Journalism Ethics and the Ethicist

Given the fast-moving and utterly weird story of the former general, the biographer, the shirtless F.B.I. agent, the other woman and the other general, you may not remember that just a few days ago an intriguing rumor was circulating about The New York Times Magazine column known as the Ethicist.

Without any evidence, many prominent media outlets â€" from The Atlantic Wire to New York magazine - were speculating that Paula Broadwell's husband was the person who had written a letter to that weekly advice column last summer, concerned about his wife's extramarital affair with David H. Petraeus, the former general and now former C.I.A. director.

Twitter was abuzz, too. How delicious, the notion went, that a situation so fraught with high-level figures would have been treated in an advice column to a newspaper months before.

Then came a definitive-sounding Twitter message from the magazine's editor, Hugo Lindgren. The rumor had be en fact-checked and it was false, he said. This was duly sent around the globe in further Twitter messages, and the rumor died a relatively quiet death.

Some readers (and a blogger for The New Republic) have questioned this move. One reader, Lou Kramberg, was among them. He wrote to me:

A New York Times editor has denied that a letter to the Ethicist last summer was sent by the husband of the woman accused of having an affair with General Petraeus. The sender requested that his name be withheld and it was withheld by the Ethicist. Let us assume that the letter was indeed sent by another husband and let us suppose that a similar incident occurs in the future. Only this time, the letter writer is indeed the husband of the accused woman. Any response other than a false denial would be in violation of the wishes of the writer to have their name withheld. Wouldn't it have been better in the Petraeus situation for The Times to have stated that they would no t ask the Ethicist who wrote the letter as a matter of confidentiality and leave it at that?

As Jeff Winkler wrote online for The New Republic:

Did the editor reveal exactly who the person in the July 13 column was? No. But he did reveal who it wasn't. That seems like a deal breaker of the trust that reader-submitters have when writing to advice columnists. Unless the advisee expressly offers details about their life, it seems the adviser should have no comment on any such matters. Even if the detail is a non-revelation, it's still a revelation. And, without putting too fine a point on it, the non-announcement sets a terrible precedent. Should a similar situation involving the anonymity of advice column patients happen again, people will demand confirmation of identity - and assume that the editor's silence means they are on the right track.

I asked both Mr. Lindgren and The Times's standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, about the denial. Both said that the decision was a carefully considered one, and one that they had discussed with Dean Baquet, a managing editor.

“The point of my denial on Twitter was to provide accurate information,” Mr. Lindgren said. “There was a great deal of speculation out there that this letter had been written by Paula Broadwell's husband, and since we had good reason to believe that wasn't true, I said so.”

As for what might happen in the future, both editors said that it's hard to address a hypothetical situation.

“We'd do our best to provide accurate information while respecting the confidentiality of those to whom it has been promised,” Mr. Lindgren said.

Mr. Corbett said: “It's tricky. This is an unusual situation and it's difficult to extrapolate.”

There are competing journalistic values here. Accuracy is important. So is confidentiality.

Does this in any way suggest that The Times won't protect its news sou rces? No. A person who writes to an advice columnist expects not to have his or her name revealed but is, as Mr. Corbett noted, “not a confidential source in the classic sense.”

The editors did not reveal an identity, or make any promises about what they would do in a future situation.

They chose to quell a rumor for the sake of accuracy, and without breaking trust with the letter-writer.

It's a close call. The opposing argument has merit, particularly because the editors' decision may seem to set a precedent. But, given the specifics of this situation, I think that Times editors made a reasonable decision.

Grow America\'s Unusual Approach to Spurring New Ventures and Creating Jobs

Alan Hall, standing in striped suit, at a Grow America competition.

When Alan Hall saw a hardworking neighbor fall asleep at­ a meeting, he knew something was wrong. The man, Mr. Hall learned, had been laid off and taken on three new jobs â€" newspaper delivery in the morning, accounting in the afternoon, managing a convenience store by night â€" to support his family.

“He was barely keeping his nose above water,” said Mr. Hall, a co-founder and managing director of Mercato Partners, an investment firm. So Mr. Hall asked a company in which he is an angel investor to hire the man, who holds an M.B.A., and offered to cover his starting salary. More than a year later, his neighbor is still at work and thriving.

Mr. Hall said the experience made him wonder: “How many millions of Americans in the United States today are unemployed or underemployed and going through the same stress that Phil was? What can I do to help?” With a windfall behind him â€" Mr. Hall had sold MarketStar, a global sales and marketing firm he founded, to the Omnicom Group in 1999 â€" he'd also amassed the resources to attempt a solution.

In March, Mr. Hall unveiled a new company, Grow America, with the stated mission of creating jobs by spurring entrepreneurship and bolstering new ventures. Mr. Hall's program doesn't invest money in companies; it gives them money. A pilot program, now underway in Utah, is on track to give away $1 million in cash and services through a series of pitch competitions culminating in January. At that time, Mr. Hall says he intends to expand his contests â€" along with mentoring, marketin g and networking help â€" across the country.

“Our goal is to help 100,000 businesses next year, with the idea that they all grow and hire employees,” Mr. Hall said, adding that his competitions will be open to ventures across all industries, so long as they're at one of three stages: initial idea, start-up or ready to grow. As for the program's potential success, he added, “I will measure it in how many people now work who didn't before.” We caught up with him to ask a few questions:

Q.

Tell us about your plans.

A.

This January, we're launching our national initiative with an online competition. We'll invite people from around the country who have ideas for start-ups, along with founders of new and growth-stage companies, to participate as contestants. We'll give away $4,000 to a single company every two weeks to get the ball rolling. That totals $100,000 a year.

If the time comes when we're a ble to encourage sponsors and our numbers go up, then we would clearly start to do more, with cash around various categories.

The money we give away is really just a token, but it gets people introduced to the other things Grow America can provide.

Q.

What else can you offer?

A.

There are three other areas where we can help: mentoring, marketing and networking. The entrepreneurs we work with, they all want advice, they want counsel. They want someone to tell them what the right next steps are and how to avoid pitfalls. They like to share experiences and to talk with one another.

We've also developed an online platform for entrepreneurs to gather insight, information, knowledge that helps them with the various steps of their business. We'll have podcasts for them, webinars of all sorts.

Q.

Grow America is a for-profit firm, but you're giving away money, rather than investi ng it. How does that work?

A.

I'm coupling philanthropy with capitalism, which I believe are the two most powerful engines that move things along in the economy. In this case, I give money to companies and seek no return whatsoever. It sounds strange. But the idea is that, when I give money away, somehow I make money on the other side more abundantly. It's almost a scriptural thing for me.

Q.

How will Grow America make money?

A.

We'll invite sponsors to join us. It's good P.R. for them. They believe in the vision and, obviously, at some point in time they might be able to help some of the entrepreneurs with their products and services.

Beyond my money, let's say we have a sponsor, like a Microsoft, an Intel, a bank, whoever. We would be taking a portion of those sponsor dollars, applying them back to overhead, then applying the rest to the competition awards, with the hope that , at the end, there's a small profit so we can maintain what we're doing. But we're giving most of that money away.

Q.

Have you tried anything like this before?

A.

For the last six years, we've offered a program here in Utah called Grow Utah, holding contests and educating entrepreneurs, and those things have been very successful. We did that in every community here in the state. We've seen 7,000 new people employed and more being hired because of that initiative. Utah is a small state, but seven thousand is a pretty good jump in a state like this. I thought, “Let's take this Grow Utah model and put it on steroids.”

The Utah program was funded with my money coupled with sponsor money; the other sponsor here locally has been Zions Bank. For each of the past last six years, it's been about a half a million - split between the two of us - per year. So about $3 million, or $1.5 apiece.

Q.

Is there a company you've funded so far that stands out to you?

A.

Keep in mind: I don't vote. I don't judge. I don't do anything. I just hand out money. But one company we've funded that I thought was singular was CompleteSpeech. It makes a speech-therapy device that allows immediate, visual feedback on how to pronounce the right sound. It's obviously a company that can be profitable, but here they are helping people with speech impediments in a most miraculous way.

They're going to price the device so any family in the United States could have it, any therapist could have it. We were just pleased as can be to give them $100,000 to move their company forward. They're now in the process of adding people and putting dollars into their marketing efforts. They already have customers - they just needed additional staff to ramp up.

Q.

Will you still be able to seed it at a national scale?

A.

No, no. I wish I were John Rockefeller. My piece will be much more modest compared to what others will give. I'm still part of it, but my end goal is to find others who are like-minded and want to keep this initiative going for the good of the country.

We're making what we call thousands of small bets. We don't know which businesses are really going to take off. We're saying, “We don't know who will succeed, but let nature take its course. When someone takes off and starts hiring people? Happy day.” We have to get as many people into the pipeline as we possibly can, connect them with resources. We believe if we get everybody thinking about this and working on it, something good will come of it.

You can follow Jessica Bruder on Twitter.

As Mark Thompson Starts New Job, the BBC\'s Implosion Is Felt in New York

When Mark Thompson started his job on Monday as president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, a British television network was there to capture the moment.

Responding to a shouted question, Mr. Thompson stopped briefly, standing under The Times's logo, to say on camera that he's very saddened by the events at the BBC, which is imploding in the aftermath of a child sex-abuse scandal and cover-up. And he repeated that nothing that has happened there, where he was director general and editor in chief, for the past eight years, should have an impact on his mission at The New York Times.

