Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, July 26, 2017

I became the first Mentor-Facilitator of the Successful Entrepreneur Program at Independence Community College in 2006. My title had already been determined but somewhere along the way, I decided it better to let others decide whether or not to call me a “mentor” rather than calling myself one. I had my business cards reprinted to use the term Business Coach instead.

I tried to do everything by what I thought was “the book.” New businesses should be started by people that had developed business plans, the bigger the better with five-year projections of sales and growth. Some invented their five-year projections with a spread sheet, but others found a plethora of software that would ask the questions and then generate the 60 – 80 page plans. The “market research” in the plans demonstrated how many people in the United States or maybe even in a smaller, applicable market area used a certain product or service. By deductive reasoning—certainly the new project would attract a certain small percentage of the “market”—we could plug these numbers into the software and come up with five-year projections, right? Once the projections are all done, it was just a simple matter of borrowing the $100,000 to $200,000 to launch the business.

In addition to the business plan, I “coached” people about the taxes they’d need to pay, the forms they’d need to fill out and the long hours they would have to work. All these technical aspects of a new business are important. Business planning is important, but not the kind of planning I described above. All these technical aspects do little to inspire people to start new businesses. Nothing kills the enthusiasm of a budding entrepreneur with a new business idea like talk of 80-page business plans, taxes and long hours.

After the first few years, late in 2011, I discovered that, contrary to what we’d been led to believe, most businesses are not started with big business plans and big start-up funding. Ninety-eight percent of new businesses are started with less than $10,000. This percentage is true even of today’s Fortune 500 companies.

Most businesses start out very small with an emphasis on real, down to earth, market research. That is, “What problem am I solving and will people really prefer my solution over whatever they are doing to deal with the problem now.” The proof is in the sale and the key is to prototype (maybe at Fab Lab ICC) what’s called a minimum viable product and see if people like it well enough to exchange some of their hard earned money for it. That’s real market research. Most of the time, the minimum viable project is not quite right. Feedback from customers and prospects will lead to tweaks and changes that are possible because the prototypes were relatively inexpensive to produce. Even many venture capitalists are realizing that investing too much money in a start-up business that hasn’t actually sold anything is not healthy. The time to invest in a business to allow it to grow is after the tweaks and adjustments have been made following initial sales feedback.

I learned of this in 2011 from Gary Schoeniger, founder of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative, creators of the revolutionary “Ice House Entrepreneurship” program. Gary discovered the secret of starting small by both his own experience in growing his multi-million dollar construction management company after starting out cleaning gutters for people. “Ice House” celebrates and promotes the notion that nearly all businesses start small, validating their solutions through actual sales before “betting the farm” (or mortgaging the house) to finance a product no one wants to buy.

Schoeniger has become a global thought leader regarding entrepreneurship education as “Ice House” is being adopted in high schools, community colleges and universities in countries all over the world. In August, I’ll be sharing the stage with Gary in eastern Ohio at a conference for small communities searching for their own paths to rural economic prosperity. He will be sharing his “Ice House” message and I will be sharing the positive effects of combining entrepreneurship (via “Ice House”) and the Fab Lab experience on our area rural economy. Our own “Ice House” class, “Entrepreneurial Mindset” will start on August 23 (Wednesday evenings from 6:30 to 8 PM)

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, July 19, 2017

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

Have you ever learned how to do something complicated over time and become good at it? This could be a sport, a business process or skill like woodworking. Many times, we say these things become “second nature,” meaning that we’re good enough so as to make what we do look easy and natural. This is common when we see athletes and performers, artisans and craftsmen or women. Almost always, we acquire new knowledge and skills as a solution to a problem. If we play a sport or a musical instrument, it’s usually answering a problem in that we have an innate need for self-improvement. We may not be a professional athlete or musician, but we can feel good about the process of improving our skills over time. In our professional lives, we all need to be life-long learners and improve our professional knowledge and skillset in order to survive and thrive in the ever volatile economy. This process of continuous learning and self-improvement in order to meet the challenges and solve problems in our personal and professional lives becomes a mindset; a mindset of problem solving.

Successful entrepreneurs and small business owners have this mindset for problem solving. They have learned to view problems as opportunities for innovative solutions. When problems arise, they don’t throw up their hands and give up, but rather they subconsciously search through their minds, extracting bits and pieces of prior experience to go together to  solve the current problem at hand. We call it entrepreneurial mindset and we believe everyone should have it, no matter what age and no matter what walk of life; student, professional or personal.

Most people that are good at certain tasks or processes find it difficult to explain how they think while performing those tasks or processes. If you ask them how they know to do things a certain way or how they have made certain decisions, they find it difficult to answer. We call this tacit knowledge, “the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it.” Successful entrepreneurs and small business owners have this tacit knowledge and it is, indeed, difficult for them to articulate how they think. Gary Schoeniger, founder of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative and the revolutionary Ice House Entrepreneurship program figured out that the way to learn how they think is to listen to them tell the stories of how they got started in business and about the twisted and winding paths they’ve taken to become successful. The Ice House program is centered on video interviews of dozens of entrepreneurs from around the globe. As you listen to each one, you begin to see some common themes. These themes are organized into the eight life’s lessons of entrepreneurial thinking. The eight life’s lessons, that should be practiced by all of us, are: the power to choose, recognizing opportunities, ideas to action, pursuit of knowledge, creating wealth, building your brand, creating community, and the power of persistence.

