Sean Mabey, Wells Fargo Small Business Banking:
You start this business, you have some sort of success. How hard is it today for a small business to really grow?

Ron Busby, President & CEO, U.S. Black Chambers Inc.:
I think what we have to do as small business owners is be creative, but we have to have a plan to be able to get us there. And sometimes the plan that will get you from $150,000 to $300,000 isn’t the same strategy. Like, I’m sure you’ve had to change your strategy several times to get to that next growth level.
I think small business owners need relationships like ours. They need partners that will take them down the journey, and I think they need to continue to educate themselves in how they’re going to get there.

Bob Marshall, Wells Fargo Small Business Banking:
But they also need to think about defining growth, because growth is not just growing sales. Growth is market share. Growth is products. Growth could be many different things depending on the small business.

Busby:
Growth could be profit.

Marshall:
Right. And so, people, really, they’ve got to think about what they want to grow, and what impact that has on the business, because if you always think of top line revenue growth, the issue is, you’re chasing customers, but it may not be where you want to go.

Busby:
You can grow yourself out of business very easily as a small business owner if you’ve not looked at and made sure that you’re accommodating for all of the challenges, as well as some of the opportunities. So many of our firms end up growing out of business because they grew too quickly. They thought, “Hey, I’m chasing this big opportunity.” They get the opportunity. They don’t have the infrastructure. They don’t have the resources. They don’t have the relationship. And then soon after that, they end up going out of business.

Marshall:
It’s interesting, because I find a lot of small businesses we talk to now, they’re trying to manage the top line. They’re not looking for the growth in their top line. What they’re trying to do is either grow that way through products or specific customers that they’re looking for. But they’re heavily managing the top line because they know that that growth means something different.

Mabey:
Is it a capacity thing?
Marshall:
It may not be just capacity. It is capacity, but it also is, “I need a better infrastructure to do X,Y, and Z. I may not want to invest right now in doing that. I may need a larger line of credit. I don’t know if I want that thing over my head, that $1 million. But if I grow this way, I can still manage my top line and then eventually do the other things, because now I have the infrastructure in place.

Mabey:
I always wonder. You think about some of the conversation we’ve had about starting here and getting to here. And growth is the word. I suppose it’s because I just want to grow. I want to grow. I wonder sometimes if people have different definitions of growth, and sometimes it can be a bad thing to grow yourself out of business. And how you manage that expectation of the American dream, or what I see on Shark Tank, or those kind of things. This one in a million thing. That’s what I want to do, so I have to grow so fast. I’ve got to go, go, go, go, go. And that creates that, I want to go here first and not instead of here.’ It’s a really interesting concept, and sometimes what people see feeds into that, because what you see is kind of what you emulate.

Marshall:
I always say, think about a baby. They just don’t decide they’re going to walk one day. They’ve got to crawl first. And if you think that in the stages that it takes to get there, then you liken it to, Ok, if I’m a small business, I may get to go on Shark Tank and get a million dollars, but what is the opportunity of that really happening? A small percentage. Think about probability. But if you really want to sustain, if you really want to open a business and then now go to something else, you’ve got to be able to see yourself through it, and it’s a process. And not many processes that I know, you can go from step one to 10 in five days or less. It takes time. 

Mabey:
What’s your growth story, Lindsey?

Lindsey Braciale, Founder & CEO, Advocations:
So, my growth story is that, it’s really challenging to grow if your business model isn’t solid. And I had gotten to the point where, basically, the business that I was running was a function of head count. And I hated the business I was in over time because it was a lot of managing different pieces and being able to have a lot of vulnerabilities, because you had to put a lot of trust in outside resources. And so, I think that our biggest hindrance to growth was the business model, so being able to sharpen that up and make it a lot more fluid. Because I don’t think the business that I started, I always saw us as very small. But then, as we were able to take on customers in California and other things like that, it didn’t work. Everything went out the window. And so, I think the things that have made us grow is, I have a Richard Branson quote that says, “If somebody offers you a great opportunity, say yes, and figure out how to do it later.” And so that’s been kind of our kind of ad hoc, you know like, let’s just grow, let’s try this out, let’s figure it out. But I think not having the strong foundation initially, because I didn’t think that forward in the future, and I actually thought: This is getting me out of a job I don’t want to do, because I can start a company, and then I won’t have a boss, and this will be great. And I can bring my dog to work, that was like No. 1. But now, kind of seeing what we boot-strapped to now being really intentional, the business model that we’re building with the tech platform leverages three different entities, and our growth strategy is a lot more robust because we need to hit different marks. Because we’re starting a business, and we’re not seeing as a small, and I think that’s the difference, is that when you start a company and you know you want to be big, you make really solid decisions up front. Whereas if you’re just jumping in to see how you can offset a paycheck, then I think you’re not as intentional.