Karen Mills counsels Maine entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs converged around small round tables at Southern Maine Community College Monday, leaning in close to hear each other amid a din of conversation. A business counselor from one of four agencies - the Small Business Administration, SCORE, the Maine Women's Business Center and the Maine Small Business Development Centers - sat at each table, doling out free advice on marketing, financing and the various other components of getting a business off the ground.
The morning's star speaker, Karen Gordon Mills, recently appointed by President Obama to head the U.S. SBA, drifted from table to table, overseeing an event that embodied one of her stated goals for the administration: To make programs for small businesses more accessible. Shopping for help at the municipal, state and federal levels is too time-consuming for people trying to run a business, Mills said between stops at various tables. "If you're a business person, you're busy," she said. "You can't go find each one of them."
Roughly 50 business owners signed up for the event, including the owner of a company that manufactures fashionable hospital johnnies out of recycled materials and a man who wants to put a film studio in a former National Guard armory in South Portland. The event was part of Obama's "United We Serve" community service initiative that kicked off Monday and is sending administration officials to volunteer nationwide. Mills, a venture capitalist and graduate of Harvard Business School, runs the private equity firm MMP Group in Brunswick, where she lives with her husband, Barry Mills, president of Bowdoin College.
Mills stressed that the SBA must learn to distinguish the needs of "Main Street" businesses and high-growth entrepreneurial ventures. Not every business owner wants to be the next Microsoft, and for many, owning their company outright, supporting their family and sponsoring the local softball team is enough, she said. "We need to be able to serve all those businesses," Mills said.
The SBA has generated $4.3 billion in new loans for small businesses since the stimulus package was passed in February, according to Maurice Dube, district director of the Maine SBA. In Maine, the administration has guaranteed more than 170 loans totaling $30 million.
In a question-and-answer session with the crowd of entrepreneurs, Mills urged "reverse engineering success." Dream big but work backwards, she said, and figure out what five steps you can take to move your business forward in the next year, such as determining how many workers you need and how large a facility you require. Work with other business owners to share capital, technology, workforce training and other resources, she said. "You have to understand," Mills said, "What is success to you?"
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