 Welcome back Ohio means business experts agree the middle market is critical to the health of the US economy, but measuring the influence of middle market companies is difficult. Ohio State Fisher College of Business and GE Capital will host a national summit on the middle market to better understand and help this significant group of businesses. Joining us to go inside the research now is Anil Makija, finance professor at Ohio State Fisher College of Business. We appreciate your time, Anil. Thanks. We'll talk about that summit in just a few minutes. First of all, let's talk about this mysterious middle market. How do you define it? Well, as you know, attention normally goes to the well-resourced large firms and of course very deservedly small firms also get a lot of attention. But there is a whole swath, the backbone of the economy that lies in the middle. We are defining it temporarily at least from ranging from 10 million revenues to about a billion. But as you mentioned, people really don't know much about this segment. Many of them are private firms and so this is a whole area of under-recognized firms. Typically it's not a public company and less than a billion sounds like a lot, but less than a billion is considered a small or medium-sized business, right? Correct. And you know, as I said, given that it's under-researched, there is even some debate as to how to draw the lines. We've at least temporarily drawn the line from 10 million to a billion, which is a pretty good range. But within that are all these privately-held firms, a lot of privately-held firms. And we're not just talking about a mom and pop corner shop. I mean, we're talking about significant businesses like maybe a brewery or a shoe company, right? Sure. And for example, just turning to some local firms, R.G. Berry, which is a dominant firm in the slipper industry, but doesn't make it to the large firms, would be a good example. Another example would be a small investment banking firm here in central Ohio, headquartered here, would be Lancaster Pollard. Yeah, who we just heard from, yeah. Perfect examples. This middle market, it's very significant to the economy, isn't it? And why? Yes. If you look at its contribution to the GDP, which is about $3.8 trillion at this point, it would rank like the fourth largest economy in the world right after Japan, but before Germany. Wow, that is amazing. The power of the middle market is certainly there. So why is it, I don't know if neglected is the right word, but it is sort of neglected and forgotten. Why is that? Well, there are a couple of things. One of which is, of course, as I mentioned, larger firms are well resourced and well positioned, multinationals, they get visibility, they have the greater ability to lobby. And smaller firms, because they are known as a center of innovation, have also received attention. And perhaps well deservedly, they also have some formal advocates, such as a small business administration. But here in the middle, you have a whole diversity of firms, and consequently, given that many are privately held, we know less about them, and therefore, they get less attention. So research is hard, but is research even being done or attempted? Well, very little research has been done, and that's one of the reasons for having the summit to bring attention to those issues which pertain to the swath of firms. By the way, these firms also account for nearly one third of the total employment. And perhaps very important to this point in time, in the last recessionary period from 2007 to 2010, these firms actually added nearly two million jobs. And there are, you know, if you look at the Census Bureau data, this whole segment is only about 195,000 firms. In the small segment, you have like six million. And in the very large, you have only about 2,000. Now you can see that if this one 95,000 with its job creation ability got attention, we could learn a lot more about what they could do for the economy, their needs, et cetera. And that's part of the reason for this summit. That's such an important sector. You mentioned the summit. Officially, it is called the 2011 National Middle Market Summit, appropriately named. This is the first week in October at Fisher College, hosted by them and GE Capital, as you mentioned. So the summit, what do you hope to get out of it? Well, several things. Let me first, of course, recognize and note our appreciation for the support we are getting from GE, because as I mentioned, this is a segment that hasn't been given much attention. We are happy to see some resources available to do that. And from the summit, we hope to gather a large number of middle market CEOs, share some of the research that we've done, and largely to initiate a conversation that identifies the needs, the issues, those topics that we need to research, perhaps the building of a database. Those are the kinds of things that we hope the discussion will bring out, so that this segment also begins to get the attention it deserves. The list of people there is pretty cool. That's my way to describe it. Pretty cool. Governor John Kasich, four-star general, Stanley McChrystal, and then, of course, Dean Poon from Fisher, and the list goes on and on. And the CEO of GE, Mr. Jeff M. Melt and CEO of GE Capital, Mike Neal. Other luminaries include Mark Benioff, Chris Anderson, Fred Smith of FedEx. I think we have quite a lineup, Roger Penske. Like an all-star game. Certainly. So has something like this been done before? Or to this scale, anyway? I don't think so. I think the segment is under service, and this kind of attention for this segment has not been brought about before. A final thought. Taking away from this summit a company that goes to the summit and learns something, what is a middle market company take away from this summit? Well, one of the things that we are going to also mention in the summit is that despite all the problems in the economy in the last few years, a number of middle market firms actually grew very strongly. And one of the things we are going to do is highlight the characteristics of these firms. So hopefully they are a bit of a role model for everyone else. Anil Makija, thanks for your insight. Thank you. We do appreciate it. Well, the 2011 National Middle Market Summit, leading from the middle, takes place on Thursday, October 6th, and will be streamed live on the web. To register, you can go to our website on NTV.com and click on the Ohio Means Business logo. You'll find a link on our webpage.