The OC Entrepreneur Community was honored to be showcased to some of the biggest companies in the world as an example of how they can reach small business owners through real local business communities.
Corporate Executive Board hosted the Warrillow Summit in Las Vegas in 2008 and brought together the top Fortune 500 companies. Warrillow is a premier small business research firm; the summit is billed as “the annual event for global enterprise companies targeting the small business segment.” It was held in Las Vegas, June 1 – 3, 2009.
Mary Telesco of Meetup.com presented to the Fortune 500 VIPs and showcased OCEC as an example of how corporate America can reach small business owners through local community organizations such as the Orange County Entrepreneur Community.
As small business owners weathered the economic downturn, they developed a deep distrust for large enterprise companies and are increasingly shunning national providers in favor of local businesses they trust. In small business circles, national banks are being overlooked in favor of local banks, and big company advertising is being ignored in favor of the advice of local brokers and dealers.
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About Meetup.com…
Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities.
Meetup’s mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.
About the summit…
As a big national brand, how can you regain the trust of your small business customers? How can you participate in the coming resurgence of the small business market?
The key will be finding a way of positioning yourself as the local provider. It means rethinking your value proposition, distribution, product mix, partners, centers of influence and media mix. Now that small business owners are disrupted and rethinking their own businesses, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win new customers for those who can scale to a positioning as the local provider.
The Warrillow Summit celebrated its 10th anniversary by bringing together keynote speakers, such as, phenomenally successful Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, as well as proven world-class case studies that offer first-hand accounts of how large enterprises can innovate to solve the small business local marketing challenge.
Drawing senior marketing and sales executives from enterprise companies across the country, here are some of the esteemed professionals you can look forward to rubbing elbows with this year:
| ADP American Airlines Apple AT&T/Yellow Pages Bank of America Bank of Montreal Bell Canada Capital One CDW CIBC CISCO Cogeco Comcast Covad David + Henderson Dell Deluxe |
Discover Network Epson Equifax Experian FedEx Harland Clarke HP HSBC IBM Ikea Intel Intuit Marriott MasterCard Microsoft Moneris |
PayPal/eBay PayCycle PNC Purolator RBC Insurance RIM salesforce.com Sprint Staples Sun Trust Symantec TD Canada Trust Telus Verizon Visa Wall Street Journal Wells Fargo Yahoo! |
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