Tuned in | Deb Neuman takes to the airwaves with tips, tricks and loads of advice for Maine's small-business community

Deb Neuman has been preparing for this moment for weeks. The headphones are on. The microphone checks are done. The guests have been briefed and told what to do ("speak directly into the microphone") and what not to do ("don't refer to the time of day"). She has prepared questions ahead of time. Neuman makes some last minute changes to her intro, jokes with the guests, but she's itching to get on the air.

"It's like a football game," says Neuman, a Bangor resident and director of the University of Maine's Target Technology Incubator in Orono. "You've got your players, you've got your plays, and you just want to get out on the field and execute it."

When Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Taking Care of Business" comes blaring through her headphones and she gets the cue from the control room, Neuman leans into the microphone and her voice booms in the little soundproof room. "Thank you for joining us this week on Back To Business. I'm your host Deb Neuman."

But before introducing listeners to the guests she's invited onto this edition of Back to Business, the small-business-advice show she hosts on Clear Channel Radio's WVOM 103.9 FM in Bangor, Neuman offers a bit of non-business advice. "I call this a pen-and-paper type of show," she says. "Because you will want to take notes."

This is the 65th episode of Back to Business. Like every show, it's taped Wednesday morning and aired that Saturday. This Wednesday, the topic is "What Augusta can do for your small business." For the show, Neuman — an 18-year veteran of working with small businesses in Maine — has brought many of the bigwigs from the state capitol into the studio and into the homes and cars of her small-business audience.

Listeners taking notes during the two-hour show could have learned from John Richardson, commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, about Business Answers, the state's toll-free hotline for business owners, or Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap's advice on how to find out whether a business name is already in use. David Cole, commissioner of the Maine Department of Transportation, gave out his direct phone number while talking about how a business off the beaten path can get a direction sign placed on a major road.

This show is about finding the "needle in the haystack," says Cole, sitting in the green room before the show. "We live in an era of information overload. A show like this is about helping people navigate it down to what [small-business owners] need. She's like a Web browser on this show: Debbie Google."

Neuman, 45, has been producing Back to Business since January 2006. In less than two years, it's gained a reputation as a valuable resource for small-business owners in the state and has a dedicated audience estimated at more than 20,000. One reason for that early success is that Maine, at its core, is a small-business state. And while small businesses may be the backbone of the Maine economy, it doesn't mean small-business owners have it easy. Starting and running a small business is complicated and time consuming, involving everything from writing a business plan to registering a business' name to making sure all the necessary licenses are in order.

Neuman's goal is to cut through the bureaucratic clutter and provide entrepreneurs with information they need to get their business off the ground. At the same time, Neuman tries to inject some life into what can be a pretty dry subject. "What I try to do — and what people said you should do — is make [the show] informative, but also fun to listen to," Neuman says. "My goal for each show is if you listen you'll learn something you didn't know before."

Real-life experience
Donna Mionis began listening to Neuman's show in February 2006, right around the time she and her husband, who was leaving his sales job, began thinking of starting their own business. "We had a germ of an idea," says Mionis. "But we had no idea what direction to go in, as far as the type of business."

Mionis became a regular listener to Back to Business, where each week Neuman tackles a topic related to starting, operating or expanding a small business in Maine. The range of topics is broad, but Neuman tries to make the show's message universal. That's why each show's guest list includes someone who's actually started a business. "I think it's important to have an entrepreneur on every show," Neuman says. "It makes you realize you could do it, too."

From the show, Mionis learned about resources like Maine Centers for Women, Work and Community, an Augusta-based organization that, among other things, helps women start their own businesses, and Eastern Maine Incubator Without Walls, a program Neuman helped found that links rural entrepreneurs with resources they need. Mionis consulted both organizations last August to launch her baking business, Daily Bread, in Levant.

Mionis began simple, baking and selling one type of bread; she now bakes 24 varieties and recently secured a business loan to purchase a second industrial oven. "So many people have ideas but don't even know where to start," Mionis says on a recent rainy morning at her stand at the Brewer farmers' market. "Deb's show is invaluable for that because all you need is one piece of the puzzle and the rest falls into place. This is the livelihood of our family now and her show had a direct impact on that."

Neuman says she's had the entrepreneurial streak since childhood, when she tried to make a buck selling everything from Kool-Aid to old toys that belonged to her brothers and sisters. (The latter case offered a valuable business lesson, since Neuman didn't exactly get her siblings' blessings: "My source for my inventory wasn't well thought out," she says.) "I think I was born entrepreneurial," Neuman says. "Many people are just entrepreneurial in how they approach life and everything they do, and that's really how I'm built."

