Exclusive: Small business backs Obama, not Democrats: poll
The Obama administration has hurt small businesses but the president still leads in backing among current 2012 election candidates, a new survey found.
Some 63 percent of small businesses said the administration’s policies had been damaging to small business, while only 16 percent indicated they had benefited, according to the poll by Manta, an online community that promotes small business. Some 67 percent were highly unsatisfied with government, with only 2 percent highly satisfied.
Meanwhile, the survey, which queried more than 2,300 small business owners online between August 12 and 29, showed President Obama as the candidate with 21 percent of support, followed by Texas Governor Rick Perry, a Republican, with 14 percent; Texas U.S. Representative Ron Paul, also a Republican, with 11 percent; and Republican former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, with 9 percent.
“What’s happening now is that the individual plays as large a role as the party,” said Manta CEO Pamela Springer, adding that candidates “are trying to separate themselves even from their party, as there are so many independents out there. And the independent vote is very, very, very critical.”
Some 32 percent of owners polled in the Manta survey – the largest group – said none of the candidates supports small business, while smaller percentages backed Michele Bachmann, the U.S. Representative from Minnesota and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, both Republicans and Tea Party candidates.
The Republican Party still led in overall support by small businesses, with 23 percent backing, but the Democratic Party trailed by only 2 percentage points. The Tea Party had 17 percent of support, the poll said.
When asked what about policy priorities for politicians, 38 percent of those queried overwhelmingly indicated unemployment and job creation were their leading worry, while 17 percent said the budget deficit was of utmost concern.
Honest Tea founder on being owned by Coke: “It’s a dual identity”
Seth Goldman, co-founder of Bethesda, Maryland-based organic beverage company Honest Tea, said his company maintains a small business culture, even though parent Coca-Cola Co increased its minority stake to full ownership in March.
With 2010 sales of $71 million, the company’s teas can now be found in national retail chains such as Kroger and CVS. Goldman, in Washington recently for an SBA National Small Business week event, spoke to Reuters about the transition.
Q: Were you able to maintain the Honest Tea culture after Coke took full ownership?
A: Absolutely. What’s really nice about us is that we still operate as a small business. We still run everything out of this one room office in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m still the Tea-EO. Our senior management team still really has stewardship of the brand and the business. We’re accountable for it. Our paychecks say Honest Tea, so in a way it’s a dual identity. We have a vending machine in our office now; it’s got Coca-Cola on the front and Honest Tea inside.
Q: What was the benefit of Coke’s investment?
A: For us, it wasn’t as much about the Coke money as the Coke resources – the distribution resources. No matter how much we or our consumers love our product, if we can’t find a way to get it into their hands, it’s really just a thought exercise. What the Coke partnership enables us to do is get the product into people’s hands wherever beverages are sold. We have the ability to do it, and that’s really critical. For the first 10 years of our business, distribution was just a bear. All of a sudden we gained access to the most powerful distribution network in the world. We are on a path to be able to launch probably early next year, a bottle made of a new type of resin – plant based. That’s something Coke is helping us with.
Q: What was distribution like before Coke?
from Tales from the Trail:
Former “start-up” Obama wouldn’t mind being as popular as…SpongeBob
He's been president of the United States for about two-and-a-half years, but Barack Obama still remembers being a "start-up" -- and he wouldn't mind being as popular as SpongeBob SquarePants.
The Democratic president, who is in the middle of a road show to sell his ideas for cutting the deficit, spent the evening in San Francisco on Wednesday raising money for his campaign, and he targeted tech-savvy donors who had started successful companies of their own.
"Some of you are involved in start-ups, well I was a start-up just not so long ago," Obama told a dinner fundraiser at the home of Marc Benioff, the chief executive of salesforce.com.
There's big money in California. Donors paid as much as $35,800 a piece to dine with the president or hear him speak.
Earlier in the day the president held a townhall meeting at the social networking giant Facebook. At a second fundraiser later in the evening, he said he was pleased that his own Facebook page was so popular.
"I've got 19 million friends," he marveled, noting, however, that he was less loved than the cartoon character SpongeBob.
Something to aspire to, he said.
Small business prominent in State of the Union
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was peppered with references to small businesses and other Americans who he applauded for living the “American Dream.” Following is a roundup of excerpts from the speech where he mentions small business.
On progress:
“We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again. But we have never measured progress by these yardsticks alone. We measure progress by the success of our people. By the jobs they can find and the quality of life those jobs offer. By the prospects of a small business owner who dreams of turning a good idea into a thriving enterprise.”
On innovation and the future:
“No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs. We are home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any other place on Earth… The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do – what America does better than anyone – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living. Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation.” On improved Internet coverage:
“Within the next five years, we will make it possible for business to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans. This isn’t just about a faster internet and fewer dropped calls. It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world.”
