This episode looks at a subject that is likely to come up with young journalists: interviewing the owners of small businesses. Co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard discuss the importance of interviewing small business owners, highlighting the significant role their businesses play in the U.S. economy. With 23 million small businesses and 22 million self-employed individuals collectively creating two-thirds of jobs since the 1970s, there is a high chance you will talk to these people often as they make up the bulk of your local business community. Maynard and Remillard discuss the challenges of these interviews and how to build a network of connections to make future interviews easier.
Transcript
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Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Thinking like a business reporter, even when you’re not one. Welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. We’re based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Micki Maynard, Director of the Reynolds Center, and with me is my co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a Cronkite school alum and a reporter and anchor with KTAR News in Phoenix. Hi Mark!
Remillard: Hi Micki.
Maynard: Today we bring you. Series 1, Episode 8: Talking to the owners of small companies
Remillard: That’s right. Last week we talked about interviewing CEOs, but in this episode, we’ll talk about something, it’s a little more likely to happen in your day to day workings, and that’s interviewing the owners of small companies.
Maynard: I can pretty much guarantee that anybody who covers money will eventually be interviewing an owner of a small business. And it’s much more glamorous to cover big companies, but I think, especially in your first jobs, you’re going to be sent out to cover someone who’s like an individual owner of a company, or someone who owns a chain of companies. So let me give you some super interesting information from the Small Business Administration. There are 23 million small businesses in the United States, and there’s another 22 million people who identify themselves as self-employed, which means that they’re running their own businesses, but without any employees. The interesting thing to me was that these people, these small businesses, have provided two out of every three jobs that have been created in the United States since the 1970s and that’s not including franchise owners.
Remillard: Well, let’s get into that. What can you tell us about, let’s go over franchises first,
Maynard: Right. So franchises are when you purchase the opportunity to represent a company in your area. So you might buy McDonald’s. You might buy a yogurt store. You might be the person that runs the Chipotle in your town. There are 8 million people in this country working for franchise operations, and about 600,000 of those stores that you see out there are individually owned. So when you put all these numbers together, basically about half of the American economy is directly related to small businesses.
Remillard: So it’s certainly something that’s really important, that you know how to deal with it if you’re going to be covering small businesses or franchises. So your editor hands you an assignment, says, “Go talk to the owner of this business.” What are some of the first things you should do?
Maynard: Well, as we’ve been saying throughout this podcast, go do your homework. You want to do a Google search about this person, and I would also recommend looking them up on LinkedIn or on Facebook. Now, what’s been a very interesting development lately is that a number of companies don’t have individual web pages. It drives me a little crazy, because I’m always looking for hours and location and all that. I know Mark is nodding.
Remillard: It drives you crazy when you can’t find it.
Maynard: Yeah. And so they’ll say, just look at like, you’ll find them on Yelp, which is a restaurant review and company review website. And then it’ll just say, you know, go to their Facebook page. But it’s, this is cheap. It’s cheap. It’s free, basically. So why not? So you have to find their Facebook page, and you’re gonna be in the position of liking their Facebook page. And doesn’t mean that you’ve doesn’t mean that you like them. It just means you want the information. If you really hit the wall, do some digging around in your city or county records, because you might want to see what kind of facts you might be able to find about this business. So if it’s a restaurant, want to go to the restaurant violations, which I read myself here that the couple of the publications locally run them, and it kind of horrifies me what’s going on in the restaurants I go to. You want to go on Yelp, but, you know, Yelp is not considered as reliable, because a lot of people go on there because they’ve been asked to do so by the restaurant or the business, and they give you five stars, or they’re mad because, you know, they didn’t get the free anniversary dessert. So they give you one star. And another place you might do is look them up and see if they’re a member of your local chamber of commerce. So you want to do homework before you go off and talk to them.
Remillard: Are there any other things that you should look to figure out before you go?
