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.
Why the debt ceiling debate won’t stop America’s small businesses
– John Krubski is an entrepreneur and the architect of The Guardian Life Index: What Matters Most to America’s Small Business Owners. He is currently working on his next book, “Cracking the America Code: How to Get US Back on Track”. –
As recently as April of this year, the Amex Open Survey announced that “For the first time since 2006, growth has surpassed survival as the number one priority for entrepreneurs… Perhaps further evidence that economic recovery is reaching Main Street, more than one-third (35 percent) plan to hire, the highest level since the fall 2008 survey.”
Just a few short months later, the headlines were filled with gloom and doom about the impending, “unprecedented” default of U. S. debt, followed quickly by predictions of a “double-dip” recession.
The truth is that, for America’s small business owners, the debt issue is an old tune, perhaps with a few new lyrics. We began as a debtor nation – dependent on a creditor country across the sea – and printed a currency without much prospect of making good on either its value or the debt incurred. In fact, the “continental dollar” printed during the Revolutionary War was worth one penny by the end of the war. Thousands of tradesmen and farmers were literally left holding the empty bag of the American government’s promises. Eventually, our national finances straightened out. However, until that time, the many small businesses that funded the Revolutionary War had to rely on themselves to figure out a viable route to survival.
More than two hundred years later, it’s still the same story for America’s entrepreneurs and owners of small enterprises. After the market crash of 2008, a key “national problem” was the availability of credit. As money for loans became more available, the problem then became “qualifying for loans.” However, as many small business owners know, the only way to get money from banks is to prove in the application process that you don’t need it in the first place.
Now, with the downgrading of America’s credit rating, the concern is not just about the availability or the qualifications, but about the cost of borrowing. Throughout this very public national “crisis,” it is important to realize that credit has never been the typical small business owner’s major concern or strategy for making his or her business work. To the contrary, most small businesses that stand the test of time rely on their own resources, live within their means and effectively adapt to changing circumstances.
The first and second of these – relying on yourself and living within your means – are the key attributes that make it possible for a small business to survive infancy and continue through even the hardest times. If you start your business with the assumption that you aren’t going to get help from anyone else, your model automatically requires a commitment to living within your means. It becomes not only a mindset, but a powerful strategy for success.
It remains true that the banks do not lend unless you can show you don’t need the money. The difference today, however, is that they no longer advance funds against confirmed letter-of-credit. They seem to have forgotten how business is done and do not have a mindset to even try to figure out that they are the ones that are wrong. It’s too bad because their attitude influences politicians who also don’t know. It’s a good thing small business continues to exist.
Jane Pauley tackles reinvention
– SecondAct contributor Kerry Hannon is a Contributing Editor for U.S. News & World Report and the author of “Whats Next? Follow Your Passion and Find Your Dream Job”. This article originally appeared here. –
Jane Pauley, the former star of The Today Show and Dateline is back. Last year, the 60-year-old newscaster returned home to NBC’s Today, launching a monthly segment called Your Life Calling with Jane Pauley.
The series profiles people over 50 who reinvent themselves, their lives and their careers. “We’re going to live longer than our parents’ generation, and there comes a point when you ask yourself, ‘What am I going do?’” Pauley says. “You can only play so much golf.”
In her mid-50s, Pauley asked herself that same question. She wasn’t hitting the links, but she was missing in action for a few years after NBC cancelled her daytime talk show, The Jane Pauley Show, in March of 2005 after one season. “It felt like failure,” she says. For the first time in her life, she was unemployed. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.”
But like many of those she profiles, Pauley has found a way to redeploy her skills to tell the stories of her peers, who are discovering their next chapter. “After the daytime show, I presumed TV was behind me and wasn’t looking for a television job when I had The Today Show/YLC epiphany in a hotel room two years ago,” she says.
“Your Life Calling is the first thing in my long career I’ve ever actually invented. It is my entrepreneurial debut.”
Jane, In one question above, you say you envy people who follow their passion. Then in the next, you describe yours! I know from my own experience that for many people, a passion cannot always be seen when you are in the middle of it.
When I turned 50, I was struggling with the same issues. I started watching myself and noting when I felt happy and I discovered that my favorite thing to do was cook. I also decided I was a Jack of all Trades, Master of none. So at 53 I decided to become excellent at something. I went back to school – against my husband’s wishes – to culinary school. It’s a long story, but one thing lead to another and I am now an Executive Chef for a small company and having the time of my life. I just kept putting one choice in front of the other until one day I realized I was having a blast! You are doing that too,whether you realize it or not and I think now you have really found your niche. Keep up the good work. We love you out here! 
