• SBA's Karen Mills Responds to Questions About Access to Credit

    Karen Mills Administrator for the Small Business Administration, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will be holding a forum with business owners tomorrow to discuss small business financing. In advance of that forum, Mills responded to questions from small business owners in a live chat yesterday. The majority of the questions focus on access to credit and SBA backed loans:

  • Forbes: Top 10 Small Companies

    Forbes Best 200 Small Companies in America list will hit news-stands with the November issue of the magazine. The top 10 list is available online. And it features 5 new members. 1. Lumber Liquidators, (Toano, VA) 2. Allegiant Travel, (Las Vegas, NV) 3. Quality Systems, (Irvine, CA) 4. LHC Group, (Lafayette, LA) 5. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, (Waterbury, VT) 6. Transcend Services, (Atlanta, GA) 7. Rackspace Hosting, (San Antonio, TX) 8. NVE, (Eden Prairie, MN) 9. American Public Education, (Charles Town, WV) 10. American Science & Engineering, (Billerica, MA) "Rankings are based on earnings growth, sales growth and return on equity in the past 12 months and over five years," according to Forbes. Other than success at building profitable business models during a recession, the companies don't immediately appear to have a lot in common. From retail (Lumber Liquidators and Green Mountain Roasters), to a couple of specialized engineering firms (American Science & Engineering and NVE), to health care (LHC) and education (American Public Education)A fairly varied list of companies--a range of sectors is represented. Read more about the companies here .

  • MSNBC's Your Business Talks Health Care and Small Business with Sen. Landrieu

    The Obama Administration has been touting health care reform as something small businesses need as much as anyone. The latest Your Business , MSNBC ’s small business program, took some time to talk to Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), chair of the Senate’s Small Business Committee, about whether any plan can get health care costs low enough for small businesses to benefit. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy

  • The Waiting Game=A Losing Game for Small Business

    Lisa Barone of Small Business Trends lays out some straightforward advice for entrepreneurs and small business owners: if you are waiting for the "right time" to launch a great idea, you'll probably miss your chance. Barone: We all suffer from this type of paralyzing perfection. The voice in our head that says it’s not ready yet, that it’s not good enough to go live. But at that rate, you’ll never take that next step. You’ll sit on the product until it’s not “new” anymore, you’ll suck the excitement of everything that you do. One of the great things about being a small business is the freedom you have to experiment. Things don’t have to be perfect right out of the gate. You can try things. You can launch unfinished. You can fail and you won’t be crucified for it. You may even be applauded for your efforts. As a small business owner, you need to take chances. Your whole business is a chance. Be true to that. Get rid of the negative thinking and just do it. If you wait for “perfection”, your business will never grow. There will always be enough distractions and more important work before you can launch. Iteration is an important part of a design process, and it only makes sense to put ideas forward as they are developing rather than waiting for them to be perfect. Read How To Kill Your Small Business here .

  • Tasty Startup Story: Chez Panisse

    Foodie fans of fine French cuisine from all over have been known to schedule trips to the Bay Area just to get a table at Berkeley's Chez Panisse . Alice Waters , the celbrated owner of Chez Panisse, started the business back in 1971. She has been honored with the prestigious James Beard Award, a Bon Apetit lifetime achievement award, and most recently accolades from the French Legion of Honor, for her contributions to cuisine . Getting the food right was one challenge. But the bigger challenge was learning how to run a business. Waters shares her Startup Story at CNNMoney , and she says the beginning, as with most startups, was rocky: "In no time I had 50 employees, and I didn't know how to manage any of them," Waters says. "We were open seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to 2 a.m., serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was too much. We were hemorrhaging money. I had to lay off half of my staff, and we stopped serving breakfast and closed on Sundays." She turned things around, and the business started to make a profit...after eight years. Read How Chez Panisse Began here .

