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WASHINGTON, D.C. - Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, a champion of Illinois small and minority-owned businesses, will welcome these groups Nov. 10 to Chicago. Daley will speak about the importance of exports to small business sales growth and job creation at a half-day seminar organized by six federal agencies at the Fairmont Chicago.

Mayor Daley has been a long-time advocate for small businesses and we are delighted to have him reach out to these groups at our Chicago Exports Live! seminar, said Fred P. Hochberg, chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), one of the seminar's six sponsoring agencies. No one is more persuasive than Mayor Daley in convincing seminar attendees that exports are critical to their business growth.

Daley, who has been Chicago's mayor since 1989, is a featured speaker at Exports Live! Real Deals, Real Profits, an eight-city seminar series. The seminars share strategies and resources used by local small and medium-size businesses that already have discovered how to increase profitability through exporting.

Even during these challenging economic times, we are making progress every day with creating and supporting small businesses, the backbone of our city's economy, said Mayor Daley. In Chicago, along with new housing, constructing community anchors such as libraries and police and fire stations, new small businesses and other commercial developments help establish a self-sustaining cycle of economic transformation in our neighborhoods.

Feature presentations and Q & A sessions will involve successful small-business exporters that have benefited from government export services and solutions. Small businesses present will include Pro-Stuff of Rockford, Ill, a new business with less than 10 employees that exported bicycle racing gates to the Beijing Olympics with the support of an Ex-Im Bank $50,000 small business short-term multi-buyer insurance policy. Pro-Stuff now sells these products to over 40 countries and has a $100,000 Ex-Im Bank policy.

Representatives of the government organizations providing these export services also are on the program and available later in the day to offer one-on-one consultations. Leading the meeting will be the heads of Ex-Im Bank, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

The Chicago seminar follows events in New York, Boston, Miami and Houston, and precedes similar sessions in Los Angeles (Nov. 16), Seattle (Nov. 17), and Detroit (Dec. 11). About 800 small businesses, lenders, brokers and trade specialists have attended the first four seminars.

Daley, a former state senator and county prosecutor, was elected mayor of Chicago on April 4, 1989, to complete the term of the late Harold Washington, and was re-elected in 1991, 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2007 by overwhelming margins.

He has earned a national reputation for his community-based programs to address education, public safety, neighborhood development and other challenges facing American cities.