Chef Lynn
5 reasons to join a startup after graduating
– Eric Stromberg joined Hunch in 2010 and works primarily on business development. Prior to Hunch, Eric worked as a summer analyst in Goldman Sachs’ Sales and Trading Division. Eric received a BA, magna cum laude, in history from Duke University. This article originally appeared on his blog. The views expressed are his own. –
After I wrote my last post, a surprising number of people emailed me asking why I decided to join a startup after graduating from Duke. Many of those I heard from face similar decisions today: either they are college seniors choosing between a big company and a startup, or they are recent graduates who work at a big company and are thinking about making the switch.
What’s interesting is that most are already leaning towards the startup career path: it seems they just want someone to assure them it’s a rational move. Their friends and family are skeptical: “How can you turn down a job at Morgan Stanley for a 10-person startup?” Hopefully this post will give those who want to join startups some good points to bring back to the skeptics as to why it’s a good idea to join a startup early in your career.
First, an important point: as much as I’d like to say that everyone should join a tech startup as soon as they graduate, I don’t think it’s that simple. People have different passions, and I’m not a fan of projecting my own interests onto others and assuming that what I did was somehow the “right” thing to do. So, the first piece of advice I’d give is to pursue whatever you are passionate about. What is passion? In defining it, I’ll take inspiration from Steve Blank’s recent graduation speech at Philadelphia University. This quote caught my eye:
It’s your curiosity and enthusiasm that will get you noticed and make your life interesting.
I think he nails it: passion is enthusiasm coupled with curiosity. Which leads me to the first reason to join a startup early in your career:
1. Passion is the ultimate competitive advantage. When I was an intern on Wall Street, I took a look around the room of my peers and thought, “What is my competitive advantage here? Everyone is smart and works hard, right?” What I quickly found was that those who excel in that job are passionate about financial markets. I thought finance was interesting, but didn’t have the same level of enthusiasm and curiosity about it as my peers did. I didn’t have a competitive advantage in the Wall Street world. However, I did have a passion for technology and for startups. If I could work for a startup, I could use this to my advantage.
Hearty 2011 seen for restaurateurs
This year the restaurant industry is poised to put up its best numbers in four years, buoyed by an increase of roughly 2 million jobs since the depths of the recession and improved household income.
Sales are seen rising 3.6 percent to $604 billion in 2011, according to forecasts from the National Restaurant Association, the industry’s trade group.
“When employment moves up it creates additional demand for convenience such as pizza,” said Hudson Riehle, the association’s senior vice president of research and information services. “Barring any unforeseen shocks, the future for the industry will continue to improve.”
The NRA said its predictive restaurant performance index – a monthly composite that tracks the health and outlook of the industry – stood at 100.9 for the month of April, roughly unchanged from March. It was the fifth consecutive month the number was above 100.
Restaurant operators continued to report net positive same-store sales in the month. Meanwhile, capital spending was also trending up, with 48 percent of operators indicating they had spent on equipment, expansion or remodeling in the last three months, the highest level in nearly three years.
Riehle pointed out that optimism among operators was highest among those establishments with the lowest check prices such as quick-service outlets, cautioning that “consumer confidence remains fragile” among a budget-strapped public.
In fact, one of the factors helping to drive improvement in restaurant figures may be rising inflation in grocery stores, which Riehle said is nearly double that of inflation on menu prices in restaurants.
Exclusive: Entrepreneurs vow to create 1,000 jobs in two days
By the time he was 30, Dan Bliss had started 10 businesses, employing hundreds of people. Now he wants to help other entrepreneurs create jobs.
Bliss is the founder of the Perfect Business Summit, a two-day event held in Las Vegas October 7-8, that brings together top CEOs, entrepreneurs and investors with more than $10 billion in capital. For the second anniversary of the conference Bliss got the participants to commit to creating 1,000 new jobs by spring 2011.
“This is like a two-day economic stimulus,” said Bliss, now 40, who made his fortune running restaurants and concert venues in his native Cleveland, before relocating to Los Angeles nearly a decade ago. “Our event isn’t one of those rah-rah conferences where it’s just a bunch of motivational speakers. We bring real CEOs, real business founders to these events that have done it.”
