National Post, August 29, 2002. Nicole Cohen

Rochelle Hutchinson tears her eyes away from the guy in the purple shades to stuff a flyer into the hands of young passersby on Richmond. She hates to interrupt her conversation, especially since this is the cutest boy she’s met all night, but the street promoter is on the job and has a stack of flyers to hand out to potential clubbers.

“It’s not a glamorous job,” Hutchinson says, “but the perks are great.”

The 20-year-old, who will be taking classes at George Brown College in the fall, earns $12-20 an hour for a few hours of work on the weekends and gets free cover and drinks at the clubs she promotes.

“It’s the best job for a student if you’re into the club scene and like talking to people. You don’t meet guys like this working at McDonald’s,” she says, turning back to Mr. Mysterious.

Glamorous is the last word you’d imagine using to describe student jobs. Financing the mind-expanding years of post-secondary education often means spending hour after mindless hour folding jeans and blending hated cups of frappuccino when you’d rather be partying, seeing concerts and indulging your material desires (or maybe reading something).

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like Hutchinson, many students have found ways to earn a living while serving their collegiate needs.

Peter , 26, has been a concert security guard since he was a third-year student. He started at $8.50 an hour, now earns $9, and gets to see shows at venues such as the Air Canada Centre, the Guvernment and Kool Haus.

Working as a security guard has given Peter the opportunity to watch The Guess Who and Kim Mitchell from the wings of the Molson Amphitheatre stage, get chased with a hose by Ozzy Osborne and learn first-hand that Dave Matthews is a close-talker.

“I also get flashed quite a lot in the pit,” Peter says. “Edgefest was basically a three-hour wet T-shirt contest.” If dealing with drunk fans and flailing limbs isn’t your ideal way to see live music, scoring a gig as a videographer could be your ticket to free shows. With minimal experience gained in a first-year broadcast class, Jordan Heath-Rawlings earned up to $12 an hour filming live webcasts for IceBerg Media.
“They hooked me up with a camera and a nice place to stand and said “shoot this concert,” he says.
Highlights of his brief stint as a cameraman included attending a secret Rage Against The Machine gig at the Phoenix, seeing Supergrass and sharing a post-show smoke with Joe Strummer.

Before he left to attend McGill University, FredSztabinski, 22, found a job on the nt as a chauffeur for Canada’s Walk of Frame. The gig was unpaid, but for Sztabinski the perks were unprecedented – a 24-case of Molson beer, lunch at Wayne Gretzky’s restaurant, movie passes and a Walk of Fame jacket.
All he had to do was pick up filmmaker David Cronenberg and his wife at their Rosedale home and cart them to ceremonies and parties in a silver Mercedes-Benz S500, worth about $100,000.

“It was a novelty,” says Sztabinski. “I picked up my friends and drove the car around all day.”

While it’s highly unlikely you’ll end up with an expensive car, the best way to score free stuff (that you can actually keep) is to become a secret shopper. Thousands of students across the country are paid to go shopping and eat in restaurants, all in the name of evaluating customer service.

“It’s an ideal job for students to make a few bucks and it’s not a big time commitment,” says David Lipton, president of Sensors Quality Management Inc., a company that pays anywhere from $15-$400 a month for students’ opinions. Secret shoppers get free merchandise and movies, nights in hotel rooms, full meals, cheap airline tickets, and sometimes just get paid to go to the bank or a car dealership.

Need a haircut? When Paula Gibson, 26, was a student at Algonquin College she answered an ad in the paper for hair models and got her long, blond hair cut, dyed an highlighted for free at a hair show, saving her almost $100.

How about a winter vacation? Airlines hire students to be flight attendants over winter and summer breaks, pay them well and fly them to exotic locales.

Emile Amzallag, 21, earns $30 an hour working for Air Canada during his time off from McGill. He often has scheduled layovers in Tel Aviv, where he is put up in a nice hotel and given a few hundred dollars in cash to cover expenses.

