I keep hearing lately how a recession is a good time for people to start businesses.

Call me cynical, but this sounds like something a crazy person would say, or someone just being counterintuitive to get attention. There's a lot of that going around lately.

"It's completely counterintuitive," agrees Thomas Koulopoulos, author of "The Innovation Zone: How Great Companies Re-Innovate for Amazing Success."

But he still thinks there's some benefit in unleashing your entrepreneurial juices during a crummy economy.

"It's not going to be a cakewalk. I'm not going to be Pollyannaish about it," he maintains.

However, he adds, with so many people unemployed right now and the prospects of finding comparable work not that great, "why not take that break and innovate something, provide a benefit to folks, or start a new business?"

The question for me still is, is it a good idea, especially now?

He offers five reasons why it is a good idea:

    1. Many people will fall back and try to create their own venture while looking for new employment and waiting for the economy to get better. Of necessity, many of those folks end up building their own businesses at a time when costs are low and labor is relatively cheap. These new business often deliver the same services as their past employers at a far lower cost with lower overhead.
    2. Large companies are far less likely to interfere with competing employees and small entrepreneurial ventures even though they may pose a threat, since they have bigger problems to content with; therefore, innovation flourishes under the radar.
    3.  Powerful new alliances are formed among unemployed workers who join forces to recreate everything they felt was wrong with their old employers.
    4.  The companies that are started in a recession are very capital efficient and don't need a lot of money to keep going.
    5.  The abundant supply of cheap office space to rent and talented staff are easier to find.

OK, ok, so there are some good reasons. But I needed examples of companies that actually were born during tough economic times.

To that, he offered this list:

1876 GE
1931 Allstate Insurance
1939 HP
1954 Burger King
1955 McDonalds
1957 Hyatt
1973 FedEx
1975 Microsoft
1976 Apple Computer
1980 CNN
1981 MTV
1992 Cliff Bar
2000 Methods (soaps)

Hmm. There's still this particular recession, one of the worst on record. Maybe this economy is different than the rest. Indeed, credit markets are squeezed, and good luck getting a loan to fund your idea.

"When you're in the middle of a recession people always want to say this is different," he says. "They're right, but most small business owners get their funding from home equity loans or refinancing their house." And with low interest right now, he adds, that may be an option for many people.

Another factor making it easier for entrepreneurs to follow their dreams, he says, is social media and networking.

Good points, but what do you all think? Did you start a business during an economic rough patch? Or have you shelved your dreams until things turn around?

Many of you who read my Twitter post a couple of months ago took me up on the offer to get on the social networking site and started tweeting to help promote your business.

Unfortunately, many of you just don't seem to get Twitter yet (don't worry -- I'm not going to name names).

You can't just tweet over and over again about your products or services. Well, actually you can do whatever you want on Twitter, but just listing products in hopes someone will head over to your Web site and buy your wares is going to get you ostracized, aka un-followed, and fast.

For the majority of people out there that don't know, first I'll start by explaining what the heck Twitter is.

Don't pretend you know. You may have heard about Twitter on TV, but you're still scratching your head. I just spoke at a women's leadership conference in Omaha and when I asked an audience of 200 plus people how many of them didn't know what the heck Twitter is, 99.9 percent of the attendees raised their hands.

What makes Twitter so different from other social networking sites is that it's like a mini blog that is perpetually updated, but not by just one blogger.

The millions of people on Twitter update this public blog with small notes of 140 characters or less called "tweets."

So millions of people can potentially see your tweets. What better way to market your business?

The key is striking the right balance when promoting your stuff on Twitter.

People that tweet, for the most part, are looking to share interesting information. If you can share a great article, or an interesting video, be assured, you'll soon be getting a ton of followers. That's how it works. You follow interesting people and people follow you. The more followers you have, the bigger your audience.

Instead of focusing on what not to tweet, I thought I'd share an example of an entrepreneur, new to Twitter, who seems to have it down.

Tracy Barnhart owns the Web site MiniMeGeology and her Twitter handle is minimegeology. Her company sells rock kits for kids.

She's been on Twitter since Jan. 1 and believes it's helping to enhance her business. She hasn't done a breakdown on how many people actually found her on Twitter, but this past quarter her sales are up 25 percent over last year.