Maynard: Well, I would try to figure out how regularly this person has been interviewed, because it’s going to be pretty easy if you find a ton of stories or clips about them, or if you can find radio reports or clips from TV. You want to read the stories and listen to the broadcast reports, because that’ll give you an idea for how well they deal with the media. So I have a really good friend in Chicago, Tony Antelas, who is the owner of Simitas Pueblo, which is a shop that started in a Latino area of Chicago, making these traditional sandwiches from Pueblo Mexico called simitas. They’re delicious. Tony just opened a second franchise in the west loop area Fulton Market in Chicago. And Tony is such a great guy, so friendly, and he’ll talk to you on Twitter, and he only has these two stores, but it’s like he’s the king of Chicago restaurants. So when you’re interviewing Tony, if you’re going to go interview him, you got to know that everybody’s talked to Tony. But even if everybody’s talked to Tony, you’ve got to try to find something new to talk to Tony about.
Remillard: Yeah, I think it’s important that you know what’s been covered on this business. Solely for the sake that you one can arm yourself with some of the past and the information, but at the same time, and it’s really stinks when it happens, but sometimes it’ll take the wind out of your sails. You find this business, you’re like, “Wait, there’s a company that does that. I’ve never, I did not know that was even a business that’s like, who, who does that for a living? That’s incredible.” And you’re like, “That’s a great story, like, somebody beat me by that, by like, six months.”
Maynard: Well, and I just heard about a company that’s a potato shop. So they make french fries, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, five different kinds of flavors of potatoes. And I’m like, “This is the coolest thing ever.” And then I looked it up, and it’s a franchise, you know. So that’s not a bad thing, but it’s not unique, you know. And you better not, like convince people that it’s unique, because if there’s 30 of them across the country, all you got was the one for your town.
Remillard: Last week, when we talked about interviewing those big name CEOs, a lot of times they deal with reporters on a daily basis. They got PR teams. How do you deal with some of these small businesses that they’ve never talked to a reporter before?
Maynard: Right. So it’s getting less and less common that they’ve never talked to a reporter, but you might end up being the first reporter that they ever talked to. And this is very true, especially when you’re dealing with immigrant entrepreneurs. So one of the things that’s been happening is that the U.S. government has been awarding visas to people from outside the United States who will come to the U.S. specifically to start a busines, and it’s very possible that they were never interviewed back in their home country, and or they’ve never been interviewed by an American reporter, so you might be the first one that happens to them. So in that case, you’re going to set the tone for every interview that they do after you. You kind of have to think of yourself as an ambassador for journalism, and you need to make sure that they understand what a reporter needs to do in order to get a good story. The story might not be favorable in their eyes, but it will be fair, and you want to assure them of that.
Remillard: Right and simple housekeeping, if they asked to see the story ahead of time?
Maynard: No, this is journalism. This is not PR.
Remillard: Of course, small business owners could be suspicious of you, though, especially if you they aren’t experienced. How do you make them more comfortable?
Maynard: Right. So you have to show that you’ve educated yourself about their company or their industry, and as you’re researching them and talking to them, you want to keep an ear open for any particularly interesting story. So many small businesses are family owned, and there’s usually a wonderful tale about how the business got started. If it’s an immigrant entrepreneur, you want to find out when their ancestors came to the United States and under what circumstances. So for people who are watching Downtown Abbey, there’s a new character in season five, called Atticus Aldrich, and it turns out that his family is Jewish, and they left Russia in 1870 because there were pogroms. In other words, Jews were being wiped out and basically told to leave the country. So they went to England and somehow went into trade. Lord Cinderbie got a title, and they they came to the point where they all were now nobility, but only one generation, or two generations before they’ve been driven out of Russia. So, you know, that’s a dramatic example. It could be very much the same for someone that you interview. Or maybe they’re the first people in their family who ever left their home country and came to the United States. So you would definitely want to ask, what did your family do before it went into this line of business?
Remillard: What are some other ways to break the ice?
Maynard: Well, I think the most important thing is to find out somebody who knows them. So all the small business owners in a particular industry usually know each other. And actually, that’s how I met Tony in Chicago, because another friend of mine in the food industry there, Barry Sorkin, who’s a co-owner of smoked barbecue, said, “Oh, you should go try Tony sandwiches.” And so when I went in, I said, “Hello, Tony. I’m a friend of Barry Sorkin.” “Oh, well, any friend of Barry Sorkins is a friend of mine.” And he came over and sat down and we did a nice interview and all that. So you definitely want to find someone who can recommend you, sort of be a reference for you. And then another thing is, if they’re like a dry cleaner, there’s definitely a Dry Cleaners Association. There’s an association for everything.
