SmallBizResource Blog -- Women in Business

Wednesday's Woman: Dawn Rivers Baker, Editor & Publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal

Posted by Gayle Kesten Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009, 12:11 PM ET

Dawn Rivers Baker has been covering the microbusiness beat for a decade, focusing on public policy and legislation -- complicated topics that make many an eyeball glaze over.

Rivers Baker's weekly newsletter, The MicroEnterprise Journal, is a must-read for any small-businessperson who wants to make sense of what's happening on Capitol Hill. (That means everyone.) Her witty, humorous style quickly drew me in, and clearly her expertise has done the same for others. In fact, Congressman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) recently recommended that Rivers Baker be invited to testify during any hearing on microbusinesses during the first session of 111th Congress. "I don't know that anything will come of it, but it would be a dream come true," she told me. "I've been wanting to do it for years."

You'd think anyone with such a passion for policy would have gone into law -- "I've been told repeatedly I would have made a great lawyer" -- but the closest Rivers Baker came to the profession was as a paralegal secretary. "I like to say I dropped out of some of the finest schools in the country," she quips. Rivers Baker worked in purchasing for between stints at Princeton and Columbia, and also spent time in the contracts department for Atlantic Records. She stopped working with the birth of her second child; she now has four who range in age from 21 to 11.

However, by 1999 she was longing for something where she could have an identity that didn't involve being a mother or wife. I'll stop here and let Rivers Baker tell her story, including how she built her business, microbusiness policy changes she'd like to see come out of D.C., and why not every microbusiness strives to be on Oprah.

SBR: What motivated you to start your own business?
DRB: I wanted something that was mine, something I could do where I'd be Dawn. At the time you were hearing an awful lot about work-at-home moms. But I had been at home with my kids almost ever since my second pregnancy. I was already at home with my kids. I didn't do the home-based business thing because I wanted to be at home with my kids. It was sort of the opposite.

SBR: What kind of business did you intend to start?
DRB: I was just going to set up a little online shopping site with a dozen different affiliate links and see if I could shepherd some people to it. I dropped the online mini market idea early on because the idea of writing this newsletter really captured my imagination.

SBR: How did that idea come about?
DRB: It's a function of my personality that if I'm getting ready to do something I've never done before, I go read up on it. I do research. When I started looking into running a small business, and particularly one online, I went to all of the usual suspects, like Entrepreneur magazine, BusinessWeek Small Business and Fortune Small Business, and found articles that were completely not helpful to me for what I wanted to do. I couldn't see myself making $10 million or $25 million a year within the next couple of years. I wasn't finding anything at all about public policy, about the kinds of things that would impact my business in terms of how much taxes I would be filing, what kind of paperwork I would have to fill out, and no hard news. I said, "Oh, it's not there. OK, I'm going to make that."

Deep down I guess I was an advocate in search of a cause. As I looked more into small business policy, what I kept seeing was policy being crafted on Capitol Hill that wasn't hurting microbusinesses, but looking at it through the lens of my own nonemployer business, it was useless. There weren't very many people on Capitol Hill who have teased the small-business data.

SBR: Did you go to school for journalism?
DRB: I'm a writer first and foremost. The Internet is a perfect fit for me because, up until now you, you exist on this medium in words. I don't have a background in journalism, which is one reason why it took me some years to gather some confidence about it. But I think there's a lot in my thinking processes that prepared me for this particular journey. My inclination is to question everything and not to accept anybody's word for anything. I always want to know more whenever I get a piece of information. That and misinformation drives me insane. Early on one of the things I spent quite a lot of my energy involved in was shooting down rumors about online microbusinesses.

SBR: Such as?
DRB: There was an incident I remember around 2000 or so: This case came up before OSHA about a company that wound up having to pay workers comp for an employee because he was working from home and he slipped on his kid's toy. This rumor went flying around online that if you run a home-based business, you're going to have OSHA people coming in, inspecting your place, and shutting you down if you have your kids' toys sitting around. My first reaction was to think, "That's ridiculous! Everyone's in hysterics, but has anyone called OSHA?" So I did and discovered that OSHA regulations don't kick in until you have 20 employees.

That's the kind of thing I see online all the time, and it makes me crazy. Word spreads, and people -- especially small-business owners -- tend to have a certain level of paranoia about the government anyway. While I'm not going to step forward and say the government does wonderful things for small businesses and is our very best friend, at the same time they don't need to be painted as worse than they already are. [Laughs]

SBR: Tell me about The MicroEnterprise Journal's early days.
DRB: I started out reporting specifically for home-based women and businesses, but the more I learned, [the more I saw] that the issues were the same regardless of gender and, for the most part, whether the business was home-based or commercially located. [Every segment has unique issues], but if you look at the broad range of microbusinesses nationwide, they all have much more in common than they have that separates the distinct groups. I've always been suspicious of wanting to carve out pieces of demographics of any big group. You lessen their power when you take any excuse offered to make that group smaller.

SBR: How frequently do you publish?
DRB: It started out as a monthly electronic newsletter, then I took it to semimonthly, and eventually weekly -- with fear and trepidation. Even when I first launched the monthly, I was really nervous I'd run out of topics to write about. That has not happened yet.

