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Current – For the current events segment we speak with Libby Hall, Digital Strategist for Flint Communications about social networking for small business.
Finance and Small Business Chairs Release Small Business Jobs Act
Washington, DC – Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chair Mary Landrieu (D-La.) today released the Small Business Jobs Act, a bill to help small businesses access capital, stimulate investment in small businesses and promote entrepreneurship – all of which will help small business create jobs.
“Small businesses are the engine of our economy and need to be a critical focus of our job-creation efforts. Helping small businesses helps get Americans back to work,” said Baucus. “Working together, we crafted our bill to promote entrepreneurship and investment in small businesses and provide small businesses with the vital access to capital they need to create jobs.”
“Every day, headline after headline goes to big business layoffs and losses, but in reality it is the small businesses and their employees that are bearing the brunt of this crisis,” said Landrieu. “Since the start of the economic downturn, 80 percent of the country’s job losses came from small businesses. It is time to turn our attention to the small businesses and entrepreneurs to get Americans back to work. By providing some cost-effective and commonsense changes to lending, contracting and technical assistance programs, we can build on successful programs implemented in the Recovery Act to help small businesses keep their doors open. Ranking Member Snowe and I have crafted this package to include provisions that we have both advocated for, and I am very pleased with the finished product. As we finalize our package, I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, as well as the other committees, to ensure the swift passage of this legislation.”
The Small Business Jobs Act will:
Help Small Businesses Access Capital
The legislation encourages investment in small businesses by allowing investors to exclude the gains from the sale of certain small business stock from their income for tax purposes if the stock is held for more than five years. This policy helps small business owners access more private capital to finance an expansion and hire new workers.
The legislation reduces the tax burden for small businesses by allowing them to carry back general business tax credits to offset their tax burdens from the previous five years. Small businesses will also be able to count the general business credits against the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), freeing up capital for expansion and job growth.
The legislation establishes a Small Business Lending Fund of $30 billion to provide capital investments to small community banks to increase small business lending. The fund is limited to only the smallest banks, those who hold less than $10 billion in assets, and the performance-based program would incentivize only those lenders that extend new credit by decreasing the dividend rate banks pay as they increase lending.
The legislation establishes the State Small Business Credit Initiative to provide $900 million in grants to existing successful state small business programs that help private lenders extend more credit to small businesses.
The legislation raises the cap on small business loans to increase lending by $5 billion in the first year after enactment, and refinances commercial real estate debt into long-term, fixed-rate loans, provisions that are expected to be budget neutral and could create or save 200,000 jobs.
Building on successful initiatives we put in place through the Recovery Act, by making simple and cost-effective changes to the SBA’s two largest lending programs and to its microloan program, we were able to pump more than $20 billion into more than 40,000 businesses in our economy. This legislation calls for an extension of these lending provisions through December 31, 2010.
Increase Small Businesses’ Ability to Make Investments
The legislation allows taxpayers to write off more of the cost of purchases for their business, such as equipment and machinery, in the year the purchase is made. The legislation also expands the types of purchases that would qualify for special expensing to include some types of real property, such as leasehold, retail and restaurant improvements. When small businesses are able to deduct the cost of purchases more quickly, they have more cash on hand to create jobs.
Promote Entrepreneurship
The legislation doubles the amount of start-up expenditures that may be deducted by someone starting a small business, making it easier for new businesses to open.
The legislation authorizes increased resources to support the Office of the United States Trade Representative’s small business export promotion and trade enforcement activities. These efforts help U.S. small business exports grow in foreign markets and ensure small businesses compete on a level playing field.
The legislation allows self-employed individuals to deduct health insurance costs for purposes of paying the self-employment tax.
The legislation improves the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) trade and export finance programs, elevates the Office of International Trade within the SBA and adds export finance specialists to the SBA’s counseling programs.
The legislation establishes the State Export Promotion Grant Program (STEP), which would increase the number of small businesses that export.
The legislation allows the SBA to waive or reduce the state-matching share of its funding requirement for up to one year to continue providing technical assistance to underserved communities to start and grow small businesses.
Promote Equity
The legislation promotes tax fairness by preventing small businesses from incurring large tax penalties aimed at large corporations and wealthy individuals investing in tax shelters.
The legislation removes the red tape and closes loopholes that too often put government work into the hands of multinational corporations, instead of Main Street businesses.
The legislation makes clear that no single contracting program receives priority over another program when competing for federal contracts.
The legislation is fully paid for, closes unintended tax loopholes and reduces the tax gap.
A more detailed summary of the provisions in the Small Business Jobs Act follows below.
I travel a lot and so do my partners and employees. We often find ourselves working very far away from each other and we need tools to work just like if we were in the same room. These are my 10 favorite free (or almost free) collaboration tools.
