Small Business News

As a business owner, you’re most effective if you spend time on high-level tasks. But it’s not always possible to hire dedicated team members for all the daily work that goes into running your business.

That’s where Time Etc comes in. The business connects entrepreneurs with U.S. virtual assistants to handle all that extra work. Read all about the company in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

Pairs businesses with virtual assistants.

Founder Barnaby Lashbrooke told Small Business Trends, “Our VAs can help with anything from emails and data entry, to booking holidays and sending gifts and flowers to loved ones. Clients pay for a certain number of VA hours per month. Businesses are also increasingly including our service as an employee perk, giving members of staff dedicated VA time to help them better manage their work/life balance.”

Providing a quality experience.

Lashbrooke says, “We were one of the first virtual assistant companies, launching in 2007, long before remote working was in vogue. Over time, we’ve built up a strong reputation as a provider of the world’s finest VAs, all with at least five years’ experience, and personally vetted by Sir Richard Branson’s executive assistant of 32 years, Penni Pike. It’s the high quality of our assistants, as well as our user-friendly platform, that sets us apart from competitors.”

After running another successful business.

Lashbrooke explains, “I launched Time Etc using the money I’d made from selling my first business when I was 24 years old. I had started that company (a web hosting firm) when I was 17 and still at school. While growing that business I’d noticed how much of my time was consumed by low-value tasks I felt that I shouldn’t be wasting time on but that I couldn’t avoid – things like invoicing and organizing files. So after my business sold, I knew exactly what I wanted to try next.”

A successful US launch.

Lashbrooke says, “Back in 2013, I got bored one afternoon and decided to create a US version of our website and throw it on the internet to see if we got any takers. And we have literally never looked back. Almost instantly we were oversubscribed with demand from the US. And this breakthrough changed the course of history for our business forever. The US side of our company is now 80% of our revenue.”

Signing a lease and hiring before bringing in revenue.

Lashbrooke explains, “If it had gone wrong we’d have had to make those people redundant and would have been stuck with huge fees to pay to exit the lease or try and re-let the building. Looking back, it was a silly risk to take. But it also meant that I simply HAD to make Time Etc work as a business, because I had so much depending on it. I think having that pressure really helped us build revenue. And looking back, I’m amazed we hit £1M (GBP) in revenue and were profitable by the second year, from a standing start with no VC funding.”

Hard work isn’t everything.

Lashbrooke adds, “From school we’re taught by parents and teachers that the harder we work the more successful we will be. Now I know how wrong, and dangerous, that message is. Today I’m militant about how I use my 35-hour workweek. There’s no room for time wasting or procrastination and every half hour is accounted for. I’m happier and more fulfilled, have great relationships with family and friends, and financially we are more successful too. During the first year I made this change, revenue grew by 275%.”

Supporting the team.

Lashbrooke says, “I’d give it back to our team and our assistant partners to help them with the ever increasing cost of living.”

Appreciation huddle.

Lashbrooke explains, “We start each day with an “appreciation huddle” where every member of the team picks someone else to appreciate and has to explain why. This simple idea is the glue that supports the incredible culture we have built.”

“If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.” – John C. Maxwell.

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Image: Time Etc., Barnaby Lashbrooke

This article, "Spotlight: Time Etc Helps Entrepreneurs Like Richard Branson Find Skilled VAs" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: https://smallbiztrends.com/2022/05/time-etc-helps-find-skilled-virtual-assistants.html

Under normal circumstances, or at least any time before the spring of 2020, the short answer to that question would have been “Not really.”

Then COVID-19 happened, and with it, trillions in federal government aid and financial protection affected the way unemployment benefits were distributed for self-employed workers.

Some of that coronavirus aid went to the CARES Act, which funded unemployment programs like the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. Self-employed people were eligible for PUA, meaning states could pay benefits to gig workers, independent contractors, and other self-employed people out of work for up to 39 weeks, giving them an extra $600-per-week.

COVID-19 persists, but the CARES Act has expired. And that means — unfortunately — that the answer to the question of whether the self-employed can collect unemployment has gone from “Not really” to “You bet!” to “It’s complicated. ”

Again, this typically won’t apply to people who work for themselves, but unemployment benefits provide workers who find themselves out of work through no fault of their own with a temporary source of income. The weekly benefit amount is typically 30 to 50% of your weekly income, for a set amount of time.

According to the Department of Labor, it’s a good idea to file for unemployment as soon as possible after being let go, giving your state unemployment office as much and as accurate information as possible to ensure your claim is filed in a timely manner.

