Don't be so dismissive of what 15k means to a small business. I'm on the board of a local small business that has about 12 full time employees and a handfull of part time employees and I can tell you that 15k makes a huge difference, because this business, like many others, is struggling in this economy.
Off the top of my head here is what we can do with an extra 15k:
* Pay about half of our property taxes.
* Make 1 month worth of mortgage payments.
* Lower the amount we require our employees to contribute to their health care plan. The 10 or so full time employees could pay $100+ less per month for their insurance.
* We wouldn't have had to cut everyone's salary by 3-5% last January.
* The employees could get a holiday bonus for the first time in 3 years.
* A much needed IT upgrade of the company computer systems.
* Capital Improvements to the building owned by the company
* Marketing costs - this one is huge as it's one area where we could spend money and expect to make money.
not having that $15,000 doesn't stop you from doing ANY of those things. If ALL of those things are necessary, you can still do them right now with a $500,000 pretax profit.
If it's worth doing and you have a pretax profit of $500,000 you can do it with $500,000 or $485,000.
The concept that you CAN'T do it without that $15,000 is ABJECTLY, TOTALLY, COMPLETE BS.