Co-founder and chairman of CCA Global Partners

Howard Brodsky

Howard Brodsky, co-founder and chairman of CCA Global Partners, has been named Citizen of the Year by the Greater Manchester Chamber. He will be honored April 4 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Manchester Downtown.

Through CCA Global Partners, Howard Brodsky oversees a group of cooperative businesses that extends to several industries, including home flooring, bicycle shops, general contractors and child care centers.

The $14 billion Manchester company, which Brodsky co-founded in 1984, operates in four countries. Its cooperative model allows independent businesses to compete with corporations.

Brodsky recently founded Open Arts United, a nonprofit that aims to bring the arts to underserved groups, and has long been active with philanthropic work in the community.

The Greater New Hampshire Chamber will honor Brodsky as Citizen of the Year on April 4 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Manchester Downtown. This interview, culled from a Down to Business podcast episode, was edited for space and clarity.

Q: Let’s start by talking a little bit about CCA Global Partners, because what you do is a lot, and there are new initiatives that you’re rolling out.

A. Our mission is to save family business in America. I always believe that if you give a family business the same scale as a national chain they’ll win every time. The problem is it’s not a level playing field, and we make it a level playing field.

We do the buying, the marketing, the training, insurance, credit card processing, store design — anything that a business has to do. And we do it with professionalism and scale that they can compete, and we do it in 14 different industries.

We started in the child care world almost 14 years ago now. And that started from some test cases in Colorado. Today we service over 34,000 child care centers and 2.3 million children every day in America. In family businesses, we service almost 800,000. In child care centers, we service about 2 million or 3 million kids.

Q. What does it mean to have that scale? What kind of help were you able to provide to companies as they were going through the pandemic?

A. It’s been a challenging time for small business. During the pandemic, a lot of our competitors were allowed to stay open, Home Depot and Lowe’s and other national chains. And independent family stores weren’t open for about a four- or five-month period. And so there was a lot of challenges, making sure they had all the availability of the Payroll Protection Plan funds. When those funds were available, the following day we were able to secure almost $250 million worth of funds for our members.

But more than that, the buying, the marketing became different, how people bought was different, and more of it was online. And so we were there. And it’s amazing that during the entire pandemic, we did not lose one member in our core businesses.

Q. Consumers may not have any idea that who they’re working with is part of this big group because they’re dealing with the local bike shop. Or they might be dealing with a nonprofit.

A. One thing we always believe is that local businesses are the heart of America. Walmart and Home Depot are not the heart of America. Go look and see who’s coaching a baseball team or was on the church committee. It’s not Walmart. It’s not Amazon. It’s the local store.

I don’t own a share of the company. The company is owned by family businesses all across North America. We return enormous profit to them and have made hundreds of thousands of people enormously successful. It’s kept family businesses alive that would never be able to sustain themselves by themselves.

Q. Do you see any other industries that you haven’t gone into yet that would look like it would work well with this model?

A. We’re building a platform for homeless shelters across the country. It’s very similar to what we did with child care. We built a whole set of services. There’s a model of a very successful homeless shelter in Saint George, Utah, that has figured a way to have for-profit businesses run under the homeless shelter that support the homeless shelter. And they’ve been extremely successful. We have partnered with them to build a cooperative and all the tools necessary to make homeless shelters more efficient and operate better.

For more information about the Citizen of the Year event, visit www.manchester-chamber.org/citizenof-the-year-celebration.