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The Arizona Small Business Association is a non-profit group that was launched in 1973 to provide resources and information that small-business owners need to make their businesses grow.

A Southern Arizona office opened in Tucson in 2000, and Charlie O'Dowd, senior vice president for the Southern Arizona region, took charge of the branch in 2003.

Today the organization boasts more than 3,000 members statewide, 550 of them from Southern Arizona. It has come to be known for its variety of workshops and classes, as well as regular mixers where business owners and entrepreneurs can get to know each other.

Here are excerpts of an interview with O'Dowd, 59, on Friday.

Q: What is the biggest issue facing small businesses?

A: The biggest issue other than health-care insurance is probably access to employees. There aren't enough people out there. You have baby boomers retiring. You have the generations behind them with a completely different work ethic, and there are fewer of them to provide the services that are needed in the community.

A: Where I believe it will affect small businesses are in those business that have a tendency to hire persons of lower economic stature. And that may be an issue that is going to be dealt with in construction, in landscape maintenance, in those types of industries. It goes to the issue of lack of qualified employees again. It's a sheer numbers issue.

Q: What is the biggest change you have seen over time in the small-business climate in the Tucson area?

A: Persons are becoming more hip to the resources that are available to them. And they're taking advantage of those resources because of the fact that they need to gain information quickly and gain it succinctly, without having the luxury of spending a lot of time, and don't particularly want to spend a lot of money to find those answers.

Q: As an organization, what do you wish you could do more of?

A: One of the things that I would like to get involved in would be bringing nationally known trainers into the community that don't have Tucson on their circuit. That is, they're on the San Diego-Phoenix circuit, but they pass us by, kind of like the rock concerts used to do. And I think that's coming.

Q: As much as 95 percent of the business in Tucson is small business, possibly higher. How unusual is that for a city our size, and what is it that makes it a great place for small business to flourish here?

A: A lot of the small businesses are lifestyle businesses. That is to say, you have people who've been in the corporate environment, who choose to be their own boss, choose to be the makers of their own fortune. And then there are people who are in small business because there aren't a lot of avenues to get into big business here.

I have heard it as high as 97 or 98 percent in Tucson and Pima County. The number is less as a percentage in Phoenix, but there are more big employers there. The country does run on small business — no question.