Update/Context: Successful businesses understand that every customer interaction is an opportunity, no matter the circumstances. This article highlights how some Independence retailers have turned what some see as a nuisance—parade crowds and festival-goers—into a valuable chance to welcome new customers. By embracing events like Neewollah and making their stores inviting, these businesses build lasting relationships and increase sales. The lesson is clear: whether it’s parade day or an ordinary afternoon, a warm welcome and a customer-friendly approach can turn casual visitors into loyal patrons.

"I Love A Parade" is a song recorded by Victor Arden and Phil Ohman and their orchestra 1931.  Although I wasn’t around in 1931, I remember this march.  People still love a parade, especially a Grand Parade such as we’ll experience this Saturday in Independence.  Retailers I’ve known along a parade route, however, have not always been thrilled to host a parade.  A group of Independence business owners have figured out the secret to making “parade time”; i.e. “Neeowollah week” valuable as a way to boost sales and/or build customer loyalty for the future. 

In a previous life, early 1980’s, I was president of a group named “Downtown Garden City”.  This was before the creation of the Kansas Main Street (KMS) program in the mid-1980’s.  (Although the state of Kansas unwisely scuttled KMS as a state-sponsored program a few years ago, the Independence Main Street program continues as a strong and vital organization working for the prosperity of downtown Independence.)  The widely held belief among the merchant members of Downtown Garden City was that “nothing kills business like a parade.” 

A few years ago, Brian Hight and Ryan McDiarmid of Magnolia Scents by Design (formerly Magnolia Health and Home) decided to buck the trend of looking at Neewollah as a nuisance and instead decided to use the event as a way to meet new customers.  Instead of restricting hours and posting a large “No Public Restroom” sign during the week, the two extended their hours and actually put up a sign that welcomed festival goers to come inside and use their restroom facility.  Imagine, on the way back to the restroom, strangers noticed the great store with great, friendly people.  They began to buy and they bought—and still buy--big.  A couple of years ago, Brian told me that Neewollah week was second only to the busiest week of the Christmas holiday season in sales volume. 

When Tom Schwarz, One-Stop Pack-N-Ship and Terry Trout, Ane Mae’s and Ane Mae’s Gifts and Goodies took ownership of the ground floor of the iMall building at 325 N Penn, they made it a point to continue the tradition of making the restrooms available to the public.  Their doors say “Public Restrooms” and their exterior banner (printed at Fab Lab ICC) leads off with “Clean Restrooms”. 

Lance and Judy Stanislaus, former owners of Uncle Jack’s at Penn and Main, used to actually invite people to bring their “Neewollah vendor” food into the restaurant and enjoy it with an Uncle Jack’s beverage. 

I once saw a glowing Facebook post on the Magnolia page espousing the great store, great products and friendly service.  The one thing the poster remembered and appreciated above all else was the way in which Magnolia welcomed them to come in and use their restroom facilities during Neewollah. 

The secret to retail commercial success is the same during Neewollah week in October as it is at any other time.  Welcome people into the business and make them comfortable while they are there. 

Update/Context: Before my retirement as Fab Lab ICC Director in September 2022, I envisioned making this article a Christmas tradition, much like the classics "It's a Wonderful Life" or "A Christmas Story." The 2024 holiday season is the perfect time to embrace gifts that are battery-free, screen-free, and entirely non-digital.

When I was growing up, let's just say it was several years ago, battery operated toys were just coming into existence. In those days, batteries (technically, energy cells) were expensive enough that most electric toys were sold without them. Hence, the phrase we still sometimes hear today "Batteries not included.” It was kind of a sign that you were up to date with technology if you got something for Christmas that required batteries. Parents wanted to give their kids the latest so why give those boring, non-electric gifts like Legos, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs or erector sets when the kids wanted the electric toys that had lights, bells and the ability to move around on their own through simple electric motors? 

