If I could tell President Obama one thing about how he could help small businesses, it would be in three words, 'Don't do anything.' If there's more uncertainty created by the government, that will just cause small businesses to push hiring and investment even further down the road.
Our sales have doubled year-to-date. We've gone from six to nine products. So you would think that we'd be hiring, but we're not. We haven't hired in over two years.
I need to hire a business development guy, a product manager, a marketing person, SEO expert and a design engineer to support our growth. But because the banks are so tight with lending money to small businesses, all of the money we are making is going back into sustaining our business, not really growing it.
President Obama has to put some organization in place, other than the SBA, that gives banks the confidence that they should lend to small businesses. The SBA is supposed to give banks that guarantee but it's not really working.
We are hurting ourselves by not being able to hire. We're not coming out with as many products. LED lighting is hot right now. But next year we need another innovation.
Here's another example: We pushed up the launch of our new Mr. Beams power outage lighting system because we felt the timing was better now. Hurricane Irene is making people think about how hurricanes affect power in their homes. We wanted to make a big splash with the launch of Mr. Beams, but we just didn't have the extra money to do it. -- P.K.
Be polite and professional when giving an employee the boot. And if the person getting fired starts to lose it, duck.