"I had heard people talking about it and at first I thought it was kinda silly," she admited. "But then I started using it and realized I could find people interested in the same things as me, or customers interested in hearing what I had to say."

Here's how she tweets:

If you have snow: Teach your kids about metamorphic rocks. Make a snowball and squeeze hard, see it change from snow to ice = metamorphism.

Good morning everyone! I'm working on igneous rocks today. Got a favorite? I'd love to hear it!

Need Easter Basket items? Check out our sister site www.MiniMeGeology.com. Mention twitter and we'll send you some rock candy w/ your order.

She maintains a nice balance of informing and trying to push her product.

Twitter has also provided her with a great business-networking tool.

She's in the process of hiring a sales team and found a prospect through a woman she met via Twitter who owns a toy store in Virginia.

Yep, it's all about making connections folks.

Have you started using Twitter, or any of the other social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to promote your business?

(Go over to Twitter.com and check it out for yourself. You can also follow me at www.Twitter.com/careerdiva and ask me how you're doing.)

It's April 1 and the world has not come to an end.

Many of you might seem surprised because the latest cyber worm threat, Conficker, was billed as a ticking time bomb. Even 60 Minutes got into the act this past weekend with a scary piece on the cyber threat.

I don't know about you, but these endless stories about cyber sabotage are starting to sound like parent threatening a child with the bogeyman.

The latest cyber culprit is called "Conficker." It was detected in November and exploits security gaps in Microsoft's Windows program.

Supposedly, it's going to begin forming a computer army today to take over the world.

OK, I may be exaggerating a bit, but that's close to what the 60 Minutes episode tried to infer.

Here's Leslie Stahl's take:

"Conficker investigators have been talking about an April Fool's attack, because in dissecting the worm, they can see it's been programmed to receive new instructions on April 1. But nobody knows if the instructions will be benign, or something that could disrupt the entire Internet."

She called worms and viruses "creepy, crawly toxic software that contaminate our computers without our ever knowing it."

Sounds like something out of "Body Snatchers."

I'm not downplaying the damage cyber crimes can cause and the importance of Internet security. I even wrote about the topic for the New York Times a few years back.

But we're starting to take a sky-is-falling approach to these issues, and cyber protection companies that make money from our panic often fan the flames and are more than willing to be quoted by every media outlet out there.

I guess it makes sense since they're the ones with the knowledge, but we should be extra skeptical when they predict Internet Armageddon.

I've already gotten quite a few emails from Internet security companies this week, and one I got yesterday even mentions the 60 Minutes story in the subject line:

"60 Minutes" 4/1 Huge Internet Threat report ...

Among all the hype on the Internet, I found one voice of reason: Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, a ZDNet blogger,

He actually put together a "No Bull Guide to Conficker." Here's an excerpt:

"Some antivirus companies love to hype malware because it's a great way to sell security products. While Conficker isn't new (it's been around since November last year), the April 1st trigger date gives security firms the opportunity to ratchet up the hype a couple of more notches (and help drive concerned users straight into the hands of cybercriminals). However, it's important to note that it's unclear right now as to what will happen come the trigger date. However, what is clear is that you will need to be infected to be at risk of anything happening at all."

What's your take? Is it hype or sensible fear? Have you ever been a victim of a "creepy, crawly" cyber villain?

This economy has got me scratching my head a lot lately.

There are just so many things I don't get, especially when it comes to financing. We're told constantly that banks, venture capital firms and other lending institutions are reluctant to hand out loans, and tons of small business owners I talk to tell me they're being squeezed because of the tight reins on financing right now.

So how the heck did a company that hasn't made a red cent get $35 million in venture capital money?

This week we found out Twitter, the social networking site, scored $35 million in venture capital, bringing its total financing infusion to $55 million.

The company is bringing in the gold, but doesn't have a plan yet to show how it will be turning the worldwide obsession with micro blogging that it has launched into actual revenues.

This from the Associated Press:

Twitter intends to start testing ways to make money this spring. And co-founder Evan Williams promises it won't drive away the more than 6 million people who have set up accounts on the unconventional communications network.

Twitter "intends" to test ways to make money this spring? This reminds me of companies during the dot-com boom, when just a cool idea translated into big VC dollars, but many firms didn't even make a dime.

