Is it just me, or do any of you think fuel surcharges have become a way of life for some companies?

Recently, after the trash company we use increased its fuel surcharge for a fourth time I decided to shop around for a new service. (OK, it wasn't just the rising cost, customer service was also severely lacking. They often didn't show up for no reason, leaving my garbage to become a science project on the curb.)

Gas prices go up and down but the fuel surcharges … they just keep coming. They started showing up big time last year on many of my bills; but initially I figured they'd disappear once crude oil prices started to slip. I know, prices for gas are still high, but do these firms just pocket the money when the numbers drop at the pump.

As a self-employed individual, I'm being squeezed like a not-so-juicy lemon.

You see, I'm a freelance writer. I cannot charge my editors more money every month or so because crude oil prices are obscene. The companies I write for seem to be fair and understanding, but they don't give a hoot if I'm paying double to fill up my gas tank.

While oil executives, economists and consumer groups are debating the ridiculous price of crude -- and the surcharges those prices supposedly cause -- I'm left, like so many business owners to eat the increases. A recent survey by the National Association for the Self-Employed, found that 74 percent of those polled said that high gas prices were indeed hurting their business.

So, why the heck do businesses, everyone for delivery companies to airlines, keep surcharging us out the wazoo?

There was a great article on surcharges on Slate.com last year titled "The Fuel Surcharge Scam."

"Fuel surcharges more and more seem as if they're just an au courant way of raising prices, while duping customers into thinking they're not paying more," the author surmises.

Is it all about just getting ever last drop of money they can?

Some firms have definitely tried to use it to their advantage.

Indeed, British Airways pleaded guilty last month to price fixing fuel charges. The Department of Justice said: "In 2004, British Airways' fuel surcharge for round-trip passenger tickets was around $10 per ticket. By the time the passenger conspiracy was cracked in 2006, the surcharge was nearly $110 per ticket–a 10-fold increase."

Man, I'd be rolling in the dough if I could boost my rate 10-fold.

What's your take on this? Do any of you charge surcharges? If so, why?

And for those of you on the other end, how have these surcharge impacted your bottom line?

There's nothing like a successful 16-year-old entrepreneur to make you feel bad about yourself.
 
We need to somehow bottle the chutzpah Cassandra Saba from Chandler, Ariz., has right now.
 
She started a designer jewelry business at age 11 and now spends six hours a day, after she finishes homework, making custom jewelry. She's even gotten about 50 orders so far from her Web site.
 
"I have a goal -- to be a famous jewelry designer," she says matter-of-factly.
 
Hopefully she will go on to become the Bill Gates of the jewelry world. But there are forces working against her. For some reason many of us women seem to lose our ambition mojo as we enter adulthood.
 
Women make up 51 percent of the population but own fewer than 30 percent of companies in the United States, according to the Small Business Administration.
 
There's a great article called "Do Women Lack Ambition?" written by psychiatrist Anna Fels in the Harvard Business Review that looks at this issue.
 
In fact, the women Fels interviewed hated the word ambition.

"For them," she writes, "ambition necessarily implied egotism, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, or the manipulative use of others for one's own ends. None of them would admit to being ambitious. Instead, the constant refrain was 'It's not me; it's the work.' 'I hate to promote myself.'"

Maybe girls need an extra hand.
 
I came across Cassandra when I was reading about a young women's entrepreneurship conference sponsored by Guardian Life Insurance Co. This is the eighth year the company has held the event, which includes cash prizes for teenagers who "demonstrate exceptional business skills."
 
Cassandra was a finalist last year from a group of 4,000 nominees, and won $1,000. She plans to put the cash toward stones for her jewelry or college.
 
The girls are judged on budding entrepreneurship, taking steps toward financial independence and making a difference in the community, explains Emily Viner with Guardian.
 
The company started the conference in 1999 to help women with financial literacy and to introduce them to entrepreneurship, Viner adds.
 
Now, about 100 to 125 girls aged 12 to 16 attend the events, which are held in different locations throughout the country. (The conferences this year are scheduled for Nov. 6 in Athens, Ga., Nov. 8 in Rome, Ga., and Dec. 6 in Union, N.J. Check out the web site.
 
