Stanford group to survey Sonoma County business owners

A Stanford researcher will survey Sonoma County’s business owners to learn what barriers and successes they’ve encountered during the coronavirus pandemic, data which local groups hope will help guide future policy decisions and organizing efforts.

The survey, which will begin Monday, is being conducted by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, a research and education program organized by Stanford University and the Latino Business Action Network nonprofit.

The initiative, which began in 2015, has historically done annual large-scale national surveys on Latino-owned businesses to understand trends within the country’s Latino entrepreneurship sector, said Dr. Marlene Orozco a lead research analyst with the group.

While the data collected from the Sonoma County-specific study will be included in the program’s national survey of Latino business owners, it will seek participation from business owners from all backgrounds, not just Latinos, Orozco said.

The decision to expand the study’s focus came after Santa Rosa’s Diversity and Inclusion Officer Socorro Shiels, who started the role in late March, told Orozco that people from racial minorities in the county other than Latinos have felt excluded from community projects in the past, Orozco said.

“Within Sonoma County, we’re looking forward to opening it up to understand the trends locally,” Orozco said.

The 15-minute survey will be available online beginning Monday through July 9. It will include questions for business owners ranging from their race, the industry they work in, the number of employees on their payroll and the amount and source of any funding they’ve received in the past year.

Two sections in the survey focus on COVID-19’s impact on Sonoma County businesses and what strategies they employed as a response to the pandemic.

”It’s uncovering and understanding what these business pivots are like,“ Orozco said of the survey. ”In times of need or crisis, what we’ve seen again and again is that Latinos are very resilient and they’ll pivot their business accordingly. What we want to uncover is not just the challenges but also the bright points. How did their business survive?“

Marcos Suarez, the Sonoma County Economic Development Board’s Business Diversity program manager, said his prior relationship with the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative helped bring the survey to the county.

He had been involved with the initiative since 2015, when he was invited to learn about the program and its goal of studying Latino entrepreneurship, a topic that there was little information about, Suarez said.

He then started referring local business owners to the initiative’s Education Scaling Program, which works with certain Latino business owners to teach them how to grow their businesses while keeping costs down and to manage and access financing.

When Shiels turned to the county’s economic development board for data about Santa Rosa’s businesses, she found the federal information that was available wasn’t as in-depth as she had hoped, Suarez said.

He then put Shiels in touch with Orozco to see if she could help, leading to the idea for a countywide survey, Suarez said.

“Once you hear directly from businesses, then we can really target and be more efficient to be able to help them more directly,” Suarez said. “We need to be able to give all that data to our leaders for when they are making decisions about our vital economy.”

A minimum of 100 respondents from each demographic group will need to respond to the survey so the researchers can conduct an in-depth analysis, Orozco said.

Both the Sonoma County and Santa Rosa economic boards plan to do outreach to encourage business owners from throughout the county to take the survey, they said.

On June 11, United Way of the Wine Country hosted a virtual meeting with several local community leaders and small business owners to get the word out about the study. Orozco presented information about the survey during the meeting.

Lisa Carreño, the president and CEO of the United Way chapter, said the survey comes at a time when her organization is taking an equity-focused approach to relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts related to the county’s recent wildfires.

They’ve found that increases in incomes is one of the factors that lead to greater equity and climate resilience in the community, making the county’s business owners, whose employees rely on them to make a living, a central part of the recovery conversation, Carreño said.

“Why we’re interested in this is because we are interested in grant-making and advocacy that helps people make ends meet,” Carreño said.

“ (Business owners’) capacity to scale their business, to overcome setbacks, to come back from catastrophe has a major impact on the lives of the employees,” she added.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets.