The Political Odyssey Of Bill Nourse

How a mild-mannered hardware store proprietor joined a new breed of savvy, small business activists.

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The following is a list of things Bill Nourse is not: a business wizard, devastatingly handsome, a high-tech genius preppy hilariously funny, a brilliant intellectual, a good ol' boy, a political radical, rich.

On the other hand, in virtually everything he does, Nourse is where most of us would like to be -- somewhere on the high side of average. He and his wife run the family business, a moderately successful West Nashville hardware store. Their five kids all do well enough in school and earn most of their own tuition money. At 43, he is the businessman most businessmen would be happy to be. "He is," gushes a colleague, "the all-American small business guy. It warms your heart just to talk to him."

Nourse's eight-year-old Brookmeade Hardware & Supply Co. will gross $900,000 this year, 80% of it in sales to contractors and residential property management concerns. Poor location limits Brookmeade's retail volume, but Nourse has built his wholesale trade by becoming a one-stop shop for the maintenance managers of Nashville's apartment complexes.

Creative buying lets him price below much of his competition but still keep his margins healthy. Take the paint, for example. Brand-name paint prices include the manufacturer's national marketing and advertising costs. Brookmeade's wholesale accounts are interested in product performance, not label. So Nourse buys from a small independent paint-maker that can match the chemistry of the big-name companies and beat their price. And, because he is his paint supplier's largest buyer, Nourse can make demands. The supplier inventories Brookmeade's stock and ships virtually on demand. Brookmeade's private-label light bulbs also come from a small independent manufacturer.

Nourse has pushed the sale of bulbs and lightweight electrical parts to apartment complexes as far west as Little Rock, east to Jacksonville, and north into Illinois. He finds potential buyers in the Yellow Pages, mails a flier listing prices, and follows up with a telephone call. United Parcel Service makes the deliveries, usually within two days.

Next year Nourse expects Brookmeade sales to break $1 million. "If it weren't for this recession," he says, "we'd already be there."

There is something in Nourse, says a friend, that appeals to everyone who is in small business for the life-style rather than the money. "His strength," says another, "is in his typicality."

Thus no one is more surprised than Nourse himself that over the past three years he has become something more than the head of a growing family business -- and that his ambitions run even higher.

Now, besides running the store and raising kids, he commutes frequently between Nashville and Washington, D.C. He talks to senators and members of Congress, and, more important, he talks to their staff aides. He has met with Presidents and is no stranger around the governor's office. Newspaper reporters seek him out. He sells paint to customers who saw him interviewed on TV the night before. He is a key man in a senatorial reelection campaign. He is asked to speak around the country. And, like the President, Nourse has acquired his own kitchen cabinet of trusted advisers. "I'm not satisfied being a small businessman," says Nourse. "I'm not contributing to society at my highest potential."

What happened to Nourse -- his politicization -- has happened to other small businesspeople. Jimmy Carter was a businessman before he was a governor. Rep. Berkley Bedell (D-Iowa) is still better known in some circles as a merchandiser of fishing tackle (Berkley & Co.) than as a congressman. Those, however, were isolated conversions, part of no discernible pattern, while Nourse is part of a group, one among many who had their political eyes opened by their participation in the January 1980 White House Conference on Small Business.

Out of the nearly 2,000 delegates to that four-day Washington gathering -- and the more than 30,000 people who attended preliminary sessions in major cities around the country -- has come a crop of previously apolitical entrepreneurs and proprietors who, despite their predisposition to stubborn independence, got a bite of collective power and liked the taste.

To be elected a delegate to the January conference, an individual had to campaign at one of the scores of state and regional meetings before the main event. Successful candidates were usually those who had put together a coalition of supporters and who had developed an identifiable position on an issue.

With no previous experience and motivated only by an "urge to get involved," in his words, Nourse composed a position paper, got himself elected a delegate, and jumped into public life along with several thousand others with similar backgrounds and motives.

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