SkypeSkype allows you to talk to people all over the world for free. It also offers chat, video chat and you can also share your screen with other people.
BaseCampIf you’re looking for a tool to manage your projects, BaseCamp is by far the best option. Create to-do lists, milestones, projects, upload files, assign tasks to people, control the progress of your project and communicate with other team members.
TwiddlaThink of Twiddla as a whiteboard that several people can see at the same time. It’s great to explain ideas, draw arrows, call-outs, etc.
Google DocsThis Google tool allows you to share documents with your team. Just put them in a folder everybody can access and you can all edit the same documents.
MintThis is a great money-management tool and it’s free.
LogMeInDo you need to remotely control a computer? This is a great tool for it. You can use your partner’s computer from Seattle if you’re in New York. You can leave your computer at home and access it from any other computer in the world.
Google CalendarKeep all your events and meetings organized with this tool from Google. The best part is that you and your team can share the same calendar so you can all see what everyone else is up to and when they all have some free time to meet.
BlueTieThis application isn’t free, but it’s only $5/month, so it’s almost free. BlueTie is a great tool to manage emails and keep your contacts organized. You can share email messages and contacts with your team. BlueTie has a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) engine built-in that I really like.
Send and receive faxes for very cheap from your own computer. You can send documents (PDF, DOC, etc.). When you receive a fax, you’ll get the pages as email attachments that you can print if you want. Having fax has never been so cheap.
EchoSignIsn’t it annoying when you have to print out an agreement, sign it, fax it, have the other person sign it and fax it back to you? There’s a better option: EchoSign. This cool tool allows you to sign documents online in just a few seconds.
The other day I met with Matt, Mike and Peter, three great friends and business owners. We’re all serial entrepreneurs and neither of us had started a new company in the last year, so we decided to start a new business together.
We talked for a good hour or so about what kind of business we wanted to start. We discovered that our definition of “the perfect business” was very different from those you can find in most business books. These are the criteria our “perfect business” had to meet:
We Should Be Able to Launch The Business in One Month We don’t like planning for years and then opening our doors and hoping for the best. We like getting started right away so we don’t lose momentum.
We Should Be Able to Start the Business with Less than $2,000 This is why we decided to start with a very small investment:
We want to test the market to make sure there is demand for our product.
When you have little money, you’re desperate to make sales. That’s a good thing! When you have money, you feel like you can sit around and “wait for the business to take off”.
When you have little money, you become very efficient. You negotiate more, look around for better deals and decide against expenses that won’t help your business grow.
We Don’t Want Investors What’s the first thing business books tell you to do? To write a business plan and look for investors. We don’t like having investors for these reasons:
We want to be able to make fast decisions without having to seek for approval for everything we do.
We want to focus on creating value for our clients instead of making our investors their money back as fast as possible.
Too much money makes people lazy. They stop caring about small costs, they pay more for stuff they can get for less and they’re not as desperate to find clients as they should be.
I’m not saying that having investors is a bad thing; I’m just saying that I don’t want to have investors for MY businesses.
We Want a Business That Provides Cashflow from Day 1 You’ve read it before: start a business, work your butt off and sell it in 5 years for millions of dollars. Although some people try this and make it, the great majority of those who go this route fail miserably. I like instant gratification. I want to make money from day 1. I want to make money every month, not just once in 5 years.
We Want a Business That Generates Recurring Income The beautiful thing about a business that provides you with recurring revenue is that:
You can afford to break even or even lose money to acquire a new client.
You don’t need to get new clients all the time in order to keep your business profitable.
Think about it: you give money to your cable and cell phone companies every month. All they had to do to get you to hire their services was to offer you a great deal for the first 3 months. Not a bad business model, huh?
We Want a Business that Allows Us to Charge Our Customers Before We Have to Pay Our Vendors The hardest part of a business to manage is cashflow. When you have to pay for something before you can charge for it, you can get in trouble. Let me explain: let’s say you start a business with $10,000 and you sell $1,000 widgets that you pay $500 for. If you sell 20 widgets in the first month, all your money will go towards buying inventory and it’ll take a few days for you to get the money from your clients (because of shipping times, the money clearing your merchant account and getting deposited in your bank account, etc.)
You’ll run out of money and when someone orders another widget you won’t have any money to buy inventory. Also, you won’t have money for marketing and unexpected expenses. And, your customers will be upset that you can’t fulfill their orders.
Now, compare the scenario above with these ones:
You create your product ONCE and you can sell as many of them as you want without any additional costs (e.g. informational products, software, etc.)
You pay you supplier AFTER you collect the money. You collect $1,000 for every widget you sell and you pay your supplier $500 AFTER the sale is made.
You sell your supplier’s product and they give you a PERCENTAGE of each sale. This could be in the form of affiliate marketing or drop-shipping and out of these three options this is my least favorite.
