Networking Takes New Forms, Shaped by Region’s Needs
Don’t like networking?
Forget about the old style where you slap on a name tag, juggle a glass of wine and fumble your business cards to strangers. Small-business owners in Southern California are taking networking to a more sophisticated level.
Prompted by the region’s sprawl, diversity and lack of an old-line business establishment, networking groups here are taking new forms and trying new things. And their rapid growth in the last two years shows they are increasingly crucial to small-business success, if not survival.
Here is what’s going on, including ways to network electronically:
* Invitation-only groups. These small, private groups ask 15 to 30 successful entrepreneurs to join, each typically from a different industry. Events can include dinners with prearranged seating so that members are forced to talk to one another, daylong seminars with consultants, and brainstorming sessions on members’ problems.
Peter Cowen, a consultant who belongs to the Professional Networking Group, said the group helped improve his Santa Monica business, Strateplan. Founded in Los Angeles, PNG has 25 groups here with about 30 people each, plus branches in Orange County, Phoenix and San Francisco. Before joining, Cowen said he prepared business plans for small firms. Now, after three years in PNG, he is more entrepreneurial, helping businesses grow as an investing partner.
“For the right people who know how to network, it can open opportunities for you,” Cowen said. “I’ve generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of business from this group.”
A similar organization, the Executive Committee (TEC), has been around since 1957, but grew by 20% last year to 5,500 members internationally. Those who belong are small-business owners in noncompeting industries whose firms generate from $5 million to $50 million annually, said Joe Phelps, owner of Phelps Group, a Santa Monica marketing agency and a TEC member. TEC members don’t usually do business with one another, but use each other as expert business consultants, confidants, counselors and mentors, he said.
“Before I joined, I thought I was pretty good at seeing both sides of the coin,” Phelps said. “But I threw out some issues and saw there were many other points of view.”
* Trade associations. Thanks to five years of effort by the Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, new trade groups were convened in Los Angeles in the biomedical, food processing, environmental technology and new media industries. These new groups are taking their place alongside traditional trade organizations that provide trade-specific information to small businesses. Some of the new groups are still at the fledgling stage, but others like the new media group are doubling their size monthly.
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Jim Jonassen of the Larkin Group in Santa Monica, head of the Los Angeles New Media Roundtable, or Lawnmower, said the rapid pace of technology change means owners of tiny companies need to get out of their cubicles, take a look at the competition and contact others who can help them grow their business.
Lawnmower has about 600 members, but its events draw more than 1,000, such as their December gathering at the El Rey Theater in the Miracle Mile, which prompted sponsorships from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft and coverage in Forbes magazine.
“This is not the ugly networking model: a bunch of people loosely put together--disenfranchised folks--with commercial people circling around them trying to sell them something,” Jonassen said. “It’s a community of interests.”
This year the group plans to expand its Web site by creating online schools and access for companies to do online, real-time searches for interns.
* Open networking groups. Increasingly, networking groups are being created that don’t require formal membership and allow drop-in visitors to participate.
“We’re not exclusive. We can have 10 attorneys or 10 doctors at the same meeting,” said Barry Allen, founder of Consumer Business Network, a 5-year-old group started in Orange County.
Allen said that he began his group as an alternative to more formal associations with rules and regulations or the requirement to bring a business lead or be fined. His group was unique at the time, but since then similar groups have begun in Southern California and some are taking root in other locales, he said.
* Internetworking. Paralleling the booming networking scene is a growing reliance on the Internet and computers as a local, small-business resource. The federal government and national corporations have had small-business Web sites online for the last couple of years.
This year more local resources will be going online:
* The Regional Business Assistance Network, a project of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., in March will launch an online service that will let small-business owners type in their needs and get a list of resources in their geographical area. Data from more than 500 service providers--chambers of commerce, small-business assistance programs, nontraditional lenders and others--will be included.
* Software should be out by April that will enable small businesses to create business information maps using Dun & Bradstreet data. For example, a firm could punch in its customer list to see a geographical display of where its customers live, find nearby suppliers or get demographic information about the best places to establish new stores or offices. The new CDs will be pricey, at more than $10,000, but the makers envision business associations and nonprofit agencies as the buyers.
* The Minority Business Opportunity Committee, started by Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s Office of Economic Development, went online last July with a listing of government and private contracting opportunities for women and minority-owned businesses. An estimated 2,000 businesses now search the Web site monthly, looking for places to submit bids, said committee director Diane Castano-Sallee.
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This year MBOC plans to link directly to the Web sites of its 90 corporate sponsors so that small businesses will be able to communicate directly and even file applications online.
For businesses without Internet access, Castano-Sallee said computer terminals in public libraries are available or MBOC will fax lists of contracting jobs to businesses that call.
But she adds, “If a small business wants to succeed, it’s got to get online eventually.”
For business information, contact:
Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. (213) 622-4300 or Regional Business Assistance Network(800) 7LA-FACT, https://www.laedc.org/
New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership, (213) 623-4223, https://www.nlamp.com/
Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance Corp. (LARTA), (213) 743-4150, https://www.calaccess.org
TEC (the Executive Committee), Candidate Services, (800) 274-2367.
Consumer Business Network, (714) 969-9790, https://www.cbni.org
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Times staff writer Vicki Torres can be reached at (213) 237-6553 or at vicki.torres@latimes.com.
