This morning ahead of the jobs summit in Washington D.C., we put together a group of small-business owners to discuss how and why small businesses are not being addressed. If ,as the SBA points out, companies with fewer than 500 employees represented 64% or 14.5 million of the 22.5 million jobs created between 1993 and Q3 of 2008, are we doing enough to help them through this uncertainty?
Participating in our discussion were financial expert Dave Ramsey of "The Dave Ramsey Show", Christopher Hurn CEO of small-business lender Mercantile Capital, and CrimeReports.com Founder and CEO Greg Whisenant. All three of them said that they have hired new people over the past year despite so much uncertainty and plan to continue to hire but are cautious given the issues being addressed in D.C. like health care, cap-n-trade, rising taxes, etc.
Ramsey: “leave us (small businesses) alone. Let us do our business without regulation and interference.”
Hurn: “We have a crisis of confidence. No certainty. There is a lack of private sector experience in this administration. This cabinet has the least amount of private sector experience making payrolls since 1900. Only 10% have run private businesses. JFK had three times that in his cabinet.”
Whisenant: “The administration has done an admiral job on fiscal and monetary policy. Health care is already a mess for small businesses. I’m pretty optimistic right now.”
Three different but important points of view. Take a listen.
Read this blog post and others from Alexis on the Glick Report.
