"Big vision, big feat"

Robin S. Reed is a business owner, serial entrepreneur, and corporate consultant with over 40 years of expertise. He is the Co-Founder and Principal of Emfluent, President and CEO of the Black Chamber of Arizona, and a professional speaker.

Robin has a great track record as an entrepreneur and financial services professional who has helped minority-owned small businesses operate on a bigger scale by offering education, tools, and resources. According to him, not all great managers are excellent leaders, and not all great leaders are great managers. He believes in finding out what your specific skills are and employing people with those strengths to fill in the gaps. We also meet ambitious entrepreneurs where they are in terms of their company's growth and development. I assist them in the acquisition of a fundamental understanding of how all firms succeed, says Robin.

“We are currently working on a technology-driven "Small Business Ecosystem" that will instantly connect Arizona's small businesses with the best training and resources available. There are several organizations in Arizona that provide excellent support for small businesses, but they are not linked together or "progressive." He explains that there is currently no logical path for a company to go through all of the available training levels and we are currently working on a solution to this issue.

According to Robin, it is a misconception that community organizations face market competition. Chambers of commerce, as well as the numerous other community organizations that support our state, are allies, not rivals, says Robin. Being one of the creators of The Community Collaborative, a 36-member group in which Arizona community organizations work together to deliver better value to the entire community, we have taken a collaborative approach. For example, with the help of the Arizona Asian Chamber of Commerce, we were able to support black-owned restaurants at the start of the epidemic, and we assisted other chambers in getting more corporate sponsorship by working with our corporate partners.

When it comes to developing strategies, we were once approached by a business owner who believed they had been denied a loan due to the owner's racial description. We acted as a go-between for the financial institution and the borrower, educating the business owner on the loan's minimum requirements. They discovered that although they did not meet the basic criteria, the bank offered a comprehensive training program that would enable them to qualify in the future.

We assisted another community organization in obtaining additional funding for an annual event by advocating that one of our business partners provide much-needed support to this organization, which would not have happened otherwise.

 

We also mediated a conversation between an Arizona company and its African American Employee Resource Group (ERG) to improve communication and resolve a contentious situation.  This resulted in a positive conclusion for numerous other ERGs in the organization, explains Robin.

Using our collaborative methodology, we grew our "Chamber Collaborative" from 6 chambers of commerce to become The Community Collaborative, a 36-organization coalition of our state's most influential community leaders. This solved the problem of our organizations working in "silos" previously, says Robin. To explain it better, he refers the quote by Aaron Bare, author of Exponential Theory, "Instead of fighting for a slice of pie, let’s work together to bake a bigger pie."

According to Robin, he has three key objectives on which he wishes to concentrate his efforts: creating a small business ecosystem; collecting and analyzing data on Arizona small businesses that identifies the owner's race and gender so we can better determine their needs and deploy resources to help them, and continuing to work with entrepreneurs to help them scale their businesses.

Robin is an avid golfer, carrying a single-digit handicap. He also travels extensively with his wife and serves on the board of directors for several nationally and internationally recognized nonprofits.