Leaders or Feeders: What Governments Can Do To Help Grow Small Businesses

Learn Methods Used Across the Country to Help Support Small Business Growth

Government officials and elected leaders are facing intense pressure to demonstrate job growth, but conventional big business recruitment efforts involve large budget and staff time commitments - and seldom pay off. Governments are increasingly seeing a need to focus economic development efforts on small business growth, but they soon discover that the same methods cannot be applied - that small businesses have very different needs and expectations. This live webinar will help you get inside the mind of a small business owner and understand their assumptions and challenges. We will then examine methods being used by large and small communities across the country to help support small business growth by providing relatively low-cost types of assistance. These "feeder" types of assistance focus on cultivating a robust, highly interconnected small business environment that can catalyze growth faster than conventional methods. We will also examine effective roles that governments can play in actively changing a community's small business environment through targeted efforts that make the best use of governments' strengths and capacities.

Learning Objectives

- You will be able to identify the different worlds of small businesses and governments.

- You will be able to explain care and feeding of small business growth.

- You will be able to discuss communicating and streamlining.

- You will be able to explain using small business incentives wisely.