Many people nowadays don't have any relationship to Tupelo Honey as anything other than an album recorded by Van Morrison, but there really is such a honey, made by bees during the 10 days a year in the Southeastern corner of the U.S. that the Tupelo trees are in bloom. That's the stuff Ted Dennard's Savannah Bee Company makes, and even though he started working with bees as a child, it was a rather circuitous, if seemingly inevitable route Mr. Dennard took to get to that point.

Mr. Dennard says, "I had a professor who said 'I back into everything I ever did,' and that's how I feel like."

His version of backing into beekeeping took him from being a reggae DJ/religious philosophy student at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, through a stint with the Peace Corps in Jamaica, and around the world and back.

Mr. Dennard continued, "That's how blind I am. When I traveled, I'm in Vietnam, in some beehive in the Mekong Delta, literally everywhere I went it seemed like I seemed to end up in bees, but I specifically never wanted to do that. I didn't want to adulterate the passion, plus there's no money in beekeeping, and ultimately I wanted to make SOME money."

The perennial $64,000 question, how to make money doing what he clearly had a passion for. The solution was prompted by necessity from the comments of a roommate.

"I ended up coming back to Savannah, putting hives in the yard, and my roommate who was a math major, he wanted to get into it, and he got a couple of hives, and he said 'This is just ridiculously expensive, we got to sell some honey.'"

Thankfully his roommate's girlfriend at the time, now wife, happened to work at a local store that could sell a few jars, so Mr. Dennard got some supplies, hand-designed the labels, made some copies, taped them on the jars, and got going. Shortly after he started getting queries from other local stores for his honey, and his commercial path was begun.

Not that it was exactly smooth sailing and "happily ever after" for the 5-year-old company. "Just general miasmic chaos," is how Mr. Dennard described the state of affairs about 2 years into his honey experiment, so he got in touch with his local SBA Development Center who showed him how to work with fun stuff like cash flow, accounts payable/receivable, budgets, etc., and voilà! Savannah Bee Company won 2007 State Small Business of the Year Award for Georgia.

As with many bits of jargon thrown around by wildly different groups of people, Web 2.0 can mean different specific things to each of those different groups, however at its core it means a more interactive vision of the web, rather than the original v 1.0 implementation common on the web that basically translated into shovel-ware, where companies did online what they did everywhere else in their interactions with their customers, readers, etc.: give them stuff to read or listen to to hopefully drive them to use your products and services more.

In the Web 2.0 vision, companies are actually engaging in a more full relationship with their customers, not just talking to/at them, but also giving the customers a public voice. The difference is between giving somebody a voicemail or email box to call/write that may or may not ever elicit a response, and having an online chat with that same customer.

There are many different ways in which this plays out online, depending on the field, but probably the most widely recognized implementation of this is Youtube. Some in the broadcast field may view Youtube as simply a collection of user-posted amateur and pirated video clips, but the true Web 2.0
viewpoint of this is of users interacting and engaging actively not just in their own content creations, but in those of professional creators as well.

Independent of the source or copyright of the videos referenced, users can post comments and ratings alongside the videos, share them with friends either by emailing links to them, or embedding them in their own web pages, and creating playlists of similarly themed
videos. In other words, letting the users do with the content what they would like, rather than "they get what they get" vision of an old-style business run under a "command and control" management model.

Collaborate is the key word here.

Another great version of this, and buzzword du jour, is wikis (you can see the most popular version of a wiki, the Wikipedia). Wikis at their heart are merely collaboratively created and edited mini-universes of content. The collaborative part
comes from the fact that they are intended for decentralized information creation where the collective group is assumed to know more about the subject than any one given person.

One great potential usage of wikis for Small Business is in the world of customer support. If you don't have a fleet of customer service representatives on call, but you do have an engaged and informed group of customers, you can leverage some of their instincts for helping themselves and others out by having them collaboratively work out how to solve problems with it.

