Business Plan

R.H. Macy & Co. said yesterday that it planned to slash advertising and take other cost-cutting actions as part of a five-year recovery plan for the retailer, now operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. With the savings and a top-to-bottom revamping of its merchandising effort, executives of the world-famous New York retailer said, Macy's projects that it will have earnings of $811 million before taxes and other expenses by fiscal year 1998. The company, which has already closed eight department stores and more than 60 specialty stores this year, did not say whether it planned to shut any more branches.

Although most city officials defend the spending of nearly a quarter- million dollars on now-abandoned plans for a new municipal computer agency, several top city data-processing employees contend that most of the money was wasted. And the man who now heads the city's computer agency, Deputy Finance Director Eugene L. Cliett Jr., says his predecessor left him with "no business plan to speak of" despite a $75,000 contract calling for such a plan. During the past 14 months the city Finance Department, on orders from former Finance Director Richard G. Gilmore, signed four separate private consulting contracts to help transform the city's old Office of Information Management into the Philadelphia Computing Corp.

Future entrepreneurs of Philadelphia need your help. After three weeks of learning how to create their own businesses, student groups from the Summer Youth Work Experience will demonstrate their skills by selling products at today's Black Family Reunion at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park. But they need your money to succeed. "We want to encourage them to learn the skills to start a business and use them positively," said Curtis Jones Jr., president and CEO of the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corp.

From afar, Burlington Island appears uninviting. There is no easy access to the uninhabited Delaware River island. A bridge connecting it to nearby Burlington City was planned but never built. There are no docks. But for 400 years, the island has been a tantalizing prize, according to historians. It was seized during a conflict between the English and the Dutch in the 1600s, settled by people of several nations, battled over in courts, and targeted for a number of failed ambitious projects.

H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest, fresh from the successful opening of the Barnes Foundation gallery on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway - where he was a key supporter of the foundation's move from the suburbs to the city - has now focused his financial energy on building a new history museum near Independence Mall. At a news conference Tuesday, the American Revolution Center is expected to unveil New York architect Robert A.M. Stern's design for a new Museum of the American Revolution at Third and Chestnut Streets, and in support of the push for the museum, Lenfest will announce a $40 million challenge grant.

Growing a tree-service business that now has more than $1 million in revenue and is on the verge of something way bigger - becoming the first U.S. franchise of its kind - is not at all what Josh Skolnick had planned when he responded to a call for help four years ago. Skolnick was just doing a favor for a frantic father of young girls when the Fort Washington native responded to a request in June 2008 to take down a dead elm. Back then, trees...

Lucy and Herman Bigham's home on a tidy West Philadelphia block is more than 7,400 miles from the litter that has both bothered and inspired them. Inspired them, that is, to start a small business with anything but a small agenda. They are out to turn plastic shopping bags in her native Kenya into a valuable commodity and elevate the fortunes of impoverished women there. Of course, they also hope it leads to profit - which their backers here think is doable. After all, that's part of the goal of social enterprise: to make money to do more good.

A year ago, Mark Hetrick threw his first ball of clay on the potter's wheel. He fell in love with the craft and with the potter who gave him the clay. Now, Hetrick and Amy Mulligan, both of Chadds Ford, are partners in a company called Fun, Functional Pottery. They sell their fish- and teapot-motif goods to 11 stores nationwide, including the Picket Fence in Stone Harbor, N.J., and Everything But the Kitchen Sink in Hockessin, Del., their two highest-volume outlets. "We're together 24-7," said Hetrick.

The city-created nonprofit group designated by Mayor Street to turn Philadelphia into a giant Internet hot spot has chosen a finalist to build its wireless network. Assuming the deal stays in place, a team led by the Atlanta company EarthLink Inc. will build and maintain the system at its own expense, said Dianah Neff, the city's chief information officer and also the nonprofit group's leader. The arrangement, which has yet to be finalized, could dramatically change the contours of Wireless Philadelphia's business plan.

Yesterday's dramatic stock-market nosedive, which knocked the wind out of the world's most valuable companies, did not dash the high-flying dreams of area college business students gathered at Temple University. And if two prominent local technology entrepreneurs were shaken by the day's and week's breathtaking slide in tech stocks, they were not showing it to the students who had come to meet them. "If this idea takes off, I can drop out," said Meghan Gregonis, who is enrolled in Temple's master's of business administration program, and who entered her Internet business plan in a regional competition held yesterday on campus.