If Oct/Nov/Dec hasn’t

heated up your business,

 Jan/Feb/Mar won’t either!

I sit here in an area of the country that –until last year’s three-foot accumulation– hadn’t had any snow to speak of for over 75 years, contemplating the seven hours of driveway shoveling I just completed of another 1-2-foot-plus, on the day after Christmas.

One can’t help, I’m fairly sure, in circumstances like this, having one’s mind drift ever so creepy-crawly, to Ex (Thank Heaven!) Vice President Al Gore’s Nobel Prize-winning predictions of global warming.

This recognition of course came well after his claims that he invented the Internet. Duh! It’s hard to tell which of the three is the bigger farce: Gore, the Nobel Prize or global warming.

Anyway, it made me think about “Chicken Little.”

Remember him?

He ran around the neighborhood yelling, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

Well, let’s have none of that, says our current Administration, hellbent on selling us all into business success by throwing good money after bad at corporate buffoon giants.

Thank Heaven, again! (Yikes! Twice in one blog post–  this “Thank Heaven!” is for Ford Motor Company. Thank you, FORD, for sassing it out and protecting Henry’s entrepreneurial legacy by telling the White House where to take a hike!).

Yes, I am a lifelong Ford owner, but No, I am not a White House hater. I am a realist. I am a serious skeptic of all who would think they could step on and over small business owners and entrepreneurs with the naive convictions that stimulus tax-dollars tossed to big business (and to frivolous socialistic-based enterprises and government agencies) would turn the economy around.  

Only small businesses create jobs. Period.   

Oh, and did I mention the flood of money that beleaguered, hardworking business owners and managers don’t even get to look at while being taxed into the dirt, while incompetent government agencies award themselves salary increases?

Well, yes, there have been some token awards possible through the pathetic SBA, assuming the struggling small business owner could afford the lawyer and accountant needed to process the truckloads of paperwork. 

Did we notice part of the government’s efforts to sell the public on economic success has been to push the media to glow with positive business talk . . . “the greatest holiday retail shopping returns in history,” I heard . . . while businesses continue to die in record numbers? 

Where does this leave YOU? If your last quarter of 2010 was great, congratulations! Odds are good that your first quarter of 2011 will also be fiscally productive.

If your last quarter of 2010 sucked eggs, odds are pretty good that the first quarter of 2011 will not break any revenue or profit levels. Ah, but hope, the White House tells us, is just around the corner.

Here’s the bottom line: Hope gets you nowhere in reality. Action is what moves business forward. And businesses that move forward drive the economy forward. (Yes, this is apparently too complex a concept for government to grasp!)

So, what’s preventing you from taking the action steps that you know need to be taken, that perhaps you’ve been shying away from to avoid making waves? Hmmm?

What will happen if you simply choose to turn up the heat on your challenges to employees, your opportunities to vendors and suppliers, and your service to customers and clients?

You don’t need the government to tell you what to do to make your business work!

You need only to choose to step up to the plate in your industry or profession, in your marketplace, and in your community.

Not being overly cautious is not the same as being careless.

Reasonable risks are what got you here in the first place.

The first quarter of 2011 is yours for the taking.

    Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Just do it!   

# # # 

www.TheWriterWorks.com

302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

 Merger, Acquisition,

Bankruptcy…

Loan, Record Sales,

Relocation, Fire,

Flood, Robbery, 

Management/Staffing

Overhaul… New Product,

Service or Market…

Bad Press, Economy, Stress.

How rare it is that small and medium size enterprise owners and managers have the foresight to reorganize their operations proactively. What’s that childhood message we get? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”? Well, that little rule of thumb might have been a truism when we were kids, but –in case you haven’t noticed lately– the world has changed, and so has business.

The strongholds of entrepreneurial leadership ushered in by today’s technology have actually helped to bring about business and market transformation by practicing the exact opposite credo from what many of us grew up with. Today, entire companies are devoted to the idea that “If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway!”  

And so, for the most part, in entrepreneurial ranks today, it’s the young who are the brave, who take reasonable risks — and who stand alone as representing the only real prospects for reversing our still desperately sinking economy.

But before you go rushing off to do this new jobs stuff, and leaping blindly into some expansion plan that relies on what you are NOT an expert at, remember to“stick to your knitting!”   

Only new and revitalized small entrepreneurial ventures have successfully stood the test of time as the single most monumentally significant source of new job creation.

It is this place alone that the government needs to focus some genuine (more than SBA tokenism) tax incentives to create and grow jobs.

• FACT: Giant corporations, such as those that received bailout tax dollars, do not create jobs. They have never been a key source for job creation.

