Small Business Outlook For 2009

The National Small Business Association just released a major report on the outlook for Small Business in 2009. Its press release is printed below. The National Business Association is an advocate for the interests of small business owners and lobbies for their interests in state and national legislatures and agencies. It represents more than 150,000 small businesses nationally. Founded in 1937 it is the oldest national advocate for small businesses. In 1980, 1986, and 1995 it took the lead in initiating White House Conferences on Small Business. Their report reflects the impact of the Recession on their members. As we have previously mentioned in our posts this traditionally optimistic group is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain that optimism. Altogether the outlook for 2009 is bleak. The complete report may be accessed through the "major report" link above.

NSBA Year-End Economic Report

Jan 12, 2009

NSBA today released a report detailing how small business is faring in the recession, and things aren’t going well. According to the NSBA 2008 Year-End Economic Report, 91 percent of small businesses surveyed over the last two weeks in December said the national economy today is worse off than five years ago, up significantly from 68 percent in August 2008.

The report found significant decreases in anticipated economic growth for the coming year with a mere 3 percent anticipating growth for the U.S. economy—down from 21 percent in August. The number of small-business owners who cited economic uncertainty as one of their top three challenges was up from 53 percent in August to 75 percent—a 42 percent shift in just four months.

“Beyond the significant concerns small-business owners expressed about the overall U.S. economy, more than one-third are not confident about the future of their own business,” stated NSBA President Todd O. McCracken. “Coming from traditionally up-beat entrepreneurs, this number ought to send a strong message to Congress—as they craft an economic stimulus package—that small business is struggling.”

Small businesses are dealing with dramatic decreases in growth of revenues, profits and employee size. Each of these key indicators declined between August and December with the number of small businesses hiring new employees in the past 12 months dropping from 30 percent in August to just 18 percent in December, creating an overall net job loss. Projected job growth didn’t fare any better.

Financing continues to be a problem for small-business owners who reported increased reliance on credit cards—nearly half (49 percent) used credit cards in the past 12 months to finance their business. Making matters worse, respondents who reported worsening credit card terms increased from 63 percent in August to 69 percent in the December. Although regulations have recently been approved that will address some of the problems small businesses are facing, the new rules failed to include business-specific credit cards, making broad reform a critical issue.

“NSBA’s Year-End Economic Report exemplifies the difficult position in which we small businesses find ourselves today,” said NSBA Chair Keith Ashmus. “Given the historic role we have played in job creation, any impediment to our ability to create jobs could make for an extended recession and more difficult recovery.”

2009 Berkshire Athenaeum Workshops

With the new year and the newly renovated Reference and Local History departments, computer and business workshops have been announced for January and February. You can view the entire schedule of workshops by going to the Berkshire Athenaeum's home page and clicking on Computer Class Schedule for January & February.

I am scheduled to lead many of these workshops. My schedule follows:
1) Email Workshops: January 8 and 22, February 5 and 25;
2) Finding Business Resources Online: January 15 and February 12; and
3) Free Websites Useful to Small Business: January 29 and February 26.

All workshops start at 10 a.m. and will end 1 hour later at 11 a.m. They will be held in the Athenaeum's new Computer Lab, which shares space with the Berkshire Author's Room, directly off of the Local History department. These are our first workshops in the new computer lab. Starting times are based on workshops held previously. The times are on a trial basis. If we find these times are inconvenient for whatever reason, we may change them in the future. Let us know whether these times are good or inconvenient for you. I personally may be reached at 413-499-9480 ext 110 or 202. Also PreRegistration is necessary. Just give the Reference Department a call at 499-9480 ext 202.

Let me give you a brief breakdown of the Workshops I will be leading.

Email - Email is one of the most popular activities on the Reference Department computers. This workshop will have a "hands-on" approach to creating a basic free Email account and will distinquish between different providers. We'll look at Yahoo and Gmail. The aim of the workshop is to get you started. This is an introductory workshop, for beginners. It will be a "no frills" introduction. Bring your questions and be prompt.

Finding Free Business Resources Online - There is a host of Business and Finacial sites online. How to distinquish between quality information and junk. We will look at several resource rich sites; sites that prove useful time and again in providing access to quality business and financial information. A list of these sites will be provided. It is expected that this workshop will focus on 2 or 3 sites, due to their depth and resources provided. Bring your questions, observations, and suggestions of other sites that you may want me to cover in the future. PreRegistration is necessary. Call the Reference Department at number listed above. Workshop will start promptly at 10 a.m.

