RVA Small Businesses, Time To Get #TILTED

Having lunch with John Sarvay is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.

And I mean that in a truly good way.

The by-product of one recent lunch is TILTED: An RVA Small Business Unconference on Saturday, February 23 at the Times-Dispatch. Here’s the story about the lunch…

Recently the fearless leader of Floricane invited me and Aaron Dotson to his new digs at the Times-Dispatch for pizza and conversation about life, liberty and the current status of our businesses.

To borrow again from Forrest Gump, sometimes you can sum up my experience in running a small business in one phrase: “Stupid is as stupid does.” There are plenty of things that, given the chance, Josh and I would have done differently.

While John’s business is a few years old now, Elevation Advertising, which Aaron started with Frank Gilliam, and THP virtually mirrored each other. Elevation is slightly older than THP (both now older than a decade), but from conversations over the years we recognize that the two businesses have hit similar milestones at similar times. We have also talked about some of the same challenges we’ve had related to things like growth, space, culture, etc.

Our lunch with John quickly focused on those growth issues for small businesses. We’re not talking about incubators or bootstrapping, although we’ve all been through that stage. We’re talking about how to continue climbing the growth ladder, how to deal with things like insurance, how to build a true culture, how to reach outside of Richmond for business growth, how to plan for succession.

While Richmond had done a great job focusing on incubating in recent years, those of us who are past that stage are now focusing on how to make the next big leap.

As the three of us listened and talked, John suggested creating some sort of informal conference of diverse small business owners, managers and experts where the group can share information and all help each other.

The lunch then led to a couple of meetings with a larger group including folks from Create Digital, Elevation Advertising, Floricane, Fraser Design, One South Realty, The Hodges Partnership, TMI Consulting, Work It Richmond and Zuula Consulting. These organizations are now the sponsors of TILTED.

If you run or manage a small business, or if you provide services to small businesses, please come out and participate. There will be lots of conversation and storytelling and only one PowerPoint presentation, promise.

We want to slightly TILT things with breakout sessions, small-group conversations, and workshops identified on the fly.

We’ll supply some of the food, you’ll buy your own lunch but we’ll have some yummy choices from RVA food truck folks.

So if you’re a small business owner, employee or servicers this is your invitation to get TILTED.

Tickets are $50, and you can register right here. And here’s more information on Tumblr.

See you there.