I wrote on this topic on Oct. 23, urging The Times to report aggressively on Mr. Thompson's role in the BBC's troubles. On Oct. 25, I noted that such an effort was already under way. Times top editors had sent Matthew Purdy, the head of The Times's investigative reporting team, to London to join the efforts of bureau reporters there and media reporters in New York.

Since that time, more than a dozen staff-written articles have appeared in The Times, most notably one by Mr. Purdy on Nov. 5 on the Business Day front, with the headline “As Scandal Flared, BBC's Leaders Missed Red Flags.”

I've been reading them carefully, as I have everything on this subject from other news organizations. Although Mr. Thompson's role is on the business side of The Times, his tenure here cannot help but have a profound, if indirect, effect on its journalism.

My conclusion is that The Times has pulled no punches in reporting on Mr. Thompson's role and on the wider BBC story. And that's not always easy.

I asked Mr. Purdy about the difficulties of reporting on a story that involves one's own employer. He said:

Obviously there are all sorts of potential sensitivities and complications when writing about your own company. And this story had an extra level of complication since it was a bout events that happened elsewhere but involved our incoming C.E.O. But I put all that aside and reported it like any other story. I did not see it as an internal investigation, since the Jimmy Savile case didn't happen at The Times, or The Times's official take on Mark Thompson, but as a story that tried to explored what Thompson did or didn't do as the Savile scandal unfolded and also to put it in the context of his time as director general of the BBC.

Mr. Purdy told me that there was “a lot of interest” from top editors like Jill Abramson and Dean Baquet but “no interference.” Mr. Purdy declined to comment on whether his reporting is concluded, but said The Times is clearly continuing to cover the events at the BBC.

What was turned up? Nothing close to a smoking gun â€" certainly no evidence or even a hint that Mr. Thompson pulled the plug on or covered up an investigation.

Most notable were two conclusions:

â€" That, as ed itor in chief, as well as director general â€" Mr. Thompson probably should have known what was happening within his organization, and that he had multiple opportunities to gain that knowledge. A Times story that appeared in the Oct. 25 print edition quoted a former BBC producer and current member of Parliament, Roger Gale, saying that Mr. Thompson was well paid “to, apparently, not know what was going on under his own roof.”

â€" That Mr. Thompson's depiction of when and how he learned about the “NewsNight” investigation has “evolved.” That is, he started out saying he had no knowledge about a pulled NewsNight investigation of claims about Mr. Savile's child abuse; he later said that he had heard something about it, but never pursued deeper knowledge of it.

I asked The Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., on Monday if he believed his newspaper had reported thoroughly and well on Mr. Thompson.

“Absolutely,” he wrote in an e-mail. “ Mark thinks so, too, by the way.”

Nothing in that reporting changed his mind; his support for Mr. Thompson has not wavered and continued in an e-mail to Times staff members Monday.

Mr. Sulzberger wrote:

We welcome him at a time of tremendous change and challenge, which must be met with equal focus and innovation. Mark will lead us as we continue our digital transformation, bolster our international growth, drive our productivity and introduce new technologies that will help us become better storytellers and enrich the experience for our readers and viewers. That is what he did as director general of the BBC.

The challenges at The Times are very real, as they are throughout journalism. Failing to meet them could damage one of the world's great news organizations at a critical time. It's safe to say that everyone here â€" from The Times's board of directors to the mail clerks - hopes that Mr. Sulzberger's faith in Mr. Thomp son will be rewarded.

But here's the twist: The same global and digital media explosion that Mr. Thompson must lead has conspired to shrink the universe. Even as Mr. Thompson came to work, a headline on The Times's home page described those he left behind: “BBC Fallout Spreads as More Executives Step Aside.”

The world is smaller now. What happens in London reverberates in New York. And the chaos at the BBC â€" in which many of the people Mr. Thompson has supervised stepped aside as recently as this past weekend - feels uncomfortably close to home.

Will Higher Taxes Affect Small Businesses? You Tell Us

President Obama may have won a decisive reelection victory, but it is John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, who is making the rounds and claiming a mandate. And everywhere he goes, he's talking about what would happen to small businesses if the Bush-era tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans are allowed to expire. To ABC News's Diane Sawyer, Mr. Boehner said, “Raising taxes on small-business people is the wrong prescription given where our economy is.” He told USA Today, “Raising taxes on small businesses will kill jobs in America. It is as simple as that.”

In a statement to reporters the day after the election, Mr. Boehner made what some observers described as a concession: House Republicans would consider new revenue as part of a deal to avert the “fiscal cliff.” But he then explained that the new revenue could not come from higher tax rates. “In the New Testament, a parable is told of two men. One built his house on sand; the other built h is house on rock,” he said. “The foundation of our country's economy - the rock of our economy - has always been small businesses in the private sector. I ran one of those small businesses, and I can tell you: raising small businesses' taxes means they don't grow.”

To support the claim, Mr. Boehner turned to the same controversial Ernst & Young study on which Mitt Romney relied in the first presidential debate in Denver.

Of course, this view is no less controversial now than it was at the time of that debate. Since the debate, we've learned about a September report (pdf) from the nonpartisan, and respected, Congressional Research Service, which surveyed the historical record and found that “the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth” - but “appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.” The Congressional Research Service withdrew the report after Republican senators complained.

Then, last week, a report from the Congressional Budget Office seemed to suggest that raising the tax rates on the wealthiest Americans would have little effect on economic output in the fourth quarter of 2013.* Extending the top tax rates would cost the economy 200,000 jobs, according to the C.B.O., an estimate well below the 700,000 jobs that Ernst & Young predicted would be lost. In fact, the C.B.O. figures show that while raising taxes (on everybody) amounts to about two-thirds of the total deficit reduction in 2013, it has a much smaller effect on gross domestic product, the measurement for output. (The C.B.O. report relies in part on economic modeling, much like the Ernst & Young study, meaning that the C.B.O.'s assumptions about the relationship between taxes and economic output informed the results.)

And Agenda readers who own small businesses have weighed in as w ell. Jed Horovitz in New Jersey wrote, “Each year, I decide how much money to re-invest in my company and how much to take out. Because I pay taxes on my profit, I always look for productive ways to invest in my company first. Spending pretax money makes sense. If my taxes were lower, I would take more money out and just put it in the bank.”

Carol Gillen, who described herself as “the wife and bookkeeper of a small-business owner” in New York, said, “Demand drives hiring, not the personal income tax of the owner.”

But The Agenda would like to hear from more business owners. We want to take a close look at how you and your companies would be affected by increasing the top tax rates, including how it might affect hiring and investment plans. It would be an intensive profile - we would want to talk through specifics on revenue, income, taxes and investments. (We have made the same request to the National Federation of Independent Business and the S Corpo ration Association of America, both of which strongly oppose any income tax increase.)

It's a lot to ask, we know, but it's an important issue. If you own such a company and have employees - making you a job-creator - and you're game, please drop us a line to let us know you're interested.

*More precisely, the C.B.O. report said that extending all of the Bush tax cuts and fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax so that it does not reach deeper into the middle class would add about 1.4 percent to the nation's gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2013. Meanwhile, fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax and extending all of the Bush tax cuts except for wealthier Americans would add about 1.3 percent to G.D.P., so the additional G.D.P. attributed to extending the tax cuts for the top two tax brackets amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent.

This Week in Small Business: Now What?

What's affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.

The Election: A Second Term

President Obama wins but Nate Silver wins bigger. Here is one voter who's definitely happy! Roseanne places fifth. Small-business owners are divided, and stocks plunge 300 points the next day. Small-business experts weigh in on Mr. Obama's second term. J.D. Harrison lists five things the election will mean for small businesses. J. Jennings Moss says the re-election will bring opportunities for entrepreneurs. Michael Gowan lists five technology initiatives for the second term, and here is what's next for Obamacare. Rich Miller and Steve Matthews say the economy is set for better times, and Ezra Klein says America could have survived with either Mitt Romney or Mr. Obama as president. Roger Johnston explains how he hacked an electronic voting machine, and dead candidates win elections in Florida and Alabama. Mark Cuban says, “you would think that the cand idate with the most business experience would be best prepared to build a national organization that ran like clockwork and made the final difference in the election. You would be wrong.” Amanda MacArthur explains how some small businesses took advantage of election marketing for foot traffic. A coal company lays off workers and blames the president. This is now the most retweeted tweet ever.

Sandy: How Your Business Can Help

Bank of America projects small-business customers will need $2.5 billion to recover from Hurricane Sandy. This is how your business can help the storm victims. Jerry Seinfeld reaches out to those affected. The Internal Revenue Service extends payment and filing deadlines for companies in the disaster zone. (Don't get too weepy: it also plans to step up its small-business audits in 2013.) Here is where business is brisk after the storm. Laurie Kulikowski explains how small businesses and social media saved her town: “the resiliency I've s een over the past week by local businesses has been uplifting, especially as the nation talks about the fragility of our small-business economy and how important hiring and supporting these businesses is during a difficult economy.” The Small Business Administration hosts a webinar on how to prepare for the winter. Employers struggle with how to pay people who missed work.

The Economy: Odds of Recession?

