Dawn Rivers

Sometimes, I amuse myself by making a small business/microbusiness wish list.

I’ve been very good this year; okay, okay, there have been occasional forays into naughtiness, but nothing too dreadful; and I hope the fact that I can share the fruits of this list with all the small and microbusiness owners out there is worth some brownie points with the Big Guy in Red.

So, in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share my Holiday wish list with you.

1. A tax code we can understand.
2. A microlending program that really works for microbusinesses.
3. Regulators who view small businesses as allies instead of adversaries.
4. A federal procurement system that works for businesses of all sizes.
5. Recognition of self-employment as the true engine of job growth.
6. An SBA Administrator who actually knows something about small businesses. read more

One of the brightest bright spots in all eight years of the Bush Administration was Tom Sullivan, chief counsel of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy.

There are a lot of reasons for that, which I won’t go into right now (although, if you’re interested, feel free to check out my final podcast interview with Tom shortly before he left Advocacy for greener private-sector pastures). But one of the coolest things he left behind him was the r3 initiative.

The Regulatory Review and Reform Initiative (that is, r3) has its roots in Section 610 of the Regulatory Flexibility Act. Under that part of the law, regulatory agencies are required to occasionally blow the dust off the regulations on their books and take a look at them, to see whether they might be outdated, ineffective, duplicative or otherwise unnecessary.

That sounds a lot simpler than it is. There are hundreds of thousands of regulations on the books; just deciding where to start must be fairly overwhelming. Sullivan’s idea was to harness the experiences of small business owners who need to deal with those regulations by asking them to nominate federal regulations they believe are in need of reform.

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It’s November and, whether you realize it or not, the 2008 holiday shopping season is already upon us. And in light of the never-ending, dismal economic headlines entertaining us lately, it’s more important than ever for small business retailers to plan for a tight spending season.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasts a 2.2% increase in sales this year. This, they are quick to point out, is about half the average holiday sales growth over the last ten years but, what they don’t point out is that it is not much less than the 2.4% growth in sales during the 2007 holiday shopping season.

Consumers anticipate spending about $830, on average, this holiday season. That figure represents a 10% decrease from last year’s average holiday spending, and includes gifts for family, friends and colleagues, decorations, flowers, candy and food, cards and postage. It also includes an expected average of $120 each on non-gift purchases made for themselves or their households by sharp-eyed consumers on the lookout for holiday sale prices.

So, what can the small business retailer do to maximize the season for their bottom line in an economic climate like this, when they really can’t compete on price? read more

It seems like a century ago now, but before the folks on Capitol Hill were yelling about financial markets and exotic investment instruments, they were yelling about skyrocketing energy costs.

Remember that?

One of the ideas that has been floated to help small businesses (and homeowners) reduce their energy costs as well as their carbon footprint is to install their own renewables-based energy systems. And, according
to a recently released report called “Freeing
the Grid 2008″ by the Network for New Energy Choices, many states have policies in place that provide incentives for them to do so.

These aren’t the standard tax-based incentives (although those exist at both the state and federal levels, too). Instead, state governments have laws on their books that combine permitting individual systems to connect to the grid with requiring energy companies to pay for electricity that is privately generated and fed back into the grid. “Freeing the Grid” rates all 50 states on their version of these policies. read more

PCI stands for Payment Card Industry and the “compliant” refers to their Data Security Standards. Credit card companies require acquirers (your merchant account provider) and their merchants (that’s you) to be compliant with those standards in order to process credit card transactions.

The entire point of the exercise is to make sure that merchants processing credit cards are taking appropriate security measures to protect cardholder data.

You might think that compliance is a simple thing if you are one of the millions of small businesses conducting online transactions through a third party service provider like Link Point. It might seem that most online microbusiness owners will have nothing to worry about because most of them never come into direct contact with customer credit card data.

However, it’s not quite that simple. We might not come into contact with the sensitive data but we are still responsible for what happens when that data is transmitted from our web sites to our virtual terminals and/or payment gateways. The PCI Security Standards Council has determined that “anybody who touches the data has to be compliant,” as spokesman Glenn Boyet put it to me.

That means, in order for you to be considered PCI compliant, your payment gateway and your merchant account provider and your shopping cart software and even your web hosting company — all the service providers you use to handle your customers’ data, transmit it, or process it — need to be PCI compliant, too. read more

Recently, President Bush signed what was dubbed by the New York Times as a “huge package of housing legislation” that is supposed to help thousands of homeowners who may be in danger of foreclosure.

There are other things in the bill, of course. As a matter of fact, there’s a little something here targeting the self-employed, something I bet nobody on Capitol Hill is going to claim credit for including.

Those vociferously fiscally-responsible Congressional Democrats, who want to pay for what they do but know they can’t raise taxes under this President, have spent the last couple of years lusting after a way to narrow the tax gap. The tax gap, in case you were wondering, is the difference between what the Treasury Department estimates it should receive in tax revenues and the amount it actually does receive. read more