Virgin Inc. founder Sir Richard Branson was the keynote speaker at last year’s inaugural event and this year Bliss has raised the bar, doubling the number of speakers to 75. That group includes a who’s who of entrepreneurs such as Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Palms Casino founder Gavin Maloof, UStream.TV founder Brad Hunstable, Hard Rock Cafe and House of Blues founder Isaac Tigrett, Aaron Patzer, founder of Web-based money manager Mint.com, Gina Bianchini, co-founder of social networking site Ning and John Paul DeJoria, founder of Paul Mitchell salons.
Josh Stein, managing director at prominent venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, will also be among the speakers.
Bliss said the idea is to tap the business acumen and capital of these entrepreneurs to help the startups attending the summit expand and hire to meet the collective pledge of creating 1,000 jobs by next April. These startups will include the winners of the business pitch competition run by Perfect Business, the Los Angeles-based startup consultancy firm Bliss co-founded with partner Mark Verge.
“It’s a realistic figure,” Bliss said of the 1,000 jobs, adding that come the spring they would be reaching out to students graduating from business schools in Nevada, Arizona and Southern California to try to fill some of the jobs at these startups. “We’re internally setting goals even higher than that.”
Big business pipeline for small business
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.
“We figured the major way that large companies could affect growth in small or medium-sized enterprises is through our supply chain spending,” said Stanley Litow, IBM’s VP of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, who started the process of developing a Web-based platform where small businesses could apply for contracts two months ago.
Litow said the website – Supplier Connection (www.supplier-connection.net) – won’t launch until next year, but the hope is it will streamline the application process in the same way the Universal College Application allows students to apply to multiple universities at once.
“It’s one-stop shopping,” said Litow, adding the service will be free to applying small businesses and the participating large corporations. “When a small business goes onto Supplier Connection they qualify or become a supplier for the six companies starting this. Hopefully over the longterm hundreds of large companies will come in with billions and billions of dollars worth of spending and make it easier for small businesses to jumpstart themselves.”
The project is backed up by a small study released last week by the New York-based Center for Urban Future that found very few small businesses are suppliers to the country’s largest companies and that helping increase that number would help boost overall economic growth.
This isn’t exactly a new idea. There are lots of industry-specific versions of this concept, such as in commercial printing. Many municipalities use similar procurement systems.
Before everyone gets all warm and fuzzy about how big business is going to save the economy keep in mind that it is a way for them to significantly reduce costs by awarding work to the lowest bidder. There’s always someone who will do something cheaper. That’s fine, but on a macro level it serves to lower the prevailing rate for work done across the economy.
Perhaps sometime in the not to distant future we can all look forward to doing $10 per hour piece work for mega corporations.
Golf and career transitions
- Candida Brush is the Paul T. Babson Chair of Entrepreneurship at Babson College. The opinions expressed are her own. -
For years I have been an avid golfer, spending as much time in the summer playing on a competitive team, in tournaments, or even just four holes in the evening with my husband.
As a professor of entrepreneurship, I’ve written hundreds of articles, books, and papers on these topics over the past 25 years. But, I have always wanted to write an article about golf!
With the downturn in the economy this past year, I started thinking about the parallels between transitions in playing golf and in career transitions.
Today, career management is even more of a challenge than ever. Most of us will work for an average of 10 different employers and our work will be interrupted either by choice (i.e. moving, return to school, family needs) or not (layoffs, downsizing, restructuring). Hence, the definition of career has changed drastically from climbing the career ladder to developing a portfolio of career experiences. In the words of professor Tim Hall, the new career is “boundaryless.”
Career transitions are even more uncertain given today’s environment and they engender a variety of emotions. As you move from job to job or project to project, you may miss what was, feel relief, insecurity, and have a loss of confidence, but, this might also be followed by new beginnings, exploration development and increased confidence.
Throughout it all you need to have a series of tips you can rely on to push through from one career position to the next, as you design your career in a way that makes sense for your personal definition of success. I find that golf is the perfect sport to gain insights in this area. Career transitions have a striking similarity to golf.
Small Talk: Healthcare debate heats up
The healthcare debate is just starting to heat up for small business owners. FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters sister publication, has a nice blog post titled “Healthcare reform & small business: 3 bills explained,” in which they break down Obama’s “Affordable Health Care for American Act” legislation, that was approved by a slim majority of 220-215 by the House over the weekend.
