Blog Posts by Adrienne Burke

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

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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

Stacey Shiring, Owner, Creative Invites and EventsIn 2009, less than a year into her first job out of college, Stacey Shiring was laid off. Then her sister, three months pregnant, was downsized out of her job as a designer at the Los Angeles Times. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Shiring and her sister paired their graphic design skills to start a customized wedding stationery business that they called Bridal Divas Ink.

Since then, Shiring's sister dove full-time into motherhood, and Shiring bought her out of the business. In the second half of 2011 she began making sales—75 bridal customers between July and December, the off-season for weddings.

Today, the company, which makes a name change next week to Creative Invites & Events, has two full-time and two part-time employees, a retail location in Cincinnati's Reading Bridal District, a headquarters office reserved in the Hyde Park neighborhood's American Small Business Center, and a first-of-its-kind interactive stationery design website set to launch in

Read More »from How a “Bad Girl” course gave a bridal business a boost

JOBS Act Makes it OK to Tap Social Networks for Business LoansBecause most reporting on the JOBS Act has focused on how the new law will make it easier for "small" companies to sell equity and go public, truly small businesses might think there's nothing in the legislation for them. Stock and IPOs? Not on the radar of most Main Street businesses.

But a pioneering company called SoMoLend is leveraging an underreported aspect of the JOBS Act to help very small businesses raise money through debt financing. SoMoLend will help entrepreneurs to crowdfund small loans from people they know. Bakeries, bike shops, florists, hardware stores, and lawncare services are the kinds of businesses that stand to benefit.

Many entrepreneurs get their start with cash from friends and family. But until now, Securities and Exchange Commission rules kept them from advertising to solicit investors. The JOBS Act makes it legal to seek loans from, say, 500 of your Facebook friends or Twitter followers, and to pay them back with interest.

Cincinnati-based Candace Klein, a

Read More »from A way to get business loans from your Facebook friends

Do you owe your company’s success to a business-friendly climate in your state or region? Has support from a network of business owners, or community bankers, or local government policies helped you grow?

Creating a more entrepreneur-friendly environment in the U.S. was the topic of a roundtable discussion hosted this week by the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. The session was the third in a series that Committee Chairman Mary Landrieu has hosted to gather input that will inform entrepreneurship legislation she is expected to introduce this summer.

Wednesday’s session, titled “Perspectives from the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Creating Jobs and Growing Businesses through Entrepreneurship,” asked panelists to comment on what role the government can play to nurture entrepreneurship in the U.S.

Landrieu said her goal is to develop policies that will transform the U.S. into the most dynamic, finely tuned entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world. She cited a list of

Read More »from What's Government's Role in Building Entrepreneurial Ecosystems?