Our national and local sponsors are an important part of the quality of the program brought to you on SmallBusiness School. These are the companies with a heart and passion for small business owners. You are their customer; they want you to succeed. This page is our Who's Who within SmallBusinessSchool.

Putting best practices first : Our founding sponsor in 1994 was IBM. Soon thereafter, MCI then BusinessWeek (McGraw-Hill) joined the team.

Our ten year salute: IBM continued sponsoring the show for the next ten years. Most of IBM's 40,000 business partners are small businesses. They are software engineers and architects and systems integrators. Although IBM serves the majority of the largest 4000 businesses in the world, increasingly revenue comes from smaller and smaller businesses.

In 1995 the United States Postal Service (USPS) became a sponsor.

Our ten year salute: We profoundly thank the US Postal Service for their ten years of sponsorship. The USPS estimates that no less than 8 million small business owners walk through their doors every day. The postmaster at every local post office is there to serve you.

Did you ever see these posters on your local post office walls?

Over the years we have had many other dedicated partners and sponsors.

Our thanks to Verizon: We particularly single out Verizon for their eight-year commitment to your local station. In that period local stations received over $3M from Verizon. Other RBOC companies contributed over $1M to other local stations throught the country.

More National sponsors: AT&T (1995), Dun & Bradstreet (1996), Business Week (1994-1995), MassMutual (1997), Edward Lowe Foundation (1998), Citibank Travelers (1999) and Microsoft (2004).

Thomson Learning has been instrumental to help us craft the case study guides. Our case studies are now part of many textbooks by professor-authors who have helped to guide some of the questions asked throughout these interviews.

Some of our local sponsors include:

Banks and CPAs: Bank of America, Chase Bank, Hibernia have all sponsored multiple stations. Many local banks have sponsor single stations. For every bank and CPA firm, we provide an equal value of online CPE - Technical for their CPAs for every dollar provided to their local station.

Telecommunications: Besides Verizon, BellSouth Mobile, Qwest (and US West), Southwestern Bell, Bell Atlantic, and Nynex all provided generous support of many stations in their traditional geographies.

Utility companies -- Detroit Edison and Madison Gas & Electric have been local sponsors of their station for Small Business School for many years.

Many others:
Newspapers -- San Diego Union Tribune and the Baton Rouge Business Journal.
Small business agencies -- SBA, SCORE, Small Business Development Centers.
Business and Trade Associations--
Chambers of Commerce have supported the show by providing dollars to their local station to have their credit open and close each episode of the show.

Our national media partners include:
Bottom Line Business, Broadband House, Business Week, Entrepreneur magazine, Forbes (1995-1999), and Success.

» JOIN PUBLIC TELEVISION:
Become a member of your local station. If you are already, great. If not and your business is doing well, consider joining the Producers' Club ($1000). Too much? Get a twenty employees, customers and/or suppliers to join en masse with you at $50 per person.

» Become a local sponsor of your station. Sponsor any show, but if you sponsor this show, the benefits statement has eighteen key points!

» Learn how to become a producer. We say just get on the inside of your local station and ask them to teach you!

» Words Of Thanks. Please take a little time to thank those sponsors who open and close each episode of the show. These sponsors hold the keys to our producing and your staion's broadcasting of SmallBusiness School. Give them a round of applause!

» Small Business Administration: For several season we worked with the United States Small Business Administration. Hector Barreto, the former Administrator, has been on the show many times. As an advocacy partner, they say that they will promote viewership of the show among all the SBA offices, SCORE counselors, and SBDC offices throughout the USA.

» More about the Becoming A Local Sponsor
SmallBusinessSchool has a value proposition for banks, CPAs, and Chambers of Commerce that could bring them into a close working relation with their local station. There can be hundreds of local sponsors. These sponsorship dollars go directly to the station. If one were to sponsor every airing station, the amount would be over $700,000 per year. For considerably less than that amount, your business can become involved.

Where our national sponsors provide production dollars to produce the shows, our local sponsors provide dollars to our local stations to keep their lights on! Local telephone companies, utility companies, banks, business publications, CPAs, legal firms, restaurants, and employment services have been generous sponsors for their local television station.

For all of our sponsors, we try to under-promise and over-deliver just like most other small businesses.

COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS.  We'll always invite your comments and questions.