New York Task Force To Examine Boundaries of Free Agency

When is someone an employee and when are they an independent contractor? The law is pretty clear, and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is setting the stage to lay it down.

The New York task force seeks to unite various government agencies responsible for enforcing different aspects of employment law -- and which have never coordinated their activities. The task force will issue recommendations in early 2008.

The WNYC news story I heard implied that the construction industry would be targeted. Hopefully the task force will seek input from The Freelancer's Union as well; knowledge workers are also affected.

When I was the director of a small yoga business in lower Manhattan, we paid payroll taxes even for teachers who only taught a few classes a month. Apparently this was not a common practice -- we had complaints from teachers for withholding taxes and thus paying them "less" than other businesses. We told them that they would understand it better at tax time, when they had to pay self-employment taxes on their earnings as independent contractors.

Why put up with this grief (and it was grief)? Because it was the right thing to do.

Spitzer's press release quotes Greg Tarpinian, Executive Director of Change to Win:

"Misclassification of workers is theft. Outlaw employers steal compensation from workers, security from their families and taxes from their communities..."

(My early August post gives more detail on the legal distinction between employees and free agents, also check out Change to Win's simple 5 question test.)

One Piece of Paper, Four Simple Questions: Business Plans 101

I offered to help a family member with a business plan. I was so excited when he took me up on the offer, I dashed off a note saying, "Here's where you start."

Back when I was in b-school, entrepreneurship professor Wendell Dunn had us write one page venture papers.

Yes, we might have world beating business ideas, but we needed to be able to describe them on one piece of paper.

He also assigned us approximately 10 pounds of reading. I derived the 4 questions from one of these articles. I have to admit that there was a brown-nosing, toady-ish, element to my derivation of the questions. I was thinking, "How can I get my idea across in one page, and have the result meet the professor's approval?"

Oh yeah, I'll look at what he assigned us to read.

I'm looking for the article, so I can cite it here. But today, a serious number of years later, these questions have become so part of my DNA that I was able to spin them out in a 2 minute email between meetings during the workday. (That is good teaching. Thank you, Wendell.)

• What is the opportunity?
• Why am I the person to bring this opportunity to life?
• What resources will I need?
• How will I get them?

In the following posts, I'll explore each of these questions, and also talk about business planning software (I'm against it) and some good books to read.

But if you want to write a business plan -- whether you're a yoga teacher or massage therapist who works on your own, or you've invented something better than TiVo, or you want to grow your existing business into a new arena -- where do you start?

One piece of paper.