Mechelen reaches out to immigrant entrepreneurs
The city of Mechelen and a non-profit organisation have joined forces to seek out businesses in the city owned by people with foreign roots and offer them help to flourish. Three business owners told Flanders Today what they think of the service
How can we help?
They singled out those establishments that appeared to be run by people with foreign-sounding names, based on their storefronts or their entries in the national registry of enterprises. Though they switched between Dutch, English and French as necessary, their first question to the sometimes wary business owners was always the same: “How are you, and how can we help?”
Referring to Mechelen’s public servants, Lutgart Dusar, who masterminded the initiative, says: “No one had ever done that before – just engaged them in conversation like that.”
These visits were the result of a partnership between the city of Mechelen and ViaVia Tourism Academy, a non-profit organisation that works in sustainable tourism development. They were an integral part of a larger, two-year project financed with a grant from the European Social Fund.
Hard to reach
The initiative Café Herman, the organisers say, was born from a longstanding frustration among city services and associations for the self-employed that immigrant small-businesses owners were difficult to reach. They didn’t join trade committees, they said, didn’t make use of the city’s services for entrepreneurs and seldom participated in local trade initiatives.
Everyone seemed resigned to the fact that immigrants were impossible to reach
“Everyone seemed resigned to the fact that immigrants were impossible to reach,” says Dusar, the ViaVia consultant who wrote and submitted the proposal for a European Social Fund grant in 2012. “I thought: Why not try a different approach?”
The idea behind Café Herman was to take the city’s patchwork of services and programmes for entrepreneurs to foreign small-business owners in the form of two real-life humans – Thomas Rottiers and Ine Van der Stock.
“Cities often seem to think: ‘We’re in the office. If you want what we’re offering, come here,” says Dorien De Troy from ViaVia, who took over the project from Van der Stock last August. Café Herman turned that idea on its head, she says. “We hit the streets.”
Local knowledge
Afrah Happinez was one of the small businesses that Rottiers and Van der Stock called on multiple times. A three-year-old hair salon-cum-catering enterprise, it’s run by two sisters with Moroccan roots who moved to Flanders from the Netherlands 10 years ago.
Zeinab Rerhioui, 24, and her sister Hajar, 28, were in the process of looking for a bigger store when Rottiers visited them in 2013. He was the one who encouraged them to not just look at establishments advertised on the private market but also to sign up for the city’s database of vacant retail spaces.
Although Zeinab didn’t choose one of those locations, she appreciated the information. “I visited a lot of buildings that they told me about. They really helped me a lot with that,” she says.
Rottiers also gave them a heads-up that the city’s massive Hanswijkcavalcade would pass right in front of their door. Organised every 25 years, this historical parade drew 55,000 visitors in 2013.
“If they hadn’t told us, we would have simply been closed because that was a Sunday,” Rerhioui says. “We were able to be prepared thanks to them – so we weren’t there with 50 cupcakes, but with 500 cupcakes.”
Hard going
A 2013 report from RSZ, the state institute for health insurance for the self-employed, shows that one in five new small businesses are now opened by a foreigner. That same report reveals that the number of non-Belgian entrepreneurs shot up by 21% between 2009 and 2013.
A project like Café Herman raises questions about the best way to support this growing group of immigrant start-ups across Flanders and the extent to which cities could – or should – assist these new entrepreneurs.
Though no recent data exists on start-up entrepreneurs’ survival rates according to nationality, starting and keeping a new businesses open is hard – foreigner or not.
According to a 2014 report co-authored by Flemish employers’ organisation Unizo, 30% of new businesses in Belgium flounder within the first five years. Given that the Flemish government’s own 2014 Stadmonitor shows that, out of 13 key Flemish cities, start-up businesses in Mechelen have the lowest success rate, the city’s desire to better assist immigrant entrepreneurs makes sense.
