State To Increase Outreach For Input From Businesses | Officials plan to hit the road for feedback
Photo/Eileen Kennedy
Andre Porter, executive director of the state's Office of Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
Photo/Eileen Kennedy
Andre Porter, executive director of the state's Office of Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
State officials say Gov. Deval Patrick's administration knows how important small businesses are to the state's economy, and they will soon be crisscrossing the state to hear what is on the minds of the people running them.
Under Utilized
At a recent conference at the Middlesex Savings Bank operations center in Westborough, put on by the year-old Massachusetts Small Business Technical Assistance Collaborative, several speakers pointed out that 87 percent of Massachusetts companies were small businesses and employ 28 percent of the workforce. The collaborative consists of providers of one-on-one business counseling.
"We know that only 1 percent of the small businesses in the state access technical assistance. We need to find ways to reach that other 99 percent," said Andre Porter, executive director of the state's Office of Small Business and Entrepreneurship.
Porter said he and Greg Bialecki, undersecretary of business development in the state's Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, will be visiting chambers of commerce, other business organizations, banks and other groups to find out what is important to small businesses and get the word out about technical assistance grants.
Bialecki said that the Patrick administration's first priority is growing the state's economy by 100,000 jobs and it knows that the best way to do so is to help small businesses.
Ninety-six percent of the businesses in Massachusetts have fewer than 100 employees,
Porter said, and small businesses have shown a net growth in the state, while larger businesses have decreased slightly.
Porter said his office will soon release a public schedule of meetings small businesses will be welcome to attend.
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