About 20 to 25 female business owners also attend and act as facilitators for the day. The highlight for many girls, Viner says, is the question-and-answer period when they get to ask the successful entrepreneurs how they got to where they are today.
 
I asked Viner if they've tracked the young women to find out if they continued with their dreams of entrepreneurship, and she says they are in the process of looking at that right now.
 
I'm going to guess Cassandra will probably make a name for herself some day. She plans to attend business school and also the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
 
Since selling her first piece -- a three-strand turquoise necklace for $150 -- when she was 11, business has been booming.
 
One big negative is she doesn't quite know how much of a profit she's made because she pours most of the money back into the business.
 
One big positive: her inspiration. "My mom runs her own charm school. She's my role model," she says proudly, even though Mom makes her go to bed if she's up too late making jewelry.

Hillary Clinton is taking another crack at fixing our nation's troubled health care system, and there's one good thing about it: Small business owners are on her radar screen.
 
She's talking about giving entrepreneurs tax credits if they perform the herculean task of providing their workers with health coverage.
 
I call it herculean, because it often takes mythological powers to afford the health care plans out there.

AP

Check out Hillary pitching her plan.
 
The heart of her plan is requiring consumers to buy insurance either through work or through a program that will be modeled after Medicare.  It also would force insurance companies to cover everyone that seeks insurance, even if they have the dreaded "pre-existing condition." This is a problem that often hits small business owners hard because they can't spread the risk among a huge workforce as large corporations can.
 
Some of you entrepreneurs out there may be cringing right about now, thinking, "Who needs more government mandates?"
 
Many of you voiced that as a big concern after I wrote a post on Michael Moore's movie "Sicko."
 
JRS from Chicago summed it up best: "I find it ironic that your 'solution' to small business problems is a further abrogation of property rights and ending for-profit enterprises in health care."
 
"As a business owner," he added,  "I have suffered the increased health care costs associated with insuring my employees. I have also suffered the increased costs associated with giving my employees wage increases. Perhaps you could really help me out by putting all my workers on the government payroll!"
 
But desperation, especially when it comes to our health, can make even free-market types open to change.
 
"We are a small corporation of two, aged 61 and 63, and relatively healthy," wrote Rita Dick from St. Petersburg, Fla.  "For health insurance with a $2,000 deductible we must pay $1,124 per month.  This is extremely difficult not to mention outrageous.  I have had to forgo removal of a small basal cell skin cancer because it would cost me over $3,000 out of pocket, which is almost as bad as when I was charged $17,000 for lying in a hospital bed overnight, and having five minutes of anesthesia so my artificial hip could be put back in socket.  All politicians should be stripped of their cushy health care that we pay for until we all get guaranteed coverage."
 
Before we strip Sen. Clinton of her coverage, let's see how she plans to spend more of our money.

There aren't a lot of details yet, but here's what I've been able to decipher. She wants to give a tax credit for small business owners who provide coverage to their employees but also contribute to the cost of those premiums. The credit could be 50 percent of the premiums the firms pay out for businesses with less than 25 employees. If the company is medium-sized the credit could be less, but her plan didn't specify by how much.

She's looking for your input and plans to "work with the small business community and Congress to design the parameters of the credit as well as how the credit might dovetail with the tax credit going to individuals and families to make premiums affordable."

Affordable? Politicians are pumping up the volume on their health-care rhetoric, and there's a lot more to come in the months ahead. But only time will tell if they'll be any help for people like Rita.

I get lots of e-mails from readers asking me about work-at-home offers that come to them via snail mail and e-mail, and my gut reaction is always: "Trash them."
 
They promise you riches, and all you have to do is work a few hours every week from home.
 
Does this sound plausible to you? Come on.
 
We've all heard the saying, "too good to be true." But alas, people keep pursuing false hopes.
 
I came across an animated short on the Federal Trade Commission's Web site that deals with this very issue. It's totally corny, but I think it's worth a look because of its really, really, really basic "too-good-to-be-true" message. It's a fairy tale including a princess, a prince and a frog that croaks "rip-off."
 
Click here to view the video.
 
