The entrepreneur’s voice in the state Capitol
California’s small firms may be key to helping the state weather a potential economic downturn, says Marty Keller, the state’s small-business advocate.
That makes his job as chief spokesman for the state’s estimated 3.3 million small firms especially vital in 2008.
“As we enter the period of economic turbulence, small businesses’ success is going to be really important because we want to grow the economy and go into smoother waters,” Keller says.
To help create that success, he plans to focus on procurement, regulatory flexibility and cost, disaster preparedness and economic development, particularly in clean energy and high tech.
Since taking over the previously vacant job in May, Keller, 56, has hired a deputy, Michael Gonzalez, set up a website, started a blog and dug into projects mandated by recent legislation. He’s also set up an informal small-business advisory group, which is open to anyone who is interested.
The Sacramento resident, a former executive director of Automotive Repair Coalition of California, a trade group, was appointed to his $99,000-a-year post by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Legislature revitalized the small-business advocate role because it considers small firms to be the backbone of California’s economy. The state’s businesses produced about $1.7 trillion in goods and services in 2006.
You have a small staff -- just one person. Is that enough?
It’s deceptive. The key to success in this office, until it’s funded like the [Small Business Administration’s] Office of Advocacy at the federal level, is to leverage the resources of other departments. Because this office is located within the governor’s official office, we have a lot more staff available to us for any special thing we need to do, so I have a lot of other resources, whether it’s the legal office or an agency secretary.
You’re required by law to oversee a study that tallies the cost of state regulations on small businesses. What have you found?
We have let a contract to do a study, which we anticipate by the end of this year, on how much it costs small businesses to comply with California regulations, a result of a bill passed two years ago.
When policymakers are considering new regulations, they ought to be able to quantify the cost in dollars and cents, but add that to the preexisting cost of complying with federal regulations. Our study will mirror the federal study that has been conducted over the past 12 years.
Until the study is completed, we are doing all this by anecdote. We don’t have any database that tells us how much it costs if you are running a dry cleaning establishment, a funeral parlor. No one knows how much you are already paying. This will establish a baseline.
No state has done this kind of study?
California is once again pioneering this. I know the [SBA’s] Office of Advocacy is hoping other states will follow California.
Despite success in fiscal 2007, the state almost never meets its goal to award 25% of its contracts to small businesses. What can you do about that?
I work with all the state agencies and their leadership to see what I can do, sitting here in the governor’s office, to remove obstacles to success. So I meet on a bimonthly basis with all the small-business advocates [for state agencies] to see who has practices that work and how we can share best practices.
I also listen to businesses to find out what they need, so the communication is two-way.
Long term, we want to build a culture of cooperation across state departments so that everyone is successful. That’s a challenge in government, which is historically structured in what we call silos, so we don’t have the culture yet to say I don’t respect my silo wall, because in order to be effective I have to have a lot more knowledge from outside.
The business world has learned that a little bit better.
California ranks near the bottom of the 2007 small-business survival index. How can you change that?
Regulatory flexibility. When the state is writing regulations, there are certain responsibilities state agencies have with respect to their analysis of the impact on small businesses. When a small business expresses to us a concern about the potential impact that a proposed regulation may have, we will contact that agency and make sure it is satisfactorily answering the concern.
In addition, we are looking at how we can make sure small businesses have an increasingly greater opportunity to comment on and participate in the regulatory process. The government regulatory process, whether at the federal level, state level or local level, is a relatively arcane and opaque process to most citizens.
One way we do that is on our Web page, www.sba.ca.gov. We list on the front page those state agencies that tend to do the most regulation that small business would be interested in. They can click on those and go right to the pages to discover what the agencies are up to. Each agency keeps its regulatory page up to date, by law.
The long-term strategy is to let folks know there is one place in state government they can go and link to information they need.
You have economic development on your agenda for 2008. Why?
It’s probably the most important of all. It’s huge. Many people are working on this, but our responsibility in this office is to keep the interest of small business at that table.
What are you doing specifically?
We are in a fact-finding mode: What’s out there? What do you need?
I’ve gone to several clean-tech conferences, making contact and asking questions a lot.
Obviously there are many other avenues championing these issues, whether solar or new energy sources. So, again, our angle is, is there anything the state should be doing or, in the alternative, should stop doing, to encourage small-business participation?
How will you measure your success at the end of the year?
Hmm. We don’t do a lot of quantifiable stuff. I will put that question to my advisory group [of small-business owners] when we meet later this month and say, ‘What do you think?’ because, really, they are the ones who should tell whether we are successful. I work for them.
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
California Small-Business Advocate
Name: Marty Keller
Appointed: May 2007
Staff: 1
Mission: Serve as the voice of small businesses in state government, ensure their participation in economic policy development, connect them to government resources and reduce unnecessary regulatory obstacles. The advocate also serves as an ombudsman for small firms that have problems with any of the state’s 90 agencies. And he works with the 200 or so agency-level small-business advocates to share best practices in boosting government contract opportunities for small firms.
Background: Keller was executive director of the business trade group Automotive Repair Coalition of California from 2002 to May. Before that, he worked for the state as chief of the Bureau of Automotive Repair in the Department of Consumer Affairs. He also has been a consultant, president of auto inspection service Greenslip Inc. and a sales executive in the financial printing industry.
Contact: (916) 445-9874
or marty.keller@opr.ca.gov
Source: Times research
