Zephyr Adventures is a Job Creator

I know. You are sick of the term “job creator” and even more tired of the endless discussion surrounding the term. Well, I am here to tell you that Zephyr Adventures is a real-life, honest-to-goodness job creator.

We are super pleased to announce that Heather Herrig and Cindy Molchany have joined Zephyr Adventures to help run our six conferences, which is the other half of our business in addition to adventure travel tours.

Heather is joining us part-time in charge of actually running the logistics of the conferences. She is a seasoned event producer who volunteered at the last two wine blogger conferences, so she is primed and ready to go.

Cindy is joining us full time to be our “community manager”, which means listening to what our constituent communities are talking about, responding and engaging in conversations as needed, helping to strengthen the communities when we can, and promoting the conferences. Cindy has seven years of experience consulting with small wineries on business development, marketing, and social media. She also has attended two WBCs, so is familiar with the our conferences.

To take an opportunity to make this blog post more interesting, here are a few thoughts I had that run contrary to what you will hear in the current presidential election about job creators:

• Tax rates don’t affect most real job creators. I am going to work hard to make Zephyr successful whether my tax rate is 10%, 30%, or 50%. So the entire line about cutting taxes on the rich to help spur economic growth is not realistic.
• In fact, government policies have almost no impact on my decision making. I am not going to hire new people because of a tax break. I will hire when we need someone new. Many of the “stimulus” ideas also don’t work.
• How governments DO impact me as a business owner is when I run into red tape. If you really want to help businesses, simplify the tax code and make it easy for small businesses to follow rules.
• If you want to call yourself a fiscal conservative, you had better be one. As the owner of Zephyr Adventures, I funded our startup and have funded every expansion since. If you are in our federal government, get real and balance the budget. If you don’t, don’t call yourself a fiscal conservative.
• Finally, I think we have to reset our expectations as a country about “growth”. We just had a serious recession exactly because we were in too big a boom (internet and then financial / real estate) beforehand. I think our slow growth recovering from the recession is actually a good thing. It might just keep us out of the boom and bust cycle we usually fall into.

What do you think?