The New York Times has a sad story on seven small businesses that shut their doors in 2009. The owners were brave enough to talk about what went wrong and offer up valuable lessons for all small business owners:

• A 12-year-old concierge service that peaked at $2.5 million in revenue fell to $80,000 in 2009 and closed its doors. The owner reflected that she should have sold the company when it was flying high, and in fact had interest from buyers.The lesson: When you're in a business that is dependent on the economic cycle and not recession-resistant, look to sell when times are flush, or diversify.
• A greeting card store, located opposite a General Motors plant since 1970, peaked in 2000 with sales of $780,000. As layoffs took their toll, sales nosedived to $400,000 this year and the store closed. The lesson: The owner never thought much about future growth strategy, nor did he follow demographic trends. If he had, he said, he would have moved his location. In retail, it's not enough to mind the store. You have to be a demographer and analyst of trends.
• A big maker of fiberboard got caught up in the housing downturn and its bank called in its loan because of the business's debt-to-cash-flow ratio. The lesson:The CEO pointed to the importance of choosing lending partners wisely and having a relationship (in writing) that protects you from random moves that force you out of business.
• A retail clothing store in a Houston mall closed after 18 months because it couldn't pay its high rents as sales declined. The lesson:Commercial mall operators have no regard for your small business. Had the owner located in a privately-owned, non-commercial space, she might have been able to get better terms from the landlord.
• A family restaurant with more than 40 years of history watched as chain eateries opened around it. Revenue fell by half and the place closed. The lesson: if Applebee's opens down the street and your customers start leaving, why not turn your family place into a Friday's or Ruby Tuesday's. Family places are great, but the handwriting was on the wall for a long time.

The stories are gut-wrenching but provide a teachable moment through their common denominators. When times are good, we rarely look for storm clouds. And yet that's exactly the time we need to prepare for the inevitably uncertain future and explore the what if's. So, what are the "what if's" in your small business that could cloud 2010? And what are you going to do about it. Please leave a comment and help everyone have a better future.

You may not have heard of Gurbaksh Chahal, but any 27-year-old who has already started and sold two companies for a total of $340 million, and has just secured more than $12 million in venture funding for his third, deserves the attention of all entrepreneurs, current and aspiring.

"G," as he's known, was born in India and came to the United States at age 3 with his parents. His father was a police officer and his mother was a nurse at a large hospital. They came to the U.S. virtually penniless. His father took a job as a security guard and his mother as a hospital orderly. To help out his family (he has three older siblings), G dropped out of school to start his first company, Click Agents, when he was 16. He sold the Internet advertising company two years later for $40 million. Then he started BlueLithium, another advertising business, which he sold three years later to Yahoo! for $300 million in cash. Last year he launched gWallet, a company in the digital payments business, which just closed on a major round of venture capital financing.

Aside from starting and selling companies for lots of money, G starred in Fox's Secret Millionaire show and has appeared on Oprah and other major TV shows. He also published a memoir, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millionsa in 2008.

He clearly likes the spotlight (check out his website and do a Bing image search on his name). He lives in a $ 7 million San Francisco apartment and drives a $240,000 car. You may or may not relate to the flashiness of his image or his lifestyle, but he offers a plain-spoken manner and willingness to share some pretty valuable ideas.

In our interview (listen to the complete podcast), he talks about some issues that are very important to business owners:

• Can you be successful if you're driven by the desire for a financial payoff instead of a passion for your business?
• Entrepreneurs need to be passionate but not emotional. How do you manage what seems like a contradiction?
• If you've never had business owners in your family, where does the entrepreneurial DNA come from?
• What's the most important factor in hiring for your startup?
• Why he follows only 31 people on Twitter (he's @gchahal), including Ryan Seacrest, Janet Jackson, Tony Robbins, Oprah, Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), MC Hammer and Ivanka Trump. (He has about 3,900 followers on Twitter, and another 79,000+ fans of his Facebook page.)
• And a lot more...

Check it out.

The Los Angeles Times reports that many small business owners aren't sitting idly by hoping for the economic recover to save them. They're saving themselves through innovation.

• One bookstore owner is switching from its standard inventory of books to bargain titles to lower inventory costs.
• A commercial bakery cut salaries across the board by 10 percent, even as it continues its expansion plans to hire more workers and add trucks.
• A 33-employee manufacturer of stage drapes for touring bands, schools and religious organizations is using teleconferencing instead of a showroom to keep expenses down.
• A fitness studio added a line of DVDs since some customers can afford to come less frequently.

What are you doing with your small business to stay competitive -- or even just to survive -- in a period of recession? Leave a comment or take the poll.

In the small business I own, I've noticed an ebb and flow through the years -- periods when I am really "on it" and other times when I am either coasting or not as engaged as I need to be. Fortunately, I've been very much on my game for the past three years (thanks in no small part to my collaboration with my coach).

For a couple of years prior to that I was up and down and, no surprise, my results were erratic. I have been thinking about what's different now compared with then in terms of my activity and attitude. I bet that anyone with a small business goes through the same cycles. Maybe if you read this you'll snap out of a down cycle and get back on your game. I am not going to to focus on what to do about each factor, basically because just noticing the problem is in itself the cure. But if you have other solutions, please comment.

• Get Fried by Their Business. Not much in life is harder than building a successful business--whether it has one employee, 10 or 100,000. Nature does not want your business to succeed. All gravitational forces and systems conspire to kill a new business, so you have to overcome the viruses, diseases and mutations that want to extinguish your venture. Often, small business owners are the business. They play many roles, not necessarily by choice but by necessity. Not everything can or should be delegated early on, or maybe ever. So owners get fried. When you're toast you can't be creative. If you are not creative in your business, it is already starting to die.

• Get Bored with Their Business: Since the advent of the supermarket (maybe before), being human has gotten way too easy. A man with a spear and an empty stomach is rarely bored. But our bellies are full and you can't fit a spear into a Prius, so we're bored! And distracted. We find it hard to focus on the day to day, nuts-and-boltsy stuff about small business that keep the wheels from coming off.  It's a weird genetic quirk, but for many small business owners the only thing that snaps them out of their boredom and subsequent lack of attention to detail is when their checking account is empty--the modern equivalent of the hungry cave-dweller.

• Start Cutting Corners: When you're tired and bored in your business, you start cutting corners. You used to maintain meticulous records in your CRM, and now you're a little less thorough. Your used to review your systems and procedures quarterly to make sure your operating methods were up to date, but it's been six months since you did your last review. You do a monthly email newsletter but the last one went out seven weeks ago.

• Don't Follow up with all Prospects Thoroughly and Immediately: A small business owner I know called me twice about her promotional products business. Each time she promised to send me a link with products she had picked out for me. I haven't heard from her in two months. She worked hard to get me to be receptive and poised to buy something, and then let the ball drop.

• Don't Follow Up with Existing Customers on a Scheduled Basis: My business doubled when I created a system for follow-up with existing customers. This goes back to the caveman discussion. We like hunting a new bear. But we have a thing about leftovers. It's nuts! We all know existing customers are more profitable than new ones. They're just not as exciting to catch.

• Miss the Opportunity to Add Another Product or Service to an Order: There's a reason we all know the expression, "Would you like fries with that?" We tend to sell the products that we find easiest to sell. Sometimes an ancillary product is not as fascinating to us. Yet by offering it we can increase our sales and marginal profit tremendously. Wonder why we don't do it every single time?