If you live in Los Angeles, or if you've at least spent some time there channel surfing from a hotel room, you've probably seen Nelson Davis' work. He's the creator and executive producer of Making It!, a half-hour program that profiles minority business owners in the Los Angeles area. The program's been broadcasting weekly on KTLA for nearly 20 years, since 1989, and in that time Nelson and his crew have profiled more than 1,000 entrepreneurs. That amounts to a lot of business wisdom from a lot of innovative individuals.
For small business owners, there's nothing like seeing yourself in the media. Not you, literally, but rather people like you. Whether it's a magazine article, a television program or a blog like this one, it's inspiring to hear others' success stories, motivational to hear their lessons learned and comforting to see proof that there are others like you out there, doing what you're doing. That's what Making It! is all about.
Roused by Nelson's program, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing him to find out what, exactly, he's learned in nearly two decades of telling small business stories. Here are the highlights from our Q&A:
Q: Why has Making It! survived for nearly 20 years? What's made it successful?
A: I think the evolution of the marketplace around us. I remember early meetings with sponsors and advertisers; I thought that small business and business development were issues that should get more media attention, because after all, you need a healthy small business community in order to have a healthy larger community.
I went to talk to a television station manager and he understood it very quickly; he could look out the window of his car while driving around and see that the demographics of Los Angeles were changing rapidly. Latinos, Asians and African Americans were bringing about major changes in the community.
But when I went to banks and marketing organizations, I found they weren't yet on the bandwagon when it came to noticing demographic changes in the greater community and wanting to work with small businesses. The banks at the time were all oriented toward serving large business. Their awareness of small business has grown over the years, however; now you can listen to radio and open up your magazines and see companies like HP and Staples making very clear and direct pitches to small business owners.
Q: When you developed the program, what was so attractive to you about minority business?
A: Well, first of all, whether it's woman-owned, minority-owned or otherwise, business doesn't really give a crap about gender or race; it only knows good business and bad business. But in the realm of minority-owned business, it was sort of an undiscovered community in two ways. First, unless you were in minority neighborhoods on a regular basis, you might not see minority business owners. That included bankers and so forth, who are the sources for money for business growth. Second, people had presumptions that minority business owners were the simplest Mom-and-Pop operations — a market, a barbershop, somebody making tortillas by hand, somebody distributing Chinese foods to grocery stores.
What happened, though, was like any business community, smart operators in the minority business community began to grow. And in this almost two-decade period we've found sophisticated, hungry, ambitious, knowledgeable, smart business owners who took something very small and grew it into something big.
I'll give you a real-life example: Helen and Marty Shih, the first story from Making It! They were a brother-sister team. He came here to go to school from Taiwan; she was already here. She persuaded him to divert some of his tuition money into starting a flower shop in downtown Los Angeles. They were running a flower business from two locations when we met them. Marty's a pretty smart guy; his language skills were limited but his brain power was working at high wattage, and he saw that companies wanted to market their products to Chinese-speaking constituents. He came up with a thing called the 777 Club, which had an outreach phone bank that made coupon offers and mailings to Asian-speaking businesspeople and consumers. Now, flash forward all these years; they now have a large building east of Los Angeles and 75 to 100 people doing outreach on behalf of major corporations. Now their company probably grosses $400 or $500 million a year; they sold the flower business a long time ago.
Q: What keeps you motivated to keep doing this show?
A: The reason for doing our show is that, for other business owners, it's inspirational. Business owners tell me time and time again that they never tire of hearing about somebody else's business because they find it uplifting and educational for themselves. As a small business owner myself, and a voracious reader of small business development magazines and books, I can still watch our shows — even though we've done more than 1,000 stories — simply because small business stories are as individual as fingerprints. They're never exactly the same, but they're always inspirational.
Q: So, you've profiled 1,000 entrepreneurs over the years. What have you learned from them?
A: Three things. The first thing is to develop a business idea that is in sync with your passions in this life. You need to do something that you love doing because it's going to make considerable demands on you, your emotions, your finances, your family life. It better be something you're crazy about because it will at times make you crazy.
No. 2 is that there's never any substitute for writing down goals and plans. In the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th hour of any given day, you might be a little bleary. Having written plans in the form of goals with deadlines becomes your working document that brings you back to reality, brings you back to the dream and brings you back to your next action step. Planning is important; if your goal is to gross $100,000 per month, you have to write the subtext of that and decide how the hell you're going to accomplish that.
No. 3 is in the recruitment process. You can't do everything yourself; you have to find, recruit, motivate and be able to retain able people. Most of us in the small business world can't afford to pay the salaries and benefits that the corporate world does, so you have to develop your marketing position not only among customers, but also among employees. Finding good people is key.
Q: You've obviously learned a lot from the folks you've profiled. What would you, in turn, teach them?
The smartest piece of business advice I ever had was from a real estate developer who was a landlord. He said to me, "Nelson, learn to love your problems because that's the only thing you're guaranteed to have every day."
To learn more about Nelson Davis and Making It!, or to watch clips from the show, visit www.makingittv.com.
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