Julia Jamieson's blog

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.

In today’s digital age, it’s nearly unheard of to not have some sort of online presence, especially for businesses that frequently utilize the Internet to market to their customer base and sell their product.  And yet, a vast 52% of small businesses do not have a website.

What started as a chance encounter between two community-minded engineers at a conference blossomed into a lasting partnership and an innovative small business focused on public engagement and environmental planning.

Nspiregreen, the brainchild of business partners Veronica Davis and Chancee Lundy, is a Washington, D.C.-based environmental and urban planning consulting firm.

The best pieces of art are often transformative. What starts out as one thing can take on a new shape, meaning or purpose for someone else. It’s the out-of-box creativity and perception of an artist that can take one piece and make it something wholly different and unique – an artist like Olivia Ashjian James, for example.

246 hours. For eight months, Kristine de la Cruz spent one hour each day working on a business plan. After 246 hours, Crème Caramel LA was ready to sell.

Crème Caramel LA, a custard and confection dessert bakeshop in Sherman Oaks, CA, may have only taken 246 hours to conceive, but the notion of owning her own business had been with Cruz for far longer.

A vacation that turned out to be more work than play sparked a crazy idea for Isabel Sanchez and her husband, Daniel Huerta, that led to Portland’s red-hot food truck, Churros Locos.

During a trip along the Oregon coast, Sanchez and her husband met a gelato business owner who was lamenting about the lack of smell exuding from his shop to attract customers. In a flash, inspiration struck.