Blog Posts by Adrienne Burke

Infographic: The oDesk and Millennial Branding Spring 2013 Future of Work SurveyTo be an entrepreneur you need not own a business, risk your personal capital, create jobs, or even work your rump off. You just need to have a certain mindset. At least that’s the definition of entrepreneurship offered by the expanding freelance workforce.

Survey results released today by the consulting firm Millennial Branding and oDesk reveal that 90 percent of independent workers and “solopreneurs” associate “being an entrepreneur” with having a mindset to “see opportunities, take risks, and make things happen,” rather than with having actually started a company. In fact, more than half of freelancers consider themselves to be entrepreneurs, according to survey results.

On behalf of Millennial Branding and oDesk, Genesis Research Associates surveyed more than 3,000 freelancers worldwide—over 60 percent of them between 19 and 30 years old (a.k.a. “millennials” or members of Generation Y) to examine their perspectives on the future of work. Small business owners might say their

AnnaMarieJarvisMother’s Day was founded in 1907 by a West Virginia woman as a tribute to her own mother. In her 40s, Anna Marie Jarvis, a college graduate, quit her job and incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association.

Jarvis was so passionate about her vision that she succeeded within 6 years in persuading the governors of nearly every state in the union to embrace Mother’s Day. By 1914, she had won over the U.S. Congress. That year President Woodrow Wilson signed a Congressional resolution declaring the second Sunday in May the nation’s day to honor mothers (for their role in the family, however, not the public sphere).

Rampant commercialization of Mother’s Day has kept it alive for a century, but the strong-willed Jarvis, ironically, detested any profiting from the holiday. She believed offspring should honor mothers with handmade gifts and letters, rather than with printed greeting cards and floral arrangements. So, after succeeding in seeing Mother’s Day widely adopted,

Would you seek out a new hire who was home with an injury collecting workers’ compensation insurance? What if the government paid you to?

Partnership for Employment, an initiative of the nonpartisan group Women Impacting Public Policy, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, is designed to incentivize small businesses to hire government workers who are unable to return to their jobs due to an injury.

WIPP board member Lisa Firestone, who has coordinated the pilot phase of the Partnership for Employment, calls it a “win-win-win” for government, small business, and injured workers.

As the President and owner of Managed Care Advisors, Firestone’s specialty is assisting with the recovery and return to work of injured federal employees. As a government contractor, she also knows well the challenges of small businesses. Winning a contract can mean you need to staff up quickly. “Small businesses don’t have their own

Aileron founder Clay Mathile

Clay Mathile says he feels deep gratitude for two groups of people: those who risk their own capital to create jobs, and the mentors who helped him do the same as owner and CEO of the IAMS Company.

So, since selling that dog and cat nutrition business to Procter & Gamble for $2.3 billion in 1999, Mathile has gone to great lengths to show his appreciation by helping other business owners be successful. He invested more than $150 million to transform the former “Iams University” employee-training program into Aileron, a nonprofit organization with a mission to ”unleash the potential of private businesses through professional management.” Today, more than 10,000 people a year visit the 70,000-square foot Aileron facility on a 114-acre campus in Tipp City, Ohio, for a variety of management training courses delivered by consultants who have all run their own businesses.

Business owners who have taken the two-day President’s Course say the experience has been transformative. “Life changing

It’s been several decades since big companies started proving that earning profits and being socially responsible are not mutually exclusive. Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, and Whole Foods come to mind. And IBM, HP, and Sprint topped the Daily Beast’s 2012 list of American green companies.

But is it affordable for even the smallest businesses to earn a living while being socially and environmentally conscious? Susan Chambers says yes. Her new book, Small Business, Big Change: A Microentrepeneur's Guide to Social Responsibility, offers steps that owners of business with fewer than 10 employees can take to align their life's work with their spiritual and social values.

Chambers, a writer and editor who is passionate about helping businesses to become agents of social change, provides case studies of numerous microbusinesses that adopted sustainable values. In their choices of vendors, clients, product materials, packaging, employee policies, community service, and more, each company is making

Small business owners with retirement plans are saving more for retirement than average American workers, a Fidelity analysis indicates

So many Americans are unprepared for the costs of retirement that some predict a looming crisis. But small business owners and their employees who put money into retirement accounts might be in better shape than most.

In an analysis of the balances of 200,000 small business accounts that utilized its SEP-IRA, Self-Employed 401(k), or SIMPLE-IRA plans, Fidelity Investments found that the plans saw an average balance increase of 20 percent between January 2007 and December 2012. Since a 2008 low point, balances have jumped an average of 64 percent, the brokerage reports.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute reported last month that less than half of American workers “appear to be taking the basic steps needed to prepare for retirement.” While only 13 percent of American workers are “very confident” they will have enough savings to live comfortably after stopping work, only 66 percent report that they or their spouses have saved for retirement at all, according to EBRI’s 2013

This time last year, the business press was abuzz with equity-based crowdfunding fanfare. Yahoo! Small Business was no exception. According to the JOBS Act, the SEC was to have established rules by January of this year to make it possible for small businesses and startups to use social media and friends-and-family networks to raise investment or debt-based capital through "crowdfunding."

Equity based-crowdfunding platforms sprouted up, and members of the sector aligned within new industry-standards organizations, ready to serve cash-strapped small businesses as soon as Washington gave the go-ahead. But the rules have yet to come.

Elizabeth Smith Kulik, founder and CEO of the crowdfunding platform ProHatch, says she’s not surprised. “A lot of the delay is just the regulatory process, review periods, and comment periods.” Sure, Congress gave the SEC 270 days for rulemaking. “But that was if everything was running on all cylinders. We’ve had an election year and a new SEC chair appointed

Your business without a boss? If you’re in management, you might not find the idea as thrilling as many beleaguered workers would. But, believe it or not, there are companies that run quite well without anyone in charge. (Some of these have been described recently in articles including Inc’s A Billion Dollar Company with No Bosses?, the Wall Street Journal’s Who’s the Boss? There Isn’t One, and management guru Gary Hamel’s Harvard Business Review essay, First, Let’s Fire All the Managers.)

To imagine a bossless workplace, and understand why and how to create one, Michelle Benjamin, CEO of Benjamin Enterprises and TalentReady, a company that offers strategic talent management solutions, suggests first defining what a boss is. According to Dictionary.com, it’s “a person who employs or superintends workers.” But that definition falls short. “It lacks purpose. It doesn’t say what are we trying to achieve,” Benjamin says.

She believes “the true role of the boss is to communicate the