Green technology is an excellent investment to make right now and you don't have to be an industry leader to explore green territories. Small businesses can do it too - and many of them actually are.

Craig Bramscher, CEO of Brammo, joins host Anita Campbell and co-host Brent Leary, to share his ideas on how, by using green technologies, Brammo may have found the secret to a thriving small business - and maybe even saving the planet.

Below are the questions we asked Craig in this episode:

• (4:20) First Craig, can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your background?

• (8:47) When it comes to green technologies and new products - what do you think is the biggest challenge for a small business to overcome to launch a new green product or technology in this current marketplace?

• (11:10) Did you invent the electric motorcycle industry and if not, what have you done that’s different?

• (12:52) How “green” is the production of the bike itself?

• (14:54) You have partnered with Best Buy - how and why did you decide to partner with Best Buy? Can you tell us a bit about that?

• (23:06) What are some of the benefits of using “green” technology and what are the benefits that small businesses, in particular, can see?

• (24:39) How do you get people to see the long term investment that comes into fruition?

• (25:38) What piece of advice would you give to other startups looking to launch during this current economy?

• (27:24) Craig, where can people find out more on the web?

Listen to Craig’s full interview now by clicking the red and yellow player below.

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Small business owners struggling to make ends meet may be interested in two new programs aimed at offering financial assistance to entrepreneurs in hard times. And they come from two organizations you're probably already familiar with and trust.

The first opportunity is through Kiva. Kiva has been lending financial assistance to business owners in Africa and other developing countries since 2005. However, they realize that hardship happens everywhere, not just in developing countries. And just last week they brought their microplatform lending program to the US in a special pilot program, allowing lenders to make small loans to low-income U.S. entrepreneurs to help give them a boost.

Just as it always has, Kiva will act as the middleman in the transactions between between US entrepreneurs and those wanting to donate. Lenders will be able to browse entrepreneur profiles created on the site and then make a small donation to help (the average donation is around $400) the small business of their choosing. The entrepreneurs are then responsible for returning the money back to the lenders, who can then either keep it, donate it back to Kiva or lend it to another entrepreneur.

Right now, the program is still in beta mode, which means it's closed to the public. But the current test run will feature 45 US businesses in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta and Miami, and is definitely worth keeping an eye on. If you want to help or just watch what they're doing, you can get more information from Kiva's partners OpportunityFund.org or Accion USA. I'll definitely be watching to see what happens. This could create an unbelievable support network for budding US entrepreneurs.

The other program small business owners will want to read up on comes from the US Small Business Association. Just yesterday, the SBA launched the America's Recovery Capital program that was enacted as part of the government's $700 billion recovery package. ARC is now accepting applications and is expected to run through the money quickly. Which means act fast or lose out.

ARC will offer established SMB owners up to $35,000 in short-term relief if they can prove they're facing "immediate financial hardship", like declining sales and revenues, difficulty in making payments on existing debt, hardship paying employees and/or rent, etc. However, note the word "established" in the eligibility requirements. It looks like if you're a brand new start up, you're out of luck.

According to the requirements, to be eligible for the loan your business must be at least two years old, you must have been profitable for at least one of the past two years and have a solid plan for how you'll be profitable in the future. The loans offered through the ARC program are intended to help SMB owners pay off other loans or debt, not necessarily to help you get going. For example, if you have credit card debt related to running your business, you can use the loan for that. If you want to use the money to expand your business in some other fashion, don't get too excited. On the upside, SMB owners who are granted a loan won't have to worry about repaying it until 12 months after their last loan disbursement and its interest free for five years.

The SBA will be offering these ARC loans until September 30, 2010 or until the SBA goes through the $250 million allocated. My guess is the latter will happen first. If you want to get your hands on some of the loan money, head to the US Small Business Association Web site for more on the ARC loan program, as well as an application.

With so many SMB owners facing hard times, it's nice to see a bit of a relief aimed at them.

From Small Business Trends

New Help Available to Small Businesses Looking For Loans

If you cast your mind back to 2003, possibly you’ll remember that one of the grand issues of the day was unsolicited commercial email, otherwise known as spam.

That was a long time ago, back when John McCain was still a maverick and nobody had ever heard of Sarah Palin or Barack Obama.

Back then, McCain chaired the Senate Commerce Committee and knew a few things about the Internet. He was one of its staunchest champions and the “Controlling the Assault of Non- Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003” was his baby.

Yes, that’s right. We have John McCain to thank for CAN-SPAM.

The bill was a peculiar piece of legislation. Originally, of course, the idea was to get rid of unsolicited commercial email. But the Direct Marketers Association –  composed of some pretty heavy-weight brands like Microsoft, Amazon.com and Wal-Mart — argued that they needed to be able to send spam, too.

