The U.S. Senate today confirmed by unanimous consent President Barack Obama’s nomination of Karen Gordon Mills as the 23rd Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
As Administrator of the SBA, Mills will direct a federal agency with more than 2,000 full-time employees, with a leading role in helping small business owners and entrepreneurs secure financing, technical assistance and training, and federal contracts.
“Small business is the backbone of the American economy,” Mills said upon her confirmation. “The SBA has a vital role to play in supporting our nation’s small businesses so that they can be the key driver in getting our economy moving again. I look forward to leading this critical agency at this important time.
“I was there on the factory floor in Arkansas and Ohio working to weather the recession of the early ‘90s,” she said. “Those experiences give me a deep understanding of what our small businesses need today to survive this downturn and to prosper in the years ahead. Since then, I have helped grow companies in organic food, and women’s media, and spent time in rural Maine working with our boat builders and composite technology to help them compete throughout the globe.
“The sum of my experience is this: I am a believer in American small business. I am a believer in America’s ability to manufacture goods and services that are world class, and I am a believer in America’s spirit of entrepreneurship. This spirit is one of our country’s greatest assets and we need to cultivate it today, more than ever.”
As Administrator of the SBA, Mills will direct a federal agency with more than 2,000 full-time employees, with a leading role in helping small business owners and entrepreneurs secure financing, technical assistance and training, and federal contracts.
Mills holds a degree in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. Mills and her husband Barry Mills, president of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, have three sons. In 2007, Mills was named Chair of the Council on Competitiveness and the Economy in Maine, which was focused on attracting investment in rural and regional development.
Click here to read Mills’ complete Statement to the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
“Every sale has five basic obstacles:
no need, no money,
no hurry, no desire,
no trust.”
Zig Ziglar
American Motivational Speaker and Author
Do second home owners kill villages?
In an article on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) blog, that’s the question asked.
Apparently Great Britain is struggling with changing rural industry, like so many other areas in the United States and around the world. Manufacturing no longer exists, tourism is becoming more important, and young people are moving out of rural areas. The elderly and retired are moving to rural villages in record numbers.
With a proposed bad on the purchase of second homes, the British government has officially responded by saying that banning second home owners from buying in rural areas would not provide more affordable homes to locals, saying it believes “there are more innovative ways” of providing assistance “without interfering with the legitimate right” to own more than one home.
The original report, prepared by Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor, called for a selective “ban” on the purchase of second homes:
“But in some communities, when there are too many second home owners,” Taylor says, “the community itself dies. And while it is not in a huge number of areas, in those places we should say enough is enough.”
So do second home owners add or detract from rural areas? Are the communities and economies in which they choose to invest being destroyed by the very nature of their seasonal visits?
BBC reporter Jon Kay visited the village of Exford on Exmoor to see what the full-time residents thought of second home owners. What struck him was how few of the cottages had lights on or smoke coming out of the chimneys.
Mark, an Exford resident in his 20s, says: “It’s a nightmare. This problem has been growing for the last decade. House prices don’t reflect people’s incomes.”
Another resident is equally critical of the housing market.
She says: “[Second home owners] are taking the housing that we would like to have available for our locals but they just out-price us so our children grow up and can’t stay put.”
A third resident explains the effects. “The newsagents has gone, the garage has gone and if a lot of these properties were filled, perhaps these businesses could have been kept going,” he says.
In one house for sale, 25 prospective buyers looked round the property - not one of them a local resident.”
So what is the role of second home owners in your rural community?
And what effect do second home owners have on your business and the local economy?
An interesting read today in The New York Times, in “Nothing is Set in Stone, So Renegotiate:”
“Maybe your fixed costs are not as fixed you think.
With the recession continuing in full force, you may find that everyone — from the company that supplies your office with water to your neighborhood banker — is willing to renegotiate their existing arrangements with you to keep your business.
Closely analyze every contract you have and look for places where you think you can get a cost reduction. Then ask for better terms.”
The article provides several ideas along with additional web resources to help you prepare for discussions with landlords and others with whom you have a financial relationship or partnership. One specific area, negotiating to get lower rent, is especially timely:
“Tenants frequently have the upper hand in a renegotiation scenario,” write the people at Gaebler.com, a business incubator and holding company. “Unless the local commercial real estate market is red hot, landlords are hesitant to risk incurring an extended vacancy period by allowing the space to turn over.”
You can certainly ask for an immediate rent reduction, citing the tough economic conditions you face. The landlord is going to be more willing to grant it, however, if you agree to extend your lease at the new, lower terms.
“The best time to renegotiate a lease is six months to a year before your current lease expires. If the renegotiation fails, you will at least have enough time to properly consider alternative locations.”
As the author says - it may look and sound simple, but renegotiation of financial matters is rarely easy. Just sometimes necessary.
Here are a few interesting blogs and online articles published this week that relate to Rural Small Business, ending March 28, 2009:
If you’re looking for an update on how the recession’s going this week, you’ve got several resources to take a look at.
To start with you can take a look at an article online at Forbes Magazine called The Recovery Has Arrived.
Although the author finds many signs of a recovering economy, he thinks these signals are really due to us just adapting to the bad situation and making the best of it - not to anything improving:
“The news of course has been horrible for months, but the numbers aren’t showing further deterioration; that means the economy has absorbed the bad news and has largely adjusted.”
Apparently the industries benefitting from our current economic conditions include road construction, bridge building, and health care, whereas industries associated with luxury living - equine businesses, landscape turf management, and the recreational vehicle industry with motor boats and Winnebagos are having the worst time. Day Care operations are also struggling in communities where they are viewed by some customers as ‘optional’ and not lifestyle requirements.
Not surprisingly, pawnshops report great sales with some up 60% as desparate people hock whatever they need to sell, and shoe repair shops are up 40% and find increased interest in their craft among younger generation.
Is Regulating the Credit Card Industry Good or Bad for Small Business? Not surprisingly, small business owners have pretty strong feelings on the issue as they endure increases in transaction fees that are supposedly needed to protect them against fraudulent transactions, but then charged for those transactions nonetheless. Small businesses also report that their credit limits are being drastically reduced, interest rates increased for no apparent reason, and accounts suddenly closed.
A new 34-page report by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council argues against government regulation of the credit card industry, claiming that it ultimately hurts small businesses, by making it harder for card issuers to stay competitive and offer the most flexible terms and best rates to businesses. The report can be downloaded here.
The rural economy has held strong over the last few months and appeared to be less affected than the overall national economy. However, in January apparently job losses in rural America and exurban America were more severe than city job loss for the first time.
Unemployment may be rising but apparently rural stock prices are too, at least according to the ‘Yonder 40 Stock Index’ a group of forty stocks selected to reflect the rural economy. Regardless of the economy’s ups and downs, it’s important that we keep looking on the bright side as we were reminded just last month:
“The rural economy may be as nasty as rusted wire,
but, hey, you can always hunt.”
