We're not hiring because we don't know where everything related to this health care reform is going.
The way the law's currently written exempts a company my size from providing coverage for my workers, but who's to say it won't be changed? The reform is being challenged in the courts, and the uncertainty undermines all of our plans.
The worry of change has already prevented us from hiring three or four people in the last year. Instead, I'm using this time to hone our skills. We want to be able to stay as lean as we can. The health care law will bring us added costs, and we will need to manage that.
When it does come, we're going to reevaluate our whole business model. I don't know what we're going to do, but we won't be doing it how we're doing it today. We've even been considering how to keep the same output with fewer employees.
And if this only affects our full-time workers, I wouldn't be willing to make them part-time. Building requires strict timelines and you can't start and stop with different people and expect to receive a timely result.
We asked 10 small businesspeople the one thing they'd ask President Obama to do to make it easier for them to hire.
