Embarrassment in Entrepreneurship?

A great quote from the founder of LinkedIn:

"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/technology/article/the-iterate-fast-and-release-often-philosophy-of-entrepreneurship-ben-parr




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Opportunity: State Operations Manager, East Tennessee

Tennessee, like neighboring Virginia, has a broadband initiative plan. Broadband, as noted during the presentation a group of participated in at Supercomm 2009, is a key to balancing economic development with innovation.

As such, this might be of interest to readers: a job opening at ConnnectedTN.org


Connected Tennessee is a part of Connected Nation, the country’s leader in working with communities and providers to break down the digital divide. If there is someone you think might be a good fit for the position, please hasten them to visit the job posting currently available at http://www.connectedtn.org/about_us/careers.php.

The departing person will be available to assist in the transition, as will Executive Director, Michael Ramage.

Pop Up Shops - A Mall Owner's Dream?

Yahoo News and Time magazine have a great story about "pop up shops" which appear in malls for a period of time. The article's premise is that mall owners and management need to fill empty mall slots, especially during the holiday season, and that entrepreneurs with a good idea and enough inventory might just be the ticket to sprucing up the facade between now and year's end.

Just, please nothing offensive at the Johnson City Mall, given their impeccable taste.

Co-working or Incubation? The Debate

Along with my friend and colleague, Jose Castillo, who runs the SparkPlaza co-working space, I'm going to be part of a "debate" on the merits of co-working versus incubation for those businesses that want to move from the spare bedroom to the boardroom.

The event, held in conjunction with the Northeast Tennessee Technology Council, debuts at SparkPlaza in Johnson City, TN, from 8:00-9:30 AM on 23 November 2009. It's also been added to the LaunchPin calendar.

A potential list of topics / questions, comparing supervised growth vs organic growth (the two basic tenets of entrepreneurial growth, here are the topic points:

1. Why do entrepreneurs move from their spare bedroom to a co-working or incubation facility?

2. What services are provided by each (tactical, such as copier, fax, phones, internet; strategic such as small business advice, mentoring)?

3. How big can one scale a company inside each?

4. What does "graduation" from a co-working space and from an incubation space?

5. What equity stake does the co-working or incubation group take in the companies that are part of each facility? In other words, is co-working peer-to-peer or are some peers more equal than others?

We've also decided to add two guest debaters to help tag-team two topics of great interest:

First, Yvette Fragile, formerly with Knoxville News-Sentinel and now with iShoptheTri.com, will help Jose and Tim make sense of the the roles of social and traditional media in business startup marketing. Second, Rayford Johnson from the ETSU innovation lab will help expand the incubation / co-working debate when we look at for-profit versus not-for-profit incubation.

Look forward to seeing you there, if you're in the area and can make it.

Opportunity: Johnson City (TN) Economic Development Summit

Back in 2002, the Johnson City, TN, city manager and a group of local economic development practitioners convened a summit to look at business development, tourism and a few other categories of interest. Since then the annual summit has attracted

The summit's mission statement is typical in its length and denseness of thought but atypical in its ability to distill a singular vision: help entrepreneurs and small businesses grow.

"Our enduring mission is to contribute to the economic and business development of the region (on behalf of Johnson City/Jonesborough/Washington County). We strive to serve as an advocate for small business and entrepreneurs and aspire to provide critical information on recources to businesses either coming into the area or needing additional resources to support their business growth."

The summit is split up in to a number of working groups focused on the development of business, infrastructure, tourism and workforce, with others focused on enhancing health and medicine as well as livable communities.

The Business Development Group is "comprised of individuals and entities representing the interests of area entrepreneurs, city, county, university, and private efforts; unified by a shared vision of improving and promoting Johnson City, Jonesborough, and Washington County as an economically vibrant and viable business-friendly community."

Again, another mouthful, but the public-private partnership approach - when applied to the improvement of the community as a whole - is a worthwhile goal that any local entrepreneur should consider participating in.

The event is set for October 20, 2009, and details can be found on the LaunchPin calendar.

Opportunity: Small Business Awards (KOSBE)

For any small business in Kingsport, Tennessee, and the surrounding area, the Kingsport Office of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (KOSBE) program comes highly recommended (see previous post).

As a part of the Kingsport Area Chamber of Commerce, KOSBE hosts a small business award contest and celebration.  This year's judges include officials from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the State of Tennessee Economic and Community Development Business Enterprise Resource Office (BERO) and the U.S. Small Business Administration.

The deadline for entries is 11:59 PM Eastern Time on October 30, 2009 (and has been added to the LaunchPin calendar; remember, this year, the "fall back" doesn't happen until after Candy Day, err, Halloween).