For example, rather than having an email support line where you constantly solve one-off type problems, you can have your registered users post their problems to a wiki that has some restrictions placed on it such that only your customers and others you allow access to can post (if you don't take precautions like this, spammers and other malevolent sorts of individual will make your world hellish very fast). Since it's a collaboratively edited wiki, those questions
could then be answered by other "super" users, in addition to yourself/your staff.

Further, because wikis are at their heart living, breathing, and editable documents, you don't have to have some complicated editorial process to update documentation/support docs. They can be as up-to-date as you and your users have the time to note changes. Most wikis also come with some ability for the users to remotely monitor changes to the pages, which also solves the problem of user notification.

The most important thing to remember in Web 2.0-world is that it is truly collaborative, and that the mix of features and resources you choose to share with your customers needs to not be some sort of cookie-cutter solution, but truly pays attention to the unique circumstances and context of your company, your products, and your users needs.

If you or someone close to you has had a baby recently and you've subsequently attended, thrown, or received a baby shower, you are probably familiar with the Colorado State Small Business of the Year, the Boppy Company .

For those unfamiliar with the Boppy, it's basically a donut-shaped pillow with a slice removed so that you can either wear it around your waist to support a nursing baby and spare your arm a little extra fatigue, or that you can place on the floor with the baby in the middle so that it can be elevated a little off the floor.

It's a very simple idea, but a product matching it hadn't been created until company founder Susan Brown saw something that caught her attention at her daughter's daycare provider:

"[They] put up signs that said 'will parents make pillows?' It was for a room for babies under 1. And I said, well I'll make the pillows, but what will you do with them? 'We stack them around the babies, because we can't hold them all at once. That way they can see what's going on,' and so I said 'well I'll make it round', and that was pretty much it."

And yet at first the Boppy had its skeptics as well, as Ms. Brown explains: "The president of Toys 'R' Us came in one day at a trade show and he goes, 'I can't believe how far you got on this stupid little pillow.'"

So that's the first vision of networking here: paying attention to the needs of people around you (and ignoring those who may not be paying as close of attention). A further benefit of this needs- focused approach is that this attention to Boppy's network also played out in the viral spread of Boppies throughout the world of American baby-dom as grateful gift recipients bought one for the next mom in line.

Networking Version Number 2 shows up in the Boppy story when Ms. Brown needed a finance person, "...because I'm not good at finance. And as soon as I got someone strong in and I got out of it, the company was much stronger." To where did she turn for that help?

Her now ex-husband's bookkeeper. Ms. Brown laughed and said, "I got her in the divorce. He jokes about it too, we're friends."

The other primary spot for networking is the one that most people focus on when they're thinking about what's needed to build a new business: raising money. But even here, Ms. Brown shows that it pays to take a more expansive view of your network than just the first degree of people whom you directly know:

"Because none of my network of friends was really involved with it, Boppy grew its own little network. And then a very important thing happened to me. I went to Mount Holyoke College and met an alum, and she said, well men are always helping each other, I'm going to get a bunch of women from our college and they'll all buy your stock because we really want to see women benefit from networking like men do. These women didn't know me, and they ended up owning about 1/3 of the company, and each step in financing is really important, as if you don't get that step, you'd be gone, so that was huge for me."

The benefits of being big in business are pretty obvious and well- documented, but one of the biggest upsides of being a truly small business is that you can provide the sort of focus on your customers that not only can provide a superior quality of service, but also makes them feel more like a partner, and less like a commodity: the generic customer/consumer of a generic product/service.

Native Angels Homecare and Hospice from Lumberton, North Carolina, was announced as the winner of the 2007 National Small Business of the Year award at the SBW awards events this week, and in an interview with sisters and co-founders Bobbie Jacobs-Ghaffar and Lesa Jacobs, Ms. Jacobs-Ghaffar described it thusly:

"We serve people from all races and backgrounds, but we are Native American, the community we serve is primarily Native American, and I think the cultural competency that we built in, the fact that we embrace the community and took our services to the community rather than having the community respond to a purely medical model was really the thing that [enabled] our growth."

