This chapter is for those in a leadership position in an advocacy organization. Especially one dependent on large numbers of members to pay their bills.
For governments to create employment, rebuild communities and deal with issues of income disparities, war-torn societies after the second world war all created a range of private and public small business institutions. The goal was to encourage entrepreneurship, start-ups and growth in small scale enterprise. All these institutions were quite different reflecting the different cultures of each nation.
Selling political involvement is different from selling commercial goods and services. It has only been done successfully employing a personal call on the small business prospect. Small business organizations stop growing when they are not able to add sales representatives that can make a living.
The Canadian Federation almost collapsed in 1972 because we could not hire District Managers or sales reps who could make a living. Who could know at the time that the process of recruiting, selecting, training and retraining District Managers would require mastering so much detail. The enormous detail required to successfully operate an advocacy organization like the CFIB is its market advantage.
It was a huge surprise to learn that the cost of sales for the Swedish small business advocacy organization, an organization that renewed its members by invoice, would be the same as CFIB that called personally to renew memberships. Making invoicing work requires expensive and massive commercial benefits as part of the membership.
It was a surprise to learn that the structure of a small business community is different in each society. It meant that CFIB could become more that a fighter. It meant that we could also be promoters of the kind of policies that could build a society in which all sectors of the business community are more entrepreneurial, more international and more technological.
It was Wilson Johnson who helped me create the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. His organization had 425,000 paid members in 1978 but only 300,000 today. It happened because future Boards forgot the basic principals upon which Wilson had built the organization.
The CFIB is more like a political party than a business, and yet the Board under Canadian law is made of business owners who are part of their membership. Emotion and perception are a powerful ingredient in selling members and persuading governments.
Part of the secret of CFIB’s success is its internal succession policy, which involves the ongoing training of successors at all key levels of the organization. In advocacy your leadership has to have both policy and political skills. Good politicians are all good actors.
In some nations, government agencies serve as advocates. This was the case in Canada before the creation of the CFIB. In Europe’s unitary states advocacy organizations function at the federal and municipal level. In federal states like Canada, the US, Brazil and Germany advocacy organizations must function at the state and national level.
Boards over the years are always looking at ways to modify the CFIB model to increase sales. I have studied this in organizations around the world. All the successful changes in our model have been linked to making the District Manager more efficient in finding good leads. Further refinements have been linked to some limited renewals by telephone. Changes in the basic revenue model are made carefully and gradually after experimentation.
In Europe and Asia, all advocacy organizations are involved in membership development through all manor of training schemes. Hundreds of thousands of brick and mortar training facilities in Europe and Asia are being replaced by online learning. Vubiz Ltd. was once an arm of CFIB.
Much decorated by his professional accounting association, Bob Morrow was also a powerful figure on our Board for 25 years. He is also the key player in ensuring that the building of our head office came in “on time” and “under budget”. Bob was a founding member of CFIB and a friend. He was a CFIB spokesman in BC all during the 1970s before we established regional offices.