  • Pop-up Stores for the Independent Business

    Pop-up shops are not new-- Trendwatching tagged pop-up retail a new trend back in 2004 --they may fit the current economy particularly well. Big companies like Target and Delta have gotten into the game, according to Forbes . But small businesses, and designers especially, can use the pop-up shop to quickly hit the market with their merchandise without tackling the long term challenges of retail. MSNBC's Your Business made a visit to one storefront recently, where a designer took over a space on a Monday. By Thursday she was up and running, selling her latest creations. Take a look: Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy

  • Lessons from Small Businesses

    It isn't only always (or maybe even often) that the big guys know what's best. Seth Godin shares five key lessons from the smallest of businesses: 1. Go where your customers are. 2. Be micro-focused and the search engines will find you. 3. Outlast the competition. 4. Leverage. 5. Respond. Read Lessons from very tiny businesses here .

  • Small Business Optimism Waning

    The majority of small business owners are not expecting conditions to improve over the next six months, according to the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Economic Trends survey. The survey shows an Optimism Index reading of 86.5. That's down 1.3 from last month, but still up from its lowpoint of 81.0 in March: The report's authors, William Dunkelberg and Holly Wade , point to a general feeling of recession fatigue by consumers and business owners: Optimism faded a bit for consumers and business owners over the past few months, primarily due to weaker expectations about economic growth. This is a bit unexpected in light of the increasing frequency of reported good signs about the economy and the stock market. Assuming the recession started in January 2008, we have been in recession 19 months, far longer than the post-war average of nine months and the end is still illusively in the future. For consumers and business owners, “emergency” reserves are depleted, jobs have not returned, and the stimulus seems to have failed on the ground (even if observers agree its effects are yet to come, expectations were set for a quick rescue). The recession is wearing Main Street folks down. Read the full report here .

  • Health Care Challenges for Small Businesses

    BusinessWeek's Joshua Kendall has an article that helps explain why small business owners are paying a lot of attention to the push for health care reform. Kendall writes about some businesses' experience of having their health insurance costs skyrocket after an employee becomes "gravely ill." A practice that one former CIGNA employee calls "purging": Purging: It's an ugly word, and it describes an ugly practice. But Wendell Potter, formerly the director of media relations for CIGNA ( CI ), says that's exactly what health-insurance companies do when an employee at a small business is unexpectedly hit with a sudden, and expensive, illness: The insurance company "purges" the small company from their rolls. In June testimony before U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, Potter said health-insurance companies "dump small businesses whose employees' medical claims exceed what insurance underwriters expected. All it takes is one illness or accident among employees at a small business to prompt an insurance company to hike the next year's premiums so high that the employer has to cut benefits, shop for another carrier, or stop offering coverage altogether—leaving workers uninsured. The practice is known in the industry as purging." Read Small Biz Purging: When Companies Lose Health Care here . Meanwhile, the Obama Administration continues put together statements and reports aimed at showing its support of small business. And nobody has been pushing the case of late more than Christina Romer , chair of the Council of Economic Advisers . Here she is following up last week's QandA on what's in the health care reform proposals for small business with another argument for why small businesses need health care reform as much, or even more than, any group:

  • Lessons for the Entrepreneur in the Mistakes of Big Business

    Luke McKinney of Entrepreneur says there is a lot to be learned from the recession. Big businesses have been making some big mistakes. Small businesses, McKinney writes, "can't afford errors," so entrepreneurs might as well take advantage of the big slip-ups to learn a lesson. McKinney outlines four such lessons: 1.Avoid complacency 2. Know your market 3. Move with the times 4. Accept responsibility Read Lessons from the Fall of Giants here .

  • Romer Q and A on Health Care Reform and Small Business

    As a follow-up to our earlier post about small business and health care reform, here's video of CEA Chair Christina Romer 's online Q and A from earlier this week: Small Business and Health Reform: Christina Romer Takes Your Questions from White House on Vimeo .

