Community Supported Economic Restructure

Select link to listen to a audio podcast of this 10-minute talk plus 10 minutes of questions and answers or go to http://www.becausebusiness.com/audio/EconomicRestructureJune292010.mp3


In the recording of this talk on June 29, 2010 at the Monticello Hotel, Longview Washington, I mention the recent passage of the 2,000-page financial industry reform bill which among other things called for 74 studies to be conducted.

I propose that business associations, Chambers of Commerce and local governing bodies support and endorse widespread use of business coaches to enhance their community’s entrepreneurial climate. Business coaches foster increased business education and skills development leading to greater sustainability of independent ventures.

1. Economic Restructure - The National Historic Preservation League in its Main Street Program sees “economic restructure” as one of its four core components along with: building renovation, an independent managing organization and promotion.

2. Business Retention is Primary - The first and most important step in the Main Street Program is retention of existing businesses before attempting to foster new businesses or fill empty space. If we fail to support existing ventures, we’ll have even more empty store fronts.

3. Stimulating New Ventures is also Important - As existing businesses are supported, generating an atmosphere of possibility for budding or expanding business is the next priority. With as many people out of work and unemployment benefits running out, people are going to be forced into ventures of their own to survive.

4. Reluctant Entrepreneurs - Some workers are being brought back to their former positions but now as outsourced contractors who must find other clients to have enough work to support their overhead and personal needs. These are in many cases technicians who have never been self-employed and are being forced into to have any work. These reluctant entrepreneurs have special needs to learn how to keep a venture alive.
5. Small Ventures are Job Creation Machines - Small family businesses are the lifeblood of American business, particularly small town and downtown districts. The operators of these small businesses have not received much formal business education. They are technicians and they benefit by expert business services support. Small business stimulation will result in the fastest, most widespread re-employment for America.

6. Current Needs Exceed Accounting Skills - The expert business support most small businesses rely upon is their accountant and bookkeeper. Some use attorneys and bankers. The complexity and rate of change for small businesses exceeds the services typically offered by these practitioners. Typically, accountants and attorneys are educated and trained to find weak spots in organizations. Entrepreneurs need both cold-water realism and optimistic encouragement.

7. Free Help: Sometimes You Do Get What You Pay For - Government advice is available from the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and Senior Core of Retired Executives (SCORE) helps some entrepreneurs who are very proactive and spend the time and energy to develop and maintain relationships with these sources. Expert help provided in a relationship of trust that costs the entrepreneur and produces results can result in long term business development.

8. Entrepreneurs are Cautious and Independent - While these services have low or no cost, most entrepreneurs are too busy, too proud, too independent and too concerned about the government being involved in their business to devote the energy necessary to make these relationships pay off. Many find their educational courses valuable but few meet regularly with the advisors. Besides there’s only a very limited number of time slots for entrepreneurs to fit into. When entrepreneurs have a disaster, they need help immediately.

9. Official Sponsorship Can Produce Increased Confidence - Sponsoring organizations can help defray part of the costs of making coaching available to more entrepreneurs. Business owners must pay something to value the services they receive. If sponsoring organizations participate it makes more help available on a sliding scale basis so growing and troubled ventures can get the help they need when they need it.

10. Opposing Skills and Talents - There are a variety of frameworks to explain why, but of successful, proven entrepreneurs, most have one extraordinary skill or talent such as sales, operations or administration. They also are adequate at a second of these abilities and then dismal at the third. Business coaches can help fill that void until they’ve developed a supportive staff. New entrepreneurs need enough experience to identify, practice and convert latent talent into professional aptitude.

11. Empty Retail Stores Hurt A Community’s Spirit and Enthusiasm - We have had a number of local businesses fail during this economic turmoil. Right now we have a few new businesses venturing forward. Let’s come up with creative ways to support additional professional business development and support of existing ventures to keep our community and business district alive.

12. Fund Raising Events Have Multiple Benefits - I propose the organization plan a series of fundraisers to build the treasury and fund educational programs and member development services. Creating activities that genuinely assist the community will inspire more business owners to join. I’m a member of this organization and I’m prepared to help.


