1. Unrelenting attention to detail.

2. Impeccable taste.

3. Indefatigable passion.

4. Absolute conviction.

5. Unwavering vision.

6. Boundless curiosity.

7. Mercurial motivator.

One or two of these will help you make a living.

Three or four of these will make you successful.

Four of five of these will make you a legend.

Five or six of these will make you iconic for all time.

All seven will make you Steve Jobs.

Read the whole thing.

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In a great article from USA Today, a plan is proposed that it’s time for small business to come to America’s rescue—and it can be done. Just as it’s been done before. More than 20 million new jobs—many from startups that grew into billion dollar companies like Amazon.com and Starbucks—were created during the great boom of the Clinton administration. During Reagan’s presidency, great economic progress was fueled by the sentiment that small businesses and entrepreneurs could account for almost all of that growth.

It’s a fact that small business helps America. According to the Small Business Administration, an astonishing 99% of companies with payroll are small businesses—and those companies employ more than 50% of the working public and create an impressive 80% of new job growth.

Small business propels the country forward—and if our stubborn political leaders want to get our country moving again and reclaim our spot as the greatest nation on earth, they need to start putting forth the policies that help small businesses and entrepreneurs do their job. According to the World Entrepreneurship Forum, a global think tank dedicated to small business, some top methods for promoting entrepreneurship include:

• Reform tax and regulatory environments so as to make it easier, faster, and less costly for entrepreneurs to set up enterprises.
• Create entrepreneurship-friendly support institutions that provide technological knowledge, market information, business know-how, certification services, access to capital, and other essential business support.
• Understand entrepreneurship by making it known that entrepreneurs are positive agents of social change, wealth creation, transparency, sustainability, and innovation.

If we had a comprehensive 21st Century Entrepreneurship Act it would include tax reform and regulatory ease. It would include immigration reform to woo the best and brightest entrepreneurs and engineers to our country. It would increase access to capital and help more startups actually start up.

Now Washington just needs to wake up and give small business a chance to save America. Write or call your congressperson and tell THEM to get to work!

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Every morning, we all wake up, and our houses may be worth less than the mortgages on them, and our 401(k)s may be worth less than our lunch, and our salaries or revenues or consulting bills may be down – maybe even down a lot – but we’re waking up in the U.S. of A., where every day is another chance to kick ass and take names.

Buck up, everyone, and go and achieve excellence.

It’s been a rough few years for most people in the USA, but hardly as bad as 90% of the people on planet Earth have it – most of them would gladly change places with you if you live in the USA. Always remember there is still plenty of opportunity in this great country. Never forget that each day is a new chance.

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There’s more detail in this Wall Street Journal article about how today (9/14/10) they will attempt to strip that provision from the bill. As of right now it has failed.

The article gives an example of the 1099 provision that should prompt all small business owners to action. A trucking business, with dozens of trucks, will now have to issue 1099′s for every gas station where each truck spends more than $600 for something as basic as fuel – truly a paperwork nightmare.

Personally, MyNewCompany.com incorporates businesses in all 50 states. This typically includes us paying the filing fee for our clients to the state. Now imagine, state fees run from $25 to $500, we easily spend more than $600/year in the vast majority of states, we usually spend more than that in a day for bigger states like Texas, Florida and California. So basically we will be issuing upwards of 50 1099′s for that expense alone – that doesn’t include our dozens of other vendors.

When I started writing this alert, I didn’t even realize the effect on MyNewCompany until I wrote the previous paragraph even though I’d been aware of the law for a few weeks. Imagine the millions of businesses that have no idea of the new law, what they’ll need to track or even how to track it.

If you care about small business or are a small business owner, you need to contact your Congressperson and Senator and ask them to repeal the 1099 provision of the Healthcare Reform Act. It is a business-killing, paperwork nightmare that threatens to make an already bad economy even worse.