Free Websites Useful to Small Business - This workshop could be considered part b to the other business workshop, though this is a stand alone workshop and the other is not a prerequisite. There are many free tools online to aid you in running your business, obtaining contacts, and providing such things as free Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Calendars, Business Reference, Tools for Mailing lists and so forth. We will look at several of these free business utilities; provide a list of sites for further reference, and look at your needs. PreRegistration is necessary. We start promptly at 10 a.m. and anticipate follow-up with regard to any questions you may have.

I look forward to your participation in these workshops and to your suggestions for others that we may have.

Thanks for your support of our Business Blog. Call me, Richard Fairfield, with any questions you may have.

The Berkshire Athenaeum and the Reference Department is located at 1 Wendell Avenue, in Downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Happy New Year 2009.

Happy New Year Or Is It?!!

We start 2009 with a question, is it truly a Happy New Year or is it just a continuation of the disaster that was 2008? Another way of saying this is Where are we going in 2009? Will things continue to get worse?

Several things have caused us to frame this first post of the New Year this way.

1). The Business Press and Business itself has been relentlessly optimistic in the past. This is especially true of entrepreneurial supporting magazines such as Entrepreneur and Inc. The daily news does not always enter into these magazine's topics. That is no longer true. Both these magazines have bleak prognoses for 2009. Along with the rest of the Business Press, 2009 is to be the "year of recovery". The situation has gotten so bleak, that Mark Hendricks wrote an editorial for Entrepreneur's January 2009 issue calling it "Crappy New Year", and there was no "tongue in cheek". Hendrick's focuses on the credit crisis, its impact on small and large business enterprise. He cites the the July 2008 Senior Loan Office Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices. Their report noted "65% of senior bank loan officers reported that they recently tightened standards for small business seeking loans during the second quarter of 2008. That's an all time high since record keeping began in1990." (You can read the entire editorial by clicking on the highlighted "crappy new year" above or at the Berkshire Athenaeum, where we have many subscriptions to Business magazines or online at entrepreneur.com.) Hendricks also emphasizes that 69% of small business have cut back on operating and capital expenses. This is true also for States where the economic crisis has caused continuing severe economic cutbacks. In President-Elect Obamas infrastructure plan may end replacing money's States have lost in cutting back their budgets. Locally, the town of Pittsfield has experienced cutbacks and job freeze, KB Toys declared bankruptcy December 10, Linens and Things closed and Berkshire Bank applied for and received $40 million from the national bank bailout fund.

2) Speaking of President-Elect Obama, he has been saying with great frequency to anyone who will listen that things are going to get worse before they get better. Whatever National Recovery plan engendered by the new Obama administration may be operating on very fragile ground. The events of 2007 and 2008 will not be ended by chronological end of year 2008. They will remain in the foreground and impact any Obama plan.

3) This gets us to our third point. We all want a return to an optimistic future and will be impatient to see change, real change, one that benefits all, not just a few. So far there has been no plan, no central organizing vision that unites business, labor, the overall public. A plan and vision are a necessary part of National Recovery. The current situation has been non reflective crisis management, trying to "put a finger in the dike" when there are only flood conditions. A national commission, like the commission of civil disorders constituted during the 1960s by President Johnson. That commisslion examined the very soul of America and was controversial. A new rexamination is needed. This is not just credit fallout, housing crisis, or bank and automotive crisis. This is a system breakdown and crisis of historic proportions. Our very daily assumptions about the role of the economy, government, priivate and public sphere need to reexamined. Who are we as a people? What happened and how was it allowed to happen? A critical eye should look under every stone? What is government to be in the 21st century? How are sectors to be united in a comprehensive and comprehensible fashion? What ideas, if any, need to be discarded? What new ideas will be brought forward to determine the road ahead? Inevitably, we are talking about the remaking and reordering of our society and who will benefit. Have laws been broken? If so what redress will be needed. This national commission should be independent and of the highest integrity. It should generate new ideas and a no holds barred critical analysis of what has gone wrong and why and provide the foundation for future directions. Whether a commission of some other form, a comprehensive national plan requiring sacrifice and commitment from all is necessary. It is these kinds of plans in the past that restored hope international, whether it was the New Deal, the Marshal Plan or the New Frontier or the Great Society. It is vestiges from these plans that have kept the United States from total collapse, agencies such as the FDIC, Social Security, and Unemployment are still critical ideas that originated during the Great Depression. The Works Progress Administration may be the model for Obama's infrastructure plan but so too was Eisenhower's National Highway Transportation plan, which created the Interstate Highway system and led to unparalleled economic and social development of the United States during the post World War II and Korean War. There is pullback now from that development.

