For the first time, in a very, very long time, I attended a women's entrepreneurship conference that had actual businesswomen there - not just a bunch of service providers representing a host of government programs. Naturally, the event was hosted by government agencies - the SBA and the Federal Reserve - and it was attended by a White House appointee for small business issues (I never did get her complete name).
The world has changed drastically since 1993, when I started what has probably been the most successful of my many business ventures - a management and marketing consulting firm. Bill Clinton was in the White House then (worth noting that he was also a Democrat, like the current 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue occupant), and we were moving toward full employment, a budget surplus, and a sense that Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" was still at full sun.
I rode the wave of extended prosperity as long as everyone else did, well into the early months of 2001, even though the few hiccups that started showing up in the summer of 2000 were accurate warnings of things to come. During my consulting heyday, none of my clients showed any interest in finding out how to get contracts with the government. None of them asked me if there might be grants that could help them move their business along. None of them agonized over hiring another one or two employees because of what the cost of additional employer-provided health care might do to their bottom line. And, for the record, none of my clients were big enough to even rate on the Fortune 1000 list, let alone the Fortune 500 list, but they were solid, small and medium sized firms that offered good value and were reliable providers of their respective products and services.
What I heard at the seminar today bothers me tremendously. For several years now, I have heard business owners be encouraged to seek federal contracting opportunities - because the federal government is now the biggest buyer of EVERYTHING (emphasis is today's speaker's).
I listened to qualified business owners, with solid business plans and proven track records, tell about being turned down for loans - even SBA guaranteed loans. I wonder what would have happened if one of my flagship clients from the 1990s were to apply for an SBA loan today - that was how he was able to get his one-man operation financed to expand and bring in two additional professionals and a host of para-professionals. (Uh, I think they call that job creation.)
I heard highly placed government officials suggest that the only way to navigate the maze of federal programs is by finding a "specialist" who can assist with that process. When I asked why that was necessary - why a competent and experienced businessperson could not handle the application process herself - I was told that a "specialist" can help open the doors.
There did not seem to be any facet of business operation that did not have some potential tie back to a federal opportunity.
Back in the 1970s, when I was taking my Economics courses, I recall our professors showing us graphs that depicted what happened when the private sector had to compete with government for goods and services: prices went up; the cost of capital went up; and the private sector became less profitable. This was not anti-Keynesian rhetoric. It was basic economic theory.
I don't think Econ 101 has changed that much. The women in my break-out session got right to the heart of things: cut the red tape; fix the tax code; fix Obamacare; and tell government to get out of the way. Over half of the room applauded at those statements.
I'll borrow from Herman Cain, who said this during the Republican debate the other night: "I know how Washington works. It doesn't."
No, Washington doesn't work, but the rest of us do - or we'd like to, if we could count on government getting out of the way, and freeing the rest of us to get down to business.