• FACT: New government jobs are not within the legitimate realm of job creation measurement because they are inevitably “favor” jobs that serve little if any purpose, and are –second– paid for with tax dollars, which simply increases the deficit! 

So, what’s one way for an SME management team to deliver a meaningful counterattack on the purveyors of our faltering economy?  

Don’t wait for a major event to trigger reorganizational activity.

The rule here remains to always think first and act second or “Measure twice, cut once!” 

Oh, right, and choosing some action is almost always better than choosing no action.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

www.TheWriterWorks.com  

302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You,

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Entrepreneurship is 

the only solution to 

plummeting economy, 

job losses, and

government spending sprees!

It’s true. American history has demonstrated time and again that the only road to economic strength and stability is the one that leads to the support and encouragement of entrepreneurial pursuits. America’s federal government has underscored this point repeatedly with its own arrogant and misguided business incompetency that runs rampant to the core.

Job losses are continuing at a record rate, and new jobs are not being created.

Job creation is the single most powerful and essential factor in strengthening industry and service sector pursuits, and in boosting the value of the dollar. Job creation is almost exclusively the product of small business. Job creation does not come from the government that uses tax money to pay for useless jobs. Neither does it come from big business that invests itself in maintaining the status quo.

 Job creation is almost exclusively the product of small business.

Job creation is the child of small business because small business is owned and operated by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs don’t know how to give up. They don’t know how to spend their way out of problems. They find solutions, or — by instinct — create them! 

Entrepreneurs live with a  burning desire to make their ideas succeed.

Entrepreneurs alone know how to capture the spirit of innovation in both thinking and practice. And no one needs to look further for the proof of it than the single-mindedness of purpose exuded out of the garages of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, out of the 10,000 attempts by Edison to invent the light bulb, out of the persistence and perseverance of Henry Ford and Mary Kay Ash and Ellen DeGeneres.

Why has nothing but SBA tokenism been offered to small business? Because tokenism is enough to make good press.

Why has nothing substantive been done to drive job creation incentives to small business and to stop breaking small business backs long enough to actually foster new jobs? Because it doesn’t suit prevailing political spending spree goals and because government has ZERO business experience.

America’s 30 million small business owners need to accept the fact that no help is on the way

What needs to happen: America’s 30 million small business owners need to accept the fact that no help is on the way, and start acting like the entrepreneurs they were in the early “pre-cushy” days. There needs to be a resurgence of pioneer spirit and a greater sense of self-reliance that seems — for the lack of necessity being the mother of invention — to have skipped a generation.

It means now is the time to dig in.

It means now is the time to dig in, to plant your entrepreneurial energy firmly into shouldering the growth of your own business, with regard for your neighbor, but determination to go forward without dependency. Government and big business won’t bail you out. And there is no hope for banding together such fiercely independent souls as entrepreneurs into some kind of grass-roots movement.

Without losing regard for others and their struggles, or the virtues of charity, or the good of the communities that support you . . . it is time to act on your own and in your own behalf.  If even a fraction of America’s 30 million upstarts lead their businesses out of the fog, they will create needed new jobs and brighten the economy with the glow of real sunshine instead of a fading flashlight.

www.TheWriterWorks.com or 302.933.0116

or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

For richer or poorer,

in sickness and

in health, it’s

YOUR business…NOT

the government’s!

     There may never have been a better time than now, for small business owners, operators and managers to rise up and defend the businesses they’re married to, to take hold of the entrepreneurial leadership that America’s government hasn’t even an inkling about how to make work.

     We’re promised leadership transparency and get instead closed doors.

     We’re assured of job creation incentives and get instead “much ado about nothing.” Mountains of utterly useless government paperwork clog our channels of communication and threaten our existences as free market competitive entities.

   Here’s the line in the sand:

The government wants to tax and spend and provide all the necessary infrastructure to gain total and complete control of our businesses and industries, our families and our personal lives. [This is not exaggerated. Look carefully at what’s been happening every day.]

American business owners want an end to taxation without representation. Small business owners want an end to spending money that doesn’t exist, no matter how great the cause. Business owners do not want the government running businesses; they want government to provide infrastructure tools for use by small businesses to create jobs and economic turnaround opportunities. They want to keep their inalienable rights to freedom and independence.

     America’s federal government has run amuck. It is using today’s lame excuse for a healthcare bill as a Trojan Horse to–once positioned inside the walls of democracy–unleash a flood of controls designed to pursue their mission to usher in socialism.

      Socialism does not work, and will not work. It has never worked.

