My dry cleaner screwed up.

I won’t mention my dry cleaner's company name, especially since I've been with them for years. But, they recently lost a couple of my garments, replacing at least one of them with a shirt that had a sleeve-length that was a good seven inches beyond my wrist. Since I have recently been considering a straight jacket anyway, I damned near kept it.

You should have seen these guys react. Not only did I receive multiple calls from the owner, but the guy who picks up and delivers the cleaning at my house has already personally visited me twice.

I don’t do a ton of dry cleaning, but neither am I a small-time customer. In a typical month, our family can spend $300 or $400 dollars on this service. So my account is reasonably important to them.

I was at Wright’s Seafood Inn the other day. I won’t get into the details of the problems I witnessed here, other than to say that Wright's owner, Joe DeCarlo, told me that he spends "a good deal" of his time on "customer relations." As an observer, I would guess that Joe spends a lot more than "a good deal" of his time making sure that his customers stay customers.

The day I was there, another customer told me: a.) that, and upon check-in, the hostess said, "You can sit here, but there's no way I can get to you inside of a half hour," and, b.) he witnessed a waitress saying pretty much the same thing to a customer who had just been seated.

Joe didn't know about these two instances, but Joe assured me that, and had he heard or seen these things happening, "heads would have rolled" right there on the spot. Hell, Joe is such a perfectionist that I have seen him, and in his kitchen, almost go to fists with one of his chefs. It's that important.

On my Tuesday radio program, Ryan Neve, owner of Neve Appraisals, said, "Ron, I have never seen a more competitive business environment. There is so little business out there, and it is being chased by so many competitors. It reminds me of a half dozen pit bulls going after a single dog bone. People these days will do just about anything to pick up even the smallest piece of business. (Note: I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the fact that, and just minutes after Ryan made that comment, a woman called him to say that she had learned about Neve Appraisals from our show, and in fact had hired them to appraise her property. She went on to say that she was extremely happy about the exemplary customer service provided by Ryan's staff.)

All over town, I see small business owners scrambling to do, “just a little bit more” for their customers. The truth of the matter is that they almost have to. Because business has never been harder to gain and/or hold on to.

If you meet a business owner who tells you that his or her business is “doing fine,” (WHICH THEY ALL DO) you know one of two things:

• He or she is probably lying; or,
• He or she is in the business of providing security.

I say this because “Rent-a-Cop” services and services generally related to security are right now the only businesses that I know of that are currently making money.

Every business owner I know is working harder than ever. Every entrepreneur I run into is on the edge of absolute exhaustion. I sat with Wright’s Joe DeCarlo just the other night and studied him as we talked. Thin, worn-out, and weary (and Joe is no different than just about anyone else owning a business these days), Joe somehow each day finds the energy to put one foot in front of the other so that his customers can be assured of having a genuinely great experience at his restaurant.

Note: I just interviewed Dean Biersch of the Gordon Biersch Brewing Company fame in California. He bemoaned the fact that, and with California's new, almost socialistic laws concerning employees, "I now pay more than $6.50 on top of each $10.00 that my employees earn in 'regular' wages." Think about it would cost you to run your business if each and every employee cost you an additional twenty percent in wages each and every hour!

According to Biersch, "It is so bad that I am considering going to a completely robotized order entry system for my customers." Ugh!

I’ve been watching this phenomenon for nearly the past three years. I keep asking myself, “How much longer can these self-made businesspeople continue to drive themselves to succeed? How do they, and with so much government regulation, international competition, and taxes still find the energy to both run their businesses and raise their kids at the same time?

How?”

For the consumer, it is ironically both the best of times and the worst of times (with apologies to Charles Dickens). It is the worst of times because Americans today have less disposable income, relatively speaking, than has been the case at any other time since the Great Depression. The savings rate of all Americans, which roughly doubled from 5% in 1949 to over 11% in 1982, is now, and according to Kathleen Keest of "Credit Slips," a blog underwritten by a consortium of banks and credit unions, "looking like a ski slope." In fact, the U.S. savings rate actually reached negative territory in 2006.

At the same time, college tuitions and related fees have jumped nearly 440% since the early 1980's! Those of you with college-age children probably need not be told this.

The middle class? Well, it seems as if this has just plain disappeared!

