Newest IDA Staffer’s Focus: Making Microbusiness Work
To help Otsego County businesses succeed, all you have to do is ask what they need.
That’s the theory Dawn Rivers, the new office manager and director of the county IDA’s Susquehanna Regional Center for Jobs, is operating under. “It’s going to be important, going forward, to listen to people,” she said. “We will be much more successful in helping our economy thrive if we listen to what people want from their businesses rather than applying a theoretical perspective.”
The Center for Jobs is one of the initiatives now being developed by the IDA’s “single point of contact” economic-development effort, which recently set up shop on the fifth floor of 189 Main.
Rivers, a 2014 Hartwick summa cum laude graduate, returned to school after a long career publishing a micro-enterprise journal. In wanting to research more into small businesses, she concentrated her studies on anthropology more than economics. “Economics don’t explain micro-businesses,” she said.
A micro-business, she said, is one with fewer than five employees. Though the U.S. Small Business Administration defines a “small business” as less than 500 workers, in an area such as Otsego, such a business might have less than 100 employees.
Her paper, “Behavioral Responses to Tax Incentives Among Small Business Taxpayers” won Best Paper at Eastern Economic Association conference in Boston in March. “The judges said my anthropology background added texture to the paper,” she said. “It was about asking the subjects ‘why?’ instead of just applying theory.”
Micro-businesses don’t often subscribe to economic theory, she said, and are more often an expression of the business owner. “They are usually run by how people define themselves,” she said. “The decisions they make for their businesses are based on where they feel they fit in the community and the kind of life they want to lead.”
She cited an example of a pet photographer she interviewed for her paper. “She loved what she did and was happy to make a living doing it. She wasn’t interested in growing her business too big because then she’d have to stop doing what she loved and run the organization.”
But to grow a good economy, she said, the county needs a mix of micro, small and large businesses. “And the IDA wants to give them all the support they need,” she said.