For the first time in nine years, McDonald's same-store sales fall. The editors at Global Economic Intersection are concerned about the worsening geopolitical system, and the staff at Der Spiegel thinks America is in decline. Cullen Roche puts the odds of recession at 100 percent. Stan Collender thinks the 2013 budget debate will be “a train wreck.” Growth in the service sector slows and Suzuki ends car sales in the United States. Earnings season is ugly all around. The trucking industry continues to have driver shortage proble ms (pdf). But gas prices continue to drop and the National Retail Federation reports that small businesses are expecting better holiday sales. Bankruptcy filings are down.

Management: Ready to Export?

Coffee shops might do better if they just used plain English. Chuck Pagano gives an inspiring speech. David Heinemeier Hansson says that in order to “follow the goal creep” you must set small goals. Giuseppe Colombi offers five qualities of a successful microbusiness owner, including “the ability to identify qualities in others.” John A. Lizotte offers six steps to assess whether your small business is ready to export, and Jeff Haden shares seven tips for finding a great overseas supplier. A small printing company suggests 11 essential movies for entrepreneurs, and this video condenses the top 250 movies into two and a half minutes. A business owner has a wrenching battle with Sears.

Finance: Firing Your Accountant

A study finds credit has improv ed for small-business owners. Richard Branson has thoughts on how to delegate control of your finances: “There's no better way to do that than through personal visits to staff and customers.” Debbie Dragon explains when to fire your accountant. Here are a few thoughts on when it is time to buy second-hand or surplus equipment. Here is what you need to know about crowdfunding. Christopher Null explains six Kickstarter nightmares and how to prevent them. Bonuses on Wall Street head up. Google Ventures increases its funds.

Mobile, Text and E-Mail: A Sneaky Trick

With enterprises equipping employees for mobile work, sales of smartphones and tablets will surpass the one billion mark in 2013, according to Gartner Research. New research indicates that mobile local ad revenues will grow to $5.8 billion in 2016 from $664 million in 2011. Google's Osama Bedier explains why the digital wallet is key to the marketplace, and Square is now accepting payments for Starbucks lattes. Here are five ways to track calls generated by mobile ads. Matthew Johnson argues that when done properly, text-message marketing can work for your customers. Josh Grillo has a sneaky trick for making e-mails stand out in a crowded in-box. Here are some great ways to use photos in e-mails to get more subscriber action.

Social Media: Viral Video

Here are 11 “shocking” social media statistics. Siobhan Baranian explains what happens when companies don't use social media in a professional way, and here's some advice on creating a social media policy for your company. Here are seven lessons in creating a truly social business. Chris Marentis thinks that you can increase your fan base exponentially with Facebook's promoted and sponsored stories. This spoof of viral videos went viral, and it seems as if Google's “House View” may be going too far! Philip Nowak explains how to manage Klout scores. Here are 20 content marketing lessons from Jimi Hendr ix. Paige Arnof-Fenn shares some secrets for content branding.

Sales and Marketing: Gerber Babies Meet

John Jantsch has a three-step approach for finding profitable clients. Misty Young says this is the second easiest customer to acquire. Ilana Rabinowitz says her favorite “Mad Men” clip explains “why we do marketing.” Ashley Furness shares the secret to Ritz-Carlton's customer-service mojo. A marketing company suggests that e-books should be part of your marketing strategy. The oldest and newest Gerber baby meet each other (neither one would want to mess with this baby).

Around the Country: A Favorite Small Business

Valpak looks for North America's favorite small business. Cloud-based VoIP provider Phonebooth plans to award $20,000 to the most innovative small business. Skype introduces a small-business community. Here's why a Dutch start-up chose to make its home in New York. Staples plans to become Amazon's national “locker room.” This is your official unofficial holiday calendar.

Around the World: Grinding to a Halt

This is Global Entrepreneurship Week, and the president proclaims November National Entrepreneurship Month. Factory orders slump in Germany. The service sectors in China (pdf) and Britain expand at a weaker pace. Athens grinds to a halt. Here is everything you need to know about China's mysterious leadership transition. Nestlé predicts that 50 percent of its sales will come from emerging markets. Miami, Dubai and London are among the top global cities enjoying double-digit property appreciation.

Technology: Tablet Wars

A paperlike display can show video, and a Twitter-activated vending machine wows the crowds. Here are five strange scientific breakthroughs to make you think. Researchers at Rice University and Lockheed Martin may have developed a low-cost method of creating longer-lasting, high-capacity lithium-ion batteries. Many small businesses are willing to d ump their iPads and Android tablets for the Surface as competitors challenge Apple's grip on the tablet market. Gizmag has a good tablet comparison guide. Pearlie Davis shares a few awesome smart phone apps for entrepreneurs and small businesses. PC Magazine updates its list of the 100 best iPad apps. More small businesses are tapping into the cloud for efficiency. Jonathan Feldman has ways to survive the coming I.T. apocalypse.

Tweets of the Week

‏@KnowledgeBishop If today's customer has a question, they don't visit your website, they search Google.

@gitomer: It's not about right or wrong - it's how you react to and handle the problem

@mikevanhorn: Growth killing attitude: “I need skilled employees,” but “I'm afraid I'm training my own competition.”

Bests of the Week

Mark Tho ma warns that Hurricane Sandy is testing our resolve to preserve capitalism: “If inequality and the economic and political power that come with it continue to grow, the belief that capitalism is unfair could become widespread. This, in turn, could bring about the kinds of changes to the market system that free-market advocates fear so much.”

Mike Myatt explains five things every leader should know to preserve his or her span of control: “Don't focus on the team you inherit, focus on the team you need - if they happen to be one and the same, consider yourself lucky. Are you looking for doers, thinkers or teachers? Do you want to build a team of tactical geniuses, or brilliant strategists, or sage mentors? Compromise has its place, but not where matters of talent are concerned.”

This Week's Question: Would you buy a Surface?

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. Y ou can follow him on Twitter.

Could the Inventor of the Bionic Wrench Have Avoided This Fight?

John Gress for The New York Tim Dan Brown, inventor of the Bionic Wrench.

The Times has published an article detailing how Dan Brown, inventor of the Bionic Wrench, wound up in a patent dispute with Sears, which has introduced a competing product, the Max Access.

As the article explains, the tools have one significant difference:

The Bionic Wrench is made in the United States. The Max Axess wrench is made in China.

The shift at Sears from a tool invented and manufactured in the United States to a very similar one made offshore has already led to a loss of American jobs and a brewing patent battle.

The story of the Bionic Wrench versus Craftsm an, which bills itself as “America's most trusted tool brand,” also raises questions about how much entrepreneurs and innovators, who rely on the country's intellectual property laws, can protect themselves. For the little guy, court battles are inevitably time-consuming and costly, no matter the outcome.

The article goes on to explain that sales of the Bionic Wrench took off after Mr. Brown got Sears to do a test sale. After the test sold out, Sears ordered 75,000 wrenches the next year - and Mr. Brown agreed not to sell his wrench to Home Depot or Lowe's.

Please read the story - and then tell us if you think there is anything Mr. Brown, who teaches industrial design at Northwestern University, might have done differently to protect his product.

Your Ideas Are Worthless

In a recent post, I wrote about my belief that ideas had no value and that it wasn't worth anyone's time to protect a business idea. It's a notion I have been talking about for some time, but it is a controversial concept that often provokes strong disagreement. That disagreement, I think, stems from a misunderstanding of what an idea really is - or at least what I deem an idea to be.

Let me try to clarify. I received a comment asking that if I really thought ideas were worthless, why did I bother to copyright my book, “The Entrepreneur Equation“? The answer is simple. I didn't protect the idea of the book; I protected the final work product - postexecution.

I didn't try to copyright my original idea for writing a book around the framework of evaluating the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship. The reality is that I wouldn't have been able to do so - that idea cannot be protected. Furthermore, I didn't keep the idea a secret f or fear that someone else would write the same book. I shared with many people what I was doing to get feedback and to create accountability for me to finish it. I had individuals, some paid, some just helping, review early drafts to make the book stronger. Only after writing the 80,000-plus words and then revising, editing and packaging it into a final product did I seek protection. But I wasn't protecting my idea; I was protecting my execution, my work product.

If you create something of value that can be protected and it makes sense to protect it (i.e. the cost of protecting it makes sense in relation to the amount of money you believe that you can generate from that work product), then do it. But there's a big difference between protecting a concept for a new business and protecting a highly differentiated methodology that you have perfected over a period of years.

In my article, I wrote that Google wasn't the first search engine and that the idea for its sea rch engine didn't need to be protected. One response was, well, what about Google's algorithm? So, here's the nuance:

• Google comes up with the idea for a faster, more focused search engine with better results - that is an idea, and it's not worth protecting.
• Google has an idea to create an algorithm to perform that more focused search - that is an idea and it's still not worth protecting.
• Google spends time and capital resources writing and producing an algorithm that changes the way search is done. This is no longer an idea; this is work product that IS worth protecting.

Copyrights, patents, trademarks and other forms of intellectual property protection are important.  As I said when Apple went to court to sue Samsung, intellectual property protection gives entrepreneurs the confidence to invest in innovation. Again, however, it comes down to execution, not ideas. Your idea for a television show isn't something to protect; your scrip t for the pilot episode might be. Your idea for shoes that can fly can be bantered about, but if you create those shoes, you definitely want to patent them.

