Local entrepreneurs invite business owners to brainstorming sessions

Alyssa Phillips Downey, owner of Amp’d Designs, and Nicole McConville of Nicole McConville Photography, leaned on each other shortly after Tropical Storm Helene, trying to find ways to keep their respective businesses afloat.

The two met through the national trade group AIGA (which at its founding in 1914 was the American Institute of Graphic Arts). Since then, they’ve become friends and colleagues, collaborating on work for their respective clients, most of them small businesses comprising restaurants, wellness providers, venue owners, artists, makers and retail shops. 

As they brainstormed ways to not only survive but thrive, they quickly realized that just about every other business owner in the area was going through the same thing: testing various ideas of how to navigate this new normal. 

What if, they thought, they brought everyone together to bounce ideas off of each other? 

This led the pair to create Resilience Roundtable: WNC Business Pivot Chats. The free video discussions will be held once a month, every third Thursday at 3 p.m., starting Nov.  21. The intent is to give business leaders an avenue to talk with each other and come up with ways to shore up Asheville’s economy. 

To register, go to avl.mx/ea4. 

Xpress talked to Phillips Downey and McConville to find out what spurred the idea and what they hope people will get out of it.

Xpress: What prompted the idea to form this series?

Phillips Downey: We are both business owners, and we run service-based businesses in Asheville. And we’ve seen all of our friends and colleagues and fellow business owners feel really stuck and concerned about the future, and we are as well. We personally feel a need for these kinds of conversations as a way to help sustain our businesses. And in talking with others, we find that other people are also needing this. And so we figured, instead of just sitting by ourselves trying to figure out what to do, we might as well all put our heads together and help each other out. I think that’s one thing that’s really beautiful about the Asheville community. All of the businesses are always so supportive, and there’s a lot of cross-collaboration. We definitely have seen in so many other instances of how our community is better when we come together. We feel excited and confident that by having this conversation as a group, we can all come out the other end strong.

McConville: Alyssa and I, very early on, after the storm, were having conversations because a lot of our work is based locally. Not only are we impacted by the fact that resources are going to be limited or redirected short-term, we both have such immense gratitude for the local business economy for helping us form our businesses. We are so mutually invested in the business community that we … wanted to broaden the table. … Instead of just having one-on-one coffee chats with other people that are in a similar situation, we wanted to have a large coffee chat to get people together to not skirt around the issue, but simply put it right in the middle of that table and say we are immediately affected by what has happened and likely this is going to have ramifications into the next six months. So we’re all having to make some very quick decisions on how to not just survive the next few months, but how can we survive and also thrive? We want to have immediate pooling together of ideas based on who attends, but also … these ideas are going to benefit us in the business community long term. 

How do you think others can benefit from your talks?  

Phillips Downey: Over the past six years of running my business, 80% of my clients have been local. I know I’m not alone in this, but I felt this initial panic of what am I going to do? How am I going to book new work? And so talking with Nicole, we started talking about how we can reach clients outside of Asheville for the time being so we can continue to make an income and sustain our businesses. In turn, we can continue to stay in Western North Carolina and put money back into our own economy and fellow local businesses so we can recover. We got to talking about how that’s basically everybody’s need right now.

McConville: I’ve had my business for 10 years and I would say 90% of my work has come locally. We’ve both had a desire and a need to expand our own clientele beyond Western North Carolina. This is fast-forwarding something that we’ve already wanted to do, and I think that we’re going to find that’s also the case with many other businesses — those back-burner ideas are in the front now.

How will this group differ from working with other business associations? 

Phillips Downey: It’s not a webinar where we are talking at people and telling them this is what you have to do to pivot your business. It’s a participatory, brainstorming event hosted by us. We are not marketing experts and we’re not giving out the answers. What we’re bringing is probably what everyone who shows up to the event is bringing: our own experiences and our own ideas and brains and willingness to share and collaborate with the rest of the community. It’s really about connection.

McConville: By welcoming people from the local business community to a table, we’re naturally going to get representatives from different fields of industry. We’re going to get people in the restaurant industry, product manufacturers and service industry folk. There really isn’t an across-the-board solution for every single industry. Our hope is that we can have dialogue in these conversations so that we can build that toolkit for each other. This really does rely on people wanting to show up and participate. 

Asheville is about people coming together to lift each other up, to make connections, to make introductions, to reach out and make things happen. That is very Asheville. I want to stress that the other organizations that are out there are absolutely providing extremely valuable information right now, and people are also hungry for that. This is simply about an honest dialogue between peers that can create that spark of, “Yeah, that’s an interesting idea.” We’re planting seeds that people are going to want to follow up afterwards, or seek out some of those local organizations where appropriate, or build new relationships that may come from those that attend. … It’s a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of community, creative, brainstorming session. 

Phillips Downey: We need to help get in front of the right audience and get creative with what we’re offering, how we’re offering it in ways that we have never really needed to before because all of our business has always been right here.

How will you measure the success of this group?

McConville: I think this will be successful if people can walk away with some new ideas with some new connections to other people. 

Phillips Downey: One thing that’s a driving factor for me in doing this is continuously seeing that statistic that 40% of businesses won’t recover [after a natural disaster]. We can just cross our fingers and hope we make it through or we can proactively try to pivot and try to widen our audience and continue making an income and sustain ourselves through this. Obviously I can’t promise anything … but I like to think that we can change that number by doing something like this.