The following details are provided by KOSBE's executive director, Aundrea Wilcox:


The annual KOSBE Awards' recognition and celebration event is set for Thursday, December 10, 2009 at BANQ, a downtown Kingsport meeting venue, from 5:30 - 7:00 PM.


Each winner will receive a variety of prizes: a KOSBE helm award at the celebration event;  a  digital award emblem to display on their company literature and web site; recognition during Kingsport Chamber and KOSBE events as well as "spotlight" placement on Kingsport Chamber and KOSBE web sites. Winners will also receive recognition in the Kingsport Times-News newspaper and one free class enrollment in the two-day class entitled “Achieving World-Class Results” offered by the nationally-renowned Pal’s Business Excellence Institute (the latter is valued at $800). 


A $25 application fee includes one free ticket to the awards celebration event.  Applicants are also encouraged to submit a 2-minute video, along with their paper or online application, detailing the applicant's business.   

For more information visit kosbe.org. 

Perspective: Entrepreneurship is the New Retirement

Interesting take in the latest US New and World Report, an article by Emily Brandon titled "Entrepreneurship is the New Retirement" starts with this line:

Entrepreneurs never really retire; they just move on to their next project.

Brandon goes on to talk about early retirees choosing to go back in to business, albeit small or startup business.  Some of them choose to do so based on financial needs - Brandon notes one armchair entrepreneur put all of her life savings in to a franchise since it looked more lucrative than keeping it in stocks and bonds - but many choose an entrepreneurial retirement as a way to maintain and sharpen mental faculties.

When I was asked to write the business plan for KOSBE back in 2004, one of the underlying reasons that my clients, the Kingsport Chamber and the City of Kingsport, wanted to address small business development was due to the fact that the town's largest employer had been systematically reducing headcount through enticement, namely lump-sum early retirement packages.

These former Fortune 500 executives would spend a few months doing nothing (or playing golf every day, which was a bit worse than doing nothing, although it may not have seemed so at the time) and then realize they missed work.

Yet many of them did not want to go back into full-time work, so we put an explicit strategy goal in place to address their need for synaptic stimulation with an equally challenging goal of finding mentors for young up-and-coming small business owners. One of our goals stated:


 Calculated risk-taking coupled with effective entrepreneurship allows mentoring opportu-
nities between the young just starting a business career and the experienced early retiree
or “gray hair” – both together can provide a balance of risk taking and risk mitigation.

In other words, we offered to work with the early retirees, many of whom chose to stay in the local area rather than uproot family, to get their own business started IF they were willing to work with a young person, mentoring them and teaching a skill, with the possibility of turning over the business to the young person once the retiree really wanted to retire. A succession-planned business from the outset.

Turned out to be highly popular among these early retirees, and may have served to foreshadow the fact that Entrepreneurship is the New Retirement.

Small business development is economic development!

Ok, I admit that I complain alot about the lack of technology development and small business development (and especially small technology business) in old-school economic development, but this quote from a recent article really drove home the need for stimulating small business ....

Turns out we're now at the highest youth unemployment rate since World War II, with over 9 million or 52% of youth unable to find a job. During previous recessions -  early '80s, early '90s and 2000s - unemployment among 16-to-24 year olds never went above 50 percent and job growth followed within two years. This recession, though, is different.

In the NY Post article, Al Angrisani, a former assistant Labor Department secretary, states the construction of the current stimulus bill may delay small business job growth.

"There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country," Angrisani said in an interview last week. "All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses."

There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.

"If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession," Angrisani noted.

Hmm. Small business and entrepreneurs as the path toward recovery? Makes perfect sense to me. But do they teach this @ IEDC?

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Milestone: Virginia Entrepreneurship Program

This from Sandy Ratliff:

Virginia's Entrepreneur Express Program is continuing to build momentum in Virginia...over 7,500 participants since Oct. 2006 and growing.

Find out more about the program and a listing of upcoming workshops in Virginia by visiting www.vastartup.org.

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Opportunity: Free Co-Working . . . and Cake

Co-working, the idea of sharing office space, has been around since, well, before Office Space. It comes in various forms and flavors, from incubators offering virtual incubation that includes use of a conference room and by-the-day office or cubicle, to Regus and Laptop Lane offering shared facilities around the country to its members.

In the Tri-Cities region (the NC-TN-VA border area where are live) there are several government or not-for-profit incubators offering this option, and two for-profit co-working spaces.

Spark Plaza, one of those for-profit co-working spaces is celebrating its birthday next week, October 2. More precisely, its half-birthday.  Below are the basics, with more details on the Launchpin.com calendar:

"We're always looking for an excuse for a party - and Spark Plaza has a great reason to celebrate.

On Friday, October 2nd, Spark Plaza marks its 6 month anniversary, so we throwing a 0.5 Birthday Party!

