If you look carefully at President Obama’s most strenuous efforts at small business outreach, you might start to see a pattern emerge. Take a look at “Startup America,” the administration’s effort to encourage and support what it calls “high impact” small businesses. The SBA has already lined up a mentor matching program for those entrepreneurs and has organized a series of roundtables to hear from said entrepreneurs about how the feds can reduce barriers and tame burdensome regulations, so those fast growing firms can grow really fast. The SBA also recently announced that, during National Small Business Week 2011, there will be precisely three forums designed to provide for small business attendees: “Social Media Forum: Get Your Business Connected,” “High Growth, High Impact Forum: Strategies for High Growth, High Impact Firms,” and “Exporting Forum: Export Tools for Success.” So, are we starting to see that pattern I mentioned?

Since President Obama took office, he has assembled various different economic advisory bodies and none of them have included any significant degree of representation for the nation’s small businesses. Last month, President Obama replaced his Economic Recovery Advisory Board with the newly formed Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, chaired by Jeffrey Immelt, CEO and Chairman of General Electric. So far, the only person who might be said to represent small businesses is Darlene Miller, the president and CEO of Permac Industries and a former U.S. SBA Small Business Person of the Year for Minnesota. And, even as a small business owner, she cannot be said to be representative of the 95% of U.S. firms that are microbusinesses. In justice to the Obama Administration, they are not exactly tossing microbusinesses under the bus. It’s just that the small businesses that the Administration wants to support are those that are working toward not staying small. The other 95% of us don’t seem to matter.