Recreational Property Available Near Morehead, KY

A 327 acre property with 22 acre lake is available near Morehead, KY . This is a versatile property that could be a paylake, vineyard and winery , B&B, spiritual or wellness retreat center and other uses . Priced to sell at $985,000 . Contact Mark Sievers for details .

Article on new resource for food innovators in Kentuckyi

See link below :

http://www.bizlex.com/Articles-c-2010-08-24-94587.113117_Kentucky_Food_Innovators_Have_New_Resource_at_UK.html

Checkllist for starting a business

How to Start a Business: Checklist for Starting a Business Start a Small Business

Owning their own business is a dream many Americans share, and learning how to start a business is not that difficult. There are certain steps that must be taken for legal and financial purposes, and other aspects that need to be addressed to ensure that you will be successful. The following start business checklist should serve as a rough guideline; your specific needs may vary depending upon the type of business you plan to operate.

How to Start a Small Business

Recognize why you want to start up a business - Perhaps you're tired of working for someone else and want to be free of the nine-to-five rat race. Maybe you have an idea for a product or a service for which you perceive there is great demand. While some reasons may be better than others, knowing why you want to start a small business is the first step in the process.

Decide on the type of business you want to operate - You could buy a franchise, purchase an existing business, or start something from scratch. Each method has its positives and negatives, and your task is to choose which will serve you best - from the perspective of temperament as well as financially.

Do plenty of research - Once you have an idea of the kind of small business you want to start, look more closely at the field to see if it offers you the kind of profitability you hope to achieve. Is the product or service in demand? How intense is the competition? What is the average profit margin, and will that give me the money I 'm hoping to gain? How long will it take before I'm successful?

Review your financial circumstances - The research you do above will help you better comprehend what sort of money you will need to start a business. Next you need to examine your own finances and figure out where the money will come from. Do you have a nest egg set aside? Is it possible to tap into your home's equity? Can you qualify for a small business loan? Do you expect to bring in outside investors?

Create a business plan - Because most people do not have the cash it takes to pay for a complete business startup, potential lenders or investors will want to see your business plan. This is a roadmap of your expectations and abilities, along with an analysis of the business you expect to build.

Create a marketing plan - This will likely be part of your business plan, but it should also be capable of standing alone in order to provide a pathway to sales success. A good marketing plan contains information on the marketing strategies you expect to employ, and what sort of advertising you will use to promote your small business.

Find your funding - With the aforementioned documents in hand, it's time to dredge up some capital for your enterprise. If you expect to secure a bank loan as part or all of your startup costs, look closely at the possibility of a loan guaranteed by the SBA (Small Business Administration). If you belong to a credit union or have been a military veteran, these avenues to money are worth exploring as well.

Choose a corporate name and a domain name - If you are buying a franchise or an existing business, this step is probably unnecessary. But for a new business, this is perhaps one of the most important things you will do. Your Secretary of State's office can tell you if the name you propose is available, and any number of domain registries on the Web can help you select the best possible Internet address. Some excellent advice: Even if you're not quite ready to use your online presence, still register the domain name immediately.

File the proper paperwork with the Secretary of State's office - Call upon the services of a business attorney and a CPA to help you decide whether you wish to form a sole proprietorship, a partnership, a corporation, or an LLC. Contact your state and federal tax services to obtain a list of the paperwork you will need to file - Make sure to note all filing deadlines in order to avoid paying penalties.

Get ready to open for business - Last minute preparations include finding a location from which to operate, filing all the proper legal occupancy documents, hiring and training employees (if that’s part of your plan), opening a bank account, having business cards printed, preparing your sales materials and signage, and look into joining a local merchants association to promote cross marketing opportunities

Interesting SBA program access news

Sam’s Club offering SBA loans
Sam’s Club is testing an online program to offer business loans of $5,000 to $25,000 to qualifying club members.
The warehouse retailer is working with Superior Financial Group, a Small Business Administration lender, on the project.
The Sam’s Club pilot program will focus on minority-, women- and veteran-owned small businesses as well as micro-entrepreneurs under the SBA’s Premier Outreach Express products such as Community Express, Patriot Express and Export Express loans.
Walnut Creek, Calif.-based Superior Financial Group is one of only 13 federally approved small-business lending corporations (non-bank lenders), and specializes in providing access to credit for “main street” and underserved borrowers, the company said.
Sam’s Club said that in a November 2009 study it conducted, nearly 15 percent of its business members reported being denied a loan to run their operation, up from 12 percent in April 2009.
“We believe this pilot program is a step in the right direction to help fuel small business growth and create jobs to stimulate our economy,” said Catherine Corley, vice president of membership at Sam’s Club, in a statement. “It’s also simple to apply and costs less…”
Sam’s Club members who apply for a small-business loan online during the pilot will get $100 off the application fee, a 20 percent discount and a 7.5 APR, which is 25 basis point discount, the company said. Loans will remain at 10-year terms, common to help keep monthly payments low, the company said. There is no penalty for early repayment.
A business membership at Sam’s Club costs $35 a year.
Sam’s Club said that while the majority of the small-business loan pilot program will be conducted online, it will test some in-club and other marketing efforts to reach business members and small-business owners.
Sam’s Club is a division of Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT). The retailer has two stores in Louisville, one in Clarksville, Ind., and one in Elizabethtown, Ky.


