For the past 10 years I’ve owned and managed a small business selling consulting services to larger businesses. I’ve been fortunate that Minnesota’s business climate has allowed me to support my growing family and work with some great Minnesota businesses. While many of my clients have been based in Minnesota, many others have been based throughout the United States: California, Colorado, and Florida.
Under the Governor Dayton’s proposed tax plan my small business would be required to collect a 5.5% sales tax on our services. This will immediately make my business 5.5% less competitive in Minnesota and around the US. But it’s more than just 5.5%, it a adds a layer of complexity to my day-to-day operations, eating into my overall profitability, and discouraging me from engaging other businesses to support my clients. Taxing professional services will mean not just lower profitability but decreased business activity for many of the great creative service firms Minnesota is known for: design, advertising, architecture.
The past couple years have been some of the most challenging for my business – it’s been a slow and arduous recovery and I’m just now starting to see some of the profitability I once enjoyed. The addition of a sales tax burden on my business will significantly impair my ability to grow my business in Minnesota.
I’m a small business owner, I’d rather not be a smaller business owner. I’m against Governor Dayton’s Sales Tax proposal – I encourage you to vote against it as well.
This will devastate the architectural community here in Minneapolis. Local architects will no longer be able to compete against national firms, or even against bigger operations here in town that have in-house accounting, printing, and I.T. Firms will close, and with them all the things that make Minneapolis a desirable place to live. I hope the creative community around the state finds a way to band together and get the message out that this is a bad idea, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum and whether or not you believe that taxes in general are a viable tool for the Governor to use to fix our state budget.