“We need to reach them because it’s very important for a city and for its economic fabric to have strong entrepreneurs,” explains De Troy. “And it’s important for them because they’re better off when they’re united.”
Against the odds
Tenzin Phuntsok, 41, is one of those Mechelen entrepreneurs with the statistical odds stacked against him. He welcomed Rottiers with open arms into the sushi restaurant he opened with two friends on the city’s scenic Veemarkt two years ago.
Yet when pressed on what he got out of those visits, Phuntsok haltingly admits that they were more friendly than economically useful. “We know what to do; we know how to do it. We know all those things,” he says. “We never asked them for anything because we don’t need anything.”
We never asked them for anything because we don’t need anything
Originally from Tibet, Phuntsok came to Belgium in 2002, and he dismisses out of hand the idea that he must have it extra hard as an immigrant entrepreneur. “I don’t feel that, no,” he says. “I have exactly zero problems.”
Pointing out that the challenges of running a business and the accompanying administrative headaches pale in comparison to the hard times he experienced growing up poor in Nepal and India, he adds: “Things are better now. We always have little problems, but you shouldn’t give those too much attention. We can quickly resolve them.”
They were already members of the local trade committee, and they had an accountant who helped them take care of the paperwork, he points out. “But if we ever need something, well, we have Thomas’ number. He said we could always contact him if we needed something.”
That, De Troy says, was the fundamental value of Café Herman for the immigrant entrepreneurs. “A great many of them had absolutely no relationship with the administration,” she says. “Now, they know where they can find the administration and are much more aware of what the city can do for them.”
Family support
Together with her husband, Larisa Mutalibova, 55, runs the Mini Mix grocery store on Onze-Lieve-Vrouwestraat. Originally from Russia, the now naturalised Chechen family settled in Flanders in 1999.
They opened the store in 2007 and moved to their current, much bigger shop a year later. Not long after, they joined a German affiliate of supermarkets with Russian products, Mix Market, which gives them the exclusive right to sell certain Russian products in Mechelen.
It was difficult with the language, and always all those papers
Between exchanging Russian banter with customers and giving instructions to her young daughter in Chechen as she fills in at the counter for her, Mutalibova emphasises she could have never done all this without the support of her four now-grown children who helped her overcome the language and administrative barriers.
“It was really difficult for us to start up the business,” she says. “It was difficult with the language, and always all those papers. We needed a translator. We received papers and didn’t understand what they said.”
Like Phuntsok, Mutalibova couldn’t offer examples of ways in which Rottiers’ visits had helped. She also indicated that her first years as an entrepreneur were the most trying ones, and that is when she might have benefited from a project like Café Herman.
All in all, it’s hard to distil what the value of Café Herman was for immigrant entrepreneurs from Rerhioui, Phuntsok and Mutalibova’s experiences, and the organisers themselves did not poll participants for feedback before or after the project.
Rethinking the approach
Still, Dusar concedes, the project was established in response to public servants and organisations’ complaints rather than actual needs articulated by local foreign entrepreneurs. Its biggest merit, then, might be in that it pushed the city’s economic department to drastically rethink some of its approaches, now that it was no longer from the outside, looking in.
Rottiers, who currently works as a consultant for the city’s economic department, was just one person, De Troy says, but the insights he gathered trickled into the department as a whole. Citing the department’s new tendency to review its own forms with an eye to reader-friendliness, she says: “A reflex has developed now: We want to be more customer-friendly.”
Based on Rottiers and his colleagues’ input, the city’s economic department also revised its offer of Dutch lessons. The standard and initial approach would have been to bring groups of 10 to 20 immigrant entrepreneurs to the city’s Adult Education Centre for four to eight hours of Dutch lessons a week.
“We realised that wouldn’t work from the results and methodology of Café Herman,” Rottiers explains. “We were then given the space to completely overhaul the project, from a general, classroom-style approach, just learning Dutch, to a personalised coaching trajectory in their own shops for one hour a week.”
