher.
Why?
Increased demand in those cities, Handelsman says. "With unemployment up, more people (have lost jobs) and are out there looking to buy small businesses," he says.
Going global
You don't have to be a corporate giant to outsource work overseas.
So says Sacramentan Thomas Dodson, who started his own PR company several months ago after being laid off by a national architecture and community planning firm.
When his one-man shop started picking up accounts, Dodson found himself overwhelmed with "laborious" tasks, including e-mailing potential new clients and doing word processing.
His solution: Hire a company in India to handle those tasks at half the price that U.S. companies were charging.
Is he uncomfortable sending that work overseas? Maybe a little, Dodson says, but "I have to do everything I can to compete with larger, more established firms so I can keep prices down for my clients."
Reach Bob Shallit at (916) 321-1049. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/shallit.
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