SustainableWork

As time allows, I'm going to continue posting about the six steps I think people need to take for launching their own slow startup enterprise.

This post is about the second of the six steps, gathering information in a way that adds value to your idea and sustainability to the platforms you will work from.

In other words, this is about business planning and slow startup enterprises.

A slow startup focuses on creating a new enterprise with limited time and funds. These enterprises are meant to bring increasing sustainability into people's lives and the communities they live in.

The common thread among all types of enterprise, rural or urban, is the need for a map of where you're headed. In the case of a slow startup that map doesn't represent a straight line to an unchangeable goal. A slow startup map, like all great tools, offers many alternate ways of getting somewhere valuable.

The subject of business planning and creating business plans can be presented as a daunting, jargon-laden realm where only experts dwell. There are certainly some kinds of business plans that require that kind of sophistication, but they represent a small slice of the business creation pie.

A slow startup would look at three main areas of focus when building their road map:

Learn what business planning is about and how it can be used for your own personal benefit.

Learn how to find resources for your business planning.

Learn how to create a business planning map, start, then learn from what happens next.

Business planning for slow startups is not an exercise in creating a document for outside investors or approaching banks and funding agencies for loans, though it can certainly be the basis for such efforts in the future. For now, it is a process of gathering information to help make you and your enterprise competent and sustainable.

From my Business Diligence and teaching work I developed a slow startup business plan I can put online. The entrepreneurs complete it as time allows and I can jump in as needed. I've begun using it in my rural economic development work.

Slow startup planning specifically can benefit small food enterprises (SFEs) such as those we hope to nurture at the new Innovation Kitchen and other slow startups that people grow from their kitchen tables.

This isn't the place to go into all the particulars, but a slow startup business plan is meant to work in service to the entrepreneur, not outside funders. It is meant to be a roadmap that includes your specific goals, acknowledging the specific assets and hurdles you face. Great business plans are not cookie-cutter templates. They are working, living documents that entrepreneurs can use to grow personally and to grow their enterprises.

Importantly, there is a strong, wonderful movement emerging of micro-lending investment platforms focusing on person-to-person business relationships in the Kiva style. Kiva has created a transparent, highly ethical model that empowers me and hundreds of thousands of micro investors to invest and loan small amounts to innovators worldwide.

New funding/micro-loan platforms are emerging that will focus on specific types of enterprise, such as eco-tech and sustainable foods. For new and emerging entrepreneurs to benefit from this opportunity, they won't necessarily need a fixed-in-stone business plan but they will need to be able to produce and demonstrate a competent planning map.

Dwight Eisenhower said, "Plans are nothing; planning is everything." If that approach was good enough for the largest military invasion in world history, then I would suggest it's a safe approach for your slow startup.

You need to plan, act, revise, repeat. That's the essence of a great slow startup business plan.

Don't let that process dissuade you from starting. Start and build. Search out the information you'll need to know to grow. Make it personal. Make it your own. Business planning is an iterative process. One foot in front of the other on a march planned to include alternate routes. If you don't start you'll never have a map. Without a map you'll just continue to wander, or worse, never start your journey.

This isn't hard. You can do it. If you start now you can build something valuable into your life and into the fabric of the communities you live in.

Slow startups are designed to fit into your life as it's lived now. Take advantage of the help, support and tools available and begin.

Entrepreneurship represents the core of the emerging economy of the 21st century. Join that revolution and see where it takes you.

Acknowledge the time needed. Plan your map. Map your plan. Start. You can do it.


Kiva

Northern Water Snake

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, funding, slow money, slow startups, startups, The slow start up movement

As anyone who has read these post for a while knows, I am a really big fan of Tom Peters and his work in designing management structures and work policies that achieve results.

I have been reading Tom Peters for decades now. Tom writes for a more urban crowd I think. What I find really interesting is that as I move into rural economic development work I am finding many farmers and rural entrepreneurs who also embrace Tom's work.

Busy weekend doing economic development budgets. Lost the time for a proper post so I thought I would share a quote from Tom Peters that I read recently.

Here is a short summary of how to effectively approach enterprise. You don't need glitz, you need truth. Here it is:

"Find Heroes. Do Demos. Tell Stories."
--Tom Peters

You want to get into enterprise? You want to explore small business? You want to know what to do next? Do that.



Tom Peters site

Photo is from the really fun plant kaleidoscopes at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, one of my favorite board rooms

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, startups, The slow start up movement

Slow startups allow people to fit a small business into their lives in sustainable ways. You get to decide how much time and money you can spend. Both can be small but if you act on your small business during the time set aside, you can come out the other end with something valuable to you, financially and culturally.

At that point you have a real enterprise. You'll have a base of unique skills and knowledge that will allow you to take your enterprise in any direction you want. You will have customers, cash flow and a track record. You will have learned to control your data. These are the pieces required to jump to the next stages, if that's what you want to do.

This is NOT an approach for people who need immediate relief. That's a different story. This story is about slowly building a platform that can support your life and your dreams for the long term.

However, this does not advocate dreaming only. This idea is about doing. Making mistakes, pulling/learning yourself up. Becoming a professional entrepreneur. Spending as little money as as possible. Getting a realistic understanding of your market.

How do you do that? It means going slowly, with time and money allocated as you have available, but once allocated that plan is executed.

It means trying. Learning. Capturing the data. Try, learn, repeat.

Our new Innovation Kitchen in Mineral Point (they've poured concrete!) will be a great platform for testing this idea. People will be able to try out different models of food entrepreneurship at radical-cheap price points due to wonderful public/private partnerships in our region.

I'm very specifically designing paths into the Innovation Kitchen in such a way that it makes its easy for new startup entrepreneurs to say 'no'. This will help create better, smarter and more sustainable entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs need clear paths for easily and inexpensively testing their ideas. However, at any point in the learning process the entrepreneur should be celebrated for saying 'no' and supported when switching directions as markets dictate.

Giving up on your preferred, stated direction - saying 'no I don't want to do THAT'- is not a sign of business weakness it is a sign of enterprise (and personal) strength. Learning to say no is perhaps the most important skill to develop while gaining a realistic understanding of your ideas.

So, back to the new Innovation Kitchen for examples. This is a unique opportunity to put these slow startup ideas in play.

Anyone who wants to launch a new food business by working in the kitchen will be offered the opportunity to do a low budget shakedown cruise with their idea.

New entrepreneurs can first meet with the foodservice staff at the Innovation Kitchen to discuss their recipes and processes. Our staff can help with everything from business planning to vendor sourcing to cooking tips to nutrition labeling to packaging and everything in between. The entrepreneurs can take a dry run through all the steps in the process. Innovation Kitchen staff can also help prepare custom production plans to match the needs of the entrepreneur and prepare cost estimates for production runs.

The entrepreneur can plunge in or change plans at this point. They can evaluate the demands on their time and money and may choose to launch their enterprise using a different model. Fine! Good to learn early and inexpensively. First ideas are rarely the best. Changing isn't failure. It's success.

If they get this far and still want to proceed, the new food entrepreneur will be offered free slow startup business plans to start filling in and help to launch their enterprise.

This shakedown cruise can also include a production run of the food entrepreneur's recipe. The entrepreneur will get to cook in a professional, state-certified kitchen under production conditions. The learning opportunities will be invaluable.

They will come out the end of this process with plans probably modified from those they entered with. Importantly they will have a production run of their recipe, professionally processed and packaged, ready to commercially market. They will have created their own product that they can use to test market and launch their new businesses or product lines with. The thrill of getting to this point with a unique product of your own creation and taking it into the public space is exhilarating.

As an economic developer I see my role as giving as many people as possible as many opportunities as possible for testing entrepreneurship. The next step is to provide as many alternatives as possible for those who want to switch directions. They have self-selected as emerging entrepreneurs. They are a seam of gold. The next thing to do is provide as many enabling paths as possible for smelting that gold into value.

The slow startup entrepreneur trades their time for knowledge.

Slow startup entrepreneurs pull themselves through the early learning curve utilizing the best help and the best tools available to them.

The slow startup entrepreneur carefully builds a realistic understanding of what it takes to wake up an idea, as well as the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship and how to plan for both.

One foot in front of the other. Try, learn, repeat.

That's how you gain a realistic understanding of your entrepreneurial idea.

