To me, goal setting is a critical phase of small business growth. In Washington, small businesses are not on the same footing as large businesses when it comes to the tax law. What NASE is doing in Washington is looking at the structure of these businesses and getting the tax code and other legislation to be the same for corporate and non-corporate kinds of businesses. The small business segment of society is huge, ranging from 14 million to 17 million small businesses in the country. While they may not represent large sales individually, you look at them cumulatively.
Small businesses are the real driving force behind the economy.
When we can get legislators to look at small businesses as a block of society and as a block of voters, then their perspective of what they want to do with small businesses becomes much different. In the past, we've been very successful in getting access to the people making legislation. Once legislation is on the table, we've been very successful getting that information out of our members and urging their support. But for the most part, the kinds of issues that we focus on are generally accepted things. We work to get the information out to them so that they can support that.