What will the National Recovery be? Will it be genuine promise or more of the same. And what role for small and large business, labor and government. At the very least, we are living in interesting times. The central issue: What outcome is expected and will we survive?!! What are the basic needs of society and how should they be met? If basic needs cannot be met, how will we survive as a people. The sign in the road ahead suggests "New Directions Needed". As in the end of a year, it will be out with old ideas and institutions that no longer work and in with the new which will bring forward old institutions and ideas that do work along with genuine new ideas and vision that provides the basis for building a new "society" that all can buy into.

Happy New Year!!

Market Share For Email and Search Providers ( Business Statistics)

This post could be called Email 2 since we have just posted a review of a major business book on email: SEND: The Essential Guide to Email For Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Some statistics on Business usage of email should be useful.

Ferris Research has tracked business email usage. For example they estimate 6 trillion non spam email messages by businesses per year. The average message is 10 kilobytes; however 5% are bigger than 1 megabyte (power point presentations, excel spreadsheets, etc.). With emphasis on collaborative uses of email, these large usages will increase. Ferris also estimates 25 billion business messages worldwide every day. Greater than 75% of messages sent are spam. A typical business user receives 600 messages a week. Ferris estimates a 35 billion dollars cost per year in trying to combat email spam, resulting in great losses in productivity (time spent in reading and deleting spam). So as email has become a great business tool, spam has become its costly byproduct.

Most large businesses use client based email servers utilizing security procedures and firewalls to deter electronic attacks. A major client based email program is Microsoft Exchange, used by larger businesses, universities, and government entities. Dealing with spam and potential electronic attacks is a costly business.

Pew Internet and American Life Project has compiled industry statistics on who uses the internet and what for. In their report on demographics of Internet users, they find 70 % of sampled adults use the Internet and that the breakdown for men and women as users is nearly equal, 73% for Women, 77% for Men. The highest percentage of users are between 18 and 64. This also conforms to working years of most populations. 70% of adults sampled use the internet and 60% use it to send and receive email; 49% use a search engine to find information; 39% to read news and 30% to consult the weather. A May 2008 Pew Study found 73% adults using the internet and 92% sending and receiving email; 89% of this sample used a Search Engine to find information. (Go to the highlighted Pew site to view these studies and breakdowns). Obviously there are differences in the adults sampled as the May study is much higher in overall usage. Tracking usage is still in its early stages. Yet these studies show high reliance on the internet both for email and information found through search engines.

MarketShare is a company that tracks usage for browsers and search engines. While Microsoft had nearly 70% marketshare compared to 21% for Firefox. Google Chrome which is a few months old has already attained 1% share bypassing Opera and many other browsers. MarketShare also tracks search engine usage. Google is dominating with 81%; Yahoo is next with 10%, AOL 2% and Microsoft Live with 1.58% share. In free email usage Yahoo claims over 250 million users, Microsoft about 220 million, and GMail about 7 million users. Yahoo is still a strong contender in the email market.

All these figures indicate the widespread significance of email as a central means of communication for all adults; search engines as major providers of information and access to information; and browsers as the main (free) tool in accessing the internet, search and email. For business there is a significant cost to maintaining email systems, which now have become mobile as well. It is a central tool and must be managed consciously for any business to survive and be productive.

Email: Benefit or Curse ( Book Review )

Has your Email got you down?

A few days ago a patron asked me to take a look at her computer. Her Email wasn't working. She opened her email and showed me the "inbox". There were over 600 messages there. Also there were over 600 messages in the "trash" file. Other factors were involved in "the crash" she was experiencing. We had to "reboot" the computer and got things going again. I suggested she might want to "empty the trash" file and to try to delete as many of the 600 messages in her "inbox" as possible.

The above story is common for anyone with email accounts. Think how Michael Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ) felt when the following email exchanges between him and his staff were revealed. These exchanges were at the height of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

"To FEMA Staff
August 29, 2005
Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?"
"To FEMA Staff
August 29, 2005
If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god."
"To FEMA Staff
August 30, 2005
I'm not answering that question, but do have a question. Do you know of anyone who dogsits?"

These embarassing exchanges are revealed in David Shipley and Will Schwalbe's cautionary tale and critique and guide to everything email, SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Shipley is OpEd page editor for the New York Times; Schwalbe, editor in chief for Hyperion Books.

Essential is, for once, not hollow hyperbole. The authors estimate 25 % of the business day is taken up by email. Trillions of email messages go back and forth every day. Email is part of Business and Government Records Retention programs. President Bush and his administration will be delivering 100 million electronic messages to the National Archives; President Clinton's was 32 million messages. There are many existing legal cases where Company Email is part of the discovery process. Email was notable in Enron and Arthur Andersen cases. Current and past Presidents have sought to prevent access by claiming "executive privilege".