They didn’t quite phrase it that way, of course.

So, in the end, Congressional attempts to ride herd on the porn spam and the viagra ads was watered down to a regulatory regime in which the ability (some would say the “right”) of so- called “legitimate” marketers to send as much spam as they wanted, as long as they obeyed the rules.

By now, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with you. Well, here’s the thing: even if you are not a spammer, if you use email for marketing or if you publish a newsletter that is delivered by email, then you still need to make sure that you are CAN-SPAM compliant.

Each individual violation of CAN-SPAM regulations is subject to fines of $16,000, which (a) is a lot of money that (b) adds up fast. There are additional penalties, including possible criminal charges, for the truly slimy  stuff like email harvesting, using malware to send by open proxy (or otherwise controlling people’s machines to send spam without their permission).

Fortunately, CAN-SPAM compliance is fairly easy to come by. In fact, you are probably doing quite a lot of this stuff already and what you are not doing can be easily implemented.

Your mailings are CAN-SPAM compliant if:

1. the subject line is not misleading and advertisements are clearly labeled as such;
2. the email headers, sending email address and other identifiers in
   the headers have not been tampered with in order to conceal your
   identity;
3. the body of the email contains a valid physical address for
   the sender; and
4. the email contains a functioning opt-out mechanism, and opt out
   requests are honored within 10 business days of receipt of that
   request.

The point of the rules is to keep us from misleading people, to ensure that we are easy to find if someone has a problem or just needs to find us, and to make it easy for people to escape from our clutches whenever
they want to.

One of the aspects of the rule-making process with respect to this legislation was watching the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) realize that there were more types and uses for email than simply commercial and
non-commercial messages.

Of particular interest to small and microbusinesses is, of course, newsletters.

Would email newsletters be considered transactional or relationship messages? Or both? Or neither? What about newsletters containing third-party advertisements? What about newsletters containing in-house advertisements, or affiliate links? As FTC staff wrestled with the various uses of bulk email, many more complexities emerged than I’m sure anybody either on Capitol Hill or at the agency anticipated.

To be honest, it is much easier to simply arrange your newsletters to comply with the CAN-SPAM regulations than it would be to wade through those regulations to figure out whether your newsletter has to comply or not. The odds are that you are already doing most, if not all, of what is required and there is no real need to give yourself a headache, too.

As for email marketers, the requirements are pretty clear. You need to keep your operations transparent and ethical, keep yourself easily identifiable and able to be contacted if necessary, and keep an eye on your affiliate program participants to make sure they aren’t spamming on your behalf. It is not really a matter of the CAN-SPAM Act to make you responsible for your affiliates but there is judicial precedence for it.

Besides, it’s just a smart thing to do. You don’t need other people creating a reputation for you as a spammer, do you?

* * * * *

About the Author: Dawn Rivers Baker, an award-winning small business journalist, regularly reports and analyzes small business policy and research as the Publisher of the MicroEnterprise Journal, where the nation’s business meets microbusiness. She also publishes the Journal Blog.

From Small Business Trends

A Quick Refresher of CAN-SPAM Rules for Email Marketing and Newsletters

If you run a small business and employ people, under one of the proposals floating around for healthcare reform you’d be required to provide health insurance for employees.

Now, most people would agree that all individuals have a right to healthcare. The problem is one of costs — small businesses often cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage for employees.

One of the latest proposals is for mandating that all employers provide health coverage for employees.

As Washington debates an overhaul of health care, many small businesses are vehemently opposed to the idea of requiring employers to help pay for their workers’ medical coverage.

But at least one small-business group says the proposals now being considered by the Obama administration and Senate leaders could save small companies tens of billions of dollars a year in health care costs — even if there is a mandate for employer coverage.

An analysis by the group, the nonprofit Small Business Majority, to be released Thursday, concludes that the changes would be better for small employers than continuing the current system, which leaves many of those businesses struggling to afford health benefits for their workers. Half of companies with nine or fewer workers do not currently provide employee coverage.

While I appreciate that this group wants to solve a difficult societal problem, the savings they are talking about is unclear. There’s no guarantee that health costs for small businesses would, in fact, be lower — it’s dependent on too many forces that are outside of everyone’s control. Also, they are talking about savings years down the road, not in the here and now.

The current system of healthcare in the United States is ridiculous. It’s shameful that so many people go uncovered in a civilized society.  Something needs to be done — but I don’t think the answer is one of putting the burden on small businesses to provide insurance.

For more, read: The Economic Impact of Healthcare Reform on Small Business (PDF) by the so-called “Small Business Majority.”

For another view on healthcare, read:  Why We Can't Afford NOT to Reform HealthCare, Even in This Economy.

