⁄Tactics⁄ You’ve mentioned being familiar with some of the challenges that small businesses face in Portland. Can you elaborate on that? Every small business faces different challenges, whether you’re a creative agency or food and beverage manufacturing company or retail business. For the retail business, it might be foot traffic, or public safety, or any of the challenges around unknowns, around tariffs increasing, goods going up or the cost of labor. Whereas for food and beverage manufacturers, it might be access to capital, getting new markets, how do you grow outside of Oregon? So what we’re really trying to do is not make this an umbrella agency where every small business is the same, because we know every small business is different. Every business district is different. Every part of the city is different. So we’re really approaching it from a one-on-one, human-empathy-focused approach. We want to know what your business is, what your exact challenges are, and then try to find the resources to help people. Certainly the things that I hear from folks [in the business community] are just figuring out what’s the right point of contact, how to get somebody on the phone who can be a liaison to the city, whether they’re concerned about public safety or, very specifically, permitting. I will say when this office got funded, permitting was top of the list. And I will say, over the past months, the permitting team over there has been amazing. They’re helping us write all the website content. There’s going to be a permitting page on the website. There’s no getting around [the fact that] permitting can be difficult and slow, but we’re also trying to work with them on thinking about the process and walking me through it. Our liaisons kind of walked through it last week step by step. Then there were certain points where they even realized, “Oh, that wording is a little bit confusing.” So it’s almost like, how many times can we maybe work with them to bring in small-business owners or those who don’t understand permitting and be like, “Let’s walk through it and just see if we can make it a little better.” But by and large, they’ve been amazing to work with so far. They really kind of see us as a partner in helping small businesses. A lot of it’s just knowledge of “Don’t sign a lease before you actually talk to permitting,” because a lot of small businesses don’t. And then there’s a change of occupancy, and then once that triggers, everything happens, like sidewalks, trees. So their big thing is just talk to us first, because a lot of small businesses don’t have an architect or a developer who understands the permitting process. Mitch Daugherty Opens the Door Daugherty, who was hired last fall to lead Prosper Portland’s Office of Small Business, launched this spring as a first point of contact between business owners and the city. INTERVIEW BY CHRISTEN McCURDY Mitch Daugherty launched his first business partly out of necessity. He’s advocated for entrepreneurs ever since. Or as he puts it: “All I’ve done is run small businesses and nonprofits.” Daugherty launched Arizona Outback Adventures— an adventure travel firm since acquired by REI — after graduating with a degree in conservation biology in 1995 and struggling to find work in his field of study. After leaving AOA, he founded Morange Design, a full-service design firm he led until 2021. When he moved to Portland in 2003 looking for design work, Daugherty got involved with Oregon Entrepreneurs Network and served on the board for seven years, two of them as chair. From August 2014 until October 2024, Daugherty served as the director of Built Oregon, an organization he co-founded at first to tell the stories of small businesses across the state, and that has since launched a mentorship program, distributed more than $300,000 in grants to BIPOC-owned businesses and launched a festival celebrating Oregon-based consumer products. Last fall Prosper Portland — the City of Portland’s economic-development agency—announced that it had hired Daugherty to run its Office of Small Business. When this issue went into production in late April, Prosper had planned to officially launch the office in May and had hired four additional staff to report to Daugherty. “What the city was missing was that part of supporting small business where if you’re a small business, you can come to a front door and talk to a human being, and they can help you navigate all the challenges of city governments,” Daugherty says, noting that a number of other cities already have an Office of Small Business or something similar. The creation of the new office grew partly out of COVID, during which Prosper created a website with guides for navigating grants and small- business loans, and resources for creating a small- business website. In April Daugherty spoke with Oregon Business about what he wants the new office to do for Portland business owners. This interview has been edited for space and clarity. 10
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