This is not a doom-and-gloom scenario. Just the opposite. Slow startups are a path to an achievable solution that can make your life better. Every mistake you make, every bit of wisdom, every new digit of data puts you ahead of potential competitors. It's your intellectual property. You are earning your 'patents'.

How do you get a realistic understanding of the process? Start now. Get smart. Go slow.

You can do it.


Driftless Appetite. One of my favorite food blogs, celebrating life and local foods in Southwest Wisconsin. Also new friends!

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, startups, The slow start up movement

The economy is rebuilding, but I don't know anyone who feels relaxed about their future economic security.

People want to put some stability and meaning back into their economic lives. There are certainly many paths to get there.

I've been writing about slow startups as a viable path for creating smart new enterprises that can make significant financial and cultural improvements in people's lives.

We've got slow food, and now slow money. Why not slow startups? Everyone wants viable new solutions and the emerging model is competence and sustainability, not speed.

Just as there is great honor in slow foods and what that idea brings to commerce, there is also great honor and long-term value in creating slow enterprise models.

We need to make entrepreneurship simpler and more accessible. We need to nurture entrepreneurship that builds and sustains our communities and our regions. We need to help people create and build their own enterprises in ways that fit into their lives appropriately.

Slow startups take into account whatever your personal and financial status is. This model allows you to build and test your own enterprise at your own pace, so that in the end you will have a service or a product that you're passionate about and a sustainable business model supporting it.

Slow startups certainly match up well with my own boomer demographic. I also think these kind of slow launches will fit in well with the wonderful artisinal young people doing so many cool things out there. And if you're in the middle, what's wrong with trying to create a long-term job for yourself by slowly starting your own business now?

So, here's my news: Most startups take far longer than the people think. This is especially true for small, self-funded startups. That's not a bad thing, it just is. What this should be saying to you is to start creating your own small business ASAP. It will take longer than you think to get underway. Start one while you have a day job. Start one in your spare time. I know, this is not easy, but the time is there. Find what time you can and put it to work.

By taking the process slowly, you will learn far more than by rushing through it. You will learn to enjoy the journey.

If you REALLY love this process after trying it out, you can circle back and do startups over and over - a perfectly viable and compelling career path in the 21st century.

In trying to help some new enterprises through our economic development office, I've been re-using the Micro-Enterprise courses I wrote and taught through the Small Business Center at WCTC in Waukesha. It's my slow startup manual.

Slow startups perfectly suit micro-enterprise and vice versa.

What do I really mean? I mean you can invest a few hundred dollars and a year or two of part time effort and come out the other end with a viable enterprise that's making money and building greater security and independence into your life. From there you can nurture and grow it in any direction you want.

If you have more time and money to invest, you can shorten your timeline to launch. This also makes it possible to make expensive mistakes. Careful.

So, start now. Start slow. Take some time to think about this and explore the possibilities. Here is my outline:

Slow startups. What to do first.

There are six fairly simple, but critically important steps to launching a slow startup. These make slow startups sustainable:

- Get a realistic understanding of what it takes to wake up an idea, as well as the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship and how to plan for both.

- Learn what information you'll need, how to find it, and how to use that information once you find it.

- Learn how become a professional at what you do, and where to turn for help.

- Create a management structure that builds your own confidence, deals with the details, and creates peace of mind for all involved.

- Learn how to market and sell in your niche.

- Learn to capture your data and turn it into commerce.

These six approaches to slow startups were the core of the six courses I wrote and taught through the Small Business Center.

They are my roadmap for creating slow startup enterprises. Each one of these topics unfolded into a 90+ minute discussion in my Micro-Enterprise courses when we dug into all the how-to stuff. There are multiple, discreet steps behind each of these major categories. I really loved sharing these ideas in depth.

I want you to know that it's not complicated. It just takes time. Take informed, measured steps. Develop mastery in small valuable steps. Make as many inexpensive mistakes as you can as quickly as you can. Execute. Innovate. Repeat.

It is not hard, but it does take time. Slow startups. Start one now and you'll thank yourself down the road.

As Tom Peters says, "Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark."

This is the Renaissance Age of entrepreneurship, and its just beginning.

Welcome friend. Now get going.


Tom Peters site

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, new product development, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

In most discussions about entrepreneurship, the talk usually comes around to 'creative destruction'. This is a term created by economist Joseph Schumpeter. It describes the inevitable loss of value in enterprises that do not innovate.

Wikipedia's description: "In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power."

If you are on the losing side, it is painful and sad when the market share of older companies is eaten by younger more innovative enterprises.

What's useful here is that innovation is available to everyone. Innovation does not have to equal high, unmanaged growth. Innovation can be increased value and service to your stakeholders (think of the excellent book, Small Giants). Indeed, innovation is limitless and never-ending by its nature. So yes, there will be creative destruction.

The next step is to build platforms for 'creative birthing'. I see 'creative birthing' as a way to prosper through the inevitable destruction by allowing ever-increasing numbers of individuals and groups to participate in innovation and entrepreneurship. Even as creative destruction overtakes the less nimble, people involved in those dying companies will have the advantage of easily participating in new, more creative and innovative launches.

Hybrid entity/governance models will likely emerge. New kinds of stakeholders will likely emerge (think of the great new work forming within the Slow Money Alliance). By supporting 'creative birthing' processes and platforms, I think economic regions can prosper. Those that don't help enable easier 'creative birthing' processes will eventually suffer.

In a previous post I linked to a study showing that regions with the highest business 'birth rates' (startups, which everyone celebrates) also had the highest 'death rates' of companies going under. Many places treat these business closures as failures, while the most successful places (highest birth rates) celebrate the culture of entrepreneurship and make pathways into that model easier.

Working in a social profit (non-profit) organization that is neither private or government, I feel a wonderful nimbleness to work on models to make entrepreneurship easier. Governments shouldn't do this stuff. Too often, private enterprise is locked in to their own form of 'creative destruction' and not interested in new options. The best enterprises don't do this, but they are typically a minority.

I think the local food processing cluster we are trying to build is a worthy experiment in 'creative birthing'. However, this is not 'The' experiment, it's 'an' experiment. There are countless other experiments possible across all types of enterprises and geographies.

There is no other way to deal with creative destruction than acknowledge it and build systems to temper and even utilize that destruction: creative birthing is here to stay.

I greatly enjoyed sharing some of these ideas with many new friends in the Regional Food Systems Working Group at the Leopold Center this week. The meeting was held at the beautiful Iowa Arboretum in Madrid, IA. I highly recommend a visit!



Wikipedia, 'Creative Destruction'

Prior post on birth rates / death rates

Slow Money Alliance

Regional Food Systems Working Group

Small Giants, by Bo Burlingham

Iowa Arboretum

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, Driftless Foods, entrepreneurship, new product development, open source economic development, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

I'm really looking forward to speaking at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa next Wednesday, Sept. 30.

This will be at a meeting of their Regional Food Systems Working Group, which is a program of the Iowa Value Chain Partnerships initiative sponsored by The Leopold Center. Very cool work. Links below.

I need their help and can't wait to discuss our Iowa County initiative to create a local food-processing cluster.

The biggest issues we are coming across in launching this food-processing cluster are governance related. This will be a wonky subject to some, but the issue is critical. We need new organizational structures to match market opportunities and community economic development needs.

In my opinion the experiments we most need to create should be designed to test alternative business governance structures. We need to take existing and emerging governance tools and mix them up into new platforms for doing enterprise creation and economic development.

I believe we need to experiment with new combinations of entity types. We've got LLCs, cooperatives, S-Corps, partnerships of all flavors, and now even L3Cs. It used to be that you had to pick one entity style and run with it. I think there are a lot of possibilities for doing great development work by creating projects with multiple governance types set up in advance that work in service to one another. Combining the strengths of different types of governance creates many unique tools for creating successful economic development as I see it.

For instance, I'm now helping run a non-profit (or social profit enterprise as my daughter E would say). If I were to advise someone about starting a non-profit I would have them look into organizing legally as a standard 501(c)3 (or (c)6) but having the attorney embed a for-profit LLC within that non-profit structure when it is created. This way you can operate the mission as chartered, but you embed a workable funding source from the outset.

It is always cheaper and easier to put these designs into play at from the outset, especially when outside investors and financial stakeholders are involved. Yes, structures can always be changed later, but it can be complicated, expensive and time-consuming.

