Entrepreneurs: An undercovered business story

By George Hohmann
Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail

Businesses with one to nine workers employ 12.8 million people nationwide and drive the economy in many regions, said Lisa Gibbs, executive business editor of The Miami Herald.

Gibbs and a panel discussed “Entrepreneurship – The Most Undercovered Business Story?” during the 2008 SABEW annual conference in Baltimore. Joining Gibbs were Spencer Ante, computers department editor at BusinessWeek and author of “The Birth of Venture Capital”; Joyce Rosenberg, Small Talk columnist at The Associated Press; and Mimi Whitefield, business enterprise editor at The Miami Herald.

Small businesses are especially important in south Florida because few large corporations are based there. “This is such an important audience for us; it’s at our peril that we ignore them,” Gibbs said.

Ante (right) said he uses four guideposts to help him determine which start-ups to write about:

-- “Management talent is the most important factor of success,” he said. “You need people who are nimble, who can change with the times.”
-- The level of innovation. “Is the product or service of the new company a breakthrough or is it just a better mousetrap? Does the product or service meet a real human need? Even better, is the product meeting an unmet need? The more unique and valuable a product or service is, the more likely it is to succeed.”
-- The company it keeps. “It’s hard to measure character but one way to get close is to analyze the investors, customers and business partners of a company,” Ante said. “If a top-name venture capital firm invested in the company, that’s the equivalent to a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”
-- “At some point, all companies have to make money,” Ante noted. “I always feel safer writing about a company that is break-even or better.”

“The bottom line for me is, if a company doesn’t score well on at least two factors, I probably won’t write about them,” he said.

Asked where to look for companies to write about, Ante suggested universities (“Google was a research project at Stanford”); venture capitalists (“That’s their job, to know what’s going on in the trenches”); other entrepreneurs (“They often invest in each other’s companies”); and blogs.

Rosenberg said she tries to write a business column that provides information small business owners want to know in a way that anybody would want to pick up and read. “I realize I’m serving two distinct audiences,” she said.

“There’s a great hunger among small business owners for information about issues they contend with on a daily basis, not unlike consumers who want to find information they can use and relate to,” she said. Rosenberg recommended attending networking sessions and writing about the issues that dominate those events.

“I just did a column on vacation policies,” she said. “A lot of companies don’t have a policy, and by early June everyone’s mad because they all want the same time off. It sounds simplistic but over the years I’ve kept running into the reality that a lot of people don’t know the nuts and bolts of running a small business.”

Whitefield said The Miami Herald hired an experienced journalist to cover small business, so the newspaper has been able to do some investigative reporting. One report that showed that a lot of federal money that was reportedly going to small businesses in Florida was actually going to subsidiaries of giant corporations. Another report exposed a consulting company’s questionable business practices.

One popular Herald feature was a monthly series, “a year in the life of a start-up.” Reporters followed the company through the permitting process, site selection and build-out. “We showed all of their warts throughout the process,” she said.

Whitefield said the Herald made another foray into the reality TV genre when it decided to make over a mobile veterinary clinic, from the van the clinic used to make house calls to the company’s business card. Local consultants provided the needed expertise, for free. The stories were written by a freelance writer. The project “was popular but time-consuming,” she said. The Herald has since scaled back and now offers to do makeovers of one aspect of a small business.

The Herald has sponsored an annual business plan contest for 10 years. The paper sponsors an awards luncheon in the Herald’s executive dining room. “There are no prizes other than you get a story about yourself in the paper,” Whitefield said. Even so, the Herald gets more contest applicants than a local university, which has a similar contest with a $20,000 prize.

Posted April 28, 2008