That sort of word-of-mouth marketing is invaluable, particularly in a sensitive, and highly competitive, field like health care and hospice work.

Ms. Jacobs-Ghaffar continued:

"At first we really weren't into expanding, but it's really kind of a natural thing to do now. People have asked us to go over county lines, to go over state lines, because they really want us to take care of [their] families, and with us it's a cultural thing. For someone to ask you into their home, it's a privilege and an honor."

I'm not sure how you teach that sort of thing in Business School.

The first runner-up in the Small Business of the Year award was Johnson Grain from Waverly, Illinois, and founder Jay Johnson had his take on providing such a holistic approach to serving his customers:

"Our mission statement is to provide the best markets and the best service to our local farmer. We provided an efficient rail line down to the domestic feed market; we are now bringing an ethanol plant right next to our elevator to provide another market that will increase the value of the corn for our area farmer. And when it comes down to the service end of it, we make sure that we have the best service when he comes into the facility, so that he can dump quickly, effectively, and also provide all of the marketing services and risk management services that we can."

Mr. Johnson, who started Johnson Grain when he returned to Waverly following his first post-college job at First Chicago Bank, thus combines his understanding of the farm world he grew up surrounded by, with that of the financial world that he studied at Illinois State University and worked in in Chicago.

As to whether or not what Johnson Grain is doing can be commoditized and taken over by one of the big players in the industry: "There's always competitive pressures. We try to work as allies with all of the big companies. We feel that there is a niche out there for everybody. We try and get along with everybody. We try to make our difference on service and markets."

Generally if a professional politician or bureaucrat steps to the podium to remind Main Street-style Business of how much said individual is looking out for their interests, they should be prepared to offer specific, and generally personal, assistance on an affected situation, as small business people do not deal so much in the abstractions of public policy as the realities of running their day-to-day business.

With the Senate in session and actively engaged in its day-to-day business of legislating, Senator John Kerry's Q&A session following his speech yesterday afternoon at SBW had to wait until today's online chat at WashingtonPost.com (transcript here), but the attendees didn't have to wait long after his departure from the stage for the Bush Administration's rebuttal to Kerry's mention of the roughly 30% decline in SBA's budget during the last seven years.

The two-part response included an acknowledgement of the budgetary situation, accompanied by the assertion that even with less money the SBA is doing more and better work for Small Business by doubling the number of government procurement contracts awarded to Small Business and a doubling of the loan guarantees the SBA provides to banks for Small Business loans.

This response drew applause as one would expect, given that it not only replied to Kerry's traditional offer of more government spending as part of his solution to the problem (one of the fundamental skills of successful Small Business is frequently figuring out how to making do with what one has on hand, not what might come tomorrow), it also gave the attendees one definite plus: the increase in procurement contracts. But the Administration's response ultimately left me with a "Huh?" when I heard the bit about the loan guarantees.

First off, what exactly does doubling "loan guarantees" mean?
Doubling the number of loans at any level? The overall dollar amounts guaranteed? Both? Neither? I listened to my recording of the response several times to see if I missed a word in there, and not that I can tell, nor could I find any similar talking point on the web. Just as throwing more money at a problem doesn't necessarily solve it, saying that something has doubled without specifying the context of the doubling doesn't help much at evaluating the meaningfulness of the assertion.

Setting that aside though, the second reason why I questioned the increasing numbers of guarantees provided is that while it does appear to represent a clear commitment by the Bush administration to supporting Small Business, what does this particular type of commitment mean? More particularly, why is it necessary in the "growing" economy we are experiencing?

I ask this because in terms of percentage of GDP represented by Small Business, using the numbers provided by the SBA in "The Small Business Share of GDP, 1998-2004" (a little light reading) the numbers have held steady at approximately 50%. These percentages haven't moved much over the last 50 yeas, and are off of their late 1950's peak, as anyone who has watched 1950's sitcoms and their accompanying visions of post-war prosperity can tell you. This is despite currently having experienced 40-something consecutive months of economic growth (so the SBW attendees were told).