One of my favorites from my era was a "robot" similar to those appearing in movies and shows like "Lost in Space.” Also, at that time, the "Jetson's" animated cartoon show sported "Rosie" the robot maid. Although hokey by today's standards, we didn't know of anything else so the robot that would merely light up and move around the floor was as exciting to us as the more sophisticated cool robots of today. That early robot didn't teach me much, except how to insert the batteries in the right direction but it was a cool toy. Fortunately for me, I kept on playing with the Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs and my erector set. 

The trend to electric and now electronic toys has continued over the last 50 years--admittedly, with some really cool technology always emerging. This keeps parents wanting to make sure their kids have the latest electronic gadgets. Unfortunately, this trend has contributed to two or three generations of folks who, by and large, don't know how to make things with their hands. Actually, many don’t try to make anything with their hands or fix anything around the house as they lack the imagination inspired by playing with hands-on toys that required tinkering and making. 

We saw this all the time at Fab Lab ICC with people of all ages that were not very adept at using their hands. In the first year we were open, 2014, one of our ICC students was a wizard at creating complex 3d drawings, using a computer program, but he couldn't make anything with his hands. He didn’t know a Philips from a flat-head screwdriver. He moved on before we could give him much experience at using hand tools and making things and will be at a disadvantage in his professional and personal life. 

Over the last few years, as we brought kids to Fab Lab ICC for maker boot camps, STEM camps and other activities, we made sure there was plenty of working with hand tools mixed in with the digital work of creating files that run the cool fabrication machines. Here's the thing. The kids love making things with their hands as much as making digital files on the computer. 

The most successful people in the future at work, at home and in business—and the future is now--are those who will make things using drills, screwdrivers and hammers combined with the latest digital technology. Even those in a non-maker profession will be better at solving work-related problems because of their ability to create and make. 

I'm not really advocating a totally battery-free Christmas, however, the toys we give, and the activities we provide for our kids (of all ages) need to be a combination of the cool technology along with some handwork with manual hand tools. The learning and increase in self-confidence that happens with this combination is phenomenal and very satisfying for the gift giver to observe. 

Update/Context: As we approach the end of 2024 and start of 2025, the principles outlined in this October 2021 article remain as relevant as ever. Reflecting on the challenges of recent years, it’s clear that fostering an entrepreneurial mindset is key to resilience and innovation. This mindset continues to empower individuals, businesses, and communities to adapt and thrive amidst uncertainty. Whether you're revisiting these ideas or discovering them for the first time, the article's insights serve as a valuable guide for navigating a rapidly changing world.

What if we had to study sports for twelve years before we could actually play? Would people even study a sport for one year before actually playing? Of course not; I’ve never even heard of anyone who read a book about golf, let alone studied the game before attempting to play. Nothing would collapse the American institution of sports like a requirement that potential players spend time studying the game before playing.

Although the sports analogy sounds ridiculous, we expect our young people, for the most part, to study math and science for several years before they actually get to make use of the knowledge in making real-world solutions, i.e., projects.

In today’s world, we hear a lot about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and finding ways to get young people interested in STEM, especially young girls. The answer is simple. If you want to get a young girl interested in STEM, help her start making things of her own design in solution of her own or other people’s problems. The answer is the same for young boys. Making things provides the answer to interest youth in STEM. Making is an equal opportunity concept. Making does not discriminate based on gender, age, social status or any of the other protected classes.

Making something that is a personal solution to a real problem is a more valuable learning tool than just following an exercise in a book or downloading some 3-dimensional drawing from the Internet to 3D print. Designing and prototyping a dog umbrella or retrofitting an electric drill with a crank so it can be used to charge a cell phone are examples of making something to solve a problem.

When people make something to solve a problem, they are willing to learn whatever they need to learn from any of the STEM disciplines in order to make the solution work. This includes increased interest in reading skills so they can better understand the written information available to help with the project. Students improve their writing and communication skills as they seek to share information about their projects with others. The lessons learned from each project build an ever-increasing personal knowledge base available for solving more problems with increasingly complex solutions.

