CO

Something significant happened on Election Day that had nothing to do with the presidential race: Four states quietly voted to raise their minimum wage.

In what is fast becoming a national trend, a majority of citizens in Colorado, Maine, Arizona and Washington voted in favor of a gradual minimum wage increase until 2020; after that, the wage will be modified in accordance with the cost of living.

And it seems good things come in fours. In 2014, a quartet of states (Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota) also voted to increase their minimum wage.

Steve Katsaros has always been an innovator. He began inventing products for the ski industry in his late teens, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (BSME) from Purdue University so he could follow his dream of creating new technologies to improve the world. In the early 2000s, Katsaros came up with his first big invention: the RevoPower, an efficient motorized wheel designed to travel up to 20 miles per hour at over 100 miles per gallon.

For many small businesses, addressing HR, legal and compliance needs can be a challenge. Many lack the resources to hire a full-time HR professional who can draft employee policies and handbooks, design HR strategies that help move the company forward or secure legal services for HR-related necessities – like employment contracts or separation agreements.

As a successful woman small business owner in Colorado, Lisa Goodbee knows first-hand the hardships that go into starting a business from scratch.

With blood, sweat and tears, Goodbee has turned her small business, Goodbee & Associates, into a standout woman-owned engineering firm since its founding in 1994.

It’s this experience and the opportunities that were available to her that shape Goodbee’s stance on immigration reform, something she strongly believes in.

Small Business Majority held a photo contest to find the most creative small businesses around for National Small Business Week. Each day, we’ll be highlighting one of the winners in a profile on our blog. The winner of Small Business Majority’s 2014 photo contest is AmCheck!

As one of the founding partners of AmCheck, a small business that provides flexible payroll services including human resources and benefits, Mike Francone’s risky decision to leave one of the nation’s largest payroll companies to start his own has paid off in spades.

Tim Gaudette

A new report released by the National Park Service, detailed in Jason Blevin’s article, “Government shutdown tapped 18.2 percent from Estes Park’s sales-tax take,” shows just how devastating the government shutdown’s closure of our national parklands was to local economies. Unfortunately, this isn’t news to our small business community.

In Colorado, Main Street businesses are working to rebuild the state’s economy. These entrepreneurs are doing all they can to hire, grow and move their businesses forward. For their wellbeing and that of Colorado’s economic future, it’s important they have ample opportunity to innovate—particularly in the energy efficiency arena, as indicated by a report released Wednesday.

Colorado small business owners strongly believe the preservation of the state’s natural assets is essential to their financial success and that of local economies, and they support the president’s ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to develop new energy resources, particularly if it includes provisions to protect public lands, according to opinion polling we released this week and reflected in an ad airing in the Denver metro area.