You must meet certain income requirements to receive unemployment, and some states may have additional requirements, such as proving that you’re looking for work. The Department of Labor has a map on its site that lets users view the programs in each state.

Our research points to one possible way self-employed workers can receive benefits now that federal funding from the CARES Act has ended.

The idea is for self-employed people to set up an S corporation and treat themselves as an employee. And like any employee of a corporation, you’d deduct taxes — state and federal — from your own paycheck, including unemployment taxes.

The problem is that this method appears to be a long shot. Even though an S corp employee qualifies, in theory, for unemployment, they may run into trouble in states that list “actively looking for work” as part of the eligibility criteria to collect benefits.

Courts have ruled that S corp owners –in this case, the self-employed worker — are not actively pursuing work because new work could technically show up at any time. That means the self-employed worker will need to show their state that their S corp has stopped being a viable business and that they are looking for new work.

There is also a program in some states known as self-employment assistance, which is designed to encourage workers who are unemployed to start their own small businesses.

Under these programs, States can pay a SEA allowance, rather than regular unemployment insurance benefits, to help unemployed workers while they are setting up businesses and becoming self-employed. Participants get weekly allowances while they are getting their businesses up and running.

SEA allowances are the same weekly amounts as the worker’s regular unemployment benefits. The only difference is that instead of working on finding a new job, participants work full-time on launching their business.

There are many different types of self-employment. These include gig workers, such as the people who drive for Uber or Lyft or make deliveries for companies like DoorDash. There are freelancers, like the people who offer their services on Fiverr or Upwork. All of these workers were able to collect weekly benefits during the height of the COVID 19 outbreak.

And then there’s the self-employed jobs category of independent contractors, like people who own their own business or hire out their professional services to another company. (For example, a business that employs an outside software technician.)

Again, in most cases, you can’t. Employers contribute to their state’s fund for unemployment, meaning their workers fit the eligibility requirements to collect benefits — in other words — regular unemployment compensation – if they lose their job.

But if you fit into one of the self-employment income categories we’ve discussed, chances are you didn’t have unemployment dedicated to your wages.

There may be special circumstances, such as people who were paid as an independent contractor and received a 1099 form. But otherwise, minus the return of something like the PUA program, it’s difficult to collect unemployment benefits if your employer isn’t paying onto the unemployment insurance fund.

While it might be difficult to collect unemployment benefits when your sole source of income comes from working for yourself, you may be able to receive unemployment benefits in certain circumstances if you have a side job in addition to your main source of income.

The maximum benefit amount is going to depend on your state’s laws and your prior earnings. In some states, you can earn up to a certain percentage of your total weekly benefits from a part-time job without it cutting into your unemployment compensation.

Earning too much, however, could bar you from receiving benefits. And don’t be tempted to not report this side income, as hiding it could be a violation of state or federal law. Different state programs have different rules, so be sure to visit your state’s website to learn more.

Again, the end of things like PUA benefits and disaster unemployment assistance made it much harder for gig workers and other self-employed people to collect benefits.

But things could be changing, at least for some workers. Washington State, for example, recently passed a law that gives more rights to Uber and Lyft drivers. The bill also sets up a task force to study how those workers would be paid out of the state’s unemployment insurance program. And in Pennsylvania, the state’s supreme court has ruled that Uber drivers are not self-employed and as such should receive unemployment.

While there was an exemption to this rule during the pandemic, unemployment benefits are normally considered taxable income by the federal government. So if you collected unemployment benefits between March and November of 2022, you’d receive a Form 1099-G from your state unemployment office in January that told you how much you’d earned the previous year. Keep that form safe so you can record that information when it’s time to file your taxes.

Image: Depositphotos

This article, "Is There Unemployment for Self Employed People?" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: https://smallbiztrends.com/2022/05/unemployment-for-self-employed.html

Cookies maker, Famous Amos, has announced the availability of the second round of small business grants for black entrepreneurs. The grants come in partnership with the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) and are part of the Famous Amos Ingredients for Success Entrepreneurs Initiative.

The Famous Amos Ingredients for Success Entrepreneurs Initiative is a grant and mentorship program that aims to provide the tools and resources to support black small businesses. Through it, participants will engage in a pitch contest that will help provide an overview of their business, why it will become a successful enterprise, and how awarded funds will be used for long-term stability.

As part of the initiative, three business owners will receive $50,000 in unrestricted capital from Famous Amos, totaling $150,000 in cash awards. Support also comes through a full suite of mentoring, coaching, and networking resources that would be provided by the National Black Chamber of Commerce.

