Blog Posts by Adrienne Burke

Bad management can be like porn: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

Michelle Benjamin, CEO and founder of Benjamin Enterprises with offices in New York, North Carolina, and Washington, DC, has spent nearly 30 years in the business of helping companies improve their management culture. Her spinoff TalentReady specifically grooms middle managers for leadership positions as they climb the ranks. She has some specific insights into what makes someone a bad boss. Fundamentally, she says, a poor leader is someone who “does not prepare their business for today’s challenges or tomorrow’s opportunities.”

The ways bad bosses do that are many, as are the damages to a business’s prospects. Some companies seem to be productive in spite of a bad boss’s shortcomings, but according to Benjamin’s experience, with truly great management the same businesses could really thrive.

Here are five traits of a boss who can make employees miserable and hamper a business’s chances of success.

1.

Marketing and social media consultant and author Mark Schaefer is a big believer in blogging. For one thing, as you'll learn shortly, it saved him from sitting through another cold chicken lunch at the chamber of commerce. Yesterday we posted part one of an interview with Schaefer explaining why blogging might be the best social media move your business could make. Here in part two he offers tips for blogging your way up the search engine ladder.

Yahoo! SBA: Does blogging help businesses show up in search engines?

Schaefer: Search engine optimization: that’s the number one benefit of blogging. It’s an evolving and complicated topic, but for many businesses today, customers are beginning their search for your business and your products on Google. It’s essential that you show up in the top three search terms.

How do you do that?

One way to begin to tip the Google search algorithms in your favor is to create very helpful, useful content that your customers will love. If your customers are

When I met the marketing guru Mark Schaefer at a crowdsourcing conference in New York last week, I asked him what’s the most important thing small business owners should be doing on social media. I was surprised by his answer. It wasn’t Facebook or Twitter or Google+. He said, “Blogging.”

Marketing and social media consultant and author Mark Schaefer

It seemed to be such a retro bit of advice. To find out why he gave it, I followed up by phone with him this week at the Schaefer Marketing Solutions headquarters, his home in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains.

Schaefer says he makes the one-hour commute by plane from Knoxville to Newark a few times a month to teach marketing at Rutgers University. He also travels the globe giving lectures, teaching workshops, and consulting with clients large and small. He also offers $200 “instant consultations” by phone, and his work, including several social media marketing books (Born to Blog and The Tao of Twitter among them) got him onto Forbes' list of the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers.

Here’s part

The sequester that went into effect on Friday will impose a nearly $60 million cut on the Small Business Administration, that, taken together with innovation-hindering cuts to education, science, and health budgets, will create an increasingly austere climate for small businesses, according to Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, a New York representative and ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Small Business.

Velazquez and fellow Democrats on the committee issued a report today describing the “Impact of the Sequester on the SBA and Small Business.” SBA budget cuts will result in “reductions to small business services, loss of lending authority, reduced oversight of private-sector lending partners, and many other areas that help our nation’s small firms succeed,” according to their report.

Among specific cuts they report:

• $1.5 billion in SBA-guaranteed lending will be cut from the SBA’s $29.3 billion business lending program;
• More than $17 million of a $335 million business lending

Six weekends remain before Tax Day, and advice for business owners abounds.

Your first stop for getting clear about what exactly your tax obligations are and how to meet them, whether you’re a sole proprietor or independent contractor or a business with employees, should probably be the IRS Small Business and Self Employed Tax Center. There you can download the forms you will need and get help determining what taxes you need to pay.

Then you’ll want to move along to all the advice that will help you minimize your tax bill.

At the SCORE website, you can find out which common small business tax mistakes to avoid, such as tossing your receipts for purchases under $75. Or spend an hour in an online workshop to learn tax secrets to keep more of what you earn, presented by the president of the American Institute of Certified Tax Coaches, which also offers a plethora of tax advice articles and resources for business owners and free agents.

The National Association for the Self Employed has

Stephen Paljieg, Senior Director, Corporate Growth and Innovation for Kimberly-Clark, says he was shocked to learn that there are 6 million entrepreneurial moms in the U.S. The number showed great promise for a concept Paljieg was considering a few years ago to crowdsource new product ideas for Kimberly-Clark’s Huggies brand from its customer base.

Clearly there are a lot of people buying Huggies diapers and wipes who have great ideas. And considering the fact that less than 3 percent of all venture capital dollars go to women-owned startups, Paljieg realized the best way to get input from mompreneurs would be to offer them what they needed most: financial resources to get their ideas off the ground.

Paljieg described the Huggies MomInspired Grant Program at the Crowdopolis Big Apple meeting in New York this week. For women who have business or product ideas “inspired by the joys of motherhood,” the program, which Paljieg says will call for a new round of applicants this May, could be

Millennial Branding study data by Monster, with icon and graphics by CharfishDesign

Widespread technology access has eliminated many barriers to starting a new business in the past decade. And with 20-something business founders like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Rent-the-Runway’s Jennifer Hyman dominating headlines, it’s easy to believe that Generation Y youth have not just easier access but more entrepreneurial chutzpah than their baby boomer parents. But a new survey debunks that notion.

Monster.com and Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and consulting firm, found in a survey of more than 2,800 Monster users that 45 percent of Baby Boomers (typically defined as the group born between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s) and 41 percent of Gen-Xers (born mid-1960s to early 1980s) consider themselves to be entrepreneurial. Only 32 percent of Generation Y (born early 1980s to early 2000s) respondents do.

Members of Gen Y also confess to being less comfortable with risk than their elders. Only 28 percent of Gen Y respondents identified with being “high risk,” compared to

A 2.7 percent budget cut might seem trivial compared to what many small business owners have had to deal with during the recession. But reports about what such a slash to the federal budget would mean to small business owners are mostly dire. The cut is due March 1 if Congress does not come up with an alternative this week. Here's a roundup of media reports about how the sequester will impact small business:

According to The New York Times' "You’re the Boss" blog:

“The sequester would ... scale back programs at the SBA. According to the administration, loan guarantees would be reduced by $902 million, from $22 billion to just over $21 billion. And the agency told the Senate Appropriations Committee that cuts to its counseling programs would force the agency’s partners to turn away at least 33,000 business owners seeking assistance.”

On a list of "Eight Ways the Sequester Could Ruin Your Life," The Daily Beast offered this warning:

"Anyone with a small business should fear the