Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Real help for entrepreneurs: It’s in the (COSE conference) bag

The thing about conferences is that, so often, all you hear while you’re there is people grousing about the same old problems and repeating whatever has become the latest conventional wisdom about solving them. It’s pretty rare to come away with a lot of useful ideas and strategies.

But when the COSE 2008 Small Business Conference ended yesterday, I found myself with a bagful of  practical tactics that I have already started trying out and a good number of contacts I know I can call on for needed services or just some additional advice.  I’ve got step-by-step notes on how to market my business more effectively online through e-mail, organic search optimization and timely posts on news-release sites. I’ve also learned a bit about analytics and what they should be able to tell me about how my site is working – or isn’t – and why.

And I listened to other people’s experiences and discovered that their perspectives reinforced many of my own instinctive beliefs about how to establish my business. So now I feel less afraid to stick to my concept, plan and intuition.

That sure beats a load of refrigerator magnets, brochures and a few more slight acquaintances. 

The two-day annual convention opened Wednesday with a keynote speech by Michael Symon, the star restaurateur of Cleveland known by the rest of the nation as America’s reigning Iron Chef. The business crowd ought to listen to people like Symon more often – it’s like stepping out on the playground and hearing the honest reactions of kids after listening to a week’s worth of press-office statements full of steely, upbeat spin from carefully scripted bureaucrats. 

The man’s an artist as irrepressibly natural as he is gifted and focused. He tells funny stories and laughs at them himself with a cartoon-Tigger giggle. He started his first restaurant, Lola, with $120,000 from a customer who believed in him. The people who took jobs with Symon then still work for him. And when he recently opened two new Cleveland eateries, he did it with only $80 to his name, having used up the remainder of an $800,000 bank loan paying his staff their wages during the nine months they were idled by delays on the reincarnated Lola. 

That’s class. That’s also creative nerve.  

Symon had two messages. They weren’t new, but from him, they were clearly true:

- Treat your employees and associates right, and they will reward you with loyalty and good treatment of your customers

- And start your business from a passion to change the world, because it’s that passion, and not a desire to be rich, that will carry you through everything you’ll have to endure to succeed. 

The two other convention speakers echoed those same lessons in their own ways. John Moore, the relentless master marketer of Starbucks and Whole Foods, urged professionalism and good customer-responsiveness (treat people right!), along with sharp focus (passion!) no matter how small or big your company. Debbi Fields, who founded Mrs. Fields Cookies, advised not accepting no (passion!) and making customers feel valued and special (treat people right!).

They’re all correct. Still,  inspiration goes only so far when you’re struggling with the day-to-day crises and dilemmas of birthing a business. Entrepreneurs need tools and those are exactly what the COSE conference offered its members: more than 50 seminars on practical matters ranging from communications and the latest regulatory changes affecting businesses to workers’ compensation and preventative health care for employees; dozens of exhibitors with services to offer and information to give away; and COSE’s own programs, from sector support groups to reduced-cost services to educational opportunities, not to mention the reassuring solidarity of shared problems and interests that comes from COSE’s membership of almost 17,000 companies.

Far from being a gigantic kvetch session, this conference actually helped.

Cleveland has a lot of problems. But excellent operational assistance and advocacy for the small-business sector isn’t one of them.