Frequent readers of this column could easily infer that my favorite stories to cover are those involving bungling bureaucrats and struggling elected officials. And they’d be right about my Long Way Home efforts.
But for community news stories, I truly love talking with small business owners along the shore and telling their stories with my keyboard. Despite my self-deprecating comments about being a corporate stooge, every company I’ve been employed in is considered a small business by bungling bureaucrats in the US Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Administration.
For purposes such as the “equitable” distribution of government contracts, the federal government considers a contractor with 500 or fewer workers to be a small business. My definition considers a small business as one where the owner(s) are employed in the business, know their employees by name, and contribute in one way or another to a local service organization or two. They have local and regional competitors, and that’s a good thing for a business’s health. They also have a persistent anxiety about big businesses stepping on their toes.
My mentor and longtime business partner, Dan Conway, was an avid golfer. Despite a “baseball” swing (if you’ve seen one, you know), he achieved a scratch handicap from time to time and was not a stranger to the podium when his teams won tournaments. In addition to teaching me how to treat the people we worked with, he’d ask me at least once a week, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
He wasn’t impressed with my golf skills, a game I’d played no more than once or twice a year. On the rare occasions when we played together, he’d swear never to play golf with me again. Time heals all things, and he’d eventually invite me out to the links, and by the end of the round he’d tell me “never again.”
One day, I asked him if a new set of clubs to replace the ones I’d inherited from my late father-in-law would help my game. “It’s not the clubs, it’s you,” he said. Another time, when we were talking about the play of professional golfers, he made a statement that I will never forget. “They play a totally different game than we do.”
Golf is, much to my chagrin, a rewarding game and a great metaphor for life. I took it up in earnest after moving to the desert at the turn of this century. Playing alone one day at Angel Park, I caught up to two golfers on hole number five, and they asked me to join them for the remainder of the round. After the obligatory handshakes, they informed me they were both players in a southern Nevada semi-pro golf circuit. Over the next thirteen holes, I found out what Mr. Conway meant about them playing a different game than us.
Whether it’s tennis, chess, Scrabble, or any other field of endeavor, including business, the masters play the game in a far different way from we of the small-sized variety. Take a look at how big corporate players permanently altered the labor market during World War II.
During the war, the government, concerned about the kind of inflation caused by wartime payroll growth driven by the war’s labor shortage, instituted a wage freeze in 1942. To prevent labor unrest, the National War Labor Board ruled in 1943 that “fringe benefits”—specifically health insurance, life insurance, pensions, and paid vacations—did not count as direct wages. These perks were exempt from the freeze. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of Americans enrolled in employer-sponsored health insurance skyrocketed from roughly 21 million to over 142 million. As time moved on, big business played a different game from small business. They used these benefits, maybe unwittingly, to put small businesses at a competitive disadvantage in finding and retaining workers.
Most of the government regulations in the ensuing years, many of which raised costs disproportionately for small businesses, were enacted with the support of big business. Something that everyone in the small-business communities should bristle against. The anti-competitive nature is evident.
One hardly hears about entrepreneurship these days. Innovation is harder than it has ever been. There is a lesson, though. If you love the game of business, remember that big businesses, whether suppliers or customers, play a different game than the rest of us.
I find reason for hope since almost 100,000 new businesses were started in Minnesota last year. Statistically, half of all new businesses close before reaching their fifth anniversary. The ones that survive the initial trial by fire are stable and growing, offering jobs and valuable assets to their owners.
Big business plays a different game, but the soul of our economy still lives in the shops and offices where the owners know your name. Here’s to the risk-takers keeping small businesses alive.