The concept of “making” as a learning tool has been around for a long time, but very, very slow to catch on. On August 25, 1912, a minister named Frank Gunsaulus preached a sermon in Chicago about what he’d do with a million dollars (that was a lot of money back then). He thought education should be more experiential, where students would learn by doing instead of just reading information in a book or listening to a professor’s lecture. He said, in the sermon, that if he had a million dollars, he’d build such a school. American meatpacker-industrialist Philip Armour was in the congregation. After the service, he asked Gunsaulus if he really believed what he had just preached. Armour gave the million dollars for the creation/enhancement of the Armour Technology Institute.

Way back in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, there were people working at Stanford and MIT that recognized the value of the personal computer as a learning tool. Not as a way to merely digitize the boring content of textbooks, but as a tool to spur making. One of the early pioneers in the maker movement, Seymour Papert, envisioned personal computers with many input and output ports so that children could connect all kinds of sensors for input and all kinds of relays and motors as outputs so young people could build all kinds of machines. Today, we have a micro-controller called the Arduino (cost is about $10) that does just what he envisioned with the expensive personal computers of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Making should be a part of all education, starting in kindergarten and remaining through college. Once we get young people to a basic level of reading, writing and math, we should throw out the standardized testing and the obsession with outcomes assessment and make problem/project-based learning a substantial part of everyone’s education. Combine all of that with an entrepreneurial mindset and we'll start cranking out graduates that can change the world and we won’t be sitting around talking about how to interest young people in STEM.

Update/Context: One of the first things many small business owners say they need is more marketing or help with marketing. For most, better marketing promises to be the key for more sales, hence better profits, and a more successful business. Yet for many businesses, whether new and small or older and bigger, more marketing may not really be what they need; right now.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant’s grand opening only to be greatly disappointed with the overall experience? Many times, a well-meaning manager or owner, of a restaurant or other type of business, will go to great lengths to market a grand opening that corresponds closely to the opening day of the business. The marketing efforts include press releases, advertising, email blasts by the local Chamber and, of course, a big effort to spread the word on social media. The big event comes, and employees are overwhelmed by the crowds that result from the marketing efforts. The crowd of customers is disappointed as the business fails to meet, let alone exceed their expectations. A great marketing effort at this time, may result in three to five times as many people being disappointed as compared to a “soft” grand opening without all the buzz and fanfare. Future marketing efforts must be three to five times bigger and more expensive, to attract all those customers disappointed by the initial grand opening effort.

The same thing may happen when a restaurant or other business heavily promotes a special event or tries to leverage a large event happening around them. This happened to me recently while dining in an establishment during a busy festival. The service was slow, but I am somewhat tolerant of that given how busy they were. The quality of the food was not good. Busy or not, I’m less tolerant on the food quality side. I’m not sure I’ll go back. I believe most other people, given a bad food experience, will likely not return.

What the businesses above needed was not more marketing, but a chance to figure out how to create the positive customer experience, excellence in quality and service. A “soft” opening, maybe inviting a very few friends and family members, would give restaurant owners and staff a chance to work out logistical kinks in service without disappointing a large population of new customers.

For existing businesses, when particularly busy events are coming, perhaps extra planning to minimize bottlenecks and maintain the quality of product and service would help keep the customer experience on the positive side, ranging from good to excellent.

I’m not just picking on restaurants. Many businesses, of all types and sizes, go to great lengths to bring in new customers while they don’t have their processes in place to ensure the exceptional customer experience. Larger companies and institutions have marketing and sales departments whose goals are to bring customers in the door, whether or not the production side of the house is ready to serve them. A perfect example is the cellular and communications companies. They are all great at marketing, but many are not so great at delivering the customer promise.

While running Fab Lab ICC from 2014 through 2022, people coming in for the first time would say something like “So many people don’t know about the Fab Lab. You need more marketing to get the word out.” I always thanked them but then said we were happy with the organic growth in membership resulting by word-of-mouth. We want to work to develop and tweak our processes to improve the member experience before doing extensive marketing to bring in more members.