SBR: How did you build your audience?
DRB: I did what was then the precursor of social networking. I found communities for small businesses online on message boards and email discussion lists. I joined them and offered information to establish my credibility. I asked questions when I had them, gave newbie advice when I could, and just participated. That was really how I got my initial audience. I actually have readers I met then who are with me now, which I think is just incredible.

SBR: What do you think are the most pressing issues in terms of public policy?
DRB: Everyone is in hysterics about the economic recovery bill [signed into law on Tuesday; here's Rivers Baker's take]. The problem is the small-business community doesn't have its traditional advocate [the SBA administrator] in place yet. Without [Karen Mill's] confirmation having happened, and without President Obama having elevated that position to cabinet level like he said he was going to do, we haven't seen any of the signals that most of the leaders in small business are looking for to say, "Yes, we are listening. We care."

Also, the SBA has not been reauthorized. It used to be a relatively simple chore to reauthorize the SBA every three years. For some reason it got into this torturous, highly politicized circus full of partisan bickering. I'm hoping that goes away and the process will resume.

SBR: Do you expect microbusinesses to benefit from the stimulus package?
DRB: Anything they get will be a function of them being members of the middle class or of having a moderate income. The only direct benefit any microbusiness owner might get is if they're in a position to sell something to the government. It's possible that microbusinesses in construction will do well. But Congress won't be able to solve our capital access problems.

I would like to see changes so that microbusinesses can collateralize loans using intellectual property. We need changes in equity capital and debt financing so bankers and investors can look at business owners and models and not screech the brakes if those businesses models are not what they're used to seeing. I would like to see procurement processes reformed so they work for microbusinesses. If you want to sell to government, the structure is composed for big organizations, the Lockheed Martins. We also need more research funded to look at microbusinesses and nonemployer businesses.

SBR: How closely do you think the average microbusiness is following Capitol Hill?
DRB: Oh, not at all. I find all of this political theatre entertaining, but most microbusinesses don't want all of these details. They want to know specifically what's going to impact their businesses. That's why I created the free Microbusinesses News Briefs newsletter. I find that microbusiness owners care about policy, but they don't want to hear about the politics.

SBR: When do you think the economy will improve?
DRB: Microbusinesses started to feel the downturn before everyone else did. Looking at the numbers for 2006, microbusinesses were cutting jobs and downsizing two years before the economy officially went into recession. Similarly, I think that microbusinesses are going to turn the corner a good 12 to 18 months before everyone else...The biggest problem is policy-makers getting in the way.

The economy is like a forest fire. Once you clear through all of the dead stuff and garbage, new growth can start. It's going to be painful and scary for a lot of people, but I think it'll be worth it in the end because we as a nation do not do ourselves any favors by clinging to the last century. The rest of the world is moving ahead. I would like to see us lead the way.

SBR: What changes have you seen during the 10 years you've covered microbusinesses?
DRB: I see fewer microbusinesses playing smoke and mirrors to make themselves look bigger. I'm seeing more of an attitude of small and proud. That's cool because there are certain competitive advantages: We're fast, so if we see an opportunity we can jump on it this afternoon without having to call board members off of the golf course. We're frugal and innovative in figuring out how to do what we want to do in ways that are affordable, evolving technology or doing something differently. And our businesses are relatively inexpensive to run, so during these times we don't have to start eating our own arms and legs to keep going. We can give our customers and clients a level of personal service impossible for larger firms. In that respect, microbusinesses will almost always be the big business.

SBR: What kinds of mistakes do you see being repeated?
DRB: The most stunning mistake I see people make is they forget their microbusiness is a business. They forget to set revenue goals in the spirit of just wanting to help people. That makes me want to slap these folks because, one, it makes all of us look bad and gives the naysayers a reason to say nay. Besides that, those who say that aren't really being completely honest with themselves. I haven't spoken to one microbusiness owner who would turn down money if you gave it to them.

That said, not everyone wants Oprah attention or growth. The concept for microbusiness owners is to keep their businesses small so they can do what they do and not stop to run a business. As a business grows and administrative burdens increase, the less fun the business is. Shove enough paperwork in front of us, and we scream and run in the other direction.

SBR: Do you use social networking?
DRB: I'm grooving on Twitter and seeing some payoff in terms of an uptick in traffic. Microbusinesses need to understand that Twitter isn't about jumping and yelling. It's about making connections with people, providing valuable information, and being who you are. It's about, how can I help you, and not necessarily to buy my stuff. I make more money when I put myself out there and am helpful. Even if it doesn't translate to dollars and cents right now, it's OK. A big part of the reason someone like Chris Brogan can be an influencer is because everyone knows who he is. He had to start somewhere.

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Recent Wednesday's Woman articles:

• Contest For Moms In Business
• Smart Networking's Liz Lynch
• Mean Girls At Work
• Angela Jia Kim Savors Her Success
• Incoming SBA Administrator Karen Mills
• Archives

The Wednesday's Woman series is written for today's community of hard-working, small-business women, featuring profiles, industry trends, research, work/life balance issues and other topics of interest.

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