Business Basher-in-Chief

Had enough of the relentless business bashing, including from our own president?

Judging by the social-media commotion, the reaction of entrepreneurs to Business-Basher-in-Chief Barack Obama has been visceral. “If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen,” President Obama told a crowd recently.

That remark did not sit well with many entrepreneurs, including Earl Quenzel, who runs a Fort Myers-based advertising agency, Quenzel & Associates. He launched a website called YesIdidbuildit.com in response to Obama's comments and the president's recent ill-timed visit to Fort Myers.

“At first I couldn't believe it. I thought it was taken out of context,” Quenzel says when he read the president's anti-business remarks.

But after viewing the video of the speech (it's posted on the website, and yes, Obama really did say that), Quenzel decided to do his part to counter mistaken perception that government is responsible for entrepreneurs' success.

Quenzel says he's been so swamped with calls from other incensed entrepreneurs that he's opened the site for business owners to post stories of why and how they built their business. He's encouraging others to do the same.

“When you say I didn't make that happen, that's the kind of rhetoric that scares me,” Quenzel says. “Our leaders don't understand what drives the American economy. We should be supporting small business to take risks.”