Leo Kahn, 94, a warehouse supermarket pioneer who turned his all-under-one-roof approach to pencils and paperclips as the co-founder of office-supply giant Staples, died May 11 at an assisted living facilty in Boston. He had complications from a series of strokes. The son of a wholesale grocer, Mr. Kahn transformed his family’s small business into Purity Supreme, one of the largest supermarket chains in New England. One of Mr. Kahn’s innovations was Heartland Food Warehouse, a big-box style grocery that Inc. ine called “the first successful deep-discount supermarket in the country.” Read full article > >

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Leo Kahn, entrepreneur who helped found Staples office-supply business, dies at 94

Three members of President Barack Obama’s administration and the heads of two federal agencies that deal with disasters and small business development are scheduled on Sunday to tour parts of Alabama and Mississippi decimated last week by one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in American history.

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Feds promise aid in ‘tough recovery’

Plus, does the way people dress affect your decision to buy, sell or hire?

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You’re the Boss: This Week in Small Business: The Shutdown and the Showdown

But it’s never to early to start thinking about it.

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You’re the Boss: Timing a Business Sale

MEPs have held their annual debate on the work of the EIB, looking at the way in which it invests in small businesses across the EU.

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VIDEO: European Investment Bank under scrutiny

Small businesses are given a three-year moratorium on new regulation under a government plan to cut red tape.

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Red-tape changes for small firms

Small businesses call on the government to extend a graduate paid internship scheme in England following the rise in youth unemployment.

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Call to extend internship scheme

“There are programs within the S.B.A. that are not being used or are terribly inefficient,” said the new chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Sam Graves.

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You’re the Boss: Bipartisan Push to Cut the S.B.A.?

A Tokyo-born chef and a former vegetarian butcher locally-sourced meats in L.A. Erika “Grundy” Nakmura and Amelia “Lindy” Posada are readying their knives and cleavers to butcher the finest sustainable California meats. Opening up shop in L.A., Lindy & Grundy will peddle locally-sourced charcuterie including Rancho San Julian beef , Reride Ranch pork, Sonoma Direct lamb and Rainbow Ranch Farms chicken. After studying the art of butchering at Fleisher’s Grass-Fed and Organic Meats in upstate New York, the married couple head west. Making appearances at Artisanal L.A. to butcher a pig and teaming up with Chicks with Knives to break down a whole lamb at Surfas, Nakamura and Posada quickly made a name for themselves among the L.A. food community and decided to establish their own butcher shop, currently opening mid-February 2011. Cool Hunting caught up with Posada and Nakmura to find out more about the journey of this French Culinary Institute graduate and vegetarian flower designer on the path to opening a butcher shop. Why did you choose L.A. for Lindy & Grundy? Erika: Amelia is born and raised in Los Angeles, so we would come visit her family here a lot, and we saw that there was a great need for a whole animal, sustainable butcher shop. We try to source as close to L.A. as possible. Everything other than our lamb comes from a 150-mile radius of our butcher shop. Amelia, you were a vegetarian for a long time. When did you decide to start eating meat again? Amelia: I started to crave meat, pretty much out of nowhere, in 2007. I found it very hard to find meats that had been raised locally and sustainably, humanely. But when we found Fleishers Grass-Fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, NY we were thrilled! Now, I love meat, especially pork. Being able to butcher what you are going to eat for dinner feels wonderful. Erika, how did growing up in Tokyo influence your choice to work in restaurants and to study at the French Culinary Institute? Erika: Growing up in Japan, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my mother and her friend Mira Metah, who owned Bidi, an Indian restaurant in town. The complexities in Japanese cuisine have definitely shaped my palate and cooking style. I think that in Japanese food you can actually taste and identify the ingredients, they don’t over power one other nor are they one-dimensional. I attended the French Culinary Institute to strengthen my culinary skills. Throughout my education at FCI, I found a great interest in butchery and charcuterie, with a special attention cured, smoked meats. You both apprenticed at Fleisher Grass-Fed meats, how did your time there affect you? Erika: We apprenticed at Fleisher’s for 8 months. We learned a true philosophy of whole animal utilization and nose to tail butchery—a skill that not many people can do these days. Amelia: It is a thriving community of artists, small business owners and all-around amazing people. They have an impressive farmers market, and one of our favorite restaurants of all time, Elephant, is just across the street from the butcher shop. It was an intensive apprenticeship, very back-breaking work, which we love. We want to share our knowledge of our craft with chefs and home cooks, and we’ll be offering butchering programs at Lindy & Grundy once we’re rockin’ and rollin’ and ready for students in our shop. What was the moment when you realized that butchering was your calling? Erika: It started in my production class in culinary school at FCI. We learned how to process smaller animals like chickens, ducks, rabbits and eventually pork butts. Even the process of just cleaning up steaks, that experience of cutting meat excited me. My background is in sculpture and I get a tremendous creative rush when I butcher, it’s a type of subtractive sculpture and I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands. Who designed the space and what is the atmosphere you are hoping to create for your customers? Erika: Our shop is inspired by the layout at Fleisher’s, and a lot of things are set-up in a way that we are used to. We are challenged by a much smaller space than Fleisher’s so we had to be very creative, and thankfully our architect was patient with us. Also, Amelia’s cousin Gabriel Shelton is an incredibly talented iron-worker in Brooklyn, and she has been a huge part of our design process as well. Amelia: She is custom-making some beautiful pieces for our shop, including our overhead hanging rail system, where our meat will be hung. As for the atmosphere, we hope to be a place where the community wants to gather to talk about food, sustainability, recipes and cooking. We want a friendly environment that is educational, approachable and fun! Meat should not be intimidating, we want folks to know where there meat comes from and be proud to support local California agriculture and small farms. What have you done to become part of the local food community? Erika: We are brand new to the L.A. food community, and have been fortunate to be embraced by so many talented chefs, urban farmers, foodies, neighbors and folks who are just excited to be able to have a new butcher shop come to town. The food blogging community has helped us network with other like-minded folks here in town. What are your goals for Lindy & Grundy? Amelia: Our goal is to provide an alternative to commodity meat, and help spread awareness of the importance of eating locally, and living sustainably. We want people to think beyond the tenderloin and boneless skinless chicken breasts, and realize how tasty, healthy and affordable the rest of the animal can be! Let’s appreciate and utilize the entire animal, and more importantly, let’s be thankful for having small farmers who work so hard so that we can eat well. All photos by Jennifer May

