MyVoice

IN THIS ISSUE OF MYVOICE:

NFIB Partners With Grow America

Celebrating 70 Years

SPOTLIGHT ON THE 113TH CONGRESS: U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly

Minimum Wage Debate More Applicable in States

Supreme Court to Decide on Key Property Rights Case

Fighting for Repeal

NFIB Partners With Grow America

A speech pathologist, an owner of an e-commerce website that sells chicken soup and an inventor of a new camera walk into a bar. No, it’s not the start of a joke. It’s a night on the town with three recent winners of entrepreneurial competitions run by Grow America, an organization that provides seed money, mentoring programs and education to budding enterprises.

Grow America started as the vision of Alan Hall, who founded global sales and marketing firm MarketStar, and the successful venture fund Mercato Partners. MyBusiness recently spoke with Grow America CEO Mark Hurst about the firm’s initiatives, successes and new partnership with NFIB.

HOW WAS GROW AMERICA BORN?
Alan Hall is a classic serial entrepreneur. He devoted his life to helping entrepreneurs live the dream. After starting in Utah, we constructed a model to take this nationwide. It is a startup itself. We formulated our competitions to be a hybrid of “Shark Tank” and “American Idol.”

WHAT DO CONTEST WINNERS RECEIVE?
Money, marketing, mentoring and networking. In Utah, we have given away $1 million, no strings attached. You get marketing expertise along the way. We also help
you network by meeting like-minded businesspeople and thought leaders.

WHO HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE NOTABLE WINNERS?
One of our top winners is a company called Complete Speech. It makes a device that gives speech pathologists and their patients a visualization of what is happening inside the patient’s mouth. It helps young people overcome speech disabilities.

HOW DID THE PARTNERSHIP WITH NFIB MATERIALIZE?
I did some lobbying on Capitol Hill and I’ve always admired NFIB’s commitment to the entrepreneur and start-up businesses. It was logical, as we set out to build a national organization, to partner with a group that has a passion for entrepreneurship. Through the partnership, NFIB will make its membership base aware of Grow America’s online programs that provide education, mentoring and free resources for entrepreneurs and business owners.

For more information on Grow America, visit www.growam.com.

 
Celebrating 70 Years

As NFIB turns 70 in May, meet one of our longest-running member businesses.

For NFIB member Bill Simon, the fourth-generation owner of a food service distributor in Falls City, Neb., the secret to staying in business for a century is simple: Provide good customer service.

“Our motto is, ‘If we don’t have it, you don’t need it. If you need it, we’ll get it.’ We don’t miss a beat,” Simon said.

Falls City Mercantile Co. services approximately 250 customers in Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. It’s tucked in the southeast corner of Nebraska in a rural town of approximately 4,000 people. The company was founded in 1919 when a drugstore and wholesale grocery business owner asked Frank Simon, Bill’s great-grandfather, to help turn his struggling company around. A year later, Frank Simon bought the company outright.

The company became a member of NFIB in 1944, when Bill’s grandfather, Clarence A. Simon (known as C.A.), owned it. Bill’s father, Clarence F. Simon (known as C.F.), would join the business a year later as a frozen-food buyer after serving in World War II.

“My dad told me, ‘[NFIB] goes to bat for the small guy,’” said Bill, who joined the business in 1976 driving a tractor-trailer to make deliveries. “And that’s what I’ve always told [my son]: ‘Don’t drop these guys because they’re on our side.’”

Like many family businesses—and NFIB—Falls City Mercantile Co. has faced changes over the last 70 years. In 1966, a fire destroyed the company’s building, and C.F. Simon spent a couple years “hitting the bottle pretty good” until finding a new location in a local warehouse.

Bill hopes that his two children, who currently work in the business (he has four total), will continue the family tradition. After almost a century in operation, Falls City Mercantile Corp. is a point of pride not only for the Simon family, but also for longtime residents of the community—and for NFIB.

“We are proud to represent companies, like Falls City Mercantile Co. that have been with NFIB since the beginning; and just as proud to represent those business owners who are signing up to be NFIB members today,” NFIB President and CEO Dan Danner said.

 
SPOTLIGHT ON THE 113TH CONGRESS: U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly

After three terms representing the 2nd District of Indiana in the U.S. House, Joe Donnelly won a seat in the U.S. Senate last November. He was born in Long Island, but went to the University of Notre Dame and settled in Indiana after graduation, where he opened his own small business, a printing and rubber stamp company called Marking Solutions.

Q: WHICH SKILLS OR EXPERIENCES DO YOU TAKE FROM YOUR PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND APPLY IN YOUR ROLE AS A PUBLIC OFFICIAL?

Before I ran for Congress, I ran a small business. Small businesses are the backbone of this country’s economy, and our elected leaders have a duty to protect and encourage their growth.

Q: HOW DO YOU SEEK FEEDBACK AND STAY CONNECTED TO THE SMALL BUSINESS COMMUNITY IN INDIANA?

Calls, letters and visitors to my office are always welcome, but I also travel from one end of Indiana to the other every chance I get. Local chambers of commerce have been helpful, but even where one isn’t available, I go out of my way to meet the men and women who make Indiana’s economy run.