     And until what I am firmly convinced is our nation’s corrupt union leadership (especially teacher and automaker unions) and until naive, ideological arts and tree-hugger communities are willing to put aside their new-found, Obama-led arrogance long enough to face reality, we as a nation are in deep trouble.

     So why address all this political mess in a blog for small business owners and entrepreneurial leaders?

     Because it is WE who are on the line here. It is WE who hold the opportunity to reverse the reckless spending and reckless mind-games being foisted upon us. It is WE who need to rise up and restore balance and strength to our crumbling economy. 

     No, these are not just words. These are actions that each of us needs to take and pledge to work for. Our government, as it has come to exist in this past year, no longer represents “WE the people.” 

     If any of us with small businesses spent money we didn’t have as mindlessly as the federal government has been doing and continues to do, we would be out of business . . . exactly where America  is headed.

     We are on a runaway train, being driven by a totally-inexperienced group of incompetent (seemingly “possessed” say some) politicians who are intent on taking us all directly over the socialism cliff into Marxism waiting eagerly below. And, God forbid that should ever take place.

     The only way to ensure the survival of democracy bolstered by its capitalistic roots that established the US as the world’s one-time strongest nation, and be able to be in the position to best help others, is to provide small businesses with real (not token) tools to lead us forward once again.

     This can only happen when each small business owner takes an active role this November in voting out those who think it’s more important to “taxdollar-bailout” corporate giants than to put meaningful job creation tax incentives in small business.

     Realize here that we have representatives who are more concerned with their empty, small-business-killing healthcare plan than with reducing unemployment rates enough to allow people to pay for the insurance coverage they’ll need to have, to avoid getting fined with amounts they have no ability to pay, because they’re unemployed. Oh, is that not logical or something? 

     We need Congressional Representatives and Senators who are not afraid to stand shoulder to shoulder with small business, who will foster the spirit of knowledgeable, experienced, and open leadership we so sorely lack.  

     We need small business leadership with the vision to restore the sovereignty and credibility of America that generations before us worked so diligently and hard to preserve.       

Hal@BusinessWorks.US 

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You!

Make today a GREAT day for someone! 

IF YOU CAN FOLLOW

these 8 sentences, you 

understand how to fix

the economy — and the

White House is puzzled.

(PART 1 OF 2)

     Entrepreneurs pursue ideas. They taste, test, trial-and-error, and explore applications of their ideas. When they settle on a direction, they find or attract enough financial support to do two things: 1) Create an operations process to develop (manufacture, fabricate, enhance) the product(s) and/or service(s), and 2) Design and deliver a marketing program.

     Marketing drives prospects to the door and creates a support platform for sales. Salespeople (or the entrepreneur herself or himself, acting in a sales role) produce(s) sales. Sales produce revenues. Revenues pay operations process and marketing (and perhaps investor) expenses and hopefully generate profits.

     Profits allow entrepreneurs to create jobs.

     Big business really doesn’t create new jobs. Research demonstrates time and again that far more than the vast majority of new jobs created in America originate with small business.

     So— why does the White House insist on avoiding and glossing over small business as an insignificant source of new jobs? Why does the White House pretend to befriend small business, shaking hands with the right hand while stabbing it in the back with the left hand?

     Can someone please answer this? Can the answer please be a real one, and not some convoluted response anchored by union-held political chips or fantasyland corporate moguls riding bailout coattails?

     How do”We the people…” choose to allow narcissistic political arrogance to override the critical needs of our economically-threatened society to stimulate and foster job creation?  Part of the answer is that we have a federal government that’s universally comprised of individuals who have not one iota of business experience, and who adamantly refuse to get the business advice needed for economic recovery from the only source that matters: small business.

     And surely–because, really, no one could be this dumb– the government can’t possibly be thinking that the SBA is the place to turn for meaningful input. (Yes, this is the same Small Business Administration administered by small-business-braindead government employees and stimulus-recipient big business corporate types who can’t even spell entrepreneur, let alone think like one) .

     The message is: WAKE UP AMERICA!  There’s more to this story, and it’s coming tomorrow.

     I hope you’ll return for –as one of my heroes, Paul Harvey, used to say– the rest of the story!

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

It’s A Best-Kept Secret

… Among Men.

     From my early days in Madison Avenue’s “Top 10” ad agencies, where I worked for the industry’s two most famous and successful leading ladies, to active roles in women’s rights marches, to a professorship career which led me to ignite a campus women’s program,  followed by group counseling facilitator days with a female partner, I learned I was barely able to hold a candle to the feminine wiles of business leadership.

     I moved into serial-entrepreneur pursuits with a bevy of talented female business associates (the most important and influential of these being Kathy, whom I married 23 years ago), I have always preferred working with women. I can’t speak for many product industries, but to my way of thinking, women have always been smarter about all the things one needs to be smart about in running a service business and dealing with clients.

