This week there are two opportunities for you to have your voice heard by the Administration.
First, on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Geithner and I are participating in a conference on access to capital. The conference is bringing together policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, and others to look at how we can get more capital into the hands of small businesses. And we want to hear from you. If you have a question or an idea for us to discuss at the conference, email it to AccessToCapRSVP@treasury.gov by Monday evening.
Next, as part of Startup America, Administration officials have been traveling the country, talking with entrepreneurs about what barriers stand in their way. To get even more input, we’re holding an online Reducing Barriers roundtable with Fast Company. On Wednesday from 12-12:45 pm, Gene Sperling, chair of the National Economic Council, and I, want to hear from you about what regulations we can change and what we can do to help entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses.
On Tuesday, I was in Cleveland with President Obama, a large contingent of his Cabinet, and about 150 small business owners. The President opened the day by telling the small business owners that the goal was “to hear from you, to gain your counsel, and to talk about how America can help you succeed so that you can keep helping America succeed.”
In my breakout session on Entrepreneurship, we heard from 25 small business owners. The President stopped by and had the chance to talk with a barbecue restaurant owner, a portable microwave manufacturer, a woman-owned construction company, and others.
Several topics came up. We talked about how access to capital is still a big problem for too many entrepreneurs and small business owners. We discussed the importance of the small business tax cuts that the President has already signed into law. We talked about promoting more high-growth entrepreneurship through efforts like Startup America. And we discussed ways to identify and remove barriers to entrepreneurship, including a new series of roundtables in entrepreneurial communities that will be kicked off next week in Durham, North Carolina.
We need to do everything we can to support those small business owners – and others across America – because they’re the ones that are working every day to out-innovate, out-build, and out-compete the rest of the world.
Moving forward, we’ll continue to support regional economies like Northeast Ohio as they work to create good jobs. The SBA, for example, has helped support a clustering effort led by a local high-tech economic development organization called NorTech, which the President discussed in his closing remarks. And we’re also expanding a successful and intensive entrepreneur training program to nearby Youngstown, Ohio.
And all of us throughout the Administration will continue to listen to the needs of entrepreneurs and small business owners, using their feedback and insights to ensure that we’re supporting them as they grow our economy and create jobs.
Over the past two days, we celebrated the success of innovative small businesses that have grown, and we laid the groundwork for even more to follow in their footsteps.
First, on Tuesday, I met with about 50 businesses that have collectively created tens of thousands of good jobs through the Small Business Innovation Research program. Each year, SBIR drives $2.5 billion in federal research and development dollars into the hands of small firms. The goal is to help entrepreneurs develop cutting-edge products and technologies that meet federal research and development needs and can be successful in the marketplace. We gave out the SBIR’s Tibbetts Awards, and we also inducted eight firms, including big names like Qualcomm and Symantec, into the SBIR Hall of Fame because of key SBIR funding in their formative years.
Then, on Wednesday, we rolled out one of the exciting new Startup America initiatives, called the Entrepreneurial Mentor Corps. To build on the excellent job that SBA counselors do to help Main-Street small businesses, we’re aiming to provide targeted and tailored mentoring for high-growth small firms, in particular. Through the initial pilot with the U.S. Department of Energy, four clean-energy “business accelerators” will match about 100 promising entrepreneurs with experienced mentors. The mentors will guide those small firms to the tools, opportunities, and contacts they need to get on the fast track to innovation, job creation and global competitiveness.
As you can tell, these past few weeks have been particularly busy at SBA. Check out our Newsroom and join us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with what’s going on.
It’s great news that the U.S. Senate voted yesterday to remove a burdensome tax-related reporting requirement that could hit small businesses starting in 2012.
Shortly after the Affordable Care Act passed, we heard from small business owners who said that one provision of the new law – the expanded 1099 reporting requirement – would create too much of a paperwork burden when it went into effect in 2012.
The Administration immediately took steps to lower the future burden this might have, but as we continued to hear from small business owners like you, the President decided that the burden would simply be too great. That’s why we supported a proposal to relax the requirement in September and called for repeal of this provision in November.
We’ll continue to work with Congress to get the job done.
In the meantime, if you haven’t already, I encourage you to check out the new tax credits and other benefits of the Affordable Care Act that are already helping small business owners start or continue providing health insurance coverage. You can hear some of their stories here, here, here and here.
For the past 50 years at SBA, we’ve always been proud to serve not only “Main Street” small businesses, but also the small, high-growth firms that drive the lion’s share of net new job creation each year in America. In fact, SBA played a significant role in the early years of firms like Intel, FedEx and Apple. Today, through a new initiative called Startup America, the entire Administration is joining us in supporting these firms in order to help drive innovation, competitiveness, and good jobs here at home.
What is Startup America?
Startup America is a nationwide effort to increase the number of successful startups and to help promising young companies grow to the next level. It’s a call to action for leaders in business, academia, the investment community, and the nonprofit sector – and entrepreneurs themselves – to do more to support entrepreneurship. Startup America will push for more investment in promising startups, more mentoring of entrepreneurs, more commercialization of new discoveries, and fewer regulatory barriers to innovation.
One of our first steps will be to infuse up to $1 billion over the next five years in underserved communities and emerging industries through a new Impact Investment Fund. This fund will be based on SBA’s Small Business Investment Company program that just had a record year.
If you watched the State of the Union, you may have heard of a firm that benefited from the SBIC program: Center Rock, Inc., in Berlin, Pennsylvania. In 2005, an SBIC invested $4 million in Center Rock, which helped the company grow from 20 to 70 employees and shift from distributing to manufacturing of drilling equipment. Last summer, one of Center Rock’s drill bits helped rescue the 33 Chilean miners.
Today, there are thousands more entrepreneurs and small, high-growth firms like Center Rock that are poised to grow and create more good American jobs. They’re ready to “do big things.” If you’re one of those entrepreneurs, I encourage you to talk with your local SBA office about how we can help give you the tools you need to succeed… and keep an eye out for new Startup America initiatives being rolled out in the coming weeks and months.
