Work On the Business, and What Philadelphia Owes the People Doing It

Monday morning, a screen full of Philadelphia entrepreneurs, and a conversation I have been having in one form or another for most of my working life. I was there at the invitation of my friend Keith D. Ellison, who founded and runs the Entrepreneurship Center at the Urban League of Greater Philadelphia, and who has been doing this particular work long enough that it has stopped being remarkable to anybody except the people it has changed.

I want to write down what I said, because it is simple and I believe it, and then the part I did not say, because that is the part that has been bothering me since.

Stop working in it long enough to work on it

Here is the whole of my argument.

At some point you have to stop spending every waking hour working in your business and make time to work on the damn thing.

Know your numbers, and I mean actually know them, not have a feeling about them. Know your customer well enough to describe them to a stranger. Build systems that do not require you to personally hold everything together, because a business that only functions when you are standing in it is not a business, it is a job you cannot quit.

And fix something every week. One thing. One meaningful improvement a week is 52 improvements a year, and 52 improvements compound into a company that does not look anything like the one you started.

I know how that sounds coming from a guy who was at the restaurant at five in the morning yesterday and will be there at five tomorrow. I am a work in progress too. That is rather the point.

What the Center actually is

The Entrepreneurship Center is not a seminar series. It connects entrepreneurs to advisory services, coaching, technical assistance, training and access to capital, and it is staffed by people who do this every week rather than once a quarter: Keith as program director and founder, Marta Coles running day to day operations, Tahirah Robinson holding the administration together.

It also serves people the rest of the economy has quietly decided are too much trouble, including people who have experienced homelessness and people coming home from incarceration. I do not think that is a footnote. A business support program that only takes the easy candidates is a filter, not a ladder.

Why it works, which is mostly Keith

Some of this is who Keith is, and it is worth setting out because it explains why the room has the tone it has. There is a particular kind of quiet in a session run by somebody who has actually done the thing, and the entrepreneurs pick up on it faster than any of us do.

His own background runs through IBM, Procter and Gamble and Manor Care before he founded the Ellison Group in 2000. He was a consulting director at the Wharton Small Business Development Center. He still teaches management communication at Wharton. He published a magazine on cultural diversity for five years, from 1995 to 2000, and he was one of the authors of a book on how people actually succeed rather than how they say they did. His degrees are an MBA from Wharton and electrical engineering and mathematics from Carnegie Mellon.

So when he sits with a founder and works through their numbers, he is not performing empathy at them. He has run the systems, taught the communication, done the consulting and built the thing himself. That combination is rarer than it should be in this work, and you can feel it in how the entrepreneurs on that call talked to him.

Charity is the wrong frame

Now the part I have been chewing on.

Every conversation about small and diverse businesses in this city eventually drifts toward the language of help. Support. Assistance. Programs. All well meant, all subtly wrong, because every one of those words puts the business in the position of receiving something rather than earning it.

What was actually on that screen Monday was people building companies, creating jobs, taking real financial risk and trying to turn a belief into something that outlasts them. Nobody on that call wanted a favor. They wanted a shot at the same things every business needs.

Customers. Contracts. Capital. Connections. And access to the rooms where decisions get made.

Look at that list and notice how much of it is not charity at all. It is procurement. It is a purchase order. It is whether a hospital or a university or a city agency writes a contract to a firm in this city or to one somewhere else. Philadelphia has a whole apparatus aimed at exactly that question, and there is a city commerce department whose job includes it. The money is not hypothetical and it is not a grant. It is already being spent.

That is why I think the framing matters rather than being a matter of taste. If small business support is charity, it competes for a small pot against every other good cause and usually loses, every single year, on a schedule everybody in the room can predict. If it is procurement, it competes for a very large pot that is being spent anyway, and the argument stops being about whether the money exists and becomes about where it lands. Those are completely different fights, and only one of them is winnable.

What I would ask for

Three things, all boring, all achievable.

Pay small suppliers fast. Not in ninety days. A firm with eight people cannot bank a three month gap and will turn down work it could have done rather than risk the cash flow.

Unbundle. A contract too large for a small firm to bid on is a contract that has already chosen its winner, whatever the process says.

Publish what is coming. A forward pipeline tells a small business that a contract exists in time to prepare for it rather than two weeks before the deadline, which is the difference between a real opportunity and a formality.

None of that requires new money, new legislation or anybody’s permission. It requires deciding that the businesses already here are worth buying from.

Back to the one thing

To everybody who was on that call: keep building. Keep asking questions. Keep helping each other, because the person one year ahead of you knows something you need and will probably just tell you.

Pick one thing this week. Put it on the calendar. Get it done, and then pick another one.

And when you get your seat at the table, pull out another damn chair. That is how this grows.

Thank you, Keith, for inviting me back, and for continuing to do the work when the room is small and nobody is watching.