This Holiday Season, Think Outside the Big Box

Here's a post that I wrote for American Public Media's Marketplace on shopping local, with an intro by Marketplace's economics editor Chris Farrell:

It matters where we spend our money. For instance, I like supporting local entrepreneurs whenever possible -- especially small business owners active in the community. Engaged entrepreneurs can make a big difference to the health of a neighborhood.

I learned a lot about the benefits of local from reading Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From It by Amy Cortese.  "Just as 'locavaores' eat mostly foods that have been raised or grown in a radius of 100 miles or so, some people are investing the same way," she writes. "I call them locavestors." 

As we head into the last weekend for holiday shopping, I thought I'd ask Amy for insight about buying local. 

Read the full post here.

Cheeseheads, Unite

The Green Bay Packers are the envy of the NFL, but for more than their undefeated record. They are also self-funded. When the Packers need money for stadium improvements or to get them through a rough patch, they simply turn to their fans—who also happen to be owners.

Green Bay is the only team in the league that is owned by its fans, dating back to 1923. It has sold shares four times in its history and today is owned by 112,205 fans. On Dec. 6th, the team launched its fifth stock sale—its first in 14 years—to help pay for improvements at Lambeau Field, the stadium named for the team's legendary manager (not a promotion-hungry corporation).

Shares are being offered for $250 a piece, with a $25 handling fee. The shares do not earn dividends. Nor can they be traded, and they will not appreciate (or depreciate) in value, other than on the collectibles market. Nonetheless, the official Packers web site, packersowner.com, was deluged with fans buying—and crowing about—their new shares.

"I'm an OWNER!!!!!!! One of the BEST days of my life......" wrote a fan who goes by the name CHEESEHOUND on the site.

For some investors, that may seem like a raw deal with little pay-off. And perhaps the Packers should be offering some sort of upside or profit participation (although technically the team is a nonprofit). But fans—and all of Green Bay—benefit in very real ways.

For one, there is the revenue that a popular team brings to the area. In 2009, the Packers and Lambeau Field contributed approximately $141 million in economic benefits to Brown County, where Green Bay is located, as well as 760 jobs and $80.6 million in wages, according to an economic impact study. That's in addition to $5.7 million in taxes to local and state coffers (see a pdf of the study here).

And the community-ownership structure has ensured that the team has stayed put in a small town, rather than follow the money to a glitzy new home like so many sports franchises have done. A big reason is a clause in the team's articles of incorporation that stipulate that, if the team were to be sold, any profits would go to the Green Bay Packers Foundation, which makes donations to charities and institutions throughout Wisconsin. That has effectively stymied any attempts to cash in.

Ownership by fans may also account for the extreme loyalty inspired by Green Bay, where the open-air stadium is regularly packed with "cheeseheads" despite freezing temperatures. (The new funding will help pay for seating for an additional 7,000 people).

Finally, while the fans may be largely funding their team's capital expenses (the Packers also have a bank loan and government incentives that help pay for the current round of stadium improvements), at least it is voluntary. Most major sports franchises end up wrangling millions of taxpayer dollars to build or refurbish stadiums. In fact, taxpayers frequently foot the bill for these boondoggles whether or not they ever step foot inside the new stadiums or can afford their luxury-priced seats. And often the debts drag on for years. A New York Times article last year examined how New Jersey residents are still paying for the old Giants stadium, which carries $110 million in debt even after it was demolished to make way for the new Meadowlands stadium.

Often, the publicly-funded stadiums are used to steal a team away from their home. As the Times article explains: "politicians and business leaders pushed for taxpayer-financed stadiums to lure teams. To name a few, New York built Shea Stadium for the expansion Mets, Atlanta put up Fulton County Stadium to lure the Braves from Milwaukee, and Oakland built a stadium to entice the Athletics to move from Kansas City, Mo."

So, Packers fans may not get rich on their shares, but this little town of 100,00 still has a team to call its own. As Wikipedia reminds us, "Today 'Green Bay Packers' is the oldest team-name still in use in the NFL, both by its nickname and by virtue of remaining in its original city."

By the way, you don't have to be a cheesehead or even a sports fanatic to benefit from community ownership. Today the model is being applied to everything from department stores to renewable energy projects—with winning results.  Now that's something to root for.