Neuman grew up in Pennsylvania and spent summers Down East at a family home in Steuben. After graduating from University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., where she studied communications and public relations, she decided in the late 1980s to relocate to Maine.

She landed in Bar Harbor, where she got a job at the 33-room Ledgelawn Inn, which she quickly began managing. It was during this time, in her mid-20s, that her entrepreneurial spirit kicked in. One day, Neuman saw a bed-and-breakfast for sale and figured if she could manage an inn, she could own one. She wrote a business plan, found a banker to give her a business loan — "I think it was his first day, so I don't think he knew any better," she says — and bought Ridgeway Manor in Bar Harbor, which she ran for five years before selling it and buying a tour boat company in Bar Harbor.

While running the tour boat company, Neuman says, she began to feel like she could help other young entrepreneurs by sharing her experiences. In 1989, she got a job as a microenterprise specialist at Washington Hancock Community Agency in Milbridge, where she helped small-business owners secure loans. Eastern Maine Development Corp. in Bangor hired her in 1993 to help launch its U.S. Small Business Administration microloan program and create the Eastern Maine Incubator Without Walls.

Now in her capacity at the Target Technology Incubator, Neuman works with students and young people who want to start companies. "I tell them, 'Go for it,'" she says. "You're already used to eating ramen noodles, you don't have the responsibilities of kids."

Getting the word out
After putting in a full workweek at the Target Technology Incubator, Neuman has to find pockets of time to plan the radio show, which she does on a volunteer basis. Neuman's not married and has no kids, which she says frees up her time to produce Back to Business. "This is my baby and this is what I take care of when I'm not at my regular job," she says. "It's work, but in a good way. Like a small-business owner, when you find something you're passionate about it doesn't seem like work." (To learn more about how the show is put together, see "On the air," see below.)

Neuman typically spends Sundays preparing for that week's upcoming show and for the live, 30-minute segment she does every Wednesday morning on WVOM's weekday morning show, Maine in the Morning — a guest spot she began doing in 2005 that led to the creation of Back to Business. (Full disclosure: Mainebiz provides a daily business news report to WVOM.)

The shows' themes range week to week from a Valentine's Day show featuring husband-and-wife business teams to more serious topics like workplace violence. Neuman once did a whole show based on a day she spent hauling traps with a Down East lobsterman. Other shows are aimed squarely at the small-business owner looking for answers: Mionis heard a show where Neuman discussed handling media inquiries a week before a local television station approached her about an interview. "I felt confident in doing the interview," says Mionis. "Which I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't listened."

That passion and experience working with small-business owners and entrepreneurs helps make Neuman an effective host, says Mary McAleney, director of the Small Business Administration's Maine district and the first guest on Neuman's first show 17 months ago. "I think the biggest benefit for business owners and entrepreneurs is the fact that Deb has on these real-life business owners that have been there and done that," McAleney says.

Daniel Panici, an associate professor of communications and media studies at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, says radio is "a wonderful medium" for disseminating advice, but that it works best "if the host is an expert in the particular area and can speak with the audience and not at them."

Neuman's show has helped spread her small-business bona fides: She's often asked to facilitate panel discussions or host seminars on small-business topics. In one three-day period last month, Neuman received the U.S. Small Business Administration's Journalist of the Year award for Maine and New England, facilitated a panel discussion on innovation in business at the Maine International Trade Day in Rockport, and hosted a small-business roundtable discussion at an all-day small-business conference in Augusta.

And Neuman's words have spread beyond the reach of WVOM's signal, which reaches from Augusta to Houlton. Stations in other parts of the state have expressed interest in airing the show, and Neuman says some friends recently attended a conference in Seattle on small business incubators where they heard people talking about Back to Business. "I guess the word's out, which is really exciting," Neuman says. "It's being held up as a good model."

For the first year, Back to Business was done live. But for the past several months Neuman has taped the show Wednesday mornings without the station IDs or advertisements, which is the first step in readying the show for syndication. Ultimately, Neuman would like to see the show go national. "Why couldn't Maine generate a nationally syndicated talk show about small business?" She asks. "We are a small-business state."

There's no guarantee Back to Business would become a nationally-syndicated show or that Deb Neuman would become a name synonymous with small business advice, but it's not fame or financial reward that drives Neuman. For now, she's content producing and hosting Back to Business each week and offering a service to the small-business owners who drive Maine's economy.

And these days, the show is easier to produce now that she doesn't worry about the well running dry on show topics or potential guests, which she did when she first began hosting the show. Now, she says, there's "no end in sight" for what she can do with the show. "The longer I do it the more I realize it's limitless," she says. "I've been in the business of small business in Maine for 20 years. I learn something every single week, and if I am then other people are."