Join us for First Friday Free co-working  from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. then grab some dinner in downtown and come back for some  cake and ice cream from 7 p.m. until 9 p.m.

Jose and Shannon Castillo"

Opportunity: Greenville (SC) Alliance for Excellence Ethics Conf

A conference for those interested in ethical business.

The Forum on Biblical Business Ethics, sponsored by Alliance for Excellence, will take place Oct. 15–17 on the campus of Bob Jones University. Visit www.allforexcellence.org for details on registration, hotels, transportation and conference activities.

Topics that Affect You Today

The conference is designed to help and encourage Christian men and women in business as well as Christians who own their own businesses. High-level speakers from companies such as Hines, Tucker Advisory Group, CF Capital, Jiffy Lube, Federal Express and Michelin North America will address topics such as:

• How a Christian can commit to biblical ethics and maintain a clear Christian testimony in the business world
• How to operate a business by biblical principles
• The interaction of Christian business people with government
• The changing role of the U.S. in the global economy
• The status of the economy

Extra Benefits

Conference attendees will have the opportunity to network with other Christians in business and with Christian college students preparing for business careers.

10 Continuing Professional Education (CPE) units are available and can be requested in advance of registration.

Registration

Register online or by mail. Registration fee is $150. $50 off registrations received on or before Sept. 28.

Opportunity: TechStar 2009 - We Become What We Celebrate

While a board member, I was involved in several of the early TechStar awards for the Northeast Tennessee Tech Council (NETTC.org). I have been delighted to see the awards ceremonies continue, accompanied by a tech symposium that was also started during my tenure on the board.

Below is an excerpt with details on the 2009 TechStar awards and symposium:


If you are a business or a non-profit and have used or developed technology to reduce costs, assist with daily operations or improved a process or outcome, then you are eligible to apply for a 2009 TechStar Award this year!  There are 9 categories for consideration and we will be honoring the 2009 TechStar award recipients at a luncheon to be held on October 15, 2009 at 11:30 am at the Millennium Centre, in Johnson City, TN. 

Applications can be emailed (dboggs@nettc.org) or faxed (423.279.9066) to the NETTC office no later than 4pm on Friday, September 25. For additional information, please contact the NETTC office at 423.863.3216 prior to the deadline.


Download the application at www.techstarawards.com or click here for a PDF version. Details on the Tech Star awards and symposium have also been added to the LaunchPin calendar.

Opportunity: 40 Under 40 Awards

Catching up on news after returning from IBC 2009 in Amsterdam, and here's a good piece of news: the 17th Annual 40 Under 40 Awards will be presented on September 25, 2009.

This information from The Business Journal of Tri-Cities Tennessee/Virginia (yes, the longest Business Journal name this side of the Mississippi):


The Business Journal of Tri-Cities Tennessee/Virginia will honor 40 of the region’s top business professionals September 25, at the 17th annual 40 Under Forty awards ceremony at the Millennium Centre, 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. with a social hour to begin at 6:30.


Keynote speaker Dr. Phil Roe, United States Congressman representing Tennessee’s First Congressional District will speak to this year’s class of 40 Under Forty honorees, inducting them into a highly-respected group that includes preceding winners David Davis, Ron Ramsey, Jason Mumpower, Steve Smith, Tommy Greer, Miles Burdine, Vance Cheek, Jr., April Eads, Robert Feagins, Jeff Fleming, Jon Lundberg, Ben Mallicote, Sam Messimer, Timothy Siglin, David Temple and Tony Treadway, to name a few.


More information is available at www.40under.com/gala.shtm

Luxembourg

Casemates, fortifications, bridges and bulwarks: Luxembourg is as much a study in small niches and hide-a-ways as it is in modern banking and the Grey List.




It is also a city of normality, with a market on Saturday that brings out the ladies dressed for market.




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We're not in business to . . .

This phrase is often heard, followed by either a truism or a myth.

I've often let these pontifications, or even stereotypes, blow right by; a recent discussion, however, struck me as odd enough to reflect on these sayings - and respond appropriately.

"We're not in business to be altruistic"

This sentence, if uttered in my native New York, would be a truism, except for the philanthropic few that support the arts or their favorite charity.

Yet it was uttered in my adopted home in Tennessee, in a conversation between two ex-pat New Yorkers discussing the local business climate. I agree, in principle, with the sentiment, and will be counted among those who will work hard, logging the hours and miles, to see a project through to fruition and profit.

Yet the profit motivator is a good scorecard, bit it's not the only - or most important - one.

Knowing about, and playing against, the other scorecards, which require both philanthropy and altruism, is highly important in the parts of the US that aren't New York or LA. Especially in parts of the burgeoning yet reserved Southeast.

Otherwise, industrial meets suburban or rural in yet another round of misunderstanding, necessitating the translation of phrases and values to make each relevant to the other.


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