Blog Posts by Adrienne Burke

The SUCCESS Act has some rare bipartisan support in the Senate.

Just before Congress departed for summer recess last week, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.), introduced legislation designed to spur small business job growth and boost entrepreneurship.

Her so-called SUCCESS Act of 2012, cosponsored by seven other Democrats, is notable because, when it was previously introduced as an amendment to the Small Business Jobs and Tax Relief Act (which remains on the Senate calendar), it got support from five Republicans to achieve 57 votes in the Senate—close to the 60 needed to invoke cloture and get to a vote. Landrieu, who chairs the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, called even that small bit of bipartisanship a "monumental feat in today's political climate."

She said in a statement that the bill "is made up of numerous bipartisan provisions" offered by members of her committee to "get our small businesses the assistance they need to grow our economy."

So what's in the SUCCESS Act? The bill is a mashup of measures from 14 other

In-person interaction is most effective marketing method, survey says

Despite the plethora of digital marketing methods available—from email, to websites, to online advertising, to social media—the old-fashioned in-person interaction is still the marketing approach that most businesses consider to be the most effective.

The small business marketing and social media company Constant Contact polled more than 1,000 members of its Small Biz Council. Its findings, published yesterday, reflect the responses of 728 business owners—280 B2B (business-to-business) operations, and 448 B2C (business-to-consumer) companies.

From a list of nine marketing-communications-related small business worries, including securing funding, 70 percent of respondents named "how to attract new customers" as their top priority. Cash was their second greatest concern—45 percent of respondents admit to losing sleep to thinking about how to get more of it. (More than half of all respondents, however, said cash flow is no problem right now, and 63 percent of B2B companies are in that

NFIB Job Creation Plans ChartNews headlines are trumpeting the Labor Department's report this morning of a better-than-expected increase in hiring nationally in July, but the National Federation of Independent Business has issued a grim report on small employers and job growth based on its latest monthly random survey of 1,803 NFIB members.

U.S. employers overall added 163,000 jobs in July—the biggest monthly uptick in five months. But small businesses eliminated jobs for a second month in a row "at a time when growth is needed," NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg reported in a statement. The NFIB survey results indicated a net job loss per small firm over the past few months (seasonally adjusted) of .04. "Readings had been on the rise; from December to May they were zero or positive, suggesting that employment might be turning around. But June, and now July, have ended that possibility," Dunkelberg stated.

To be sure, nearly 80 percent of small business owners surveyed made no net change to employment in

Mitch Goldstone, CEO of ScanMyPhotos.com, won a $7.25 billion settlement against credit card companies in favor of merchants.

While politicians have been arguing over who's doing more for small business, one independent businessman with no campaign agenda has dedicated the last seven years of his life to pursuing a lawsuit advocating for merchants like himself. Mitch Goldstone, the CEO of ScanMyPhotos.com, became a small business hero last week when he won a $7.25 billion settlement—the largest private antitrust settlement in U.S. history—that promises to put large sums of money back into the pockets of millions of businesses that accept credit cards.

Goldstone, of Irvine, Calif., was the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed in 2005 that alleged that Visa and MasterCard illegally fixed interchange fees—the so-called swipe fees that U.S. merchants pay the card companies for the privilege of accepting consumers' credit payments.

Yahoo! Small Business Advisor spoke with Goldstone as he celebrated his legal victory last week.

Yahoo! SBA: This is a real David vs. Goliath story. How did it start?

More business owners are getting credit with personal cards

Small business issues continue to hold center stage in election season. Here's a roundup of current events and reports from around the web this week related to small business and politics, including new legislation that would support immigrant entrepreneurs, various explorations of the access-to-credit crisis, and a discussion of tax cuts and small business.

Supporting immigrant entrepreneurs

A Democrat and a Republican in the House have teamed up to introduce a bill that would offer green cards to foreign entrepreneurs who live in the U.S. and establish and invest a minimum of $125,000 in a business here that creates and sustains full-time employment for at least three U.S. workers over two years. The National Small Business Association blogged its support for the legislation, which it says would also modify the EB-5 visa program to attract additional foreign investment.

Fewer debt delinquencies

Small business lending in June hit its lowest point since October, but was up two percent

These tips for making the most of a daily deal promotion come from merchants who’ve tried them, from Rice University business school professor Utpal Dholakia, who studies the industry, and Groupon Communications Director Julie Mossler.

1. “You must prepare for your Groupon.” That’s NYC Bagel Deli owner Corey Kaplan’s number one piece of advice. “You have to be prepared for what you’re selling. You have to be able to afford to have that paper on the street,” he says. Rice University’s Utpal Dholakia adds, “Be careful in calculating your margins. Think about the terms of your offer and be sure you have a high margin on the item being offered. The daily deal salesperson tries to get the business to run a deal that will be attractive to the daily deal customers, but that is not necessarily in the interest of the business.”
2. Don’t offer deals too often. Kaplan advises against offering more than one deal a year. “I don’t want to make the consumer think the regular price of my food is high. I

The story of the demise of Washington, DC, restaurant Back Alley Waffles went viral today because its owner blames Groupon’s payment scheme for putting him out of business. Waiting a month for partial reimbursement on the $2,600 worth of waffles he served to coupon holders while continuing to fulfill discounted orders was too much for the cash-strapped startup to handle. So Craig Nelsen shuttered his waffle house after only three months in business, leaving hundreds of coupon holders high and dry.

Groupon, which will now refund the unserved diners for their purchases, explained its payment practice in a statement that was published today on several news sites (including the Huffington Post, the Mail Online and the Washington Post). Protecting itself from being left holding the bag when merchants go out of business before fulfilling their coupon orders is one reason Groupon staggers payments over three months, communications director Julie Mossler told Yahoo! Small Business Advisor.

But

At a time when Republicans and Democrats can't seem to come to terms on anything, most politicians are in agreement on one thing: the corporate tax code should be simplified.

Tax code complexity costs employers billions

We reported here several weeks ago that far fewer small businesses than the Federal government expected had claimed a tax credit made available to them through the Affordable Care Act. Business owners cited the complexity of complying with the tax code as a major impedance.

Now in a front page story titled, "Firms Pass Up Tax Breaks, Citing Hassles, Complexity," the Wall Street Journal reports that this is true not just for health insurance tax credits but for many other tax breaks available to employers. Fed up with paperwork and leery of inviting IRS scrutiny, businesses are opting to skip deductions for energy efficient buildings, for hiring unemployed veterans and workers from disadvantaged groups, for increasing research, and for producing goods domestically, according to the Journal's report.

Though large