So, most businesses need more marketing at some point, but we all should be working to improve the customer experience so that when our increased marketing efforts bring in new customers, they won’t be disappointed.

Update/Context: Since its original release in 2018, "Genie Out of the Bottle" remains highly relevant, reflecting ongoing shifts in workforce expectations and educational approaches. As traditional factory jobs evolve and the demand for creative problem-solving skills rises, youth increasingly gravitate towards meaningful, engaging work. This article explores how experiential learning in maker spaces is reshaping young people's views on careers, pushing manufacturers to rethink outdated models. The insights shared continue to resonate as we address the future of manufacturing and workforce development.

After attending the 2018 USA Fab Lab Network Symposium recently, I was happy to see nearly all USA Fab Labs and Maker Spaces are engaging youth from K - 12 grades in the "maker movement." Wisconsin is working on a substantial movement to build a Fab Lab in each K - 12 school district. The good news is that these kids, empowered by the self-efficacy increases of learning by making, will be much better equipped to enter a world where traditional ways of doing business, including manufacturing, are being turned upside down. Manufacturers and communities betting their future economies on repetitive manufacturing jobs will discover increasing difficulty in finding workers willing to do that kind of work. Today's world is much different than that of our grand and great-grand parents that went to work in factories in the early 20^th century. The genie is coming out of the bottle for today's kids with every Maker Space experience as they learn to become creative problem solvers wanting to do meaningful work in their lives. They are not going to be satisfied with traditional manufacturing jobs, doing repetitive, non-meaningful work every day. 

Not So Easy Back Then (1905 working for Henry Ford) 

In the early 20^th century, making a living and providing for a family wasn't so easy. As the country continued to recover from the devastation of the Civil War, a factory job, such as those Henry Ford offered, although repetitive, paid enough to provide for families and many were satisfied doing that kind of work. 

The Repetitive Work Factory Model Worked for 60 - 80 Years 

Despite the Great Depression of the 1930's and the advent of labor unions to improve working conditions, the repetitive work factory model remained intact. The educational model was changed to provide workers for the factories and the nation's business schools taught people how to be managers in the large corporations. Vocational and work-force training programs were developed to teach people how to do the repetitive work and a fast and efficient manner. 

Internet Advent and Fall of the Wall Changed All 

In the 1980's and 1990's the Internet and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union gave people around the globe a hunger to produce products for the vast American market and they were (and are) willing to work in repetitive jobs for much less money than their American counterparts. Somewhere along the line, we decided the answer was for everyone to have a college degree to a point that today, half of college graduates can't find the work they believed would result from their degree. 

Work Force Training Remains Even As Youth Lose Interest in Manufacturing 

Today, some say "Everyone doesn't need college. We need to bring back vocational training programs for those not smart enough to get a college degree." OK, they don't quite say it that way but that's the message that comes across to the students that don't do well in the one method used in our educational models for the last 100 years. Most students today are not interested in manufacturing jobs, as they perceive them as dirty and repetitive, regardless of whether they go to college or not. Meanwhile, experiential learning, the learning of Maker Spaces, tells us most students that don't do well in traditional academia, are really very smart; they just learn in different ways. 

Closing the Gap 

How do we close the gap between the work that's needed and the work that youth is willing to do? It's the work in our factories that needs to change. Automation, robotics and lean manufacturing methods will change the work while making companies more competitive. The work will involve a variety of skills and require the critical thinking and problem solving skills that result from the experiential learning possible in a Maker Space environment. The genie is out of the bottle and we'll likely not see a generation anytime soon willing to do the repetitive factory work of the past. 

Listening to the national media, one would think that the major urban areas like Silicon Valley in California and Boston have cornered the market on new innovations. Although population is certainly higher in many areas, there are innovators all over rural America. We just don’t hear as much about them. The Kansas Small Business Development Centers (KSBDC) would like to change that and, in our region, we’re going to help spread the word to celebrate and foster rural innovation. We at Fab Lab ICC are co-hosting an event called the Rural and Independent Innovators Conference on May 20 and 21 at ICC West. More on that at the end of this column. 

