Announcing the recent launch of Stamford”™s Small Business Portal, Mayor David R. Martin was joined by state and national legislators and by a host of business community members to discuss the business support site and the challenges facing the community.
“We in the city of Stamford don”™t give loans out,” Martin said at the Jan. 29 roundtable in the Ferguson Library in Stamford. “We don”™t train small businesses. But I am trying to knock out some of that difficulty of starting up a business in Stamford and that”™s what this is about.
“One of the few things we are experts at in government is coming up with bureaucracy,” he said. “Small businesses have to maneuver through a labyrinth of regulations and it just kills that energy.”
Enter the Stamford Small Business Portal, a recently launched city website dedicated to providing support for small business owners to navigate the startup process and for current owners to access resources normally hidden in what Martin acknowledged are sometimes difficult-to-approach government services.
“If we were a corporation trying to make money, the level of service we have as a government to help people get their various licenses and permits and whatnot ”” we would go out of business pretty fast,” he said.
The portal was created in the summer of 2015 under the direction of Thomas Madden, director economic development for Stamford, and a team of six student interns.
According to intern and UConn student Stephen Strosser, the site is a first for any municipality in the state to provide a full complement of resources, from the permits and licenses required to start a business to marketing and financial resources for growing and maintaining it.
“This is a step-by-step instruction manual for how you can start your business,” Strosser said.
Multiple tiers of government were represented via the participation of U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and state Rep.Caroline Simmons, D-Stamford, at the roundtable with Martin.
“If you think about all the jobs that have been created in this country since the bottom of the recession, 90 percent of them have been created in small businesses,” Murphy said.
Both Murphy and Martin emphasized that among all the talk of General Electric”™s departure from Fairfield, job gains have been overshadowed for companies like Synchrony Financial and the thousands of jobs produced by small business.
“They are on track for adding 400 jobs,” Martin said of Synchrony. “I think we are doing fine. We have more financial services jobs in Stamford today than just before the recession started.”
Getting ahead of the stream of local and national bad press on the county was a concern raised by members of the small business community in tandem with how Stamford is marketing itself to attract and promote business.
“We chop this state up into tiny little districts,” Martin said. “The ability for these municipalities to cooperate together is extremely limited and as a result we all under invest. So the city of Stamford does nothing in marketing. I wish I had more money, but even if I did I wouldn”™t do enough because I can”™t afford to market for the benefit of Greenwich and Norwalk and everybody else.”
He added that there is entrenched bias in the established media sources, but despite these headwinds, Martin was optimistic for Stamford”™s future as a leader in Connecticut, where, he said, it currently generates significantly more economic activity than any other city in the state.
“I think Stamford is exceeding phenomenally well against a structural organization that is very much bias against it,” he said. “We don”™t have it all worked out, there are lots of places where we need to improve the way we do things, not just to save money, but to make it easier for people to succeed ”” who have the right to succeed.”
