Welcome to Biz-Scout.com
Biz-Scout provides a listing of business suppliers we feel provide top quality and pricing. Many of them we use ourselves—others we have researched and found them to be invaluable vendors. Biz-Scout.com is unlike other "referral directories" that list EVERY business they can find. We feel that if we provide links to great businesses, you will come back and will also refer your associates.
Small business loans: $10 billion evaporates
Reports to the Treasury confirm what small business owners have known all year: Banks are cutting back on Main Street lending. See the NEWS page for more.
The Recession is over!
(Or is it?) The government released figures to show that the economy has awakened from its deepest slump since the 1930s and is in the early stages of a recovery. But is also issued another set of figures showing unemployment continuing to rise above a clearly recessionary 10%.
How can both be possible?
Many forecasters say they will show GDP growing at an annual rate of about 3%, validating a widely held belief among economists that the recession ended in June or July.
But try telling that to the more than 15 million still unemployed, the small businesses and individuals who can't get loans and the people whose homes are worth less than their mortgages.
Assertions by government and private economists that the recession is over — issued amid graphic examples of continuing wide distress — are raising fresh questions about economic scorekeeping.
The national recession may be technically over, but the state of the economy remains in the eyes of the beholder. As the saying goes, a recession is when your neighbor loses his or her job. Depression is when you lose yours.
A survey of economic forecasters prepared by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, a research organization, predicted GDP growth to remain positive in each quarter through the end of 2010. In a survey by the National Association of Business Economics, 34 of 43 economists polled said the recession is over.
Key marketing strategy: Focus on share.
This recession presents a continuing opportunity to realize share in market gains as your competitors go belly-up or continue to cut back on marketing (some going all the way to zero). They may also have suffered slippage in customer satisfaction, making their clients more open to considering new options. Market as aggressively as you can to generate business (but beware of discounting), and focus internally on good service and quality control. Ensure that existing customers have no reason to go elsewhere and new customers have no reason to go back to your competitors.
If you own or manage a SOHO, small or medium business, you are our target audience. How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy? According to the SBA Administration's 2009 FAQ's:
Small firms:
- Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
- Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
- Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
- Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
- Create more than half of the non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP).
- Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
- Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
- Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
- Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