Here's what's covered in SEND: "Why do we email so Badly. When Should We email. Anatomy of an email. How to write ( the perfect ) email. Six essential types of email. Email that can land you in jail. S.E.N.D ( Simple, Effective, Necessary, Done ). The last word. How to read your header (Appendix). Email in all its manifestations is covered -- from the silly to the very serious. This book is a comprehensive account of do's and don'ts; a true manual and guide. It is not a "preachy" ettiquete book. It is highly enligtening and often humorous in its presentation of its subject. The authors do not exempt themselves from falling into the trap of misguided communications. They put their discussion into context behind the emergence of this important tool and differentiate between other forms such as instant messaging ( IM ), chat and the evolution of mobile emails ( Blackberries ) dominating business life 24/7. In fact email seems to have taken over many lives and made once private communication open and public.

The need to prioritize, to discuss access, the fact that one receives email from total strangers, who in the Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn generation become your "friends". Every manager must decide how to handle email. Anything in email transactions must thought of as "public". Effective time management requires an email policy. In fact email may give one the illusion of getting things done, but production is elsewhere.

So, if you find yourself in the email mire or are trying to work out effective policies, SEND will be an essential guide for you. In fact anyone entering the email world will beneft from this book. Probably one of the most useful Business books of 2008 or anytime. Along the way you learn the history of email ( much older than the world wide web ), how email in fact works in the internet, and many true life illustrations of what is right and what is wrong about email In fact you may want to make this book required reading for your business, employees and managers. Besides its obvious utility, there is a bonus: it is a most enjoyable read!

On Being Thankful - Gas Prices Down

As Thanksgiving 2008 arrived, there seemed little to be thankful for this year. However, regardless of circumstances, there is always much to be thankful for each day and this day gives us a chance to reflect on the positive.

Let's just take one change we can all celebrate. I'm speaking, of course, about gas and oil prices. They are down dramatically. Gas prices for regular are now under $1.99 a gallon in Pittsfield, cheaper elsewhere in Massachusetts. That's more than a 50 % drop since July. A barrel of oil now goes for under $60, far from the $147 barrel high. And diesel prices are down substantially as well. (See our sidebars on AAA Gas Prices and Locators to determine prices in your area.)

The bleak consumer situation in July for oil and gas has been substantially relieved. Will it continue? Who would dare predict? All bets are off! Still we are Thankful for this relief this Thanksgiving. More money is in the pocket of the consumer and the small business. People are reluctant to spend; credit is tight; people are worried. City and State governments are worried about what 2009 will bring.

So while gas prices are declining, let us rejoice for that. Reports are spreading that with gas prices down, automotive sales may be increasing even for SUVs, which have been languishing on dealer lots.

Be worried; be careful; be thankful; get prepared for 2009.

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 2008 - A Time of Transition

November was a time of transition for the U.S. economy.

Throughout the month the economy took a continuing downward trend into Recession and some proclaimed the worst trends since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The housing and automotive markets have continued to slide. The Treasury Department and Congress has said no for the time being to a bailout of the automotive industry. Detroit's big three wants an additional $25 billion to help with debtors. Congress has told Detroit, it will need a concrete plan on how monies will help to be presented in December.

The stock market continued to decine, half of what it was a year ago. Major banks such as Citigroup have had their stock values slide to all time lows, below $5 a share. Citigroup applied for $20 billion more and received it from the Treasury in return for preferred stock and promise of repayment. Still even with this infusion, Citigroup is only trading at$8.29 a share at the time of this writing. This does reflect doubling since the Monday announcement of the $20 billion.

While there is some optimism with respect to Citigroup, the housing loan credit default swaps that got it into trouble have not and will not go away. There is a very long way to go. But as with AIG, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae, Citigroup is "too big to let fail.

On other fronts the long political campaign saw the Democratic Party continue to reverse the Republican Party's hold majority representation. Barack Obama handily defeated John McCain as millions voted for a change in direction. President elect Obama has quickly moved to appoint a transitional team and cabinet that reflects recruitment from the last 3 adminstrations. Obama clearly sees economic recovery as central to his administration. Small and large businesses will be looking closely at the Obama appointments and programs as will labor and countless unrepresented populations, which will be vieing for attention.

That the economy has been turbulent and volatile is an understatement. All are looking for positive signs. The last week of November has seen some restoration in the market. But credit and loans is still a problem. There were bleak forecasts for retail but the post Thanksgiving retail market held steady over the weekend. Time will tell where it will go.

December will continue to represent this transitional phase. Which way for 2009 is the big question?