Typical Objections
1. Why should the community help people who are failing? If they’re not capitalized or service client needs efficiently they deserve to go out of business.

Empty storefronts discourage shoppers who are driving from stopping and stop walk in traffic from continuing down the block. Anything that can be done to keep retail business in storefronts helps everyone in business downtown and throughout the community. People talk about “all the empty stores” and that just makes buyers more reluctant to be confident when shopping.



2. No community group ever helped my business or anyone else here, that the problem with government today, it’s building a ‘hand-out’ society.

I am not proposing a “hand-out.” I am proposing a sponsorship investment in the business fundamentals which are more critical now with business credit all but impossible, revenues down and in many cases costs and overhead higher than normal. Business tools formerly reserved for aggressive growth are now needed for survival in many industries.

3. There are college courses, online classes and books in the library if someone needs to learn about business. I never had a consultant or coach, what good would a coach do for a real business person.

To retain existing businesses and encourage new ones, exact answers to specific questions are needed sometimes urgently. Many business owners are not trained in business and don’t have the resources or time for research. Entrepreneurs are independent by nature and frequently embarrassed to ask for help or are not sure who they can ask, when they need the answer today.

4. Business owners don’t have time to sit and talk, they’re serving customers. People who talk about business don’t do business.

Entrepreneurs need time to reflect and other business people with whom they can be candid. They know they can’t appear weak of vulnerable with employees and customers so establishing a relationship of trust with a business coach is an invaluable resource.


5. Our organization is doesn’t have money or time to educate people who want to be in business. They either know it or they don’t.

Business organizations need to be positive and resourceful about meeting community needs before solutions become even more costly. We’re all business people, if we can’t be creative and make money regardless of the economy, then we need to rethink our community priorities and create new solutions. No business person and no business is an island. More than ever our businesses and communities fortunes are tied together. We must foster a healthy business climate to promote customer confidence and investor confidence.

6. Our organization doesn’t have money to support coaches or anyone else. Our businesses and our organization are barely hanging on.

Negative thinking is small thinking. Entrepreneurs create opportunities. Leaders inspire confidence and trust their intuition while developing carefully thought out plans and budgets to support realistic goals. A healthy local economy requires vision and commitment by business leaders.

7. What kind of possible fund raising could be produce with the economy in this sorry shape?

There are many activities and needs which our organization could sponsor to invigorate our business community and in turn raise funds to invest in more professional business operations.

Wikis for Be Cause Clients

I set up a wiki for a Be Cause automotive repair client Saturday. We set it up as an internal company knowledge base.

We included pages for worst and best vehicles to repair, job descriptions and procedures. This week employees will be encouraged to begin adding insights and their frequently asked questions; the owner will post his answers.

The Be Cause Wiki is moving forward; see links at www.BeCauseBusiness.com

I finished reading "Wikinomics - How Collaboration Changes Everything" by Don Tapscott and William Anthony (www.Wikinomics.com). It's a thought provoking book on where participative management and Web 2.0 tools are leading business and culture.

I'm now reading "Publish & Prosper - Blogging for your Business" by DL Byron & Steve Broback. I am eager to dialogue with others about ways to enhance participative management. Cheers...

What am I creating?

In recent weeks, I've been writing on how organizational development can lead to sustainable prosperity.

Friday and Saturday we participated in a program called The Experience Training in Salt Lake City. Our dear friends and colleagues, Bob Adams and Diane Cole, assisted. In the training, we did extensive reflection and dialogue about our lives, dreams and purpose.

Afterwards, my partner Kathleen and I drove 12 hours from Salt Lake City to Longview, Washington. Below are some rambling "stream of consciousness" thoughts from the drive.

Sustainable prosperity is abundant wellbeing that continues indefinitely. Sustainable means something that continues in perpetuity. While something sustainable may fluctuate in strength, it is resilient. Built into a sustainable system is self-regulation so it can grow and renew itself. It is adaptable and flexible.

The term sustainability is usually associated with the environment. Our dependence upon autos and industry appears to be causing global warming. If so, these behaviors are not contributing to a sustainable environment.