If the economy is growing so strongly, why does the government need to provide more assistance/guarantees? Isn't this the sort of market that the free markets, as represented here by the banking community, is supposed to want to put more money into? Do commercial bankers know something about the risks of entrepreneurship in this economy that we don't?

Wal Mart. A name that sends shivers down the spines of Main Street- style businesses all over the country, and yet the final speaker of the SBW Awards events here in Washington, D.C. this week was Matt Kistler, the Senior Vice President of Marketing, Research & Insights for Sam's Club, Wal Mart's 25-year-old chain of warehouse club stores often found within close proximity of a Wal Mart.

Not that I really expected to see flaming pitchforks magically appear when Mr. Kistler stepped to the podium for his short speech, but here I was in a room full of award winners in an industry frequently discussed as being directly impacted by the speaker, and there wasn't even a detectable murmur of dissent questioning Kistler's motivations speaking to this group.

Pragmatic is another "P" word that could describe Small Business's relationship with the Wal Mart company. You hear many shopkeepers complain particularly about the effects of Wal Mart's pricing policies on traditional retailers, but it is also true that the Sam's Club division of Wal Mart offers many small business owners the ability to buy products at quantity discounts normally only accessible by the volume purchasing of large companies.

In his speech Mr. Kistler referenced one of those new products, health insurance offerings that Sam's Club is now offering to its membership, but he also gave an example of a small 8-person manufacturing company in Phoenix, Arizona, Sam's Club partnered with to develop a salsa for test sale and distribution in Sam's Clubs in the Southwest.

To many small businesses making products for consumer retail sales, distribution at a major chain can appear to be the Holy Grail, promising significant increases in sales volume, while also giving them a reliable, deep-pocketed customer. Theoretically this could change their workaday reality from having to manage the complicated working relationships with a number of smaller distributors, which complicates matters as most distribution setups are customized, meaning the manufacturer and the distributor/retailer has to negotiate all kinds of policies and procedures for fulfillment of the product, and paying for it, which takes time and money away from developing those products.

As with all change, there are also tradeoffs. One of those readily understood is that you typically have to give those large distributors DEEP discounts, but in exchange for that deep discount, the business owner theoretically no longer has to work with potentially dozens of customized work-flows, instead now having a more stream-lined single one generally geared towards fulfilling the needs of one much larger partner. However that much larger partner's work-flow needs are also customized.

Further, because the small business owner is plugging into a highly complex ecosystem at a place like Wal Mart at the lower end or Nordstrom's at the higher end, that single set of procedures can be more complex than all of the individual sets combined. Compliance with it can not only cost significant time and money to get a company ready for it, but is further complicated by the relative weights of the two partners: the big distributor can change the rules of the game basically whenever they want, and if you fall out of compliance, there can be penalties imposed that will be deducted out of the monies owed to the small business owner.

This is probably not newsworthy to most of the award winning Small Business attendees this week, those who aren't dealing directly in business-to-business or business-to-government work at any rate, as they have likely had to deal with plenty of complicated relationships and gray areas just to survive. Yet even acknowledging that extremely complicated relationship, it didn't sound to me like anyone was sitting on their hands when Mr. Kistler strode to the stage, nor upon
exiting: he was welcomed and thanked as warmly as anybody else.

Most of us at one point or other in our adult lives work a job where we would like to tell our boss to, as Johnny Paycheck said, "Take this job and shove it!" Most of us don't, but out of the ranks of those who do, come many a small business owner. For many of these small business owners, the sentiment is more accurately described as simply "wanting to do what you love."