While you might be thinking, "Why the heck is our government wasting time creating second-rate, corny animation?" there is something to be said about making the message as basic as possible. Somehow we all lose our sense of reality when we're promised a fast buck, especially if we're in dire financial straits.
 
I wondered if business scam complaints were on the rise, so I asked the FTC.
 
This is when I wished they had a corny film instead of a public relations office.
 
I found data for 2003 through 2005, and it turns out the complaints about business opportunities and work-at-home plans rose significantly – from 13,995 to 16,511. When I tried to find numbers on 2006, that's when I hit the proverbial bureaucratic wall. The numbers I got from the FTC PR department showed a significant drop, to 7,460.
 
I asked the PR person if the number was accurate because it seemed like such a big difference, and she e-mailed this response: "The difference in numbers is attributed to a change in coding the complaints by contributors."
 
Huh? I called to find out what the heck this meant, but no one could tell me why the coding was changed, or who decided to change it.
 
"There's not a whole lot more I can tell you," the spokeswoman said.
 
She connected me with David Torok of the FTC's division of planning and information, and he pretty much told me the same thing -- not a lot. But he stressed: "We have no statistics on whether or not complaints have increased or decreased."
 
And, he added, the numbers are unimportant because they are just complaints, and the FTC has made no determination on whether they are real scams.
 
Why track them at all, I asked? "At least they provide a snapshot," he answered.
 
Of what? I wonder.
 
Thank goodness a spokeswoman for the Better Business Bureau, Allison Preszler, was able to shed some light on the issue. Work-at-home scams, she says, are a perpetual problem, though some years are worse than others. Complaints to the BBB declined in 2004 and 2005 but rose more than 5 percent in 2006.
 
What she's noticed lately is many of these scammers are putting ads in parenting magazines trying to nab stay-at-home moms who are looking to help supplement their family income.
 
Beware, moms!
 
How do you know when to run the other way?  Check out the BBB's tips.

My favorite warning: "The only people who benefit from chain letters are the mysterious few at the top of the chain who constantly change names, addresses and post office boxes." (I hate chain letters!)

Have you ever been taken?

Next week is my dad's birthday, and even though he passed away a few years ago, it's always a hard time for me.

Almost every year of his life, my father seemed to be coming up with a new business venture.

He was a stationery store owner, furrier, restaurateur, car exporter, and he even tried his hand at importing irregular, knock-off Levi jeans from a former Soviet bloc nation. That didn't work out so well. The jeans were really irregular – the fabric die came off on your skin, and they were so rigid you couldn't sit down in them.

I always thought he had the heart of an entrepreneur. But is there such a thing?

I spent the Labor Day weekend with my best friend's family in Massachusetts, and her son, who's only in high school, is already showing the signs of a budding entrepreneur.
He's trying to start a business selling sails for kayaks. But if this particular venture doesn't take off, he says, he's on the lookout for the next big thing.

When I was in high school the last thing I was thinking about was starting my own business. I didn't even run a lemonade stand.

Babson College entrepreneurship professor Heidi Neck does not know of any studies that tackle the entrepreneur "born vs. made" debate.

"It would certainly be interesting to see how one would conduct such a study," she said. "I would suspect an entrepreneur gene would have to be identified for one to believe that entrepreneurs are born."

Neck doesn't really think that such a gene exists.

She offered me a quote from management guru Peter Drucker as proof: "It's not magic, it's not mysterious, and it has nothing to do with genes.  It's a discipline, and, like any discipline, it can be learned."

If you asked me a few years ago, I probably would have said entrepreneurs are made. But lately, I'm feeling this type of person may actually have some innate characteristics.

I interviewed the founder of the game company Cranium, Richard Tait, for my book "From the Sandbox to the Corner Office," and it turns out he's been an entrepreneur since childhood.

This guy became a newspaper delivery boy when he was growing up in Scotland, but he took the job to unheard-of entrepreneurial heights. He started selling bacon sandwiches -- known as bacon butties in his homeland -- along with the paper on Sunday mornings.

