Meet Dan Flanagan and Lisa Tait of Silver Top Graphics. The sign says “Beware of CHICKEN” and, yes, that really is a chicken. Well … a rooster, actually …

Lisa Tait is a neighbor of mine, in the way you can have a neighbor who lives twenty miles away when you live in rural America. I first met her through the community organization we have in common, where we’ve been working together on a series of projects over the last year.

One of the things I noticed about Lisa early on was how easy she is to work with. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of amazing how much the two of us can get done — effectively, efficiently (most of the time) and fairly painlessly.

Of course, I should have known that she is also a microbusiness owner.

Lisa and partner Dan Flanagan own and operate Silver Top Graphics, a full service graphic design firm headquartered in New Kingston, NY. “It’s any type of graphic commercial communication, visual communication,” Lisa explained during a recent telephone interview. “So, it’s been primarily pre-print pieces, although it’s been moving over to Web more and more.”

When you talk to Lisa, you find her to be so very down-to-earth and unassuming that it’s hard to believe she is a veteran of the high-powered world of Manhattan-based publishing corporations and ad agencies. Then again, that might be because she left that world quite some time ago.

Dan and Lisa initially launched Silver Top as a part time venture, in much the same way that N’Gai Cobb and his partner launched Future Filing (last week’s Microbusiness Profile), and the way countless others dip their toe into the waters of entrepreneurship to test it out before taking the plunge.

That was in 1984. “Yeah,” Lisa jokes, “back when people were still doing things with sticks and rocks.”

In other words, Lisa and Dan were running a home-based nonemployer business more than a decade before home offices became trendy or the Census Bureau coined the word “nonemployer.”

Parenthetically, it makes you wonder how many other twenty-five year old nonemployer businesses there are among the 20.8 million, doesn’t it?

Five years later, when they were getting enough business that they were forced to consider giving up sleep altogether, they decided to give up the day jobs instead and turn their enterprise into a full time venture. At about the same time, they relocated their home office from Brooklyn to rural upstate New York.

But (younger readers may wonder) how could Silver Top Graphics have functioned way back then, when it is so far away from everything?

Well, there weren’t any rocks or sticks involved but, if you are as old as I am, you probably remember that telephones and fax machines pre-dated email and web sites and Internet conferencing by several decades. If you’re not that old, I suppose it must be difficult to imagine.

Over the years, Lisa and Dan have given some consideration to expanding, hiring folks and going the traditional business growth route. “The thing we always ran into was ‘would the headaches compensate for the possible added income?’” Lisa told me. “I mean, the headaches were pretty definable but the potential added income was never clear.”

“I guess you have to determine what headaches you’re willing to live with,” she added.

Right now, the one fly in the ointment is a common problem for small business owners across the country, regardless of firm size: the cost of health insurance. Lisa tells me she recently looked at a pie chart of her business expenses and got a shock when she realized how much she is working to pay insurance premiums.

“I nearly fell out of my chair,” she recalls.

What is particularly distressing for Lisa is that she is not paying individual premiums or the small group premiums so many small business owners complain about. As a member of the county Chamber of Commerce, her firm is already part of the sort of insurance pool that is supposed to bring those premiums down.

In addition, Lisa and Dan don’t use high-priced, comprehensive insurance. Instead, they have opted for what Lisa calls a more catastrophic approach. In short, they have done everything available to them to reduce their health insurance costs. And what they have done may have reduced those costs, but not enough.

“What it’s doing is it’s eating up a lot of money that, really in many ways, gives minimal return. And I feel like I have no options there, that’s something that bothers me,” she says.

The usual spate of health care proposals has been floated yet again during the 110th Congress, some of which favor a more market-based approach (like Senator Mike Enzi’s Small Business Health Plans) and some of which favor a more social welfare approach (like Senator Ted Kennedy’s inclination to expand the Medicaid program).

Some of them, like the SHOP Act (S. 2795, H.R. 5918), attempt to do both. The bill is the product of intense bipartisan negotiation between Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AK), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and Norm Coleman (R-MN).

The bill would create a government administered program through which small and nonemployer business owners could purchase private insurance, thus creating a presumably gigantic pool that is expected to keep premiums down. It also includes a tax credit for small employers who pay a portion of the premiums for ‘qualifying employees’ under the plan.

The SHOP Act was introduced in April and has received no form of action since then. It was referred to the Senate Finance Committee because of the tax provision; no doubt it would need to make a brief stop in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee before finding its way to the Senate floor.

At this stage of the game, floor action is unlikely. Another year will pass with much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Like many microbusiness owners, Lisa Tait is smart enough to recognize that this issue, which has been around forever and gets so much attention but so little action, is not as insoluble or intractable as it seems.

“I think that probably the biggest problem is getting everybody on board behind an underlying philosophy and I think the underlying philosophy is what’s getting in the way of just simple problem-solving,” she says.

Well said.