The 3 scenarios described above are a lot less risky than buying inventory upfront and then trying to sell it.
We Want a Business We Can Automate
Some businesses are extremely complex and require a lot of time. We don’t like those. We like businesses that we can automate or delegate easily. We like processes that we can break down into smaller tasks and train high school students to do them. This doesn’t mean that we always hire high school students, but it’s a great way to think about it.
We Want to Do Something that Makes Us Happy
This is the most important criteria of all. To me, 40% of the happiness a business brings me depends on who I work with. I like working with smart people I can have fun with and share my way of doing business (mention “business plan” around me and I’ll run away from you as fast as I can).
The other 60% depends on doing something with meaning. I want to know that not only I’m making money but I’m also making the world a better place. I’m not talking about alternative energy or fighting poverty (although I’ll make a contribution to those fields some time soon); I’m talking about creating tools to make processes more effective, save people money, help them make more money, be happier, etc.
When you believe in what you do and get hundreds of nice emails from customers, it feels really, really good.
I love listening to a good story…especially ones about entrepreneurs and their path to eventual success. The woman or man who turned nothing into something, who did it quickly, and without the help of others, AKA the “rags to riches” story.
I think there is a yearning in every entrepreneur who hears these stories to identify with the subject and imagine how it could happen to them. Like there is some magic formula to success, and if we could just do this one or two things…our business would take off, our work load would ease up and we would start living the good life we deserve.
There is a video on YouTube of famed story teller Ira Glass, host of This American Life, explaining what makes a good story. According to Glass the first characteristic is (paraphrasing here) an anecdotal storyline; a sequence of events that leads to a destination, creating questions and suspense along the way. The second characteristic is a moment of reflection or “ah ha” moment.
This formula, or at least the first characteristic is used in most “rags to riches” story. The second characteristic is usually more illusive. For example, in the August issue of Inc. Magazine the cover story proclaims “Think Rich and Never Give Up” subtitled “How Joe Cirulli turned his last 12 cents into a $17 million company”.
Clearly this cover blurb is targeted at selling magazines. But, one could imagine an enterprising entrepreneur walking by a newsstand, catching a glimpse of the title accompanied by a cover shot of an average looking Joe Cirulli and thinking: “Hey! I can do that…I have 12 cents in my pocket and I certainly know how to think rich. Where do I sign up?”
Unfortunately, unless you are at Barnes & Noble where freeloaders religiously read books and other publications free of charge in the store, you may have to spend you last 12 cents and beg for another $4.87 to find out. But I digress…the article entitled “The Believer“, also points to the books “The Power of Positive Thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale and “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill as a contributing factor of his success.
As it turns out, (and as you might suspect) the 12 cents and the books were inconsequential to the success of Joe Cirulli and his Gainesville fitness center. According to the article, it was a few years after he was down to his last 12 cents that he happened upon on opportunity to purchase a local health club, who’s alcoholic owner was getting divorced and facing bankruptcy. Then, only through the power of persuasion he convinced gun shy bankers not to foreclose on the business (and I guess assume the loan being foreclosed on although it is not expressly stated in the article), finds a new location on a deadline, begs people for personal loans, only partially completes fit-up on a property that fails inspection, opens anyway and finishes it over the next six months without incident or interference from the local city inspector. Once up and running, his passion for fitness and customer service grows the business into a successful operation…over years.
But I guess the subtitle “How Joe Cirulli used perseverance and persuasion to build a $17 Million Company over several years” doesn’t sound as captivating because it sounds like work. My hunch is if you asked Joe…hard work would be on the top of his list of what made him and his company’s successful.
I am not picking on Inc magazine. They are no better or worse in this regard than any other publication on entrepreneurship. In fact, just months before I remember reading an article on the true costs of building a multi-million dollar company, like lack of social life, free time, not seeing your kids grow up, poor marital relationships, etc. etc.
I am, however picking on entrepreneurs who are looking for something for nothing. So, lately I have been wondering: Do anecdotes help others become successful? Or, are they just entertainment and should be taken as such? Are they good for people or do they build false hope? I would like to know your thoughts.
In the mean time I have another anecdote for you: A local entrepreneur has a great idea for a new business she is passionate about. After learning the bank won’t lend her the money to get it started, she cashes out her retirement and hits up friends and family for money. Starting the business on a shoe string she runs out of cash after about 12 months. Because she has not received a paycheck to date, her personal credit suffers but she scrapes it together and pays bills when she can (mostly out of the business account). After two years she scratches out a living that when calculated per hour amounts to slightly over minimum wage. After five years that living grows to a comfortable level. She never makes millions but she is proud of having built a business that provides for her family and puts equity on her personal balance sheet.