Intellectual property protection can be valuable and worthwhile, but protecting your business ideas is not. It can even be counterproductive.

Carol Roth is a business strategist who has helped clients raise more than $1 billion in capital. You can follow her on Twitter.

More Detail on Why The Times Called the Presidential Election Later

In a post Wednesday, I noted that The Times took longer than most other major news outlets to declare the winner of the presidential election.

Rich Meislin, who is the other half of the “decision desk,” along with the associate managing editor Janet Elder, wrote to me Thursday providing this more detailed explanation of the Times's process.

Mr. Meislin, a consultant to The Times, was editor of news surveys and election analysis from 2003 to 2005, and he has been part of the decision team for the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

He wrote:

A bit of additional insight might be useful about our decision to call the race for President Obama later than the networks and The Associated Press. It was rooted in our lack of certainty about the result in Ohio, which pushed President Obama over the 270 electoral vote mark for the television networks beginning around 11:15 p.m.

First, some background: T he major television networks and The Associated Press are members of the National Election Pool, a consortium that shares the very high cost of conducting exit polls and collecting real vote counts from polling places across the country. The work of gathering and managing this information has been coordinated since 2003 by Edison Research, a survey and analytics firm.

News organizations other than the networks and A.P. subscribe to Edison's work, which provides us with exit poll data as well as guidance, based on Edison's own analysis, on when the winner in a state is ready to be called. The network members of the consortium and The A.P. have an information advantage over subscribers: they receive early access to exit poll results, faster real vote tallies and additional information on voting in key precincts that subscribers do not. This allows them to develop their own models to predict the outcomes in the states that are more sophisticated than subscribers like The Times can create with their more limited data.

We are cautious in our calls. We make our decisions based on a combination of sources: the exit polls, when they are decisive; the actual votes that are being reported compared with the historical performance in counties; the experience of our political staff; and the judgments of Edison's analysts and The Associated Press, which also has access to the expanded data. In the case of Ohio, the exit polls showed a very close race, and so did the real vote counts. The patterns we saw led us to believe Mr. Obama would win Ohio, but not with enough certainty that we felt comfortable to make a call when the networks did. (Indeed, the real vote total in Ohio tightened quite a bit for a while after the network calls before loosening again.) Edison also held back, even with the advantage of its data models, and that increased our caution; Edison ultimately called Ohio at 12:55 a.m.

In the meantime, we began seeing enough resul ts from Virginia, Colorado, Wisconsin and Nevada to allow us to call an Obama victory. (An advantage on Virginia came from Michael Shear, who was able to read the county results with the background of having covered the state for many years as a Washington Post reporter; we called Virginia well before the networks and A.P.)

And until we were able to make our own call, we told our readers that the networks had called the race, which we thought struck the right balance between keeping readers informed and being sure we had it right.

The Technologies That Got Them Through the Storm

Earl Wilson for The New York Times Alexandra Mayzler

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, She Owns It business group members gathered to talk about how they fared. They also shared lessons learned from this, and past, disasters.

A group member, Alexandra Mayzler, who owns Thinking Caps Tutoring, said the storm forced her to cancel tutoring sessions during a busy week when students are typically studying for the Independent School Entrance Exam and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. To the extent possible, she offered substitute tutors and conducted sessions by Skype, but Thinking Caps is still playing catch-up this week.

The storm reminded her that her New York business relies on public transpor tation, a fact that was driven home several years ago when a snowstorm closed city subways. Back then, her tutors and the parents of Thinking Caps' students were confused and frustrated. With no plan for inclement weather, no one knew what was expected or how to proceed.

After that storm, Ms. Mayzler created a plan. It states that under certain circumstances - for example, if the subway system or schools are closed - expectations of tutors will be limited. “When we wrote it, we thought we'd never have to use it again,” she said - but it has repeatedly proven valuable. And she believes it helped manage expectations this time around.

While it was too early to tell whether the storm would affect Thinking Caps' bottom line, Ms. Mayzler said it was unprecedented for the company to have a week with so few lessons, especially during this time of year. “Still,” she said, “it's not going to put us out of business or make a huge diff erence.”

Another member of the group, Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour, said she, too, considered herself lucky. “We had no power outages and none of our people were really affected,” she said. Ultimately, she said any impact on the Megawatt Hour would be “trivial.” For example, it might take time for potential customers to turn their attention to energy purchasing as business returned to normal.

“We're basically an Internet business, so my real concern was that our servers would be affected and that we would lose access,” Ms. Lord said. But the company, which helps business clients track and forecast their energy usage and expenses, never lost power. Its servers, which are in Northern Virginia, were untouched.

Like most businesses in the group, the Megawatt Hour uses a cloud computing platform, in Ms. Lord's case, Amazon Web Services. The system is redundant, she said, meaning it is backed up by secondary resources to guard against fa ilure. “If we had to,” she said, “we could restore all of our data tomorrow if we lost it all tonight.”

Ms. Mayzler raised a related point. “Everyone's moving to the cloud, and that's great,” she said. But, she added, an important question is, “Where are those servers?” If you're having a problem in New York and your servers are in New York, she said, your data will also have a problem. For that reason, Thinking Caps' servers are located around the country. She also stores and backs up vital information with a few providers, including Dropbox and SkyDrive, to create redundancies.

Ms. Lord said you could request servers in various locations. But, she wondered, “Where is safe these days?”

Susan Parker, who owns Bari Jay, missed the storm. She was visiting several of her company's dress factories in China, Hong Kong and Vietnam. The trip was prompted by continuing quality problems with a Chinese factory (which we'll discuss in future posts) .

At Bari Jay last week, Ms. Parker's sister and co-owner, Erica Rosenfeld, held down the fort. The company stayed closed Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, it opened for those employees who could get there. A few people in every department came in.

“Were people working from home or were they just taking the day off?” Ms. Mayzler asked.

“Just taking the day,” Ms. Parker said.

Ms. Mayzler asked why they couldn't work from home.

Bari Jay's current computer system can't be accessed remotely, Ms. Parker said - something she has been working to change for more than a year. “Hopefully, by January 1st I'll be on new Web-based software,” she said. This will allow most employees to work remotely when necessary.

While every other tenant in Ms. Parker's office building lost Internet service, Bari Jay did not. She isn't sure why, but she has a theory. Until recently, Bari Jay used Broadview Networks for both its phone and Internet services. Now, the company's phone service is through Broadview, and it has Internet service through Time Warner.

“I back up my Internet with Broadview, and I back up my phones with Time Warner, so I'm wondering if maybe one of them worked and then the other flipped over,” she said. Previously, when the company lost power, both its phone and Internet service would go down.

“Very smart,” said Ms. Lord.

Although Bari Jay had Internet service, it couldn't ship dresses, which were stuck in Hong Kong. That was “a big deal for us,” Ms. Parker said. “But I didn't hear any screaming from stores, so we're assuming we didn't have any urgent weddings,” she said. “If anything, I was getting e-mails from people just making sure we were O.K.”

Over all, Ms. Parker doesn't foresee a big impact on sales. “At end of the day, it's probably a wash,” she said. While numbers for October will be down, she expects to make up for it by shipping more dresses in November - the ones that weren't shipped earlier.

Jessica Johnson couldn't make the meeting because of an obligation unrelated to the storm. I caught up with her by phone - she was on her cellphone because her company, Johnson Security Service, was still without its VoIP phone service, which went out after the storm.

Johnson Security worked throughout the storm, Ms. Johnson said. Her building suffered no damage or loss of electricity and the company can run virtually. Some employees and clients, however, were affected personally. “In situations like this, our clients need coverage, and we had to figure out how to get staff to and from jobs,” she said, noting that the company's hourly employees who couldn't get to work will feel the brunt of the storm's impact because they won't get paid. Some employees commuted between the Bronx and Manhattan on foot.

The company's resources were stretched thin, Ms. Johnson said. And during disasters, when property is at risk, demand for guards can increase. “There were some accounts where we had no hours worked, some where we had overtime, and we also have some new opportunities because of the storm,” Ms. Johnson said. Ultimately, she expects the storm to have little impact on her business.

Reflecting on the effectiveness of her company's constantly evolving disaster recovery plan, Ms. Johnson praised her employees, who stayed in touch before, during and after the storm. She said it would take time to determine what she would have done differently, if anything. “You never know what you need until it's tested,” she said.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

The Genius of Starting a Company Without Outside Capital

Courtesy of Evil Genius. Evil Genius: A brewer with no brewery.

I wonder how many millions of small-business owners and entrepreneurs are sitting out there at this very moment, thinking about the money they need to finance their companies and ideas. The approach an owner chooses can make or break a business. It's a decision that can change your life.

The first question owners need to ask - and challenge themselves on - is how much money they really need. My experience is that most entrepreneurs think they need much more money than they really do. There is almost always a cheaper way to get things done. And here's the point a lot of entrepreneurs overlook: Every month that they are on the hunt for money instead of developing and marketing their product or service, they are wasting valuable time.

I recently met with Luke Bowen, founder of Evil Genius Beer Company, who has managed to finance his growing business without taking on debt or handing out equity. The following conversation, in which he explains how he's done this, has been condensed and edited.

