Most of the time, when people discuss the SBA’s entrepreneurial development programs, they are singing their praises in no uncertain terms. Which is why it was both surprising and understandable that witnesses at last week’s House Small Business Committee hearing appeared to have been instructed to can the beatitudes and tell us what’s wrong with [...]

Late last month, the Social Venture Network announced the recipients of its 2008 Innovations Awards, one of which was Jonathan Lewis, founder of MicroCredit Enterprises. MicroCredit Enterprises is a private sector anti-poverty program that helps to fund microcredit programs. It’s innovation was to guarantee the loans that microfinance organizations use to capitalize their loan funds, [...]

Since it’s going to be October before the week is out, it should come as no surprise that retail industry types are starting to talk about those all-important fourth quarter sales and, specifically, about the upcoming holiday shopping season. And, since most of the economic news seems pretty dismal these days, you might expect early [...]

In case you didn’t know it, if you accept credit card payments, you need to be in compliance with the data security standards developed by the PCI Security Standards Council. That’s true whether you are a point-of-service merchant who swipes your customers’ credit cards or whether you are an online microbusiness merchant who never sees [...]

Those of us who arrived online in the mid to late 1990s with the first major wave of Internet-based microbusinesses sometimes forget that there will always be newbies. And, for as long as there are newbies, there will be scammers. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it had secured a contempt order [...]

If you want to talk small business policy, one perpetual issue is small businesses and federal procurement. Unfortunately, federal procurement is a perpetual issue because procurement officers assume microbusinesses can’t fill a government contract and most microbusinesses don’t want to put themselves through the paperwork-intensive, complicated process of selling to the feds. But how is [...]

Given what is happening in the rest of the economy, it should come as no surprise that most taxpayers are filing, on the lookout for a tax refund that can give them a bit of fiscal breathing room. Still, there are always those last-minute types — including a certain number of microbusiness owners who may [...]

Perhaps one of the most important services that microbusiness owners need, and often don’t get, is business management training. That is unfortunate, because the SBA’s training resource partners — the Small Business Development Centers, the Women’s Business Centers and the SCORE volunteers — offer world-class small business management training, at little or no direct cost [...]