Entrepreneur Support Organizations (ESOs) have been active in the Corridor for well over a decade.
By design, these organizations exist to “help current or aspiring entrepreneurs move closer to starting or growing a viable business,” according to a 2019 article published by the Kauffman Foundation.
There are a lot of ways to help current and aspiring entrepreneurs, and the Corridor is lucky to have many engaged people and organizations providing value here.
There is a common thread through many ESOs that start with a need to thoroughly understand the problem that an entrepreneur is trying to solve. Digging deep into that discovery should be a prerequisite for anyone considering starting a company. If the first step of entrepreneurship is an idea, then the next step should be to translate that idea into a problem that needs to be solved. Many ESOs exist to help an aspiring entrepreneur think about their idea using tools and methods that have become common across the world. Tools like the Business Model Canvas (BMC) can help create the scaffolding for a business plan. Our local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and programs like Venture School through the University of Iowa are two places that have used this tool to help entrepreneurs frame their idea into a solvable problem and start to build a plan for a company that can survive.
Ideas need to be validated through a structured process in order for them to be considered fundable. Who gets to define that process varies. We often tell entrepreneurs that the customer is the one that pays you money. It stands to reason that if an entrepreneur wants to attract an investor’s money, they should learn what the investor values and how they will deliver that value with their company and the investor’s money. If an entrepreneur is planning to fund a company through a bank loan, grant program, or by acquiring paid customers, then they need to consider what each of them values.
So often, it comes down to taking your idea and crafting it into a compelling story. The story becomes compelling when people believe that your company is going to solve a critical problem for a group of people and will generate a revenue stream that allows that company to grow and scale.
Flashback to 2014. I remember sitting in a roundtable discussion at an EntreFEST session when one of the participants expressed an opinion along the lines of: There are not companies that ought to be funded out there that are going unfunded. There was a belief back then that there was not a capital scarcity. If a company had merit, it would find the funding it needed. I remember disagreeing strongly with that opinion then.
What was true back then and still true today is that the customer is the one who pays you money. They get to decide if your idea has merit and ought to be funded. Whether we are talking to friends and family investors or venture capitalists, they have a choice of where to deploy their capital. If it’s a smart investment, in their opinion and not just yours, they may deploy that capital to you. The same is true for bankers, grantors, and prospective customers.
What we need to continue to work on, and in many cases double down on, is supporting entrepreneurs at every stage. Investing the time, as a community, to take ideas through a process that validates these ideas and can articulate why these ideas ought to become companies — and why these companies ought to get the funding they need to thrive. •
David Tominsky is the chief relationship officer at The New Bohemian Innovation Collaborative (NewBoCo).