Q.

When did you start your business?

A.

In late 2009 while my original partner, Trevor Hayward, and I were in graduate school at Villanova getting our M.B.A.'s.

Q.

Why did you choose to start a business instead of getting a job?

A.

At the time, we saw a lot of businesses laying off people and our prospects for gainful employment as we graduated were pretty slim. We felt at that time - and we still do - that there are tremendous opportunities in recessions to start companies.

Q.

What did you do first?

A.

We took a look at four or five different ideas based on our expertise and our experience as employees and we thought we could make a difference or start our own business. We did feasibility studies on all of them and really found that none of them had as much potential as the craft beer idea.

Q.

So once you decided on beer, what were your options?

A.

Well, our option in the very beginning was to build a brewery, and that's how most of the craft breweries of this country started. In the late '80s, '90s they started small nano breweries and kind of expanded from there, and when we ran the numbers on basically the amount of beer we were going to be able to produce and the profitability from that small amount of beer, we realized that wasn't feasible.

Instead of raising all this capital in the middle of a recession for a company that had never sold a pint of beer, we decided to use our internally developed recipes and brands and basically outsource the production to a third-party manufacturer.

Q.

What were your start-up costs?

A.

We started this business with less than $35,000.

Q.

Did you get any loans or take any equity from anyone?

A.

No, we took no equity partners and the start-up capital for the business was contributed by the three owners.

Q.

What happened next?

A.

We started selling in Philadelphia. That was our first market. We did a lot of things well and some things not so well but we were always striving to develop the best quality product that we could. Not only did we focus on product quality but we focused on innovative packages, innovative branding, innovative marketing.

Q.

Times Was Slower, but Sure, in Calling the Presidential Election

A few observations on Tuesday night's online coverage and Wednesday's print edition:

The Empire State Building was in blue lights, Mitt Romney's Boston crowd was looking despondent, and even the careful Associated Press had taken the plunge, but The Times held off late Tuesday night in declaring President Obama the winner.

Well over a half-hour after most news organizations had projected the president's re-election, The Times was holding off and attributing victory to the television networks in its major home-page headline. The A.P. made its call at 11:38 p.m.

At 12:03 a.m., I got a mobile alert with The Times itself projecting the president's re-election.

Journalism history is full of cautionary tales about ill-fated instances of jumping the gun â€" whether the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in The Chicago Tribune or, much more recently, the many newspapers and cable networks who got the presidential result s wrong in 2000.

Unlike the television networks, which depend on their combined exit polls in calling elections, The Times prefers to look at real numbers in addition to exit polls, said Janet Elder, an associate managing editor who is part of The Times's election “decision desk.”

“We have been disciplined” she said, “and it has paid off.”

Both on the Web and in print, Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, The Times had rich offerings for its viewers and readers. In typical Times fashion, it was restrained in both places, with a quiet headline that read, simply, “Obama's Night.” (For extreme contrast, one could look at The Huffington Post on Wednesday morning with its huge “¡Viva Obama!” headline, including Spanish-language exclamation points.)

I especially liked Jodi Kantor's essay in The Times about how Mr. Obama has sought a role in history â€" a smart piece of thinking ahead â€" and forward-thinking analytical pieces by Peter Baker and Carl Hulse.

Online, I enjoyed Megan Liberman's TimesCast video interviews, none more than with a quietly satisfied Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight blogger and statistical wizard who had the night of his life. (I couldn't help but note their good-natured and joking reference to my blog post last week on Mr. Silver's wager offer to a TV talk show host.) And I thought the front-page photograph of the Obama family was a heartwarming choice, no matter which candidate you supported. It was an inspired touch to use, as a detail, a similar photo of the family from four years ago. (For one thing, it gave everyone a chance to gauge the height differences of the Obama daughters, four years later.)

Coverage of the election â€" reasonably enough â€" drove follow-up coverage of Hurricane Sandy's damage off Wednesday's front page. But I was glad to see that the storm coverage was given plenty of space inside. That coverage included Jim Dwyer's moving About Ne w York column about the hardship in New Dorp in Staten Island.

The election is decided - causing jubilation for some and disappointment for others - but real devastation continues, especially for those who have the fewest resources.

The Joys (and Dangers) of Owning a Microbusiness

Today, there are about 27 million businesses in the United States. Of these, the vast majority are what we call microbusinesses, those that typically have fewer than five employees and less than $1 million in sales. This was where I started my business career and, after having gone through all three stages of business growth, I'm happy to be back there again today with my wealth management and consulting business.

I love being a microbusiness. I have few worries about capital investment, little need for bank loans and no concerns about taking care of a large group of employees. I am able to concentrate on serving clients and don't spend a lot of time on administrative duties.

Of course, when I'm not able to work, my business suffers. If I were unable to work for more than six months, the business would have a hard time surviving. That's the biggest down side, one I experienced while going through my cancer treatment four years ago.

The other big challenge with a microbusiness is lumpy sales - when your sales go up and down in a significant way. You move between extremes. One day you're so busy serving customers you don't know what to do, and a week later you're trying to figure out where your next job will come from.

That's what happens when a microbusiness owner tries to do everything. Among other things, the microbusiness owner is the marketing manager, the sales representative, the service provider and the person who runs the company. It's the moving from doing work to landing work that causes the roller-coaster ride in terms of cash coming in the door.

Cash flow is king in most small businesses, but this is especially true for those with fewer than 25 employees. Research from Open at American Express shows that about 50 percent of small businesses experience cash flow strains, mostly because they aren't creating enough in extra profit to allow them to put cash away for a rainy da y.

If your business doesn't have enough cash, you will be under stress. That is something I can attest to from first-hand experience. When you don't have enough cash, you feel pressure to take any client who walks in the door. But this is usually a mistake. Trying to be all things to all people will cost you money.

Most owners understand this. But when you are under pressure to pay your bills, it's hard to say no - even if the customer is outside of your target market. You need money, you take the business, and you often end up spending an inordinate amount of time serving the customer. And if you stay in this cycle, you put your business at risk. When you own a microbusiness, burning time is just like burning money.

Several years ago, I did some work with a graphic design firm, Gray Cat Studio. Michelle Bisceglia, the owner, had built a knowledge base working with specialty food manufacturers. She knew a great deal about the businesses and what made them s uccessful.

When I first started working with her, she would take work from anyone. She often lost money when she went outside her knowledge area, but like many microbusiness owners, she was often short on cash.

We worked on developing her niche and I coached her in using a new word: No. Over time, two things happened. She was able to charge higher fees because of her expertise, and it took her much less time to complete projects. This allowed her to create a cash cushion, which made it even easier to say no to customers who didn't fit her profile.

Ultimately, microbusiness owners have two choices. They can choose to remain a microbusiness, like Ms. Bisceglia, or they can do what I did in my previous business and move into the next level, the traditional small business. In both cases, understanding the drivers that create cash for living and saving is crucial. If you want to grow, you will not only need to finance your own living needs and retirement savings , but you also need to create cash for growth.

There is no good or bad about this decision. It's truly about an owner's preferences. Some people decide they want a bigger business, and some are happy just doing what they want without having to worry about managing other people.

If you choose to stay at the micro level, you need to understand that lumpy sales exist and you must have a strategy for dealing with them. You should have a plan in place in case you become disabled. You should have a strategy for saving for retirement, because you will not be able to sell your business.

What do you think? If you're a microbusiness, what are your challenges? Have you decided to stay at this level?

Josh Patrick is a founder and principal at Stage 2 Planning Partners, where he works with private business owners on wealth management issues.

An Election Day Look at How Language Changes in The Times, and in the Culture

Here's an Election Day diversion, courtesy of the research and development people at The Times. It's called Chronicle and it measures the number of articles in which a particular word or phrase has appeared since 1981.

The brainchild of Alexis Lloyd, a creative technologist, Chronicle has a serious purpose.

“You can see how topics have risen and fallen over time, but you can also see the way language and terminology change over time,” she said. For example, she said, the term “greenhouse effect” has given way to the broader discussion of “climate change.”

She built a rudimentary version of the tool about six months ago and has been refining it every since. Eventually, she intends to take its reach back to include more than another 100 years of Times usage.  It is intended for internal use, at least for now.

My use of the tool started with some brainstorming involving not only Ms. Lloyd, but also Matt Boggie, director of technology strat egy, and my assistant, Joseph Burgess. Because this post is appearing on Election Day, we concentrated on phrases from the political realm - from “activist judges,” which peaked in late 2004, to jobs and economy, phrases that have been increasing and falling for years but are at an especially high level now for obvious reasons.

Readers who have interesting ideas for words or phrases to search or compare can e-mail me at public@nytimes.com. (One particularly interesting one that is sometimes used as an example is the fall of “yuppies” and the rise of “hipsters.”) I'll do a follow-up post soon to show the results of some of the best suggestions.

From “climate change” to “recount,” here are some of the results we came up with.  (One further Election Day note: I'll be staying in The Times's newsroom later and into the night and intend on being active on Twitter, where you can follow me at twitter.com/sulliview.   I' ll put the messages in Storify form on Wednesday and add them as a link to this blog.)

