Blog Posts by Adrienne Burke

How does your state rank on small business friendliness? If you run a business in California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or Vermont you probably aren't saying "great." Those states all got failing grades in a recent national poll.

Giving the grades were more than 6,000 small business owners who were surveyed by Thumbtack.com and the Kauffman Foundation. Business owners were asked about the economic health of their businesses, their state’s overall friendliness towards small businesses, its regulations, and the availability of networking/training programs there. Thumbtack.com, a provider of online local services search directories, translated the answers into a point system and awarded small-business friendliness grades to 45 states and 40 cities.

The survey data, released this week, could be “used by would-be entrepreneurs to decide where to start their companies and by governments to determine where they excel and where they can improve,” Thumbtack.com suggests.
 
The results, presented in a

Read More »from How Does Your State Rate on Small Business Friendliness?

Linda Tomb says to start your business day being still.

Having once birthed a baby and a business in the same month, Linda Tomb knows a thing or two about the unique challenges that women entrepreneurs and working moms face. After a decades-long business career, during which she helped to expand a chimney sweep service across three states, launched three high-tech companies, and secured several million dollars in venture funding for a dot-com startup, Tomb turned her attention to helping other women figure out how to balance life and motherhood with business ownership.

Today, as owner of Unleash Your Business, Tomb offers one-on-one and group coaching targeted at female entrepreneurs. Though she has come to the conclusion that "there's no magic pill—every working woman needs to arrive at her own tailored solution for achieving balance and flow," Tomb says there are some issues that trip up just about everyone. So she's devised a three-step free teleseminar to help. It's called "Time, Focus, Money: The Three Step Solution to Unleash Your

Read More »from Go from Frazzled to Focused: Five Time-Management Tips for Women Entrepreneurs

Equity- and debt-based crowdfunding could help U.S. businesses

We've reported here about the JOBS Act, which is designed 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." U.S. entrepreneurs won't be able to take full advantage of this practice until the SEC establishes rules (expected by January 2013), but a report released yesterday shows the significant amounts of money organizations around the world have already raised using several different crowdfunding approaches.

According to the crowdfunding research firm massolution, 452 crowdfunding platforms worldwide raised a total of $1.5 billion for more than 1 million campaigns in 2011. Massolution reports that the majority of those campaigns were in the donation-based crowdfunding category, which is unregulated in the U.S., and that North America was the largest market for fundraising with $837 million raised by 532,000 campaigns.

But outside of the U.S., in places where

Read More »from Crowdfunding a Promising Option for Businesses Seeking Loans and Investors, Report Indicates

Dr. Phil says passion and patience are the keys to success in starting your own business. The celebrity mental-health professional should know. His 10-year reign as the popular daytime-television life coach might make him seem more entertainer than entrepreneur, but Phil McGraw is a small business success story.

The former clinical psychologist spent 25 years in private practice, including more than a decade running a Texas forensics litigation consultancy that won Oprah Winfrey as a client, before switching gears to devote himself to a startup media business. Today Dr. Phil has more than 1,500 hours of national television programming to his credit, as well as numerous awards, and 21 Emmy nominations. He has also penned six New York Times bestsellers, which he markets alongside 30 more books and audio products as a Yahoo! Small Business customer with Dr. Phil’s Online Bookstore.

In an exclusive interview with Yahoo! Small Business, which you can view in its entirety below, or see

Read More »from Dr. Phil on starting a business: passion is currency, patience is crucial

Conquer your inner saboteur

"Fear is the biggest reason people don't start their own businesses," says Paska Nayden, a business coach in Fairfield County, Conn., who serves a national clientele. "Fear comes into play when you're making any kind of life change, such as getting married, starting a family, or switching careers. And it becomes louder when you're considering starting or buying your own business," she says.

After a 30-year career at IBM, Nayden faced her own fears when she decided to leave the corporate world for home-based work with more flexible hours. Even her mother urged her to stay with an employer, but she has succeeded in carving out a niche as a coach who helps people explore options in franchise ownership. As much counselor as coach, Nayden has, through surviving three debilitating battles with cancer, honed a talent for showing others the way to face frightening, life changing events. I spoke with her about how she helps would-be entrepreneurs overcome fear.

YSBA: When it comes to starting

Read More »from How to get beyond the fear of being your own boss

Mitt Romney (photo credit: Gage Skidmore via flickr)

The economy, and in particular small business, has taken center stage in the Presidential campaigns this week. Mitt Romney and President Obama both took the opportunity to emphasize how bad the other is for the growth of US businesses.

An Obama campaign ad released this week accuses Romney of outsourcing American jobs to Mexico, China, and India and argues that the corporate tax breaks Romney wants will go to aid the companies that still do.

Romney told crowds along the campaign trail that President Obama's policies have made life more difficult for entrepreneurs, and said the administration is "anti-small business."

Meanwhile, a new seven-minute Obama campaign video declares that the President rescued the auto industry, created 4.1 million new private sector jobs in the last 25 months, and brought middle class taxes to historic lows.

But a Romney campaign ad, called Broken Promises, points out that the nation's total public debt has reached a record $15.6 trillion under this

Read More »from Do Romney’s 10 Deliverables Address Your Small Business?

Clean air standards are good for business, survey says

A majority of small business owners in six U.S. states support EPA standards and believe they're conducive to job creation and economic growth. That's according to results of a survey of 600 small business owners in Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia commissioned by the Small Business Majority, an advocacy group focused on policies that create jobs and maximize business opportunities and cost savings for small businesses.

Although more than half of survey respondents said their businesses would be impacted by EPA oversight of greenhouse gas emissions, more than three-quarters agreed that EPA should determine limits on new power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, and 56 percent support EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, even if it would bring increased utility prices. More than 80 percent surveyed support new EPA requirements to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxics from power plants.

"Across all industries and at

Read More »from Small business owners say clean energy policies are good for growth

Last week the U.S. House voted 235-173 in favor of the Small Business Tax Cut Act legislation “to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide a deduction for domestic business income of qualified small businesses.” Under the new rule, businesses with 500 or fewer employees would qualify for a 20 percent deduction.

The tax break is designed to help defuse what Dan Danner, President of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, called, in an AP interview this week, the “enormous tax bomb that's set to go off at the end of the year” when Bush-era tax cuts expire.

While the Republican-authored bill makes its hapless way to the Democrat-controlled Senate, analysts are parsing the arguments for and against it, to determine what the benefit to small businesses really might be. 

Here’s a roundup of the week’s reporting on the Small Business Tax Cut:

1. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column compared Rep. Xavier Becerra’s complaint that the bill would give “three percent of Read More »from Business owners, Congress, and the ticking tax bomb