A Weekly Roundup of Small-Business News - NYTimes.com

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A weekly roundup of small-business developments.

What?s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.

The Big Story: Consumers Are Spending

Consumer confidence increases to its highest level in eight months. Gallup reports a 4.1 percent uptick in holiday spending. Porsche sales are up 25 percent. But Sears announces that it?s closing a bunch of stores, and consumer and business spending points to slower growth ? a forecast supported by numbers from the advertising industry. But cheer up, this video of the best wins of 2011 will make you feel better!

The Economy: Might as Well Jump

The four-week average of weekly unemployment claims are the lowest since June 2008. The Federal Highway Administration reports that traffic is down from last year. Home prices fall 3.4 percent and some think America is becoming a nation of renters. But pending homes sales are the highest in a year and a half and experts see a recovery in commercial real estate this year. A forecasting firm is predicting a recession in 2012 (but not for the original Van Halen, which just announced a new tour). The United States government received record demand for its bonds in 2011. The Standard & Poor?s 500-stock index moved the least since 1970. Steve Strauss of USA Today begins his list of the top trends for small business in 2012. NPR sums up the year in four great charts.

Ideas: The Latino Opportunity

Justin Kownacki says 10 things changed his life in 2011. Matt Ryan lists five everyday products made possible by NASA. Bad idea: taking 247 animals with you on a plane. Cassie Murdoch reports that grocery stores are not just for ladies anymore. The satellite launching business faces a cloudy future. But an electric car can go more than 300 kilometers. Evangeline Gomez explains why Latino-owned businesses are leading the recovery: ?Latino-owned businesses are expected to increase their total revenue contribution to the economy by 8 percent annually over the 10 years from 2005 to 2015. This is more than three times the average growth for all businesses. What does this mean: Latinos will have more economic clout, employ a greater proportion of the population and purchase substantially more in goods and services than they do today.?

Your People: Robot Hiring

A company sues a former employee over 17,000 Twitter followers. An employer argues that employees should not be allowed to discuss their pay. A deadline looms for posting employee rights per the National Labor Relations Act. A boom in robot hiring has begun. CareerBuilder says employers are ?cautiously optimistic (PDF)? about hiring in 2012, but I?m certain none of my children qualify for this job. A majority of employees are not taking all of their vacation time. Your employees may benefit from these tips on choosing the right health insurance plan. Michael Flatt explains how to give feedback that works: ?I quickly learned that the team felt alienated by scattershot criticism and a lack of recognition from the head office. Something had to change. The team and I designed a review system to evaluate each project on a 10-point scale. That transformed the feedback from random critiques to consistent, objective assessments.?

Start-Up: How Silicon Valley Was Built

Here are 10 San Francisco start-ups that will shake up the world of food. A new company shows how to profit when a relationship breaks up. Scott McNealy shares his recent start-up experience. Joe McKendrick reports on a few cool start-ups he likes and five reasons to be optimistic about technology innovation. This video explains how a handful of investors built Silicon Valley. Laurie Kulikowski picks the best businesses to enter in 2012.

Marketing: Amazon Plays Guess the Religion

Amazon and Apple get high customer service marks but this little girl is upset with the way toys are marketed. Uzi Shmilovici suggests eight ways to go viral, including: ?Embeddable virality. This method works superbly well for content Web sites. The ability to take a piece of content and embed it anywhere on the web, with a link back to the original website. This will put your product in front of countless users.? Amazon profiling tries to guess customer religions by gift wrap choices. Mike Thimmesch asks whether QR codes are worth putting on trade show displays. Fourteen experts suggest must-read social media books. Google Plus passes 62 million users. Scott Gerber lists 13 location-based marketing tips for entrepreneurs. Lior Levin offers five reasons live chat has untapped potential for online selling.

Red Tape Update: Five Victories

Paychex lists 12 potential regulatory changes that small businesses should know about. Same-sex spouses lose big on taxes and Santa Claus gets arrested for tax fraud. A report finds that small-business investment in federal contracting is up 21 percent over last year. Kent Hoover says entrepreneurs snagged these five victories from Washington in 2011.