A brief look at Google patent search shows that in this corner of Southeast Kansas, Montgomery County, patents were prolific in the period from about 1900 through the mid 1920’s. In all the years since then, there have been patents, but not at the break-neck pace of that first period. More about the reasons for that in a future column. 

A partial list of those patents suggests a wide diversity of problems being solved. The last two are much later and I wish I had the resilient tire on my current riding mower. Here is a partial list of some of items in Google’s patent search for Montgomery County Kansas. Pump rig or jack, pressure valve, refrigerator, washing machine, fruit picker, ship construction, display rack, resilient tire, pencil holder, wire fence machine, arm rest for Jeep vehicle, live animal trap. 

We now realize that a patent alone is no indicator of future market success. Except in the cases of the last two items on the list, we don’t know much about the commercial viability of the earlier items. Yet, just the volume over a few years in the early 20^th century says something about the rural innovator’s ability to invent solutions to current day problems. In the case of the Jeep arm rest, thousands were sold in a day when arm rests were not standard equipment. Inventor Doug Misch went on to invent and market dozens of after-market Jeep accessories over the next 40 years. He has since sold the company, Misch’s 4 x 5 Products, and continues innovating in other ways while also helping Fab Lab ICC members develop their innovations for possible release to the marketplace. The live trap was invented by Independence resident Dana Watson. In his case, being proprietor of the successful Watson Vending company, he sold a license for his trap to the corporation that owns Victor traps. His invention is marketed and sold world-wide. 

Innovators are alive and well in rural American, many of them own and operate our family farms and small businesses. We should be doing all we can to “bring them out” and help them in any way we can to develop their products and bring them to the marketplace. That is the purpose of the Rural and Independent Innovators Conference (RIIC) initiated by KSBDC last January in Manhattan, Kansas. Lab manager Tim Hayes and I participated in this two-day event, sitting on panels to discuss how Fab Lab ICC can help with the prototyping and development of new products. The vision of KSBDC is to host regional RIICs around the state throughout the year with an overall statewide conference once each year. We at the Lab are pleased to be co-hosting the first of these regional RIICs on May 20 and 21 at ICC West. We hope to attract “closet” innovators that have had ideas on their heads for years, current innovators in various stages of coming to market and experienced innovators to tell the stories of their journeys to market. We also want to attract the practitioners that can help the innovators’ efforts; business coaches, technical consultants, patent advisors and financial people. There will be lots of networking and the “closet” innovators will see that the experienced innovators are just like them but made a decision to come out of the closet at some point in the past. 

Update/Context: Customer satisfaction is of universal importance across all sectors, including government and nonprofit organizations. Using a struggling restaurant as a metaphor illustrates how focusing solely on attracting new customers without addressing underlying quality and service issues leads to failure. Government agencies, like businesses, must treat constituents as customers, providing value through thoughtful service and innovative solutions. By adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and prioritizing customer satisfaction, even city governments can foster stronger, more prosperous communities.

The owners of a restaurant in a community far, far away, decides they need more customers. Business has been dwindling. They think it’s due to the economy or to increased competition. In reality the food quality and service levels have declined, and many customers have not been satisfied with the value they receive at this restaurant. The owners decide they need better marketing to get more people in the door. The fallacy of this strategy is that increased marketing will expose more people to the less than stellar food and service and the business will not grow. 

We all should be about satisfying customers, whether or not we work in or own for-profit businesses or are part of not-for-profit institutions and even government agencies. One way or another, someone is paying the bill for us to continue operations and we should be making sure our customers, constituents or taxpayers are satisfied with the value they receive from our services. I’m going to use city governments as an example, but the principals apply to all units of government, local, state and federal. They all should be treating constituent businesses and individuals as customers not subjects to be governed. This is not about one particular community. I’ve observed this lack of customer service in the Kansas communities in which I’ve lived, large and small as well as a large city in Washington state. 