On healthcare reform:
If the government would really like to help my business, they could force banks to lower their intrest rates on my line of credit. If they get money at 0%, why am I paying them 9.5% that is about 4% more than what it costs them to do business. If my financing overhead was cut in half, I could pay down my debt faster and be in a better position and have money avaliable to take advantage of more opertunities to invest in my company. I believ that as soon as this crisis started in November of 2008, the fed should have allowed businesses to keep 50% of our employee tax contribution and put that money to work. When the government takes in money and then redistributes it, they loose at least 30% to overhead.
from The Great Debate:
Obama fails small businesses
-- 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. The opinions of George Cloutier are his own and do not represent those of the United States Conference of Mayors or Partner America. --
President Obama gets an “F” for his small business program. The SBA has guaranteed a paltry 50,000 loans to the nation’s 29 million small businesses – that’s .0017. Loan volume is down 36 percent from 2008 and 50 percent from 2007. Obama and his advisers have actually done the unimaginable; they have reduced the flow of aid to small businesses in the face of a deep recession. The program’s bank lenders have left $15 billion on the table due to “regulatory problems.” Even an administration plan to provide lending to 70,000 vehicle dealers has no takers and failed.
Administration “experts” allocated less than 1 percent of the stimulus bill to small business. It’s mind-boggling that Washington ignores the biggest economic sector in the country employing 60 million people, producing 50 percent of GDP, and creating 70 percent of new jobs.
In the past several weeks, I have had the honor to lead events for small businesses in 15 cities (including Philadelphia, Kansas City, Missouri and Baton Rouge, Louisiana) directly engaging with 2500 small business owners (employers only). Ninety-five percent of these business owners feel the administration's stimulus plan and program has badly mistreated small businesses compared to Wall Street and Detroit.
On October 21st, President Obama announced a second stimulus for small business. His new plan must have been a political speech since it lacked specifics as to how many businesses would be helped, how much money would be allocated and distributed, and when the money would actually start flowing.
Recently, the House passed a bill that purports to offer $40 billion to small businesses. The banks, having left billions of dollars on the table, astoundingly were selected again as the prime source of lending.
The bill mentions authorizing the SBA as a lender of “last resort” if certain loans are not funded by the banks, with a complicated process yet to be determined. No amount of authorization is mentioned and the process to achieve “last resort” status has no definition or timeframe. Much of the lending purported in the $40 billion will be achieved by raising the limit on certain types of loans; this way more money can be loaned to fewer businesses providing political cover for Congress and the president.
I am an African-American and operate a Small Business that provides services to the Federal Government.
During the Bush administration we were shut out of most procurement bidding opportunities, as was all small, minority and veteran-owned companies. Large companies routinely lied about their size in order to siphon work away from small businesses, and federal regulations were routinely ignored by contracting officers and continue to be ignored.
The federal agency’s Inspector Generals turned a blind eye to this practice. I naturally assumed after a strong election victory, that fixing this would be one of administrations priorities, being that positive changes here would reverberate throughout the economy.
You can only imagine my disappointment in this administration’s ‘real’ attitude when it comes to including small, veteran-owned and minority businesses in any recovery act or day-to-day federal contracting opportunties.
Small Talk: Jobs data contradictory
Over the last week there have been some wins and losses for small businesses in terms of new job data.
On the win side of the ledger, a new Intuit survey shows 44 percent of small businesses say they plan to hire in the next 12 months. The data is included in a San Francisco Chronicle story profiling a local Web startup – Airbnb.com – that is doing its part, having hired seven people since April, at a time when national unemployment has reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent.
But that optimism is tempered by a USA Today story that said the main reason the unemployment rate jumped in October was due primarily to small businesses cutting staff. It seems that while some small companies are starting to hire again, they are still outnumbered by the ones laying off their workers. The story quotes Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, who explained there is a bias towards big companies in how the Labor Department compiles its payroll survey, which showed October job losses were down nearly 50 percent (190,000) from the average of 357,000 in May, June and July.
BANKRUPTCIES HURTING OBAMA EFFORTS
Small businesses are trimming staff, because many of them can’t get the loans they need to stay afloat until the economy picks up again. The Obama administration is ramping up efforts to get more money into the hands of small business owners, but the President’s efforts have been hamstrung by the bankruptcies of two of the country’s biggest small-businesses lenders: CIT and Advanta.
CIT lends to more than a million U.S. small businesses, while Advanta – a small business credit card lender – is trying to collect close to $3 billion in outstanding loans to 360,000 clients. The idea of both CIT and Advanta calling in markers has sent small businesses into a panic. The filings, which came just a week apart, may well be why Obama has chosen next week to stage a small business forum in Washington, in which U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Small Business Administration head Karen Mills will engage small business owners on the best way to get them more financing.
Sensing an opportunity, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced yesterday it is stepping up lending to small businesses by $4 billion. A Reuters’ story suggested JPMorgan, which received $25 billion in public TARP money, could also be responding to government pressure to do its part to help get the small business economy back on its feet.
In 2002, there were approximately 23 million small businesses in the United States according to the US SBA (Small Business Administration).
90% of the small businesses contacted , which was 9 out of 10 selected from the DNC contributors list said they support Obama after being contacted by South Side Louie the 10th was on vacation…