Published in the Independence Daily Reporter July 2020

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

On December 17, 2017, my headline was “E Myth Revisited” Oldie But Goody. As you’ll see below this book has been around a while, yet the concepts are timeless, and many small businesses today struggle with the same challenges presented in this classic. Here’s what I said in 2017 but I could have easily said it for the first time today. 

I’ve learned that most entrepreneurial concepts are timeless, mostly, I think because they have to do with human behavior and human thinking. So, many books about essential entrepreneurial mindset skills are current, even if they’ve been around for a while. Such is the 1995 book called “E Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Gerber.  

I went to work for Independence Community College back in 2006 after the president Terry Hetrick had a vision for a nuts and bolts entrepreneurship program to help community members develop and grow their businesses. Dr. Hetrick wanted a program that was “nuts and bolts” as opposed to academic so he sought not an academic professor or MBA to run the program but, apparently, someone like me. I had owned a couple of small businesses and then worked in manufacturing about a decade in two different Boeing supplier companies. I had only one semester of accounting but learned the rest along with other management skills through ten years in the photography business in Garden City from 1976 through 1986. In the two manufacturing companies, I worked in accounting, production and inventory control, scheduling, and even manufacturing planning. Nearly all the learning was on-the-job and much of it came the hard way, through experience and making mistakes. I often joke that I got this job because of all the different work experiences and the fact that I couldn’t stick to one career. Now, I believe all that experience, plus the knowledge of nearly twelve years at ICC has set me up for what I’m doing today. We have Fab Lab ICC now, but the original vision of Dr. Hetrick to help community members develop and grow their businesses is still at the core of everything we do. 

I have no major regrets about the way my career stacked up; indeed, the opportunity to be involved in the creation and development of Fab Lab ICC and its potential to help people from all walks of life is an extreme privilege and honor. I have one minor regret. Until a few years ago, I always thought I was too busy to read regularly.  

I did not discover “E Myth Revisited” until a few years ago, some 15 years after it was published in 1995. Even that version was an update of the original “E Myth” in 1986. The subtitle is “Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.” Gerber, an author and business coach does a great job explaining why so many small businesses fail, often when the owners become burned out after several years of working so hard. 

He makes a point that every business needs an entrepreneur, a manager, and a technician. The entrepreneur watches out for new business opportunities and is concerned about making the business so good that customers prefer it over competitors. The manager takes care of the day to day administrative details of running the business; cash flow, accounts receivable and payable, inventory, and other activities not directly related to providing products and services to customers. The technician in a business is the one that is directly responsible for taking care of customers.  

The key to a business being sustainable today and, in the future, depends on the entrepreneur always looking for new business opportunities and the manager working to “systematize” the day to day operation. In very small businesses, the owner has to be all three. Many get caught up in wearing only the technician’s hat, working long hours just to satisfy customers. This can go on year after year while the entrepreneur and manager hats sit on the shelf. When this happens, sales diminish, and eventually, burnout takes over and the business closes. 

There are ways the small business owner can learn to wear all three hats, building a sustainable business with processes that run smoothly. I’ve recommended this book on several occasions to small business owners struggling to make more than a “wage-rate” living from their businesses. We are working hard to run Fab Lab ICC like a business and implement the “E Myth” principles even though they are approaching 25 years old. Even businesses involved in the latest technology need to incorporate these timeless principles. 

Now, back to the present. The value of “E Myth” is reaffirmed by the fact that it is used as part of the programming of the upcoming “Growing Rural Business” 8-week training series facilitated by the Center for Entrepreneurship at Wichita State University. We will conduct this training in Montgomery county starting September 10 as business experts from WSU and the business community travel here each week. This training series will help owners learn to work on their business to make it better. See more information and registration links at http://www.fablabicc.org. 

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks. Archive columns and podcast at jimcorrell.com. 

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter July 2020

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

When this column was first published a couple of years ago, city life had plenty of scary elements. Compared to what’s happening in many big cities today, the city life of a couple of years ago is child’s play. For at least the last 60 years rural American populations have been shrinking and there’s never been a better time to market to folks in the city to come and join us in our world of rural America. We should start with youth who grew up in the area and then branch out to other population segments that are ready to leave the city for a safer life. 

We’ve Told Them To Leave 

It’s a common question at community and economic development meetings. It’s usually prefaced with a discussion about the general decline in population in rural areas of Kansas. And then someone says, “Why are our young people leaving?” The answer is that the youth are doing just what we’ve told them to do. For at least the last 60 years, we’ve told them to leave. The message, from our families, our schools, our peers, indeed, all of society has been that the opportunities are all “out there somewhere” and to be successful in life, you’ll have to go somewhere else. That part of the message has been very direct. A more subtle part of the message is the implication that if you come back to your hometown, it means you couldn’t “cut it” in the city. So, off they’ve gone for generations, many never to return and we wonder why they have gone. 

How do we change this?  

Here are three things we should be doing. 1.) Change the message; 2.) As they leave to find fame, fortune or education, tell them they are always welcome to return and 3.) Invite those already “out there” to return. 

1.)Change the message to one that says opportunities lie within finding solutions to the problems of others and that you can solve problems for others as an employee of a company or as an entrepreneur and small business owner. There are problems, hence, opportunities everywhere. 

