Immigration Enforcement Targets Small Business

There is a growing chorus arguing that the best way to deal with illegal immigration is to take away the incentives for illegal immigrants to enter the US. Specifically this includes social services and employment opportunities.
This week ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) came down hard on three employers.

“ICE is taking an increasingly tough stance against egregious corporate violators that knowingly employ illegal aliens,” says ICE Assistant Secretary Julie L. Myers. “Bringing criminal charges against these unscrupulous employers and targeting their ill-gotten gains is a tactic we are adopting nationwide. This is a wholesale departure from the past system of sanctioning corporate violators with minor fines, which were rarely paid in a timely manner or at all.”

So who were these immigration king pins that ICE brought to justice? Some large corporate meat processor? A mega corporate farming operation? Was it the large employers in New York City who Mayor Bloomberg said would go out of business without illegal immigrants? Guess again.
They were three small businesses. In Arkansas it was a small construction framing business. In Kentucky it was a franchise owner of a few hotels in the small town of London, Kentucky. And in Ohio, it was the owner of Bee’s Buffet in Fairfield, Ohio.
A former official of ICE being interviewed on Fox News this morning speculated that small businesses were targeted because they were cheaper and easier to go after. To make a public relations bust to show our citizens that the government was finally cracking down on illegal immigration, ICE busted a few motel maids, carpenters, kitchen workers, and the small business owners who employed them.
I agree with enforcement of our immigration laws. But why focus on a few small employers to grand stand for the media? That will do nothing to quell the illegal immigration crisis.

HCA May Go Private

HCA, headquartered here in Nashville, may be going private in an announcement expected today (according to Reuters and other media sources). There have been rumors of this for weeks. HCA owns hospitals and other healthcare businesses throughout much of the US and operates several facilities Great Britain.
Participating in the highly leveraged private equity buyout is some members of the Frist family (Dr. Thomas Frist, Sr. co-founded HCA with Jack C. Massey, benefactor of Belmont’s Graduate School of Business).
Leveraged buyouts are an interesting case study, and this one will likely be no different. The usual short-term outcome is finding ways to streamline assets to only the most profitable, and seeking other cost-cutting measures. More money has been amassing in firms specializing in leveraged buyouts as other investment options have become less lucrative.

Accidental Entrepreneurs

Do you find yourself suddenly unemployed? Are you so tired of your cubicle that it is time to move on before you lose your mind? Did a once in a life-time opportunity to launch a start-up just get plopped in your lap? Not all entrepreneurs end up as entrepreneurs as part of some grand plan or life-long dream. It may just be the events of everyday life that put you in that position.
Information Week recently ran a profile of several “accidental” entrepreneurs who started their businesses after life dealt them a twist, as it often does. They looked to their personal interests, their techie hobbies, to find new paths for their careers.

Hey, Maybe I’m Not the Only Luddite Entrepreneur

I used to get teased by my managers, bankers, lawyers, and CPAs about how long I would drag my feet on new technologies. They complained that we were among the last businesses to buy a fax machine (OK, I am dating myself a bit here) and PC work stations. Everybody else had voice mail and e-mail long before we did, so they claimed. But a new study released by the NFIB shows I am not alone in my conservative approach to new technology (access the report via this page at NFIB’s site).
Bank web sites with lots of bells and whistles may appeal to some, but they are just window-dressing as far as the nation’s small-business owners are concerned. Only half do any Internet banking, according to a NFIB National Small-Business Poll. The study found that over the past three years, slightly more than half–54 percent–found technology at their principal bank increasingly helpful. But more than one-third asserted that technology had no impact on them at all, and 11 percent complained that technology is getting in the way. Now those are my kind of people!
So what matters most to small business owners? A convenient location is the most important bank characteristic for conducting their firm’s banking business (62%), followed by a bank whose personnel know the owner and the business (57%), and a reliable source of credit (57%). Who needs fancy technology when you have a banker nearby who knows you and your business and is ready to loan you money when you need it?
One of the biggest complaints small-business owners lodge against banks is staff turnover. Only half of those surveyed have been served by the same account manager over the past three years. Twenty percent said they had two, 13 percent had three, and 7 percent report having no manager at all to help them. This is not a new problem. It really accelerated back when banks were deregulated in the 1980s. You would think banks would have solved this problem by now.
The NFIB survey found that small-business owners are generally happy with their banks and they are slowly moving toward electronic banking that will bring greater efficiencies and lower relative costs over the longer term. The key word here is slowly. We eventually got that fax machine, but not until the prices came down and I was convinced that it would actually help our business perform better.
Maybe we are not really Luddites. We are just prudent when it comes to our money.

The Risks of Viewing Your Career as a Noun

What do farmers do? They farm. What do designers do? They design. What do managers do? They manage. What do entrepreneurs do? Well, they…..

