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.

Look out for Andrea. That's the message as hurricane season officially kicks off Friday. Still, more than half of small-business owners aren't worried about Andrea, or Barry or Chantal for that matter, the names of the first few storms this season, and 71 percent don't have any kind of plan, according to a TNS NFO study for Office Depot.

The Securities and Exchange Commission took a step Wednesday toward easing Sarbanes-Oxley accounting requirements for small public companies. While the little guys have been complaining about the rules since 2002, when they were put in place after Enron's collapse, legislators have not heeded their calls until now.

You finally got around to putting together a website. But no, you can't rest now. With a growing number of people connecting to the Internet via BlackBerrys, cellphones, and other mobile devices, small-business owners now have to make sure that they set up a mobile website, too, says Jeff Grosman, senior vice president of marketing at Network Solutions, a Web hosting and design company that recently expanded its offerings to mobile sites. By next year, 1.3 billion people around the world will have Internet-enabled mobile devices, according to research firm IDC.

Last week, the National Small Business Association picked Scott Hauge as its 2007 Small Business Advocate of the Year. Hauge took over as owner of San Francisco-based Cal Insurance & Associates from his dad and transformed it into a shop focusing on small- and medium-size businesses. That led him to get more heavily involved in lobbying for small business in 1984, founding Small Business California, an advocacy group. I talked to him about how small business fits into the big picture.