Name: Julie M. Scofield
Position: Executive director of the Smaller Business Association of New England (SBANE) since August 1993.
Background: Before becoming executive director, Scofield served as associate director of SBANE for two years, and before that was its director of education for 15 years.
Education: BA in English from the University of Michigan in 1969
Age: 52
Family: Single
Residence: Essex, Massachusetts
JULIE SCOFIELD, executive director of SBANE: ‘Our mission is to improve the environment in which all small businesses operate.’
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PBN: SBANE was founded in 1938?
That’s correct.
Where was it founded?
Right here in Boston. The organization began as a New England organization, but its roots were in downtown Boston. It grew out of the war effort. Just about every other part of America had been mobilized to support the country in the war effort, except small business, which was the last to organize. It was called Small War Plants, it was typically all manufacturers, certainly all male. And they popped up all over the country. SBANE is the only one that is still in continuous operation.
It became a national organization?
We’ve become a national organization as recently as 1986, but SBANE began through that effort for the war. Small companies came together and found out that they had a lot in common, they had a lot to learn from each other. It was a chance to compare notes about problems, a very powerful thing. While it came together for a different purpose it stayed together because they gained so much from each other. It was many years later it started to develop partnerships with other small business groups which came in and started to pop up around the country. Now we have sister organizations in Michigan, in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Colorado, not all, but almost all parts of the country.
In New England there are 1,300 member companies. How many in Rhode Island?
Over 100 companies that are members of SBANE, about 120.
How do you define a smaller business?
We use the same rule that the U.S. Small Business Administration uses, which are fewer than 500 employees, a big number. Using that number, 99.7 percent of all businesses in America are considered small.
What is the critical reason that SBANE exists today?
Running a small company is the loneliest job there is. You are completely isolated, with no one to talk to in your business. The world of a small business owner is characterized by limited resources. One of the best ways to address limited resources is to talk to other people and find out how other people are adjusting to those limited resources. And certainly to use the buying power of an organization like SBANE to lower your cost of doing business, either by pooled purchasing or by grass roots advocacy to lower the cost of doing business from an environmental point of view, regulatory, compliance, taxation, favorable policy.
I presume SBANE operates on varying levels – as a buying group, lobbying group, and certainly as an education group.
And partly as peer to peer resources. You can come to me and say I need somebody who does intellectual property, I need somebody who does mergers and acquisitions, I need somebody who can solve an HR question, I need a great accountant, somebody who can train my sales people. Whatever the problem may be, a small business owner needs periodically to ask for that type of expertise. It is a very efficient way of identifying the expertise that you need periodically.
How big a staff does SBANE have?
Eight people.
Does that include people involved in lobbying efforts?
It’s left to the membership. We have staff people who help guide that process and we have a committee structure that helps support that process. But we are grass roots lobbyists at the state and federal level.
I look at the numbers, 1,300 in New England, a little over a hundred companies in Rhode Island. Those aren’t very large numbers compared to the number of small businesses that exist.
Very true. Lots of opportunity to reach out and bring our services to many more, and we really do. There are lots more to reach. One part of the market we don’t reach at all and we don’t even go after is the retail segment. The make-up of SBANE is manufacturers, wholesale distributors, technology based businesses and the service companies that support them. We understand those markets and we have a very full plate meeting the diversity that exists within those. Retail is a segment of the market that we don’t know much about. It’s very different.
What are the benefits of being a member of SBANE?
I believe you want to join because it is a fitness club for your business. You as a small business owner need to get outside the four walls of your office to sharpen your mind and get into the flow of ideas in the marketplace, or you get stale.
Can’t I do that through my Chamber of Commerce?
You can, but you’re not going to be in the same milieu. The Chamber of Commerce has a higher concentration of retail member. As a B to B company it is more likely to want to be involved with other small business owners. Most chambers of commerce, not all, but most chambers of commerce are dominated by their largest employers. They are not dedicated to the issues that affect small companies. The chamber is in fact dedicated to making every member of that chamber a profit, get business from membership. Our mission is to improve the environment in which all small businesses operate. If you’re a prospect, I’m not trying to say that when you join SBANE you’re going to get business. I don’t make that promise at all. I can’t. That’s not what we’re organized to do. But what I can say is that with your voice we will be more successful in creating an environment that is favorable to small business formation, access to capital, to the kinds of things that are going to help your business prosper.
What are the key issues facing small businesses today?
Number one would be the shortage of skilled workers.
We complain about that in Rhode Island, but it’s not just a local issue.
Definitely not. It’s a national problem. Times are very, very good and people are motivated by doing everything they can to make hay while the sun shines. But that’s very difficult to do when you’re a one- armed paper hanger, to be able to meet the demand of your existing customers, take advantage of the customers that are knocking on your door and do it with a shortage of skilled labor. It’s a big problem. It’s an obstacle to growth.
What is SBANE doing to address the problem?
