Roundtable talks in Rockford, Peoria bring small business concerns to forefront
PEORIA (Jan. 12, 2018) — Gov. Bruce Rauner met with two dozen entrepreneurs and small business development advocates for roundtable discussions near Rockford and in Peoria today.
The governor is dedicated to helping build on Illinois’ base of 1.2 million small businesses that employ nearly half the state’s private workforce, or about 2.4 million people.
“Most employers in Illinois are small businesses, so their success is our success,” Rauner said. “We need to help them grow and that means cutting red tape and bureaucracy, and easing the tax burden.”
Today’s gatherings focused on gaining more perspective on the challenges unique to starting and expanding small businesses in Illinois. The Rockford Roundtable included area business owners, the Rockford Chamber of Commerce and Small Business Development Center officials.
Jim Derry, president of Field Fastener in Machesney Park, said the governor’s visit spoke volumes about his devotion to improving the business climate in the state.
Derry noted that his distributorship has grown 19 percent annually since he and his brother bought it in 1990. Field Fastener now employs 152 people companywide, with 80 in Illinois. That’s up from 12 in 1990. But growth has proven more and more challenging as many of his customers — manufacturers — have departed Illinois.
“In 1990 when I bought the company, virtually all our customers were within 50 miles of Rockford,” he said. “Now, a very small percentage of our customers are from the Rockford area, and more and more of our customers are not in Illinois at all. They’re in Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas … our company’s growth and employment within Illinois would be higher if there were more manufacturers here.”
Signing Senate Bill 867 slashing LLC fees for start-up, reporting and other Limited Liability Corporation filings, was a step in the right direction, Derry and others said.
At a media gathering after the roundtable, Patty Thayer of Thayer Lighting said she polled fellow business owners about the issues that most negatively affect them.
“The resounding cry was taxes, taxes, taxes,” she said, noting along with Rauner that federal tax relief is an example Illinois ought to follow to help spur the economy.
Christine Deehring, founder of Peoria’s now-thriving start-up Bump Boxes, echoed the concern on taxes. Deehring was part of a group that met with the governor at the Next Innovation Center in Peoria.
“We self-funded our business and it’s tough, especially on the front end,” said Deehring, speaking of the subscription-based pregnancy product, e-commerce business she launched in 2015 with her husband, Leland. The business, which started with a first-month shipment of 20 boxes, grew to 100,000 total shipments in 2017, and now employs 24 with plans to add more.
“Anything we can do at the beginning to help people get these businesses started is going to have a great impact,” she said, noting Illinois must also do more to stem the tide of outmigration due to high taxes and shrinking opportunities.
“We were born and raised in Illinois,” she said. “We’re raising our family here. The better we can make it here for businesses to grow and thrive, the better off we’ll all be.”
Ross Miller, director of technology commercialization at the Illinois Small Business Development Center at Bradley University, said that much potential for economic growth in Illinois lies dormant in the drawers and computer files of large corporations and research institutions in the form of unused patents.
“We need to look at ways to make it easier for tech transfer to happen,” Miller said, explaining that entrepreneurs may wish to purchase rights to patents to bring concepts to fruition. “Innovative technologies bring in external money … and usually create better living-wage jobs.”
“I’m a huge fan of seeing great ideas find the backing needed to get them to market,” Rauner said. “If we can work together to reduce our regulatory and tax burden, we’re going to become a fast-growing state very quickly.”
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