“We established the Famous Amos Ingredients for Success Entrepreneurs Initiative to support Black businesses and to honor the legacy of the brand’s founder, Mr. Wally Amos,” said Rachna Patel, Senior Director of Marketing for Famous Amos.

To qualify, businesses must be Black-owned and have been in operation for five years or less with the deadline for submissions set for June 26th, 2022. Ten national finalists will be selected, judged, and narrowed down to three recipients by some of the nation’s foremost Black business leaders.

These include Mandy Bowman, Founder of Official Black Wall Street; Steve Canal, CEO of Flourysh; Roby Mercharles, VP of Partnerships at The American Dream Fund & Marketplace; and Nancey Harris and Tracy Green, Co-Founders of Vontelle, LLC, one of three businesses selected from the first cycle of the Famous Amos Ingredients for Success Entrepreneurs Initiative.

Winners of the grant and mentorship resources will be announced on August 29, 2022. The first cycle of the grant scheme saw 2,750 applications with three companies:  MeLisa Chanele, Black Girl MATHgic, and Vontélle winning grants.

According to the Small Businesses Administration (SBA), Black-owned businesses make up some 3.07 million of the nation’s 32.3 million small businesses. Black-owned businesses account for close to 10% of small businesses across the nation with only 124,551 (0.38%) employing staff.

In addition, according to the Federal Reserve System’s 2021 Small Business Credit Survey most small business owners reported experiencing financial hardship during the early stages of the pandemic, of which the highest rate was reported by Black business owners at 92 percent. The survey also pointed to challenges in receiving pandemic-related support with only 43 percent of black businesses receiving the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans they applied for, compared to 79 percent of white-owned firms.

Image: Depositphotos

This article, "Famous Amos Offering Another Round of $150,000 Small Business Grants to Black Entrepreneurs" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: https://smallbiztrends.com/2022/05/famous-amos-small-business-grants-black-business-owners.html

This week is customer engagement platform Pega’s annual user conference, PegaWorld.  For the third year in a row it’s virtual, and for the second year in a row Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of the company, joined my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I for a candid LinkedIn Live conversation leading up to the event.  And as a founder of a 39-year old tech company doing a billion+ dollars in annual revenue, and also as a member of a century-old family restoration business, Alan has been there, done that, and seen pretty much everything when it comes to business.  So we pick his brain on the current state of affairs and how it the current state of the economy compares to what he’s seen and lived through previously.

Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the whole discussion.

Paul Greenberg: I’ve always been impressed with Pega’s ability to seamlessly evolve itself over your 39 years.  It’s a very hard thing to do.  How have you done it?

Alan Trefler: In the tech business, you don’t see many good examples. You see lots of bad examples of what companies do. The tech changes enormously. And the worst thing a company can do is not always be looking for where the tech is going, what the changes are. In the course of our lifetime in Pega we’ve seen the world go from character-based IBM mainframes and Dec VAXes  to Minicomputers to PC networks, to client-server… I could ramble on for another 5 minutes. And all of those technologies had elements that you can learn from. But also, each one of them successively had elements that held them back.

What we’ve always tried to do is figure out how to look at where technology is going and find a way to ride that wave.  But at the same time, use the concept of model driven architecture. Use the concept now referred to as low-code to make it so that the business intent is captured in a way that we can change our tech. But that business intent, that hard work that drives our clients businesses, can come along on that journey; even if the tech itself is as radically different as our tech is typically every handful of years.

Brent Leary: You said last year if this no code low code thing isn’t done the right way, it’ll just end up turning into the latest Lotus Notes or something to that effect. Are you seeing it go the right way or the Lotus way?

Alan Trefler: I’m seeing a shocking number of Lotus Notes type cautionary tales, if somebody wants to do kind of a standalone little system for half a dozen people in the corner to use to do something better about their work, there are lots of good ways to do that, and there’s probably no consequence. On the other hand, if you’re building something that’s going to touch an organization’s customers or that’s going to potentially have a large number of users, or is going to become one of the mission critical systems, you need to make sure that’s able to grow with the business, otherwise what ends up happening is people get to a certain point, and then they get stuck.

For example an organization will say “I want to provide better service in some area, so I’m going to start in a call center. I’m going to put a great call center system in, or I’m going to create a great chat bot”. If they start doing that with a low code or any system and embedding that business logic into those channels, then they’re creating a problem when a customer wants to move from one channel to another channel, and customers want to do that.  I’m seeing lots of “Phase Ones” that were kind of successful but not scalable because they don’t have the right architecture built into it.

