SustainableWork

The world of artisan foods entrepreneurship is in its infancy. Innovation in foods and everything connected to it will increase omni-directionally, as Bucky Fuller said, for as far as I can see. This move toward local foods and regional food systems will make better, healthier foods available to increasing numbers of people at increasingly affordable prices.

I want to help make the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen a platform for food innovators and entrepreneurs to take advantage of this emerging artisan foods marketplace.

One way we will launch this effort is through a program we're calling our Preparation Partnerships. In this process the Innovation Kitchen will prepare, process, package, store and distribute your food innovation for commercial sale.

I'm going to put the draft of this Preparation Partners plan into this blog post and then later move some of it forward as we see what works.

Our Preparation Partners will be food innovators - chefs, existing small food businesses, new food innovators, farmers, anyone who loves food. We will offer a partnership with the Innovation Kitchen to launch and grow artisan food businesses in a state-inspected, commercial kitchen.

Let's map out how this would work on one simple case.

Let's say you want to start or expand an artisan food enterprise.

As an example, let's say you wanted to start an food business around a soup or stew that celebrated a specific local food. [Editor's note: this is a very good idea.]

As a Preparation Partner you could have your recipe prepared and tested at the Innovation Kitchen in an artisan-batch, commercially relevant scale. If this works for all involved, we can help register your recipe and your new business with the state. Then, as a Preparation Partner, you can have your recipe prepared, packaged, and distributed for commercial sale on a contract basis through the Innovation Kitchen.

Here's an overview… The Preparation Partners program will be a platform you can utilize to launch your artisan food business without having to invest in an entire food processing facility and support networks on your own.

This Preparation Partner option will be the initial focus of the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen. We see 3 key processes making up this program.

Process 1. Will it work? As your Preparation Partner, we want your food innovation to succeed. We will work with you to prepare your recipe in artisan-scale, commercially-relevant batches. This insures your recipe will meet your goals for taste, quality, packaging, etc. when it is prepared in larger volumes in a commercial kitchen. Think of it as a 'shakedown cruise' for your recipe.

Process 1 example: You have an amazing morel mushroom soup recipe. It works great in your home kitchen, and everybody loves it. You want to launch a small food business around this recipe. However, you need to learn a number of things about what happens when you scale your recipe up to small commercial batches. Will it meet your goals for quality? How much of the recipe ingredients will you supply? What ingredients will be purchased at what specifications and price? In short, what are the true costs of production for a small-scale commercial production run? This first process at the Innovation Kitchen is designed to answer those critical questions with you tasting and approving the results. This step also supplies critical documentation of real numbers and actual times required, not extrapolated results.

The idea is to make a small, smart investment in your emerging food enterprise to make sure the idea is scalable. Also important, this first Preparation Partner test run will give everyone involved a basis for pricing larger, commercial production runs if that is an option.

So, how is My Magnificent Morel Soup Mix doing? We rented time on the commercial dehydrator at the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen and got a batch of our morels just right for a dry mix. We purchased some ingredients from local farms. We bought a few ingredients and our packaging through the Innovation Kitchen's Purchasing partner program. The recipe scaled up to a small-scale commercial size. All costs were documented.

This matched the targets in our business plans, and we decided to move forward and prepare for commercial sale.

Process 2. Signing In. Most food products sold commercially must have their recipes and process approved prior to sale. (A good thing for all of us!) There are exceptions, but if you're going to run an artisan foods enterprise you need to think of yourself as a professional and run your enterprise accordingly. That includes going through legal registrations and all professionally relevant trainings and certifications.

The Innovation Kitchen has the support in place to help legally register food products and processes in Wisconsin. We will also have access to full information for selling your food products outside of Wisconsin. Additionally, the Innovation Kitchen 'Signing In' process makes available business help finding information about appropriately registering new business entities.