Boss of the Week: Louis CK shows how to earn big bucks in 12 days with a $5 video.

Around the World: Samoa Skips Friday

An investor defends his decision to abandon setting up a start-up fund in Chile: ?The Chilean society is less dynamic than Asia or the U.S.; a handful of monopolistic families control the country, and won?t move. Worse, these families don?t care about anything (the young, the poor ?) besides their money. They don?t have to: the country?s natural resources (copper, etc.) are a disadvantage here, because it means the rich don?t need to work hard.? A Chilean entrepreneur responds. Cisco and the Moscow Business School introduce an M.B.A. executive course. Japanese small-business sentiment continues to weaken. America is the world?s most charitable nation but also the largest jailer of citizens per capita in the world. Brazil is now the world?s sixth largest economy. Om Malik explains why Berlin is poised to be Europe?s new tech hub. Samoa skips Friday.

Around the Country: Following the Luggage

Small businesses in Kalamazoo, Mich., report improved holiday sales. For the second time in four years, an information technology firm is named NASA?s small-business prime contractor of the year (which is almost as impressive as this sixth-grade basketball player in North Carolina). A Colorado Springs company that has been offering clinics for high school football coaches is expanding next month into offering conferences for small businesses on sales, marketing and human resources. Massachusetts gives $2.2 million in loans to life sciences start-ups. See how your luggage travels on Delta Airlines.

Technology: Cyber Insurance

A security think tank gets hacked and insurance against cyberattacks is expected to boom (but Grandpa isn?t interested). A marijuana company buys a software firm. Microsoft?s Windows phone marketplace hits 50,000 apps but Robert Scoble explains why the Windows Phone 7 hasn?t taken off: ?So, when a consumer goes into a carrier store to buy a new phone, what is going on in the back of her/his head? Android=safe. iOS/iPhone=safe. Everything else=not safe.? Small businesses are expected to buy more tablets in 2012. Tech companies ramp up on intern hiring. Rieva Lesonsky reports on why now is the time to raise your I.T. budget. PC World?s Logan G. Harbaugh lists technologies that should be on our company?s radar this year. Chandra Steele lists her biggest tech disappointments of 2011. Jeweller Magazine wonders if Apple is introducing an iWatch.

The Week?s Bests

Way to Stay in Control. S. Anthony Iannarino wants us to stay in control and be flexible: ?Great salespeople follow a sales process. They know that there are certain necessary and important outcomes that position them to win, that serve their clients through the buying process, and that allow them to later execute and meet their client?s business outcomes. But these salespeople don?t follow the process when doing so doesn?t work to achieve these outcomes. When the roadmap isn?t an accurate representation, they make adjustments.?

Way to Find Humor in What You Do. Michael Hess explains why your business doesn?t have to be so serious: ?Humorless, uptight companies are often paralyzed by politics, stifling hierarchies, defensiveness, fear of failure/consequences, and other dysfunction. A collective sense of humor and the cohesive culture it engenders tends to minimize such toxicity.?

Lessons From 2011. A business owner and data analyzer, Chris Merrick, summarizes what he learned in 2011, including: ?Anything we can do, our customers can do better. In the early versions of (our product), customers were unable to edit anything beyond the level of charts and dashboards ? modifications to the actual data set had to be performed by (one of our) analysts. The stated reason for this was that the tools we had to perform these changes were powerful and confusing, a mix that we were afraid might lead customers to make irreversible changes accidentally. But, as our customer base has matured, we have felt more demand for data warehouse management tools, and as our product development team has matured, we have recognized that the above reasons are really just lame excuses. We can build tools that aren?t confusing, and we can build in protections for reversing accidental changes ? and that?s what we?re going to do.?

This week?s question: What did you learn in 2011?

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/this-week-in-small-business-the-latino-opportunity/

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