Scott,

Hyphenated domains such as domain-name.com should not cause problems with search engines at all.

As for how it will hurt or help your business, that mainly depends on how you will advertise. If a lot of your traffic will be driven by business cards, fliers, word of mouth, and so forth... then you will want something that is easy to remember and preferrably short.

On the other hand, if you will be advertising mostly through search engines, and linking to other websites / from other websites, then hyphenating your domain will not cause a problem. People who find your site from search engines, links, and then book mark your site could for the most part care less how long your domain is.

I own www.Bluefireweb.com which is a hosting company, designing websites / search engine optimization / and hosting are my specialties!!

Hope this helps!

Daniel Rosales
http://bluefireweb.com/