Nature has been sustainable for tens of thousands of years. Imploding meteors may have triggered global climate change and the end for dinosaurs. This was perhaps the latest in a succession of explosive episodes in the earth’s history. Nature has been quite stable until the last 150 years. Beginning with the industrial age and accelerating with the atomic age, our modern culture has resulted in unprecedented rates of environmental change.

I have learned that the effects in nature we see today are caused by events which took place 50 years ago. This has been called the “butterfly effect:” Small changes can have large consequences. A butterfly in China flapping its wings results in storms and high winds far away in the United States. Weather is a complex adaptive system. Simple causality is not adequate to explain today’s reality. Perhaps a better way to express this is our complex understanding requires sophisticated explanations.

A report on global warming released in England earlier this year, calls for dramatic changes by governments and industry to avoid huge economic shifts 50 years from now.

Another recent event is the success of the film and book “The Secret” about the “Law of Attraction.” Newsweek and others have criticized it as simplistic, wishful thinking. Positive thinking, affirmations and new age philosophy are denounced in the popular press.

This is a volatile time. War in Iraq and Afghanistan has been longer than World War II with three thousand American troops dead, hundreds of thousands wounded and ten times those casualties and dead for the local people.

Congress and the president are at war over the direction of our government.

Perhaps we need some “wishful thinking.” In conversation with a dear colleague and old friend, he suggested that a more thoughtful criticism for positive thinking is it doesn’t take into consideration the place of tragedy in human life. Instead, it covers over or ignores it.

I say there is no “unified field theory” for life. There is no single explanation or methodology to guide us despite the appeal of such an idea. Perhaps the closest I have come to it is the only moral decision is to do good. The Buddha’s final words, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” Shakespeare said, “To thy own self be true.” Jesus, Mohamed, Patanjali , the Sikh gurus and all the spiritual teachers have aphorisms we can live by. These guiding principles have profound meaning. From their work we have elaborate systems, codes, rules and laws.

These very beliefs have us at war with Al-Quaeda and some Islamic leaders. Their idea of heaven and ours contradict. Yesterday within a hour I heard two dramatically different news items that reflect what is so. A vanload of people in Iraq belonging to a minority religious sect, presumably was killed by another sect. An American woman, raised in a large Catholic family, converted to Islam and has been elected president of the American or North American Islamic Society. This is the first time for this society to elect as president a woman, a convert and a non-immigrant. There was an extended interview of her on NPR’s “Speaking of Faith.”

Today it is one week since a lonely Korean attending Virginia Tech killed 32 on that campus. In this event are stories of tragedy, evil, heroism and good. Horrible and glorious events are unfolding all around us. Our stories to understand them follow. We are awash in communications, adrift seeking meaning and direction.

A fundamental question is can we learn to live together? Can we serve another while caring for ourselves? I suppose an answer is that we are, it’s not always pretty, polite or comfortable. Can we do better? Obviously and we are. This is a process.

Population is increasing, therefore as a species we are succeeding. What is the price of this success? What is the quality of our lives? Each of us must ask and answer this question or face ongoing depression and confusion.

My reply is, “I create meaning and beauty in the face of temporality.” I am choosing to consider what is balance and harmony in my life experience? How may I serve, live simply and prosper. How may I sustain prosperity? My reply is what I think, speak and do. Today, my partner and I will visit her 29-year old niece that the doctors say is dying of cancer. Today she is alive. She’s happily married with two small children. They are a happy family. Her time is apparently quite limited. Today she is alive. Is this a tragedy? Is it stupid and crazy that this could be true? Her immediate and extended family is in deep grief. Everyone is hurting. Today she is alive.

Today I am alive. What will I do? What am I creating? Can I find balance? How may I contribute more than I consume?

I am creating my today and thereby my tomorrow. I live in a complex circumstance. This is life, my life, our life. I chose to serve small businesses improving their sustainable prosperity.

To create business models which are sustainable and prosperous is the goal of small business to support families of owners and employees while serving customers and their broader community.