Jobs vs. Economy: Rising and falling but at a higher level over time.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Bailout: It increased and has remained in the conversation.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Election: Predictable rises and falls.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Time s

Climate Change: Almost unheard of until 1990.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Activist Judges: We were talking about them most in 2004.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Chads: The aftermath of the 2000 election made them a household word.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Job Creation: A growing concern.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Health Care: Usage reached its height a few years ago

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Death Tax: On everyone's lips in 2000 and fading ever since

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Recount: Is another big increase on the way?

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

An Election Day Look at How Language Changes in The Times, and in the Culture

Here's an Election Day diversion, courtesy of the research and development people at The Times. It's called Chronicle and it measures the number of articles in which a particular word or phrase has appeared since 1981.

The brainchild of Alexis Lloyd, a creative technologist, Chronicle has a serious purpose.

“You can see how topics have risen and fallen over time, but you can also see the way language and terminology change over time,” she said. For example, she said, the term “greenhouse effect” has given way to the broader discussion of “climate change.”

She built a rudimentary version of the tool about six months ago and has been refining it every since. Eventually, she intends to take its reach back to include more than another 100 years of Times usage.  It is intended for internal use, at least for now.

My use of the tool started with some brainstorming involving not only Ms. Lloyd, but also Matt Boggie, director of technology strat egy, and my assistant, Joseph Burgess. Because this post is appearing on Election Day, we concentrated on phrases from the political realm - from “activist judges,” which peaked in late 2004, to jobs and economy, phrases that have been increasing and falling for years but are at an especially high level now for obvious reasons.

Readers who have interesting ideas for words or phrases to search or compare can e-mail me at public@nytimes.com. (One particularly interesting one that is sometimes used as an example is the fall of “yuppies” and the rise of “hipsters.”) I'll do a follow-up post soon to show the results of some of the best suggestions.

From “climate change” to “recount,” here are some of the results we came up with.  (One further Election Day note: I'll be staying in The Times's newsroom later and into the night and intend on being active on Twitter, where you can follow me at twitter.com/sulliview.   I' ll put the messages in Storify form on Wednesday and add them as a link to this blog.)

Jobs vs. Economy: Rising and falling but at a higher level over time.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Bailout: It increased and has remained in the conversation.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Election: Predictable rises and falls.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Time s

Climate Change: Almost unheard of until 1990.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Activist Judges: We were talking about them most in 2004.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Chads: The aftermath of the 2000 election made them a household word.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Job Creation: A growing concern.

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Health Care: Usage reached its height a few years ago

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Death Tax: On everyone's lips in 2000 and fading ever since

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Recount: Is another big increase on the way?

Alexis Lloyd/The New York Times

Why Everyone Wants to Fire the Founder

With all of Facebook's struggles since its initial public offering, I suppose it's not surprising that there were whispers over the summer that Mark Zuckerberg should be replaced as chief executive. But spare me. There is no one on Earth who is as qualified to run Facebook.

While things have started to look up for Facebook of late, this conversation is part of a familiar pattern. Bankers, investors and consultants are often outrageously quick to pull the trigger on founders of fast-growth companies. We all get intoxicated by hyper-growth, and expectations can get out of control, which is why smart, fast-growth entrepreneurs temper those fantasies. But it can be hard when the publicity machines are trying to turn the entrepreneur into some kind of Superman.

It happens all of the time with entrepreneurs who are successful enough to hire experts to help them move their companies to the next level. The problem is that the bankers and consultants often show up right in the middle of the hyper-growth stage and sometimes the next level is where the growth starts to level off into reality.

At this point, the bankers and consultants really can't help, but they want to stick around and the only way to do that is by firing the guy who hired them and bringing in a white knight to “save” the company. You've seen this movie before: the founder steps down and is followed by a carousel of unsuccessful chief executives for years to come. If this kind of talk can happen to a founder like Mark Zuckerberg, who has produced billions of dollars of revenue, it can happen to any founder. But given how poorly the strategy often turns out, it's tempting to ask why people are so quick to fire the founder.

There are two reasons. First, bankers, investors and consultants often underestimate founders by calling them visionaries or technical geniuses while questioning their skills as executives. But to get a company from start-up to second stage - where it has transitioned to both positive cash flow and increased market share - is extremely demanding. It requires swift execution and creativity. If the founder didn't have those skills, the company wouldn't have gotten so far. Often, the founder has to plead with people to make personal sacrifices; it can be very hard for an outsider to walk in and make the same demands.

In addition, bankers, investors and consultants often point to a decline in revenue growth (or in the stock price if the company is public) as a sign that the entrepreneur should depart. But no company - not even Facebook - has financials that only go up. Often, this argument is just a pretext. The fact is, the relationship between founders and financiers is uncomfortable from the start. Entrepreneurs are wheelers and dealers who are always testing limits and trying new things. Bankers and consultants like predictability and stability. More to the point, for them, firing the founder is part of their own exit strategy. Their goal is to flip the company by telling the next investor, “We have proven the concept, and we are now bringing in professional management to take it to next level.”

It does not have to be this way. Keep in mind that most of the people suggesting the replacement of fast-growth entrepreneurs have never built anything themselves. They don't understand what it takes.

Founders often have more options than the bankers lead them to believe. For example, if the issue is getting financing, a good place to start can be your own customers - and I don't just mean by selling them something. Lots of established companies are willing to make strategic investments in a smaller company that is performing a vital role for their businesses. Don't be bashful. Present the idea as if you are giving the company a rare opportunity. And if you are asking for $5 million, make the effort to look and act like you know what to do with $5 million.

It' s also critical to be smart and careful with board seats. Don't hand them out like water in the good times, and make sure you know how to count. If you have seven seats, you have to have four votes you can count on in tough times. That's one reason I am a big advocate of keeping one or two people from within the company on the board.

All companies go through ups and downs. The bankers, investors and consultants will always be quick to pull the plug on founders when the first signs of trouble appear. But the person who is most likely to get the business to the next level is the very same person who got it to the current one.

Cliff Oxford is the founder of the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs.

Has Sandy Affected Your Small Business?

Here in sunny Bridgeport, Pa. - just outside of Philadelphia - there is little sign of Hurricane Sandy's passage. Last week, of course, was a bit different.

On Monday, trees were whipping back and forth, one could hear the intermittent crackling of branches snapping off, and it was raining very hard. I got up early and made the 10-mile drive from my house to the factory where we make our conference tables, just to make sure everything was O.K. and was surprised to find that 6  of my 14 workers had showed up. I gathered them and told them that I appreciated their diligence but that they should leave soon, as it was likely that the storm would get much worse as the day wore on.

I was out of the shop on the Thursday and Friday preceding the storm. My shop manager, Kyle, made sure that windows were closed tightly before he left on Friday and had moved our work-in-progress into the center of the shop, far from the windows. Otherwise, we didn't do anything. I'm not worried about flooding, as we are on the fourth floor, and I was philosophical about the potential for power loss - our building has its own power infrastructure and isn't dependent on lines strung on poles. I'm not sure what it would take to knock it out, but it would have to be an extreme event. Our building complex is right next to the Schuylkill River, but we are on a relatively high spot. The only unusual preparation I made was to stop at my bank and pick up a couple of thousand dollars in small bills, in case A.T.M.'s stopped functioning.

As it turned out, we've had very little disruption from the storm. Our shop power never went out. On Tuesday, seven of the guys showed up, even after I called everyone to tell them to stay home if they felt like it. We had a full complement on Wednesday and have been going strong ever since. The biggest disruption we have felt is from the trucking companies that deliver and pick up from us - they have been delayed and all servic e is much slower.

Have I learned anything from my experience? Not really, other than that it's good to be lucky. There just hasn't been much intersection between the type of damage that Sandy did and the list of things that we do. Clearly, however, this isn't true for many, many businesses. Have you been disrupted by the storm? What do you intend to do about it? Is there anything you wish you had done differently?

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.

On Volunteering Negative Information When Selling

Now that TerraCycle is almost a decade old and operating in 22 countries, I have realized how much sales styles differ throughout the world, especially in Europe. While the American style of sales is typically gung ho â€" energetic and positive - the European style is quite different, much more conservative.

This hit me when, after a sales pitch in Germany, our client said, “Tom, we'd love for you to present TerraCycle to our leadership team, but please be less American. Please don't be excited and just present the facts.” I thought to myself, Wow, how do you sell without being passionate about the product or service you are selling?

Whether you are selling to a new client or persuading an existing client to continue buying, sales is the critical driver of your business's growth. Naturally, when selling, we spend most, if not all, of our time highlighting the positive attributes of our product or service. The golden rules of su ccessful selling are to solve an existing problem for your client with a compelling proposition. Then communicate that proposition clearly, simply and passionately. And always be closing! But this raises a question: How much negative information should we volunteer?

When selling hamburgers, should the restaurant owner note that the meat came from a slaughterhouse and disclose any associated health issues? When selling public relations services, should a P.R. agency discuss its failed campaigns or only the good ones?

After a decade of successful sales, I do think that there is a place for disclosing negative information. But it should be done wisely and in moderation. Here are three things to keep in mind:

If you think the client may know of something negative, own it. The way to do this is to address it up front in your meeting, before the client raises it. And you should address it more aggressively than your client would, if he or she were bringing it up. When you do this, it's best to have a solution ready to offer. Such action will show your client that you don't shy away from challenges; you take responsibility for them. At TerraCycle, every time I have done this, it has been successful and built trust.

