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On Vacation, Owners Think About Work
Tweet Share on Facebook June 15, 2007 CommentFor corporate desk jockeys, summer means vacation and a chance to forget work. For small-business owners, even time away from the office doesn't mean time off. Turns out that even when they are out of the office, most small-business owners never stop thinking about their companies.
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Seven Places to Look for Wasted Time and Money
Tweet Share on Facebook June 11, 2007 CommentSmall companies can't afford not to run a tight ship. Even small costs or time drains can make the difference between staying afloat and sinking. So Ron Wince, CEO of Guidon Performance Solutions, tells small-business owners to take some advice from Caddyshack and "Be the ball." In this case, he's talking about how small-business owners need to put themselves in the place of their customers to figure out where they are wasting time and money.
At Guidon, Wince often counsels companies on how to become leaner. But small companies don't usually have the resources to hire outside consultants and may not have the business background to undertake a major overhaul. That doesn't mean they still can't take a few simple steps that could add up to dramatic savings.
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A Tip of the Hat to Entrepreneurs
Tweet Share on Facebook June 8, 2007 CommentSmall companies can pat themselves on the back. That's because entrepreneurship is the reason for American's economic growth, says Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, a new book comparing different forms of capitalism. The book's authors, William Baumol, Robert Litan, and Carl Schramm, say that capitalism is not a monolith. Actually, the authors identify four types and, as you can probably guess from the title, they believe that some do a much better job than others of helping countries grow.
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Get Ready for Emergencies
Tweet Share on Facebook May 31, 2007 CommentLook out for Andrea. That's the message as hurricane season officially kicks off Friday. Still, more than half of small-business owners aren't worried about Andrea, or Barry or Chantal for that matter, the names of the first few storms this season, and 71 percent don't have any kind of plan, according to a TNS NFO study for Office Depot.
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Sarbanes-Oxley Rules May Be Eased for Small Companies
Tweet Share on Facebook May 24, 2007 CommentThe Securities and Exchange Commission took a step Wednesday toward easing Sarbanes-Oxley accounting requirements for small public companies. While the little guys have been complaining about the rules since 2002, when they were put in place after Enron's collapse, legislators have not heeded their calls until now.
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Setting Up Your Mobile Website
Tweet Share on Facebook May 21, 2007 CommentYou finally got around to putting together a website. But no, you can't rest now. With a growing number of people connecting to the Internet via BlackBerrys, cellphones, and other mobile devices, small-business owners now have to make sure that they set up a mobile website, too, says Jeff Grosman, senior vice president of marketing at Network Solutions, a Web hosting and design company that recently expanded its offerings to mobile sites. By next year, 1.3 billion people around the world will have Internet-enabled mobile devices, according to research firm IDC.
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Fighting Big Government for Small Business
Tweet Share on Facebook May 14, 2007 CommentLast week, the National Small Business Association picked Scott Hauge as its 2007 Small Business Advocate of the Year. Hauge took over as owner of San Francisco-based Cal Insurance & Associates from his dad and transformed it into a shop focusing on small- and medium-size businesses. That led him to get more heavily involved in lobbying for small business in 1984, founding Small Business California, an advocacy group. I talked to him about how small business fits into the big picture.
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Pinkberry's Success Story
Tweet Share on Facebook May 10, 2007 CommentFailing at one business venture is enough to ruin most people, but not Shelly Hwang. The 33-year-old Southern California entrepreneur ran two unsuccessful franchises before hitting the jackpot with the wildly popular frozen yogurt shop Pinkberry. But before the shop even opened its doors more than two years ago, it seemed doomed. Despite threats coming from all directions, Hwang and her business partner, Young Lee, have managed to expand Pinkberry to more than a dozen locations in California and New York and develop a cult following along the way.
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Ruling on Patents Roils Companies
Tweet Share on Facebook May 3, 2007 CommentGetting a patent got a little harder this week with the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions. The case, in which KSR International challenged a Teleflex patent over an adjustable gas pedal, is likely to have the most impact on fields like biotechnology and software, where small firms play an important role.
In a unanimous ruling Monday, the court took its biggest dive into patent law for decades, broadening the standards for rejecting a patent. It showed the court's belief that too many of the patents that have been issued don't pass the key test of not being "obvious."
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Lessons From the Contracting Wars
Tweet Share on Facebook April 26, 2007 CommentFaye Coleman is in the enviable position of telling the government what to do. As founder of Bethesda, Md.-based Westover Consultants, she helps a range of agencies design outreach programs or create online tracking tools. On Monday, I wrote about how some small businesses are yelling at the top of their lungs but have yet to get noticed by the government. For six years, federal agencies have failed to meet a goal to dole out 23 percent of their contracting budgets to small companies, costing small businesses $4.5 billion last year alone, according to testimony this week at a House Small Business Committee hearing. But after decades of working with the government, Coleman's consulting firm is one business that has learned how to get its voice heard within the marble walls.