Remillard: It’s amazing.
Maynard: And so you might call up the head of the Dry Cleaning Association in your town and say, “Hey, do you know Joe the dry cleaner?” And when you go into the interview, you can say, “Hey, Joe, Dave the dry cleaner says Hello.” So I really do believe in networking. I mean, I know that’s the title for it. I just call it knowing people. But I think the more network you can build up, the better it is when you go to interview new people.
Remillard: Yeah, if you’re looking for something and you need to find that association, just type in whatever your industry is and put “association” at the end of it.
Maynard: Right. Bake Potato Association.
Remillard: I found this, I was working on a story just recently about business between Canada and Arizona. And lo and behold, there’s a Canada Arizona Business Council, and all they do is work to increase business between Arizona and Canada, there you go. And right from there, I got about three stories because I was able to talk to the head of that and it’s amazing what you can find out from these councils. And that’s their job is to know these industries and know all the players, and you know. And so they are so well adept at knowing who to talk to, who to get to. It’s amazing what you can find.
Maynard: Absolutely.
Remillard: Sometimes they’re completely new into town and they’re not a part of association. What do you do?
Maynard: Well, that’s also interesting, because they might be introducing a new product or a new style that hasn’t been seen in your town before. So maybe they’re the first to open a juice bar. Or they’re the first to offer locally brewed beard. You know, craft craft beer is not that new, but it’s new in a lot of places. There are a lot of, especially small towns in this country that have never had craft beer before. And holy cow when craft beer comes to your town. It’s sort of like when the weather channel comes to your town. You know it’s a big story. So you want to do a little bit of research to find out where else their product is offered. So for example, Phoenix just got its first Korean fried chicken restaurant, and Korean fried chicken has been a big deal in New York and LA for a long time, but it didn’t get to Phoenix for whatever reason. So you might ask them, “Did you have Korean fried chicken somewhere else and decide to bring it here?” And that is literally how stuff happens in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is where I’m from. The owner of a hardware store, went to visit, I think, a child out in Portland, Oregon, and saw that there were food truck courts in Portland, came back to Ann Arbor and started a business called Marks Carts, which is a collection of food carts. And it was a hit from the moment it opened. And he literally got the idea from going to Portland and bringing it back to Ann Arbor. So that’s always a wonderful part of the story.
Remillard: So what are some of the problems that you can run into when you’re doing interviews with small businesses? My experience has been that they can take these things very, very personally, because this is their livelihood, and sometimes it’s their family’s livelihood, and it’s not like writing a story about McDonald’s, you know, or another big company. This is their life. So you have to be aware of that. And it does not hurt at all to call back and check some facts when you’re written the story. They will probably appreciate it. And I’m not saying review the story. I’m just saying, you know, is it true that your grandfather came from Russia in 1870 you know, they’ll probably be happy that you did that. Another thing to keep in mind is that your story will probably affect their business. So if it’s positive, you know, they might see a boom in business. If it’s negative, it might keep customers from going in, and every small business worries about losing business. So there’s a great story about my friend Kevin Pang at the Chicago Tribune, who writes about cheaper places to eat. He’s a celebrity in Chinatown because he’s written about many of the businesses, and they’re a little too small for the big restaurant critic to go there, so Kevin goes and finds them. I mean, I’ve actually seen people come out of the kitchen to shake his hand, and his story is up on the wall. So again, it’s all personal, good and bad.
Remillard: Yeah, there’s definitely a visual impact when you write about small businesses, because they’re in your town, they’re local, and you can see the change that your story brought. Good and bad.
Maynard: Exactly.
Remillard: That’s it for this edition of How to Cover Money. Next time, we’ll be talking about sports and money, which is something that doesn’t get covered all that often.
Maynard: Support for our podcast comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Visit our website at businessjournalism.org, you can find us on Twitter @bizjournalism. That’s at B I Z journalism. You can also look us up on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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