“I’m getting paid to go to a beach,” Amzallag says. He has been all over Canada, to England and Trinidad. Some days Amsallag will wake up in Toronto and go to sleep in Tokyo. Exhausting, but worth it.
If you can afford to give your time away in exchange for experience in the real world, there are some internships that will weigh you down with free stuff.

Canada’s arm of music giant BMG hires a raft of interns for various jobs in the marketing and publicity departments. Most interns are paid a token $75 for about 15 hours of work a week but come home with piles of free CDs and the chance to hang around the office with Canadian music celebs Avril Lavigne, The Rascalz and Sloan.

So fear not, students; if you have to sell your soul to a corporation or slave away for minimum wage, remember there are some jobs out there with enough gratuities to make slogging the hours away a truly perk experience.

By David Lipton
July 2002, Foodservice and Hospitality

Whether you’re just starting out in the restaurant business or you’re an industry dinosaur, dealing with the competition is an inevitable part of the job. And no matter how hard you try, simply ignoring competitors will not make them go away. Even the most loyal customers may become curious about the “new joint” down the street, and in the process, they may find out there’s something it has that your operation doesn’t. That something may seem small and insignificant to you, but it could mean the difference between an anniversary celebration and a going-out-of-business sale.

While some call competitive analysis immoral and unethical, others call it necessary for survival. Restaurants that ignore customer needs and desires are the ones that don’t last. Survival is guaranteed by staying one step ahead of the competition, but in reality, that doesn’t always happen. It’s vitally important to be sure your menu is not lacking the one dish everyone is seeking out, or to ensure that you décor is not passé compared to competitors. Restaurant owners must have a sharp, keen ear for the latest industry trends; staying attuned to what competitors are offering, how they offer it and why.

Competitive analysis involves using a number of techniques and tactics. The following list represents a few techniques.

1. Broadly define the competitive landscape. Don’t overlook businesses that could easily become your competition by making minor changes to their operation.
2. Attend industry conferences and trade shows. This will allow you to monitor trends and keep track of important issues that may affect your business.
3. See your competition through the eyes of a customer. Being a customer enables you to get a first-hand look at how an operation is run, and their quality standards in terms of service and products. Posing as a customer to experience the competition first-hand is one option. A third-party mystery shopping program can also provide an in-depth assessment of the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as how it compares to your establishment (from an impartial third party’s point of view)
4. Talk to your competitors’ customers. Find out what they like and dislike about it, why they dine there, and what keeps them coming back. Conducting exit interviews and/or focus groups are some of the ways to obtain this type of information. Comparing that information to the same information from you own business can show you exactly what you are doing wrong—or right.
5. Find out as much as you can about the people who run competing businesses. They may have had training or education that your staff is lacking. Also, since buying out the competition to grow your business is a common strategy in all industries today, knowing how that business runs and who runs it could probe to be invaluable in the long run.
6. If you’re looking at a publicly traded company, obtain information through the investor relations department. Shareholders have access to certain information, such as financial records and strategies that may not be otherwise acceptable.
7. Check public filings. This information will allow you to obtain insight on how the company is actually doing and what its future plans are.
8. Use the Internet. A lot of competitive information is readily available to the public with a little bit of time and Internet searching know-how.
9. Assess the competition’s goals in relation to your own. You may wish to alter certain aspects of your business to better accommodate your customers, or target the competition’s customers.
10. Be aware of the potential for new competition. With today’s technology reducing communication time, business concepts are easily duplicated or developed in a very short amount of time.

Keeping up with the times and knowing what your competitors have up their sleeves is just as important to a restaurant’s longevity as serving the freshest meat and vegetables. Knowing your competitor’s business is as important as knowing your won. Everything from becoming a customer, to talking to customers, to conducting surveys, or accessing public records is a small but key component of thorough competitive analysis. The key to beating the competition is to always be alert, and never let them have the upper hand.