September 2023

Welcome back! We took a break over the summer and hope you did too!

We’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, and the students are back on campuses which is always exciting and brings a renewed energy to our very quiet halls (in case it slipped your mind, we’re hosted by UND, and the Lead Center is housed in the Nistler College of Business & Public Administration).

September doesn’t just bring us back to normal, it throws us into the busiest time of year – CONFERENCE SEASON! We will have many chances to reconnect with you, and below is where we look forward to seeing so many in the coming weeks! Stop by our booths, find us or any of our staff (hint, hint, hopefully, they will be wearing their ND SBDC gear), and grab a few more business cards and resource guides if your supplies are low. You can also reach out to your local service center; someone can bring the goodies to your office. Any way we can make it happen, we look forward to catching up, hearing about your summer vacays – promise we won’t be jealous – okay, maybe a little, and planning the “what’s next” with all our partners across the state.

• Sept 4-8: We love seeing our peers nationwide at the America’s Small Business Development Centers (ASBDC) conference. This year we’re in Nashville, a favorite destination for many.
• Sept 11: Tiffany and Marnie will be at the North Dakota Bankers Association Regional Meeting in Grand Forks
• Sept 12: Paul will be at the NDBA Regional Meeting in Fargo
• Sept 13: Tyler will be at the NDBA Regional Meeting in Bismarck
• Sept 14: Mary Beth will be at the NDBA Regional Meeting in Minot
• Sept 12-13: We will have some ND SBDC staff at the 2023 EDND Fall Conference in Bowman. Be sure to visit some phenomenal local small businesses, a few might be ND SBDC clients, and we love sharing the success they have seen working with Laura in our Bowman Center.
• Sept 14: If you’re already in Bowman, stay put for FUSION 2023. It is a great day with amazing speakers and other attendees, and you will leave with renewed purpose and a “go-after-it” attitude! We happily sponsor this event each year since it kicked off, and we have loved watching it grow – way to go, Bowman team! (They’re going to be tired after this week.)
• Sept 20-22: See you at the ND League of Cities conference in Bismarck. We connect a lot with lenders and economic developers, but the connection to our city leaders is also very important. In our rural state, you are sometimes the person doing it all, needing to know where everything is and still do the job your title defines – we appreciate you and look forward to meeting you there if we haven’t met before.
• Sept 27: The one-day GNDC Policy Summit is so informative they should probably make it more than one day! We love that GNDC loves small businesses (because when you think that 98.8% of businesses in our state ARE SMALL, we can only gather that they love small businesses just as much as we do!)

Looking off into the distance, mark your calendars for the Main Street Summit on October 24-25 in Watford City. Our Main Streets are built by small businesses, which are the foundation for everything we love about the communities we live in. Keep them alive – shop local! And find us at the Summit, we will most likely be at our booth!!

We’ll catch our breath around Thanksgiving… see you somewhere around this great state very soon!

Tiffany Ford, State Director
And all the Staff of the ND Small Business Development Network