WSUV students help small businesses to succeed

A decade ago, Mark and Barb Nulph bought a franchise for Pressed4Time, a pick-up and delivery service for dry cleaning and shoe repair. They purchased Clark County Cleaners five years later so they could increase profits by doing their own dry cleaning rather than subcontracting.

Then the recession hit and their customer base shrank. The couple found their finances slipping just as they were trying to build a retirement nest egg.

Now the Nulphs are getting much-needed help rebuilding their business through a budding Washington State University Vancouver program that links business students with small-business owners. This spring, four WSUV seniors worked on a marketing and promotion plan that could guide the Nulphs in attracting new customers and winning back old ones.

Mark Nulph, who spends four days each week on service runs to Clark County homes and businesses, says he expects the student suggestions will speed Pressed4Time’s and Clark County Cleaners’ recovery. “Sometimes companies like mine don’t have extra cash to hire professionals to put together what I hope will come out of this program,” he said.

It’s not uncommon for college business students to learn from the examples of local companies, but WSUV hopes its program will benefit the business owners as well as the students. The lofty goal of the program’s leaders is to give a boost to businesses that have the most potential to create more jobs in Clark County, while making the university more relevant to the larger community.

“I think it will be incumbent for universities to take their obligations to the community more seriously, because there’s not going to be support for an ivory tower,” said Joe Cote, professor of marketing at WSU Vancouver who is leading the collaborative effort. “You have to show the value of an institution.”

This fall’s kickoff class, funded with $22,000 from JP Morgan Chase Bank, amounted to a trial run of the new “Business Growth Mentor and Analysis Program” — Business Growth MAP for short. WSUV is looking for $100,000 from business sponsors to cover next year’s costs, including a salary for a program coordinator.

Students will focus on companies that are three to five years old — past the adrenalin-infused startup phase but still too small to have the in-house expertise to seize opportunities and manage their growth. The program is structured to build a support network of volunteer mentors, advisers for students, and a cast of community partners including banks, nonprofits and business development organizations.

“If we can create a link between banks, business, and education, we should be able to help local businesses succeed,” said Ron Bertolucci, a First Independent Bank vice president who is teaching the Management Operations 492 class. Of eight student teams working with local businesses, seven are in his class. “There are life stages businesses go through, and if they can get through that phase and start generating business and get to profitability, they bring money back to the community.”

The student groups will gather this Thursday for an official wrap-up of their work, with business owners as invited guests. Those owners run the dry cleaner, a bakery, a yacht repair shop, a seminar and training consulting firm, a nonprofit, and the Rusty Grape Vineyard in Battle Ground

Jeremy Brown, who with his wife, Heather, owns the Rusty Grape Vineyard, says he’s grateful for the student help in marketing his wines, and advice on a tasting room he hopes to open in downtown Vancouver. “You put these young heads together and they help you create something,” he said.

Friendly, busy

The Nulphs come across as the kind of people who you’d love to have as friends. When they admit, with some hesitation, that they cleaned plenty of clothes for free during the recession to help job-seekers look good for an interview, it fits with who they are. They’re instinctive marketers who join local business organizations, change the artwork on their display windows each season, and hand out a bottomless supply of Tootsie Rolls to customers. But they’re also busy, now in the midst of a building remodeling project, which means that the 2010 Christmas window display has survived well into this spring.

They want the students to help them step up their game. “We shake hands with everybody, but we know we need to do more than that,” Barb Nulph said.

It’s such down-home friendliness from a family-owned business that WSUV student Tanya Zakharov sees as one of the clear strengths of the intertwined Pressed4Time and Clark County Cleaners businesses. Zakharov, one of four students working with the Nulphs, said the couple need to promote their personal touch to existing customers and potential new ones.

The student team of Jessie Massie, Chris Wilson, Darla Mills and Zakharov researched “Customer Relationship Management” systems for the firm, conducted phone surveys to determine marketing opportunities, and proposed marketing and networking opportunities.

While Zakharov thinks the 32-page report will help the Nolphs, she says the students also got plenty out of the project. “It’s a great opportunity for students not to work with made-up things from a book, but real examples,” she said.

The student team working with Rusty Grape Vineyard took a similar approach. They concluded that young adults between ages 21 to 35 are likely to carry the industry for the next three decades, said Kimberly Wilson, one of the students working with Rusty Grape. They suggested targeted promotions to appeal to that age group, with artistic or humorous labels for varieties they hope to sell in local stores, and marketing at the Vancouver Farmers market for a downtown tasting room.

Colleen Kronebusch, a 20-year-old senior, says the class project has been one of her most rewarding. “It’s an assignment, but at the end of the day, if we see that we pitched an idea and sales went up, we have a sense of pride that we were helpful,” she said.

UW’s program

The University of Washington has been working the same territory since the mid-1990s and has developed strong support from Seattle business organizations, says Michael Verchot, director of the university’s Business and Economic Development Center. The program is focused on minority and women-owned businesses, typically in struggling communities, he said. Businesses in the programs get hundreds of hours of marketing, accounting and legal assistance, he said.

The idea for the University of Washington program originated from research about how to best help businesses in low-income neighborhoods.

“What comes out of national research is that there are three components to business success: money, market, and management skills,” Verchot said. “The research shows that if you improve management skills, the businesses can find markets and capital.”

Verchot has learned from successes and failures. One favorite is a Seattle fast-food restaurant called Ezell’s Chicken. It had expanded to several locations but was struggling to attract new customers.

There were enough customers, but “they couldn’t get through the door quickly enough,” he said. The students came up with a plan to redesign the kitchen for faster service and to change the dining room so the lines didn’t look as long. Sales increased by 25 percent and the company now has seven Puget Sound locations.

The WSUV program still has bugs to work out before next fall.

Without clear direction, some advisers and mentors contributed little to the effort, students and business owners said.

While the university says it wants to replicate University of Washington’s emphasis on assisting minority-owned businesses or others in “under-served” communities, this term’s selections were rushed to tap into last-minute funding. And the university would love to have a civic or business group play a lead role in providing business mentors, as the Rotary Club of Seattle does for the University of Washington.

Verchot is optimistic that the WSUV program will replicate the success of its academic rival in Seattle. “Part of what it means to be a public university is that we serve the public,” he said. “This is a visible demonstration.”