Women/minorities
From JJ Ramberg:
This past weekend our senior producer Chris and I went down to Tampa to do a story on small businesses that were working with the NFL around the Big Game. As so often happens, there were so many more interesting things about the companies we covered than we had time to talk about on air.
We met a woman named Cindy Dervech who owns a company called Breezin Entertainment and Productions which provides bands and other entertainment for events. She was thrilled to be working with the NFL since, as you can imagine, business had been down recently.
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I'm going to confess to you all that I have a really bad back. I can throw it out at a moment's notice. Play boxing with my son, or taking a fork out of the dishwasher are all potential back land mines.
But for me the biggest back buster is high heel shoes. I know, women are insane for wearing stilettos, but I love the way nose-bleed shoes look. Alas, my back hates them.
So, it's little wonder that my interest was piqued when I got an e-mail from a source at entrepreneurial business school Babson College who told me a group of undergrad students has come up with a high-heeled shoe with a retractable heel.
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It's amazing to me that more women-owned small businesses are not taking advantage of a huge revenue stream -- the federal government.
Only 3.4 percent of all the federal contract dollars went to female entrepreneurs last year, according to data released by the Small Business Administration last week.
That figure's just unacceptable.
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Sean O'Rourke, owner of a technology consulting firm in New York called Syzygy 3, doesn't yet know which presidential candidate he'll be pulling the lever for this November.
"I'm undecided," he says, even though he considers himself a Republican.
And Rae Hostetler, who owns Zionsville, Ind., -based Hostetler Public Relations, says, "At this point I'm the skeptical voter and I can choose to skip the polls or exercise my vote. I choose the latter. My pick is with caution -- the lesser of two evils."
While you might think John McCain would be the slam-dunk choice for entrepreneurs at this November's presidential election because Republicans are often thought of as pro business, many small business owners don't see things that way.
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Last week, I was a guest on "The Big Idea," a show on CNBC hosted by Donny Deutsch, and the topic of the day was whether a husband and wife should start a business together.
I was on hand to talk about why this is probably not a good idea for most couples out there.
My mom has a saying -- "never with your husband."
She came up with it after years of trying to run a business with my late father.
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“I have quit feeling guilty that I’m a mom first.”
I recently read this line in Working Mother magazine while I was sitting in the pediatrician’s office waiting to have my son’s tonsils checked. Ah, guilt -- every working mom has it at one point or another. How do you quit it?
I had to cancel an important story interview to get my son to the doctor’s office, and I only started reading the magazine as a way to take my mind off a number of stressful thoughts: Would I make it back to my office in time to finish an article that was due? Would the doctor tell me my kid needed his tonsils out? Would dinner be ready by 6 p.m. when my father-in-law was coming over?
The source of the quote above was Sarah Stevens, the owner of a technology security business in Charlotte, N.C., and mother of four kids, ages 9 and under.
The article talked about how she sometimes attends meetings or work dinners with a baby in tow, and “I’ve had children spill on clients,” she says. “I never really find balance, but I’m comfortable with who I am and what I do.”
Turns out many mom entrepreneurs are having trouble staying on the business balance beam, according to a new survey.
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What did you all do during the holiday weekend?
Our last-minute plan was to go to my father-in-laws summerhouse and leave my laptop at home.
The drive is about 90 miles and my husband and I promised each other we wouldn’t go out to eat because money was a bit tight these days. The plan was to ride our bikes and catch up on some reading.
Even going on this mini vacation with the kids was sort of a luxury because of gas prices. But to heck with common sense, I needed a break from my hectic schedule.
Seems like many of you small business owners out there are feeling the way I am. But should we be waiting until the breaking point when we say goodbye to work?
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| Roy Morsch / Corbis file |
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I was one of those teenagers who had really bad acne growing up, and I tried everything to clear my skin up.
I even swore off chocolate and Kalamata olives for 2 years but it really didn’t make much of a difference.
When I hit my twenties a friend of mine treated me to a facial for my birthday and I was in shock how much it helped my skin problem. I vowed to get lots of facials so I to could become one of the lucky clear-skinned humans. That is until I found out how much my really nice friend ponyed up for the facial.
It was nearly $100 for a half-hour treatment at some fancy schmancy Manhattan salon. Being a poor journalist at the time, I figured it would be the last time I’d make it to a facial spa.
But what if there were drop-in facial shops that offered cut rates on facials? (Look at all the cheap manicures you can get on almost every street corner today.)
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| Ivan Hunter / Getty Images |
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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 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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