Sheri Welsh comes from a family rich in entrepreneurial spirit, and she has recently been appointed the chair of the Small Business Association of Michigan (SBAM), which advocates for and supports more than 33,000 Michigan small businesses.
Not only did her parents own their own businesses, but her grandparents on both sides of her family did as well, so the desire to be a business owner is part of her heritage. “Anyone who thinks that being an entrepreneur is not a genetic thing, I would beg to differ,” says Welsh, founder and CEO of Welsh & Associates in Kalamazoo, an executive talent search firm specializing in small to mid-sized companies.
“The ability to control your own destiny and to provide a service or run an operation in a way that impacts other people’s lives and your community positively and gives you the ability to be able to give back to your community in the way that you want to — that is very appealing.”
How did you get to where you are today?
I was born in Detroit, and at the end of my fifth-grade year my parents moved to Oscoda to start a business. I graduated from high school there and went to Central Michigan University for four years and then moved to Kalamazoo.
My bachelor’s program (in business administration) required an internship to graduate. I was able to finagle — and I do say the word “finagle” — a full-time internship with Gilmore’s Department Store in the summer of 1985. They had never had an intern before. I said, “Look, I want to come to work for you. This is what I think I could do for you.” At the end of summer they said, “OK, we know that you’ve got nine credits (left). We’d like to hire you for a full-time position as our special-events coordinator. However, we know you want to finish your degree. How can we figure this out?” I was able to go to Western Michigan University and transfer those credits to graduate from Central. Gilmore’s gave me time off during the day to complete my coursework. I graduated with a full-time job. In 1985 it was tough for college graduates to find jobs, so I was fortunate.
I stayed there for nine years. I transitioned to outside sales for five years, the last stint of which I was placed in by a recruiter. When it was time to do something different, I went to that recruiting firm and said, “Hey I’m looking for something new,” and they wanted me to come work for them — and I laughed. It was a commission job. I was married at the time and had two small children. It seemed like a big risk, but it apparently was where God wanted me, because every other door I had been exploring closed and it was the option left. In my sales role I had called on a lot of financial professionals across Southwest Michigan, and so I thought, “I’ll start out and develop a practice focused on placing accounting and finance professionals because I know them and I can leverage that.” And that’s what I did.
How has Welsh & Associates evolved since you founded it in 2002?
We continue to evolve all the time. In my role as a CEO, I’m a doer and up to my elbows in the day-to-day operations of my business, but I’m also its visionary and strategist. Part of my responsibility is looking out over the horizon. What is coming at us next? What is happening in the economy? What is happening in the industries that our clients work in? What is happening with the evolution of supply chain, human resources, in the executive search and the recruiting industry?
When job boards first came online, people said it would be the death of the recruiting industry. It wasn’t. It simply made more information available to more people with more access, but it didn’t allow companies to find talent any faster. It just allowed people to send resumes easier and for companies to get inundated with responses that didn’t fit what they were looking for.
Today everyone’s really concerned about AI, saying it’s going to replace our industry. It’s not, because we introduce our clients to talent they can’t find on their own. Our secret sauce isn’t the best technology to go out and scrape the internet for names. It’s reaching out, contacting people and inviting them to consider opportunities. It’s direct recruitment, and it’s the network that we built year over year. It’s a spidering effect: The more people you know, the more you do. The more you do, the more you have success, the more people want to work with you.
What are some of the challenges facing small businesses today?
The big challenge for small business owners right now is providing affordable health insurance. Michigan small business has seen double-digit increases in health insurance premiums the past several years. Double digit. Your bottom line suffers. I think we all know businesses are in business to make profit. If they don’t make profit, they cease to exist. There is no easy answer, but SBAM is willing to get in the fight and raise the issue. The worst-case scenario, if you play it out, is that premiums keep going up (and) small businesses say, “I can’t afford health insurance anymore,” and drop coverage for their employees. We don’t want small businesses to have to make those difficult decisions.
What are some initiatives of SBAM?
This fall we launched Nurture Benefits, a program to expand health insurance, life insurance and retirement options for the child care industry. There are not enough child care options so people can go back to work, and child care is not affordable. Part of the reason it’s not affordable goes back to benefits.
The cost of running child care operations is really high. Nurture Benefits will help expand access and stabilize child care affordability, making it easier for child care providers to provide benefits for their employees, attract workers and retain those workers, which then allows Michigan’s workers to find a place to put their kiddos so they can get back to work. We’re super excited about it.
— Interview by Jordan Bradley, edited for length and clarity