That's why we have worked on the forms of governance for the Iowa County food processing cluster so carefully. We want to design and execute a successful experiment that can be reproduced and improved on.

We had only considered cooperative governance at the beginning for a number of reasons, but co-ops have their limitations, just like every other form of governance.

What I seem to be learning in the food cluster is the same lesson I found in my non-profit world: there is a great need for experimenting with governance tools to produce hybrid structures that can work efficiently in this new market. You need to create enterprises that make a profit and are sustainable. You need a way to fit this entity into the world of private and public investors and align everyone's expectations with the community and economic development goals of that entity from the outset.

So, we continue to explore all of these paths. I had a great meeting this week at Isthmus Engineering in Madison, which is organized as a unique form of cooperative. They do some of the coolest design and production work I've ever seen. Check out the YouTube video on their home page linked below.

At this meeting also I got to meet Melissa Hoover who is the Executive Director of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives. I learned a great deal about challenges facing new enterprises and alternate forms of governance nationwide. Melissa is a really nice person and a wonderful business resource.

I'm convinced the next thing needed for regional economic development are experiments of all kinds in non-traditional and hybrid forms of enterprise governance. Then when those experiments are run and proven effective, their structures can be reproduced inexpensively.

That's what economic developers and funders of all kinds should put some attention into. Right now it's hard and complicated for individual economic developers and entrepreneurs to create these structures. It shouldn't be. Let's do the experiments. Let's find what works. Let's discover which paths are reproducible. Then we can make our results - especially the design of successful hybrid governance models - available to others at a price and hassle-factor they can afford.

Ready access to inexpensive, reproducible hybrid governance structures is a vital, missing piece for regional economic development. I am thrilled to be able to help design experiments with this goal as the object of the work.

Yes, a wonky topic, but I can't think of anything more needed in the world of sustainable economic development right now.

With the help of great new friends I'm convinced our Iowa County initiative can make a lasting contribution to the field of regional economic development and building better regional food systems.

Makes me hungry.

Aldo Leopold Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. Regional Food Systems Working Group

Isthmus Engineering

United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives

Introduction to L3C governance. Short introduction to Low-Profit Limited Liability Companies. Our newest entity form, now emerging state by state.

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, new product development, open source economic development, startups, The slow start up movement

Here in Wisconsin there is great interest in creating publicly available kitchen space to help small, local food enterprises come to life and grow. The short hand term for these efforts is 'kitchen incubators'. The model is that you can rent a state certified (expensive!) kitchen for a modest hourly rate and grow your own food business.

In our area, safety requires that foods produced for public sale need to be processed and packaged in a state inspected facility. Frankly this is a critical marketing benefit to be state certified. These inspections are probably required in most states, but I have not had the time to research.

The idea is to utilize public and private funds as available to create public shared-use kitchens as tools to enable local farmers, food enthusiasts, and food lovers of all kinds to become entrepreneurs.

I believe this idea will work for all kinds of locations. I see a very special place for this work in rural economic development where I spend my time.

I'm wrapped up in this subject at the moment. We have a public shared-use kitchen (kitchen incubator) opening in Iowa County early next year. It will be owned and operated by The Hodan Center, a wonderful enterprise celebrating and enriching the lives of people with disabilities. I am working with the Hodan Center on creating a public shared-use kitchen platform, available to the public when not used by Hodan activities.

I grew up with entrepreneurs, and I've been a working entrepreneur for 35 years. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a bigger, better or easier opportunity to explore entrepreneurship than in what I'm seeing now.

The Slow Money folks refer to these businesses as Small Food Enterprises (SFEs).

I dearly love this idea, but I don't think the phrase 'kitchen incubator' does this movement justice. The possibilities are much bigger and much more profound.

'Innovation Kitchen' is my term of art that embraces the new entrepreneurship possibilities of food. I am fully enchanted with what can happen from these kinds of platforms.

Creating a kitchen is not enough. Creating a network is what is needed. We are calling our new platform 'The Wisconsin Food Innovation Network', or, the Innovation Kitchen' for short.

In our area, we are all indebted to Mary Pat Carlson of the Farm Market Kitchen in Algoma, WI (linked below). Mary Pat pioneered this concept in Wisconsin and is making it work. Mary Pat is generously helping those of us with new kitchens in the planning and building stages understand what's required for these to succeed.

What excites me so much about this idea is that is speaks so clearly to the almost endless possibilities for entrepreneurship these certified kitchen platforms provide.

I've been saying for a long time that this is the Renaissance Age of entrepreneurship and that it's just beginning. I believe our Innovation Kitchen can become a model for enabling all kinds of economies, but the economic development benefits can be especially transformational for rural and agricultural regions.

Our new Wisconsin Food Innovation Network will focus on creating a sustainable platform for creating and growing food-based enterprises. I see the network aspect of this as creating, in advance, relationships for the kitchen with buyers, vendors, professional advisers, and entrepreneurship assets.

The Wisconsin Food Innovation Network will open its Innovation Kitchen in Mineral Point, WI in early 2010. We are planning the public-use protocols with the idea of learning what is most sustainable and reproducible over time and in other locations.

I'll be dedicating our first Iowa County Entrepreneur and Inventor Club meeting to a wide ranging discussion of the kitchen with Hodan staff available for questions. That meeting will be Wednesday, Sept. 23 in Dodgeville, WI at the Stonefield Apartments. Doors open at 5:30 PM. Meeting starts at 6.

I have focused these posts recently on our work to help create our Iowa County Initiative, Driftless Foods. This is designed to create a planned system for a local-foods processing cluster in a discreet region. The Innovation Kitchen fits this project hand in glove. It is my belief that over time, some entrepreneurs working from the Innovation Kitchen will 'graduate' into bigger revenue roles and need bigger processing and support capabilities. We will have that infrastructure waiting for them with Driftless Foods.

The time has come to roll this out big time. I am SO looking forward to working with and supporting the Hodan Center and the Wisconsin Food Innovation Network.

I will use this space to report back on what worked, what didn't, and (oh my!) all those possibilities….


The Hodan Center

The Farm Market Kitchen

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, new product development, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

My mission is to create as many small, sustainable enterprises as possible. Working with Mark on the Driftless Foods / Iowa County initiative I've come to believe that the best way to create large numbers of new enterprises is by building new local economic infrastructure designed to support them.

Mark and I have been talking about community supported development (CSDs) as a new piece of economic infrastructure whose time has come. It is a model we'll pursue for growing Driftless Foods.

Much as community supported agriculture (CSAs) seeks to create long-term vibrant farms in local communities, CSDs would seek to build long-term vibrant enterprises of all kinds into local communities.

The CSA metaphor is intended. In a bad year you'll get a smaller basket of produce. In a good year you're awash in zucchini. What if the returns were dividends not veggies?

Community supported development can be a tool for creating, funding, and growing long-term local economic infrastructure in communities and regions. With a little planning, this infrastructure can be designed to strengthen market-based local entrepreneurship for generations.

The infrastructure supplied by community-supported development can be digital, and/or brick and mortar capacity, and certainly many other manifestations. In our case we are trying to create a platform for moving large quantities of regional foods into a processing and distribution system geared toward mid-tier farms. This will require the creation of a legal entity capable of organizing that kind of effort; the building of a physical structure robust enough to do this efficiently; and the wiring up of social networks that will enable this project to move forward. Some of this is old-fashioned shoe leather, but much of it will involve investing in the tools to needed to launch and grow this community effort.

In our case we are trying to create a community based economic development platform that will not only benefit local enterprise but critically, community investors as well.

Community supported development would employ judicious early use of funds available from public sources such as grants and loans from economic development sources in government and
non-profits.

People from the community and the region should also be able to invest and benefit from this development as well. This is the heart of community supported development. Not only would local entrepreneurship benefit, but community investors would also benefit.

Community also implies those of like mind. If a place for an investment from the wider community is available that should be available to supporters wherever they are.

Sound legal structures can be put in place to allow individuals and local entities to invest in this way.

There is, thankfully, no 'one' right way. Many traditional investing formats will work. There are also new legal forms of organization emerging all over the country, state by state, that are allowing many creative new ways to create and build sustainable entrepreneurship.

So, how do you organize that? Clearly you hard wire self-interest into the equation. You just can't talk about win-win. The system needs to DO win-win. Sustainable = repeatable. Over and over. Mutual self-interest is a repeatable platform.

