Illinois Bell Telephone has underwritten a series of seminars designed for small businesses, with sales of $5 million to $20 million, going through the “growth” period of the business cycle.

Bell and the College of Business’s management department will sponsor the seminars intended to help firms make critical decisions relating to growth.

“The seminars will develop some programs which will help small enterprise identify opportunity for growth and further development,” said Wilma Strickland, acting chair of the management department. “We want to help businesses at this growth point who are writing the next chapter in their business-histories,” she added.

The three-to four-half-day seminars, still in the planning stages, will probably be held in Chicago for northern Illinois businesses.

Small Business Project Director Dan Lemanski said to prepare for the seminars, Northern will put together focus groups from chambers of commerce in Elgin, Geneva and Aurora. The groups will be composed of company presidents who have made it through this stage of their business. “We’ll find out from them what the major obstacles are,” Lemanski said. He said,”We’ll ask ‘if you had to do it over, what would you want to know?'”

Peter Potamionos, college relations manager at Illinois Bell said, “We will be contacting the users (of the information) and finding out what these people really want to know. The content of the seminars will depend on what real needs are identified and not what is nice to know.”

The grant proposal for the series states, “There is an obvious ‘hole’ in the current state delivery system of materials and services for inventors, entrepreneurs and small business owners. That is, new enterprises exhibit a business life cycle and the stages are initiation, growth, maturity and decline. The state’s heavy emphasis on the initial stages of business development does not reflect an assessment of the importance of other stages. For example, the transition from an entrepreneurial firm to a larger organization is equally as difficult (as starting a new business).”

The seminars are part of Illinois Bell’s “year of small businesses” for which the company is channeling its efforts to help small businesses, said Potamionos. “It is an exercise in good economic-citizenship by Bell,” said Strickland.

“It is the small-to-medium sized businesses that have been growing in Illinois,” said Strickland. They also have shown the greatest growth in number of jobs and are an important economic-resource to the state, she added.

Case study materials reflecting the conclusions of the seminars will be published and disseminated to members of the academic and business communities. “The seminars should help us to develop a battery of information to better help businesses going through this period of development,” Strickland said.

The grant proposal for the seminars also states, “The need for programs directed at growing firms is especially acute among minority entrepreneurs and minority-owned small businesses.” Therefore, “efforts will be undertaken in order to increase the rate of participation by minority entrepreneurs and small business owners,” it states.