Simply an unbelievable day…

1: As I have stated before, jobs and daily tasks have changed for all, including me.  I am spending more time pitching clients to the media every single day.  I want and need to be more connected than ever before to hands-on activities core to our business.  Paramount to achieving success in media relations is often positioning clients in individual spaces as experts.  This builds credibility and ensures that they get quoted on a regular basis.  Today, I received an amazing one-line response to an expert pitch from a major business reporter I deal with regularly at a top-tier magazine:

“There is no such thing as business or financial experts.  They are all liars.  I will not read any ‘expert’ pitches.”  Verbatim.  WOW.

2:  I grew up without much money.  I started working 40 hours a week at age 11 in a Bronx pizzeria.  I kept working at that same pizzeria, sometimes 40 hours a week and sometimes 80, up until the age of 23 or so.  My family never received any help from the government, nor did we expect any.  I was blessed to start a business in January 2003 after working very hard at other PR firms, and since then, I have thank g-d built that business up from working even harder.  Every day is a struggle; every day as an entrepreneur is challenging.  I consider myself an entrepreneur – involved in a number of ventures, I assume accountability for risks and outcomes.  It’s difficult. As such, I don’t ask, nor expect help from the government.  I increasingly learn that they don’t make it easy to succeed.  Today, I was shocked when I learned of the government’s intrusion into my small business, via the stimulus package, which we have heard endlessly about.

We learned that 65% of COBRA payments, which we offer to laid-off employees (and gives former employees the right to continue group health insurance benefits for 18 months), will now need to be paid for by 5WPR (and in some shape, form or manner supposedly reimbursed via tax subsidies). Of course, everyone has the right to health insurance, but this stimulus package’s 65 percent COBRA subsidy is paid for by the employer (me), adding significant bills to the small business owner (whose business is already down and suffering from lower cash flow). 

I couldn’t say it better than this article on MSNBC:
“…employers have to pay the subsidy upfront….  Employers…have to give the government a short-term loan.” 

So, the reward for the small business owner is that he now has to subsidize the employee that he presumably couldn’t afford to pay, or who wasn’t performing up to snuff.  Furthermore, “the employer must reach out to both those who took COBRA at that time and to those who didn’t take it.”  Once again, they’re forcing small businesses to spend time on non-revenue generating activity.  A capitalist environment?  At 5WPR, we are focused on servicing our clients and bettering our business – Should we focus at this time on non-revenue generating activity ?

I also don’t understand where the government thinks this money will come from.  Most likely, employers will have no choice but to increase healthcare costs and contributions from current employees. The answer in this economy isn’t taxing small businesses, but providing us with incentives, growth and opportunity, which we have always passed along to our employees.

Ronn Torossian
5WPR

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under EMPLOYEES, ENTREPRENEUR, GOVERNMENT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.