Our job as economic developers is to build win-win into the equation from the beginning with the entire community in mind.

The local benefits derived from community sponsored development will be greater economic diversification and security. More capital will circulate locally. People and local organizations of all kinds will also reap the benefits of living in an economy that grows entrepreneurs.

The regional benefits of this kind of economic development will grow immediately. As more and more of these new startup enterprises are created and nurtured they will begin to interact in mutually self-interested ways. This will benefit the entrepreneur organizations and create region-level community supported development platforms.

I know that multi-state benefits will accrue as this model builds out. The wider an area that can be knit together by self-interest, the more chances there are for finding and growing profitable partnerships for all involved. Our previous startup used this very model as we grew our fluid recycling business. We knit together partnerships all across the upper Midwest. As projects came and went, unique multi-state coalitions of these partners would come together on demand.

What's needed are more partners. We need to create the infrastructure for entrepreneurship to thrive.

Community supported development is an idea whose time has come.

Labels: business plans, entrepreneurship, open source economic development, platforms, The slow start up movement

When Woody Tasch from Slow Money came to town last week I was startled to hear him respectfully and with gratitude reference the book Small is Beautiful.

I'd read Slow Money and was struck by the possibilities but hadn't connected the work to E. F. Schumacher and his great book, "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered."

But this is a natural 21st century marriage. Efficient, market-driven financial discipline, with sustainable goals and methods, (Slow Money) meets smart, appropriate-scale technologies, in this case taking the form of local foods and sustainable agriculture.

What a magic time for this combination to occur. Demand is off the chart for local foods. Production and processing techniques are faster, smarter, cheaper. Tools for design, organizing, marketing, sales and distribution have never been better or less expensive. I'm back to the fact that this is indeed the Renaissance age of entrepreneurship, and it's just beginning.

Food is an issue whose time has come. There is a wonderful quote from Wisconsin's own Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac that ties in here. Think about the following Leopold quote in terms of sustainable agriculture, local processing, local foods and healthy, more compelling communities; "By and large our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use."

Free markets have nurtured the greatest freedoms in human history, but we need to apply those tools in less destructive, more successful ways especially in the way we feed and nurture ourselves and the place we live.

As a group of us works to design an efficient, reproducible local foods processing system with our Driftless Foods, Iowa County initiative, none of us are taking anything as gospel. Small is beautiful not because it sounds good as a theory on paper but because technology has evolved small, smart, nimble processing equipment that makes better use of resources and produces higher, more sustainable profits. That's why small is beautiful. Schumacher was [is!] right.

Small is a matter of perspective certainly. The multiple local foods processing plants we are designing to work in a self-supportive coalition, are not garden sheds. They will take a lot of money by anyone's standards. They will be technologically and environmentally brilliant. Small? No, compared to farmyard vegetable stands. Yes, compared to the Wall Street backed food system now falling apart.

One of my favorite Schumacher quotes sums up what a new local foods processing system might look like: "The aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption." That is, an ultra lean, wise production system that creates great multi-generational jobs for a community, passing the bulk of the profits into a pool that all contributors are compensated from equitably.

I'm going to post the first Driftless Foods Cooperative white paper that we produced by separate headline following this. It's a short overview of the project.

Small is beautiful because it is smart, sustainable and profitable. Above all else small is valuable because it is reproducible .

In economic terms, that's a beautiful thing.



The E.F. Schumacher Society

Small is Beautiful. Wikipedia

The Aldo Leopold Foundation

Aldo Leopold. Wikipedia

The Aldo Leopold quote in this post is from the dedications page of the 25th Anniversary edition of Small is Beautiful.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, green tech, innovation, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

A great week for local food processing.

What a week of positive steps. Entrepreneurship is flowering in the world of local foods in ways that I have never seen. This is the renaissance age of entrepreneurship and it's happening extensively in local foods.

Several great highlights to report.

Wood Tasch was in Madison last Monday for their 5th Slow Money Institute. Woody and Slow Money are linked below.

My friend Bartlett Durand is from Otter Creek Organics in Iowa County, home farm of Gary Zimmer, a new friend I greatly admire and United States 2008 US Organic Farmer of the Year. Bartlett summed up the positive emotion in the room on the day of the Slow Money presentation when he fists-up challenged the room and the world with, "It starts here. It's starts now." That was not rhetoric. It was 'run toward the sounds of the guns' stuff (listen to the interview with Woody linked below to get an idea of the buzz in the room all day). The time for local foods is now. And it is erupting in Wisconsin in many amazing ways. Local food development and local food processing models will emerge from our region that will empower people worldwide.

I was privileged to be able to make a presentation about our Iowa County initiative, the Driftless Foods Co-Op, at the Slow Money Institute (SMI), along with my great partner in this adventure, Mark Olson from Renaissance Farm. Margaret Bau, legendary cooperative developer from USDA Rural Development and a member of our Driftless Foods organizing committee, also presented to the SMI.

The next day a few of us had an amazing two hour meeting with Mr. Rod Nilsestuen, our Secretary of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection in Wisconsin.

Mr. Nilsestuen was over-the-top helpful. Mark Olson and Lois Federman, both good friends I've written about, were at this gathering. When I think about all the meetings I've been to in my life, I count this among the few that I would call the most productive. We got to discuss the Iowa County initiative that we outlined at Slow Money the day before. Because we are proposing to organize as a cooperative, Secretary Nilsestuen's background and bias-for-action were transformative. What he was able to bring to our discussion was immeasurably helpful. Mark and I were executing valuable action steps before we hit the parking lot based on what we learned from the previous couple of hours.

Mr. Nilsestuen was the leader of the Wisconsin Federation of Cooperatives for 24 years, which represented about 860 co-ops with 1.8 million members in endeavors ranging from finance and insurance to rural development and agriculture. In 2003, Mr. Nilsestuen was inducted into the National Cooperative Hall of Fame at the National Federation of Cooperatives.

Driftless Foods will be organized as a cooperative because it makes sense for this specific application. I have not been a co-op guy in the past, but there are some inherently beautiful ways to design systems of interdependent, self-supporting enterprises that are perfect for a cooperative structure.

And as for the bigger picture of creating those enterprises and nurturing entrepreneurship...

As a working entrepreneur, the only secret I can reliably pass on about what kind of businesses are best to start is that you should look for what's broken and create opportunities from that. I can't ever remember a moment where entrepreneurship was on such a verge to flourish and succeed.

In the world of local foods, local food processing is the missing link. We have created enormous demand for local foods with consumers, food stores, and restaurants. The production, or supply side, is not being developed in ways that are sufficient to meet this demand.

My immersion into Slow Money early in the week followed by clear, valuable, tactical support for action from key stakeholders in government, academia, and the investor community was invigorating. This is a moment for local foods and for economies of all shapes and sizes to, as Bartlett said above, recognize that the time to change is 'right here, right now'.

I am personally enchanted with the work of Slow Money, and I am empowered by the vision of Mr. Nilsestuen.

I've been a working entrepreneur for more than 35 years. I have never in my life seen this level of commitment to entrepreneurship and creating new enterprises. Watching it happen in the world of local foods is breathtakingly cool.

I can't wait for next week!



Woody Tasch interview with Bill Lubing

Secretary Nilsestuen's CV at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection.

Otter Creek Organics


Lubing Creative

Slow Money new friend Odessa Piper: "Local is the distance the heart can travel." Odessa is the founder of the world renown L'Etoile Restaurant in Madison. She has promised to share her essay behind this quote in a future post.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

I have been smitten by the ideas championed by Woody Tasch in a wonderful book titled "Slow Money. Investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered".

The title is a riff on the theme of slow foods, the concept of beautifully prepared simple, local foods, natural diversity and nurturing community. Mr. Tasch has devoted his life to investment capital and knows those ropes well. He has now turned his skill toward building an organization that takes the principals of investment and applies them to the widespread needs of our broken food system through his Slow Money Alliance.

I've pulled a set of representative quotes from this great book below. Mr. Tasch will be giving a public talk in Madison, WI next Sunday evening, July 26. Details follow this post.

