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It’s no secret that small business owners must wear many hats from CEO to sales to marketing to HR and all the way down the line to being the warehouse and logistics honcho who knows where the extra toilet paper is stashed.

Sartorial success, however, is often hard to pull off with not every hat a comfortable fit – Texans understand this every time they get a glimpse of any “dollar store cowboy” in an oversized 10-gallon hat.

“It’s a reality that we all deal with as we work to grow our businesses. We have to perform several different functions as effectively as possible. One day you might be working on your marketing plan. The next day, you might be negotiating with vendors. After that, you might find yourself being your own accountant,” Jeff Charles shared in Startup Advice.

Many small and mid-size business (SMB) employers and their employees could use a win these days after more than two years of uncertainty that has included the COVID-19 pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years, and political and social tumult.

Fortunately for these SMBs there is a win-win solution that is growing exponentially: the outsourcing of HR services to professional employer organizations (PEOs).

Small business owners can be forgiven if they hear the echoes of carnival barkers during these inflationary times:

“Around and around, it goes, where it stops, nobody knows!”

Unlike a “Wheel of Fortune”, however, the current economic climate is more like a “Wheel of Mis-Fortune” for small businesses as rising costs across the board have them in a vice grip with higher prices for goods, raw materials, rent and transportation on one side and escalating salary and benefit demands by employees on the other.

Forbes reported in December that U.S. economic officials were finally admitting that inflation was not ‘transitory’ and since then things have only gotten worse with inflation hitting 8.5 percent in March 2022, the highest year-over-year level since December 1981.

Employers and employees both agree that continuous learning can have a positive impact on employee wellness and career advancement, as well as improving workplace culture and, best of all, your business's bottom line.

“The vast majority of U.S. workers say that new skills and training may hold the key to their future job success,” according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Business owners are facing an issue many have not experienced in their lifetime as inflation reached its highest level since 1982 with consumer prices jumping 7 percent last year.

“The last time inflation was this high, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Olivia Newton-John was all over the radio, and the cool new computer was the Commodore 64, named for its 64 kilobytes of memory. Oh, and there was a new soft drink about to hit the shelves,” NPR’s Kelsey Snell said of a time before Diet Coke was an option.

Has there ever been a harder time for business owners to make decisions than right now?

That can certainly be the perception from Wall Street to Main Street with a confluence of factors leading to decision paralysis including:

• Rising Inflation
• Supply Chain Woes
• The Great Resignation
• And the Ongoing Pandemic Pressures

“2022 is shaping up to be one of the hardest years ever to run a company – even harder than 2020, when the pandemic first hit, corporate leaders and analysts tell us,” wrote Emily Peck and Erica Pandey, this month, in Axios.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) are the backbone of America, providing more than half of all private-sector jobs. Most SMB owners are forced to wear many hats as they lack the vast resources of large companies.

“Small business retailers are among the hardest working people in America, often keeping long hours, overcoming numerous challenges and making repeated sacrifices to pursue their dream and make their business successful,” said a 2016 National Retail Federation (NRF) survey.

The Internal Revenue Service is urging employers to take advantage of the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), a refundable tax credit, which has been extended and increased through the first six months of 2021.

The credit, designed to aid employers that choose to keep employees on the payroll during the COVID-19 pandemic, was part of the CARES Act and originally set to expire at the end of 2020.

The origins of SWOT analysis are murky, but the strategic planning technique first became popularized in the early 1970s by Albert Humphrey at the Stanford Research Institute just as Silicon Valley was incubating into a global tech hotspot.