By Christina O’Connor

As the president and CEO of a regional Better Business Bureau, Tyler Andrew oversees the organization’s operations in several states including Hawaii, but one of his priorities this year is to expand its presence in the Islands.

To that end, he said he is focused on expanding BBB’s local network, increasing the number of Hawaii businesses that are BBB accredited and growing its partnerships.

BBB is a nonprofit that aims to foster trust in the marketplace by promoting ethical business practices through publishing business profiles, customer reviews and complaints, and ratings. It has an accreditation program that evaluates applicants on several standards, including an owner background check, and establishes a set of values for member businesses.

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Tell me about your plans to grow your presence in Hawaii this year.

Hawaii is so unique because it’s relationship driven. … And so that’s really my first priority is to continue to expand my network. Whenever I come to town, I have meetings set up with leaders of organizations. Also we do a number of shows through our partnerships — with BIA, for instance, we [had a booth] at the home show [last] weekend. … And then I also speak locally. A lot of the insurance companies and banks in the area have cohorts where businesses go through training, and we like to be a part of that. We speak about a number of things that are impacting businesses.

We also want to grow our accredited business community. Currently, we have 1,685 total members. We want to grow this community so consumers will have more trusted options for business. It’s something that I’ve been focusing on, and I also work on the retention side as well. Every time I’m in Hawaii, I have meetings with existing clients.

Another part is partnerships. We’re not able to do all things for businesses, but through our partnerships we can have complementary services. We have a partnership with BIA, and then also the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii that just kicked off at the end of last year. We’re continuing to look at other partnerships where we can continue to increase our reach.

And then finally, we have a new program that we started last year called Restoring Trust. Restoring Trust is on the consumer side where we look for consumers that have been defrauded. We had our first program on Maui at the end of last year and would like to do several more throughout Hawaii. It’s a community-powered initiative of BBB Foundation that helps people recover from harmful encounters with dishonest businesses, especially in the trades industries. By connecting fraud survivors with vetted, philanthropic accredited businesses, we help rebuild what was lost and remind the community that good business still exists.

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