What draws me to this effort is the realism that is embedded throughout. Throughout my life I've watched many, many well-intentioned 'movements' dissolve into inaction. This Slow Money effort feels significantly different. They are planning their rollout of millions of dollars of investments into Small Food Enterprises (SFEs) through a series of Institutes held around the country. Madison will host the next Slow Money Institute, and I'm honored to be involved as a presenter. I will be discussing the '760 square mile incubator' we are creating in Iowa County, WI. That effort will create and integrate multiple SFEs, primarily local processing facilities, under the guidance of a leadership co-op that follows the operating principles for economic development first created at Mondregon in Spain.

I highly recommend 'Slow Money', by Woody Tasch. I do so mostly because Slow Money does not present itself as another 'ism' or another theory. Slow Money is a tool for our times.

Check out some quotes from the book:

"It falls to us to undertake a new project of system design: the creation of new forms of intermediation that catalyze the transition from a commerce of extraction and consumption to a commerce of preservation and restoration". NOTE: It is not left to someone else, the challenge is directed to "us."

There are many new thoughtful investors and angel investment groups beginning to focus on early stage companies that create commercial solutions to social and environmental problems.

"A 'patient capital' marketplace is emerging to better serve such companies, since most are not easy candidates for the same dollars that are seeking the next Google. Patient capital does not yet exist as an organized or disciplined asset class; it is the gestalt that emerges as socially responsible investing matures and the wave of triple-bottom-line [social, environmental and economic accounting] entrepreneurs and investors builds… Applied to the food sector, patient capital becomes slow money - whose name carries with it more than a doff of the cap to Slow Food, the international NGO that promotes biodiversity, artisan food traditions, heirloom varieties and connections between small farmers and consumers. Slow money can be thought of as a subsector, or sub-asset class of patient capital, focused with appropriate patience on the health of soil and bioregion."

If you are a thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, now is your time. If you are an investor looking to go beyond 'social investing', now is your time. I believe slow money is a real tool that will have real positive consequences, right down to the farm family with the best tomato chutney recipe, somewhere out there in our beautiful rural landscape. The time to fix this mess in right here. Right now.

Mr Tasch discusses a new kind of market that is rapidly developing around slow money. "We need a market that rewards humility and promotes patience and invites the participation of all those individuals who will sleep better at night knowing that some of their dollars are swirling around cyberspace a little bit slower, lending a little bit less of their energy to the economic engine that brought us, last year, 8 million light trucks and SUVs, and who knows how many million Twinkies. We need a peaceful market, a market that rewards peaceful companies, a market that dares to recognize explicitly, publicly and financially, that growth, growth, growth is predicated on dislocation and churn and continuously reinvented and unsatisfiable consumer demand, and that these conditions constitute a form of economic violence."

There are many, many more quotes highlighted in my dog-eared copy of Slow Money. Too many to put into a single post.

As the soul of Sustainable Work is entrepreneurship, let me close with a beautiful piece that helped me knit together the ideas of rural economies and entrepreneurship as I started in my current role doing rural economic development.

"Entrepreneurs and farmers are the poets of the economy. They are holders of ambiguity and risk. They cultivate interstitial spaces, where demand and need and aspiration coexist in a mildly turbulent state of chaotic possibility. They continuously test the boundaries of quality and quantity, as a poet tests the boundaries of denotation and connotation. Ideas in a business plan; seeds in potting soil; rhymes in search of new reasons."

Great language. Great concepts. A thoroughly great book.

This is the Renaissance age of entrepreneurship and it's just beginning, my entrepreneur/farmer/poet friends. Forward!


The Slow Money web site

The next Slow Money Institute (Madison, WI), will be Monday, July 27th. Woody Tasch will give a public talk on Sunday, July 26th at 7:30 p.m. at Morphy Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus, 455 North Park Street in Madison.

Triple botton line, Wikipedia

Labels: entrepreneurship, open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, The slow start up movement

Since moving into rural economic development I have learned many new perspectives for thinking about how to make things happen appropriately.

When I worked in heavy industry, our challenge was to get international as fast as possible. That fit the situation, and it fit the market.

Now I am privileged to be able to work with food and farmers, along with artists, and a wonderful quilt of small and large enterprises. I'm learning new markets and searching for models that will add real value to the communities I get to work in.

Entrepreneurs look for problems to solve. That's where our opportunities are. When I look around rural economic development I see a really unusual problem. There are customers galore but very little infrastructure in place to support the production and marketing efforts needed to fill the demand.

My friend Lois Federman, a farmer (Marr's Valley View Farms, their family farm since 1874), head of the great 'Something Special From Wisconsin' program, and an all round great observer of ag market trends helped me focus on this issue.

According to Lois, we have done an outstanding job of educating consumers and food retailers of the value of buying local and regional foods. We have created the demand. The problem is that we have not created the support infrastructure to fill the buy-local supply chain.

Specifically Lois Federman discussed the need for what she calls 'local food processing' to match the demand for local food purchases. I really love the phrase. It also matches the experiment we're building out in Iowa County, WI, to create a series of small, smart, nimble, interrelated food and ag processing plants at a county-wide scale.

Local food processing does not mean tiny unregulated food funnels in people's kitchens. Like technology in every other industry, ag processing tech can now create wonderful efficiencies of scale at points on that curve that used to be reserved for only the largest, most capital intensive plants. Now the equipment is faster, smarter and cheaper. Processing tools can be rapidly swapped in and out to match supply and demand in real time.

You don't need large monolithic food processing plants to reach economies of scale. Local foods can be gathered locally, processed locally, and distributed locally in ways that would be impossible for the large processors to reproduce. You can achieve economies of scale with smart new tools and business organization models that match the markets, that match the consumer demands of this early 21st century world we live in.

I know this to be true. We're running numbers for our first plant now and what's emerging looks to me like the early days of the Internet and the efficiencies that brought to enterprise. It feels like lean manufacturing and Six Sigma meet winter squash.

So I thank my friend Lois Federman for the concept of local food processing. I think it's the key to growing not only the local foods market but to growing farmers of all kinds and the communities they live in.


Lois Federman's family farm

Something Special From Wisconsin program

Labels: business plans, entrepreneurship, marketing, new product development, regional fair trade, The slow start up movement

I usually use these posts to share something enlightening that works in support of my premise that we need to create economic security for ourselves and for our communities by making jobs through new enterprises.

For folks who have tagged along on these essays, some of what I do for my day jobs has come through. This post will be one of those essays, following up on a couple of recent ones about developing new smarter, faster, cheaper startups.

I currently am privileged to work in rural economic development in a very special place, Iowa County, Wisconsin. It's immediately west of Madison and just up the road from Dubuque, where IBM has just transformed the economic landscape by moving a huge data support center there. The landscape of where I work is spectacular. It's called the 'Driftless region' because the landscape has never been flattened by glaciers. It is a land of ancient mountains and pristine valleys, now softened by time into a scale that is so pleasant I can't do it justice.

This beautiful upper Midwest landscape is surrounded by 35 million people within a few hours drive. The rise of regional economics, especially in foods is compelling. In service to this economic and geographic landscape I'm working with wonderful new friends to launch a new job creation platform we hope to make transparent and reproducible in other counties, and other states. If we do it well enough it will work in other continents. That would be a good gift from the upper Midwest Driftless region I love so much.

So, here's a first report from the field.

We held a kickoff meeting for interested stakeholders in a wonderful one room schoolhouse built in 1875. Just down the hill from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen, it now serves as the Town hall for the Town of Wyoming in Iowa County. When we first assembled our mailing list 12 days before the meeting, we only had 15 people on the list. As word spread during those first days, over 200 people had asked to be included. When the day came, I sat in the empty schoolhouse whistling past the graveyard as they say. When the time came however, the building came alive.

More than 50 people from all over Wisconsin attended. We had a wonderful group of farmers, food buyers, ag specialists, investors, community bankers, people from every place on the political spectrum, University folks, people from USDA Rural Development, and on and on. This is a topic people really want to delve into.

And we did.

The gist of what we are proposing is the creation of a leadership co-op based on a model developed in Mondregon, in the Basque region of Spain. They start and launch new interrelated enterprises based on a proven system of training, research, financing and mentorship. [See links at the end]. Rather than gush about the good stuff, let me highlight one number. When new enterprises are created under this model the success rate for those new businesses after 5 years is 97%. You read that right. In doing so they have created about 200,000 good paying sustainable jobs.