Process 2 example: With the help of the Innovation Kitchen, we submitted our Morel Mushroom soup recipe and processing steps. We included all three of the sizes we were intending to produce. We were approved within a few weeks. During that time we also incorporated a new enterprise around our business plans and registered with the appropriate state and federal agencies. We also did this with resources available through the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen.

Process 3. Launch services. Preparation Partners will have access to Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen marketing and sales networks, as well as storage and distribution networks.

Process 3 example: We test marketed our Magnificent Morel Mushroom Soup through the Innovation Kitchen marketing network and found the right mix of customers to start with. After processing our Magnificent Morel Mushroom Soup, the Innovation Kitchen stores our finished product. We send in orders for our soup, and the Innovation Kitchen ships them directly to our customers.

Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen Preparation Partners.

So, what's one of the easier and smarter ways to launch or grow an artisan food business? Outsource the testing, organization and food preparation to a state-inspected commercial kitchen that is set up to celebrate artisan foods.

All the difficult food regulation, management and execution steps will be done to code in a state-inspected commercial kitchen. You will have the opportunity to pre-test your recipe at a commercially relevant scale, document your costs, and market-test consumer demand.

Is this a guarantee of success? Of course not.

What the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen represents is a valuable opportunity for food lovers and food entrepreneurs to experiment with new food innovations and product lines in an affordable, valuable setting. A goal of the Innovation Kitchen is to help develop new and existing artisan food enterprises that celebrate healthy foods and our grow our rural communities.

Our Preparation Partners program is one of the ways we can make that happen. Got a recipe you'd like to try?

Stay tuned. I will report back as this emerges.

Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen link

Photo is of Hyde's Mill in beautiful Iowa County, Wisconsin.

Labels: artisan food processing, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, Outsourcing, platforms, slow startups, startups, Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen

Many people want to start their own enterprise but they never begin.

This is due to a variety of personal reasons of course. One very common reason I've seen over the years is that people just don't give themselves permission to try.

They are put off by all the language of commerce - market research and business plans and financing and on and on. It all sounds like too much to learn.

These planning steps are needed of course, especially as the organizations people plan grow more complex and expensive.

However, most people considering entering this fray can do a self-funded, slow startup with little or no money. You can also start your own enterprise in a way that you can fit into your own time schedule, if you have realistic expectations for growth.

That leaves only the fear of the unknown as the main reason people don't give themselves permission to try.

Give yourself that permission and take the first steps.

The only thing you have to lose - if you do this right - is your nagging feeling that you should have tried to start your own business.

Of course the first steps should be small steps. Some of them will be wrong. As long as they don't cost much money you will be smarter and better ready for the steps that come after that.

Do not give up on your dream of starting your own enterprise. There is lots of help available. There are mentors. There is training. There are free and low cost tools available that will connect you to knowledge, customers and possibilities almost without limit. This is the renaissance age of entrepreneurship, and it's just beginning.

Give yourself permission. You can do it.

Labels: bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, slow startups

The opportunity for entrepreneurship in local and regional foods surpasses anything I've seen in my 35+ year career as a working entrepreneur. It's like software, only sustainable.

In the world of local and regional foods there is a wildly expanding demand and an impossibly small capacity to supply this demand. The supply side - the people who grow and process these local foods - need help to get to a scale that is sufficient to begin meeting this demand.

It's a big subject with serious economic development implications for rural and urban areas worldwide.

My goal is to help launch our new Innovation Kitchen efficiently and with high value for all involved. I'm going to need to convey a lot of information across a wide variety of subject areas as clearly as I can.

That's why I took the Wisconsin Acidified Foods Training Course and passed my exams so as to be certified, as trained in: "microbiology of canned foods, principles of acidified foods, thermal processing, food process sanitation, facilities requirements, state and federal regulations, record keeping and process monitoring."

Not everyone will need this course to become an artisan food processor but many will. For anyone in Wisconsin thinking about this, I urge you to take this course (linked below). It's taught by Dr. Barbara Ingham, from the Department of Food Science at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Ingham teaches this course 6 or 7 times per year around the state.

