The most conspicuous effort at serving so-called “underserved” markets on the part of the SBA to date has been the Microloan program. But while the Administration has not abandoned its efforts to find a way to reduce Microloan program costs, SBA Administrator Steve Preston is also plugging a pilot program called Emerging 200. The idea [...]

Currency exchange rates have the most significant impact on those micro-manufacturers with fewer than ten employees, but that effect is largely (and understandably) confined to industries where import penetration is significant (5% or higher). At the same time, in addition to industries that do not face much international competition, smaller manufacturers seem to be insulated [...]

Given what is happening in the rest of the economy, it should come as no surprise that most taxpayers are filing, on the lookout for a tax refund that can give them a bit of fiscal breathing room. Still, there are always those last-minute types — including a certain number of microbusiness owners who may [...]

The House and Senate both passed their separate budget resolutions before they went home for Easter break and, if you want to wade past all the political noise, you can actually find a few nuggets that may be of interest to microbusiness owners. On the matter of taxes, the House version of the budget does [...]

The rate of growth in small business lending in 2006 was modest, which is only to be expected in what (in hindsight) can be called a sluggish economy. And, when compared with the previous year, there was a bit of a flip in the numbers between small and micro business lending. Those were the principle [...]

There’s nobody who wants to be taken seriously in economic circles who is prepared to deny that the U.S. economy has some troubled times ahead of it. The only real disagreement has to do with how severe those troubles are likely to be and how long they’ll last. The NFIB has found, interestingly, a slight [...]

Perhaps one of the most important services that microbusiness owners need, and often don’t get, is business management training. That is unfortunate, because the SBA’s training resource partners — the Small Business Development Centers, the Women’s Business Centers and the SCORE volunteers — offer world-class small business management training, at little or no direct cost [...]

New businesses are, almost without exception, microbusinesses. Which means, among other things, that whenever new research or a new data set that focuses on startups is released, the information in them can teach one quite a lot about microbusinesses — even if that was not the original point of the exercise. Such is the case [...]

It isn’t discussed often in the context of access to capital but, right now, the primary source of debt financing for small businesses is the trusty credit card. Since there is enough about credit cards to entice the typical microbusiness owner, regardless of whether that is the best financing option available to them, there have [...]

A House Small Business Committee hearing last week demonstrated that the nation’s governors can often be more practical and less preachy than federal lawmakers when it comes to health care reform. Minnesota’s Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) and Pennsylvania’s Governor Ed Rendell (D) described their very different approaches to health care marketplace reform in their respective [...]