The Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce (GVCC) has formed a Small Business Advisory Council to better communicate the needs of Southwest Washington’s small business community with regional economic development leaders, local jurisdictions and elected officials.
The council, led by Darcy Altizer, GVCC vice president of member services, held its inaugural meeting in Vancouver earlier this month.
“We see this as a way to advise the chamber on the environment for small business in Southwest Washington,” said Altizer. “Our hope is to work with other economic development entities – in addition to our small businesses – in fostering a stronger environment for entrepreneurship, business growth and retention.”
Max Ault, business development manager at the Columbia River Economic Development Council (CREDC), said the new entity sets a good precedent for stronger collaboration and communication between the two organizations, “especially in parsing out where we can collaborate better and assist each other in that overlap between what the focus of the chamber is versus what the focus of the CREDC is.
“We can facilitate that handoff back and forth a lot more smoothly,” he added. “I know in the past it has been sort of disjointed and broken, and I think that having the direct connection now with this new unit will be really helpful.”
The council will also focus on educating local businesses about resources that are available to them.
“One of the gaps that we recognized,” explained Council Chair Ben Hoskins, “is there are a number of organizations locally that provide services to small businesses – whether it’s S.C.O.R.E. or the Mentor Analysis Program at Washington State University Vancouver – and a lot of our members don’t know what’s out there.”
As the local franchise owner of 1-800-GOT-JUNK and You Move Me, Hoskins said he experienced the difficulty of trying to sort out all of the appropriate resources that are available to small business owners.
“I moved up here and started a business almost seven years ago,” he recalled. “At the time, just trying to figure out what to do legally to have a business that’s based in Southwest Washington but that operates a lot in Oregon [was confusing]. I definitely had a lot of questions. I went to S.C.O.R.E. at the time and they were able to connect me, but I think there were a lot of other resources I wasn’t aware of that, in retrospect, probably would have been really useful.”
Though the council is in its infancy and still forming an overall direction, Hoskins said the issues and projects it takes on will be driven by the needs of chamber members.
“It’s based on a model where if we have a particular need and we identify members that would like to work on that, we’ll try to move the ball on some of those projects,” he said. “The idea comes from a chamber policy affairs subcommittee that worked successfully with the county on a lot of regulatory issues for small businesses.”
Speaking of the county, Hoskins said the newly-formed advisory council can help strengthen the often strained relationship between county leadership and the local economic development community.
“A lot our members are business owners and we’re interested in getting things done,” he said. “It’s one of those things where even if people don’t agree on everything, there are areas that we do agree on, so we might as well work on them.”