At Fab Lab ICC, we have discovered that adding the process of making things to the entrepreneurial mindset greatly accelerates the development of our mindset for problem solving.

We would like to become the national leader in the combination of entrepreneurship and the Fab Lab making experience. We believe this combination is an essential ingredient in the economic re-development of our small rural communities across the United States.

In our area, the Entrepreneurial Mindset class will start on August 23; Wednesday nights through Thanksgiving. Class is a collaborative effort by participants to further develop their mindset of problem solving by listening to video as well as live entrepreneurs while practicing their own problem solving skills.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, July 12, 2017

The robots keep coming and they are getting smarter by the day. For our purposes today, we’ll use the term robots to represent the concepts of robotics, automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Robots hold a promise to make life better and safer for many people. Our systems of making products and services available to a much wider spectrum of the world’s population can be greatly enhanced at a lower cost. But there’s at least one aspect that, while not exactly being ignored, is going to be a problem for which we are not yet seeking a solution. That is the effect on overall employment numbers in a coming automated global economy. For many community colleges and other institutions of higher education the robots are like invisible elephants in the room; the coming reduction in overall employment numbers never being discussed or explored.

Most colleges are affected by “institutional sluggishness.” Indeed, some don’t seem to realize that the very nature of work in the future is changing drastically. An example is that just a couple of years ago several community colleges in Kansas were in a clamor to create wind energy programs. The efficient availability of wind energy is an upcoming technology that promises to provide a substantial portion of the energy needed to run our homes and businesses. In the old economy, new technologies usually meant a need to train legions of technicians to keep the technology up and running. So, the colleges reasoned, wind energy programs would be required to train legions of wind energy technicians to keep the huge wind turbines running. Some people from ICC toured the turbines over near Beaumont a few years ago and learned that for all those turbines it only takes only eight to ten technicians to keep them up and running. The field at Beaumont is huge, I believe the cost to build was many hundreds of millions of dollars. If it only takes ten technicians, it seems like we don’t need very many community colleges churning out dozens of new wind energy technicians every year. In the future, all new technologies will have robotics and automation built in. This will lower the cost of operation and make the end product less expensive for everyone.

Since wind energy is new, some colleges saw the problem before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the equipment, faculty and facilities to launch wind energy programs. What do we do about the existing industrial fields for which we’re cranking out thousands of technicians each year? There are people in all fields working to further automate the work with robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. This will eliminate jobs and that is what we are not talking about. When I mention this, some people say “Well, when there are robots, there will need to be people that can repair them and keep them running. We need to train people to work on robots.” While this is partially true it is not going to work for everyone. If a company of 500 people automates to the point only 250 are required to do the work, the company will not need 250 technicians to keep the automation up and running, but rather ten to fifteen. The remainder of the 250 will be let go.

Meanwhile, no matter how much automation there is, there will continue to be problems in the marketplace and our society that need to be solved. Automation will not cure all of our problems. A substantial part of the answer in the future, as huge portions of our work force are laid off due to robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, is to give people an entrepreneurial mindset and exposure to entrepreneurship along with technical training so that many of them can become independent business owners and contractors to solve the problems in the marketplace.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, July 5, 2017

We start it earlier and earlier, sometimes even as early as 6^th or 7^th grade. We constantly challenge our youth to decide what they want to be when they grow up. By the time the youth get to high school, we call this part of our “college and career ready” process. The pressure builds from the earlier times for the young students to decide what they want to be. Sometimes it’s what a well-meaning parent wants the student to be. Along with the pressure of what to be, comes the pressure to make the grades to insure getting into the “right” college. Many times we imply that it’s the right job, making the right amount of money that will make us successful. Not necessarily. We need to change the message and the challenge.

We live in a world in which the job market and business marketplace change on a month to month basis. Today’s hot new technologies and careers didn’t exist a few years ago. Tomorrow’s hot careers do not exist today and many of today’s careers will go away. We do a terrible job of predicting how new technologies will affect the marketplace. How can ask a college junior or senior to hit the moving target of career or business opportunities, let alone the 6^th or 7^th grader?

The answer is to quit asking kids what they want to be when they grow up but ask them to think about ways they might like to help others. Another way is to ask what problems they might like to solve, throwing in the possibility of changing the world while we’re at it. The mindset of our youth, as well as our own needs to change from fixed to growth. A fixed mindset is the idea that you can pick a career; then study hard through high school and college to get a nice job with a nice salary to go with it. A growth mindset is about always learning new things in school and striving to be a lifelong learner, always alert and open to the changes in technology and the marketplace while looking for the most fulfilling way to solve the problems that are sure to remain in world.

There are a few college graduates that will find rewarding careers in the traditional way, but many of the students that are deemed at or below average by our educational institutions will not fare so well, racking up tons of student debt to graduate from college only to become mal-employed at a lower paying job, unrelated to the career path they chose years earlier.

Students should be going to school to learn as much and about as many topics as they can, not because they can pick some career today that will still be relevant by the time they graduate. Every student needs to remain flexible in thinking about how they might solve the problems of others in a way that is both fulfilling and lucrative for them.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.