January 2008 - Posts
President Bush urged Congress last night to quickly push through a stimulus package. But do you guys need one? I’m talking to all of you small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Health care reform would probably do more to help you all, I know, but at least Congress and the White House are planning to throw you a bone as part of the stimulus package.
Small business advocacy groups seem happy with the bone, which includes tax provisions for small firms.
“We are very pleased that the deal announced today includes many of the key tax provisions which NFIB listed as our top priorities for any economic stimulus package,” says Dan Danner, executive vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business.
But do you need to be stimulated?
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| Ron Edmonds / AP file |
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This past weekend I got it in my head to finally use that fondue pot my sister-in-law and brother-in-law gave us for Christmas. Well, actually, they gave it to us three Christmases ago.
It was cold outside and the kids were restless. What better way to make everyone happy than a big hot pot of melted cheese and simmering beef broth, and lots of stuff to dip into them.
I set out to buy many of the ingredients I would need from local businesses. By local, I don’t mean the big supermarket chains that line the busy thoroughfare near my neighborhood. I mean I wanted to buy as much as I could from my neighbors with no ties to conglomerates.
Little did I know I was part of a growing trend, a trend that's actually boosting business for local retailers.
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Many moons ago when I was working for a daily newspaper there was a columnist there who would always write his best columns after a three or four martini lunch.
Many of us in the newsroom would say, after reading a particularly witty column, “He must have really tied one on at lunch.”
And, at a fashion publication I wrote for, one of the big time editors there would keep a bottle of whisky in his top drawer, “just in case.”
I never found out what he meant by just in case. I figured there were probably a lot of just in cases in his day.
Alas, behavior like that is a thing of the past with only about 7 percent of American workers saying they drink during the workday, according to a University of Buffalo study.
But should entrepreneurs abstain? Can't they do what ever they want? They are their own bosses after all.
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| BusinessWire |
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Ha! Made ya look.
I’m not trying to anger all of you out there, but when it comes to business, men want to be in control, while women are the nurturers and consensus builders.
Isn’t that what’s drummed into our heads day in and day out!
Yet another survey points to just this phenomenon among entrepreneurs.
“Small business owners want to control their destiny,” says Sastry Rachakonda, director of Discover's business credit card, which polled 1000 small business owners with five employees or less in its monthly Discover Small Business Watch is a monthly survey. “However, men and women do this in different ways. For men, it is about being in control and being their own bosses, while for women, it is about having more flexibility with their time.”
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It’s time to trip over the next big idea.
Get out of the office. Get out of the house. Head out into the world.
That’s how many entrepreneurs found the big brands -- like Burt’s Bees and Clif Bar -- that made them rich.
At least that’s the belief of David Vinjamuri, author of the forthcoming book “Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands”, and president of ThirdWay Brandtrainers, a marketing training company in New York.
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Earlier this week I wrote a blog post on how small business owners were bucking the trend and actually hiring or looking to hire more workers this year.
The big problem was finding qualified applicants.
Some of you pointed out the double meaning in the headline I wrote:
“Small Business Owners Are Hiring Junkies”
My friends, I meant you guys were in a hiring frenzy, not that you were hiring drug addicts.
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With all the doom and gloom out there about the jobs outlook, small businesses appear to be thumbing their noses at economists and reporters like me.
I did a story about how hard it’s going to be to find a job this year for my Your Career column yesterday, but it looks like it will be easier for people who are open to working at smaller firms.
A national report put out late last week found that businesses with 50 employees or fewer are in a hiring frenzy, at least compared to their larger company counterparts.
Are small business owners living in an alternate universe?
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| Amy Sancetta / AP |
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It took the federal government almost seven years to finally submit a proposed rule that would help women-owned small businesses get a level playing field when it came to the federal contracting procurement process.
Some argue -- most notably the sponsor of the original bill in 2000 -- the new rule doesn’t go far enough to help women business owners.
Rep. Nydia M. Velazquez (D-N.Y.), the chairwoman House Committee on Small Business, sponsored the “Equity in Contracting for Women Act of 2000” that created the Women’s Procurement Program as a way to give women some needed traction when it came to competing for government jobs.
But the program never passed go, mainly because the federal government spent years reviewing and assessing how the plan would be implemented.
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