He found a newspaper store that also sold rolls and bacon and started delivering the pork breakfast treat to his customers by initially carrying them in his book bag. But alas, the butties would get squished. So he decided to build a customized cart that connected to his bike.

"I made it out of wood and old tram wheels I found," he told me. Basically, he would deliver the ingredients, rolls and freshly cut bacon, so his customers "could make them at home as fresh as possible and with the bacon crisp like it should be."

Ultimately, the butty/newspaper route brought in 10 times the money of his traditional route. "I trust my intuition and my antennae and being human," he said. "I always thought I had to listen to my heart."

There it is, that heart again. Do entrepreneurs march to the beat of a different heart?

Don't fat people have it bad enough? Now they face the risk of losing money at work if they don't shape up.
 
Thanks to new federal regulations that went on the books this summer, companies are allowed to charge unhealthy, aka overweight, employees more money for their health care premiums than their skinny counterparts.
 
I'm not kidding, folks. It's time to put away the Twinkies and Big Macs. Your boss really wants less of you, and since wellness programs and free pedometers didn't get you dropping those pounds, some employers now think its time to hit you below the belt -- in your wallet, that is.
 
Small business owners have it the hardest when it comes to health insurance. They pay more than big corporations, and because they have fewer employers there are fewer people to spread the risk. That means a couple of obese employees with major health problems can send a small firm's insurance premiums through the roof.
 
While you don't hear a lot about it, entrepreneurs have been trying for years to adopt wellness programs similar to those you see at big firms, but American workers just keep getting fatter and fatter.
 
Most small business owners, even though they're pulling their hair out over rising premiums, are using the carrot instead of the stick right now, says Stephen Glick, administrator of the Chamber Insurance Trust, which administers health plans for 50,000 small businesses in Connecticut and western Massachusetts. What he's seeing is firms offering incentives such as gifts and free weekend getaways for workers who slim down -- not financial disincentives.
 
But the tide is turning, says Jerry Ripperger, director of consumer health at Principal Financial Group. Before the federal health insurance laws on penalizing employees were clarified in July, he got about one call a month from employers asking whether they can charge unhealthy workers more for premiums. Now his phone is ringing off the hook.
 
He even got a call from a business owner wondering if he could drop health coverage for an employee whose body mass index was too high.
 
That's going too far, and is not legal under the new regs. What an employer can do is charge employees up to 20 percent of the value of the coverage if they don't play by the "keep-your-butt-skinny" rules. (The new rules cover employers with two or more workers.)
 
Ripperger advises small business owners to focus on getting employees to participate in wellness programs at work rather than penalizing them for being fat. If they don't participate in health screening or take advantage of exercise programs at work, then go ahead and dock their pay.
 
But beware if you start randomly penalizing workers you deem to be a drain on your health coverage dollars just because they are wearing plus sizes.
 
"We encourage employers to make this a positive experience," Ripperger adds.
 
I'm going to guess this is going to be anything but a positive experience for workers who hate working out but love pigging out.
 
No one wants to be told what to do, even if it's good for us.
 
Small business owner Nancy Trent encourages the 17 employees of her marketing firm to eat right, but she says it has nothing to do with keeping premiums low. "When people look better and feel better they have more confidence and perform better socially and professionally. Therefore penalizing someone for being overweight detracts from the goal and will make them feel less valuable to the organization."  
 
Good ol' pressure from the boss can do the trick. One of Trent's employees, Pamela Wadler, says: "We are encouraged to eat healthy. Soda and snack foods are so frowned upon a new girl snuck a Snickers bar and ate it quickly under her desk."

Americans pride themselves on being workaholics -- able to keep grinding away no matter what.
 
We don't need vacations or lunch breaks anymore. We're even encouraged to go back to work quickly after a tragedy. "It will keep your mind off of the pain." Many of us have heard that before.
 
But, it turns out, if you run your own company, this logic is bogus, at least for the bottom line. New research shows that if the CEO of a company loses a child or spouse, his or her ability to keep the profits rolling in is derailed.
 
Three finance professors studied thousands of Danish companies, including many small firms, and lay out in their report "Do CEOs Matter?" that profits typically drop following a death in the CEO's family, especially if it was a nuclear member.
 