  • CEA Touts Health Care Reform Benefits for Small Businesses, NFIB Disagrees

    As members of Congress head home for August recess, you can be sure they will be talking almost non-stop with constitutents about health care reform efforts. And they are likely to run into some small business owners who are not fond of House Resolution 3200--or " America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 ." The National Federation of Independent Businesses --a powerful advocacy group that has not exactly been fond of the Obama Administration's economic policies thus far--is pushing back against the legislation, and lists these ten reasons it is bad for small businesses: 1. An Employer Mandate 2. Payroll Tax Penalty 3. Pay-or-Play, Pay-and-Pay and Offer-and-Pay 4. A Mandated Minimum Plan with a Big Price Tag 5. An Exchange that Limits Access to All Small Businesses 6. An All Powerful Insurance Czar 7. The Government-Run Public Option 8. The Surtax: A Tax on Job Creation 9. Jeopardizes Options That Small Employers Have Today 10. An Employer Tax Credit with Limited Value Click here to read explanations for each item. Still, the White House continues to stress that the bill is a new positive for small businesses. the Council of Economic Advisers has released a study: The Economic Effects of Health Care Reform on Small Businesses and their Employees . CEA Chair Christina Romer writes that under the current system, the small businesses that do offer health care do so at a much greater cost to the business and the employees: Put simply, the current U.S. health care system imposes a heavy tax on small businesses and their employees. Those small firms that do offer coverage have to pay a higher cost than their larger competitors. To the degree that higher costs are passed on to workers, small firms pay lower take-home wages to their employees. Those small firms that do not offer coverage have employees who do not receive the substantial tax benefits of employer-provided health insurance that their counterparts at large firms enjoy. These employees are more likely to purchase policies in the individual market, where they pay much higher rates. In either case, small firms are likely to be at a competitive disadvantage in the market for hiring workers. Small firms are likely to have a more difficult time than larger firms recruiting potential employees who do not have health insurance from another source. Even if a small firm provides the best fit for a worker’s skills and interests, the individual may choose not to work there given the implicit tax. Read the full report here .

  • Struggling County Calls on Small Business

    Few places in the country have been hit as hard by the recession as Merced County, California . Now, as Amy Choi writes in BusinessWeek , the town's leaders are looking to entrepreneurs to play the superhero role and save their economy: Home prices in Merced dove 42.3% in 2008 and continue to fall. The collapse coincided with a drought, forcing farmers to leave fields fallow and lay off employees. The dairy industry, another major employer, faced its own contraction because of a fall in milk prices and a drop in exports. Merced County now has a 22% unemployment rate. And despite a statewide moratorium on foreclosures—due to expire in June—it holds the dubious honor of having the nation's third-highest foreclosure rate. Local authorities such as the Merced County Economic Development Corp. (MCEDCO) and the Los Banos Redevelopment Agency, along with the local Small Business Administration outpost, are counting on entrepreneurs to help create jobs and restore the region's economic health. "It'd be nice to get a big employer, but we believe it may be more effective to provide small businesses the resources to grow," says Scott Galbraith, chief executive of MCEDCO. "The vast majority of the 5,000 businesses in the county are small companies. If we can get just half of them to hire one person, that's 2,500 jobs right off the bat, rather than working for 10 years to get a large employer into the region." It is an interesting test for small business owners. Read the article here .

  • Twitter Touted for Small Biz

    The growth of the social media tool Twitter has been one of the leading tech and media stories of the last year. But skeptics abound as the business model for Twtter seems elusive, secret, or nonexistent. As Twitter's founders play their cards close to the vest, some businesses have found a great deal of utility in the tool. Small Business Trends writers have frequently highlighted the potential value of Twitter to small business owners--most recently giving it a key mention in their list of 16 Things You Can Do Yourself to Create Word-of-Mouth for Your Business . Zane Safrit writes: Join the millions of people who’ve looked like fools at least once in their life. It’s a party. And join them as they connect with millions of customers, prospects, partners, vendors, ideas, innovators solutions. And the New York Times is getting in the act. In today's paper, Claire Cain Miller profiles some small business owners who drank the Twitter Kool-Aid and are seeing big results after relatively little effort: “We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s , but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling , an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses. Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network. Read Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media here .

  • Many Small Businesses Get Failing Grade for their IT

    Small Business Trends and 8 partners have put together a survey to help small businesses assess their information technology strengths and weaknesses. Upon completion of the survey, you get a grade for your IT. So far, 1 out of every 4 small businesses (in this case businesses with fewer than 100 employees) have failed the test. Anita Campbell , of Small Business Trends, says this means: ...that SMBs are not taking sufficient steps to develop and maintain their IT systems to prevent business disruption. Small businesses are not observing best practices on measures such as: having enough qualified tech staff; good IT security to protect against hackers, and intrusions and other insecurities; disaster recovery preparations; downtime of your systems; and incident reporting and management. Read more about the survey here .
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