We're in a recession, right?

Don't get me wrong. I love Twitter and use it almost every day. I think it's a great tool to network for a job, or promote your small business. But how come lenders and investors are saying "yes" to Twitter but "no way" to other firms right now?

I asked some industry experts to help explain why.

Here's a sampling of their thoughts:

"The reason a 'company' like Twitter can get financing when tangible businesses can't is the same reason Google spent $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube. It's the same reason that scores of companies with no revenues saw their stock prices skyrocket during the dot-com bubble: these guys have a big audience. For Twitter, it's the million-plus-strong user-base. Venture capital investors seem to agree that there has to be a way to monetize a service like Twitter -- after all, some of its users (including small businesses and entrepreneurs) have managed to leverage the site to grow their businesses in a big way. While a number of social sites (like Digg, which lost $4 million in the first three quarters of 2008) have floundered when it comes to bringing in a return on investment for venture capitalists, we'll see what the future holds for Twitter."

Jonas Elmerraji, portfolio manager and editor of Rhino Stock Report.

"Largely because they touch so many people. There is a standing belief that if a firm can touch a lot of people then the value of that touch can be monetized. In this instance, the most likely path is one of data mining. Applied, this would be real-time analysis on consumer interests, wants and needs, which could be translated into advertising offers, investment insight and politics."

Rob Enderle, technology analyst, Enderle Group.

"The social networking space is very hot from a Web traffic and investment standpoint, so a company that is not in this space may not be as desirable by the VC and investment community."

Scott Testa, marketing teacher at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

My two favorite comments came from a few of my followers on Twitter who responded to my recent tweet: "Financing riddle: why can no-sales-generating Twitter get $35 million in VC seemingly over night?/i thought money was tight."

"it's all about potential. I'm v bullish on Twitter's ability to monetize audience. surprised if it doesn't grow to be a $1Bn biz."

twitter.com/acton

"Twitter slept with someone rich?"

twitter.com/AlyzabethM

Now that makes sense.

What's your take? You can tweet me if you like: twitter.com/careerdiva.

My local newspaper has been shrinking and that's making me very sad. But you know what's been making me very mad? The number of coupons in the damn thing seems to be multiplying.

I may not be able to read in-depth stories about my community, but I can get 50 cents off diapers and poisoned peanut butter products. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

What will happen to all those glossy coupons when the foretold death of newspapers finally occurs in this country?

One entrepreneur is already benefiting from print media's downfall, and the economic downturn.

Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com, saw his sales rise nearly 200 percent in 2008 compared to the previous year.

"The economy, the decline of newspapers and the natural migration from the print world to the Web is helping our business," he explained.

Basically, Coupons.com, based in Mountain View, Calif., allows consumers to print out coupons from the Web and carry them to their local grocery stores, bypassing newspapers altogether.

Boal says the Web site offers about 1,600 coupons every day, compared to the 30 or so you get in your Sunday paper.

I don't know about you, but I'm not coupon savvy. I see all those people in the stores with their coupons and I'm always envious of the money they save. I often cut them out but rarely have them with me when I need them most -- at the supermarket checkout line.

I thought coupon use was actually on the decline, and was surprised when I heard Coupons.com was doing so well.

"For 2008, the use of paper coupons is staying steady at 2.6 billion coupons redeemed -- the third year in a row at that level," notes Matthew Tilley, director of marketing for Inmar, a promotions logistics firm. "However, that three-year trend is a reversal of the 15 years of year-over-year decline in coupon use prior to 2006."

Economic woes are boosting coupon use, notes Tilley. (His firm has a contractual agreement with Coupons.com). 

It makes sense. Given the economy, people want to save money right now.

Coupons.com's Boal says consumers who use his service redeem about $2,000 annually in coupon savings.

That's a nice chunk of change in a struggling economy.

So a coupon renaissance makes sense. During the Great Depression, coupons saw a burst of interest.

This from the UK-based Web site PromotionalCodes.org:

"When the Depression hit, people had to do everything that they could possibly do to save money. One of the things that they could do was to start using coupons for all of their purchases. It was during this time that clipping coupons really became a widespread act that people engaged in specifically for the purpose of saving money on things that they needed or wanted to buy. Prior to this, the drive for coupons was primarily from businesses seeking to advertise but because of the economic demands of the time, the drive for coupons came more from the customer's need to save money."

