Native American small business owners and entrepreneurs from across the country traveled to Bismark, N.D., on Tuesday to participate in a threeday conference on business strategy hosted by Tuck School of Business management professor Leonard Greenhalgh. The conference is a "three-day concentrated learning experience" for management teams of native-owned businesses, and just one of many Tuck professor-sponsored events each year for approximately 40 to 70 Native Americans looking to improve their business practices, Greenhalgh said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Greenhalgh and Tuck marketing professor Gail Taylor will spend the three days in North Dakota discussing business strategy with conference participants, Greenhalgh said.
"It's three days of taking the business law, learning what works, what doesn't work, what needs improvement, what's going just fine and what they ought to do more of," he said.
Native American business owners who attend such conferences often lack formal business training and are just "hard-working people," Greenhalgh said.
"A lot of people know how to manufacture a product or deliver a service, but they don't know how to run a business," he said. "It's a combination of teaching and coaching."
Conference participants are encouraged to share challenges they face in operating their own businesses with other attendees, according to Joseph Hall, a Tuck operations professor who has spoken at numerous Native American business conferences alongside Greenhalgh.
This is the fifth conference directed at Native American small business owners that Greenhalgh has hosted this year, Greenhalgh said. The conferences are funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, he said.
Throughout the three-day event, Greenhalgh and his colleagues customize their advice based on the region and tribes they are addressing, he said. Since the conferences are so focused on the attendees' specific businesses, getting to know the individual business owners and establishing long-term contact is an important part of the process, Greenhalgh said.
Conference attendees range from individuals interested in opening up a grocery store or a gas station to the upper management of huge manufacturing operations, fish processing operations, tobacco operations, wind power operations, hotels, construction businesses and gaming and entertainment companies, Hall said.
Greenhalgh's previous conference took place in Phoenix, Ariz., on Oct. 12-14, according to Venessa Gleich, program manager of the American Indian Chamber Education Fund Arizona Procurement Technical Assistance Center and the local coordinator for the Phoenix conference.
One of the best aspects of the three-day training session was that Greenhalgh and Hall, who spoke at the conference, were available after the official sessions to speak with individual attendees about their business strategies, Gleich said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Two Native American business students from Arizona State University also attended the conference, Gleich said.
"There was a lot of information that they found helpful to pass on to other Native American students that are interested [in business]," she said.
Andy Wells, owner of Wells Technology, Inc. a company that produces and sells hardware equipment attended Greenhalgh's May 2325 conference in Bemidji, Minn., and said the conference was "time well-invested."
The conference provided Wells and his management team with practical strategies that "could be applied immediately," he said.
"It was a good opportunity to back away from business for a few days and get a refreshing view of some ideas about growth strategy and sustainment," Wells, a member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe Indians, said.
Greenhalgh embarked on his first Native American business conference tour eight years ago after speaking with Native American leaders who informed him about the need for additional business advice catered to Native American businesses.
Tuck has hosted conferences for minority business owners for 32 years, but the information that applies to minorities and women often "doesn't ring true for Natives living on reservations," Greenhalgh said.
"The Indian reservations are sovereign nations within the U.S.," Greenhalgh said. "A lot of the laws that apply to business don't apply on a reservation it's very difficult to get financing."
Native American businesses often have a special interest in providing employment to tribe members, rather than seeking employees based on purely "profit-maximizing" motives, Hall said.
"Everyone wants to hire the grade A people straight out of college, but the fact is that on a lot of our reservations we don't have those people," Wells said, adding that Greenhalgh encourages business owners to invest in their local tribal communities through training initiatives.
Adapting Greenhalgh's advice, Wells founded Wells Technology in 1985 "with the intention of trying to hire the local people," he said. In 2006, Wells founded Wells Academy, a non-profit trade school that helps Native Americans fine-tune the skills needed to enter the workforce. The academy recently hired a new full-time instructor and developed a curriculum based on Greenhalgh's advice, Wells said.
Wells Technology grew by about 21 percent this year as Wells incorporated various business strategies advocated by Greenhalgh, according to Wells.
Wells' company also recently developed partnerships with the manufacturing companies BAE Systems and Fastenal, based on Greenhalgh's advice to engage in "mentor-protg relationships" with established business, Wells said.
Greenhalgh's experience and "unique set of knowledge and skills" is a valuable resource for small business owners across the country, Wells said.
"[Greenhalgh] sees so many different businesses, and brings all these options to us," he said.
Greenhalgh also collaborates with various local organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense technical assistance centers, which handle day-to-day consulting and check in with Native American business owners on a regular basis, Greenhalgh said.
