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"One of the things that we make sure that everyone understands from the beginning is that we have a give back clause. The more successful you are, the more you have to give back." -- Jose Corona, Inner City Advisors
Jose Corona is the Executive Director of Inner City Advisors, a nonprofit that helps build sustainable and responsible inner city businesses that create quality jobs, reinvest in the community, and contribute to the local economy. Their clients include companies like Blue Bottle Coffee, Numi Organic Tea, Premier Organics, and Revolution Foods.
Prior to Inner City Advisors, Jose served as the development director for five years at the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that provides microenterprise business technical assistance and neighborhood planning services to small businesses. He was recently named 2009 Young Professional of the Year by the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.
Jose sits on various economic development boards: the Oakland Workforce Investment Board, the Bay Area Business Advisory Board of Directors for the Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco, and the OneCalifornia Bank Advisory Board. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the YMCA of The East Bay, OBDC Small Business Finance, and People's Grocery.
Below is an edited transcript of my Big Vision Podcast interview with Jose in late August. To start, Jose talked about what Inner City Advisors is, and what makes them special. You can also listen to our conversation on iTunes.
Jose Corona: Inner City Advisors is an organization here in Oakland that was founded in 1996 by Professor Michael Porter at Harvard Business School. He created an initiative in 1996 called the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. His whole premise was to see how you use the market and business to revitalize neighborhoods. What we do here in Oakland, and throughout the Bay Area, is we work with inner city companies that not only have a scalable model, but also have a social responsibility aspect built into their business model. We don't seek out socially responsible companies. We look at companies that are doing good.
How we define doing good is how they benefit the community where they operate: hiring people in the communities, paying above living wages. We feel that that is the strategy to drive economic development and community development in a neighborhood.
What makes us special, I think, is the caliber of consulting that we do. We have a talented group of entrepreneurs that we work with all the way from Numi Organic Tea to Blue Bottle Coffee, to Premier Organics, and many others in different sectors. They are socially responsible and environmentally responsible companies, but are in need of some additional assistance, mostly strategic advice, that helps them scale to the next level.
I think where we get our competitive advantage is that the caliber of our advisors is far and above any kind of advice that you find out there. And we do it for free. We are pretty selective on the companies that we work with, and because we offer it for free is we are pretty limited on our capacity.
Britt Bravo: So, if I came to you and said, "Hey, I have this business that I want to start. I'm going to be green. I'm going to be great here in Oakland. First of all, how would you choose me, or not choose me? If you did choose me, what do I get?"
We look for several things. The companies that we look at are companies that first of all, we believe in. We're all about building relationships, so we have to believe in the entrepreneur, or the team that comes to us. If you came to us with an exciting idea and we felt a connection to you, and felt that you were the right entrepreneur to take it to that level, that's how we start.
Then we look for, of course, location. It has to be an inner city community. We define that as a low to moderate income location, essentially. If you look at somewhere like Oakland, it's everywhere but the hills. Everything below 580 is inner city community.
We look at the potential to scale, not only financially, but more importantly, to create jobs. We don't work with start-ups. You have to have shown some track record of success, or at least have been in operation for a minimum of two