Do you use coupons? Do you use traditional paper ones, or Web coupons? Do you offer consumers coupons for your products or services? Are they helping you out in this economy?

So it finally happened. I read a "tweet" this week about someone having a bowel movement.

It was just like any other day. I was perusing social networking site Twitter when I came across this clear example of too much information.

A lot of people think Twitter is all about inane stuff like this, but in reality bowel-movement notifications are a rarity among the great comments you find on this Web site. Basically, Twitter is a place where people share a sentence or two about something great they read, or an interesting blog post they wrote.

It's also an ideal place to get the word out about your service or product -- for free.

At a time when the economy seems to be squeezing almost every small business, Twitter is increasingly making economic sense for entrepreneurs who don't have money to burn on marketing.

Take Stephanie E. Estrin, president and founder of CurlyQ Cuties, a company that makes handmade monster dolls.

Her company, based in Cedar Park, Texas, is about a year old and she's been on Twitter since October. She already has about 2,800 followers. (You can find them at: http://twitter.com/CurlyQCuties.)

Basically, Twitter is a service that allows individuals to post comments of 140 characters or less on any topic imaginable. The idea is to write interesting short comments, called "tweets," and get people (friends or strangers) to follow you.

"We use it to get the word out about who we are; to get people to notice us," Estrin says about Twitter. "It has generated several sales for sure."

The key for a small business is not hitting people over the head when you advertise on Twitter -- that's a sure way to get followers to stop following you. There's nothing I hate more than being constantly barraged by a company hawking their product. Subtle hawking, even funny hawking, is fine though.

Estrin seems to have it down when it comes to promoting her business.

"I don't bombard people with tweet after tweet saying: 'Come look at my site.'" she explained.

Here's one of her recent tweets:

We're still here pumping out Monsters ... just very busy and haven't had a spare moment to tweet. Have you hugged your Monster today?

Twitter can also be used as a research tool. Estrin recently asked her large pool of Twitter followers if they'd be willing to pay more for shipping if she switched to a different carrier. The answer was a unanimous no.

She also got some feedback from the Twitter community regarding where she could buy certain labels for her printer.

"We use it a lot," she admits.

So what do you have to lose? Head over to Twitter and give it a whirl. You can even follow me: http://twitter.com/careerdiva. I promise I'll follow you back.

If you do decide to advertise on Twitter, just don't use it like a press release. You'll get a lot of twitt-a-holics like me tweeting about how much that bugs us … it's almost as bad as potty humor.

Why does everyone insist on making my life more difficult?

I can't just pop a DVD into the player and have it start playing a movie without watching the previews. People don't respond to my e-mails with a message history anymore. And lately, Twitter keeps saying it's "over capacity" and won't let me tweet.

Now the Better Business Bureau (BBB) is getting in on the make-my-life-more-difficult act.

The agency that tracks the behavior of businesses nationally is sending us all back to school with its decision to give out letter grades.

It used to be so simple -- "unsatisfactory" or "satisfactory" were the only ratings firms got.

But nooo, that was too simple. Now we have to have grades from A+ to F.

Before, if you were a business owner all you had to do was get yourself off the unsatisfactory list and you'd be okay with customers. These days you could get a "D" and then make a good case for yourself with the business bureau and get upgraded to a "C" -- but that doesn't sound that good either, right?

And for consumers, too, it was so clear-cut before. Either a firm was satisfactory or not. If it was unsatisfactory, you didn't deal with the company. Now you have to decide if a "C" grade is bad, or not so bad.

In a press release put out this week, the BBB said it was adopting the new system "to help consumers more easily and quickly identify and compare the reliability of businesses."

I don't know about you, but all this seems way more complicated to me.

The BBB will base the letter grades on a 16-point formula:

1. The type of business and its business model
2. How long the business has been operating
3. Whether the business has appropriate competency licensing
4. Total volume of complaints filed against the business
5. The number of unanswered complaints
6. The number of unresolved complaints
7. The number of serious complaints
8. An overall complaint analysis
9. The number of complaints with delayed resolution
10. Government actions against the business
11. Any advertising issues found by BBB
12. The extent of background information available to BBB for evaluation
13. The extent to which BBB is able to develop a clear understanding of the business
14. Whether the business has honored any mediation/arbitration commitments
15. Whether the business has attained BBB Accredited Business status
16. Whether the business has had its BBB Accreditation revoked

Then the agency's number crunchers take all this information and come up with a grade.

