More than 12,000 members and a responsibility that extends beyond them
The Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) is one of the largest chambers of commerce in the country, serving more than 12,000 member companies, ranging from solo entrepreneurs to major corporations such as Progressive Insurance and Sherwin-Williams. Through its small business arm, the Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE), the organization supports the growth of small businesses across Greater Cleveland with programming, events, public policy advocacy, and member benefits.
But Chad Hamman, Vice President of Membership and Product Development, and the GCP team recognized early on that their responsibility extends beyond their membership base. The Cleveland region has a broad ecosystem of organizations supporting businesses at every stage. GCP and COSE are strong at serving established businesses. Other organizations in the ecosystem are strong at serving startups. The question was how to make sure businesses could find the right support regardless of where they entered.
In partnership with EcoMap, GCP launched the COSE Small Business Resource Hub, powered by EcoMap Discover, to serve the entire business community, not just its members.
Spreadsheets, interns, and a system nobody else could use
Before EcoMap, GCP was maintaining its resource information manually in a spreadsheet. The list was incomplete, time-consuming to update, and required a summer intern each year just to keep it current. Nobody outside the organization was using it.
When a business called or emailed looking for a resource, the response was manual. Staff would field the request, search their own records, and try to point the business in the right direction. That process worked, but it didn't scale, and it was only available during business hours.
The challenge is one that chambers and business support organizations of every size will recognize. The information exists, the team knows where to send people, but there's no system that makes that knowledge accessible beyond the staff who hold it.
More than 900 resources, organized for how businesses actually search
The COSE Small Business Resource Hub now includes more than 900 regional resources, all searchable and accessible to any business in Greater Cleveland. The hub is not restricted to COSE or GCP members. It's open to the full business community, including the ecosystem partners who serve those businesses.
Resources are organized by topic, including Access to Capital, Certifications, Coaching and Mentoring, International Trade, Marketing, Technical Assistance, and Cybersecurity. Discover's collections feature also allows the hub to serve different audiences with curated pathways for Solopreneurs, Established Businesses, and Startups, so a first-time founder and a scaling company aren't sorting through the same list.
That structure was a deliberate choice.
Chad describes the approach simply. GCP put the hub out there for the good of the ecosystem, not just for themselves. The organization doesn't own the ecosystem. They're proud to own a tool that enables it.
The hub is available around the clock, which matters for the entrepreneurs who don't keep chamber hours.
"It's there at the hours that entrepreneurs do business, not just at the hours that the chamber of commerce does business," Chad said.
A tech collection that wasn't in the original plan
After launching the resource hub, GCP's technology team saw an opportunity to build something new on top of it. Using Discover's collections feature, they created a dedicated tech collection at greatercle.com/cletechhub/, curating resources specifically for startup and growing technology companies, as well as businesses looking to leverage AI and emerging technologies.
The tech collection was not part of the original rollout. It emerged as the team saw how quickly the technology landscape was shifting and recognized that no single team could keep up with the pace of new platforms, programs, and companies entering the space. Discover gave them a way to organize that information for a specific audience and keep it current without adding manual workload.
The tech community in Cleveland has embraced it. For GCP, it confirmed something Chad had been seeing since the launch. When the underlying infrastructure is flexible, the team can respond to new opportunities without starting over.
Ecosystem partners as co-navigators
One of Chad's goals from the start was to make the resource hub useful not just for businesses but for the organizations that serve them. When ecosystem partners are navigating resources on behalf of their own clients, they use the same hub. That gives the region's support organizations a common reference point.
Businesses enter the Cleveland ecosystem from many different points. Some come through GCP or COSE. Some come through an accelerator, a nonprofit, or a workforce program. The hub gives all of those entry points access to the same comprehensive view of what's available.
GCP's hope is that early-stage businesses who find support through the hub will remember where they found it. As those companies grow, the relationship with COSE and GCP deepens. The hub is open to everyone, and GCP is betting that serving the broader community now is what brings businesses back when they're ready for membership.
A long view on community impact
The Greater Cleveland Partnership's investment in EcoMap Discover was not driven by a specific membership growth target or a single efficiency metric. The biggest measurable impact so far has been time savings for the team. Staff who used to spend hours fielding resource requests manually now have infrastructure that handles the information layer. That time goes back into strategic connections and relationship-building.
Chad frames the investment the same way he frames the hub itself. GCP did this for the good of the business community and the good of the ecosystem. The membership benefit follows from that, not the other way around.
Learn more about the Greater Cleveland Partnership at https://www.gcpartnership.com.
Explore the COSE Small Business Resource Hub at https://cose.org/resourcehub/.