Whichever side of that divide you happen to lie on, imagine if you finally up and did it, headed out the front door not-to-return, because you actually got a contract to do whatever it was that you always wanted to do for yourself, and then whammo! The gig goes kerblooey (that's a technical term, like "whammo") that you were counting on to finance your own shot at becoming a benevolent dictator (or however you happen to see your version of overlordship).

Well, actually, not quite "goes kerblooey," but it had to feel that way to at least some extent when Ecotone Services found out more or less exactly that their first contract with the US Forest Service's Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, one they were counting on when they quit their paying jobs, was protested and had to be reviewed by the authorities one more time.

And not only were they now working without the safety net of their previous corporate jobs, but the project they had bid on was against what I euphemistically call "more resourced" firms (bigger, richer, better connected, etc.), who could theoretically survive many more rounds of review and re-review, or minus that, they could just deal better with whatever normal delays might come up in the real world than a company Ecotone's size could (only 50-some employees even today).

"This was not a small business set-aside. The project we bid against Brown & Root, British Aerospace, and more," said Jeff Fletcher, the soft-spoken, Paducah, Kentucky-born native and Ecotone President and co-founder during an interview Monday afternoon here at SBW. Fortunately he and fellow co-founder and Chairman of the Board Dwight Watson possessed one key attribute everyone tells you is necessary for survival in small business: patience.

And probably more than that they would argue, they had worked out the numbers. "You need to have your financing lined up early on," Fletcher said. "You need to find banks, or backing from somebody like the SBA early on because banks are just real risk averse right now. They're only going to loan you something like 80% of your AR (accounts receivable)."

That sort of backing will make the patience easier, but certainly won't quell all the rest of the fears, since when you're the boss, you're the boss. That means you've got to take care of everything, including insurance on everything: your workers, equipment, management, anything and everything that can go wrong will need to have some sort of insurance.

And how do you find the money to pay for all of that hassle?
According to Mr. Fletcher a good place to start is http:// www.fedbizopps.gov/ , self-described as "the single government point- of-entry (GPE) for Federal government procurement opportunities over $25,000."

Go there, click on the "Advanced Search" button to search for contract offers, and if you are totally confused by what you see, that means you probably still have yet to jump through all of the requisite hoops you need to bid on government work. This is a regulated world, so depending on what sort of business you are looking for, there are a variety of certifications and registrations you would have to get just to be able to bid on one of these opportunities. However, once certified, you have equal access to resources such as this, and even in eras of smaller "Big" government, Uncle Sam still needs to spend a lot of money on a lot of things just to keep civilization, well, civilized.

Now finally, and most importantly for those of us not just financially motivated, WHY would you want do such things? Jeff Fletcher: "I can tell you one thing, that I would not trade the freedom I have as a small business owner for anything else in the whole world, anything. I still work as many hours as I used to, but I work them when I want to work, according to my own schedule."

********************

Ecotone Services was the 2007 SBA Prime Contractor of the Year award winner

One reason I in particular like talking to small business owners is that not only did they put up with my occasional normal case of marbles-in-the-mouth mumbling, and despite my wordiness tendencies (especially when caffeinated, as I had to be to switch my body clock this week from my normal geek/writing working hours of 9 a.m.-3 a.m. to the more normal workaholic hours of 6:30 a.m.-12:30 a.m.) and fumbling attempts at F2F interviews (face-to-face for those not up on that level of geek-speak), nobody told me to shut up, calm down, or otherwise let them get a word in edge-wise this week.

I obviously eventually did shut up and listen for a decent amount of the time of most of my interviews, otherwise I wouldn't have much to plow through for posting, but I really appreciated the patience of whomever it was that had to sit across from me and wait to get to the
point of my questions, recover a lost thread of thought, or simply try to get my iPod charged up enough that I could record the interview so I didn't have to rely on my chicken-scratch notes, which would be even more indecipherable if I had to focus my attention more on my notebook instead of the interviewee.

Another example of this politeness came when somebody unfortunately left their cell phone on in their purse, under their table, and disappeared during one of the main speeches today. I can't imagine it was intentionally left behind, more likely simply the result of "last day of school"-type wandering attention spans.