2.)At 18 – 20 years old, most youth want to see their hometowns in the rear-view mirror; that’s natural. We need to encourage them to “go out into the world” and find their way to a happy and fulfilling life by solving problems for others. However, we need to also say that their hometown is part of the “world” and there are plenty of problems here that need to be solved, and, that they are always welcome to come home. Humboldt, Kansas gives each graduating senior a personalized mailbox as a symbolic invitation to return at any time. 

3.)Every small town should have a process for inviting the home-town youth to return. This effort would include a database of youth identities and locations discovered through inquiries with local family members and class reunion organizers. Then, systematically, young people are invited to return. Of course, everyone won’t be interested in coming home, but even a success rate of 10% would be impressive. 

I’ve noticed that the best and brightest young people returning to the area as entrepreneurs and professionals are coming back to be close to family. We should do everything we can to encourage them to come back to their families and that there are opportunities everywhere, especially in their hometowns. 

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks. Archive columns and podcast at jimcorrell.com. 

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter June 2020

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence 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. This fall, through a collaboration among Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College (ICC), Coffeyville Community College (CCC) and the Montgomery County E-Community (a Network Kansas initiative), important and effective training in small business management will be offered in an 8-week program; 4-weeks at the Fab Lab in Independence and 4-weeks at CCC in Coffeyville, starting September 10. (www.fablabicc.org/events)

Early Business Programs Were Not About Starting Businesses 

In the 20th century up until the 1980s, there wasn’t much thought given to entrepreneurship and small business start-ups. The prevailing thoughts, in between stock market crashes, wars and depressions were 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 were “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 a 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 the 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 named the “Successful Entrepreneur Program” (SEP) and they 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. (The next one is in August. www.fablabicc.org/events) 

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 are 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 the 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. More information about GRB is available at www.fablabicc.org/events.

 

Jim Correll can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of Fab Lab ICC or Independence Community College. Archive columns and podcasts at jimcorrell.com. 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter June 2020

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

There’s really no problem with science as defined by this definition, “...the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.” There’s a problem with our societal perception of science but that makes for a title that’s a little long and complex. 

Early Love of Science 

I’ve loved science for as long as I can remember. Before I started kindergarten, my mother would help me with “experiments.” One was called Dancing Mothballs. It involved dropping mothballs into a solution (I don’t remember what it was) and watching them bob up and down in the solution for a considerable amount of time. By the time I was 7 or 8, I had a chemistry set in my room on an antique table my grandfather (who I never knew) had made. I was interested in making my own fireworks and in one test I ignited a small amount of homemade gunpowder in an aluminum pie pan. It burned through the pie pan and burned a silver dollar sized divot in the antique table before I could put it out. That was observation and experiment. It sounds really bad now, but I did learn that experiments with homemade gunpowder are probably best done outside. 

In 7th and 8th grade we had a teacher, Bill Rollins, that taught us quite a bit about chemistry and physics in a lab where we could do many experiments. For the most part, if you do “experiments” from a textbook, the outcome is known ahead of time so one doesn’t really learn anything unknown but can observe examples of how elements of the physical and natural world work together to form the environment in which we live. 

Complex World and Universe 

We live in an incredibly wonderful and complex world and the universe. Real scientists research and experiment in areas where the outcomes are not known and have learned a lot over the centuries about how things work. However, we still don’t understand it all. The problem comes when certain scientists don’t fully disclose the fact that they are using a theory or a projection model to explain or predict something. Sometimes they forget to say their explanation or prediction is based on theory and they don’t know for sure what is going to happen. 

I love watching the science channel. The other night, they were talking about new theories about black holes and exploding stars. Basically, they were saying the previous black hole theories are probably all wrong, but now this is the way it is. I chuckled because it reminded me of Kevin Nealon’s character in “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update sketches where he would launch into telling you facts. Then, he would stop himself and say “You know what, that is all wrong. This is the way it really is.” He would go through that cycle several times in a way that was really funny. 

Many in Society Know Little Science 

We live in a society that by and large, the person on the street has little working knowledge of science and how the physical and natural world works. (There are people who think the sun revolves around the earth.) So, when a scientist says their model predicts that 2 million people will die in a pandemic, many people just accept it as fact and go into hysteria. Often the scientists don’t mention that their model is made up of 100 assumptions, essentially sophisticated guesses, that introduce a huge variability in their predicted outcome. Some scientists are good about being humble and outrightly stating that “this is what we believe may be true, but we just don’t know.” Many imply that what they are telling you is true and that if you don’t believe them you don’t believe in science. (BTW, as a side note, in a complex world such as ours, you can’t rely solely on medical scientists’ predictions alone to determine how much of an economy to close down.) 

Science is Not an  Exact Science 

We certainly can’t ignore science or scientists, but we have to understand that science is not an exact science. A better approach would be to sharpen our critical thinking skills and gather information from multiple sources before sizing up any situation. 

When we talk about increasing our youth’s interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) it is usually with an eye toward getting more of them into science and technology careers. However, even if they do something else with their life’s work, providing opportunities to observe and experiment at an early age will make them better critical thinkers in the complex society of their future.

 

Jim Correll can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of Fab Lab ICC or Independence Community College. Archive columns and podcasts at jimcorrell.com.