Those who start and build businesses engage in a career that has no simple verb to describe what we do. Entrepreneur is a noun. Entrepreneurship is a noun. Entrepreneurism, a newer form of the term, is a noun. Entrepreneurial is an adjective. But, as you remember from 8th grade, adjectives simply describe nouns.

Entrepreneur comes from an Old French word (a fact that I still find hard to accept) entreprendre, which means to undertake. So it started as a verb, but now is a noun. As a side note, I am glad we did not take the literal translation of the French term to refer to those who start businesses. Otherwise all of us who are entrepreneurs would be known as undertakers instead.
So why is Professor Cornwall going into a long, and rather seemingly trivial diatribe? Am I finally becoming the doddering old academic we see mumbling to himself, shuffling across campus?

I assure you there is a point to all of this.

I have been watching the crusty old journalist (another profession that is not a verb), Dan Rather, go ungraciously and rather defiantly off into the sunset of his life. His career as a journalist is clearly behind him, but he won’t give it up. And then it came to me. His understanding of who he is is defined only by what he does for a living. He defines who he is as a person by the career he has pursued. Without his career he has very little else. Without it he is lost as he has nothing else in his life that has any real meaning.

We have seen others fail at retirement. Lee Iacocca could not stay retired as a corporate executive (noun). Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan could not stay retired as athletes (noun). For all of them, what they did for their work defined who they were as people.

Careers can do this to us. If we are not careful, they can consume all that we are. And what gets lost? Our families, our friendships, and even our souls.

If we are to become all that we were put on this Earth to do, we have to temper the temptation to become consumed by our work. We need to resist becoming the noun of what we do for a living.

Work hard at being a spouse. Work hard at being a parent. Work hard at worshiping God. Work hard at being a friend. Work hard at being a good citizen in your community. And yes, work hard at your vocation. None of these alone can fulfill our humanness.

One of the risks of using nouns to describe what we do in our work is that it can reinforce the tendency we all have to get carried away with our work. I loved starting a growing businesses (most of the time, at least). I love teaching and writing. It is indeed a blessing to love what one does for a living and joy the hard work that goes along with it. But, with every virtue there is a vice looming in the background. Although hard work is a good thing, it can be taken to excess and become a vice if it keeps us from all the other things we should be doing with our lives.

American society does not make this any easier. I am reminded of the lyric from a jazz record from the 1980s that said, “Everything in moderation, and moderation is the first to go.” We have become a culture of excess.
This is particularly true for the entrepreneur. We seem to create folk heroes out of entrepreneurs who expend Herculean efforts to achieve success in their businesses. And while this is good to a point, if entrepreneurial success comes at the expense of our marriage, our families, our faith, and our friendships, it is a hollow victory. If all we have at the end of our lives is our wealth, if that is all we leave behind, that is not a life well lived. As the old saying goes, “you never see a hearse with a luggage rack.”

So here is what I am going to commit to: I will help to find us a verb to describe what entrepreneurs do. It has to be catchy, like the term entrepreneurship, so that people will actually use it. And if they do, maybe that will be one small step toward no longer defining those who start businesses only in terms of that activity. We can be, and should be, so much more.

Investment Banker Becomes Music Entrepreneur

The Tennessean has a profile of Alison Brown, who traded a career as an investment banker for one as a bluegrass music entrepreneur.

“I worked with the kind of people who just wake up in the morning thinking about structures for bond refundings,” said Brown, a Harvard University alumna and UCLA business school grad. “I’d wake up and think about when I was going to get to play the banjo again. And the two things were just mutually exclusive.”

Rather than take the traditional path of trying to make it with one of the big labels in town, she decided to make her own path.

“If you have the money and the clout of a major label, you’re in a better position to shove things down people’s throats,” she said, speaking as someone who had worked briefly at a major pop label. “Our approach is to find art that we think is great and then try to draw people to it.”

This niche approach to the industry is gaining traction. She is one of many who are quietly changing the music industry right under the feet of the big three companies that now dominate.

Bootstrap Marketing Made Easier through Social-Network Sites

I must admit that I am one of the few people who have never been to MySpace or FaceBook. I have nothing against such sites. It just must be the Luddite in me that keeps me from wanting to try anything new.
StartupJournal has a story about how social-network sites are proving to be a great place to engage in very targeted marketing. And it is free…at least for now.

For start-ups on a shoe-string buy topamax online australia budget, the opportunity to gain widespread exposure at no cost may seem too good to be true. But networking sites like MySpace, purchased by News Corp. last year, allow groups — including businesses — to create online communities for free. As a result, new ventures eager to establish an initial customer base can benefit by creating a network on MySpace and inviting “friends.”

Time to update my bootstrapping lecture for this fall!