We’ve run a number of education programs to bring people who are very creative about this process together. We have not done anything that I think is the solution to the problem. We’re expecting to weigh in on some hot issues that are going to come down the road on immigration policy, because that is one of the only ways you are going to bring any significant number of skilled workers into key markets. Certainly there are some training funds that are available that are going to address the skill gap you have in some workers. But the issue is a tough one. You have major demographic shifts that are working against the solution to the problem that are predicted to get worse.
Be a little more specific.
The demographic of the age group that small businesses typically hire are anywhere from 20 to 45, where we all hire, all businesses hire, is a declining percentage of the workforce. The percentage of the workforce increasing is the older workforce, over 55. When you have 2.9 percent unemployment and you see the base that you’re hiring shrinking, that’s a powerful force that is working against you.
What are some of the other important issues?
The accelerating rate of change. Figuring our where e-business, e-commerce is going and what you need to do, how aggressively to move your company to take advantage or change, keeping up with the expectations of your particular customers is a puzzle, it’s all new. It’s not cheap to invest in that technology. To move aggressively enough, but not get change too quickly for your customers. You need to know where your customers are on the technology growth so you don’t fall behind their expectations, while your competitors stay even or move ahead. But there’s no – especially in the world of B to B, in the industrial world, the model of what e-commerce looks like is evolving. There isn’t anything out there you can copy, bring that model into your business. You really need to be ready to move and that’s expensive. Most of our members are trying to cope with e-business in their spare time, which they don’t have much of.
Are there many technology companies that are members of SBANE?
We don’t go after the dot com world as members. We don’t go after businesses whose business plans have going public in the next one to five years. A very small percentage of our target will ever go public. How you define a technology company today is today even a no-tech business has a pretty significant degree of technology and the lines are getting blurrier. And depending upon whom you sell to, what the expectations of the people you sell to for the adoption of your technology can be pretty aggressive. We have a lot of our members that make highly precisioned products. They make plastics, machine parts or gauges, or they have a lot of technology and they are selling to Fortune 500 companies, which means you need to be operating in a very sophisticated fashion if you want to keep them as your customers.
How would you rate the state of small business today in what has been a very good economy?
They are very optimistic and doing extremely well. Our members tell us, just repeatedly, that their expectation of the next six months is very, very high. They expect demand for their products and services going up and they expect to be, despite the work shortages, they expect to be adding to the workforce. They’re extraordinarily, consistently, optimistic.
We hear all these projections of a slowing economy; are you seeing that at all?
We haven’t yet. In the last six months, even less is when we heard some consistent predictions of a diminution of the ardor of the market. But we’re not feeling, our members haven’t reported it yet. We are waiting to see it reflected in the numbers they tell us about optimism, but we haven’t seen it yet. This is years. I think that technology has done just an extraordinary job of wringing a lot of those missed projections out of the economy. Businesses are much better at forecasting demands, at keeping track of say inventory levels throughout the system. So we don’t have as much aberrance of chance.
Business has always been cyclical, but I wonder, if as you say, that technology has cut through some of that, allowing people to predict better.
I think that’s part of what makes business able to not over-react to those things. So there’s not a wrench in the system, you don’t have to have a 20 percent reduction in force to scale back production, you just let attrition do some of that for you, or redirect, redeploy your workforce into a different concentration.
Are business owners smarter today?
Yes, I think they are. The ones that survive have to be. That’s another demand in the workforce. You have to be smarter and hirer smarter, because there’s a lot more technology all throughout business. So the lowest person in any company has to be better educated. You have to be trained. Years ago the idea was you go to school, you might get a degree, and there was a remedial connotation to going back to school. That’s all gone. Now people recognize they have to continuously go back and get exposed to current thinking and a whole host of different practices and management tools and your people need to be learning how to be better managers, how to be using technology that’s changing so fast there are ongoing training requirements. You do need to be smarter to be in business.
Is there more in-house training going on?
Not in small businesses. We are the outsource training department for many small companies.
What kind of training-education programs do you offer?
Lots of sales training. The sales force always needs a refresher course, a battery charge, another fresher approach, and sales people are getting more sophisticated. Sales and marketing, small business owners are always interested in anything that will increase revenue. Fundamentals of finance, cash flow management, credits, collections, those kinds of building block issues. A lot of things about e-business, a lot of a programming around Internet strategies, how to use e-business strategies and work that into your overall company strategy going forward. General management, leadership kinds of programs, the job of the CEO. We do ongoing program called the school for managers, which teaches primary, managerial supervisory functions to that whole group of employees who are probably very good at what they do but have no formal training. Were given additional responsibilities because they were good at the last responsibilities they were given because they have common sense. But no one ever taught them. They never had an hour’s worth of formal training on how to manage people, how to manage their time, when to use different kinds of leadership skills to be more effective in their jobs, and they blossom incredibly after these four half-day programs.
What’s SBANE’s relationship with the SBA?
There’s no formal tie, but we have long, long-term ties in the marketplace, working cooperatively on a number of programs today over the years. Funding of the SBA is among the top 10 legislative issues for small business owners. We’re big supporters of the SBA.
