Powering up small businesses Nonprofit broadens its reach in counseling more fledgling firms
Anita Brattina knew her direct marketing agency needed help to survive, but she couldn’t summon the courage to tell anyone.
It was 1992 and the firm she had started seven years earlier in a bedroom had moved to office space in Monroeville. Despite having a real business address, she was still stashing receipts in a Giant Eagle bag, which she handed over to her accountant at tax time.
All of her credit cards were maxed out, she was worried about meeting payroll for her seven part-time employees, and the business had yet to turn a profit.
Even when Barb Moore, a friend from college days, urged Ms. Brattina to allow her company to serve as a test case for PowerLink — a new advisory service Ms. Moore co-founded to assist female entrepreneurs — Ms. Brattina kept putting her off.
“I was trying to maintain the appearance that I was doing really well, but I was actually struggling and my husband didn’t even know how much I was struggling,” Ms. Brattina said.
Ms. Brattina finally agreed to meet with a PowerLink advisory board. For the first meeting, she transcribed the numbers from her grocery bag receipts onto accounting ledger paper, and crammed extra chairs into her office so the group of seven seasoned business professionals could fit.
Over the course of the year, the board met with her quarterly and each adviser also held one-on-one sessions with Ms. Brattina.
Reflecting on the experience 25 years later, she’s convinced the input probably saved her company.
“I was sitting in my gerbil wheel trying to figure out how to run a business and they said, ‘Here’s how you should approach the market,’ and ‘Here’s how to measure your financials.’ And they gave me confidence and the ability to bid on bigger jobs.”
Within two years, her firm’s sales jumped from $260,000 to $1 million. When the company reached $6 million in sales and over 100 employees, Ms. Brattina sold it.
She then launched three more businesses.
Expanding to reach new entrepreneurs
Since that first year when it organized boards for Ms. Brattina and one other fledgling firm, PowerLink has experienced its own growth spurt and engaged with more than 300 companies.
This year, the Forest Hills-based nonprofit expects to create boards for about 100 companies in Western Pennsylvania. The firms it assists typically have a minimum of $100,000 to $250,000 in annual sales and aim to grow to $1 million.
In 1997, it began licensing its concept and now operates in 34 other cities besides Pittsburgh. In addition to its on-going advisory boards, PowerLink offers one-time business workshops and think tanks where a panel of experienced executives offers advice to small business owners in front of an audience.
Recently, the nonprofit broadened its mission to work with male-owned businesses and companies in low-income communities that lack resources.
That outreach is largely a result of PowerLink’s partnership with Mansmann Foundation, a nonprofit that counsels startups in neighborhoods undergoing revitalization including Hazelwood, Garfield, Wilkinsburg, the Hill District, Carnegie, Penn Hills and New Kensington.
Mansmann is providing funds to PowerLink to cover some overhead costs. PowerLink also generates revenues from client fees that average $250 per month. All of the PowerLink board advisers are volunteers, so fees are used for staff and programming.
Before collaborating with Mansmann, PowerLink had exclusive licensing deals with Seton Hill University and the University of Pittsburgh, which covered some of its expenses. It also received some foundation funds.
Since 2015, however, it has operated independently so that it can recruit a more diverse mix of clients from a network of 30 sources in the region that work with startups, including community development agencies and small business centers at local universities.
By widening its scope, PowerLink hopes to build a healthy roster of clients so that it can sustain itself through program fees by the end of 2018, said Ms. Brattina. Its budget is $250,000 annually.
No side entrances, no attorneys
PowerLink’s approach to assembling a team of outsiders with different skill sets such as accounting and marketing helps early-stage entrepreneurs because they are typically immersed in day-to-day operations, said Rebecca Harris, director for the Center for Women's Entrepreneurship at Chatham University.
Entrepreneurs tend to “work in their businesses, not on them,” she said.
The idea for PowerLink grew out of Ms. Moore’s frustration as a female business owner when she began running her family’s trucking business after college in the 1980s.
Back then, she recalled, she was frequently the only woman in the room when she showed up for meetings at the Duquesne Club, the private Downtown establishment where Pittsburgh’s power brokers have been making deals for more than a century. She recalls women having to enter the club through a side entrance.
“That was a problem and it was annoying,” said Ms. Moore.
After she met Ilana Diamond — then a management consultant for PriceWaterhouse and now managing director of business accelerator AlphaLab Gear in East Liberty — the two started commiserating about the lack of women running successful businesses and hatched PowerLink.
In 1992, there were 6.4 million women-owned businesses in the U.S. By last year, that number had almost doubled to 11.3 million, according to research by American Express Open.
“Men were doing so well because they had gone to business school and therefore they knew the banker, they went to school with the insurance guy and the guy who runs the advertising agency,” Ms. Moore said. “We thought, ‘What can we do to give women that access?’”
Ms. Diamond recruited willing mentors — both male and female — to sit on advisory boards. Ms. Moore went in search of women business owners who had potential to grow.
Much of the structure they developed in 1992 still forms the basis for PowerLink.
The business owner must produce financial statements by the first meeting and the board gathers at the company’s location to get an unvarnished view of the startup.
Each board must include another entrepreneur who has run a successful business. “They offer a reality check and I think that’s our secret sauce,” said Ms. Brattina who in 2015 returned to PowerLink as the organization’s chair and chief executive.
A couple things have changed over the years. The PowerLink boards now work with companies for two to three years instead of just 12 months; and lawyers no longer serve as advisers.
Attorneys on board were a mistake, said Ms. Moore. “When they opened their mouths, everyone else conceded and their advice was usually extremely cautionary and risk-adverse.”
Talking lactose-free ice cream
As some of the firms it helps to counsel with Mansmann begin to grow, they may also be tapped to participate in traditional PowerLink boards.
Leona’s Ice Cream in Wilkinsburg is the first company that will transition from a Mansmann peer-topeer advisory pod to PowerLink. Katie Heldstab, cofounder of Leona’s, expects her advisory group to convene this summer.
Leona’s, which was founded in 2013 and makes lactose-free ice cream sandwiches sold in specialty markets and at several local breweries, recently introduced pint-size containers of ice cream and wants to expand the pints distribution regionally and possibly nationwide.
Sales were about $200,000 last year and are on track to beat that this year by the third quarter, said Ms. Heldstab.
She hopes her PowerLink board will pass along “years of experience, red flags and cautionary tales.”
“This should allow us to grow in ways we’re not even quite sure of yet.”