     And TODAY, I can finally say to all those smirking owners, investors, and VCs who’ve always equated quarterbacks, fighter pilots, and five-star generals with required business leader traits and qualities: “See. It’s not just me who thinks women are better business leaders!”

     The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute has just released new findings that predict women entrepreneurs will create close to 6 million new jobs in the U.S. by 2018, more than half the expected new job total. “That’s great,” you say, “but so what? How does that make women better business leaders?”

     Ah, it’s HOW this new job creation tsunami will occur that’s important. Women entrepreneurs are reported in this research study to be “more customer-focused, more likely to incorporate community into their business plans, and more adept at creating opportunities for others,” according to a report of the findings earlier today by Lisa Pateus Viana in the “Small Business” section of FOXBusiness online.

     Viana says these characteristics are “helping women excel in 1) running a business 2) keeping employees driven and productive and 3) building a loyal customer base.” She goes on to say that the research shows “the only things more important to women entrepreneurs than their customers are family and religion,” and proceeds to make a strong case for the values of something few male counterparts strive for: a sense of balance.

     It seems to me that the only ones who disregard the validity of these kinds of study findings are those who have never learned to accept themselves or be able to respect others anyway. So, good riddance to all those stimulus/bailout-dependent corporate and government muckity-mucks who think entrepreneurship is an irritating business nonevent without promise.

     And let’s hear it for the emerging new stronger-sex business leaders! In fact, if we cut them some slack, they may actually create us some millions of new jobs sooner than later! 

~~~~~~~~~~~Visit Hal’s Recent Guest Blog Posts~~~~~~~~~~~

•  
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America runs on small business!

Small business runs on

competition.

Competition runs on sales.

     It’s beyond me why no one in government has yet to figure out this relationship, or be able to translate it into the two following, near-unanimous, conclusions by leading national and global experts:

Free market price competition, state-by-state, is the only workable answer to healthcare reform.

Small business sales success is the ticket to job creation, and job creation is the only workable answer to economic recovery.

     I can understand that most politicians have little or no experience in business, but I cannot understand why they so adamantly refuse to acknowledge the truth of the two statements cited above … why they simply cannot deal with the simplicity of each. 

     They have political agendas. Who cares about their political agendas? Do you know anyone who cares about their political agendas? Our economy and our healthcare reform plans are sitting deep in the bottom of the toilet because our elected officials have agendas for self-aggrandizement, self-promotion, and self-preservation.

     Last time I looked, these people lugging around their agendas were supposed to be representing the taxpayers who have hired them. Hmmm, now there’s a unique thought! Just imagine how much would be possible to achieve if elected officials were not preoccupied with protecting their own butts.

     Imagine if politicians actually served those who elected them, instead of pandering to the government agencies, big business entities, and union constituencies who trip over themselves clinging to elected (and bought) coattails, seeking stimulus money to bail out of the holes they’ve dug for themselves.  

     In fact, ask any group of small business owners, and they’ll tell you that that federal and state government leaders are misguided, ill-informed, inexperienced, and completely unrealistic. They are trying to appease small businesses with a ridiculous, unnecessarily and overly-complicated loan program that no small business owner has time to deal with. And who needs a loan now anyway? Why do tax-incentives have to be Rubix Cubes?

     Government is trying to ramrod an unwanted, unworkable, astronomically expensive healthcare reform program down the throats of small business owners, and simultaneously smokescreen the public into thinking it’s in every one’s best interest when it clearly is not.

     Maybe America’s government and corporate giants and unions do run on donuts and promises and paybacks, but America’s small businesses are fueled by genuine competition, authentic innovation and accountable sales. 

• Small business owners know how to reform healthcare with free market enterprise price competition.
• Small business owners know how to fix the broken industrial manufacturing and financial communities with value-adding and innovation instead of cash handouts.
• Small business owners know how to turn the economy around by creating jobs that big business cannot. And frankly, it sucks that the government flat out refuses to give small businesspeople the chance to do these things that government is incapable of achieving.

     Competition makes life work. Sales are both the heart and the fuel of business. And small business is the engine of our economy. Small business owners don’t talk about “downsizing” and “cashing in political chips” and “taking loans to pay loans.”

     Small business ownerstalk about “opportunity costs” and “cashflow” and “innovation” and “asking and listening to their customers.” They equate sports with their businesses and use competitive terms like: Slamdunk! Goal! Hole-in-one! Gamepoint! TKO! Touchdown! Grandslam! to describe their sales efforts!

     Which sounds healthier to you?

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