Entrepreneurial

– George A. Cloutier, a graduate of Harvard Business School, is the founder and CEO of American Management Services, one of the Nation’s largest turnaround and management services firms specializing in small and mid-size companies. He is also the author of the bestselling book, “Profits Aren’t Everything, They’re the Only Thing”. The opinions expressed are his own. –

The lack of serious small business aid proposals, empty rhetoric, and general intransigence by the Republicans has anointed the Democrats by default as “The Party of Small Business.”

The Obama bill to inject $30 billion into community banks with the primary focus of expanding small business lending, is hardly a panacea. But Republican attempts to block the bill, for a variety of political (although not practical) reasons, amounts to more stumbling and bumbling by the opposition that has produced no worthwhile alternative.

Choosing not to increase taxes is not a stimulus, but an overused bandaid designed to gain votes. Republican candidate Carly Fiorina’s proposal to have a two-year tax holiday may create jobs for her and additional money in the system, but it’s not going to induce any small business owner to add new jobs that weren’t already planned.

Proponents say this bill could produce up to $300 billion dollars in expanded lending to starving small businesses. It will likely produce substantially less, but something is always better then nothing. Before Republican senators George Voinovich and George LeMieux recently announced they would vote for the bill, this revenue-neutral bill was astonishingly blocked by the party of “no.” So far proposals to help small business, from both parties, have lacked the fundamental understanding that small businesses need working capital (aka cash). This lack of cash is the biggest blockage to expansion in the small business sector.

CORRECTED: the Universal College Application was created by ApplicationsOnline LLC and not the NCAA as was previously stated.

With President Obama’s small business bill stalled in Congress, big business is trying to pick up the slack.

Six of America’s largest corporations – IBM, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, Pfizer and UPS – have banded together to create a “one-stop shop” for small and mid-sized businesses looking to sell to them and take advantage of the nearly $150 billion awarded collectively in contracts each year.

Peter Cohan and U. Srinivasa Rangan teach at Babson College and are authors of “Capital Rising: How Capital Flows Are Changing Business Systems All Over the World”. The views expressed are their own.

Since the “Great Recession” began, at least 8.5 million jobs have vanished. How will we create new ones? The answer lies in improving the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE).

Everyone looks to entrepreneurs to create jobs. The Kauffman Foundation found that firms five years old and younger created most of the 40 million jobs in the U.S. between 1980 and 2005.

Jon Weiner envisions a day when he can quickly build a new hospital utilizing American best practices and state-of-the-art technology anywhere in the world. While our experts were excited by Weiner’s healthcare concept they were mixed on his ability to ultimately pull it off.

Weiner co-founded the New York-based startup OR International LLC (www.orintl.com) with the goal of exporting a higher-quality American brand of healthcare throughout the world, with a primary focus on improving patient treatment (see original story here). In just six years ORI has opened specialty hospitals in the UK, Africa and Cyprus.

“Our first hospital in the UK has the highest patient satisfaction rates of any hospital in England,” said Weiner, whose company operates five specialty hospitals in the UK, one in Cyprus as a partnership with the American Heart Institute and last January opened the doors on a new $100-million facility in Botswana, Africa.

– Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. He is the author of “Mastering the VC Game” and writes the blog “Seeing Both Sides”. The following is an abridged version of a blog that originally appeared on PE Hub. The views expressed are his own. –

I love Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It’s one of the most extraordinarily beautiful settings in the world. One cannot help being in a good mood when observing the breathtaking wildlife, open sky and the awe-inspiring Grand Tetons.

Thus, reading the reports from last weekend’s annual economist confab in Jackson Hole could not have been more depressing. If the practitioners of the dismal science sound this pessimistic amidst such an uplifting setting, what will their attitude be when they trade in their cowboy boots for green shades and return to their drab offices to stare at spreadsheets? A usually staid Allen Sinai sounded positively hyperbolic, yet apparently spoke for many at the conference, when he told the New York Times, “I’m more worried than I have ever been about the future of the U.S. economy. The challenge is unique: poor and diminishing growth, a sticky unemployment rate, sky-high deficits and a sovereign debt that makes us one of the most fiscally irresponsible countries in the world.”