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Lindy & Grundy

The social shopping site Groupon appears ready to close a new financing round of $950 million dollars at a valuation of $4.75 billion. While the latter number may be surprising, it’s the amount of money that Groupon’s sucking in that shocked me. That’s green tech or biotech-level money. What could a tech company need all that money for just a couple years after its founding? It’s not like Groupon actually, you know, makes something and needs factories or anything. P Morgan Brown has a good explanation of what’s going on. Basically, they’ve decided to go right after all the small businesses (SMBs) of America. And to do that, they’re going to need, as Matthew Ingram put it, ” a massive local-sales army .” As Brown points out, not even Google has attempted to build that kind of fighting force. Groupon knows that without people pounding the pavement, pounding on doors and pounding the phone, they won’t reach the mass of SMBs who are 1) not actively seeking out new advertising options online and 2) are hounded by traditional SMB advertising providers like the Yellow Pages, who don’t ever let up on closing small business deals. And to put that organization in place is going to take a ton of cash. You need sales agents in each city, you need sales management, you need office space, you need call centers, you need fulfillment, billing and operations teams to handle that size of a customer base. And that takes a ton of money. What Groupon is doing is something that no other tech company has done in recent memory–made a real run at securing a big chunk of the SMB market. Sure, new local-business-focused companies pop-up all the time. But most of them are either niche providers or they partner with the big existing yellow page providers to get access to their sales organization. They become a B2B channel provider leveraging the existing sales force because few can generate or raise the cash necessary to build a sales organization to go out and reach those SMBs directly. Even mighty Google has taken this approach until now. They’re either unwilling to, or culturally unable to, commit to the SMB market with a massive sales force. Read the full story at P Morgan Brown .

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What Groupon’s Doing That Google Couldn’t

Self-employed people need more help if they are to expand their businesses and employ others, according to the Federation of Small Businesses.

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Call for help for self-employed

Or will it pit merchants against consumers?

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You’re the Boss: The Fed’s Debit Fee Rule

Washington – Maybe I’m getting carried away because it is the season to believe in miracles, but the tax-cut deal just might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Seriously. read more

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Ruth Marcus | Opportunity in a Tax Deal

For one of the most expensive midterm elections in history, the candidates spent wisely. Many small business owners say their company saw a boom when candidates utilized their services. Candidates were also careful to choose smaller media consulting…

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Campaign Spending Helped Local Businesses

The Small Business Administration banned GTSI from getting government work on Friday, saying the massive contractor inappropriately used smaller companies to get its hands on contracts meant for smaller firms. The decision puts GTSI in jeopardy, as it…

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Feds Ban Giant Contractor From Gov’t Work