And all the while, the wealthy get wealthier. From 1976 to 2006, the bottom 90% of all wage earners in our economy saw their income grow a miserable 10%. While this was going on, the top one percent of all Americans (expressed in terms of income and wealth) have seen their aggregate net worth increase by more than 239%!

Can anyone spell revolution?

But the flip side of this coin is the fact that those with even a modicum of disposable income and wealth find themselves in a virtual paradise. This is because businesses are literally giving away their fare. Products are discounted almost to cost, and companies are providing services that they simply cannot afford to pay for. All the while, small business owners are literally killing themselves trying to out-produce and out-compete their rivals.

This cannot continue. The other day on my radio program, my guest was none other than the redoubtable Lou Stanasolovich, founder of Legend Financial in Pittsburgh's North Hills. Lou, like others who seem to "get it" (this would also include people like Mike Kauffelt of Bill Few Associates and Mariusz Skonieczny of Classic Value Investors) loves to refer to the "New Normal." For those of you unfamiliar with this term, the New Normal generally describes an era that none of us have ever seen before. It is an era where the old rules no longer apply, and it is an era where the successful business person is someone who throws out convention and then takes full advantage of his iconoclism before the masses begin to figure things out.

Returning to the radio show, I am personally blessed by the fact that I have a show producer (Darryl Grandy) who, and for the most part, seems able to conjure up just about any guest that I ask him to get.

How he does this, I'm not exactly sure. But oh what fun it is to ride a talk show program that gives an arrested-development case like me the ability to ask just about any damned question I want to just about any damned expert I can think of! In recent weeks, for example, these experts have been such sages as: Robert Kiyosaki of the Rich Dad/Poor Dad fame, Regis McKenna, perhaps the top marketeer in America when it comes to high technology, and Jason Fried, current owner of the top-selling business book on just about every elite top-ten list in the country, and so on and so forth.

Like Stanasolovich, these people all get it, too. They fully understand the fact that thee game has changed and we're just not going back to the old ways.

Like me, I'm sure that you can feel it. Paraphrasing Potter Stewart, the late Supreme Court Justice, who when asked to define pornography said, "I can't define it, but I sure know it when I see it," Americans somehow just woke up one morning into a world where that comfortable, "We're Number One" mantra no longer applied. A world where the U.S. economy seemed to have taken a backseat to not only China, but to other fast-growing nations as well.

And a world where our children have found themselves relegated to performing jobs that pay just a fraction of what we expected them to pay and who struggle to clean up their staggering college loan balances; loans made for educations that, and looking back, now seem quite effete.

I don't want anyone committing suicide before the end of this article. But I do need everyone to understand that it is only the entrepreneur who has a chance to re-balance this changed world. This is not to say that a few choice corporate executives won't also have a say in America's future. But the price both these types will pay for such achievement is going to be extremely high.

In future articles in this space, I intend to talk about some business ideas that I think our readers should strongly consider. No, I am not going to hand our readers business plans and then say, "Go get em." But I am going to offer the same advice that I give to my colleagues and students. Basically, I am going to exhort you readers to begin to look at things completely differently. I'm going to invite you to more or less "unlearn" the things that your parents and teachers taught you to be sacrosanct.

I don't know how far this elevator ride will take us. I am not from the Kiyosaki school of, "buy guns, seeds, and farm land," nor am I suggesting that you run out and join a multi-level marketing firm.

I am only going to tell you the things that I seem to be hearing, and en masse, from the brilliant minds that I am privileged to probe on my show every now and then.

You can do yourself and your friends a favor by letting them know about these forthcoming articles. (I'm not even sure when I'll begin writing them ... I assure you that it will not be in the next week or even the next couple of weeks as I'm still assessing and combining the input I have received from probably as many as three or four dozen of my show guests.)

In the meantime, my advice to everyone is to read and understand what the McKenna's and Chris Anderson's (of Wired Magazine) and Fried's of the world are telling us. Also, I urge everyone to spend as much time as is humanly possible with their family and their friends. For these are the most feckoned sources of tranquility and mental peace.

And never forget that we are all at the end of the day destined to finish things up in that same six-foot six-inch box, co-occupied only by the trinkets those same friends and family threw in with you before the lid was closed. (This is where most people would disarm everyone by throwing in a smiley-faced emoticon.)

I won't.