I could not recommend this course any higher if you are considering any kind of artisan food enterprise in Wisconsin.

All foods with any water content have a pH. This measures the acidity of that food. A pH of 4.6 is the magic number. Foods that are pH 4.6 or lower have enough acidic content to be assured of safety. Shelf stability of acidified canned foods is ensured by a vacuum seal and adequate thermal processing.

Artisan food entrepreneurs utilizing these kinds of foods who want to work from the Innovation Kitchen will need to pass these exams first. After taking this course I sincerely believe that this is not some kind of onerous intervention into free enterprise. Just the opposite. Being part of a system like this - one that inspires the highest quality, safest and most interesting food products is a branding windfall.

If you have an interest in this subject, this course is not only fun, but it is densely packed with information that Dr. Ingham shares in ways that are understandable and easy to remember. Also the take-away binders contain printouts of everything relevant to your journey as an acidified foods for later reference.

We were also very fortunate to have Dave Steinhardt, who is a Food Safety Supervisor with the WI Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP). Dave answered a wide range of questions regarding the inspection protocols that our artisan food processors will need to follow when working in the Innovation Kitchen.

This was a wonderful course. I can't recommend it highly enough.

For those of you in other areas, I would strongly recommend you search out this kind of training. It is in your own best interests. You will create better food products, and you will have a better business because of it.

Not all processors will need this kind of course. Some may need even more advanced courses, depending on the food. Some processors may require less training. My point is that you can't just wander into the subject and open up shop. You'll need to find out what training is needed and learn how to work in a community-access processing kitchen. It's not hard. You just have to do it, for all the right reasons.

So, back to the start. I believe there is a terrific entrepreneurship opportunity in artisan food processing, especially with a focus on local and regional foods.

If you have an interest in this field, start organizing yourself to get in the game. Costs to enter are low, demand is high, there appears to be a good opportunity for profit and - if this course is an indication - artisan food processing can be a lot of fun.


Download the 2010 Wisconsin Acidified Canned Foods Training for Small Food Processors brochure and registration form. PDF format. 164 KB

Labels: artisan food processing, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, Innovation Kitchen, slow startups, startups

These posts have consistently tried to advocate for sustainable, repeatable business practices.

This brings me back often to Tom Peters. I am thrilled to see Tom has a new book coming out in early 2010. Tom Peters is at the top of my list of transformative business thinkers.

His new book is called "The Little BIG Things". Sounds like Tom at his best. He is building his current presentations around what he calls "The Eight Courtesies". I'll highlight them below. Buy the book.

Yes, the economy is awful and people are getting hurt badly, but it doesn't mean that we can't explore options for finding a way forward. There are opportunities for 'the rest of us' to start and grow new and emerging enterprises. I have a powerful sense that new kinds of local and regional trade will continue to emerge worldwide for the foreseeable future. It's happening from Australia to the West Bank, to Avoca, WI, and to China (hello Yongchao!).

There are deep and fruitful opportunities here. I am increasingly seeing my immediate contribution to the subject being enterprise creation through local foods.

Individually, these new enterprises may not seem Wall Street worthy, but in aggregate they represent a lot of positive, sustainable, long-term value for economic development on Main Streets and across regions.

So how do you participate? Think you've got to be some kind of uber-trained CEO type to run a new enterprise effectively? Think again.

It's nothing of the sort. You can do it. You DO do it now in other areas of your life. After 35+ years of entrepreneurship I couldn't have described effective entrepreneurship any better than Tom Peters is doing right now.

Here are the eight most important management tools Tom prescribes in The Little BIG Things.

