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John W. Tulac, a Claremont attorney, believes the Inland Empire could learn a lesson from Orange County.
Not the Orange County of today, necessarily, but the Orange County of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which Tulac saw up close when he was starting his law career in Newport Beach. At the time, Orange County’s business community adopted a hard-nosed approach to dealing with Los Angeles that Tulac believes the Inland Empire should claim as its own: encourage local business, and the local government, to hire local talent.
To promote that idea, Tulac, 73, has started Professionals of the Inland Empire, a weekly half-hour podcast that dropped its first two episodes on YouTube May 8th and 15th, attracting nearly 1,100 viewers combined eight days after the initial launch.
“We’re going to try to change the way business is done in the Inland Empire,” said Tulac, a specialist in international law. ”That approach worked in Orange County, and there’s no reason why it won’t work in the Inland Empire.”
During a recent interview with IE Business Daily, Tulac discussed Orange County’s action of 45 years ago, the current state of the Inland economy, and how he plans to use the local chapters of a national business network to get Professionals of the Inland Empire off the ground.
IEBD: What will the podcast focus on?
A: It’s going to be about doing in the Inland Empire what Orange County did in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the real estate market there exploded. The business professionals in Orange County said to the service companies in Los Angeles County, if you want to continue to do business with us you need to come down here, or send some of your people down here. If you don’t we won’t do business with you.
IEBD: And that idea is catching here?
A: A lot of business people in the Inland Empire believe we should follow that model, and I agree with them.
IEBD: How much of a difference did that approach make?
A: It made a huge difference. I was practicing law in Newport Beach at the time, and I saw it happen. A lot of the big law firms in Los Angeles did send people to Orange County, and they did set up satellite offices there.
IEBD: Where was the Inland Empire when this was going on?
A: No one thought about the Inland Empire in those days.
IEBD: Why do you believe the Orange County model, as you call it, applies to Riverside and San Bernardino counties today?
A: Because the county and the city agencies in both places outsource most of their work to non-inland Empire professionals. Amazon is a good example of what I’m talking about. It has a lot of warehouses in the Inland Empire, but for the most part they don’t hire local talent.
IEBD: Have you ever had to deal with this approach personally?
A: Yes, I have. About eight years ago I was on an ad-hoc committee to bring foreign investment into San Bernardino County. They hired a consultant from Minneapolis to run it, someone who knew nothing about San Bernardino County. There was no point in going to the meetings. It was a complete waste of time.
IEBD: Whose idea was it to start a podcast?
A: Mine. I came up with the idea about four or five years ago. I put it on the shelf because I had other things I wanted to do, but I’ve decided this is the time to do it.
IEBD: Who will you have on as guests?
A: During the first year, every week we’ll have two guests from ProVisors, which is a national business network with more than 10,000 members. It has four local chapters – two in Ontario, one in Corona, one in Riverside – which is where our guests will come from. Our guests will be local business people talking about business in the Inland Empire.
IEBD: Why are you doing this now?
A: Because the idea is still fundamentally sound, and calling attention to the problem can only help improve it. Nothing has changed in the last five years, so I decided to kickstart it.
IEBD: How do you start a podcast?
A: It’s easy. All you have to is hit the record button, and then talk. But if you want anyone to listen you need a backroom all of the technical things I don’t know anything about.
IEBD: How will you market the podcast?
A: We have people who have gotten it onto YouTube, who will do the postings on social media. We have a LinkedIn group devoted to the podcast that we just got started. We’re going to use our own networking contact. From there it will either grow or it won’t.
IEBD: How will you know if it’s a success?
A: I’m looking for a couple of things. One, I want to know how my fellow ProVisor members react to being guests Did they enjoy participating, and do they feel like they put out valuable information? And did the casual listeners, people who maybe don’t know know much about business in the the Inland Empire, learn anything?
IEBD: Are you putting a deadline on this project?
A: I’m going to stick with it until I get enough data to tell me whether or not I should keep going. If the data says give it up, then I give it up, But if it develops business for our (ProVisor) members, that’s a good thing. If we get our government (representatives) to pay attention to our local talent, that would be the best thing. Whether that’s hiring some of our people, or putting them on committees, I don’t know. But that kind of recognition would help.
IEBD: Who is your completion? Are there other Inland Empire business podcasts you will be going up against?
A: Gene Valdez, the Loan Doctor, (a former Inland banker, now a business coach based in Upland) but I don’t see it as competition because we’re going to be doing something completely different. We have different voices, even if we’re talking about the same thing. As far as international trade is concerned, I don’t have any competition in the Inland Empire. I’m the only person doing this.
IEBD: How much of the podcast will deal with international trade?
A: I will comment on it if it gets mentioned, but it will not be the point of the podcast, because the podcast isn’t about me. It’s about a group of very smart, interesting people who are all local and who all have something to say. It will be exposure for them and their businesses.
IEBD: Historically, how would you describe the Inland Empire economy?
A: The Inland Empire tends to be an indicator of bad times. Unemployment will go up in the Inland Empire before it goes up in the rest of California. People who live here, but who work in Los Angeles or Orange counties, get laid off, but that job loss gets counted here, not there. You also see a downturn in logistics in the Inland Empire that you don’t see in other places.
IEBD: We aren’t really seeing any of that yet.
A: No, we aren’t, but imports are down, and that will eventually have an impact.
IEBD: We are now in a tariff war with several countries, most notably China. Can you speculate on how this might hurt the Inland economy.
A: The worst case is that it sticks, that the tariff war is protracted, and that the tariffs are steep. That will hurt the Inland Empire, because the transportation of goods will go way down. The companies that rely on component parts to make things here will get hammered.
IEBD: How big an issue is it locally? How much are people talking about it?
A: I’ve gotten more calls from companies about tariffs – companies that otherwise would never call me — in the last three months than I’ve gotten in 30 years. Unfortunately, there’s not much can do for them.
IEBD: Is there any advice you can give them?
A: The best I can do is tell them be resilient, to stay the course, and don’t do something you’re going to regret later. In the meantime, try to share the burden. Because as worried as we are here, the mom and pops shops in China are panicked. They know they might go out of business. We can vote the people we don’t like out of office, but it doesn’t work that way over there.