What this means is that investors, who typically have to wrench huge returns out of startup investments because so many fail, can now approach this model with a sense that their risks are largely mitigated, and they can participate in the economics of these emerging enterprises with longer term, more secure return expectations.

What this would mean to my beautiful county is that we can create a leadership co-op of a few key visionaries who are not afraid to fail and who hold a new vision for creating jobs and building economic independence in a real and lasting way.

In a post I put up earlier this month I talked about smarter, faster, cheaper economic development models for rural economic development.

Our new effort in support of this plan is what we are doing about it. We are calling the effort the Driftless Foods Co-Op. The people that are coming to join this new effort are amazing. I've done many startups before and I have never ever seen talent and ethics like this emerge.

We are working to develop the financing and the infrastructure to begin processing foods that we refer to produced and marketed under 'regional fair trade' standards.

We are forming the leadership co-op now. It is my hope to begin build the first food plant so that it can start processing this year. I would like to build 2 more plants the following year under the umbrella of the Driftless Foods Co-Op. The following year I hope to add 3 more plants.

We are promising our stakeholders and anyone who cares to listen that we are doing this as an experiment. We want our work to be used to create case studies and documentation such that our efforts and policies can be reproduced elsewhere, with different ag assets, probably even non-ag assets. I posit that it's the process that needs to be honed to a reproducible model. Given all that entails - financing, production, mentor relations, community relations, worker participation, buyer transparency, and on and on - this little experiment can be used to make the economics of business creation and job growth far more sustainable and valuable than the policies responsible for what we're experiencing now.

This is my kind of economic development. Work that drives revenue and security to the producers and the communities they live in. It's an energetic, well-grounded launch with wonderful people and noble, sustainable goals.

If we do it right, we just may be able to change the world in small but important ways that last for generations.

Happy Independence Day!


Mondragon in the Basque region of northern Spain is the shining example of an entrepreneurial economy shaped by over 100 co-ops owned by 200,000 people. Thanks to the Mondragon co-ops, the people of the Basque region enjoy one of the highest standards of living in all of Europe while being phenomenally entrepreneurial. Mondragon is proof that co-op ownership can work on a grand scale and compete globally.

Article about our Driftless Foods Co-Op kickoff meeting in the Wisconsin State Journal

Download our working definition of regional fair trade, in PDF

The Mondragon model comes to the inner city Mid West.

Labels: boomers, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

Inc. Magazine has just given their June cover story over to Paul Graham and his wonderful Y Combinator startup machine.

I've written about Paul Graham a number of times in the past and linked to his sites, which I'll do again at the end of this post. You should know about Mr. Graham and his model for doing - not talking about - actually doing, economic development.

The cover story is titled "The Start-Up Guru. Paul Graham has launched 145 companies. His formula? Smaller. Cheaper. Faster."

In a great story written by Max Chalkin, he opens with the this position: "Graham's system generates scores of bold ideas, churns out dozens of new companies, and creates hundreds of jobs - for a lot less money than you might think."

At its core, Y Combinator is a venture capital fund, operating with small ball investments of $10K or so. More importantly, Paul Graham trains his startups to make things people want and change rapidly as they learn from their mistakes. He doesn't have any high finance back-office structure to accomplish all this. Y Combinator runs out of Graham's home office. Yet he has generated more than 500 jobs with his startups over the last couple of years and this job creation pace is accelerating as his startups mature and are acquired.

The Inc. Magazine piece is too short to do justice to what Mr. Graham is pulling off. It also doesn't give much background about his philosophy, which you can learn more about through his essays (below). Suffice it to say that he builds his entrepreneurs into realistic enterprises ready to face the world. A quote I really loved from the piece sums it up: "Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly. But working for a large company is like being waterboarded."

OK. All of the startups Graham and Y Combinator do are software related. Logical. Graham is a Silicon Valley guy. However, here is where I would introduce my question. Why can't this model be adapted for all kinds of industries and geographies? I would posit that all that would need changing is the exit strategies for investors/stakeholders.

In fact I'm proposing just this kind of model in my day job doing rural economic development. I will say very specifically that the move toward rural small business development highly favors boomers and knowledge workers, typically people wearing both hats.

Why can't we launch many small, fast, fun, smart new farms and ag processing enterprises? Why can't we make training and tools and small ball investments available that will allow people in rural and urban areas to tie into each others economic and cultural self interests in ways that benefit both?

Certainly there is a vast structure of entrepreneurship talk therapy out there. What's needed even more is strategic and financial participation, as well as launch help for farmers in transition, new farmers, and cool new processing facilities emerging to meet the rapidly evolving new world of regional food economics.

My new friends at U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development have shown me a powerful organizational structure that can be used to accomplish these kind of goals. Adapting that structure to Y Combinator like 21st century speed, nimbleness, and adapt-as-you-go enterprise training seem like a perfect marriage for doing effective rural economic development.

With my new friends, especially Mark Olson of Renaissance Farm, we hope to make Iowa County Wisconsin a 763 square mile business incubator for progressive, effective rural economic development. We will be having a roll-out meeting for regional stakeholders to discuss this proposal on June 15 from 3 to 5 PM. eMail me for details if you have an interest.

It's high time we put the coolest startup smarts (Y Combinator) into projects that build our rural communities, grow more farmers and create a growing network of sustainable food infrastructure.

Smaller. Faster. Cheaper. Yum!


Y Combinator

Paul Graham essays

Renaissance Farm

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement, women entrepreneurs

I've been fortunate to meet many new people through this writing who are working on entrepreneurship issues.

A new friend of entrepreneurs caught my attention this week. She is Sramana Mitra, a tech entrepreneur and a columnist for Forbes. Ms Mitra has a Masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, has founded 3 companies, and consults with Silicon Valley VCs.

Importantly, Ms. Mitra has been writing a series of books under the theme of 'Entrepreneur Journeys'. Her second volume in the series was recently released under the title "Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction."

While most of the examples are small tech companies, the lessons Ms. Mitra evokes from them are universal. A quote from the middle of the book is a great place for us to start: "I remain resolute that if entrepreneurs the world over learn to build sustainable small businesses without requiring large sums of outside financing, the global economy will run without a hitch. No doubt, many of these ventures will go on to seek large-scale expansion capital, in building out larger enterprises, but those who don't grow exponentially will still enjoy the pride and privilege of being small business owners. And we as a people, and we as communities and as nations, will enjoy the health and wealth of their contributions."

Yes. A thousand times, yes. The subject of Ms. Mitra's book and the approach she recommends is clear: You need to bootstrap most businesses. The next step is mentor capital, not venture capital. This will come when you've got customers and a track record. Use your bootstrapping phase to get smart, make mistakes and build a market. It will take more time but less money than you think.

I'd like to post a nice piece from the prologue to introduce this book. It matches very nicely with the themes of the writing here at Sustainable Work. You not only can do it, but you need to do it. Starting your own small enterprise is MUCH safer than not doing it. The world needs you and your contributions. You need your independence strengthened and validated.

Ms. Mitra talks about the current financial collapse and resulting economic mayhem in her opening…

"So, what next? Where to from here? From my perspective it is clear that small business must be a top policy priority. There are approximately 5 million small businesses in the United Sates with fewer than 20 employees. Another 20 million mom-and-pops endeavor day in and day out without employees. Let us hope that in the coming decade, those numbers will double, then triple and quadruple. For here is the most powerful engine of economic growth and sustenance. Here is our way back"

"If the next Google is to emerge and bring with it thousands of new jobs, it must first start over some kitchen table where not only hope but opportunity is readily available. Where entrepreneurs not only start businesses at a higher rate, but also survive and thrive at a higher rate."

"Through much discussion, writing, and brainstorming on each topic, I arrived at one core thesis: Not just entrepreneurship, but bootstrapped entrepreneurship is the true weapon of mass reconstruction."

"Businesses often fail to take flight because they cannot raise funding. Well, start with the assumption that funding will not be available until the business is substantially further along, if ever, and that bottleneck is removed."

"In this volume we will explore a dozen stories of entrepreneurs who have mastered the art of doing more with less, creating a great many options in the process. And making clear for the world over that prosperity and independence are not mutually exclusive. That in fact, they go best together."

That's been a major theme of this Sustainable Work site since it started. Self-enterprise is a path to personal independence and growing, vibrant communities. But for most new enterprises, that journey needs to be one of bootstrapping, self-funding, and longer timelines than you expect.

