The story Bret Michaels tells is that he was upset over a cheating girlfriend when he wrote “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” a power ballad from the glam rock group Poison that topped the charts in the late 1980s.
But the song, in which the band’s lead singer gave a Reagan-era spin to Dickensian angst about the best and worst of times, captures equally well the dilemma facing small businesses three decades later, when consistent profit growth is accompanied by shrinking revenue gains as well as trouble getting loans.