In the case of a child's death, profitability sank more than 20 percent, and nearly 15 percent for a spouse. And I'm not trying to be funny here, but the only family death that actually was followed by a rise in profits was when the CEO's mother-in-law kicked the bucket.
 
This is one of those studies that makes me go DUH.
 
Of course losing a child would compromise your ability to work, especially run your own business. I get derailed when my kids have the sniffles or a stomachache. I can't imagine what would happen if I faced such an unthinkable tragedy.

Indeed, the younger the child, the more of an impact the event has on the CEO, according to the study. The authors also found "the biggest effects on firm profitability in cases where the CEO only has one child."

The authors go to great pains to explain why they researched these somewhat morbid statistics: "We have argued that analyzing these tragic events is attractive for inference because they provide a plausible exogenous source of variation to (1)  empirically assess the importance of managers on their firm performance, and (2) to quantify the interaction between the personal and business roles that managers play."

 "Our results," they write, "provide strong empirical support to the idea that CEOs are extremely important" to a firm's performance.

This research proves that we are all human, that we can't just keep going like robots, focusing on productivity and money above all else. No matter how hard we try, our emotions get the best of us.
 
That's not a bad thing. It proves we're alive and breathing.
 
I interviewed a CEO of a small manufacturer a few years ago whose wife had committed suicide at the height of the firm's success. He told me he fell apart emotionally and ended up handing over control of the company to two of his managers.
 
Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt and in hindsight he blamed himself because he was unable to shake off the sadness he felt.
 
But in the end, he told me, "I may have sacrificed the company, but I didn't sacrifice me."

What's in a name? A whole lot more than a smelly rose, especially if it's your company's name.

So, when you're finally ready to create a Web site for your firm don't cheap out and don't be dumb.

Before you do anything, here are some words of caution: Step away from the guy you met in line at the supermarket who's trying to break into Web site design.

What is wrong with you people? You can't hand off something as important as your company's Web site to someone you don't really know, who has little experience.

It's your reputation that's at stake, and some of these folks might end up taking you to the cleaners.

Or worse. You may end up losing your domain name, the name you choose as the embodiment of your company in cyberspace.

That happens to many small business owners. They hire a so-called Web developer and that person offers to buy the domain name for them.

NO! Never let this happen. Always buy your own domain name.

If they buy the name for you, it's theirs. They can hold your company's cybername hostage. In some cases, they may demand big bucks from you to buy back your own name.

I recently wrote a story for BusinessWeek's SmallBiz magazine about an entrepreneur who unknowingly lost ownership of her firm's domain name. That's when I realized how pervasive this was.

Genma Stringer Holmes, founder of a Nashville pest control company, met a guy at church and decided to let him develop the Web site for her longtime extermination business, even though he had little to no experience.

Besides the fact that he created a crummy site, he also bought the domain name for her.

Well, he never finished the site: holmespestcontrol.net. If you go to it you'll see that none of the links work, except an unfortunate two. The links that ask you to set up an appointment or include your contact information do work, but there is nothing set up for Genma to get this coveted customer data. The information goes into the Internet abyss.

The worst part is that Genma can't shut the site down, and she can't have another Web designer fix the mess. Why? Because she does not own the domain name.

Turns out a lot of small firms are getting shafted by their Web developers and designers. An employee at the hosting company that hosts Genma's site told me he gets about eight calls a day from firms that have similar Web hell. And the Better Business Bureau has seen complaints against such Web outfits skyrocket to 1,971 last year, up from 603 in 2003.

After the story came out Genma told me she was inundated with phone calls and emails from entrepreneurs who went through exactly what she did. She's now spending her time away from killing bugs commiserating with fellow entrepreneurs about the issue.

Having been burnt, she has some words of advice: "Go back to the basics."

Investigate the heck out of your potential Web developers. Start out with BBB.org, and ask for a slew of references. And check their work. That's easy. You don't even have to get up out of your chair. Just go to the sites they've already designed.

And make sure you are the registrant of your domain name.

If you've already handed over the design of your site without making the domain name ownership an issue, go ahead, check the owner of the domain right now on Whois.org.

You might be surprised by what you find.