Q: WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS REGARDING THE FEDERAL DEFICIT AND HOW CONGRESS SHOULD ADDRESS GOVERNMENT SPENDING?

We have to get our fiscal house in order. It’s a moral issue as much as an economic one. I refuse to accept that we should leave our children a country with anything less than a balanced budget. That’s why I support a balanced budget amendment and have fought throughout my career to cut federal spending.

Minimum Wage Debate More Applicable in States

Although Pres. Obama has suggested raising the federal minimum wage to $9, such legislation is unlikely to be approved by Congress. But, that doesn’t mean business owners can breathe a sigh of relief: Instead, they should turn their attention to similar legislation in the states. 

As of February, legislation has been introduced in 23 states to increase the state minimum wage or provide automatic adjustments to reflect increased cost of living, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Some of these minimum-wage bills have already passed. In March, the New York State Assembly voted to increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour from $7.25, with automatic increases tied to inflation, effective Jan. 1, 2014. The initiative is included in the state budget, which passed on March 29. “This is going to have a significant, adverse effect on small business, particularly in New York, which has the highest cost of doing business [of any state] in the country,” said Mike Durant, NFIB/NY state director.

Durant said the initiative will ultimately hurt the state’s employers and employees. “The minimum wage is not intended to be a living wage,” he said. “The easiest way to heighten the economic opportunities for New Yorkers is to stop strangling existing business, and to stop prohibiting new business from starting in the state.”

NFIB members face a similar fight in Illinois. “Illinois is an island in the Midwest with a much higher cost of doing business,” said NFIB/IL State Director Kim Clarke Maisch. In February, Gov. Pat Quinn proposed a minimum wage increase to $10 from $8.25. “The vast majority of people earning minimum wage are young people or adults living in a household where they are not the only source of income,” she said. “So of course it’s difficult to raise a family on minimum wage; that’s not what minimum wage is for.”

The New Jersey General Assembly also recently approved a state minimum wage increase to $8.50 from $7.25, with automatic cost-of-living increases tied to the Consumer Price Index. But, Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the measure and offered a compromise: Increase the minimum wage to $8.25 over three years, with no annual cost-of-living adjustments. The assembly didn’t take the deal. Now, New Jersey voters will have the final say in a November ballot measure asking if they’d like to hike the minimum wage to $8.25 immediately, and tie annual increases to the rate of inflation.

Supreme Court to Decide on Key Property Rights Case

Would you believe that a 1937 law requires farmers to surrender portions of their annual raisin crop to the U.S. Department of Agriculture? This would be like a law requiring all small businesses to hand over a portion of their inventory to the government each year. Needless to say, this New Deal-era law stands as an affront to private property rights.

This law is actually still enforced, and the U.S. Supreme Court is now taking up a case, Horne v. USDA, in which California farmers were fined nearly $500,000 for refusing to surrender their crops. The case asks the court to decide whether the farmers had a right to raise the Constitution as a defense to the taking of their crops. Remarkably, the government argues that farmers must first surrender their property before they may assert their constitutional rights.

In this case, the government asserts the farmers must first pay the Department of Agriculture $438,844 in penalties—and only then may the farmers go to court to get their money back.

“Requiring a separate suit for damages to recover money taken in a prior proceeding would hardly be just, reasonable or constitutional,” explained Karen Harned, executive director of the NFIB Small Business Legal Center. The Legal Center filed an amicus brief on behalf of the raisin farmers to make the point that property owners should always be able to assert their constitutional rights in court.

Fighting for Repeal

Although supporters of the federal healthcare law trumpeted it as an antidote to the high cost of health insurance, small businesses are now facing even higher taxes and penalties.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that employers and employees will pay an additional $232 billion in penalties and taxes over the next 10 years, thanks to Obamacare.

That’s why NFIB is contributing to the effort to repeal the employer mandate and the health insurance tax, two of the more harmful provisions of the law, which will take full effect in 2014. We recently helped introduce the following bills in the House and the Senate:

THE AMERICAN JOB PROTECTION ACT
This legislation (H.R. 903/S. 399) repeals the employer mandate, which requires businesses with an equivalent of 50 or more full-time employees to provide sufficient health insurance or face a $2,000 per-employee penalty. “It’s a disincentive to grow,” said Amanda Austin, NFIB’s director of federal public policy. “The closer you get to 50 employees, the employer mandate makes you question whether you want to hire additional employees.”

THE JOBS AND PREMIUM PROTECTION ACT
We’re also supporting the Jobs and Premium Protection Act (H.R. 763 and S. 603) which repeals the health insurance tax. The HIT is levied on health insurance companies, but will almost entirely be passed onto consumers and small businesses in the form of higher premiums.

It’s an amount distributed across health insurance providers, set to raise $100 billion over 10 years. The tax never sunsets, and rises as premiums increase after 2018. Austin said it will likely cost owners $400 to $500 per family for a business of any size in 2014, and will rise each year.

NFIB is educating members of Congress on both issues, leading petition campaigns and making media appearances to drum up support for repeal. “This is the Obama administration’s signature law, and it’s going to be difficult to overturn pieces of it,” Austin said. “[Repeal] is all about building momentum around an issue. I’m hopeful we’ll get there, but it’s going to take time.”