We hire city managers that have had no training in customer service nor entrepreneurial thinking. Most I’ve known about have never owned a business of their own, struggling to make payroll each period while doing their best to satisfy their customers and keep them coming back. It’s not really the city manager’s fault. The training and culture of city government is to, well, govern. Keep the citizens in line. Make sure the ordinances are followed and the bills are paid. 

This lack of customer service training is not unique to government education and training. Most all professional training and education in all the major fields such as medicine, law, accounting and insurance is all about the technical aspects with little or no attention to customer satisfaction. 

Cities and counties sponsor all kinds of efforts to bring new people and businesses to their communities. But, like the restaurant’s increased marketing campaign, if cities are not customer friendly the word will be out, and new people and businesses won’t come and the ones that are already there will not be satisfied customers. 

Example. A business buys a larger building to expand and proceeds to re-establish an interior wall that was removed by the previous owner. The fire chief, who happens to be a customer, sees this project and the business owner soon receives a call from the city attorney demanding that the business owner file a building permit. It’s one thing to debate whether or not a building permit should be required in this case, but really, is it good customer service to pay the city attorney $250 per hour to call the owner and scare him into getting the building permit? I could fill this column, in multiple parts, with similar stories but I’ll let this one suffice for right now. 

The number one objective in a city’s economic development and recruiting effort should be to change the culture within all of city government to one of treating constituents like customers and not as subjects. It’s not that the cities don’t have a job to do in making sure ordinances are enforced. After all, the reason we agree to the ordinances in the first place is that we don’t want our neighbors to be allowed to have something like a full-blown chicken operation next door. Rather, it’s in the way the rules are enforced. 

How do we change the culture in city government? We can train everyone in how to think like an entrepreneur. The really successful entrepreneurs see their role as providing solutions to customer problems in the best and most innovative way possible, creating satisfied customers. 

No doubt running a city is a balancing act using scarce tax-payer resources in the most efficient way possible to provide the city services necessary for a healthy and prosperous community. If the constituents felt like satisfied customers instead of subjects, their communities would grow and there would be much less grumbling about taxes paid for city services. 

Update/Context: In the fast-paced world of business and entrepreneurship, there’s often pressure to move quickly—getting to market before competitors, securing funding, and scaling as soon as possible. However, as I reflected in this 2019 article, speed isn’t always the best strategy. Over the years, I’ve seen many entrepreneurs learn (sometimes the hard way) that taking time to refine their idea, test assumptions, and adjust to customer feedback leads to a stronger, more sustainable business. This lesson remains just as relevant today, reinforcing the value of patience, adaptability, and strategic growth over sheer speed.

I was on a panel at a conference recently entitled “You Have an Innovative Idea, Now What? Should You Pursue It?” Part of the discussion turned to how quickly or aggressively you should pursue the idea toward getting it to the marketplace. 

The first thought is that quicker is better. After all, we have to beat the competition, right? It seems it would be best to have plenty of capital to launch the idea very quickly without delay. In the business coaching and economic development business, we all have a joke about the potential client that says, “I have this great idea. All I need to do is borrow [$insert large sum of money here] to launch the full business model. I haven’t made a sale yet, but sales will come almost immediately after I open. How soon could I have a check with the loan proceeds?” There are at least two reasons why this scenario rarely plays out. 

First, it’s almost never a good idea to launch a full business model directly from the idea stage. The original idea for a product or service is almost never the final version that customers want to buy. Changes to the original product or service idea are almost always required. If someone spends all their resources launching the original idea, there are no resources left over to make the changes requested by the customer. 

Second, things happening too fast don’t give us a chance to think those things through. Constrained, or slower resources make us really think things through and in some cases make us think of innovative ways to accomplish more with fewer resources. 

In another topic, the moderator asked us panelists to share one of our big mistakes. That’s tough to do in front of an audience, but the other panelists had bigger, or at least more expensive, mistakes than mine, so that helped. My mistake had to do with things happening too quickly and without enough constraint on resources. 

