Small Business Pulling More Weight Down Home

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Statewide small business conferences have recently rung up an impressive series of victories on the local level:

* In Texas, the state legislature created a new Office of Small Business within the Texas Industrial Commission. The legislature also liberalized and expanded the use of Industrial Revenue Bonds for small business.

* The governor of Maine signed a bill in June to phase out the inheritance tax in favor of a less onerous estate tax.

* In Nebraska, the state legislature passed a law exempting new industry and existing businesses expanding into new industries, from initial sales tax on equipment.

"The message this year is that the state level is the place to work," says David Tomlinson, chairman of the National Unity Council, a group set up to monitor 60 recommendations voted on at the White House Conference on Small Business in January 1980. Since the conference, 25 states have held their own small business conferences, and another 10 have scheduled them. Utah held its second statewide conference in May and plans to make it an annual event.

"At the White House Conference we anticipated that the federal effort would slacken, and that the states would have to pick it up," says Bill Nourse, one of the Tennessee conference organizers. "That's in fact what has happened. It's been a major development." Attendance at the statewide meetings has averaged about 200, although North Carolina's conference last January drew 600, and Texas's 13 regional forums and final statewide session had close to 1,700 participants. In Maine, small businessmen donated private planes to fly organizers up to the remote northern part of the state. An accounting firm in one southern city contributed professional advice that would have cost regular clients $75,000. And in Tennessee, local chambers of commerce provided space, mailing lists, and other services.

The message delivered by many conferences was the need for increased communication among businessmen. Spurred by the state conference in January, industrial buyer/supplier conferences in North Carolina recently brought together purchasing agents from 40 big electronics companies and 200 suppliers from small businesses. The two groups spent a day together, and small manufacturers walked away with the possibility of new markets in a high-growth industry. North Carolina's governor has also lobbied with major bank presidents for more assistance in making expansion credit and venture capital readily available for small companies.

The conferences have had their share of disappointments. State legislatures have rejected bills ranging from a recommendation in Maine to liberalize the state's investment tax credit to a proposal in Oregon that would have revised that state's workmen's compensation rates.

Some state conferences ran into problems even before their opening speeches. Recession-plagued Iowa canceled a three-day conference after officials realized the length of the conference and the $125 fee for participants had discouraged attendance. In Texas, "cooperation on the part of the local chambers of commerce was lousy," says Morris Womack, state chairman of the Governor's Advisory Commission on Small Business. "A lot of them acted like small children who want to protect their turf. They look at us as potential rivals."

Still other states haven't even gotten around to organizing a conference. Former SBA regional advocate Russell Davis says Mississippi hasn't scheduled one yet because of "factors that affect small businessmen everywhere -- they're too busy doing other things."

Even the promoters of successful conferences warn about too much optimism. "None of us can realistically think, in the first term of the general assembly following a small business conference, that we can conquer the world," says Tom Broughton, director of the business assistance division of North Carolina's Commerce Department. "But we're planting the seeds. Over the years there will be more and more legislation designed for the benefit of small business."

And the crucial task of the conferences is to teach small businessmen to lobby, says William Gould, president of National Graphics Inc. in St. Louis: "Small business people talking to other small business people is like talking to the wind. It's interesting but nothing happens. But if you talk to a legislator, something may actually come of it."