Always talk about your competition positively. Competition, while negative to your business, is a fact of life. My suggestion is to be fair and positive. This will play well with your clients as they see that you are looking out for their best interests. This, too, will build credibility and trust. TerraCycle doesn't have competitors the way most businesses do, but there are other services that our clients perceive to be in the same “bucket” as TerraCycle.

One example is RecycleBank, which manages recycling rewards programs. Whenever we are asked about RecycleBank,we always say positive things - they are indeed our friends. But we also try to explain the differences between our two propositions (we help bra nds recycle previously nonrecyclable products or packaging). Then we let the client decide. Look, clients can always get this information themselves; it builds credibility when, after a sales meeting, they do their own research and come up with the same facts.

Sprinkle some negatives during your pitch. We consider TerraCycle a premium service. For that reason, we always highlight that our cost is higher than other solutions - such as sending waste to landfill. But then we emphasize that the benefits of working with us may be worth the expense. Of course, there is a fine line - you can volunteer too much negative information and kill the deal. Negative information is like salt on one's food. It should be applied in moderation.

In the 22 countries where we operate, I have found a wide range of approaches to handling negative information. While most of our sales teams do a great job with the first two points, they often struggle with the third. This is especially tr ue of people with less sales experience, and the most striking example is in Europe. There, our sales teams typically volunteer too much negative information in their pitches. They cross that fine line, and when they do, their closing rates decline.

We're trying to coach them to be a little more American in their approach.

Tom Szaky is the chief executive of TerraCycle, which is based in Trenton.

This Week in Small Business: Good News for the Next President

What's affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.

In Case You Forgot

There's an election Tuesday, and this little girl can't wait for it be over.

The Big Story: Storm Pummels Small Businesses

What could be the most damaging storm ever wreaks havoc on small businesses on the East Coast (this was the most accurate forecast of them all). In New York, big businesses shut while small businesses stayed open. For some small businesses there are costs, but for others there are opportunities. Subway-dependent businesses saw their traffic slow. The storm could cost more than $50 billion and help the economy but others believe it will not help. Jared Bernstein offered some cold, wet comfort. In the middle of it all, American Apparel made an odd advertising choice and a model picked a poor time to model. The storm caused a disturbance in the airline force. The cloud took a beating. Office Depot offered free office space and services to affected businesses. Brooklyn got smug. Mayor Bloomberg's interpreter stole hearts online. And a biker toured the damage.

The Economy: Greece Is the Word

The latest unemployment report is good news for Tuesday's winner. As the United States approaches its borrowing ceiling by year end, Ezra Klein believes the “fiscal cliff” will bring on a faster contraction than Greece's. Edward Hadas says economists should just admit their ignorance. Consumer spending jumps. Home prices continue to increase. Gallup's economic confidence and the Conference Board's consumer confidence are the best since 2008. But growth in the Texas region slows and manufacturing in the Chicago region drops. General Motors' profit falls. October's factory activity hits a 37-month low. Intuit reports a decline in small-business employment and revenue. Did ADP grossly overstate job growth over the past 12 months? Online labor demand (pdf) falls. The Restaurant Performance Index declines. SurePa yroll's Small Business Scorecard shows a 15-point drop in optimism.

Your People: Digital Literacy Is Essential

Sarah Rowson has some tips for running a multicultural work environment, including: “Even if asking questions reveals ignorance on your part, taking steps to correct that ignorance is still better than continuing to grope about blindly.” Lars Lofgren explains how to recruit a world-class marketer to your start-up. Silicon Valley employers go wild with lavish benefits for their employees. These are five out-of-the-box ideas from Zappos for keeping employees engaged. This business wants to keep solicitors away unless they're selling Girl Scout cookies. Here are seven reasons people hate being in meetings with you, but don't worry â€" this company is working on a way to beam you up. Rick Broida tests another teleconference solution. A new report finds most small businesses consider digital literacy essential for new h ires.

Management: Managing Disruptions From Home

Here are 33 reasons you're not getting anything done. Julien Smith lists the 12 phases of a successful project. The folks at EnMast put together some business horror stories in honor of Halloween. Here's how to manage disruptions when working from home. Jim Smith lists six questions a small business should ask itself, including: “Are we spending enough time studying our customer needs?” Here are some things to consider when buying or selling a business.

Online Marketing: Finding Early Adopters

This is how to use photo-sharing apps to increase your online presence. Adrian Aoun thinks the future of search may look more like Yahoo than Google. Twenty-four percent of consumers who conduct “local” searches, according to a new white paper, are tech-savvy early adopters who own multiple mobile devices, use mobile shopping apps, purchase daily deals and post reviews of businesses more than the average p opulation. A small-business study finds a disconnect between mobile device use and mobile security preparedness. Jeff Bullas asks if your business is right for Pinterest and lists his top 10 Pinterest boards. A new survey finds most small-business owners are not capitalizing on social media while another shows that small businesses are investing more in social media but juggling resources. Zachary Knight thinks being online has become so common that some people no longer identify it as being online (kind of like these people). Facebook now enables advertisers to target specific mobile devices.

Marketing: Ruining Your Proposals

Jim Connolly learns some lessons from Jo Average. Jeff Korhan shares three ways content marketing can make every business better. Sydni Craig-Hart has some ideas for getting prospects to sign up for your teleseminars and webinars. These are 10 small daily habits to help you manage and build your network. Here are three marketing ideas inspi red by Apple. A Crowdspring blogger explains how to slice and dice your customer service data. Becky McCray wonders if you're treating all of your customers the same. This is how your high school English class is ruining your proposals.

Starting Up: Go to Stanford

In this video, Roger Bicknell shares his best small-business ideas for college students. But to get your idea financed you might want to attend Stanford (where you will not find students taking notes like this). Here are a bunch of business ideas that cost less than $20. Dane Carlson has 20 small-business ideas for small towns. Entrepreneurs share their stories of what start-up life is really like. In Las Vegas a fund is helping start-ups. A start-up hub emerges in Chicago and Denver's Startup Week attracts 3,500. While Dharmesh Shah shares the classy way to get media coverage for your start-up, here's how to tell if your start-up needs a public relations firm. Adam Gottlieb explains the various types o f alternative financing. A start-up that bills itself as an alternative to Groupon raises $5 million.

Around the Country: Haunted in Denver

Pitney Bowes and Google plan a marketing event for small businesses in New York City. New Orleans plans a series of informational meetings for small-business owners. Los Angeles will be the site of a Small Business Expo on Wednesday. A small business in Denver is hailed as one of the nation's top haunted houses. FedEx plans a $1 million gift card giveaway for Small Business Saturday. This infographic explains what small businesses mean to everyone. A company that sells software to monitor networks and servers tops a list of America's best small companies.

Around the World: Performing Tricks for Six Figures

Japan's factory output falls. Britain gets 4G, and the Olympics help put an end to its recession. Retail sales in Spain plunge while German retail sales increase for the second month in a row. Euro zone unemploy ment hits a new high. A baby robot plans to conquer the world. An elephant speaks Korean. The world's first commercial-scale vertical farm opens in Singapore. Canada's economy shrinks. A mentalist and illusionist makes $350,000 traveling around the world performing tricks and reading minds. So far, 108 billion people have been born.

Technology: Is Buying an iPhone Irresponsible?

IBM has a chip breakthrough. Here are six ways the Surface beats the iPad, and here are five reasons buying an iPhone is financially irresponsible. Both Microsoft and Google announce new smartphones. Sherisa Aguirre wonders if e-mail is friend or foe, and here's how to keep e-mail from driving you crazy. George Lucas sells Star Wars to Disney (it was a tax move!) while the military prepares for a zombie apocalypse. The bar code turns 60. Ryan Pinkham suggests eight things small businesses should know about the future of mobile marketing, like: “Most mobile searches are location-based.†

Tweets of the Week

‏@jasonillian: Entrepreneurs don't see the glass as half-full or half-empty. They see the glass as completely full in the future.

@ConsistencyKing: Why survey customers if you are not going to follow-up? This is a great question that 100% of your customers are asking under their breath.

@KingAndJames: Ok when you have to put your cell phone call on hold so you can open your Trick or Treat bag, you're too old for #Halloween

The Week's Bests

Donna Maria shares advice for picking yourself up when you're discouraged: “Run toward something. Maybe things didn't work out the way you thought they would. You didn't win the competition. You didn't get the sale. If you are an entrepreneur, set some new business goals. More money won't solve all of your problems, but it will make them easier to deal with. Use your business to create new ways to generate more excitement, enthusiasm and income in your life. As you do this, your confidence will increase. As your confidence increases, so will your ability to deal with the next gobsmack.”

Matthew Torn says to let people work for you and “offer a high commission even if you may feel a little uncomfortable doing so. Put yourself in the position of somebody looking for a product or service to sell. Obviously, their time is as important to them as yours is to you. They want to receive the most reward for their investment, and they're drawn to high commissions. Of course, the best and brightest marketers are not making decisions solely on commission rates. But if you've taken care of the first step and created something of true value, your offer will have a dual shine.”

This Week's Question: What will you do differently before the next storm?

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

The Times\'s Washington Bureau Chief, and Legions of Others, in Defense of Nate Silver

Nate Silver, author of the FiveThirtyEight blog on NYTimes.com, may be under attack from some people, as I noted in a post on Thursday but he also has many defenders.