I was a young adult in the photography business in Garden City, Kansas. This was circa 1980 BD (before digital.) I was booking many portrait and wedding sessions and decided I was paying out too much money to the photo processor. In the period BD, to make photographs you used a light sensitive material in the camera called “film.” After chemical processing, the film yielded a reverse-color image of the subject. We called them “negatives.” The negative was used to make an exposure on light sensitive paper, which again after processing yielded another reverse-color image, turning it back to a “positive” image of the scene. When the chemical processing was just right, at precise temperatures, the images turned out to be an accurate representation of the colors in the original scene. Any out-of-control parts of the process and the colors came out wrong, requiring rework. It sounds extremely complicated and it was. Somehow, I convinced myself that I was smart enough to buy some equipment and do the film and paper processing myself and do it with less expense than I was paying the professional processing house. 

My chief investor, my mother, didn’t ask too many questions. She trusted, wrongly, that I knew what I was doing. So, the financing came quick and I set out to buy the equipment. Of course, there was no used equipment to be had. It all had to be purchased at a new price. The suppliers said “Oh, you won’t be able to find a machine like that used. They never become available. Here’s your price quote on a new machine.” 

In a nutshell, over the next two years, with much money down the drain in the form of rework and wages, I learned that the professional processing house was not the bad value I had thought. So, I sold all the equipment I had purchased two-years before. At this point, there were used machines like mine everywhere. So many on the market for sale I did not come out well at all when I sold. 

That was my own personal, hard lesson in what sometimes happens when you try to rush things too much. Today, even in "retirement," I get frustrated at how long it takes to implement something, both in my part time business and with home projects, but generally the delays have led to better results as I think things through while trying to implement. 

There are undoubtedly several high schools in Southeast Kansas using some kind of entrepreneurship curriculum.  The best programs concentrate as much or more on the way entrepreneurs solve problems than the technical aspects of running a business.  While we’re not familiar with all the various high school entrepreneurship programs, we are familiar with one of the best of the best.   Formerly known as Youth Entrepreneurs of Kansas, YE has now become just Youth Entrepreneurs.  Based in Wichita since 1991, YE has grown to provide curriculum and support for about 40 high schools in Kansas and another 16 in border states.  Currently launching the high school program in several markets across the Unites States, YE is poised for growth. 

YE offers week-long entrepreneurship camps as an introduction to their program about helping high school students to learn about “business, markets, and solving problems for profit”.  We have the (day) camp available at Fab Lab ICC next week, Monday – Friday from 8:30am to 1:30pm.  We’re adding time in the Fab Lab at the beginning of each day.  The facilitators (one from Wichita and one—fresh out of YE facilitator training) will start the YE part of the program at 10:30 each day.  We’ll feed these students lunch for a camp fee of $39.  The registration link is posted on our Facebook page “Fab Lab ICC”. 

The great thing is that we’re all involved in “business, markets and solving problems for profit” whether we work for someone else or we go out on our own.  The YE program is not just about business, but about the business of solving problems, whether in a professional or personal context.  Hence, it’s a very good way to introduce and develop life skills in our young people.  Some people would call it a curriculum to inspire the elusive “soft skills” we always complain to be lacking in our young people. 

Until this fall, there were no high schools in Southeast Kansas offering YE.  All 40 active high school programs were in the other quadrants of Kansas.  This fall Independence, Field Kindley (Coffeyville), Elk Valley (Longton) and Fredonia high schools will initiate YE into their schedules as a regular elective course.  We are happy to have been of some assistance in the implementation of Independence and Field Kindley.  Elk Valley and Fredonia have come into the light on their own accord. 

Two years ago, we hosted about 25 YE students from around the state on the ICC campus for a tour of Fab Lab ICC and some of our other innovative programs.  During the visit, we all noticed that these students were different than the average high school student.  Alert, positive, curious and self-confident is how most of us described them.  It was at that point that we stepped up our efforts to be a catalyst for initiating YE in our area high schools.  It is very satisfying to see us establish a foot-hold for YE in Southeast Kansas. 

