Julia Jamieson's blog

With a keen eye for alluring design and a mission to showcase and honor the one-of-a-kind flair of different local communities, Designing Local is a consulting firm that seeks to bring the inner-beauty of a given locale to the forefront.

Based in Columbus, Ohio, Designing Local is celebrating a big milestone – one year in business of bringing pride, legacy and prosperity to the projects and communities they take on.

When Monica J. Scott touched down in Washington, D.C. on May 11, 2015, she had no idea the magnitude of the event she was about to take part in.

Gathering at our nation’s capital for Small Business Majority’s inaugural Small Business Leadership Summit, Scott was a member of a group of the best and brightest small business owners who came to voice their opinions to policymakers, hoping to institute real change that would benefit the greater small business community.

What happens when you put more than 100 small business owners in a room together to discuss the biggest issues facing small businesses today? That’s what we found out during our inaugural Small Business Leadership Summit, a three-day event of education, collaboration and action that took place May 11-13 in our nation’s capitol.

For a professional baker, nothing could be worse than discovering the thing you love the most is detrimental to your health. But that’s what bake lover Michelle Retik began to realize when she was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis.

Small Business Majority CEO, John Arensmeyer

By all accounts, our economy is continuing on a path of recovery in the aftermath of the recession. And while this should signal good times ahead for our nation’s small businesses, entrepreneurs are still struggling to get what they need most to grow and thrive: access to traditional loans and more reasonable terms on alternative lending.

Sometimes you have to get down and dirty in order to create something beautiful, and that’s the driving philosophy behind one of the leading landscape architecture firms in the Midwest.

Big Muddy Workshop, based in Omaha, NE, was founded by John Royster, a third generation small business owner inspired by design and a passion for sustainability. Having come from a family of business owners, Royster decided early on he should merge his personal interests with his family’s entrepreneurial spirit.

By Maria Contreras-Sweet
Administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration

With apologies to baseball and your mother’s apple pie, nothing is more American than National Small Business Week.

Any true Southerner will tell you that, when it comes to cooking, it’s all about the heart. There’s no need for those fancy, highfalutin culinary degrees when you’ve got decades of tradition and a little splash of love in the kitchen. That down-home, fuzzy-warm style of baking is exactly what Catarah Coleman and Shoneji Robison brought with them from the South to the mean streets of urban Los Angeles.

A business is only as good as the employees who work there. In order to staff their business with the cream of the crop, Jill and Craig Treadway took a unique approach to their hiring process that has paid off in spades.

JT Engineering, an engineering consulting firm based in Hobart, WI, was established in 2005 by Jill Treadway, the principal owner, and specializes in design, construction and program management services at the local, state and federal level.