The Un-Walmart

A few weeks ago, I boarded Amtrak's Adirondack train and headed to Saranac Lake—or at least as close as I could get to the isolated village in the Tri-Lakes region of upstate New York. I went to cover the opening of the Saranac Lake Community Store, a department store that was organized and financed by residents who raised more than $500,000 from the community by selling shares in the store. The village badly need a general store: its lone Ames department store had closed, and while there was a vibrant mix of merchants on Main Street, certain items such as bed linens and underwear required a 50 mile drive to the nearest big box store. Yet the only retailer interested in locating in Saranac Lake was Walmart, which wanted to build a supercenter there. Many locals rightly feared that a store that huge would swamp their village, with its year round population of 5,000. So they took matters into their own hands and decided to open their own.

As I wrote in my story for  the New York Times, it's the retail equivalent of the Green Bay Packers: a department store that won't pick up and leave when a better opportunity comes along or its parent company takes on too much debt (as the bankrupt Ames chain did).

The story was the #2 most-emailed story in the Times for much of the day, which I think reflects how the idea of community ownership and initiative resonates in these days of protest and unrest. Last week, I heard from Melinda Little, one of the organizers of the store and the current president of its board, who said that her phone has been ringing off the hook since the story ran with calls from "folks all over the country who want to invest and/or want to emulate the model." One local small business owner made a $6,000 investment. (The share offering closes in December).

Community-owned stores are not unfamiliar in the American West, where towns with dwindling populations have a hard time attracting and retaining businesses. They are also thriving in the rural UK, where villagers have banded together to create their own general stores, pubs and post offices when faced with shutdowns. There are now over 260 community owned shops in England, Scotland and Wales, according to the Plunkett Foundation, a UK organization that helps rural communities combat decline in their areas by setting up community enterprises. Each year, some 400 village shops are shuttered, with community owned ones replacing about 5% of them, according to Plunkett. These enterprises are often more than just a shop, they are the beating heart of village life.

They have also proven to be quite resilient. Community shops have a 97% success rate, compared with a national UK business survival rate of 46.8%, according to a report produced by the Plunkett Foundation last year (a pdf of which can be found here). The shops operate with an average gross margin of 21%, in part due to the a large reliance on volunteers, and 22% of net profits are reallocated to community projects.

Retailing is a notoriously tough business, especially in an age of mega-retailers who wield their clout to demand price concessions from suppliers. Yet that model may be running its course: Walmart's same-store sales in the U.S. have been down for 9 consecutive quarters, and behemoths like Borders and Blockbuster have gone bust. And as the success of 'buy local' campaigns has shown, people may be tiring of the soulless, cookie cutter big box shopping experience.

A community-owned enterprise, in contrast, is about more than commerce, it is about relationships and a sense of place. And that engenders loyalty and trust that a big box will never have, even if profits are modest. The Saranac Lake Community Store shows that alternatives are possible. And for that we should be thankful.

Update: Port Townsend, Washington—a town north of Seattle with a strong local investment ethos—plans to open a community-owned store to replace a general store that recently closed. Read the Seattle Times article here.

CDFIs: Under the Radar No More

There are so many interesting issues brought up by the Starbucks "Create Jobs for USA" program, the subject of my last blog post. As noted, Starbucks will take donations from customers and pass them along to the Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), a network of community development financial institutions, or CDFIs. OFN will then make grants to individual CDFIs that apply for the funds. Joe Nocera of the NY Times points out that CDFIs, which lend to underserved communities and entrepreneurs, operate "mostly under the radar." Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had never heard of them before an employee proposed the partnership. Nor have most people.

That is a shame, because these organizations do an enormous amount of good. In particular, community development loan funds, a type of CDFI, engage in the sort of relationship-based lending long abandoned by big banks and even many smaller ones. Rather than simply rely on credit scores and cookie cutter lending models, CDFI officers meet face to face with entrepreneurs and assess whether they have the knowledge, character and business savvy to succeed. The 180 CDFIs that are part of OFN have lent more than $23 billion to entrepreneurs and individuals through 2009.  In 2008 alone, they made $2.3 billion in loans, including to more than 51,400 micro-businesses that created or maintained 223,738 jobs.

