Small Business Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama:

The Small Business Administration (SBA) was established to assist small businesses and to provide guidelines to other government agencies which from time to time may or must deal with small businesses. Accordingly it has established numerical size definitions, either in dollar sales or number of employees, for various industrial classifications. Aside from agriculture virtually any business with under 500 employees or $7 million in sales is classified by the SBA as a small business.

Census bureau statistics reveal that there are over 20 million businesses with just a single employee,  5,377,631 business with between 2 and 19 employees employing almost 30 million people, and only 627,000 businesses between 20 and 500 employees.

I submit that the very small businesses consisting of owner/employee businesses and enterprises with less than 20 employees have issues not even imaginable by the folks who run the small minority of businesses designated as “small” which would have 100 or more employees. Yet it is the larger of the small businesses which have  leverage with the SBA, the administration at large, and the congress.

It is no secret that our economy, today more than ever, is being driven by millions of small businesses. The number will only grow larger as thousands of unemployed people get the entrepreneurship bug and open their own companies. Now the sad news is that many existing small business and many new ones are destined to fail through bad timing, bad management, and lack of capitalization.

The time is now for the federal government to give recognition and assistance to the very small businesses to empower more of them to survive and provide increased employment.

Let’s start with a national roundtable discusson of top government officials meeting with a cross section of owners of companies with fewer than 20 employees to discuss the particular concerns, issues, and problems facing these organizations. Use the findings from the discussions to craft an agenda that will help improve the survival and success rate of these businesses.

Short of a national roundtable, a few measures that could and should be quickly considered are:

1. Provide tax credits to anyone investing in a startup or very small business.

2. Provide grants or tax credits to any business for each new net employee hired.

3. Release TARP money for low-interest lending to very small businesses with minimal paper work. Thousands of businesses are struggling because banks have either called their loans or will not issue lines of credit.

4. Release TARP money for business startup loans which could be forgiven upon achieving preset hiring milestones and profitability.

5. Encourage entrepreneurship at the high school level by funding courses that teach young people how to be innovative successful business owners.

President Obama, I can’t even begin to imagine how big your job is in dealing with mid-east conflicts and a financial crisis at home and world-wide. I am convinced that paying attention to, and helping out, small business is one of the tools you need to use to help restore economic health to our great nation.

Sincerely,

Will Limkemann
Small Business Counselor
will@limkemann.net
www.neobizadvisor.com