Remember however, this isn't a reason NOT to do your own startup; just the opposite. You need to start now and get the journey underway.

You can do it. The world needs your contributions and you need a better tomorrow. A perfect fit. Take that first step friend.



Amazon link to Ms. Mitra's new book: Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, The slow start up movement

A short post this weekend, but something near and dear to my heart.

If we boomers are going to have to work longer, why not work at something we love through our own small businesses?

The most recent Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity found that the highest rates of entrepreneurship came from people age 55 to 64. Boomers had the highest rate of business creation of any age group in 2008. The only other demographic with higher startup rates were immigrants. Both good stories needing attention.

The Kauffman story breaks down new business startups into high and low income types of businesses. However, I would posit that many boomer startups are not intended to be high growth, big money operations.

Boomer businesses are typically small enterprises based on work the entrepreneur loves and skills and knowledge the boomer entrepreneur has developed over decades. They are typically self-funded and are designed to produce an income or two or three. If it grows from there all the better, but if it reaches these plateaus and can contribute financially in this awful market, good on 'em.

In my work as an economic developer and when I teach startups, I see the boomer demographic most strongly represented as the emerging power in new business creation. They have subject expertise. They have love for a niche. Most importantly they have wide ranging contacts in their field they can turn to as peers.

If we're going to have to work longer, why not be passionate about the work? Why not design the work to fit into our lives rather than vice versa? Why not put those years of hard work to use for ourselves for a change?

Whether you want to do it or need to do it or just are looking for an enriching challenge, you can do it, my boomer friends. There has never been a better time. This is the Renaissance Age of Entrepreneurship and it's just beginning.

We boomers are perfectly positioned to take advantage of it to help ourselves and help the planet. More on this specific subject in upcoming posts….


Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity highlighting boomer entrepreneurship

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, startups, The slow start up movement, women entrepreneurs

I've run C-Corps, S-Corps, LLCs, and sole proprietorships. Right now, I have the opportunity and good fortune to help run a non-profit. In that day job, I'm helping organize Co-ops.

Structure, structure, structure. It defines a lot of what works and what doesn't work once the rubber meets the road.

This is not a piece about legal structures however. Structures don't make organizations work, leaders do.

I've been thinking about what connects leadership across all the kinds of enterprises I've had the opportunity to participate in.

Fortunately I don't have to think too hard. One simple thing stands out. I just came across a wonderful quote from Tom Peters that sums up my own philosophy better than I could:

"The essence of the leader is to induce people to grow." --Tom Peters

Induce: "to lead or move by persuasion or influence, as to some action or state of mind."

Grow: "to increase by natural development."

If you are a person considering a startup or working in an emerging enterprise, you need to be a leader, no matter your specific position. The world needs your solutions and you need to get those solutions deployed. If you are leading a small team or even if you are only leading yourself, you need to create states of mind and actions that help people get better through natural, reproducible (sustainable) solutions.

Short post, thanks (again) to Tom Peters.

My friend, lead by inducing people to grow.

Tom Peters

Labels: entrepreneurship, startups, The slow start up movement, Tom Peters

I often find that some of the most important information I need finds me after I need it.

Much of the work I do in these posts is to find information that I know to be credible and useful and pass it along with the hope that it reaches you before you need it.

Here is a must-read addition to that discussion: "Rules of Thumb" by Alan Webber. Mr. Webber was the cofounder of Fast Company Magazine.

First a note about Fast Company. I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Fast Company Magazine 'Fast 50' award in 2004. It's one of the business honors I most cherish.

The Fast Company magazine that Mr. Webber cofounded was the coolest place on the planet to read about enterprise and entrepreneurship.

At the time, here is what they said about their Fast 50 winners: “The Fast 50 are the idea elite of business, individuals with the vision and personal commitment to propel their companies and industries into the future.”

What I will be forever proud of is that we won our Fast 50 award with a business of just 4 people. Highly dedicated friends, all of us passionate proponents of our cause. Dave, Mary, Dan and myself. From this core group we recycled many tens of millions of gallons of water and saved well over 10 million gallons of oil every year that used to be lost as wastewater. Dave and I were fortunate enough to be awarded 9 patents for our work. It was very heady, very fun times. However, we knew very little about promoting ourselves or telling the world about our work. Fast Company magazine found us. They understood what our little revolution was accomplishing and told the world about us.

Allen Webber's new book, "Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self" is a must-read for anyone approaching entrepreneurship or working in new and emerging enterprises. It will profoundly strengthen your will and resolve to persevere. It will shine a clear light on the pathways you need to navigate. Importantly, "Rules of Thumb" will bring you street-level wisdom about entrepreneurship that can only come from someone who has done it wisely themselves and learned the best and the worst from those of us who have worked in the field our entire lives.

"Rules of Thumb" is the best short course in entrepreneurship I have come across in decades of work as an entrepreneur.

I'll give you a few of the 'rules' in short form, then close out with one of my favorite quotes from the book.

- Learn to take "No" as a question.

- Failure isn't failing. Failure is failing to try.

- Simplicity is the new currency.

- Nothing happens until money changes hands.

- The difference between a crisis and an opportunity is when you learn about it.

All of these 'rules' and many more (52 in all) get discussed at length in "Rules of Thumb".

Among my favorite in the book is #38, 'If you want to think big, start small.' Mr. Webber is discussing Muhammad Yunus and the founding of the Grameen Bank, which has profoundly changed the world, and earned Mr. Yunus a Nobel Peace Prize along the way. Here's a quote from that section: "It started out, in other words, as a solution in a Petri dish, like so many other world-changing social projects. What it offers is an instructive model for crafting solutions that work, one that applies equally well to for-profit and not-for-profit entrepreneurs."

"Start small. Do what you can with something you care about so deeply that you simply can't not do it. Stay focused, close to the ground, rooted in everyday reality. Trust your instinct and your eyes: do what needs doing any way you can, whether the experts agree or not. Put practice ahead of theory, and results ahead of conventional wisdom."

"Start small. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn't work, change what you're doing until you find something that does work. Start small, start with whatever is close at hand, start with something you care deeply about. But as Muhammad Yunnis [tells listeners], start."

Do you need any more permission than that? Are you waiting for more inspiration?

Among the pieces, some of the most valuable relate to raising money (#37 - 'All money is not created equal'). For anyone raising startup capital this piece is critically important.

When I read a business book, I call it a great success if I can take away one solid idea or truth I can put to work. In "Rules of Thumb", there is not a single weak piece in the entire book. Just remarkable.

Allan Webber has distilled a career working in entrepreneurship into a magnificent collection of hope and how-to.

I rarely recommend anything this enthusiastically, but "Rules of Thumb" is one of those rare gems in the world of entrepreneurship that you just need to read.



Allan Webber bio

Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, funding, startups, The slow start up movement

I really love the work of the Kauffman Foundation, the foundation for entrepreneurship.

In my talks I quote one of my favorite Kauffman Foundation statistics. That stat has just been updated and I'd like to share it. I think it puts the discussion of entrepreneurship in a good perspective.

The Kauffman foundation has been keep a running tally of startups called their Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. I use one particular stat from this in most of my talks. The most recent full year data available is 2007.

In the United States in 2007 there were four hundred ninety-five thousand new startups. Every month. Month in and month out. And this rate of entrepreneurship, 0.30% (about 300 people out of every 100,000 adults) has held steady for more than a decade. My friends and I working in economic development see an uptick in the number of people engaging in 'forced entrepreneurship' due to the current economy so it's probably higher now.

Almost half a million new startups every month. Those are just official startups. The number of folks thinking about it or planning to open some kind of enterprise are probably 3 times that, filling the funnel with about a million startups per month at some stage of being birthed. You are not alone.

I was fortunate to hear a great keynote presentation given by Mr. Burt Chojnowski of Fairfield, Iowa this week. Anyone following these posts would love Burt (linked below). He is the only other person I've heard beyond me saying that it is scarier NOT to start a new enterprise than to start one, especially under the circumstances we're in now. Why would you trust all of your economic security to the vagaries of other people?

Burt also tracks these posts strongly in telling people that entrepreneurship is not a pathway toward quick money. He agrees that it's a matter of delivering well-crafted services and products that are executed at the highest levels. This doesn't require Silicon Valley type enterprises. It requires entrepreneurs doing what they love passionately and professionally, working in an environment designed to support them personally and professionally through their successes AND failures.

