As Fox News’ small business voice, Amilya Antonetti has shown the kind of insightfulness and business savvy that made her company Soapworks a runaway success. She can also create buzz and stir passions, as she proved in a recent Fox appearance that quickly went viral in the business community. Antonetti will bring that same passion to Madison as the keynote speaker for the In Business Expo & Conference, to be held Oct. 19 at the Alliant Energy Center.
We caught up with her to get her take on the current business climate, the Obama administration, and the challenges that small businesses face. We also asked if she could give us a quick preview of her speech. Naturally, she didn’t disappoint.
What advice would you give small business owners who might be struggling in this economic environment?
I think my advice to them right now would be that this is not a solo act anymore, this is definitely a team environment, and what I mean is that you should not only rally the team and the support around you in your personal life, but also get your employees all on the same page and [create] strategic alliances with other businesspeople. What I see happening now more than any other time in the 20-plus years I’ve been in business is that what used to be your competitor is now becoming your ally, because the philosophy is now that if we stick together, we’ll get through this time of crisis as one, versus some of us making it and some of us not. The heart of the entrepreneur and the spirit of entrepreneurship are definitely rising, so I would make sure that a business owner has a mentor, has a great team of advisors, and that you [receive] the commitment from each and every one of your employees to say that this is really what’s in front of us, and the only way we get there is together.
You’ve been critical of President Obama’s handling of the economy. What advice would you give him if you had the chance to sit down and talk with him?
The advice I would give anybody. Before you comment or make rules and regulations on a topic, it is best to really understand what the journey feels like in those shoes. So many of the people in the administration, I would like them to not walk the hallways of large, huge enterprises like General Electric and many of the others, but to really walk the hallways of true entrepreneurship – people that have been true blue entrepreneurs for several years over – to really understand what it is that we need, what our lives are like, how the risk shows up, not just in the business world but how it shows up for our families and our kids. To understand what our lives are like before you start making programs, rules, regulations, all these types of things that you’re trying to create for us, and you don’t understand us.
It is insulting for me as a business owner – and I pride myself in being a small business owner – that you confuse me with the CEO of a large conglomerate who does not pull money out of their paycheck [for their business]. They get a paycheck whether they do a good job or they don’t. I physically pull money off my table and invest it in my team and invest in my business, and every single person – every vendor, every employee, every supplier – everybody gets paid before I take a dollar. And that is a huge difference between us and them. Do not put me in the same bucket. It’s insulting.
Do you see any hopeful signs on the horizon for small businesses, and what challenges do you think still lie ahead?
Absolutely, because the heart of the entrepreneur will not die. This is exactly where the game is on as far as I’m concerned. This is where the true spirit of entrepreneurs rises. We will bind together, we will win against insurmountable odds. That is what the entrepreneur does. We do what you say can’t be done. And you’re going to see the difference between small business owners and entrepreneurs, because there’s a big difference between the two. And is there hope? Absolutely there’s hope. Because I and many people like me will not allow the American dream to die. That’s what this country was founded on. My family came here for the American dream, that’s what I’ve always believed in, that’s what my team believes in, and that spirit is going nowhere.
Do you get a sense of the collective mindset of the small business community right now, and what policies do you think most small business people would like to see enacted?
I think what they would like to see is, one, some type of consistency. Meaning that policy after policy after policy and regulation after regulation that’s been created, one basically contradicts the one before. And the difficulty is we can’t understand the impact on our business, meaning the difference between a small business person and big enterprises is they have people on staff to analyze that stuff to make sure they’re in compliance. We don’t. We have to outsource it, which hits our internal margin. And now we have regulations saying we can’t go here for resources, we have to go there for resources. That radically impacts our forecasting and our ability to predict what the margin is going to be. And the more that you attack our margins, then it gets to a point where we basically have to fold up and say, look, this energy, this investment, I’m not going to put that [in]. It no longer is turning the margin that we need in order to survive. And when you start looking at things with the EPA and start looking at different rules and compliances, that’s what’s happening. It’s attacking our internal margins, and it makes it almost impossible for us to forecast what we need come the first and second quarter of next year, and the more I can’t forecast, the more I can’t raise capital.
Take ObamaCare, for example. It is impossible for me to predict what it is per employee for ObamaCare. Is that $1,000 or is that $5,000? If I can’t put together a budget, that means I can’t go out for investment from the private sector to invest in my company, because I don’t know what that’s going to be. If I say it’s $1,000 per head and it turns out that it’s going to be $5,000 per head, well, guess where that miscalculation is going to come from? It’s going to come right out of my pocketbook. If I predict that it’s $5,000 and it really turns out to be $1,000, well, that’s $4,000 that I could have invested somewhere else in my company, so either way I get hurt.
Give us a little preview of what people can expect to see at the expo. What pearls of wisdom will you be sharing?
I’m going to be sharing exactly the tools, the tricks, and the actual programs that I am putting in place into my companies to rally that team mentality so that my team believes that they can fly at this point, that it can beat whatever comes at it. We’ll show you what I’m actually doing in my company to keep employee retention, to keep them motivated without increasing my costs, and I’m going to show you all the incentives I put into my company that do not cost me a dime.
To register for the keynote breakfast with Amilya Antonetti, go to www.MadisonBusinessExpo.com/attendee-registration.
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