Entrepreneurship training and the design of entrepreneurship programs is not easy, especially for the benefit of existing small business owners struggling to grapple with all aspects of running their businesses. Few have time, money or inclination to get business degrees. Training has to cut to the chase, be affordable and not take a long time. 

Early Business Programs Were Not About Starting Businesses 

In the 20^th century up until the 1980’s there wasn’t much thought given to entrepreneurship and small business start-ups. The prevailing thoughts, in between stock market crashes, wars and depressions was that big business and government would care for us, providing jobs and pensions for a comfortable retirement. Generally, the education system was changed to develop workers for manufacturing and industry. This included business programs in higher education that had everything to do with training to become a mid-level manager in a corporation and nothing to do with how to start and run a small business. The ongoing mantra of big business, and these business education programs was “profit is the number one goal.” That largely remains today, and we still see plenty of instances of greed and corruption in big business due to the excessive emphasis on profit. Plenty of the “entrepreneurship” programs at 4-year schools are just repurposed mid-management business curriculum with a few “entrepreneurial” aspects mixed in. 

Top Business Goal Is Not Profit 

Thanks to Gary Schoeniger founder of the Ice House Entrepreneurship program, in 2011 I changed my whole way of thinking about entrepreneurship education. Primarily I learned that the number one goal of business should be to provide unique and innovative solutions to the marketplace, letting profits take care of themselves through business management techniques as customers gladly pay for solutions to their problems. 

In 2006, ICC president Terry Hetrick recognized that traditional business curriculum did not provide a good training solution for existing small business owners. He and the administrators at the time created a vision for a new training program they named the “Successful Entrepreneur Program” (SEP) and then hired me, a non-academic with small business experience, to develop it. From the beginning, we offered a two-year, non-transfer, degree program in small business management for entrepreneurs. I developed most of the curriculum myself as I never met a business textbook that I liked. In the two-year program, I covered most of the major topics; marketing, value creation, sales techniques, practical legal issues, financial management for owners, and developing a niche in the marketplace. In the first four years of SEP, I had maybe 12 – 16 people go through the program. To this day, several have done well in business and have told me what they learned in the program was helpful. There were two problems; 1. Hardly any small business owners care about getting a degree, and 2. A two-year program is perceived as taking too long, making recruiting difficult. 

After discovering Ice House in 2011, I shifted away from the two-year program and offered just one class beginning in the fall of 2012, Entrepreneurial Mindset featuring the Ice House Entrepreneurship program. The objective of Ice House is exclusively to change peoples’ thinking to realize that to have a successful business, the emphasis has to change from profit as a primary motive to providing great market solutions. It turns out that this change in thinking is good for everyone, whether employer, employee and in business, personal or academic lives. Today, more than 100 people have had their mindset changed by this class and it is still offered twice each year. 

Providing a Small Business Management Training Solution 

The Mindset class is very good at changing mindset and helping people become better problem solvers and even validate whether or not a solution they want to provide is going to be useful. What has been missing since 2012 is the actual business management training covering the topics I’ve mentioned earlier. Developing an abbreviated version of the original 2-year program has been on my list for 8-years, but the development activities of Fab Lab ICC starting in 2013 have prevented much progress. Now, the Center for Entrepreneurship at Wichita State University (WSU) has provided a solution and Montgomery County E-Community is bringing small business management training, called “Growing Rural Business” GRB to our county this fall starting September 10. 

The folks at WSU have been facilitating this series around Kansas for a couple of years. The content is different and non-academic. Reviews from participants is always positive. Network Kansas is making a substantial investment in our local E-Community organization to make this training possible at a very reasonable registration cost for small business owners. 

With Entrepreneurial Mindset and Ice House covering the front end of a business start-up idea through product launch, the GRB training series provides much needed training in the specific management needs of small business owners.