Hello -

One of our long-term goals is to work with each of your local stations and the local Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, Economic Development, and SBA-SBDC-SCORE offices to identify at least 200 businesses each year and to have at least 13 small business owners profiled on television on their local PBS station. The best of these erpisodes will then be aired nationally and globally (VOA)!

We are glad to help each station get help from their state's Department of Economic Development, the state and local Chambers of Commerce, the local SBA and their Small Business Business Development Center and SCORE volunteers, the business press, and so many others. The banks and utility companies will help pay some of the expenses.

What a result -- founder/owners of some of the best businesses lifted up as role models for our children and for each other! Such people are in every community. We only need to look for them! Here's our selection criteria.

Our mission and that of our nation's public television stations have much in common and it is very different from commercial television. Our television shows are uniquely dedicated to empowering people through continuing education. We, Small Business School, focus on the topic of work; and we search for the best examples among those people who, in creating work and wealth, make our world a better place. We ask and find answers to the questions, "What is good work? And, what has value?" It is a close-up on how people discover their special gifts and how they convert these gifts into a purposeful life. It is education by example and inspiration and that is the heart of empowerment.

Like many programs on public television, we go around the country and the world to capture the best of the human spirit – people who follow their dreams. These people are value creators, the prime movers of social capital. In the opening of every show, we say they are "... today's pioneers and quiet heroes." They forge into unknown places, bringing out the best within their employees, suppliers, resellers and customers.

One of the ways we hope to help each station is to start a selection process within this site. We are prepared to host a description of 400,000 businesses with an overview, study guide and transcript, and even a streaming video clip from their appearance on their local public television station.

No good business is excluded from these listings, but that list is a qualified list by local Chambers, business press, SCORE, SBDCs, and other small business advocates within each state.

If you appreciate what we are trying to do with Small Business School, please join us in thanking your local public television station. At least be sure your membership is current. If you are a small business owner and you're doing well, become a member of your local station's Producer's Club. That is usually $1000 per year.

We need to support our Three Sopranos that create harmonies not those HBO Sopranos who thrash values and make a mockery of small business. In lifting up exploitation as an artform, cleverly shaping every second, HBO -- and so much of commercial television and our cinema -- encourages the weak, confuses the marginal and weakens the strong.

If you are not a member of your local PBS-member station, please join today! Public television needs small business owners like you! We are asking all our viewers to thank your station, become a member, and get involved with quality TV.

Our viewers and web visitors often respond -- and we welcome your notes. Some have told us they quit jobs and started a business because the success of others inspired them. We have received hundreds of comments like, "Keep it coming!"

All of us here at Small Business School thank you for your letters of support. These new pioneers and quiet heroes, lifted up as our Master Class teachers, can help improve the fabric and quality of our communities and the world! Thank you.

With our abiding thanks and every good wish for your greatest success,

Bruce Camber, founder and Executive Producer

PS. We have initiated a program whereby the ownership of SmallBusinessSchool gets turned over to the local stations that air the show, the sponsors, the viewers, and others who believe the small business marketplace needs their abiding attention. That discussion is here. It is an open letter and the makings of a collaborative business plan, the dawining of a new age of business where there are huge joint ventures by all interested parties. You will also note within this business plan that it is an exit strategy for Hattie and me and the formal beginning of the Small Business Index for growing Companies. This letter is one of our basic statements. There is also the mission statement, an explanation of the name of the show, and the story behind the show.