If an entrepreneur doesn't like his or her grade, BBB spokesman Steve Cox stresses the bureau is "more than happy to talk to any business that has any issue with the grading."

"Maybe it's a matter of you fix one thing and improve your grade, but it may not be," he said.

The key thing for consumers, he added, is to look for whether a company has BBB accreditation. To get that, the firm needs a "B" or higher.

I asked Cox if a consumer should do business with a "C" graded firm. His answer: "Maybe."

Jeez, that doesn't help.

What the heck does it mean to get a "C"?

"That's an average grade, just like it was in elementary school," he explained.

I don't know about you, but the last place I want to go back to is elementary school.

What do you all think? Is this a good move for the BBB, or should we be giving the agency an FFF?

Recently we decided to take the kids to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and we encountered parking hell.

Since I'm a native New Yorker, I pride myself on never having to pay for parking and lately we're trying to be more budget conscious, but on this particular weekend my frugalness caused a big fight with the hubby.

I was circling the neighborhoods near the museum looking for someone who was pulling out of a primo spot, and my husband kept insisting I just pull into a parking lot. He had to go to the bathroom but I just couldn't bring myself to drop $40 plus for a lot.

Turns out, a young entrepreneur's recession-busting idea could have saved us all some grief.

Ben Sann, 20, runs BestParking.com. It allows customers to scan the parking lot prices in four major cities and figure out which ones have the best deals.

Sann just won the distinction of one of the top ten home-based businesses in the "recession buster" category in a contest conducted by small business website StartupNation and Microsoft Office Live Small Business.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

You know things are bad when contests start including a "recession" category.

But I digress.

Sann's business has been booming despite the bad times. His sales this year have already hit nearly $250,000. And unique visitors to his site are up 80 percent in the last three months.

So far his service tracks parking rates in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington DC. But his plan is to expand it to San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles in 2009.

So why is he doing well in a recession?

"Parking companies are struggling and need to find ways to boost revenues," explains Sann, so they sign up to provide rates via his service.

"And consumers are coming to us because of the recession," he adds.

Of the ten recession-busting firms that made the top ten, there were a few things these entrepreneurs had in common, says Rich Sloan, cofounder of StartupNation.

"They all leveraged the value of the web for their businesses and many used online marketing techniques," he says. "They were also very focused on caretaking their customers, addressing concerns of customers and going the extra mile for them."

Here's a link to the other busters.

For all of you small firms out there struggling, Sloan suggests some things you can do that successful companies are adopting right about now.

Do what you can do deflate your fixed costs, including looking at your business more as specific projects that have to be done. So that would mean you hire more contractors to do individual jobs instead of having to pay lots regular salaries when times get tough.

Sann has two full-time programmers on staff, one full-time rate input person, and part time rate collectors in each city. Other than that it's just he and his dad who run the show.

The idea for the service came to him after watching a Seinfeld episode where George had trouble finding a parking space.

This kind of how-do-you-solve-a-problem thinking is what separates great entrepreneurs from the rest of us.

There I was driving around New York City, having a screaming match with my husband because I just wouldn't park the car already, and all I came out of that with was a headache and angry husband.

Do you all have any great recession-proof business ideas, or marital advice?

I received an e-mail recently from a telecommunications company touting how they are cutting prices to help small businesses struggling in the current economy.

Now, I've covered business long enough to know that few, if any, business owners change their operating strategies just to help others. So I e-mailed back to ask:

"Isn't the company lowering prices to help boost its customer base?"

The spokesperson for GotVMail, a virtual PBX (private branch exchange), wrote back:

"Yes. But we also recognize that small business owners are trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their outsourced technology solutions."

Fair enough.

Still, I wondered, should small business owners be cutting prices for goods and services in a bad economy? (A twist from when I looked at raising prices in a bad economy last March.)

I asked pricing guru Mark Burton, coauthor of "Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table," what he thought about the pricing strategy.