All the more amazing, they did that with a minuscule charge-off rate—1.3%—that would make Bank of America green with envy.

How are they so successful? For one, because CDFIs focus on a particular region, they are intimately familiar with the neighborhoods they are lending into. And, when a borrower runs into trouble, they work with her to avoid a default. (Imagine your megabank lender doing that!) They also seem to be pretty good judges of character.

Community development loan funds get their capital from big banks, which give them low-interest loans as a way of fulfilling their Community Reinvestment Act mandates to lend locally (something the big banks are no longer equipped to do well themselves). They also receive grants from foundations, to help pay for operating expenses or create reserve funds for losses. Although they haven't marketed themselves, many community loan funds also take investments from individuals. 

Typically, individuals can make an investment—usually a minimum of $1000, but sometimes lower—for a period of one to several years. In return, they receive a modest fixed return, typically 1% to 3% for a short term loan and up to 5% or more for a 10-year loan (based on current rates), with principal returned at the end of the loan period. It's like a locally-focused CD, except that the funds are not FDIC insured. But then, it is rare, if not unheard of, that a loan fund does not return capital and keep to its promised rate of return—even throughout the financial crisis.  Best of all, as an investor, you know that your money is going to work in your community and helping budding entrepreneurs get a foothold—not generating trading profits or lining some fat cat banker's pockets.

The Starbucks campaign is shining a light on these under-appreciated financial institutions. But if you'd like to do more than donate a five-spot, consider investing in a CDFI in your region—there are more than 800 certified CDFIs across the country, so most regions have one. The Coalition of Community Development Financial Institutions offers a search tool on its site at CDFI Coalition www.cdfi.org. The Opportunity Finance Network offers one as well at opportunityfinance.net.

Another easy option is to invest in Calvert Foundation Community Notes, which invests the money in CDFIs across the country (you can choose which region you prefer). An advantage of the Calvert Notes is that they are available through most major brokers (I bought mine through Charles Schwab—and it's about the one thing in my portfolio that hasn't lost money this year!) For more information, go to www.calvertfoundation.org/invest/how-to-invest/community-investment-note. You can also invest in community development loans funds, including Calvert Notes, on www.microplace.com/.

And, if I may close with a shameless plug, if you are interested in learning more, I devote a chapter in my book to CDFIs. I call it "The Biggest-Impact Financial Sector You've Never Heard Of."

A "Grande" Idea - Let People Profit From Crowdfunding

Starbucks' recent announcement that it will start taking donations from its tens of millions of customers to help fund small businesses was a grande - no, make that venti-sized - idea. As the NY Times' Joe Nocera explained in his recent op-ed, "We Can All Become Job Creators," Starbucks will act as the middleman, passing along the donations to the Opportunity Finance Network, a group that represents 180 community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which lend to communities underserved by traditional banks. 


With tight credit still holding back many small businesses that might otherwise expand and hire, Starbucks and its CEO Howard Schultz have been rightly praised for this innovative program. It will be interesting to see how many caffeinated customers step up to become small business donors, or "Americans helping Americans," as the wristband they will receive for donations of $5 or more reads.


If the experience of sites like Kiva, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo is any indication, there is a lot of pent up desire among Americans to help out entrepreneurial ventures that they care about. Kiva allows people to make small loans to micro-entrepreneurs around the world and in cities like Detroit, while the other two sites are a conduit for donations to artists and entrepreneurs, such as musicians and filmmakers. Kiva has facilitated nearly $250 million in loans from more than 600,000 individuals, and Kickstarter users are pledging funds at a rate of $2 million a week.


That's impressive. But to really crack the small business capital market open, we need to make it part of the mainstream financial landscape. In other words, let people earn a profit on their money. Donations and no-interest loans are great and have helped a lot of people, but they cannot serve the vast demand for small business capital in this country. That's why I advocated in my own recent NY Times op-ed for changes to our securities regulations that would allow businesses to raise funds from many small investors—a practice known as crowdfunding.


As I wrote in that op-ed:

[Crowdfunding is] the sort of person-to-person (or P2P, in industry jargon) funding that characterized financial transactions for millennia, before our mediated, securitized financial system took hold. Crowdfunding has the sort of populist, common-sense appeal that resonates with free-market libertarians and champions of the working class alike. By marrying online social networks with finance, crowdfunding offers a more democratic model of finance, in which individuals can directly fund other individuals or businesses that they deem worthy, without going through a bank or Wall Street middleman. 

