SBA appointee is used to tilling big shoes.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Money Matters - Small Business Administration's Region VIII's Elton Ringsak - Brief Article

whatever hard times businesses in the West are going through, Elton "Mick" Ringsak can probably relate.

His family owns and operates Miller's Boots and Shoes in Butte, Mont., a store founded in 1917 by relatives on his wife's side -- brothers who survived a mine fire that killed more than 100 people and resolved never to work underground again. The brothers used their savings to open a shoe store, and it has operated in Butte ever since.

More important, Ringsak knows the cyclical nature of business, particularly in this region. In recent years, Butte has lost two of its major employers -- through a mine closure and the divestiture by Montana Power Co. of its energy businesses, headquartered in Butte. And then, like so many businesses in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, sales at Miller's Boots and Shoes dropped 30 percent.

Ringsak's empathy for the small-business owner became important in mid-October when the 58-year-old decorated Vietnam veteran was named Regional Administrator of the Small Business Administration's Region VIII, an area of 500,000 square miles covering Colorado, Montana, North and South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.

Miller's Boots and Shoes has never applied for an SBA loan. Whether "Grandpa Miller" ever needed one is hard to say since the agency didn't exist for the store's first 36 years. But Ringsak knows that plenty of businesses in Region VIII could use the SBA's help. He knows that partly because he spent 11 years on the SBA's Montana State Advisory Council, including two years as its chairman.

"The SBA is the best-kept secret in government," Ringsak says. "I think what's important to the SBA is that the disaster of September 11 affected the entire economy, and it doesn't seem to matter what business you're in. And small businesses, more than large companies, tend to have challenges with cash flow. Place that on top of the slow economy in general ... that's where the SBA can help."

According to the SBA, Region VIII is the most rural in the nation, and Ringsak can vouch for the region's vastness.

His first week on the...