Building Shared Success: A Guide to Small Business Job Quality Advising for CDFIs

Maureen Conway

Vice President; Executive Director

Bryn Morgan

Senior Research Associate

with Rossana Espinoza, Former Associate Director, Business Ownership Initiative

This tool offers guidance for small business advisors on how to integrate a focus on job quality into their conversations with their clients. Developed as part of the Shared Success demonstration, the tool is based on the understanding that improved job quality benefits both small businesses and their workers.

It centers business value and includes a variety of information and resources to assist business owners in addressing poor job quality and building successful firms. The tool revolves around two central questions:

• How can implementing job quality improvements help business owners achieve desired business outcomes?
• What strategies can be used by business advisors to demonstrate how these outcomes may surface?

There are many opportunities for small businesses to improve the quality of jobs of their employees as part of their work in building a successful business. 

The job quality advising guide is divided into the following seven steps:

1. Identify the business owner’s motivation and goals as you learn about business challenges.
2. Revisit or discuss the business’s financial position to identify the costs of poor job quality.
3. Build the business owner’s understanding of workers’ perspectives.
4. Determine job quality improvements.
5. Make the connection between job quality improvements and business goals, and support implementation as needed.
6. Assess outcomes of the job quality improvements.
7. Continue support and measure outcomes.

Appendices

• One-Pager on Building Shared Success for Small Businesses
• Building Shared Success Worksheet for Small Business Advisors
• Handout on The Costs and Opportunities of Job Quality For Small Businesses

Testimonials from Shared Success CDFIs

“The advising guide gave us the tools to not only build staff capacity, but to champion job quality work with confidence. It helped to turn an abstract concept into a strategic framework that our leadership team now fully supports and promotes.” – Israel Flores, Business Services Director, Northern Initiatives

“The toolkit has been crucial in helping us tailor job quality work to every client’s unique needs…We’ve highlighted areas that we want to focus on with our community… we’ve honed in on what will be most beneficial to the business owners that we serve.” – Delphine Ntegeye, Loan Officer/Business Advisor at African Development Center

“I wish this guide had been around when I started at CEI and we really bolstered our good jobs program seven years ago… Even for an organization like ours that has been working with businesses that we invest in on job quality, this is a fantastic onboarding tool for new employees. It gives them a great overview, and so much of the methodology is aligned with what we do.” – Cynthia Murphy, Senior Program Director of Workforce, Coastal Enterprises, Inc.

For additional resources on the six categories of job quality detailed in this tool, visit the Building Shared Success topic guide in our Job Quality Center of Excellence.

The first edition of the Job Quality Advising Guide was published in 2024 and has since been updated. If you are trying to access content from the original version, please email us at [email protected].