Flood-affected businesses get more than a pep talk at 'Prevail Cedar Rapids'

CEDAR RAPIDS - Veteran business advisor and consultant Garrison Wynn has spent a lot of time studying behaviors that distinguish successful businesses and their leaders.

Wynn discussed dozens of them during two speeches at Cedar Rapids Prevail on Tuesday, Feb. 8, but he offered one with a very specific example for several hundred small business owners and managers in attendance

“Asking is the key to success and survival,” Wynn said during a morning speech at Theater Cedar Rapids. “Successful people ask for help when they need it.”

Wynn urged business owners to get help from case managers at the Business Success Initiative, a Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce unit that sponsored Prevail Cedar Rapids with financial support from four flood-affected businesses.

Wynn operates Wynn Solutions in Houston, Texas, which was was walloped by Hurricane Ike only a few months after the June 2008 Cedar Rapids flood.

Of the 70-80 chambers of commerce in the Houston area, Wynn said none offered the kind of direct help to businesses being offered in Cedar Rapids.

“There were a lot of lunches,” he said. “Do you have a problem? Let's talk about it! We'll do lunch,” he said mockingly.

For 90 minutes, Wynn hammered his audience with humorous anecdotes illustrating the behaviors of success. He said the bottom line of his success research is the importance of influence.

“Are you influential enough to deal with the difficult people in your life?” he challenged the audience.

Wynn said leaders often undermine their influence by unnecessarily voicing judgments about the people who work for them, or criticizing their ideas.

Employees will almost never follow the ideas of a leader when times are good if their own ideas have been criticized when times were bad, Wynn said.

Shaking off the sense of loss from the the 2008 flood and focusing on successful business strategies was the focus of the two 90-minute Prevail Cedar Rapids sessions. They are the first in a series of workshops planned by the Business Success Initiative this year.

John Bloomhall of Diamond V Mills, the main sponsor of Tuesday's event, said his company was able to reopen its factory in the city's Time Check neighborhood only eight days after the flood due to remarkable efforts by its employees. Diamond V Mills manufactures nutritional additives for the livestock industry.

Bloomhall said he declared a full recovery in his annual “state of the union” address to the company, he said, but later discovered that the recovery may only be beginning, because the company could face multi-million-dollar relocation expenses.

For businesses affected by the flood, “the pain and loss has been very real,” Bloomhall said. Even so, he acknowledged that government doesn't have programs to help businesses recover from disasters like the 2008 flood. With less than 20 percent of the flood-affected businesses closed, he said. “I really feel our city has done a great job.”

“It time to conclude the pity party and take action to start moving forward,” Bloomhall told the business audience.