It's been a hectic week but I've made some excellent progress. I've identified a number of key players in the business community that are eager to contribute to the project. It's interesting to note that small businesses are indeed supported and respected by our local chambers and municipalities. Something that Dan Henderson told me is starting to make alot of sense. His staff spends a a majority of their time assisting small businesses. However, assisting a small restaurant or manufacturing company obtain capital financing isn't necessarily "newsworthy" so no one really knows what's going on behind the scenes. What gets newspaper coverage is obviously landing a large corporation that employs hundreds.
As I plan for interviews in the upcoming weeks, it will be interesting to hear from small business owners whether they feel supported by their chambers and economic development agencies.
Late this afternoon I met with my first small business contact, a financial planner formerly with Merrill Lynch. He's on his own, still associated with ML and now BofA, but in his own agency. We discussed a number of topics but one item in particular is worth nothing. When we started talking about business success, he told me that he is actually doing better this year than he did last year while many of his counterparts have stuck their head in the sand and have done everything wrong. So what did he "do right" to do better and thrive in what one would expect would be a dead business (investing in the stock market, financial planning, etc). What this fellow did was step up his efforts and started to increase contact with his clients. He told me about one of his clients who called and said, "I just lost $40,000! The market is crashing and I'm in a panic." Clearly the blame was the financial planner-- it was his fault this particular client has lost what appears to be a great deal of money. After some refocusing, calming down and lots of reassurance (basically hand holding), the client realized that he had in fact not lost more than $2300.00. The point was that his method of dealing honestly with clients, calling them and explaining what was happening and by working with them to reprioritize their portfolio, not only did he keep all this clients, he picked up 5 or 6 new clients, valued at several million dollars. While the other financial planners avoided their angry and scared clients, this guy did just the opposite-- he made himself available and worked closely with each of them to let them know that "things will be fine." Another interesting side note is that he actually instructed his clients to stop watching the daily bad business news that kept reporting that "this is the worst day in the history of Wall Street."
Tomorrow, I'm meeting with an SBDC Consultant and with the Chandler Chamber of Commerce.