www.thesieverscompany.com

Link to article on leveraging WEG for business oppotunities

http://www.bizlex.com/Articles-c-2010-05-12-92605.113117_Leveraging_the_WEG_requires_flexible_thinking.html

Useful website for start-up

I recently discovered the Startup Nation http://www.startupnation.com/ website and it has some useful information. I also created a Kentucky Network group on there .

On Thursday December 10th, Sens. Landrieu and Snowe introduced S. 2869, the Small Business Job Creation and Access to Capital Act. This new bill contains a series of measures that were separately introduced by Sens. Landrieu and Snowe earlier this year. The Senate Small Business Committee will mark up S. 2869 next Thursday, December 17th. The bill and a section-by-section are attached for your review. Highlights of the legislation include:
Increase the loan limit on 7(a) loans from $2 million to $5 million.
Increase the loan limit on 504 loans from $1.5 million to $5.5 million.
Increase the loan limit on microloans from $35,000 to $50,000.
Allow the 504 loan program to refinance short-term commercial real estate debt into, long-term, fixed rate loans.
Extend the authorization to provide 90 percent guarantees on 7(a) loans and fee elimination for borrowers on 7(a) and 504 loans through December 31, 2010.
Direct the SBA to create a website where small businesses can identify lenders in their communities.
Increases the maximum guarantee on 7-A loans to $4.5 million
Changes the eligibility criteria to (a) a tangible net worth not to exceed $15 million and (b) the average net income after Federal Taxes over the past two full fiscal years is not more than $5,000,000.

This Bill is deserves support !

Restaurant Real Estate Opportunities

The current economy is creating a lof of opportunities for restaurant growth for operators that can take advantage of the market . Rather than grow by spending the capital to build a new facility or convert a non foodservice facility into a restaurant, there are many " second generation space " opportunities which are spaces that have already been built out for a restaurant and can be acquired at a much lower investment than a new build out . Restaurant infrastructure is expensive with costs for HVAC , fire protections systems , cooler/freezer systems, etc.. Opportunities exist out there throughout Kentucky and beyond to grow your business at reduced capital investment costs .

Limestone M & A Alliance formation - self starting business stimulus

Two Kentucky business intermediaries , Mr. Jay Knoblett (owner of Arlington Scott, Inc.) and Mr. Mark Sievers (owner of The Sievers Company LLC) , have formed the Limestone M&A Alliance . This alliance, which will operate as a consortium of independent companies , has been created to respond to the challenges of our economy by facilitating more and faster paced information sharing among the business community. This will accelerate main street and mid M&A market deal flow which in turn should play an economic stimulus and development role in the Bluegrass region and beyond.

The Limestone M&A Alliance http://www.limestonealliance.com/ welcomes affiliations with business/professional individuals and organizations . Their database of buyers, sellers, lenders and professional resource providers will initially focus on Kentucky but will be global in scope.

Workout plan often a better alternative to bankruptcy

In the current economy there are many good solid businesses that are troubled or may become troubled later this year . This is a link to an article about how developing a workout plan can be a better alternative to filing bankruptcy :

http://www.franchisetimes.com/content/story.php?article=01246

Buzgate - Business Resorce

Today I ran across this business resource some readers might find useful .

Buzgate www.buzgate.org

Cap and Trade Makes Industrial Recruitment Even Less Logical

I've long been convinced that industrial recruitment, that is a strategy that tried to grow our economy by convincing a factory to locate in an industrial park, is a losing strategy, generally speaking. There just aren't too many Toyota's lining up to locate here, and the companies within the United States, well, they're already American based and why should we use our tax dollars to steal them from another community? It just makes more sense to try to grow the economy overall than to fight the tide pulling these ventures south and east, to China and Mexico.