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Compare this to the standard processing time of select US Secretary of States (as of June 2010):

• California Secretary of State: 70 Days
• Maryland Department of State: 75 Days
• Nevada Secretary of State: 45 Days
• New York Secretary of State: 20 Days
• Washington D.C. DCRA: 40 Days

So if you want to file a DBA, incorporate a business or form an LLC in the United States, you will almost certainly have to wait longer than your entrepreneurial equivalent in Rwanda. This should be a wake up call to each US Secretary of State’s filing office: in the largest, most powerful economy in the world, we are now falling behind 3rd world countries (recovering from a brutal civil war) in the time it takes to register a business.

The number of new business registrations is an important indicator of the overall health of an economy and US State governments should make upgrading their systems a priority not only to make business startups faster, but to improve and streamline the internal operations of their own offices.

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Small business is respected by at least 70% of Democrats, Republicans and Independents – there seems to be no political group that doesn’t overwhelmingly trust small business.

However, the poll also shows a striking lack of attention for small business from the Federal Government coming in as the most neglected group, just ahead of the Middle Class.

Of course this is not news to us, we’ve been singing the praises of small business for 9 years! We’ve also been keenly aware of the lack of Federal attention to the issues important to small business: too many rules and regulations, an out-of-control tax code, a health care system that still unfairly punishes small firms (health care reform or not), anti-competitive cooperation between big business and the government (including outrageous subsidies to large firms) and a laundry list of state and local issues.

In short, though small business is the most respected group in the US, it is the most neglected by government. This is a sad state of affairs considering most innovation and job creation comes from small business. It will ultimately be innovative startups, those brave few who actually start a company, that drag our country out of the current recession. The government should act like it cares.

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He shows why the debate about tax cuts and capital gains is unproductive:

You can cut taxes for 95pct of Americans and raise taxes for the rest. You can cut taxes for businesses and retain the Bush Tax Cuts. You can increase or decrease the capital gains tax 5 or 10pct either way.  Under both programs the deficit for the country will increase,  we will borrow and print more money.  5 or 10pct variance either way, given the big hole our economy is in wont matter.

and:

We are in an economic mess right now. It doesn’t matter who caused it. It’s here. It doesn’t matter what our Presidential candidates and their economic advisors come up with. Its meaningless. 

His solution is what has always been the driving force behind the American economy:

The cure for what ails is us the Entrepreneurial Spirit of this country.  We are a nation of people who encourage , support and invest in those of any and all age, race and gender who will use their ingenuity and come up with a new idea.

Its always the new idea that re energizes this country.  Industry, manufacturing, transportation, technology, digital communications, etc, each changed how we lived and ignited our economy and standard of living. Tax policy has never done that.  The American People have.

So what is the specific solution? :

What we need is our candidates to stop yelling at each other and starting looking at the American people and encouraging the best of who we are.  That is who I want to get behind. That is what I would like to see for our country. That is what will energize and motivate people to create companies and invent products that will  turn the economy.

The best time for little guys to start a business is when the big guys are worrying about surviving in theirs. You dont need to raise money. You need to be smart and be focused.  I had no idea until this current financial crisis that when I started MicroSolutions, my first company, it was in the middle of a very bad recession. I had no idea whatsoever. I didnt know what the tax rates were, and I didnt care. I had an idea, a floor to sleep on and a lot of motivation.

Now is the time for Entrepreneurs to step up and do our part for our country. Its up to us to start businesses and create jobs. That is the cure to this country’s economic problems.

So there you go, starting a business or managing and growing your existing business will get us out of this economic mess and back on the road to prosperity.

I also recommend his other article: The Best Equity is Sweat Equity, especially for those concerned about raising startup capital in this tight credit market.

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We can make the process of closing an existing business simple and painless! Just visit our page on filing Articles of Dissolution to properly close your company and we can make sure your company is closed properly (and also prevent your company from having to pay recurring fees).

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For more information on how an S-Corporation is organized and the differences between entity types see our page on choosing an entity.

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For the United States to survive and continue its economic and political leadership in the world, we must see entrepreneurship as our central competitive advantage. Nothing else can give us the necessary leverage to remain an economic superpower. Nothing else will allow us to continue to enjoy our standard of living. We either support and nurture increasingly entrepreneurial activities in all aspects of our society and around the globe, or run the very real risk that we will become progressively irrelevant on the world stage and suffer economically at home.

(via Dr. Cornwall)

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