HELP FOR SMALL BUSINESSES IS GREAT, BUT WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM?

In today’s New York Times, I read the following editorial about needed help for small businesses.Help Small Businesses Hire again.

As a management consultant at Silkin Management Group, I consult our clients with the workable management technology that helps their business grow, even during these tough economic times. Silkin clients are all primarily single doctor owned health care practices such as dentists, veterinarians and optometrists. As such they are all small businesses in the truest sense of the word and anything that affects small businesses affects them. That’s why I found this article interesting.

The author points out those businesses with fewer than 20 employees account for 25 percent of all jobs, and that these same small businesses created 40 percent of the job growth during the 2003 to 2007 economic expansion. I know that our Silkin clients had something to do with that because, as they learned to become effective managers, their productivity grew and the need for more staff increased in order to keep up with the increased productivity. Expansion for our clients is the primary goal of Silkin Management Group and, as consultants, that’s what we are expected to produce. With that viewpoint, I fully back any ideas and methods to help small businesses and that’s why this article caught my attention.

But reading further through the article I found some seriously strange concepts. I thought it was a positive note to promote the concept of making it easier for small business to obtain needed credit, and the author discusses why this is still very difficult, despite the President’s recent statements otherwise. But then the author puts out some concepts that frankly seemed strange including refunds for taxes paid in the past in exchange for higher taxes in the future and work share programs paid for by the government. Interesting ideas, but where does the money come from to pay for all this? He doesn’t say anything about this.

At Silkin Management Group we try to teach our clients fiscal responsibility. This would include the very basic idea of not spending more than you make and running very tight budgetary controls. These are not esoteric management concepts. The Silkin clients who apply these basic principals do well financially. The government, and many economists who write columns such as this one, don’t seem to think that such a basic concept has anything to do with government.

You know as well as I do that if you keep spending more than you make, and you keep borrowing and borrowing money, it will catch up with you and take you out. Why would this be any different for the government, other than the fact that they can print as much money as they want in order to have the money needed? But that activity just leads to inflation. All you have to do is look at the price of any commodity 50 years ago compared to today to see the truth of that.

So, as a management consultant for small business at Silkin Management Group, I appreciate the author’s concern for small business. But I also must express that any help must follow basic and workable management technology and not include more and more borrowing, more and more inflationary activities and less and less fiscal responsibility.

I’d love to hear your opinion about this article and my point of view on it.

For more information about Silkin Management Group, visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com or email us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

Bill Hickey
Silkin Management Group Consultant

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