A New Structure for Business Assocations

A standard tactic for helping to develop community economies is to build a business association which is structured almost exactly like every other business association. At first this new business association creates excitement as entrepreneurs hope that the association will help them get new projects done. In the first few meetings the business owners try to figure out what they should do, and a few of them dominate the discussion and work on the projects. Soon most of the businesses stop attending all together. Eventually the business association is a meeting between one or two officers (The VP and Treasurer often stop attending the meetings) and one or two other businesses, while the association itself does very little. This is a huge problem for economic development organizations which rely on the associations to assist them in their efforts and provide them with the opinions of the businesses in an area.

A New Structure is Needed
Nearly all business associations are structured the same way high school governments are with a President, a VP, a Secretary and a Treasurer (a job which in many associations does nothing but sign checks and say how much is in a bank account). This isn't how a government or business is structured, indeed very few effective organizations are structured in this manner.

Structure like a business
Corporations are structured with specific departments which have specific tasks, a.k.a. a Chief Financial Officer who finds new sources of revenue for the organization, develops budgets, and allocates money. A Chief Marketing Officer who comes up with and executes promotional strategies to increase profits.
Similarly a Business Association could have a Financial Officer which searches for grants and sources of revenue, a Marketing Officer who comes up with plans to promote a region and which helps build a relationships with the members of the community, a Government Relations Officer which makes certain businesses know about new laws impacting them and which voices concerns to the government officials.
Each of these leaders could have their own set of volunteer business owners which makes and executes plans and reports to the other businesses which can choose to overrule a plan or who can elect new officers to head each of these department but which will likely allow each entity within the association do its job.

Wiki Structure
With modern technology a structure could be set up in which there was no actual leadership, rather any business with an idea could post it to the Associations Forum, Wiki, etc, and email the others. The businesses could than all vote on it. Such a system would of course be much looser but in some cases more ideas would be generated when every member can post them and when no one person controls the structure.

The Economic Development Organization
The development organization in an area should help to found a business association with a list of recommended projects already ready for the business association to take on. The businesses can of course come up with their own plans and projects but typically they will want to have projects to work on from the time they start.