Small-business people may have plenty of reasons to complain about their jobs—the long hours, the tight credit, the unreliable help—but their salaries, it seems, aren't one of them. According to a survey released yesterday by Salary.com, the national median salary this year for a small-business CEO overseeing a company with an average of 92 employees was $233,500. The top execs at companies that have grown to 500 employees make an average of $500,000.

The Salary.com survey used data from 2,237 businesses in a range of industries and locations. Other findings of note:

• CEOs in finance, construction, and real estate tend to make even more than their peers. Small-biz owners in the rental and leasing industry, for example, brought in an average of $320,000 this year. (The average salary for their assistants? $46,100.)

• The more their companies earn, not surprisingly, the more CEOs take home. CEOs of businesses with $25 million to $35 million in revenue earned 113 percent of the national median salary (about $263,000). For owners with more than $50 million in revenue, the number jumped to 159 percent (about $371,000).

Small-biz owners may have their struggles—and as the election season heats up, you can count on hearing about them—but chances are, they're making more than your lawyer.

Pop quiz: How many of the 10.4 million American businesses owned by women generate more than $1 million a year in sales?

The answer isn't as big as you might expect: Only 3 percent of female-owned businesses—or about 300,000 companies total—have made the jump from start-ups into successful, midsize companies, according to a survey by American Express.

Why is this? The poll, billed as the first ever to focus exclusively on more than 1,100 women who are committed to growing their firms to the million-dollar level, offers insight into what makes entrepreneurs tick—and identifies some of the biggest challenges facing women who start their own businesses.

No matter what the Donald may say, no one thinks it's easy to start a business. From finding early-stage financing to working out the kinks of product development to picking a steady management team, an entrepreneur's dilemmas come fast and furious—and from every conceivable direction. A series of new studies in the Journal of Business Venturing offers some guidance for small-biz owners buried by an avalanche of choices:

Here's a question: If you've been successful as an "entrepreneur" in the black market—selling stolen TVs online, say—what are the chances you could be successful taking those same skills into a more legal business setting? Is there any correlation between illegal business performance and legal business ventures? A recent study holds good news for young crooks looking to go straight—and offers a unique take on what, exactly, separates winners and losers in business.

Even in uncertain times, small-business owners tend to keep their chins up. Finding a way to scrape along when credit is tight and energy is expensive is an essential part of the entrepreneurial badge of courage. Still, a survey released this week by American Express shows just how much managers, in spite of their usual stoicism, are sweating it through the market's recent ups and downs—and staying up nights worrying about hiring, healthcare, and cash flow.

There has never been a better time to be a woman with the entrepreneurial bug. Businesses owned by women are the fastest-growing sector of new ventures in the United States. Nearly half of all privately held firms in 2004 were at least 50 percent owned by women, according to the National Foundation for Women Business Owners. Between 1997 and 2004, the number of businesses owned by women grew by almost 20 percent, compared with only a 9 percent increase overall.

Does mood matter in the workplace? Do cranky bosses make employees more or less productive? Is it better, in other words, to be feared or loved?

All of these questions are answered in a new study by Sigal Barsade, an associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Donald Gibson, an associate professor of management at Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business. In their paper, "Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?" recently published in Academy of Management Perspectives, the two scholars examine more than a decade of research dealing with mood and emotion in the workplace—and their findings are utterly devastating to devotees of the fear-mongering school of management.

Entrepreneurial success is often chalked up to being first to market, or having the lowest prices or the best customer service. But what about the management team: Does who's running a start-up make any difference in whether it succeeds? It's a question investors make a point of asking—anyone who has presented to a group of venture capitalists can attest to that—but there is surprisingly little research on how much impact the management team has on a start-up's chances of going public.

Until now, that is. In "Early Team: The Impact of Team Demography on VC Financing and Going Public," published in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Venturing, three business school professors from the University of California-Irvine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business examine how different kinds of management teams at 170 Silicon Valley start-ups performed between 1994 and 2002. The paper highlights some characteristics most highly correlated with success.

Rumors of the death of the mom-and-pop may have been greatly exaggerated. There are 22 million businesses in the United States with five or fewer employees. Together, they produce more than $1 trillion in annual revenues. Major credit card companies and banks have descended on the sector, jostling to get the business of small business, and several—American Express and Discover Card, most notably—have begun publishing regular surveys examining this corner of Main Street.

Kirk Kerkorian desperately wants to buy an automaker. Five months after the 89-year-old deal maker sold a large stake in General Motors–after failing to pull off some major reforms he had sought–Kerkorian has offered $4.5 billion for the Chrysler Group, which parent company DaimlerChrysler has put on the block. If Kerkorian–or another private buyer–ends up owning Chrysler, it might be the best chance for turning around the No. 3 U.S. automaker. It could even revive Detroit.

How fitting that the symbol of economic angst in America has turned out to be a store. The displacement caused by globalization, the anxiety felt by the undereducated and the have-nots, the national addiction to stuff we don't need: Wal-Mart embodies it all.

Boohoo. I am just distraught over the thousands (millions?) of high-risk borrowers who got mortgages over the past few years and are now unable to pay back their loans. And the poor lenders! They were so generous, offering loans with practically no interest at the beginning, so that people who couldn't otherwise afford a home could enjoy the American Dream. And now they're being vilified just because the interest rates rose to usurious levels in the third or fourth year of the loan. Hey–I'll bet that brief taste of homeownership will make those defaulting borrowers better citizens! Better to have owned and lost than never to have owned at all.

Here in the East, we just endured our first winter "storm" of 2007. If it revealed anything, it's how little we, as American consumers, get for our money.

Could we please call an end to the empire, and get it over with?

Is corporate America going soft?

I was still trying to absorb the ramifications of a call for universal healthcare by the Business Roundtable–a collection of leading CEOs who famously lean Republican–when there was more shocking news: DuPont, GE, Alcoa, and seven other industrial companies were calling for major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.