"I have a lot of concerns about doing this across the board," he said. "You're not running a charitable organization."

And such a pricing move can come back to haunt you.

Burton points to a newspaper he worked with in the 1980s that reduced ad rates in order to help department stores that were struggling during tough economic times. When the economy eventually turned around, the department store operators dug in their heels when the newspaper tried to push through price increases and refused to pay for the hike, he explained.

"If you think cutting prices earns you goodwill, you have to be careful about that," Burton said. "Some customers have short memories."

The best approach, he advises, is creating a new tier of products and services -- one that offers customers less expensive options with fewer bells and whistles. That way, you don't cannibalize your existing offerings.

In Burton's own consulting business, Holden Advisors, he offers a low-cost option as a fallback during negotiations, if needed. It's all to encourage a fair give and take because, he notes, "we recognize budgets are constrained right now."

Siamak Taghaddos, the CEO of GotVMail, a company with 50 employees, has a different take. He believes it all depends on what you're selling.

"Cutting prices alone may start commoditizing some products and devalue others, which can lead to challenges when the economy turns around," he said. "For us, increasing the value of our service is beneficial to both us and our customers regardless in both a bad and good economy."

Business has been hurt lately for GotVMail, especially among financial customers.

"In the last two weeks, there has been a decrease of financial customers and over the last six months, mortgage brokers," said Taghaddos.

The way he sees it, "we didn't just cut prices, we increased the value of our plans. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we place more importance on value than just cost."

It all comes down "happier customers, he adds.

What's your take? Is it a good idea to cut costs when the economy is sinking?

I recently interviewed a small business owner in a lavish conference room where he showed me his new idea for large screen video ads, but I kept walking into walls and the conference room's table.

No, I wasn't drunk folks. I was doing a bad job navigating my avatar.

An avatar is a computer simulation of you. I created one in the virtual world known as Second Life. I made the mistake of having my eight-year-old daughter help me design the avatar, which looks like a six-foot Lara Croft bunny rabbit.

My avatar met up with entrepreneur John Westra's avatar in Second Life so he could show me a video system he has created using large flat panel screens that he wants to sell to big retailers and airports to advertise products.

Westra didn't have to spend a dime on the hardware to build a prototype for his idea. Why? Because he created a simulation of the video system in Second Life.

I know, most of you probably thought virtual worlds were only for technology nerds who want to play weird games online and avoid interaction with humans.

But you'd better get your head out of the sand. More and more entrepreneurs are turning to virtual worlds for a low-cost way to design, test and even launch new business ideas.

I wrote the cover story this month for BusinessWeek's Small Biz magazine. It's titled "First Stop: Second Life. How to use virtual worlds to test your business ideas," and the article delves into this growing phenomenon.

During my research it really blew my mind to see how entrepreneurs were using virtual worlds to test their ideas and products, and it makes total sense -- why spend money on equipment, raw materials and focus groups if you can do everything virtually?

One business owner designed a toy in Second Life and met up with an engineer from a Hong Kong factory in Second Life to show him the design and have him create a real model.

Another small business owner who runs an architectural firm created simulated homes in the virtual world and has his customers create avatars so they can virtually walk through the homes before a single brick is laid.

It's all about thinking inside the box -- your computer.

You don't even need a real office anymore to meet clients.

When I met Westra in Second Life we were able to communicate via instant messaging, so our conversation was essentially held in real time.

Even though I had trouble navigating my avatar I was able to eventually walk over to the simulation of his new product and go through a presentation (I have difficulty making my avatar sit down, so we stood throughout the meeting).

Strangely, after the meeting was over I felt like I had actually met Westra.

The potential for virtual worlds is just beginning to be tapped. I suggest all of you get over to Second Life, or any of a host of cyberworlds available to the public.

I'm not saying every business can benefit from testing products in cyberspace, but maybe there's some potential for exploiting these worlds for the greater good of your company, or future company.

What do you have to lose?

Sunday night, Eduard Slinin, the owner of Brooklyn-based limo service Corporate Transportation Group, was watching television when he heard news Lehman Brothers might file for bankruptcy.

"I was afraid and worried. Lehman is one of my biggest clients," says Slinin, whose business services financial firms on Wall Street, driving everyone from top executives to investment bankers to their destinations.

