If I could play “Startup Angel” for a day and could accomplish whatever I wanted, one of my chief goals would be to reduce the barriers that make it unnecessarily difficult for small and innovative businesses to succeed. Such entrepreneurial companies are the lifeblood of our economy, so anything we can do to help them rise to a sustainable level of success is of utmost importance.

In a world of changing business practices, social media and digital technology, many of these businesses need practical and proven systems to leverage new media easily and effectively.

I’d provide a simple easy-to-use platform to bridges the gap between the current business practices and the digital system of the future, with practical features all crafted to improve one’s success in social media. I would help businesses win in an environment where being in the game is not enough.  Success lies in being ahead of the game.

I’d help these entrepreneurs understand what resources are available to them, like this great site, Weebly.com, that enables small business owners to build and host a website or blog free with a simple drag and drop interface and online Reputation Management tools for monitoring your  brand, like Google Alerts which are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic, Backtype for monitoring blog comments and Yahoo! Pipes another good tool for aggregating and combining feeds into one central repository.

I’d let them know they can conduct a name search, or find various topics they are interested in and then subscribe via RSS on Twitter. Or they could use Twilert and TweetBeep to receive email alerts.

I’d help them find great content on Social Mention, a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. And FriendFeed, a social aggregator that takes all of your social accounts, such as YouTube, Delicious, Twitter, blog, and Flickr, and pull them together into a single (Friend) feed.

I’d tell these entrepreneurs about Scribd & Docstoc which have brilliant powerpoint presentations on every topic imaginable, document sharing, and knowledge exchange.

I’d make sure they new about  Entrepreneur Assist where they can get business templates to build a business plan, schedule events and reminders, create text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and hold live online meetings with customers and colleagues.

The exciting thing is all these tools were designed and built by entrepreneurs just like us.

While it’s a safe bet that I’ll never be “Startup Angel” for a day, the good news is I do have the opportunity to share these ideas with entrepreneurs. And so do you.

Shoot me a message on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or  send me an Email. What other tools do you use that have really helped you take your game to another level?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.