Soon, there may be yet another reason why industrial recruitment is a losing strategy: Carbon Cap and Trade. This will be a federally imposed tax on the production of CO2 emissions. Factories utilize large amounts of electricity generated by coal and other fossil fuels. Frequently, they burn their own fuels to make energy. In a day not too far into the future, the costs of doing this will increase. When it does, the costs of manufacturing will go up. Here's how CNBC's Larry Kudlow describes it: "[The coming] cap-and-trade program will be a huge across-the-board tax increase on blue-collar workers, including unionized workers. Industrial production is plunging, but new carbon taxes will prevent production from ever recovering. While the country wants more fuel and power, cap-and-trade will deliver less."

At this point I think it will be impossible to stop the cap and trade steamroller. From my standpoint, as a practitioner of economic development, I have to take the laws as they are, not necessarily as I would want them- and I do have reservations about cap and trade. So too do communities.

This means local communities have one more reason to think beyond their industrial recruitment dogmas and realize that entrepreneurship and improving small business efficiency makes more sense than adding onto your inventory of assets for a future factory that just ain't coming.

Laid Off in 2008? Start a Business in 2009 - Entrepreneur.com

Laid Off in 2008? Start a Business in 2009 - Entrepreneur.com

Posted using ShareThis

Is Entrepreneurship on the Decline in America?

That's what one economist is saying at US News and World Report. Snips:

[T]he population of U.S. firms is not a measure of new business creation. It is a measure of the stock of businesses in existence at any point in time. The population of businesses goes up if the number of new businesses started each year exceeds the number of existing businesses that fail each year. So we need to look at a different set of SBA numbers to figure out what happened to entrepreneurial activity over the 1997-to-2006 period.

The SBA's primary number for estimating business formation is the count of new employer firms founded in a year. The SBA reports that in 1997, 590,644 new employer businesses were started. In 2006, the agency estimates, 640,800 new employer businesses were created. That's a 7.9 percent increase over the decade.

The Census Bureau reports that in 1997, there were 272,912,000 Americans. In 2006, it estimated that the population had increased to 298,363,000 people. That's a 9.3 percent increase. Over the 10 years, the U.S. population increased faster than the rate of new employer firm formation.

Below is a graph I created of the per capita rate of employer firm formation in the United States since 1990. The trend is not good for entrepreneurship in America. Although the rate bounces around from 1990 to 2007, the per capita rate of new employer firm formation was 10 percent lower in 2007 than it was in 1990.

This bleeds over into the Gazelles vs. Mom 'n Pops argument that consumes many in the economic development arena, but it's worth considering.

Full story: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/outside-voices-small-business/2009/02/23/sba-data-show-a-declining-rate-of-entrepreneurship-in-the-us.html

The Pillars of Entrepreneurship

Nice graphic from the United Nations Development Program Toolkit for Private Sector Development. (I'm having trouble viewing the entire graphic here, but if you click on it you can see the whole thing.)

Lack of VC Inhibits Caveman Inventor

Now we know why it took so long to commercialize the wheel.

Tweaking Friedman

This article dittos the underlying premise behind one of Tom Friedman's recent provocative ideas about technology, entrpreneurship and innovation. A snip:

Government funds for the VC industry is simply unnecessary. At $30 billion per year, there is no lack of VC capital being deployed in America. The bottleneck in the VC-entrepreneurship equation isn't in the inputs of capital, it's in the outputs. The lack of exits and the dearth of the IPO market is what needs to be fixed to open the floodgates of innovation.

But then I thought - let's not go overboard with our criticism by taking Friedman literally. The guy's a huge fan of global entrepreneurship (I loved it when he referred to the worthy work of the global non-profit, Endeavor, as the "best anti-poverty program of all"). His heart and priorities are in the right place.

So before folks get up in arms about "bailing out VCs," let's take Friedman's comments figuratively. He's dead on when he points out that entrepreneurship is what is going to get us out of this mess. The government shouldn't focus on silly notions of VC subsidies that nobody wants. Instead, the policy agenda to foster entrepreneurship and the flow of capital to entrepreneurs is very clear.

The article goes on to talk about specific policy needs for America's tech based economy. I'd tweak Friedman a little differently by saying he's right on the underlying anti-poverty idea of entrepreneurship. But we need a stronger pro-entrepreneurship in general in America, not just one focused on tech companies. And the problem is about more than the current recession, we need more entrepreneurs for entirety of the forseeable future.

It'll take entrepreneurs to replace the factories lost to globalization, to find ways to reduce our carbon footprint within the coming regulatory framework, to make coal cleaner, to find new ways to use the next wave of the web, etc. Entrepreneurship is just a new app to be used to solve a particular problem. It should be part of our DNA in America.

What's Missing from the Stimulus Talks

Growth! Our economy has to grow again. How do we do it? By starting with entrepreneurial friendly policies that allow entrepreneurs freedom to hire people, tap markets, finance their companies, staff their teams, etc.

