When I received a call from Wilson Johnson, the President of the National Federation of Independent Business out of San Mateo, California, congratulating me on achieving our goal of 50,000 members, I told him I was helping a colleague start a similar advocacy organization in Britain just as he had helped me start CFIB in Canada. He remarked that I could not have paid him a finer compliment.
My colleague's name was Stan Mendham, a fellow engineer, who was recommended by an academic whom we tried to help before Stan, but could not sell memberships. Stan, on the other hand, was near the top of the leaderboard every week he sold memberships in South Western Ontario. On the weekends, he lived in our cottage on Lake Simcoe. And like so many crazy Brits, he would swim without hesitation in ice cold water.
We worked hard together building the Forum and CFIB. But of particular value, was creating new networks that reached into all the various small business associations in the EU.
Although the UK is a unitary state, membership in the EU was like dealing with another level of government. He used to explain that the EU set all these crazy rules that most of Europe ignored but the UK upheld because they were a rules-based culture.
My first real British small business contact was made at the famous international Symposium on Small Business in Tokyo in 1975, and a keynote speaker was Graham Bannock, who was an economist and the former Research Director of the Bolton Royal Commission on Small Business back in the 1960s. Graham was a personal advisor before I developed a lot of in-house expertise. In the photo, I am visiting Graham and his wife Francoise in their home in Surrey, England. When I started working with Stan, the first thing I did was match him up with Graham, so he would have a source of expertise when he got into the significant UK issues.
A great contact Stan made in the UK was with Sir Charles Villiers, who was the former Chairman of British Steel. In retirement, he was dedicating his energies to stimulating entrepreneurship and new venture formation to compensate for all the layoffs at British Steel under his leadership. He was a friend of the Royal Family and godfather to Prince Charles. He helped Stan bring the International Small Business Congress to the UK. He was involved in espionage in WW2 and received a gunshot wound to the face. His wife wrote a best-seller called "Granny was a Spy".
Over the years, we worked hard together to build the International Small Business Congress. Stan became the informal leader for Europe, I for the Americas, and John Liu for Asia. In the attached photo from the 10th ISBC in Singapore, John Liu is on the far right. He was fluent in English, Mandarin and Japanese. It was through John that I learned how small business policy worked in all the Asian countries. John brought the Congress to Taiwan twice.
Stan suffered a stroke and lost control of his organization, but he continued to dedicate his life to the betterment of small business. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the Queen for his efforts to strengthen small business in the UK.
Life is so full of surprises. When you do something that simply seems to be the right thing to do, you just never know what you are going to create. One of the great benefits from my friendship with Stan was that the information I garnered about small business in Europe working with him, was more useful than the information I gathered from attending OECD conferences, where bureaucrats talked pure gibberish in ten languages.