Adrienne Burke

    Blogger/Writer, Yahoo! Small Business

    Adrienne Burke has been editing and writing for B2B publications since 1993.

  • How to Get More Business Loans to Women: Bill or Business Model?

    Following an analysis by her committee that found that, despite owning 30 percent of small businesses, women account for only 4.4 percent of the total dollars in small-business loans, and win only 17 percent of the total number of all SBA-backed loans, Washington Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell introduced a bill bent on changing those stats. [...]

  • New Platform Takes Pain Out of SBA Loan Process

    Most owners of young small businesses—10 years old or less—have never applied for a business loan. The reasons are many, according to results of a Sageworks survey released earlier this year: they didn’t want to take on debt, they didn’t think they’d be approved, the credit cost was too high, or the application process was [...]

  • The App That’s Revolutionizing Wholesale Fashion Sales

    As owner of a women’s clothing boutique in Charlottesville, Va., Audrey Lewis is familiar with the wholesale fashion buying drill: Jet up to New York City for Fashion Market Week every February and September; visit designers’ showrooms, the D&A show, and the Coterie show at the Javits Center; take copious notes, jot down style numbers, [...]

  • Federal Agencies’ Small Business Contracting Milestone Questioned

    Earlier this month the Yahoo! Small Business Advisor Profit Minded Blog reported here on an apparently momentous achievement the Small Business Administration had announced: "For the first time in eight years, the federal government has achieved its goal to award at least 23 percent of all federal contracts to small businesses ... Just over 23 [...]

  • Small Biz Group Will Hold Politicians Accountable to Main Street

    Championing Main Street America is a favorite pastime of campaigning politicians, but small business owners know that few elected officials walk the talk. This election season, there's a meter for measuring the small-biz BS. The National Federation of Independent Business this week announced its “Vote for Main Street” program. The Republican-leaning advocacy group says it [...]

  • Entrepreneurs Say They Will Vote for Change in November

    When midterm election day arrives 1o weeks from now, most small business owners will be going to the polls with the economy on their minds and a vote against their current elected officials. Only 19 percent intend to vote for incumbents. An online survey that the virtual small business community Manta conducted of 1,511 of [...]

  • An E-Commerce Pioneer Addresses Modern Merchants’ Pain Points

    Manish Chowdhary was an e-commerce pioneer in 1997 when he started developing websites for retailers in his University of Bridgeport dorm room. Today he’s at the helm of GoECart, a company that offers software solutions to small and medium businesses who make online sales. Asked if he ever imagined in 1997 what the e-commerce world [...]

  • How Your Boutique Could Do Multichannel Commerce As Well As JCPenney

    It was the very early days of e-commerce when Manish Chowdhary and a few of his fellow University of Bridgeport computer engineering majors began earning income building custom business websites in their dorm rooms. Many of the features they were developing could be re-used, so they put them into an off-the-shelf software package to save [...]

  • He Makes a Living Making Howard Stern’s Underwear

    Tom Patterson, a former small-town South Dakota high school football star, is building an underwear empire in NYC’s fashion district. It all started with being really annoyed by his undershirts. Working as a medical device salesman after graduating from Arizona State University, Patterson wore a suit and tie every day. “My undershirts constantly came untucked, [...]

  • Get Paid Like an Expert, Even If You’re Not One

    So, you’re self-employed. Maybe you’re an architect, a carpet cleaner, a landscaper, or a wedding planner. Could your business be doing better if you were known to be top in your field, niche, or region? Debbie Allen says the key to succeeding in a fiercely competitive marketplace is to “position yourself as the go-to authority [...]

  • They Bet Their Bar Mitzvah Money on Bicycles

    Michael Fishman and his colleagues caught the business bug as seniors in college four years ago. He was taking an entrepreneurship course at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and, he says, “looking to start a business doing anything.” Inspiration struck when Fishman and Austin Stoffers, a fellow Los Angeles transplant in Madison, went shopping for [...]

  • How to Market Your Brand with Your Customers’ Images

    Apu Gupta is CEO of Curalate, a two-year-old Philadelphia company that helps major brands make sense of and leverage social media sites such as Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. Neiman Marcus, GAP, Rebecca Minkoff, Starkist, and Under Armour are among the 450 brands that benefit from Curalate’s “smarter marketing through imagery” approach. Software developed by [...]

  • 20 Federal Agencies Get an “A” for Small Business Contracting

    For the first time in eight years, the federal government has achieved its goal to award at least 23 percent of all federal contracts to small businesses, SBA announced yesterday. Just over 23 percent of contracts, accounting for $83.1 billion, were awarded to small businesses in 2013. Of 24 federal agencies, only 4 failed to [...]

  • JetLux Offers Corporate-Style Travel Perks to Small Business

    If you’re a road warrior who left the corporate world to run your own show, you know what a comedown business travel on your own dime is. No more relying on the company travel agent to book you into a classy place at the corporate rate. Now you’re comparison shopping hotel deals online, torn between [...]

  • Has Your Cash Register Joined the 21st Century Yet?

    Remember the mechanical cash register? In the machine’s heyday NCR, the National Cash Register Company, controlled more than 90 percent of the market. In its 130-year history, NCR has seen the birth of the electric-motor-powered cash register, perfected the liquid crystal display, and commercialized the first bar-code scanners. As retailers moved from registers to PCs [...]

  • Learn How, and Why, to Reinvent Your Business

    A book that promises the “keys to success for any startup, entrepreneur, or family business,” sounds too good to be true. But the high praise that some leading entrepreneurs are lavishing on Invent Reinvent Thrive, by consultant and entrepreneurship professor Lloyd Shefsky, indicates the subtitle is no exaggeration—and that the key lies in the title's [...]

  • Prize Lets Business Save More Pets from the Pound

    When pet shop owner Krista Milito learned about the ShopKeep “Small Business, Big Ideas” contest that we reported on here in May, she thought winning was a long shot. But as a dog trainer who has saved many an uncontrollable family pet from the pound, and as owner of a profitable business that started at [...]

  • 4 Ways to Make Your Website Work for Your Business

    As the product designer for EasyPost and past CTO of Vintacom Media Group, Sawyer Bateman has expertise creating websites that enable startups and other small businesses to scale quickly. In particular, he’s a proponent of building sites that all but eliminate the need for “live” customer service by incorporating self-service functionality. Bateman’s design of the [...]

  • Few Small Business Employees Are Happy with Benefits

    As the boss at a small business, how important do you believe benefits are to your employees’ happiness? There’s a good chance you’re underestimating. In a recent survey of nearly 600 benefits decision makers at small companies, only 44 percent said they believe benefits are extremely or very influential on job satisfaction. Even fewer believed [...]

  • Is Your State a Friend to Your Business?

    I had just ordered a latte in the popular and pristine Cool Beans Cafe in Narragansett, Rhode Island, one morning last summer when an unidentified man entered the shop, stepped brusquely behind the counter, shoved a thermometer in a plate of egg frittatas, and demanded to know when they’d been baked. The baristas, who had [...]