Don't take it from me. Here's Carl Schramm from the Kauffman Foundation:

We should be asking President Obama, his economic team, and Congressional leaders a basic question: How do you propose to help ensure that the United States maintains a long-term annual growth rate of 4 percent (or higher)?

We at the Kauffman Foundation have our own proposals, all of them centered on the core fact - borne out by our research - that entrepreneurship and innovation are the key growth drivers in our economy. Highly entrepreneurial companies like Google, eBay, Amazon create more than half the nation's new jobs.

Action in several areas can make America's economic ecosystem more conducive to entrepreneurial growth and should therefore be central to the country's growth agenda.

• Building a skilled workforce. Finding and attracting highly skilled, entrepreneurial workers is one of the more important challenges facing the U.S. economy. Major, entrepreneurially driven improvements are necessary throughout our educational system to help prepare skilled workers, especially in math, science, technology, and engineering - the fields that will be most relevant to generating future innovative breakthroughs.

• Welcoming high-skilled legal immigrants. One quarter of the science and technology start-ups launched in the United States between 1995 and 2005 had a foreign-born founder. These companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006. Our economy needs more, not less, of such highly motivated entrepreneurs. One way to keep them is to grant a permanent work visa to any immigrant earns a degree in science, engineering or math.

• A lower-cost health care system that encourages entrepreneurship. Continued escalation of health care costs and uncertainties about future trends rank high on virtually every American's list of concerns. In addition, the fear of losing health care deters some employees from leaving their current jobs to launch new enterprises. Health care needs to be made both less expensive and more portable.

• Keeping U.S. capital markets competitive through appropriate regulation. Sarbanes-Oxley has turned out to be substantially more costly than was expected at the time. In addition, the SOX requirements may be discouraging successful entrepreneurial firms from going public and instead to sell to larger companies, an "exit" path that may reduce the entrepreneurial energy that drove the success of these firms in the first place. In its current form, SOX is a job killer in desperate need of reform. And, this current crisis, we should heed the lesson of SOX. Let's not ram a complex new regulatory scheme through Congress in a matter of days - only find out later that it has worsened the very problem it was intended to fix.

• Strengthening trade and global markets. Companies like Intel, Microsoft, eBay, and Google would not be the giants they are today without access to global markets in which to sell their products. In addition, firms of all sizes benefit from being able to purchase supplies and services from anywhere they can be competitively sourced. Free trade has a taken a political beating in recent years. It's time for our candidates to show some courage and stand up for this vital principle.

www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/02/whats_missing_from_the_economi.html

New Growth Theory and Entrepreneurship

Interesting theory... how would entrepreneurship play into this:

New Growth Theory emphasizes that economic growth results from the increasing returns associated with new knowledge. Knowledge has different properties than other economic goods (being non-rival, and partly excludable). The ability to grow the economy by increasing knowledge rather than labor or capital creates opportunities for nearly boundless growth.

Markets fail to produce enough knowledge because innovators cannot capture all of the gains associated with creating new knowledge. And because knowledge can be infinitely reused at zero marginal cost, firms who use knowledge in production can earn quasi-monopoly profits. All forms of knowledge, from big science to better ways to sew a shirt exhibit these properties and contribute to growth. Economies with widespread increasing returns are unlikely to develop along a unique equilibrium path. Development may be a process of creative destruction, with a succession of monopolistically competitive technologies and firms. Markets alone may not converge on a single most efficient solution, and technological and regional development will tend to exhibit path dependence.

History, institutions and geography all shape the development of knowledge-based economies. History matters because increasing returns generate positive feedbacks that tend to cause economies to “lock in” to particular technologies and locations. Development is in part chaotic because small events at critical times can have persistent, long term impacts on patterns of economic activity. Institutions matter because they shape the environment for the production and employment of new knowledge. Societies that generate and tolerate new ideas, and that continuously adapt to changing economic and technological circumstances are a precondition to sustained economic growth. Geography matters because knowledge doesn’t move frictionlessly among economic actors. Important parts of knowledge are tacit, and embedded in the routines of individuals and organizations in different places.

New Growth Theory, and the increasing returns associated with knowledge have many implications for economic development policy. New Growth Theory underscores the importance of investing in new knowledge creation to sustain growth. Policy makers will need to pay careful attention to all of the factors that provide incentives for knowledge creation (research and development, the education system, entrepreneurship and the tolerance for diversity, macroeconomic expectations, openness to trade). Because it undermines the notion of a single, optimal general equilibrium, New Growth Theory implies that economics will be less capable of predicting future outcomes. (emphasis added)

Excerpted from New Growth Theory, Technology and Learning: A Practitioner’s Guide. By Joseph CortrightImpresa, Inc

Our Fearless Leader