Pragmatic Populist

Earlier this year, my husband and I took a small business workshop offered by a local certified public accountant.  He covered the ins-and-outs of both starting and growing a small business, starting with assessing the pros and cons of each type of corporate structure: sole proprietorship, limited liability company, corporation and various partnerships.  His (relatively [...]

CNNMoney.com published an article on this week’s government report that states, over the past six months, the “22 banks that got the most help from the Treasury’s bailout programs cut their small business loan balances by a collective $10.5 billion.”
The report goes on to highlight that over the past six months that TARP recipients have [...]

In Marc Kramer’s recent Forbes article titled, The 10 Questions You Should Never Stop Asking, the Wharton School professor identifies ten vital questions that all organizations should continue to ask themselves.
Beyond being a very good list in and of itself, Kramer uses his past experience as a frustrated executive at a struggling (and ultimately doomed) [...]

Scott Shane’s recent article on Business Week is called, “Beware the Freelance Economy.”  In it, he posits that cheering for the increased number of new businesses is premature, since so many of them are really solo practitioners (a.k.a. “freelancers”).  His point is that, because of this, these firms are not realistic sources of new jobs [...]

Personality tests are one of my favorite types of brain candy.  I find something innately amusing about trying to discern something about someone’s psyche from how they answer a quiz or the way they seat themselves around a conference table during a meeting.  Whether there is validity to them or not is always secondary to [...]

In the American Express OPEN Forum article, Effective Word-of-Mouth is Made Not Born by Yvonne DiVita of Windsor Media Enterprises, the author discusses some tips to cultivating what is called “word of mouth marketing.”
Aside from just being a reasonably trendy buzzphrase, word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing tactic designed to maximize the marketing leverage possible by [...]

I grew up in a family-owned business.  I remember, back in the early 1980’s, when my mother (the bookkeeper) got her first computer for the business: it was a Data General and it was bigger than our dishwasher.  It had five-and-a-quarter floppy disks; it had virtually no RAM to speak of; and it came with [...]

One of the most compelling reasons for an entrepreneur to strike out on his or her own is lifestyle. For some people it might be health reasons or inability to tolerate a long commute anymore; for some of us it may be a craving to be location independent or it could be the birth [...]