- A new poll by the Kauffman Foundation shows most entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs believe the U.S. government could do more to help them. About 63% of respondents think it should make it easier for individuals to create and grow businesses, while 22% think the government should create jobs; only 33% said they support the [...]
When a Wal-Mart comes to town, trying to compete with the big-box store by reducing prices does not help, concludes a two-year study by the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University in Hanover, N.H.
The study found that after a new Wal-Mart store opened, local supermarkets in seven regions of the U.S. suffered sales [...]
Just a few days after President Obama announced a stimulus plan for small businesses, more breaks might be in the works. Yesterday, Rep. Frank Kratovil of Maryland, a Democrat, and Rep. Chris Lee of New York, a Republican, proposed amending IRS code to allow new businesses to write off more of their operating costs.
The bill, [...]
by Sarah Needleman
Due to the sour economy, many small-business owners are being forced to displace workers. For some, the decision is one they’ve never had to make before, including how to create a fair — and affordable — severance package.
A small importer in Hackensack, N.J., is currently considering layoffs for the first time [...]
As the saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
The influx in government spending is bringing with it a wave of fraud, with scam artists promising to help small-business owners and consumers cash in on the government spending spree – for a fee. “We started seeing these ads pop up [...]
The nation’s small businesses are being “targeted for more rigorous, more painful scrutiny by both federal tax-enforcement officials and the nation’s accounting standard-setters,” according to a report this week by Accounting Today.
The first sign of increased attention on smaller businesses came last summer with a new study by tax researchers at the nonpartisan Transactional [...]
A story in today’s WSJ points to an unlikely trend: Venture capitalists are putting money in small, high-end consumer goods companies.
It’s no secret that the VC business - and Silicon Valley in general - are in disarray. Tech start-ups are disappearing in clumps. Even their supplies are being auctioned off. Venture-capital investment virtually dropped off [...]
The Obama Administration yesterday unveiled its plan for helping struggling small businesses that included several measures to revive Small Business Administration lending, such as using stimulus money to buy SBA loans on the secondary market, reducing SBA loan fees, raising guarantees and requiring banks to report how much they lend to small firms. The plan, [...]
It sometimes seems hard to escape people selling Girl Scout cookies. Your co-workers hit you up. Your neighbor knocks on your door. Girl Scouts set up shop outside supermarkets.
But one eight-year-old from Asheville, N.C., found that there are limits to where you can sell the cookies. Her dream of selling 12,000 boxes of those cookies [...]
- Small businesses make many last-minute tax-preparation mistakes, like missing lucrative deductions or underreporting income. [AP]
- “Search funds” – where wealthy investors hire top-tier business school students to find them lucrative businesses to buy and run that business – are back in vogue. [NYT]
- Best practices for marketing your business in the economic downturn. [...]