Unfortunately, in this country, it's illegal to raise funds this way in return for a profit. Once a financial return is promised or implied, the offering becomes a security in the eyes of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and the legal hurdles go way up—putting public capital out of reach for most small businesses.


The laws, put into place after the 1929 stock market crash, were intended to protect investors from unnecessary risk. But the effective result is this: wealthy investors can invest in pretty much anything they like: private equity, hedge funds, venture capital. But ordinary investors (the 99%, you might say) must stick to publicly traded securities.


The problem is, most small business can generally not afford to go public—consider that the median IPO size was $140 million in 2009, up from $10 million twenty years ago! Nor do many want to, given the market volatility and Wall Street's fixation with short term results. (There is also a certain irony to this. In order to protect "unsophisticated" investors, the SEC confines them to the public markets. How safe do you feel about your stock market investments these days?)


So, no surprise, the financial landscape today is dominated by big business investment options. Think about your 401K (if you are fortunate enough to have one of those employer-sponsored plans). These plans offer a menu of funds that invest in the stocks and bonds of large companies (even a "small cap" firm falls between $50 and $300 million—the size of a large cap in the 1980s!). There may be some government bond or emerging market funds thrown in as well. But what you will not find is a small or local business fund. Those things do not exist.


Eight decades after the legal framework of securities law was put into place, the Internet and social networks have transformed the way we do everything, and the regulations look wildly anachronistic. And the vast majority of Americans are prohibited from investing in small and local businesses they want to support, and these firms in turn are cut off from a huge pool of badly needed capital.


That's why there is so much excitement about the growing bipartisan support for a crowdfunding exemption. President Obama has championed crowdfunding through his Startup America initiative, and House Republican Patrick McHenry has drafted a bill that is winding its way through the House. There are also grassroots petitions calling for a crowdfunding exemption before the SEC. The proposals vary in their details, such as the caps on the amount individuals could invest in each deal, but all would allow ordinary investors to put small sums of money in small businesses without requiring the business to go through a long and costly registration process with the SEC.


Yes, small businesses can be risky, but the small sums involved would ensure that no single investor could lose the farm on an investment. And here at Locavesting Central, we believe that community-based crowdfunding—where businesses are reaching out to their customers, neighbors and supporters— would further mitigate the risk. That's because local business owners have a reputation in the community, and potential investors have a greater knowledge of the company and the market it operates in—a key concern of the SEC. (ProFounder, an interesting crowdfunding startup in Los Angeles, is promoting such a "community-funding" model). What's more, I believe that this kind of investing—where individuals have a literal stake in their local businesses and therefore their communities—can help in the renewal of democracy and civic engagement. 


Of course, there is no guarantee that anything will come of these crowdfunding proposals, that's why it is so important to speak up. So sign the petitions (links below), call your elected representatives, and drop a few coins in the donation can at Starbucks.

• The Sustainable Economies Law Center has filed a petition with the SEC that would allow individuals to invest up to $100 in small companies. Details, including how to post a comment with the SEC can be found here. 

• Startup Exemption is another campaign to change the law—add your signature here. 

Community Capital

It’s not fun being an investor these days. The options are pretty stark: parking your savings in an inflation-lagging money market fund or T-bill (or under the mattress), or rolling the dice in a stock market that has careened wildly amid global uncertainty.

But a growing number of investors are discovering alternatives in the small businesses in their own backyards. Just as locavores eat a diet sourced close to home, these investors—call them locavestors—are investing that way. The idea is to earn profits while supporting your community.

Read the rest of my guest blog post for American Public Media's Marketplace, with an introduction by Chris Farrell, here.

Pennies From Many

AS Congress considers President Obama’s job package, one measure seems to have rare bipartisan support: a proposal to loosen some of the outdated securities regulations that hamper small businesses in raising capital.


The Obama administration, not surprisingly considering its own success in gathering small donations during his campaign for the presidency, is supporting crowdfunding, a financing model that relies on collecting small sums of money from many people over the Internet.


Read the rest of my op-ed in today's New York Times here.