Entries for June 2007

For corporate desk jockeys, summer means vacation and a chance to forget work. For small-business owners, even time away from the office doesn't mean time off. Turns out that even when they are out of the office, most small-business owners never stop thinking about their companies.

Small companies can't afford not to run a tight ship. Even small costs or time drains can make the difference between staying afloat and sinking. So Ron Wince, CEO of Guidon Performance Solutions, tells small-business owners to take some advice from Caddyshack and "Be the ball." In this case, he's talking about how small-business owners need to put themselves in the place of their customers to figure out where they are wasting time and money.

At Guidon, Wince often counsels companies on how to become leaner. But small companies don't usually have the resources to hire outside consultants and may not have the business background to undertake a major overhaul. That doesn't mean they still can't take a few simple steps that could add up to dramatic savings.

Small companies can pat themselves on the back. That's because entrepreneurship is the reason for American's economic growth, says Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, a new book comparing different forms of capitalism. The book's authors, William Baumol, Robert Litan, and Carl Schramm, say that capitalism is not a monolith. Actually, the authors identify four types and, as you can probably guess from the title, they believe that some do a much better job than others of helping countries grow.