Paul Greenberg: You’ve always taken into account business models and culture as part of how you define digital transformation, in that technology plays a role but it isn’t the only thing involved. How do you manage to maintain that through the pandemic?

Alan Trefler: I think we’ve always been sensitive that a business transformation is a transformation of the business. It’s not a transformation of swapping out one tech versus another. I think one of the advantages of having been around a while is we’ve seen tech changes happen, and we’ve seen where they’ve really manifested themselves into great successes. And in other times it just changed the underlying technology.

You need to understand that businesses ultimately are about people and it’s about their customer relationships. It’s about their partners, it’s about their internal relationships. And if you’re going to transform the business it better be about empowering the people of that business. Look at all the stresses that people and businesses are under today. The biggest drivers at this instant for digital transformation is not just there’s new cool tech out there, though.  It’s that businesses have staff who have been under enormous stress and really are in many cases stretched to a breaking point. Those staff are exhibiting less and less affiliation and loyalty. Those staff are subject to enormous personal inflation in terms of what’s happening to their budgets and what they need to do. Those staff are also getting visibility to a very discontinuous job market where the job inquiry, the raises and in some cases the opportunities are suddenly coming on and having an enormous destabilizing effect on the businesses. And as businesses go to hire, they struggle to be able to find the talent they need and also to reconcile the talent they’re getting with the teams they have.

It’s something we all wrestle with. I think it can be addressed by digital transformation, but digital transformation will not replace the need for worrying about each one of those things. It simply provides additional capabilities and vehicles for an organization to now make it staff jobs easier.  How do you reduce stress? You give the team better tools. How do you handle the fact that turnover may be higher? You make it easier to onboard because your systems are smarter. How do you make it so the staff doesn’t feel as overworked? You use the capabilities of digital transformation to include the end clients more directly in the processes and in the engagement.

But if you’re going to do that, you better have great client engagement. The client engagement better actually be engaging. So I think digital transformation is a tool for capable management teams to use to go after some of the very specific problems.

Brent Leary: You’ve been in business for 39 years. Your family’s been in business for a century. Given all that, is this the most challenging business climate that you’ve faced personally as a CEO and working in the family restoration business?

Alan Trefler: I think that this will be the most challenging business climate, for many people, that they will have ever seen. I think the business climate will be shocking for many, many people. But, having been around a long time, I’ve seen some other traumas as well. I’ve seen, for example, up close and personal the bubble explosion, which was pretty traumatic for lots of businesses in the technology space.  And I don’t think we’re in a completely analogous situation, but we’re not in a completely dissimilar one either. There are lots of comparables there. I also can remember, though I was pretty young, when inflation hit the mid-teens. And I don’t think people understand what that means in terms of destabilizing an economy.

So, I would not say that this is as challenging. But I think it affects directly what all businesses, ourselves included but also our clients, how we want to think about the next 12, 18 months. When businesses get under stress, they start very rationally figuring out growing revenue is hard.  But also figuring out how becoming more cost effective offers more control. We’ve been anticipating a shift more from the parts of our business that say “sell, sell, sell” to the parts of our business that say, “ let’s make sure we’re operating in a prudent, highly effective way”.  We see that as something we need to do as well.

The other thing I think is critical is customer engagement. You can’t at the same time that you’re doing that (focus on being prudent), take your eye off the client engagement ball because if you do that, the business can completely fall apart. You can get the worst of all possible worlds. So I believe client engagement is right at the heart of dealing with some of these paradoxical changes. That’s why we feel excited about the types of digital transformation we’re plugged into. We’re not simply moving stuff to the cloud. We’re changing the ways that businesses operate.

Brent Leary: What do you make of this Elon Musk Twitter thing? Are people making too much of this? Does it matter? What’s your take on this thing?

Alan Trefler: I think we’re making exactly as much out of this as Elon wants here. He’s getting the full news cycle the day after day after day. And I’d say it’s definitely better than 50-50 that he’ll buy it.

I do think he underestimated the amount of regulatory aggravation he will have as a result of buying it. Because, you know, you got the Europeans, you got a lot of people in the U.S. It’s such a highly polarized environment. For platforms like that.

Brent Leary: Metaverse. Is this something that people should be focused on in the near term? In the long term? At all?

Alan Trefler:  I think that the key part of that phrasing is “averse”

Brent Leary:  How can I add to that?

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This article, "Alan Trefler of Pega – Current Business Climate Makes You Focus on Efficiency, but Not at Cost of Client Engagement" was first published on Small Business Trends

Read more: https://smallbiztrends.com/2022/05/alan-trefeler-of-pega.html