Blog
FBA becoming more influential, lobbyists say at Family Business Day
FBA is earning the respect of business allies and opponents in the never-ending struggle to enact pro-business legislation and defeat bills that would make it even harder to do business in California, the Association’s lobbyists told FBA members on May 2 during the...
Lund Construction marks 60th year in business with view to the future
Now in its third generation and celebrating its 60th year in business, Lund Construction Co. – like so many family businesses – began as a home-based business. The year was 1958 and George and Alta Lund began the Sacramento-area business with just a motor grader and a...
Trade Wars: It’s All About Leverage
Elliot Eisenberg | GraphsandLaughs, LLC | May 2018 Editor's note: Here is economist Elliot Eisenberg's latest column for FBA members. With the U.S.-China trade war looking increasingly ominous, two questions are on the minds of many: do trade deficits matter and which...
FBA Member Lippow Development Co. is truly an only-in-America success story.
While Lippow Development Co. is officially celebrating its 70thanniversary this year, the Martinez-based family business really began decades earlier, when family patriarch Leo Lippow opened a bike shop outside of Milwaukee, Wis. During the first decade of the...
Pini Hardware: Owned by different families along the way but a family business for 100 years
Sometimes, a family business is owned by several families along the way. Such is the case with Pini Ace Hardware in Novato, which is celebrating its 100thanniversary this year. Russ Young, Pini’s CFO and treasurer and a member of the third generation of his family to...
Jobs: They’re Not What They Used to Be
Elliot Eisenberg, Ph.D. | GraphsandLaughs, LLC | April 2018 During every business cycle, economies experience job losses followed by subsequent job gains such that, in time, all job losses are made up, and then some. Between January 2008 and February 2010, almost nine...
Five companies join Family Business Association of California
Recognize need to be part of only statewide group focusing solely on family businesses Five more companies have recently joined the Family Business Association of California, the only statewide organization that solely focuses on the impacts of new laws and...
Jim Dobbas Inc.: 50 years of working on the railroad
When Jim Dobbas incorporated his business, he figured doing so on April 1, 1968, was fitting. “It was April Fool’s Day, but I didn’t care because I didn’t think I was going to make it anyway,” he recalled with a chuckle. Fortunately for California’s railroads, his...
The Age of Austerity Is Over
Elliot Eisenberg, Ph.D., GraphsandLaughs, LLC When the Congressional Budget Office made its June 2017 forecast of our fiscal future, it projected a deficit of $689 billion in FY2019. The deficit is now poised to be $1.2 trillion, a dramatic and profound change that is...
FBA Joins Coalition Opposing Huge Tax Increase
The Family Business Association of California is one of the business groups that signed on to the following letter to Assembly Members Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, and Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, opposing their proposal to impose a 10 percent "surcharge" on corporate...
FBA Lobbyist Recaps State of the State, Discusses Business Tax Proposal
By Dennis Albiani, California Advocates Governor Brown delivered his 16th – and final – State of the State address last week, asserting that the “bolder path is still our way forward” on climate change, infrastructure investment, health care, education, and criminal...
FBA scores major victory: State death tax proposal dies
Legislation that would have reinstated the Estate Tax in California if the Federal government repealed the tax died last week. SB 726, by San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener, would have asked voters to reinstate California's estate tax if the federal government had...