Looking for personal approach to help small biz grow

PERSONAL GROWTH: Mark A. Stewart, state director of Rhode Island Small Business Development Center, said that the death of his twin brother helped him begin “caring more about people.” / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
PERSONAL GROWTH: Mark A. Stewart, state director of Rhode Island Small Business Development Center, said that the death of his twin brother helped him begin “caring more about people.” / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Mark Stewart has a vision to make “extreme customer service” the priority of the restructured Rhode Island Small Business Development Center.
His strategy is for the SBDC to develop close, one-on-one working relationships with businesses across the state through a team of three regional directors and three SBDC business counselors, moving from a consultancy model to one that uses in-house talent to create long-term relationships. He’s hiring a bilingual business counselor for one of those positions, to be available to the Latino community. Another will be a floater, working across the state.

PBN: What kind of accomplishments did you have in North Carolina that helped define your plans for Rhode Island?
STEWART: Rhode Island is a different culture and environment with different types of industries. I serviced two large counties, Halifax and Northampton counties, in North Carolina. Those two counties were larger than the state of Rhode Island. They had high dropout rates, high crime rates, very high unemployment and very low opportunity for economic development. I had to come up with a strategy to help people understand complex financials and business plans. I was put there to create economic opportunities in those counties. When I got there I saw that in the previous year, only one business had been created. I was there more than four years and during that time we created, I think, roughly about 98 businesses.
What’s the same is, you still have the core mission – you have people who have goals, who have ambitions and who have dreams, and my goal in Rhode Island is to assist people with their goals and ambitions and dreams and when their businesses thrive, it’s good for the state.

PBN: How did you help create all those new businesses in a challenging economic environment in North Carolina?
STEWART: I had to re-engineer everything. My goal was to teach difficult concepts at a sixth-grade level. I worked there with only one administrative assistant. I taught 19 seminars myself while I was there. … I taught people how to present a funding package to a funding committee. I helped them understand what the banks are looking for and what it means to operate a business. I took them through the whole process.
PBN: Is there one business you helped created in North Carolina that you’re most proud of?
STEWART: It’s wonderful when you can help someone start a business and hire their mother. There was a client I worked with who didn’t have any money. He had very little collateral. He wanted to buy a tractor-trailer to start a trucking company. The loan package, by the time I was done with it, was about 132 pages. We presented it to a funding committee and he got funded 100 percent. The newspaper there did a story about him and it showed a picture of him sitting on a bench with his mother, who was his dispatcher, and he hired his father as well. … There’s another business I’ll never forget. I had a client who opened a staffing agency, Essential Staffing Services. She got a lot of people jobs, a lot of them in manufacturing – 60 people right away and then I got an email that 180 more were hired. The impact to that community was huge.

PBN: How did the businesses do after you helped them get started?
STEWART: I maintained relationships with them. I’d check in on them. If I had a business that didn’t pay their loan to the funder, I would go check on them to see what was going on. I would help them so they could keep their doors open. … My clients had my cellphone number.

PBN: You’ve said you developed partnerships in your work in North Carolina. What type of partnerships did you develop?
STEWART: The Small Business Center where I worked was hosted by the community college and the funding came from the state of North Carolina. There are 58 small-business centers in North Carolina assigned to community colleges and the SBDC is assigned to universities – there were 18 of those. The SBDC works with businesses that are already started, so the Small Business Center does a lot of the groundwork. We had partnerships with the Department of Revenue. So if I had a client who was in tax trouble, I would assist them with their taxes.
I worked with local mayors and many of them didn’t have economic-development offices. So they would call me, and I would be their economic-development arm.

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PBN: You mentioned that you lost your brother to suicide. Certainly that tragedy affected your life – do you think it influenced your work?
STEWART: I lost my twin brother to suicide. He was a Marine stationed in Cherry Point, N.C. He had been deployed, and I think he just couldn’t deal with the consequences of being a Marine and making the decisions he made as a Marine. His suicide changed how I viewed things. I was 24. Prior to that, I wanted to go to law school and be a corporate litigator. I wanted to do mergers and acquisitions and things like that. … I became more involved with people. I started caring more about people. •

INTERVIEW
Mark A. Stewart
POSITION: State director of Rhode Island Small Business Development Center
BACKGROUND: Mark Stewart is from Erie, Pa. He worked as an independent business consultant for more than 20 years, advising businesses in Ohio, New York, Delaware and New Jersey. His most recent position was as director of the Small Business Center at Halifax Community College in North Carolina. He assumed his post in Rhode Island on June 23.
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Edinboro University, 2001; MBA from Eastern University, 2004; master’s degree in human resource development from Villanova University, 2008.
FIRST JOB: Cleaning a stadium in Erie, Pa., when he was 13 years old.
RESIDENCE: North Providence
AGE: 49

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