Legislation to the Rescue?
Dec. 24, 2009 by Julie SturgeonThere’s a lot of skepticism of Washington, D.C.’s ability to help end the recession out in the fly-over states, and franchise owners certainly make up part of that crowd. “I’m not a big fan of a lot of political machinations,” Growth Coach® CEO Ingar Grev says right off the bat. “So in general, I think the more the government tries to pull all these levers, the more they get unintended consequences.”
That doesn’t prevent him, of course, from hoping congressional bills like S. 1229 and H.R. 2672 written to allocate dollars toward small business funding – veteran ownership in particular. “The one thing good about veterans is we did work for the government and part of the benefits package is it is reasonable for the government to provide certain incentives for training and education for employment after the military. It’s the same package you’d get in corporate America,” says Grev.
But even with Uncle Sam’s legislative hand up, there’s plenty of work for the private sector to do.
When Grev first began exploring franchising, it took nearly three months before he realized he could use his home equity to pay the fees. “I didn’t realize how much money I had until I came across that,” he says. So when S. 1229 specifically mentions reaching out in a better way of communicating available resources to veterans, that gets an automatic thumbs up with him – but as a member of the board of trustees at the Naval Academy, he’s not holding his breath, either.
“I’ve started investigating how we can do a better job in the alumni association of communicating the benefits of franchises,” Grev reports. “Can we do this without the government? Absolutely.” In fact, he argues, his military outreach groups can even more effectively spread the message, since associations are formed with people who have a passion for the subject, and government is a detached entity.
Then there’s Dave Phillipson, CEO Space, Inc.’s Long Beach (Calif.) president. In a recession, the idea of collaborative capitalism is worth a heap of new legislation. “The SBA [U.S. Small Business Administration] has the right intent but the wrong tools,” he says. “Or perhaps I should say they don’t have the strength of the necessary tools to be as effective.” He’s talking about better hands-on coaching, more expert advisement, and the ability to give hands-on mentorship – steps beyond what SCORE® and the SBA’s Small Business Development Centers currently take.
These are, however, by-products when entrepreneurs, even competing ones, get together to boost each other. “It may be a supply chain concept, it may be that you and I have similar ideas that we combine our resources to make each other stronger,” says Phillipson. “Rather than both of us coming out with a similar product in the same niche, there’s enough to go around for everyone.”