The proliferation of startup incubator or accelerator programs has made it tough for most to stand out among the crowd. So the way the Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition chose to do it, is by offering what it claims is the “world’s largest” cash award – $500,000 – to the winning business pitch.

The only condition is that the winner has to set up shop in Michigan.

“Seventy years ago we were Silicon Valley,” said David Egner, executive director of the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan, which provided $750,000 – in the form of a grant – of the more than $1 million in prize money for the competition. “That DNA is still here and we need to re-highlight the activities that are already happening and the things we need to do in Michigan to return it to its innovative roots.”

The contest is the collaborative efforts of four of the state’s biggest incubator programs: Ann Arbor Spark, Automation Alley, Macomb-OU INCubator and TechTown. The competition will be accepting proposals from startups around the globe through October 6 and will award the grand prize on December 12th. There is also a secondary competition just for students with concepts for longer-term business viability, which runs through October 22.

Customer reviews can be crucial to a small business, especially in a climate where consumers are trying to make smarter decisions about their purchases. It’s no surprise then that review sites such as Yelp, Local and Mahalo have flourished over the last few years.

RatePoint is the latest to attempt to cash in on the trend, having secured more than $20 million in funding since it launched in 2006. Recently the Needham, Massachusetts-based site got another $7-million from three local venture capital firms: Prism Venture Works, .406 Ventures and Castile Ventures.

Neal Creighton, RatePoint’s co-founder and CEO, insisted his company is not just another Yelp, noting RatePoint’s reviews come from actual customers and not just a community of reviewers that may have no connection to the company. It’s a subtle, but important distinction, said Creighton.

– Vance Checketts is the VP of Operations for online storage company Mozy. The opinions expressed are his own. –

Among the myriad challenges small and medium businesses (SMBs) are currently facing, data loss is an often unanticipated – but very real – cause of revenue and productivity loss.

Businesses of all sizes depend on files and email stored on desktops, laptops, and servers for their very survival. Natural disaster, theft, or even something as commonplace as a cup of coffee spilled on a laptop is not just an IT nightmare. Such events can literally put a small business out of business.

SecondAct contributor David Ferrell is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and the author of the comic baseball novel “Screwball”. This article originally appeared on SecondAct.com. Top photo by Veronica DeLuca

Pilot John Voishan devoted a long career to flying travelers across the globe. He loved to gaze down on mountains and rivers as he guided massive 747s to cities in Europe, Australia and throughout the Americas. His final assigned route – from Los Angeles to Sydney – took 14 1/2 hours and spanned 7,500 miles each way, with hundreds of people reading and napping in the cabin behind him.

Though retired now, at age 65, Voishan hasn’t quite given up the passengers. But he’s traded in jumbo jets for a slow, boxy, open-air vessel known as a shoreboat, a water taxi that serves Santa Catalina Island. The rugged fleet of shoreboats – each slightly smaller than a bus – is one of the distinctive features of the picturesque island 22 miles off the Southern California coast.

The following is a guest post by Tereza Nemessanyi, founder and CEO of Honestly Now Inc., a web and mobile social media platform which will release its beta product to the market in September. The opinions expressed are her own.

After decades investing in “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford,” venture capitalist John Doerr broke a pattern in July: he invested in a woman.

Not that Kathy Savitt was a risky bet.

The former CEO of American Eagle Outfitters and a senior executive at Amazon, Savitt built Lockerz.com, a social networking and commerce site for ages 13 to 30. She grew it from 50 college and high school students to 15.5 million users in less than twelve months, leveraging natural networks of friends and social influence. In the web technology world, she’s a rock star.