When I was a kid, I had the best mother in the world. She was my best friend, provider, encourager, cook and even my nurse.

If I got scraped or hurt, it seemed to hurt her even more. “Oh honey, what have you done to yourself? Let me get a Band-Aid for that.” Then she would very gently clean the place and bandage me with tenderness and care.  

I remember getting hurt in one of my first football practices when I was in the 7th grade and starting junior high. The scrape was a bad one, and painful, so I rushed to the coach to see what should be done. Patiently dealing with the distraction from one of his little players, he looked compassionately at my dirty and bleeding arm and said, “Boy, get back out there. I’ve had worse than that on my eyeball!”

That’s when I learned there was more than one way to deal with pain, and that if you’re going to play football, unless your injury deserves a trip to the emergency room, you might as well keep it to yourself. That wasn’t a bad lesson for a young man to learn, as life and the business world are a lot like that, too. And I said all that so you’d all know just how bad I hate to complain, before I took a little time to do just that. Here’s the story:

For several years we had been planning an expansion of our business, and, as some of you know already, our WPC Services company, a new venture, was set up to do cutting and finishing services for local and some not too local customers.

More than a year ago we were finally buying some very expensive equipment and getting ready to move into a building we built and financed just for this new entity. Then the crash. So it has been interesting to say the least.

To get some free publicity and to reach out to our local market, my son Slade contacted the local paper to see if their business department did articles on new start-ups in our area. As it turned out, they were about to do a feature on how businesses were doing, old and new, on the west side, our side, of town, and they came and interviewed us.

The article they wrote was really pretty good, and showed a couple of photos of the boys and myself and some of the work we were doing. They wrote about the significant investment we had made in our end of town. The only problem was when I gave them some rough dollar figures we had invested into the local economy, I was talking about everything, two businesses and four buildings. When they wrote the article, they wrote we had put that much money just in the new venture we had started. And I had a feeling when I read it that this was not a good thing.

Not a good thing because I figured the local tax assessor’s office probably had people who keep an eye out for anything written about new businesses, and their assets, and any and everything they can assess taxes on. And I wondered just how long it would take before one of their agents came by for a visit, carrying a calculator, a notepad, and a copy of that stupid article.

Well, it didn’t take long. Within a month or so, an agent from their office dropped in totally unannounced to take a good long look at what we had in our building, and see how much money they could count on when taxing it for the upcoming year. And sure enough, he had a notepad, a calculator, and believe it or not, a copy of that article exactly as I had predicted, I tease you not.

Now, we were not hiding anything, we fill out our property tax forms as required, and I had no second thoughts about it as I gave him the tour, evaluating the equipment as we went. It all totaled to about half what he expected, and I explained the newspaper’s error, but then consoled him with the fact that they would get taxes on the rest anyway from forms we’d fill out on our other shops.

Now, I understand that governments need taxes, and we all have to pay no matter how painful this can be. But here’s my complaint: when a small business person or persons, go out on a limb, probably investing their life savings into starting a new business, creating taxable assets for the city, county and state for now and eternity, there ought to be at least a short time frame when they’re allowed to get their venture up and running just a bit before the government comes along with its hand out. When 80 percent of all new small businesses fail, why isn’t there some minimal effort to see that they succeed?

Well as you can see, I’ve about run out of space for this month, and have only enough room for whining and complaining, and none for the solution. But the solution is so simple it requires none anyway. It involves no government handouts, but just a little time to allow a business to crawl, walk or run before they come along and clobber ’em.

Oh well, that’s my take on it anyway. I hope your business is doing well, and finding a way to grow in this recession like we’re trying to. Good luck to you all, and have a great month.