On Monday morning, Slinin's worse fears turned out to be a reality. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy.

"I've been in this business for 28 years and I never would have thought something like this could happen," he says.  "We went through the '87 crash. The 2001 crisis. This is the worst."

The storm that's raining down on what were once Wall Street titans is also soaking some small business owners who rely on major financial sector companies for their livelihoods.

For most business owners throughout the country with few ties to the financial world, the havoc on the Street will have little impact, says Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business. That is, unless consumer spending is significantly derailed as a result.

But for entrepreneurs like Slinin, it's a different story.

He got a call from Lehman on Monday telling him that Lehman employee vouchers would no longer be honored, and if employees used his car service they would have to pay by their own credit cards.

With the loss of Lehman, his company, that employees 96 people, could see at 15 percent drop in sales and some layoffs.

Christopher Morgan is president of Corbeau Technologies Inc., a company that implements financial systems for a host of major financial institutions including investment banks.

"We expect to be significantly impacted by the financial crisis that we are seeing today," he says.

"Our entire business involves implementing back-office systems in financial companies," he explains.  "These are large-scale, capital projects, that typically are an investment in the tens of millions of dollars at the large financial institutions and millions at smaller companies."

The crisis on Wall Street could go two ways for Corbeau.

Financial firms may decide capital expenditures need to be put on hold and that could put projects Corbeau now has in the pipeline at risk. Or, on a positive note, he notes, those firms could want "more out of their investment accounting systems -- the systems we implement and support -- therefore needing more from companies like Corbeau Technologies."  

So basically, entrepreneurs like Morgan and Slinin are holding their breath and hoping the financial industry turmoil won't ravage their bottomlines.

"Today there's a lot of panic," says Slinin about recent Wall Street events. "I believe things will rebound."

Are you all as optimistic as Slinin? How will Wall Street's woes impact your business?

Hurricane Ike is pounding Texas and there's a good chance many small businesses in the path of the storm are not prepared if major damage occurs or it they can't return quickly after it's over.

When David Beahm, a vice president at New Orleans-based Blachard and Company,
 evacuated right before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, he admits no one took the storm very seriously so there was little planning for a business backup plan.

"We packed a bag for a long weekend with the family and went to Houston and figured we'd be right back. When the hurricane went through everything looked fine," he recalls.

Then news reports hit about the levees breaking and the city being flooded, and suddenly everything got serious.

Small business owners have always had to deal with and prepare for potential business disasters, but their growing reliance on computers for storing data and running their companies has made them even more vulnerable to a devastating loss in business or possible closure. And in addition to having to deal with the prospect of natural disasters, fire or theft, the growing specter of terrorist attacks and the proliferation of Web-based problems such as virus and spam, are only adding to the list of concerns.

A survey of small business owners conducted a few years ago by The Gallup Organization for the National Federation of Independent Businesses' Research Foundation, found that at least 30 percent of small businesses had to close for 24 hours or longer in the last three years as a result of a natural disaster.

After Katrina, it became clear that Blanchard, an investment brokerage firm that specializes in precious metals, wouldn't be able to keep operating running unless something was done fast, Beahm recalls.

What Blanchard faced and what the company did after the fact serves as a lesson to many small businesses who are now heading out of town as Ike approaches, and for any firm that doesn't have an emergency plan just in case a disaster strikes.

Beahm says they quickly signed an agreement with a company in Dallas to get the company's server and telephones up and running, a key for a firm that relies mainly on the phones to buy and sell products.

They also heard about a disaster recovery company called The Regus Group that had office space for rent on a temporary basis and Blanchard was able to secure offices and equipment quickly for its 70 employees.

The original lease was for one month, but Blanchard ended up working out of the space for three months.

"It took five days for us to have everything we needed," he says, but even that short disruption cost the company thousands of dollars.

That won't happen again, Beahm maintains, because now they have a recovery plan, including a permanent office space in Dallas and backup servers outside of New Orleans.

When Gustav hit last month, he says, "we flipped a switch" and operations were easily moved to the Dallas location.

You have to take your business seriously and prepare just in case.

Here's some information from the NFIB on planning. And there's a great piece on US News & World Report offering some ideas on what you can do written by Matthew Bandyk.

But the bottom line is deciding you need a plan and actually crafting one.