"Epigraph:

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart.—Henry Clay

The 'Eight Courtesies'

1. Stay in touch. (MBWA: Management By Wandering Around)

2. Invest in relationships. (Make friends. Obsess.)

3. Listen. (Respect. Learn. Student. PROFESSIONAL. Sustainable Competitive Advantage #1)

4. Ask. (Engage. Inspire. Consult. React.)

5. Thank. (Appreciate. Acknowledge.)

6. Network......

7. Apologize. (Unequivocal. Rectify. Over-react. Forgive.)

8. Practice thoughtfulness. (Kindness is free. This is ... STRATEGIC.)"


You heard it here: The Renaissance age of entrepreneurship is just beginning. Remember Tom's 'Eight Courtesies' as you journey.

You can do this friend. Start. Engage. Be courteous. Enjoy.


Eight Courtesies: From TP blog 11/24/09

I'm going to buy this book: The Little BIG Things. New book by Tom Peters out February 2010

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business partners, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, open source economic development, sales tales, slow startups, startups, Tom Peters

My friend Mark Olson and I, with a scary-smart group of emerging friends, have been working out possibilities for our Iowa County initiative. This is an economic development prototype to build interrelated local food processing clusters, operated at a scale to meet institutional demand. These facilities will be located strategically across rural economies and organized in a way that is mutually self-supportive. The design of this system moves the bulk of the revenue through the management and production levels, delivering it to the producers and their communities. There is a link at the end to the summary white paper about this initiative that we presented at the Slow Money Institute in Madison this summer.

To me, creating experiments in all kinds of regional food systems is needed. This is a startup effort and startups are not straight-line endeavors. Stuff needs to get learned. Policies and procedures need to get worked out. That doesn't mean go slow. It means to hurry up. Let's make our mistakes early, often, and inexpensively. Our Iowa County / Driftless Foods initiative is a startup designed to to develop and document the knowledge needed take the next steps.

With that base in place, our goal is replication elsewhere: finding ways to deploy successful regional food systems models in other places and at bigger scales.

I had a great meeting this week with a nearby multi-state region of 10 to 15 counties. This may become an opportunity to replicate the Iowa County prototype in a larger, more diverse region sooner than later. I've got some great new friends across this area. I am not only confident, but flat-out excited that we could knit together a world-changing leadership team for this project. Our goal is to create a reproducible regional food system, this time at a bigger scale. The idea is that a successful multi-county (and especially multi-state) model would be one that could be replicated nationally in short order.

Of course, every area will have its own ag (and non ag) resources to contribute to these regional systems. However, I believe the process of organizing and deploying regional food systems is what's critical for making them successful and reproducible. That's at the heart of what is valuable here.

And, to walk-the-walk, I had a chance this week to say what I thought local food processing clusters most needed right now in response to a question from people who could make my answer happen. I had a chance to ask for a lot of money but (per last week's post) I actually said enabling legislation.

On first review I was sure I should have said money, mostly because it's likely true. However, if regional food systems are to be made replicable, they really need some meta support, like enabling legislation, that will give people working on local food initiatives some actual tools to help them move the discussion forward. We need to quit talking about this and take some action steps. We need to create opportunities, enable infrastructure, build markets, create jobs and jump start economic development by nurturing market demand and giving our entrepreneurs a stable platform to grow from.

I remember the early days of recycled paper. It was a good idea that everyone talked about but was stuck in kind of a niche market of early adopters. When the Wisconsin government decided to emphasize the use of recycled paper in its purchasing, that business took off and we've never looked back.

I would suggest that we don't need more requirements, but if the enabling legislation were to just say that opportunities to utilize locally grown and locally processed foods should be explored, it would be huge. The locally processed language would give permission and support to people within local institutions - schools, hospitals, etc. - to see what they can do with local foods. Their buying power will ultimately most enable the success of this process. I would not make these institutions buy locally grown and locally processed foods. I would make it easier for them to do.

If the enabling legislation just indicated that locally grown and locally processed foods were included as a recommendation, but not a requirement, many valuable interests could be served, bypassing potential battle lines.

