A quartet of this generation’s most-respected economic and financial minds say that meeting small-businesses’ capital, technology and labor needs while relieving their regulatory burden could drive a new jobs boom.
“How can we increase the speed of job creation? A critical part of the answer lies with America’s small businesses, which create over 60% of net new private-sector jobs and employ nearly half of America’s workforce,” Lloyd Blankfein, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and Michael Porter wrote for
USA Today.
“Helping them expand — to get their ideas off the ground — is one of the best ways to support economic growth and needs the continued focus of both elected officials and the private sector,” the quartet said.
Blankfein is chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg is a former New York City mayor and founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School.
“As we’ve seen through Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, entrepreneurs across the country are facing barriers to growth. Based on a survey of over 1,800 small businesses, the report pinpoints four major challenges that cut across industries: the need for better access to capital, less burdensome regulations, more qualified workers and ability to better assimilate information technology,” they said.
“Small businesses face other challenges, but progress in these four areas would provide a significant boost to local hiring — and to national economic growth. More than six years into a sluggish recovery, we must do more to help small businesses drive a new generation of growth — and put the next generation of Americans to work,” they said.
Buffett also had additional advice for small-business owners at a Goldman Sachs small business event in New York on Tuesday,
MarketWatch reported.
“Tomorrow when you look in the mirror, just write in lipstick or whatever you want, ‘Delight my customer.’ Not satisfy my customer, delight my customer. Any business that has delighted customers has a sales force out there.”
“The classic example [is] Jeff Bezos. He set out every day to delight his customer by fast delivery, by lower prices, whatever it took. And today he is thinking about how to delight his customer. He’ll never quit.”
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square Inc. and Twitter Inc. also offered advice.
“It’s all about the people and attracting the right people means you have a deep understanding of what your purpose is, that you can clearly articulate that purpose and that you can see alignment and misalignment,” Dorsey said.
“The most important question I ask whenever I’m interviewing someone to join the company is, ‘Why are you here?’ And if I see passion for our purpose, I know that any skill can be taught but passion cannot be. If people have passion about their work, they’ll go above and beyond to make it successful.”
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