Top offered tips on how to run a small business

SALISBURY — World-class advice for retailers and other entrepreneurs is available, for free, on April 23 at 5 p.m. at the Scoville Memorial Library. The presentation is a Tri-State Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours event.

Business consultants (and Salisbury residents) Mark and Lauren Trager will give a talk and answer questions about how to turn a small business into a big success.

Mark Trager’s career was on Wall Street. 

“I worked for several major financial institutions for about 40 years. I was primarily involved in private equity funds that would purchase under-performing companies,” he said. “We would select the companies, we would work on the purchase price and then we’d help fix the company.”

In the process, he said, they had to learn “what drives a company in just about every industry. We’d have to figure out whether their problems could be fixed.”

That kind of awareness doesn’t just fade away in the happy years of retirement. Trager and his wife, Lauren, moved to Salisbury eight years ago and found that, when they would wander into a shop or have a meal at a restaurant, they couldn’t help themselves from assessing the health of the business. 

“You can just walk in and guess how they’re doing, there are signs you look for,” Trager said.

Lauren Trager is a retired teacher who has an indefatigable need to help other people. Much of her career was spent at schools in Yonkers, where she worked with students in high school and college in a “gifted” program. The goal was to help them imagine and then start their own businesses. 

“We worked on finding a target audience, doing product design and marketing, financial analysis, accounting,” she said. “I was teaching them how to dress for meetings and interviews. We taught them how to go to the bank and get a loan, and we taught them the discipline of paying off that loan.”

Here in bucolic Salisbury, the two have joined forces and created Two Twelve Consultants. It started with offering advice to friends and people they met in their travels through town. Since then it’s grown into a business of its own. 

The first meeting with the pair is a free consultation. Everyone talks and gets to know each other, and then, the Tragers said, “the clients become like family. We take responsibility for them, their business, their finances, their state of mind.”

The state of mind is an important component. For many entrepreneurs and small-business owners,  the stress of managing things day-to-day can be overwhelming — and can keep them from being able to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Often the details of management and real estate and finance are not the strong point of someone who has a great idea for a service or a store, or for someone who is a brilliant chef. 

“We deal with employee relationships, we help with leases,” Lauren said. 

“We often end up acting almost as therapists,” Mark said. “We help recognize the problem and then we can figure out how to solve it.”

In their presentation on April 23, the Tragers will share their list of 10 things a small-business person should know. There will be a question-and-answer session, and of course they are available for private conversations after the talk. 

In addition to their expertise and experience, the Tragers said, one thing they have to offer that is particularly precious is time. 

“Business owners are stressed out, there are so many things they have to think about,” Mark said. “And when I was working on Wall Street, there was always a deadline. You couldn’t work in a linear fashion and fix things one at a time.”

Now, in what passes for retirement for these very busy people, they have time. And are willing to share it.

“We live here now,” Lauren said. “We are invested in this community. We love it here, and we see ourselves always being here. We want the people in this area to be successful. We are here to help them in any way we can.”

Anyone who can’t attend the talk at the library can contact Two Twelve Consulting at twotwelveconsult@aol.com.

To register for the program, send an email to sdickinson@tristatechamber.com.