About a half million startups occur in the U.S. every month. Most are bootstrapped. Most are grown to solve problems the entrepreneurs are passionate about. If you count in partners, investors, employees, people planning a startup, what is that? One million people per month? Two million people or more per month wouldn't be a stretch.

You are not alone. You can do it. Reach out and look for help, mentors, tools, and advice. This stuff must come first. Money comes after this.

It will take longer than you think so start working at it now. Work cheap, act quickly, make as many inexpensive mistakes as possible, but most importantly, start to create action steps then take them.

Burt Chojnowski has run with some of the big dogs (Guy Kawasaki) and has a terrifically impressive entrepreneurship CV. I loved what he brought up during a discussion of planning for small scale startups. He said, (and I agree) "Entrepreneurs learn from on the job training." That is, get going, get in the game, and learn what you can as fast as you can and put that knowledge to work each new day.

Entrepreneurship is not an isolated activity undertaken by geniuses in labs. It’s a social movement with unbelievable depth and breath across all levels of our society. It is indeed the Renaissance age of entrepreneurship. And it's just beginning.

You can do it. There is plenty of help and plenty of peers available. Get going on your new enterprise, friend.

The time is right. You are not alone.



Read executive summary / Download full Kauffman Index to Entrepreneurship

Burt Chojnowski's Brainbelt Consulting

Labels: boomers, business plans, entrepreneurship, startups, The slow start up movement

Today marks the 4th anniversary of these posts. I see this activity as a mental health outlet. And it's clearly practice. I enjoy the subject of sustainable enterprise and sustainable work and want to write and talk more about it.

Remember, sustainable doesn't mean you save the whales first. Sustainable means keeping you and your enterprise going. You make real progress. You grow. You get more competent and independent. You keep excellent books. You capture data professionally. Your enterprise grows in value in every way. If you crash and burn, both you and the whales are toast. That is what I mean by sustainable.

To be sustainable, that is to grow and build value, requires competence. It does not require star quality entrepreneur mojo.

I read a great piece in the April 13 Business Week by Robert Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford.

The article is titled, "In Praise of Simple Competence".

The basis of this is the Peter Principle, the idea that people are promoted until they run out of skills to accomplish the growing amount and complexity of tasks we ask of them. Then we all have to live with their incompetence.

As Mr. Sutton writes, "If Dr. Peter (The Peter Principle) were alive today, he'd find that a new lust for superhuman accomplishments has helped create an almost unprecedented level of incompetence. The message has been this: Perform extraordinary feats or consider yourself a loser. We are now struggling to stay afloat in a river of snake oil created by this way of thinking."

The thing I've learned to do that might be the most valuable contribution I can make to someone thinking about their own startup is to give them permission. You can do this. Surely you need competence, but that's all. You do not need to reach for the unattainable. You can build a successful, growing, sustainable enterprise. If you are realistic, your enterprise can be one that matches your needs and your timeline.

With small businesses and startups, remember to fail early and often. That's not permission. That's an order. I've said this forever, and I continue to prove it myself every day. You will fail. Do so cheaply, non-catastrophically, and learn from every one.

This is my bedrock foundation for approaching enterprise. You can do it. You will make mistakes and not get it right. It will likely take longer than you think. Go forward and scramble.

In support of this two great quotes: the first from my favorite business sage, Tom Peters, the second from Arthur Lefler, current CEO of Proctor and Gamble.

"Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast." - Tom Peters

"You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don't make the same mistake twice." - Proctor and Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley (story link below).

It's fun when really smart people back up what you know to be as true as anything that exists in the world of enterprise.

This is the solution. Simple competence. It is not the ability to avoid mistakes but to live with them, to keep their damage manageable and their lessons valuable.

I'd wanted to start writing about this stuff long ago but was always afraid I wouldn't be good enough or that it wouldn't instantly get to the New York Times' best seller list.

Then it hit me one night, sitting in a hotel room in Dubuque, Iowa. I couldn't do one more thing that day. I was dead tired and covered in oil and fatigue from the startup of one of our industrial fluid recyclers at the local John Deere plant.

I decided to write down a couple of ideas that I'd learned that day about what I wanted to do with my life. It didn't have to be on the best seller list. It needed to be a competent presentation of what I know to be true about doing enterprise. Good enough. An action step.

That was four years ago today. Still practicing. Still touting the joys of simple competence and inviting you into the world of sustainable work.

C'mon along for the next four years. I see a LOT of interesting work on the horizon.



In Praise of Simple Competence. Business week article by Bob Sutton. April 13, 2009. Online version titled "the Peter Principle Still Lives.


How P&G Plans to Clean Up Business Week April 13, 2009.

Tom Peters

First post and mission statement April 12, 2005

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, First post and mission, innovation, startups, The slow start up movement

Anyone who works with me or reads these posts knows I insist you really love the work you're doing in your startup or small business.

As this awful economy grinds on many people are moving toward entrepreneurship as a viable option. I applaud that and welcome you to the practice.

What's getting me a bit nuts is the preponderance of media shouting out that you need to follow your bliss into entrepreneurship.

Yes, I agree. But then what? Do you follow your bliss over a cliff? At least you'd enjoy the plunge for a few short moments.

If you are going to endure and celebrate what makes small business, you have to have all the parts of your mind and body engaged.

I love the quote from Dr. Howard Thurman, the great religious leader and pioneering civil rights activist who mentored Dr. Martin Luther King: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Did that mean Dr. Thurman spent his days navel gazing? Just the opposite. He wrote more than 20 books. He met Ghandi and, at Ghandi's request, brought back his message of non-violence to African Americans, then served as spiritual advisor and mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King's family. He gave up a safe, honored, tenured faculty position to change the world.

He worked relentlessly, as though tomorrow really needed him. It did.

However, it's the DOING of the work that matters, not the thinking about it.

I'm reading Malcom Gladwell's great new book, "Outliers". He talks about needing proficiency to claim mastery. His thesis is that you need about 10,00 hours of practice to become a master of any trade, from musical composer to hockey star. Four hours per day. Seven days per week. That's about 10 years of practice.

Gladwell also talks about the potential efficiencies of applying that time and mastery to everyday life.

Until very recently as techniques and genetics have improved, the average wet rice farmer in China may have spent as many as 3,000 hours per year working, as opposed to European farmers that spent 1,000 hours per year working.

What was different?

"What redeemed the life of a rice farmer was the nature of the work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was meaningful."

Chinese rice farming is NOT the North American agricultural economy of the 21st century. It is however a startlingly apt metaphor for the rest of commerce in the global 21st century economy.

Yes, you REALLY do need to love what you do. Not because you'll be following your bliss. You need to love what you do because you'll be living with your work through times of miserable cash flow, angry customers, crushing time constraints, and working more time than you can imagine.

That doesn't sound like following your bliss. It's not. What really matters is working toward your bliss.

You mean it's hard? More than I could tell you. You mean it's going to take longer than you think? Yep.

Does that mean you shouldn't do it?

Just the opposite. You need to enter commerce; as have thousands of generations before us, and work hard and solve problems. Keep excellent notes and records, and then work harder to make it all happen again and again and again.

Among the most dog eared books in our house are our copies of "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfieild.

Mr. Pressfield's book focuses on resistance. How resistance will rise up at every turn and offer you easier ways to lead your life than what your quest demands.

Mr. Pressfield's gift is to remind us that our struggles are ages old and that we have the constitution and the guts to work our way to a better life. Success is based in large measure by how willing we are to show up and push through the daily grind of planting the rice and cultivating what you love through hard work and perseverance.

Here's a good example from "The War of Art":

"Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. 'I write only when inspiration strikes,' he replied. 'Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.'

That's a pro.

In terms of resistance Maugham was saying 'I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.'

Maugham reckoned another deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration…."

Doing what you love is critical. The key word is 'doing'. Not talking about it but acting in an efficient way, creating sustainable (reproducible) business models around what you love. Trying, failing, trying again, and above all else, showing up every day.

Then, and only then, will you be able to turn your bliss into a business.

I wish you the best.


Wikipedia Dr. Howard Thrumon

Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers"

Steven Pressfield's wonderful book "The War of Art"

Labels: business plans, entrepreneurship, startups, Steven Pressfield, The slow start up movement