This happens commonly at the last day of an event like this, when not everybody is any longer directly involved in the remaining activities, and in this case they disappear to take advantage of the networking opportunity among a group of peers that really comes along rarely in the normal course of running your business, since there generally isn't enough time for such luxury. Or maybe seeing as many of them also likely rarely get to the District, they skip out a little early on the one day they aren't at the office and check out a museum, or shop, or just soak up part of a beautiful, sunny Spring day on the National Mall.

Whatever the case, the owner had it programmed with one of those annoying musical ring-tones that everybody, including myself, now has. The kind that you probably still like, if nobody else is around you when you hear it, which sadly is usually the case when you pick your ring-tone (though you might get even worse results if goaded into it by your friends). I know occasionally after a glass of wine or two on a weekend night I've searched for ring-tones that I'm
pretty certain I would have been embarrassed to play had I been successful in my search.

Despite the fact that said phone rang at least 4 times during this one, not overly long speech, none of the nearby attendees felt that the inconvenience and annoyance resulting from the experience warranted opening the purse and turning the **** thing off. I can't say that would be the case in all of the other high-energy/high-achieving groups I've been around in my day.

All of the above plus 100 high-energy, high-achieving, strong-minded but polite and well-dressed small business owners could be found in this morning's session, aptly titled "Government Briefing," at Small Business Administration's (SBA) Small Business Week here in Washington, D.C.

James H. Lambright, President of the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), demonstrated the range of non-traditional manufacturing projects Ex- Im takes on with an anecdote of Virginian and livestock importer, Oscar Kennedy, and his travels around the country on an Ex-Im engineered connection with a Turkish businessman who was searching for not just the best milk cows money could buy for the dairy farm his company wanted to start back in Turkey, but pregnant heifers to get the farm off to a running, mooing and milking start.

Frances F. Townsend, Chair of President Bush's Homeland Security Council, as expected, had a more sober presentation, reminding the attendees that not only is there the occasional highly localized disasters like the tragedy at Virginia Tech, but that we are still overdue for some sort of a global/regional pandemic, akin to the 1918 flu outbreak that affected an estimated 28% of the American population at the time, killing approximately half a million.

Bird flu is obviously the most recognizable, and currently in-the- frontal-lobe, of the known threats and already has a government-run site dedicated to it at http://www.pandemicflu.gov, but more general information directed towards business can be found at the Ready Business subsite of Ready.gov at http://www.ready.gov/business/ index.html.

The recently appointed Director of the less-well-known, more policy wonk-friendly territory of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Susan E. Dudley, finished the morning off with the government's Recommended Daily Allowance of Acronyms Referring to Cryptic Regulations and Regulatory Bodies (RDAARCRRB, pronounced "RadarCrrab" with rolled Spanish r's).

Unfortunately for Ms. Dudley, her mandate covers a world whose impact is outsized in the small business world, with its much higher per- capita costs for regulatory compliance, so she took some of the more pointed comments from the attendees, like how to compete in a market where your competitors have much lower regulatory costs, whether that low-cost competitor is located for example simply in a cheaper state than California or New York, or on the far side of the world. This brought up the odd turn of phrase, "regulatory competition," which you can find a primer on it from a paper by Catharine Barnard and Simon Deakin at the Academy of European Law online .

In general Ms. Dudley referred attendees and other small business owners to the SBA's Advocacy program , a site dedicated to notifying small business owners and requesting feedback from them on upcoming rulings and recommendations that might affect small business.

Hi everyone. I'm really looking forward to Small Business Week in Washington, D.C. During Small Business Week, I'll cover some of the panel discussions, wander the aisles, hear the pitches and share with you the best of them all. I'm also hoping to get an interview with a few of the honorees, maybe even the top small business owner of the year. Check back for updates and feel free to share your comments, questions and suggestions regarding this blog.