From Small Business Trends

Are You Ready to be Forced to Provide Health Insurance?

If there is anything that small business owners can agree on, it’s that leadership isn’t what it used to be.

Whenever I get together with any group of business people, it seems that the consensus is that we seem to be running a little short on inspiring leaders in all facets of life.

I refuse to participate in that conversation. It’s easy to criticize and complain about the state of business or leadership. What’s more difficult is actually knowing and using leadership behaviors and making a difference.

This is where my latest read comes in.

“The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life” is a book that will show you how ordinary business leaders were placed in unbelievably difficult conditions and made changes and improvements that were not only performance changing for the organization, but LIFE CHANGING for everyone involved in the process.

Who This Book Is For - and Not For

I won’t lie to you. This is a sort of heady book.

If you’re a self-improvement junkie, and love reading anything having to do with how you think and how your brain works, you will love this book.

If you are a more traditional thinker, you’ll enjoy this book differently. You will find some of the language philosophical and perhaps annoying, but you will find the actual application of the principles valuable. I have to admit that I had to read and re-read some of the descriptions a couple times to “get it.”

What You Need to Know About the Authors

This book is written by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. They call Zaffron the “Zen master in a business suit” and Logan has earned the nickname “Dr. Phil to the Fortune 500.” So, you already know that these guys have a different approach to handling corporate conundrums.

Zaffron and Logan’s approach to leadership is to turn conversations upside down and dig beyond the words that are said to get to what’s really going on. What these guys do is go into organizations and help people to see the elephant that’s in the room and then describe the elephant, what it means to everyone and what they can do to deal with the elephant — ultimately making it disappear and creating a new bigger, better, brighter and more inspiring future than any of the participants could have imagined.

What at the “Three Laws of Performance?”

I know you can’t wait to get to the heart of the book so I won’t keep you waiting. The Three Laws of Performance are:

1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. Another way to say it is “There’s what happens and what you make it mean.” It’s never what happens that upsets us - it’s how we perceive what happens and how we judge what happens. It’s the conversations we have with ourselves about what that means. For example, let’s say that you’re sitting in a room and someone gets up, leaves the room and slams the door. You might think that they were angry. What happened? They left the room. The door slammed. What you made it mean? They were angry. but see, you could be wrong. And that’s where communication and perception breakdowns create a mess that no amount of skilled leadership could solve, unless you know how to manage that.
2. How a situation occurs, arises in language. The best way to understand this concept is with the example from the book of Helen Keller. Helen describes how she thought with her body, how she cried without understanding the emotions behind the tears. Then once she learned to communicate, a whole new world was open to her. The world literally occured differently for her because she could now name and communicate emotions around it.
3. Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people. This principle creates the distinction between describing what’s there and what that means and creating and generative language. This is language that generates something new - a new future - a different experience. I’ve had a real experience with this kind of process. I remember doing strategic planning from an approach of identifying problems and then seeking solutions and then participating in a process called “Future Search” where we created a new future and then generated activities and strategies to create the future. The theory was that when you create a new future, things that might be a problem NOW, may not be a problem in a future scenario, so you shouldn’t spend time solving that.

See what I mean? It’s heady stuff. What makes the book ultimately useful and readable is the fact that there are so many true stories where Zaffron and Logan applied these principles and changed lives and futures.

The Three Laws of Performance is a must read if you are a CEO or managing teams of people in this economy. I’d recommend not only reading this book, but sharing it with your management team and having conversations around some of the stories and case studies and see what transformations you create in your future.

* * * * *

About the Author: Ivana Taylor is CEO of Third Force, a strategic firm that helps small businesses get and keep their ideal customer.  She’s the co-author of the book “Excel for Marketing Managers” and proprietor of DIYMarketers, a site for in-house marketers.  Her blog is Strategy Stew.

From Small Business Trends

The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

This is actually thanks to my wife.

She got a daily book recommendation calendar for Christmas and every so often comes across one she thinks I might like. Max Brooks’ “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” was one such suggestion, and I loved it.

I’m not normally a zombie fan, but for whatever reason this ignited a two month obsession with zombie films, video games, books, comics, and zombie banks. Though that last one was just good timing.

Anyway, my thoughts naturally turned toward the zombie chant “Braaaainsssss!” and this just sort of popped out. It’s a fairly new cartoon, and one of my recent favorites. (Zombies are really fun to draw!)

True, they’re fairly limited in commercial appeal, but I can’t see my love of zombie cartoons staying dead for long.

* * * * *

About the Author: Mark Anderson's cartoons appear in publications including The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. Anderson is the creator of the popular cartoon website, Andertoons.com, where he licenses his cartoons for presentations, newsletters and other projects. He blogs at Andertoons blog.

From Small Business Trends

The Business of Intellectual Property