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Are you an entrepreneur living your dream? A risk-taker with a big idea for a game-changing business? A small business owner working to innovate amid trying economic times?

CNBC wants to invite you to its Town Hall event on June 13 in Atlanta.

This dynamic and empowering event will feature well-known entrepreneurs and business people speaking on what it takes to create and sustain a small business in the 21st century.

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As the financial markets anticipate the initial public offering of social networking megasite Facebook this week, let us take a step back to admire this success story and the entrepreneurial free market system overall.

The Facebook IPO is expected to bring in $100 billion dollars — an astronomical amount for most people. While we congratulate Facebook’s creators in producing a multibillion dollar business concept from an idea developed in a dorm room, we should remember that there are thousands of innovative small firms who have great products but continue to struggle to raise capital.

Congress recently passed, and the president signed into law, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which will provide greater opportunities for small businesses to raise capital and expand. This law is an example of what government can do when we work in a bipartisan way and actually focus on job creation and the needs of small companies. As Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, I’d like to see more of this.

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CNBC President Barack Obama speaks on an America built to last.

President Barack Obama says Congress could help sustain the economy's "momentum" by passing legislation that would give businesses a 10 percent income tax credit if they create new jobs or increase wages this year.

Obama made his pitch during a roundtable discussion with small business leaders in Washington. The legislation is part of what Obama calls his "to-do" list for Congress. Obama says the action plan will help ensure that the economy doesn't "lose steam" at a time when people are starting to feel optimistic.

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When business is good, it's all good. It's when the going gets tough that you find out who is really in your corner.

Take Bill Silverman, owner of a ski shop in Livingston, N.J. His business had been through unseasonably warm winters before.

January and February of 2005 had been some of the wettest months on record, but also the warmest, and his business, which usually grosses about $2.5 million annually, fell off sharply. That time, he said, his bank discussed pulling his line of credit, but it was eventually renewed.

But this spring, after another nearly snowless winter in the Northeast, Bank of America, which has been his lender for years, sent a letter requesting that Silverman pay off his current line of credit by June 15.

Silverman, who has run High Country Ski and Sports for 26 years, is trying to come to terms with BofA, but he’s not waiting to hear if they reinstate it. In recent weeks he’s met with other, smaller banks. “I’m surprised how receptive the locals are,” he says, “They’re looking to beat out the big banks.”

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A pickup in hiring heading into the summer months could bode well for job creation in the second half of 2012, according to a recent survey by CareerBuilder.com.

The online career site’s annual Summer Job Forecast shows that 29 percent of employers plan to hire workers for the summer, an increase over last year’s 21 percent.

“This is good news for job seekers, as seasonal work can often lead to full-time opportunities,” said Brett Rasmussen, president of CareerBuilder North America, in a statement. “A majority of employers told us they consider a summer position an extended job interview.” In addition, the survey revealed that 71 percent of employers said they’ll be considering some summer hires for permanent positions.

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While the center of the universe this week for Wall Street and the IPO world is Facebook’s long-awaited debut to the public market, the biggest ongoing story related to the IPO market is the enactment last month of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.

This important new law contains all the elements needed to breathe new life into an IPO market that had been eviscerated over the past decade. It is an especially welcome tonic for the emerging growth companies that drive U.S. innovation, job creation and economic activity.

Among its key provisions, the JOBS Act creates a so-called IPO on-ramp that removes many of the roadblocks to going public that emerging growth companies have faced over the past decade due to a jumble of well-intentioned but ultimately misguided government regulations, including the almost universally loathed Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002. Originally conceived in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom accounting scandals, SOX was intended to apply only to the 1,000 largest companies in the U.S. Yet, in a fit of last-minute regulatory zeal, Congress in its wisdom ultimately decided to apply SOX to all U.S. public companies.

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It's not just large businesses that are looking to cutting-edge technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing and mobile devices to beef up their disaster preparedness capabilities. A significant number of small- and medium-size businesses are adopting these innovations as well, a new survey shows. And the move is paying off for them.

More than one-third of SMBs are now taking advantage of mobile devices for business use, according to a worldwide survey of more than 2,000 organizations with between five and 250 employees sponsored by Symantec

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[SYMC  Loading...      ()   ], the IT security company. Virtualization is also on the radar of SMBs, with 34 percent currently deploying or already benefitting from server virtualization. Even more popular is cloud computing, the survey found, with 40 percent deploying public clouds and slightly more (43 percent) implementing private clouds.

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The customers might hold all the cards, but it doesn't mean they are always right.

That old saying, “The customer is always right?” Not true, says Robert Bodi. “I guarantee you the customer is not always right.”

Bodi, who, along with his daughter, Ashley Bodi, hosts a TV show called Business Beware on Biz TV, says they have a name for customers that are never satisfied. CustoMonsters.

“Every business has bad customers,” he said. “They are the customers that go from business to business to business, and they are never satisfied. They always want something free, which actually costs the consumer in the long run, because a good consumer has to pay for the CustoMonsters.”

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