Positive Yarn

The 2010 National Small Business Week has come and gone, and as we wait the 50(ish) weeks for it to roll around again, consider the most recent Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index. It found that despite new tax credits for hiring unemployed workers, 52 percent of respondents are saying it’s “very unlikely” that they’ll be hiring in 2010.

In fact, 53 percent of business owners are maintaining current staffing levels, only hiring as many employees as needed. Another 34 percent report that they are hiring fewer than needed. Why? Well, according to the press release, 81 percent say they worry revenues or sales won’t be sufficient to justify adding more employees. Other reasons given include concerns about the potential cost of providing healthcare (65 percent). Sound familiar?

In addition, overtime is not theirs to give right now, it seems: 67 percent of business owners say they have kept weekly hours the same, while 19 percent said they were decreasing hours.

Please keep in mind that this survey, which has been done for the last 28 quarters (third quarter 2003), is based on telephone interviews with 603 small business owners of all stripes — not just retailers and certainly not just in the craft and needlework industries. It’s also a small sliver of the estimated 27.2 million (per the Small Business Administration) small businesses across the U.S. But at the end of the day, as you wish fervently that you had just a little extra cash on hand to get another worker in to lighten everyone’s load, at least take comfort in the knowledge that you’re not alone.

Also try to find the silver lining in the situation: Take this opportunity to capitalize on the talent you already have with you. A few tips:

1. Keep them motivated. As this 2008 CNN Money article describes, “clarifying expectations, managing outcomes, and giving workers a voice to help improve processes” can all go a long way toward keeping employees loyal and productive.

2. Keep them challenged. Maybe every day can’t be filled with fiber bliss and creativity — after all, mundane things like inventory and dusting aren’t going to do themselves. But consider this quote from entrepreneur Ben Baldwin in this 2009 article: “I make it a point to put myself in the shoes of my employees. If I was placed in an unchallenging and monotonous environment, chances are I wouldn’t like it, either. That said, I try hard to provide a challenging and dynamic work environment that fosters creativity and excitement.” How does that stack up against what your employees are currently tasked with doing on a day-to-day basis?

3. Keep them competent. Don’t expect magicians if you can’t supply the hat and rabbit. In other words, empower your employees to make good decisions on your company’s behalf. Let them flex their creative muscles when it comes to marketing ideas, display rotations or class schedules. Give them the encouragement they need to come forward with any problems they spot early on — along with any solutions to these problems they might have. As this recent Workforce Central Florida newsletter opines, “Employers who provide the tools, technology, training and staff necessary to do exceptional work will bring out the full potential of their employees.”

This, according an official press release from the White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-proclamation-small-business-week. (Thank you, Terri Mason, for bringing it to my attention!)

There are a whole lot of events going on to celebrate, including streaming live Webcasts that can be found at the official site, NationalSmallBusinessWeek.com. I’ll be back mid-week for more to report on all the hoopla. In the meantime, feel free to sound off below if your local business community is doing anything to mark this special week — as well as ideas on how you can “celebrate” in your own business.

The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) says that women own about 28% of the more than 23 million non-farm businesses in the nation — and if you add in another 2.7 million firms that are co-owned equally by women and men, the figure jumps to about 34%.

Last year, the SBA’s Office of Advocacy published a report titled “Self-Employed Women and Time Use,” authored by university business economists Tami Gurley-Calvez, Katherine Harper and Amelia Biehl. Drawing from data on a group of earlier studies, and adding in a new Time Use survey where participants kept a daily diary to chronicle their work, leisure and sleep periods, the results of this study are interesting. Having been in the salaried world and in the self-employed world, and comparing my work hours, I am still trying to figure out whether I fall into their “average”:

Several patterns are clear from the time-use data. On average, women spent less time on work and work-related activities than men, and self-employed women spent less time on work than wage-and-salary women. Self-employed women spent the most time in primary and secondary (defined as having a second parent home, but occupied with work or other activity) child care activities….

These time-use patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that women are more likely to choose self-employment because of family or other off-the-job concerns. Time spent on off-the-job activities such as volunteering, exercising and traveling, differ by gender, but there do not appear to be significant differences in this variable between wage-and-salary and self-employed women….

