It is a long-held economic tenet that small businesses drive economic growth and job creation. While small businesses do employ most Americans, their effect on job growth is much more nuanced. Meaningfully growing jobs is far more dependent on encouraging businesses of all sizes to grow than it is on the sheer number of new small businesses we are able to create.
This is a particularly important distinction in Maine. Thanks to decades of deliberate effort, Maine has many great companies and is becoming one of the best places in the country to start a business. But now those businesses need to grow. Today, Maine businesses stay too small to create significant numbers of new jobs or boost wages. Maine beats the national average for firms with just one to four employees by 5 percent, but it has 25 percent fewer businesses of 50 to 99 employees, and 53 percent fewer firms with more than 1,000 employees.
Maine has both the talent and resources to support high-growth companies, yet even firms with significant potential stay too small to become significant job engines for their community. This compelling dichotomy motivated the Blackstone Charitable Foundation to launch a $3 million initiative to spark Maine’s high-potential businesses. We saw Maine’s challenge as one that could benefit from both our capital and expertise in helping businesses succeed and grow.
Local leaders deserve tremendous credit for the sophisticated support for entrepreneurs and innovators already in place. What is missing, particularly in such a rural state, is the linkage and coordination that would naturally aide entrepreneurs in places such as Silicon Valley, the Boston Corridor or the Research Triangle. We do not have to turn Portland into Palo Alto to reach that goal. Like all states, Maine can learn from robust growth regions about how to nurture its own young business, attract a steady flow of talented young people and brand itself as a “destination” for the deal-making community.
To help accomplish all this, we chose to partner with a few of the organizations already making a difference in Maine’s innovation and entrepreneurship community: the University of Maine, Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development and Maine Technology Institute.
In our first year of operation, the initiative Blackstone Accelerates Growth has begun connecting leaders of high-growth potential companies with sources of intellectual and financial capital. We are offering training opportunities tailored to individual business needs and access to a supportive virtual community of innovators and entrepreneurs. We also are focusing on developing a talent pool of next generation entrepreneurs.
In this short amount of time, Blackstone Accelerates Growth has already made connections that have sparked growth opportunities. We helped a company connect to an angel investor. We doubled the number of businesses benefiting from mentorship services and supported the expansion of online entrepreneurship training into rural Maine. We placed student interns at some of Maine’s most innovative companies, two of whom received job offers as a result of their experience.
Our reach expanded further this fall with the official opening of Blackstone Accelerates Growth “innovation hubs” in Bangor and Portland — both focused on identifying and supporting businesses with the greatest potential for growth. These hubs allow for coordinated and direct referrals to a wide range of experts and resources including “office hours” for entrepreneurs to hone business plans, networking events, training programs, as well as access to a talented pool of interns.
In its first three years, Blackstone Accelerates Growth intends to assist 250 companies — offering each a tailored suite of support services to help them take their businesses to the next level. In addition, more than 400 college students will receive training in innovation and entrepreneurship. Those are ambitious goals, but we cannot create thousands of new jobs in Maine unless hundreds of companies begin to grow.
Amy Stursberg is executive director of the Blackstone Charitable Foundation. John Voltz is executive directive director of Blackstone Accelerates Growth.
In this political and economic climate, why put in the effort to maximize your small business just so it can be taxed and regulated into submission by the state and federal governments or demonized by the anti-capitalist left-wingers as those “evil” bloodsuckers bringing down society? Maine will never see true dynamic growth or jobs until liberals learn simple economics. Yeah, as if THAT will ever happen!
Though this article is written in an unbiased, non-political way, and it simply gives accolades to Maine’s worker’s and employers, you have decided that it is absolute insanity for someone to invest here. You are saying “why put the effort to maximize your small business”? , you can ask many millionaires that same question. Why would they invest with an attitude like yours? Why would they want to deal with people like you, who blame one set of people (the democrats) even though, the new legislature (meaning prior to that, both were controlled by republicans) hasn’t voted……….once?
“Maine will never see true dynamic growth or jobs……”……and the reason for that is liberal economics? HELLO? The US had 8 years of Jr. you cannot convince me that his “war” didn’t impact our economy. he had a compromising congress; Maine now has a governor that refuses to cooperate, with anyone other than his “other self”, a legislature that refused to do anything about their own party’s representative (the governor), and now, it’s all about “anti-capitalist”? How is it that corporations can deliberately close doors, not conform to law (they’d rather pay the penatly), and say, why tax the rich? They are the money maker’s right?……NOT!
Given that it was the economics of de-regulation and liberalized business policies that crashed the global financial system, I wouldn’t be so quick to claim any special knowledge about how to run an economy. The policies of “beggar thy neighbor” havent played out so well over the past 40 or so years.
Without demand for goods and services businesses won’t expand or hire. Macroeconomics 101. These Blackstone folks are looking for investment opportunities, not a bad thing. But it has been the wrongheaded economic notions of trickle down that has created the vast inequality we see now and lack of demand from the largest segment of our economy that generates demand, the middle class. The bottom 80 percent own nearly 70 percent of debt for a number of reasons. Under the burden of that debt the middle class labors for their creditors, in many cases the big banks that crashed the global financial system.
Without a strong middle class businesses in Maine will not be able to grow except in those few areas where demand exists. Blackstone is essentially prospecting for those few companies that might provide a good return on investment. That is what venture capitalists do and how they make their lightly taxed capital gains. You can almost read this “article” as an advertisement. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing from the standpoint of helping small businesses be successful. Just recognize it for what it is: an opportunity to find lightly taxed capital gains that under current tax policy skew the playing field against people that don’t have capital gains in their income mix. This is how Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
Let me add, an organization with a distinct venture capitalist purpose dispensing advice and entrepenurial support while calling itself a “charitable” organization seems to me to be stretching the definition of “charity” just a wee bit… Education as charity is an interesting way of looking at it, I suppose.
Seems to me if Ann and John want publicity for their “charity” they ought to pay for advertising it.
Why all the whining. Obama wants to raise taxes on small businesses..