Hattie and I have been doing this television series since 1994. Every week is a deadline. For twelve years our deadline was Wednesdays to get the next episode ready for NETA to receive on Thursdays to go up on their satellite on Saturday at 4:30 PM EST. Feeding the monster. Though a rewarding period in our life, it is time for us to pull back a little and turn over some of our infrastructure (and even ownership) to independent producers, stations, and corporate partners. One of our new goals, our 2007 focus, will be to produce four HiDef productions per year. Yet, we want SmallBusinessSchool to carry on with its productions, so we are inviting others to participate with us. There are hundreds of wonderful, creative, bright, loving independent producers in this country who would enjoy producing an episode of SmallBusinessSchool.

In every state and in every Designated Market Area (DMA) we will work with each local station to engage the finest local producers and we will work with many small business advocacy groups within that geography to select from an emerging List of 1000 small business owners recognized by the community. The legacy of the show and the website is that there is a mechanism in place to develop a list of best possible people to become the subjects of an episode. 1000 business owners is equivalent to almost 40 years of programming! That would be doing just 26 episodes per year! And, we now know that there are at least 1000 such people in every DMA.

A back-breaking production schedule is to do 26 new episodes a year. We believe every local market could do at least three in the early stages. We will provide a toolkit and the funding. Those three local episodes would be aired in place of one of the episodes from our national feed. Ultimately, we would like to see each local market produce at least 13 episodes per year. There are 210 DMAs. Even if we had only 100 DMAs participating, that would be 1300 new episodes per year. We already have a virtual management team for SmallBusinessSchool. Now our group will be expanded with producers, folks from the stations, and small business advocates to review these local productions and to select those episodes to be fed within our national and international feed.

This working document is to focus our energies to have the small business advocacy groups work together with their local public television station, with SmallBusinessSchool, and with their best local independent producers to begin producing their first episodes. We have listed many of the small business advocates in your state. We have listed all the stations. And, we have begun to list the best independent producers (who often work through the local station) in each geography.

Strategic Priorities. Our priority will be those states and DMAs where SmallBusinessSchool is on the air. The next focus will be those areas where SmallBusinessSchool is not on the air and where there is no small business porgramming, And then, we will work with those stations that have their own local show like Maine Public Broadcasting (MPB) Made in Maine, Minding Your Own Business (Wichita's KPTS), or Alabama@Work (APT). We believe in the course of the week, an hour of small business programming is still not enough!

Now, after fifty seasons and twelve years of non-stop efforts, we have thoughts about how these productions can be done economically without becoming a major coordination effort or another major line item on anybody's budget. We are recommending a more grassroots approach that would involve the small business owners at the outset. Ultimately we believe the relation for local productions should be first between the local public television station and their constituencies. To that end, we would like to share four ideas to fund such productions, create viewership, and make this a special event for every small business in your state or DMA:
1) Small Business Producers' Clubs,
2) Local businesses and business groups as sponsors,
3) Grassroots Small Business Owners Membership, and
4) The Small Business One-hour Block.