Making Stone Soup: Building Healthy Small Businesses Without Breaking Your Staff or Your Budget

Learn cost effective methods used across the country to support and enable small business and employment growth.

Government officials and leaders are facing intense pressure to grow local jobs and local businesses, but conventional recruitment and incentive strategies take too much money and too much staff time for far too few results. Innovative government leaders are looking for ways to refocus their economic development efforts on small businesses and entrepreneurs, but they hit two problems: First, small business and entrepreneur success factors differ extensively from those of bigger businesses. Second, there are far too many small businesses and entrepreneurs to give everyone the hands-on staff attention that these departments are usually set up to give. This topic will help you get inside the mind of a small business owner and understand what they need to succeed in an entirely new way. We will then examine strategies being used by large and small communities across the U.S. to help small businesses succeed - by making a stone soup in partnership with them. We will look at strategies for catalyzing a robust ecosystem that supports and enables sustainable small business and employment growth - and at a fraction of the cost of the old methods.