In general the reaction by small business to the Obama legislation has been largely negative, with the most damning attacks coming from small business lobby groups, the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Small Business Association. In a Wall Street Journal story, titled “Small Business Crunches Numbers“, NFIB senior VP Susan Eckerly said the bill’s “punitive employer mandates and atrocious new taxes will force small business owners to eliminate jobs and freeze expansion plans at a time when our nation’s economy needs small business to thrive.”
Denver Business Journal reporter Kent Hoover examined the bill from a small business perspective in his article “How small business fares under health-reform bill“. In it Hoover said that while the majority of small businesses oppose the legislation, some support it because “they think the insurance market needs the bill’s reforms, such as barring insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions,” wrote Hoover, adding: “Plus, they think providing a government-run option in new health insurance exchanges would bring needed competition to the insurance market.”
Here’s a roundup of how politicians on both sides view the legislation:
- Democratic Congressman Jerry McNerney (Pleasanton, California) voted for the bill, because he explained that “as a former self-employed small business owner, I’ve personally experienced the effect of rising health care costs and the burden these costs place on our families and small businesses.” McNerney added the new legislation will “improve benefits and quality of care for seniors, help small businesses to stay open and operating, and stop insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or kicking sick people off their plans.” Read McNerney’s full statement here.
- Democratic Congressman Ben Chandler (Versailles, Kentucky) voted against the bill, telling the Lexington Herald-Leader: “I do not believe it is the best course of action for the people of Central Kentucky, specifically our working families, small businesses, and seniors.” Chandler said he was concerned that the new bill “would not adequately protect our rural hospitals and our small businesses — the engines of job creation.” Read Chandler’s full interview here.
- Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner (New York, NY) released his own “Top 10″ list of reasons he voted for the bill, most of them tailored to his New York City constituents. In the Epoch Times story Weiner said the new Act helps small businesses that already provide health insurance, because they “will receive a tax credit over a two-year period, and small businesses with 25 employees or less with wages of less than $40,000 a year will qualify for tax credits up to half the cost of providing insurance.” Weiner added that 204,200 small businesses in NYC will be able to qualify for the tax credits.
Good informaiton. Here’s another article that parallels what you said. http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/ 2009/11/09/small-talk-healthcare-debate- heats-up/
America’s economic recovery lies in the middle market
Thomas Bonney is founder and managing director of CMF Associates, a financial consulting, staffing and recruiting firm based in Philadelphia, PA, that serves private equity, middle-market and small-cap public companies nationally. The views expressed are his own.
In his 1988 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, George Bush championed the tradition of the American community, describing it as “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”
More than 20 years later, this tradition still forms the core of our country’s strength – particularly the “thousand points of light” that comprise our medium-sized, family- and private-equity owned business community. I believe it is this community that will ultimately drive the tailwind of economic recovery and growth.
The economic healing power of these businesses is clear. According to the Small Business Administration, more than 6.7 million of the 27.2 million existing businesses in 2007 were small businesses with less than 500 paid employees. Just one hire by each of these firms would more than replenish the 6.46 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007 through June 2009.
Smaller companies continue to forge the strongest track record of job protection. The Labor Department’s Quarterly Business Employment data for Q4 2008 shows that, relative to the size of private sector employment, job losses at large companies were approximately one-third larger than losses in the middle market. Mid-sized companies with 999 employees or less accounted for 10.9% of job losses, while larger companies with 1000+ employees were responsible for 20.7% of job losses.
Middle market American leadership teams generally are innovators. The innovation we see on the ground is qualitative and anecdotal, but indicates a growing desire on the part of a subset of the middle market to begin to play some offense. This is not the sort of data that quickly moves through the labyrinth of channels used to generate state and federal government data that drives Wall Street and dominates media outlets; we expect that our qualitative observations will be validated in quantitative data by Q1 2010.
For instance, smaller companies are already taking the initiative to pick up the pieces of fallen “humpty dumpty” corporations. Many individuals displaced by larger organizations’ job-shedding are choosing to leverage their experience and relationships and start their own organizations which, in turn, will hire more employees. One example is a newly founded consulting firm that identifies orphan pharmaceutical compounds within large pharmaceutical companies, and connects them with middle-market companies whose cost structures are in line with the orphan compounds’ expected revenues.
It’s a good point brought up in the article – about laid off individuals starting their own companies, leveraging the experience they acquired while working for a large corporation. It’s definitely a better option to sitting home and feeling depressed that no one hires you with your brilliant skills and impressive experience. The recession benefits these new entrepreneurs in a way that once they lose their jobs, they have so much time to reconsider their life goals and think about other options, than just jumping into another dead end job.
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…