South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Change Papers discusses the significance of North Carolina’s decision to appoint a commissioner and assistant commissioner of small business.

It’s not that we lack public and private agencies and organizations that can help.  We have folks in the SBTDC, who generally work with fast-growing or technology-driven businesses,  and the people at the 58 Small Business Centers on community college campuses, who generally work with smaller, community-based small businesses. We have the existing business employees at the state Department of Commerce, theirBusiness ServiCenter, and the electronic portal Business Link NC (BLNC). We have the NC Rural Center-spawned Business Resource Alliance. We have the process consultants from the Industrial Extension Service, some of our business or management schools, as well as the private sector. SBCN. We have the Institute for Minority Economic Development. We have regional entrepreneurial support organizations, like the Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED) and some of the NC Rural Center’s pilot projects, the entrepreneurial outreach efforts of the UNC system’s 11 entrepreneurship centers and other centers at private colleges like Elon University. And depending on what part of the state you are in, the local office of theCooperative Extension Service may well be able to provide some consulting for your small business.
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What we have lacked with all these agencies and organizations is coordination. And lack of coordination means inefficiency – rather than becoming great at core competencies, organizations are tempted to claim they can “do it all.” The Small Business Commissioner approach gives the state, for the first time, some folks with responsibility and permission to herd cats, to figure out what is and isn’t getting done, and to determine how to make it happen.