On average, the self-employed spend less time in work activities than wage-and-salary workers, and women spend less time in work activities than men. Wage-and-salary women spent about 7.3 hours (30 percent of their time) in work activities, compared with 8.2 hours (34 percent) for men. The difference was larger for the self-employed, where women spent about 6.2 hours (26 percent) on work activities, compared with 7.6 hours (32 percent) for men. There were also marked differences in time usage across industry groups, indicating that there might be significant differences in lifestyle

and career factors that motivate self-employment in each industry. For example, self-employed women and men in financial services spent between 1 and 1.4 fewer hours a day on work activities than their wage-and-salary counterparts.

The team broke out a few different categories when calculating the percentage of time devoted to “off-the-job” activities, including “household activities” (note, this is different than child-rearing, where self-employed women with children spent more time doing so than men or their female wage-and-salary counterparts):

Self-employed women spent about 2.8 hours per day on household activities, followed by wage-and-salary women, who spent about 2.3 hours, and men, who spent just under 2 hours. This translates into self-employed women spending about 3.5 more hours in household activities per week than wage-and-salary employed women and 6 more hours than men.

The point of the research was to see how women, by education, race, marital status and financial level, fit into the overall current picture of self-employed Americans. You can download a PDF of the entire report and its findings here, but the authors’ results summary suggests a few areas where the SBA can focus attention on helping women work for themselves:

The results suggest several areas where policy could be used to address the chronically lower rates of self-employment among women. First, the time-use evidence indicates that women, and particularly self-employed women, allocate more time to care activities and household production. Programs that enhance work-life balance or facilitate secondary child care opportunities (where a parent works from the same location as the child, but is not responsible for primary child care) would likely make self-employment more attractive for women. Further, policies to offset racial disparities in self-employment and increase human capital through the accumulation of education would serve to encourage greater numbers of women to seek self-employment.

So does your work-play-sleep schedule match with their findings? Did you start your business to achieve more financial success than you had in your previous work life, or for more flexibility with your kids and/or your social life? Are you working a 40-hour week? Do your work and leisure activities blur?

And in the end, does it matter if you’re doing what you love to do?

Every media outlet imaginable has some take on what the stimulus bill that President Obama signed into law today means to the nation, but I came across a news release from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) that might directly affect small businesses — in a positive way.

According to the release, which can be found as a downloadable PDF here, “the bill provides $730 million to the SBA and makes changes to the agency’s lending and investment programs so that they can reach more small businesses that need help. The funding includes:

• $375 million for temporary fee reductions or eliminations on SBA loans and increased SBA guaranteed shares, up to 90 percent for certain loans
• $255 million for a new loan program to help small businesses meet existing debt payments
• $30 million for expanding SBA’s Microloan program, enough to finance up to $50 million in new lending and $24 million in technical assistance grants to microlenders
• $20 million for technology systems to streamline SBA’s lending and oversight processes
• $15 million for expanding SBA’s Surety Bond Guarantee program
• $25 million for staffing up to meet demands for new programs
• $10 million for the Office of Inspector General

“The bill also authorizes refinancing for certain SBA loans so borrowers can expand their businesses on favorable terms, and expands leverage capability for small business investment companies.”

But before you spread the word that the SBA holds the answers to all your business funding prayers, be mindful of an alert purported to have been issued late this afternoon: There is a so-called “phishing” scam running rampant, with letters being sent to small-business owners under the guise of being from SBA and asking for banking information so as to give the recipient a tax rebate under the new law.  While as I post this, I personally do not see this alert anywhere on the SBA.gov site, it’s being reported by a wide variety of credible news outlets that the SBA is aware of the problem and is working with investigators to put an end to it.

The SBA has long been a champion of American small businesses. If this scheme is really going around, I hope that law enforcement can catch and prosecute the people behind it before the fraud tarnishes the Administration’s reputation. However, I also believe that with the risk of identity theft so prevalent in today’s society, most business owners carry a healthy suspicion that if something sounds too good to be true — and asks for their bank account — it’s just too illegal to be true.

I’d love to hear your opinions on what this new legislation means to the craft industry and its professionals and enthusiasts. Drop me a line at positiveyarn@goochandgooch.com, or please feel free to comment below.