Before There Was A Tea Party, There Was The Perkolator
By Art Gallagher
The Tea Party is getting quite a bit of media attention, both here in New Jersey and throughout the nation for the impact it is making in the current mid-term election campaign.
The Tea Parties, Taxed Enough Already, are committed to electing members of congress who will reduce the size and intrusiveness of government so that businesses can grow, create jobs and restore our economy to healthy vibrancy.
In Monmouth County there is another grassroots group that has been quietly growing for over the last three years that empowers small businesses to grow, create jobs, and restore our regional economy to healthy vibrancy. That group is the Northern Monmouth Chamber of Commerces’s“Perkolator.”
Paul Morris. Photo credit: www.3chicksthatclick.com
The brain child of the Chamber’s Executive Director Paul Morris, the Perkolator was started in 2007 shortly after Morris took the helm of the Chamber. He sent out an email to his membership announcing that he would be having breakfast at a local diner every Friday morning and that any member was welcome to join him to discuss business with him and any other member who showed up. The first week it was just Morris and Lenny Inzerillo, owner of Lenco Mortgage. The second week Brian Compton of J,. Crawford Compton Realty joined them. Three years later, with no more promotion than word or mouth and emails to the membership, 40-60 business people show up every Friday morning at 8am for breakfast at the Keyport IHOP.
Unlike formal networking groups, the Perkolator has no rules or quotas for referals or recruits. Just show up and pay your $10 for breakfast, ($15 for non-Chamber members). Each attendee has an opportunity to introduce themselves and give their “30 second commercial.” Each week Morris arranges for a Chamber member to give a 5 minute presentation on their business.
Well established businesses and new ventures are finding that the Northern Monmouth Chamber of Commerce’s Friday morning Perkolator just the stimulus they are looking for. No red tape required.
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I’ve been thinking that the next “ToDo” for Tea Party activists might be to figure out how to get themselves elected to boards of major corporations – ie becoming voting shareholders and work in enough of their own people to actually change some corporate cultures of corporations that operate based off of tax-payer funded grants and/or just produce/sell services that such activists might deem “unAmerican”… I’d bet that the idea of a people’s take-over of GM could gain some traction, but it seems a lot of Tea Party folks I’ve met might also be interested in taking over pharmaceutical corporations or food production companies. Just some Random Thoughts(R).
Great idea jim but the magnitude of difficulty is about 10 times harder then getting elected tp Congress
Seems like the Chamber is drifting left… When I joined, events were headlined by the likes of Joe Oxley, Art Gallagher or Joe Kyrillos. Now it’s mostly Amy Mallet, Vic Scudiery and Sean Byrnes.
TR – surely difficult, and certainly an area I, and I suspect many others, know little about (as compared to elections for public office, we all at least got the primer in school, right?) and I think it would be a huge undertaking to try to understand the SEC rules and regulations and get enough other people of the same mind-set to understand the same and take action.
If you haven’t, read “Investors Gain New Clout” at
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703632304575451572616571774.html you might give it a read and let the imagination go to work.
It may be 10x harder – but I have to think once in position, it would be easier to make instant changes since, AFAIK, there is no system of checks and balances like there is in gov’t.. Ie, if you’re the chairman of the board and your company is doing stem-cell research, it seems like if you, the chairman, says there will be no more stem-cell research and that the company should return the grant money to the US Gov’t, is there anything to stop such a chairman from making such an order and seeing it done? Maybe a shareholders lawsuit – but if the majority of the shareholders elected you on that very idea, then what? Like I said, just thinking outloud of the possibilities which may or may not exist.