Bronzeville initiatives leave small businesses behind

Top-earning businesses with revenues between $100,000 and $1 million can look forward to a refocused Chicago Urban League to assist them, but small business owners lack advising mentors and struggle to connect with new residents after losing many displaced customers.

For 22 years, Dorothy Scott’s popcorn and candy shop, located in the Lake Meadows strip mall at 35th and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, has served treats and hot dogs to local residents. Scott’s business perseveres despite losing many customers displaced from the Ida B. Wells and Robert Taylor Homes housing projects.

Courting new residents has been difficult. Scott wonders how organizations like chambers of commerce and the Chicago Urban League can help local business owners drum up new customers and use inventive ways to advertise.

“We have a lot of high-rises that are middle-income and they don’t patronize in our area,” Scott said. “They seem to do their shopping maybe in an enclosed mall or in an area where they work.”

Scott said over the last two years, a collective of business owners on 35th Street have used several ways to attract new residents. Under its previous director, the Bronzeville Chamber of Commerce used marketing efforts like trolleys to ferry visitors from the McCormick Convention Center to the 35th Street business strip. The defunct 35th Street Merchants Association tried giveaways and even a Mayor’s Ball to introduce local businesses to their new neighbors.

Success was limited. Chamber directors moved on.

“It was for the middle income as well as the lower income [residents],” Scott said. “They did as much as they possibly could as far as trying to bring the people out.

“They just didn’t come.”

Entrepreneurs like Lawrence Griffith must develop an idea into a business plan investors will bankroll. While chambers of commerce help local businesses by providing strength in numbers, intensive assistance programs for startups are rare.

Griffith, a Hyde Park resident in his mid-30s and creator and CEO of SampleSaint, is carefully selecting investors. A former Proctor & Gamble product and planning manager, Griffith, won the 2005 Miller Brewing Urban Entrepreneur contest with his cell phone coupon technology company. Finding business mentors has been difficult.

Entrepreneurial advice programs by many nonprofit organizations are self-serving, Griffith said. He only found mentors to offer him strategic advice and refine his business plan by using company contacts.

“To date, there is not in existence in the city of Chicago or in the state of Illinois, a not-for-profit organization that actually helps the entrepreneur understand the equity investment game, understand what actual documentation they need, i.e. a proper financial model, a proper executive summary, a functioning business plan and potentially even a private placement memorandum,” Griffith said.

“No one talks to you about that. No one educates you on that. But more importantly, even those organizations that talk to you about business plan writing, you might if you are lucky, get a template. You might get a one-day seminar if you are lucky, but that’s about all you are going to get.”

Griffith said typically, the communities such organizations purport to help have no knowledge of business plan writing. “To find someone to write a business plan for you or consult with you could be between $10,000 and $50,000. These organizations in essence are dysfunctional.”

Cheryle Jackson, president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League, said the organization cannot be all things to all people. ProjectNext is created to support and help take successful black businesses to the next level, Jackson said.

“Other community resources do exist to advise and help small businesses grow and Urban League partners do so,” Jackson said.

Despite their challenges Scott and Lawrence Griffith embrace mentoring neighborhood students and other business owners.

For Scott, former residents remain loyal, visiting from south and southwestern neighborhoods like Dalton, Bolingbrook, Riverdale, Blue Island and Chicago Heights. Visits are like reunions and Scott sees former residents who worked in her shop as teenagers. Some went on to become lawyers, pathologists and business owners. Scott said she could have retired long ago, but enjoys mentoring the neighborhood students she employs.

“Most of the employees that I had were all the 16 to 17-year-olds that were in the lower incomes who I tried to help get through high school and college,” Scott said.

“I gave as much as I could to the community in helping some of these kids get an idea that maybe they could be an entrepreneur one day,” Scott said.

Griffith said organizations that only offer basic information to entrepreneurs are not enough. “This is a new stage of technology, of new and innovative ideas.

“And there are a lot of us out there who have these ideas, but there is no one out there to help us shape and form those ideas so that we can better understand how to move forward.”