A one-sided balancing act
Recently my wife and I drove from Fort Smith to Bentonville to sit in the audience of a G60 event—a more localized, lower-stakes version of Shark Tank.
G60 is an event organized with the purpose of bringing entrepreneurs together and providing them with an opportunity to present their ideas in the form of a 60-second or less elevator pitch to a crowd of peers, potential investors, and the public. It was a great event having the additional benefit of being held at 21c Museum Hotel. I was blown away by the level of community support that showed up at this event to support these entrepreneurs, some of whom were as young as 11 years old.
My enjoyment of this event was interrupted by the unfortunate realization that Fort Smith isn’t investing in something like this. But why? Why does our area not seem to express the same interest in offering a high level of commitment to our small businesses and entrepreneurs as other regions in our state seem to be doing? And I thought about that question as I drove back to Fort Smith.
It’s not a lack of economic development effort; it’s a lack of diversified economic development effort. Fort Smith is not bad at economic development. Just look most noticeably at Chaffee Crossing and all of the great additions that we’ve been fortunate to add there over the recent years. Look to the recent announcement that Phoenix Investors is going to purchase the old Whirlpool complex. We have economic development happening. The issue is that our economic development is heavily one-sided: It is so recruitment-focused that we end up ignoring or under-serving the existing business population. We do not provide the same level of attention or resources to our own homegrown businesses as we seem to extend to those companies that we’ve brought in.
That unfortunately has been the double-edged sword of Fort Smith’s economic development strategies. While it’s true our region has a lot to offer, and I am certainly not suggesting that we should stop working to recruit new companies to complement it, it is equally and painfully true that we do not have a system in place that provides that same level of attention, commitment, and support to the development of our own homegrown businesses. While it is not my intention to deny the positive effects gained when recruiting new industry to our region, I cannot help but simultaneously be alarmed by the underwhelming effort and support that we seem to provide to our own small businesses and entrepreneurs to help them thrive.
It is time that Fort Smith invests in its own growth by developing a system that supports entrepreneurs and small businesses to the level necessary for the creation of a healthy and growing small business economy. The amount of commitment, resources, time, and focus that our region invests into recruiting new business is magnificent, but at the very least it should be mirrored by the same level of commitment being afforded to our own businesses and entrepreneurs: Organizations started by people who pay taxes here, that raise their families here, that went to school here, who send their kids to school here, that go to church here, who are stakeholders in our communities; the entrepreneurs that have a vested interest in our region should not receive less support or assistance than those companies that we are working so hard to bring in.
Creating an environment of successful, well-equipped small businesses and entrepreneurs doesn’t happen by chance. It is very much the result of intentional, deliberate effort. And when more than 60 percent of new jobs created in the U.S. are being created by small businesses it is irresponsible to not provide those businesses in our region with an adequate level of support; it will inevitably be counter-productive to our region’s growth or at best a long term break-even practice that will continue to work only as a negative balancing act to our positive recruiting efforts.