Hundreds of them wrote to me in e-mails, in Twitter messages and in comments on the blog to say that they vehemently disagreed with my criticism of Mr. Silver's offer of a wager to a talk show host on the outcome of the presidential election.

Some questioned my intelligence, sanity or sense of fun. Some said that by criticizing the wager offer, I encouraged the unfair critics of his overall methods.

Others questioned the logic of my specific complaint. I'll address the latter here, then turn over the floor to the Times's Washington bureau chief, David Leonhardt.

First off, I want to state clearly that I see nothing in Mr. Silver's writing that suggests his work has partisan motivations. I also will repeat that those who choose to equate probability and a close political race are wil dly missing the point. To use everyone's favorite new word, they are innumerate.

But here is the problem: Mr. Silver's offering a wager could be interpreted, by critics who already paint him as partisan, as evidence that he has a rooting interest in a particular outcome. Yes, even though the winnings would go to charity and even though he was betting to make a point about his model. There may not be a true conflict of interest, but there is an appearance of one. And appearance matters - it affects credibility, which is at the heart of good journalism. (There is a school of thought that rejects this idea and many people articulated that well on Friday.)

Put more broadly: Journalists shouldn't bet on the outcome of news events they cover because betting raises the reasonable idea that they have a stake in how those news events turn out - or that they even might try to make the events take a particular course. That's why business repo rters are not allowed to trade stock on companies they cover.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, has a strict anti-betting policy.

One of the most thoughtful respondents to my post was Mr. Leonhardt. While not defending the wager offer, he pointed out that Mr. Silver has a public record of taking a nonpartisan approach to polling analysis. He wrote:

When liberals were claiming momentum in the final days of the recall campaign against Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Nate threw cold water on the argument and said Walker remained a heavy favorite. Walker won, of course. Nate's model also suggested that the G.O.P. House takeover in 2010 and Scott Brown's win in 2010 were likely to happen.

None of this means Obama will win. A 20 percent chance is a serious chance. The system would be flawed if 80 percent favorites won 100 percent of the time. To put it another way, a pair of dice isn't broken if it rolls a seven.

The larger point is that Nate's work has long earned the benefit of the doubt about its goal: to produce the best polling analysis possible, given the inherent noise in polls and the inherent uncertainty of life.

Later, after conferring with Mr. Silver, he also offered examples of cases in which underdogs in his model have gone on to win, noting that these also reflect no partisan pattern. (As Mr. Leonhardt notes, underdogs “should” win sometimes, “just as baseball batters sometime get hits.” ) The examples follow:

In 2008, Mr. Silver had John McCain, Republican, favored in Indiana, and Barack Obama won.

In 2009, he had gay marriage favored to pass in Maine, and it did not.

In 2010, he had Sharron Angle, Republican, favored in Nevada, and Harry Reid won.

In 2010, he had Ken Buck, Republican, favored in Colorado, and Michael Bennet won.

In 2010, he had the Tea Party Republican, Joe Miller, favored in the Alaska Senate race, and the moderate Republican (Lisa Murkowski) won.

In 2010, he had Bill Brady, Republican, favored in the Illinois governor's race, and Pat Quinn won.

In 2010, he had Republicans projected to win 55 House seats, and they won 63.

There were three cases in which Mr. Silver had Mitt Romney favored in the primaries, but Rick Santorum won.

Mr. Leonhardt adds this praise to his commentary on Mr. Silver:

Nate has done a public service through his work. He didn't cause people to start paying attention to polls. He instead helped people who were already paying attention to polls understand that individual polls can be so noisy as to be directionally misleading - and yet even flawed individual polls often have both noise and information. There is no pollster, no political scientist and no other writer who has a better recent public record of analyzing elections data than Nate. It's not perfect, as he himself tries to convey with his emp hasis on uncertainty and humility. But it's serious, impressive and nonpartisan, and the same is not true of many of his critics' claims.

It's well said and I find much to agree with there. I haven't changed my mind about the wisdom of publicly offering a wager to a television talk show host, but I'll admit that it's a quibble in the overall picture.

And, on a personal note, I want to acknowledge Mr. Silver's generous response to me on Twitter on Friday morning. Clearly, this is someone who understands what it feels like to be under siege.

Assessing the Impact of Health Care Reform on New Businesses In Massachusetts

A couple of weeks ago, when The Agenda discussed Jon Stewart's musings on creating a safety net for entrepreneurial risk-taking, we touched briefly on how health insurance reform might spur people to go out on a limb and open a new business. “What about the risk of, you're afraid to leave your job and be an entrepreneur because that's where your health insurance is?” Mr. Stewart asked his “Daily Show” guest, Austan Goolsbee, the former Obama administration economist.

That led to this question from an Agenda reader, Joyce Carpenter, who wrote that she lives near Boston: “Is there any data from Massachusetts to show that Romney-care a k a Obama-care would help mitigate the risk and encourage entrepreneurship?” Excellent question, Ms. Carpenter, and one we'll explore here. (Spoiler alert: the answer will be disappointingly murky.)

To begin to answer the question, you have to know first whether the health insurance le gislation signed by Governor Mitt Romney in 2006 has in fact lowered the cost of individual insurance in Massachusetts enough to make it attractive to prospective entrepreneurs. That is according to Yasuyuki Motoyama, senior scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which focuses on issues related to entrepreneurship. For this, Mr. Motoyama referred us to a study of the Massachusetts health insurance market by economists John Graves of Vanderbilt University and Jonathan Gruber of MIT. (As an adviser to then-Governor Romney, Mr. Gruber helped devise the Massachusetts health reform law.)

The study looked at the average premiums for non-group health insurance plans in each state from 2006, when Massachusetts began to implement the new law, through 2009. (The premium costs were compiled by the Association for Health Insurance Plans, a trade association.) In those years, the average cost of individual coverage grew by 14 percent across the country, but in Massachuset ts, premiums fell by more than 21 percent. For family plans, the difference was even more stark: across the United States, premiums rose by around 13 percent; in Massachusetts, they fell by nearly 40 percent. “The estimates show enormous reductions in Massachusetts over this period relative to the national average,” the study's authors wrote.

“There's no way - there's no way - that that health care law doesn't free people up to start their own companies,” said Robert Nakosteen, a professor at the Isenberg School of Management of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It's absolutely certain, to a 100-percent degree of probability, that the health care law in Massachusetts has created an environment where individuals can quit their jobs to take the risk to start new companies.”

There is also, however, no way to verify this with a look at data. According to figures from the Census Bureau, entrepreneurs in Massachusetts and across the country created more new companies in each year from 2002 to 2006, but the rate of growth in new Massachusetts companies lagged far behind the rate for the entire United States - and even behind the rate of growth in neighboring New Hampshire and Rhode Island. From 2006 to 2010, the last year for which figures are available, the number of companies under a year old recorded by the Census Bureau fell across the United States and in Massachusetts at roughly the same rate. In New Hampshire and Rhode Island, the rate of start-ups fell even faster.

Professor Michael Ash, chairman of the economics department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst sees a silver lining for the state in these figures. From 2002 to 2010, he said, “Massachusetts went from pretty week performance to bad performance, but the U.S. and the rest of New England went from better-than-Massachusetts performance to worse-than-Massachusetts performance. Massachusetts bombed less than the other places.”

On the other hand, this company-creation data can be read to suggest no linkage between the theoretical opportunity provided by portable and affordable health insurance and entrepreneurial activity. Connecticut performed roughly as Massachusetts did over the same periods - but without a 2006 health care law. And when the numbers for new companies are expressed as a percentage of the total population, the per capita rate of new entrepreneurs in Massachusetts has lagged behind the whole of the United States since 2004.

“Whatever impact the Massachusetts health care act may have had on business start-ups has been washed away in the flood of the financial crisis and resulting recession,” said Mr. Nakosteen in a follow-up email. “In recent years I think we are mostly seeing cyclical effects rather than anything that can be tied to a state policy.”

This is why it is impossible - or perhaps irresponsible - to attempt to tease out any connections, or the absence of a c onnection, between any of these facts and the health care law, according to Mr. Nakosteen and every other economist we spoke with. There are just too many other variables at play, not least of which is the greatest economic calamity since the Depression. “This kind of impact research is really difficult to conduct, because you should have a clear intervention like the health care law, and you have to assume that no other factors are intervening,” Mr. Motoyama said. “And in reality, that kind of hypothetical situation does not exist.”

Mr. Gruber pointed out that many more small firms in Massachusetts now offer health insurance than did before the reform. “Beyond that,” he said, “it's just theory.”

But two authorities on entrepreneurship at Babson College, outside Boston, were skeptical of a link between the health law and start-ups. Donna Kelley said that studies of American entrepreneurs have found that “health insurance is one factor when it co mes to entrepreneurship, but there are many factors, and this is a smaller factor.”

“The health care affordability act is a small step in the right direction but not a complete solution,” said Dennis Ceru, a professor who teaches entrepreneurship but also works with business owners as a consultant and as the head of a networking organization called The CEO's Group. “It seems like it has helped a little bit but not a great deal. There are still all of the taxes, and small- to medium-sized businesses still have difficulty obtaining bank loans or other funding.”