newenergyWith the start of a new year many business owners get a boost of renewal and new energy. The trick is to sustain that energy for as long as possible. Some of our articles this week should help you do that. Our Startup Diaries series is written by real small business owners working away on starting and sustaining their new businesses. J. P.Sawyer talks about the lessons he learned in getting going. Chris Myers of Bode Tree also wrote about his three startup lessons. We looked at why you should get an insurance re-evaluation at the start of every year and how to boostrap your dream business in ten steps. And if you haven't taken the entreprenurial leap yet, here is how to handle job burnout.

If you haven't taken the plunge yet, hopefully some of these articles give you the impetus to start your own business — and if you do, we have tools to help. Besides our domain name, web hosting and ecommerce products, we also have just added an innovative marketing dashboard that you can try for

Telling legislators how their regulations affect your small business is now as easy as clicking here. The House Committee on Small Business yesterday unveiled Small Biz Reg Watch, a website that alerts users to proposed regulatory actions with consequences for small business. The site lists the regs, describes their impact on small businesses, and provides an easy-to-use comment section to gather input from the small business community within the comment period.

Six regulations are presently described on the site—two from the IRS, two from the EPA, one from the Small Business Administration, and one from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the Fish and Wildlife Administration. More than 250 individual comments have been posted by small business stakeholders.

To be sure, an online portal for submitting public comments on proposed regulations already exists at Regulations.gov. Small Biz Reg Watch is linked to that portal, but highlights particular rules likely to impact

Small business owners are starting 2013 with a sunnier outlook than they ended 2012 with, according results of an online survey released on Friday.

The quarterly Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business survey in early January found a significant jump in optimism among 601 small business owners since surveying a random sample of the group online in November. “Small-business owners as a group have returned to being essentially neutral about their current operating environment from being more pessimistic last November,” Gallup reported.

Yet optimism is down overall among the group from a year ago, and business owners point to many reasons to remain worried about their business prospects. Gallup reports that:

“More than half of U.S. small-business owners say healthcare costs and taxes on small businesses are hurting their operating environment ‘a lot,’ making these the top two concerns among eight issues tested ... They are followed by the price of energy, government regulations, and the federal

The Small Business Administration has launched an online marketplace designed to simplify the way small tech businesses find and bid on small contracts with federal agencies. Innovative technology companies are invited to use RFP-EZ to create a company profile and bid on low-cost, high-impact jobs.

According to SBA: “By simply creating a company profile on the beta site, each small business can search and bid for contracts relevant to its skill set. A small business can easily search for an opportunity, see a statement of work, and bid all within the RFP-EZ web interface.”

At present, the site features four available contracts, all commissioned by the Small Business Administration with deadlines of February 4. The jobs are in database enhancement, database integration, web-based communications, and automated email communications.

If the pilot phase of RFP-EZ proves successful, SBA says the program will be expanded to include more contracts for a more diverse group of innovative

If you’re among the many small business owners who regularly forfeit the home office tax deduction for fear of attracting an audit or because it is just too complicated to calculate, there’s good news for you out of Washington today.

The Small Business Administration and the IRS have coordinated to provide “a new, simpler option for calculating the home office tax deduction.” Taking the deduction will no longer require calculating the energy costs, mortgage interest, homeowner’s insurance, property taxes, and repairs you pay on your home office as a percentage of the entire home. Instead, small business owners and employees who work from a qualifying home office will have the option to deduct $5 per square foot of office space on up to 300 square feet, for as much as $1,500 in deductions annually.

According to the IRS’s calculations, the simpler formula will save taxpayers more than 1.6 million hours per year in tax preparation time. One hitch: the new rule won’t go into effect till

Last week we reported on small-business-supportive language contained in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 that is aimed at helping small businesses win more contracts with the federal government. One provision of the law signed by President Obama on January 2 is particularly promising for women small business owners. It removes caps on the dollar amounts of awards for which women-owned businesses are eligible.

Not only have government agencies consistently failed to meet the goal to award 23 percent of contracts to small businesses, but they also failed to meet the Women Owned Small Business Federal Contracting program goal to award 5 percent of contracting dollars to women-owned businesses. In 2011, the first year of the program, federal agencies awarded $16.8 billion in contracts to women-owned small businesses, which accounted for only 3.98 percent of federal contract dollars, according to the Small Business Administration.

Advocates say the caps—$6.5 million for

As founder of Government Business Solutions, Lourdes Martin-Rosa is a small business owner who has been generating income from government contracts for a decade. Her $3+ million company provides event management and human resources solutions to government agencies. Eager to help other women business owners do the same, she has been advocating on behalf of the women’s procurement program for 12 years and serves as an American Express OPEN advisor on government contracting.

Contracting can be a lucrative revenue booster for women-owned small businesses, Martin-Rosa says. “It can be very important to have a strong customer like the federal government.” In fact, while fewer than 2 percent of all small businesses that contract with the government generate revenues in excess of $1 million, 42 percent of women-owned small business contractors generate that much or more, according to recent American Express OPEN government contracting survey.

But there are 83 industries (see WOSB program

Had you asked any entrepreneurship observers six months ago to predict the top small business stories of 2013, equity-based crowdfunding would surely have been on the list. Now, many fear the story might be delayed another year, or worse, end before it ever started.

The new practice that would allow unaccredited investors to take stakes in small startups through online portals was made legal by the JOBS Act last April. Not to be confused with donation-based crowdfunding—which entrepreneurs and inventors such as Jonathan Lansey have been using successfully for several years—equity-based crowdfunding would allow funders to reap a financial return on investments or loans that help startup businesses get off the ground. Pioneers of a new equity and debt-based crowdfunding sector pounced on the opportunity and prepared for the law to take effect in 2013.

But to their disappointment, the Securities and Exchange Commission has failed to issue the rules that were mandated by the Act to open