Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, January 25, 2017

A growing number of retail businesses know about becoming a destination. Being a destination means that something about a business is so unique, exceptional and/or compelling that people will go beyond normal efforts to go to the business. Efforts to become destinations should not be limited just to retail businesses. Our businesses, organizations, attractions, hospitals, and schools should all strive to become destinations. As more and more entities become destinations, a “critical mass” occurs and cities within a region and indeed, the region itself, becomes a destination. As people come to the destination, they bring with them dollars to spend and thus economic prosperity for the region.

If you normally spend up to fifteen minutes getting to your usual restaurants, perhaps there is one restaurant that is so good you’re willing to travel for up to one or even two hours to get there.  That would be considered a destination restaurant for you. A destination restaurant has figured out a way to do something extraordinary to be worth your extra effort.  Most of the time, this requires more than just good food.

Becoming a destination has to do with the way people; i.e. customers, clients, patients, citizens, students, and visitors are treated as they seek solutions for their problems and needs. Each entity has to figure out exceptional ways to meet those needs in ways so much better than the competition that people will go out of their way to purchase the solutions. This is where innovation comes in. Sometimes innovation can be a totally new product or service, but many times innovation can be changing an existing product or service to provide new and better ways of solving people’s problems and meeting their needs.

What is required to become a destination varies widely based on the type of entity.  Helping businesses and entities become destinations is an important component of the Growth Accelerator Program at Fab Lab ICC.  We’ve partnered with E-Community, a Network Kansas initiative to promote and facilitate the help of an internationally recognized destination expert, Jon Schallert, and his “Destination Boot Camp (DBC)” where participants spend 2 ½ days with Jon in Longmont, Colorado learning  “how to reinvent their businesses and marketplaces.”  Jon spent 10 years in marketing at Hallmark before starting his own business in 1996, launching Destination Boot Camp in 2002.  During this time, he’s helped thousands of business owners and other leaders figure out how to make their entities destinations.  We have funds available to help businesses and entities participate in Camp sessions in Longmont, CO.

Camps are held several times each year, including early April, 2017.  There will be an informational lunch about Destination Boot Camp in downtown Independence on February 13.  There are no geographic limits regarding who in Southeast Kansas can participate.  Promoting our businesses, cities and other entities to be innovative in becoming destinations in their own right, will help our region become a destination for customers, visitors, entrepreneurs and businesses.

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, January 11, 2017

Most businesses want to grow.  That’s natural and generally a good thing although growing too fast can be detrimental as there is considerable up-front money required to grow fast before the resulting sales increases begin.  We’ll talk about managed growth, meaning growth at a healthy pace that allows the business to adjust without too much chaos.

What does it take to grow a business?  As with so many things in life, it depends.  Requirements to grow for a business start-up are much different than those for an established company that wishes to grow to new levels.  To be in the business of coaching businesses, it would be nice if there was one playbook that would work for all.  Not only is there not a playbook that will work for all, there’s not a playbook at all.

For the last ten years, I’ve tried different methods and strategies to find the best way to be helpful as a business coach to a wide range of start-ups and small businesses.  What I’ve found is that being helpful to entrepreneurs and small business owners is not as technical as one might think.  To be a coach, one doesn’t need to know all the technical ins and outs of a particular business or industry.  One doesn’t even need to have all the answers.  The secret seems to be finding a way to provide the right combination of information and business tools to each entrepreneur or business owner based on their individual situations.

We have assembled such a collection of tools and we’re grouping them under the umbrella of what we call the “Growth Accelerator Program”.  Some of the tools are virtual, some are personal and some are physical.  This is a buffet of resources available if and as needed by our clients.  The tools include access to Fab Lab ICC and, pending completion of our new building later this year, access to the Entrepreneurs Bullpen, an open-collaboration incubator adjacent to the Fab Lab where start-up entrepreneurs can collaborate with each other while working on their own businesses.  Business incubators are fairly common and Fab Labs are becoming more common, but incubators connected to Fab Labs are still very new with but a handful in the country.

Some of the offerings are fee based, but many are free.  There are need-based scholarships available for nearly everything.  Membership to Fab Lab ICC and the Growth Accelerator Program have no geographic limits.

We consider the Growth Accelerator Program to be in a “beta” test with a few members signed up now.  We would welcome more.  We believe the combination of these tools offers a path to growth for any size business from start-up to existing with up to $5M or so in sales.

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, January 4, 2016

We’ve been conditioned over the years to believe that starting new businesses always requires a formal business education (MBA, etc.) and a lot of start-up capital.  Media outlets have supported this idea by honing in on a select few entrepreneurs that are flamboyant and appear to be high-rollers will to place big bets on their business ideas causing devastating losses when some of those ideas inevitably fail.

What I’ve learned over the last 4 or 5 years, through studying interviews with entrepreneurs from around the world and listening to our local and area entrepreneurs as they visit my classes is very different than what we’ve been led to believe.  Research from the Kauffman Foundation (a global leader in supporting entrepreneurship) shows that less than 3% of all new businesses receive equity investment from non-family investors.  And less than 1% receive venture capital at inception.

So, how do the other 97% of businesses manage to get off the ground without so-called “adequate” financing?  “Bootstrapping”.  Google “bootstrapping” and you’ll see many definitions.  The one I like is “get (oneself or something) into or out of a situation using existing resources”.  For us, bootstrapping a new business means starting out small enough that existing personal and family finance can get the business started in order to make sure that customers will buy what the entrepreneur has to offer.  Many times, no matter how much planning and research we do, we don’t get the product or service offering quite right in the very beginning.  Starting small allows for course corrections and tweaks as we learn what customers really want.  Even if the new venture doesn’t fly at all, starting small is much less devastating to personal and family finances.

The time to consider conventional or venture capital financing to support the growth of the new business is after the tweaks are made and the sales start coming in.  Many venture capitalists (VC’s) realize now that most businesses are better off starting small, then finding venture capital after customers start buying and the business starts to grow.  VC’s Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom have written a book about this, “Nail It then Scale It: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation”.

We have many examples of this type of entrepreneurship in Southeast Kansas.  One is Bret Chilcott of AgEagle in Neodesha.  A few years ago, he bootstrapped his way into the agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—now almost all of us use the military vernacular “drone”—market.  Bret went from concept to production in just under two years.  AgEagle is now the global leader in the agricultural drone market.  Although he says he may have waited a little longer than he should have to seek additional capital to support the growing business, he would say that the bootstrapping, with its inherent constrained resources, made him a better innovator and is a primary reason he was able to enter the market in such a short time.

Occasionally, someone will call me and say something to the effect of “I have this great idea and all I need is funding to launch.  Can you help me find $100,000 in capital?”  That is the time to share the bootstrapping concept and the stories of the many entrepreneurs in our network that have bootstrapped their way to success.

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.