So, a really wonderful week for local foods processing. Future's so bright… I gotta wear shades. Based on what we learned this week we're planning on ramping up the pace of the rollout of our Iowa County initiative.

As my friend Mark always signs off, be well.


Download PDF white paper on our local food processing initiative first presented to the Slow Money Institute gathering in Madison this summer.

A great interview with Salli Martyniak of Forward Community Investments and Wally Orzechowski of Southwest Wisconsin Community Action Program about community investing. Wally is a friend and is a leader in our team rolling out the Driftless Foods / Iowa County initiative. Salli is a new friend who leads one of the most valuable enterprises I've come across in any field, Forward Community Investments

An interview with Mark Olson about his wonderful Renaissance Farm and adding value to agriculture.

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, new product development, open source economic development, platforms, slow money, slow startups, startups

First, a great day this week meeting with the Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, Mike Sheridan. The Speaker is on my left in the photo. On my right is my friend and our State Representative Steve Hilgenberg.

Next, I thoroughly enjoyed my presentation to the Wisconsin Economic Development Association gathering this past Monday.

The discussion at the end of these talks is always the best part. I was asked a long-standing question that is universal: Are entrepreneurs born or can they be made?

I took the obvious route and said yes.

Too easy. I also didn't get the answer right.

Entrepreneurs are not born or made. Entrepreneurs are enabled.

We can't make people do this stuff, but we certainly can make it easier for those that want to.

It's my opinion that we need better entrepreneurship infrastructure of all kinds. That's why I'm so excited about the almost endless possibilities for new business platforms that our Innovation Kitchen in Mineral Point will enable. Ditto for the local foods processing cluster we're designing and building across Iowa County and beyond. New platforms for creating value. Easier ways for people to know their farmers and food processors. Easier paths to value for all involved.

Entrepreneurs are not born or made. Entrepreneurs are enabled.

So, what does that mean in the trenches?

I learned a new term of art (for me anyway) that is one key tool for enabling entrepreneurs: enabling legislation. Enabling legislation isn't a tool like a hammer or a food processing plant. It's language used in law and regulation that helps something desirable happen.

I've got 3 words that I think could change economic development in rural areas dramatically. These three words could be inserted into (enabling) legislation so that it would create an outcome everyone wants. Such as enabling entrepreneurship and local foods.

In many states, including Wisconsin, there is legislation in the works that would guide institutional buying to build in a preference for locally grown food. I applaud that but I would insert my three words: a preference for locally grown and locally processed food.

You've seen this broken model in other business sectors… You produce a product. You ship it out of the region at low prices for value to be added. Then you buy your own stuff back at high prices. Haven't we heard this story long enough?

So, if you are a person out there who is working on local foods initiatives, think about adding one more layer to the equation. Include 'and locally processed' into your descriptions. Three simple words could lead to wonderful rural economic development possibilities. How anyone defines 'local' is up to them, of course, but there needn't be one answer. Different communities at local, state and regional levels can define what's right for them, and we can all have a good food experience figuring it out.

Creating appropriate scale economic infrastructure to support agriculture and rural economies benefits all people in a region. If regions are to prosper, rural communities must be included. Thriving rural economies support and enrich urban economies. Without both, regions stagnate.

We need to enable our local growers and food entrepreneurs a launch path to join the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF2) movement, sponsored by the White House (Thank you Mrs. Obama!) and the USDA.

We need to enable entrepreneurship of all flavors with as many tools as we can muster.

There is always economic chaos and we are entering an era of even faster change, but I'm a person who believes that, in general, humanity will continue to re-emerge into better lives with increasing value and dignity for continuously-increasing numbers of us.

Entrepreneurs are not born or made. Entrepreneurs are enabled.

You can do it. Wherever you are personally in this discussion, I urge you to enable and to be enabled by the possibilities of entrepreneurship. Let's go. The world needs you!



Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF2)

Labels: bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, innovation, slow startups, startups

I am really looking forward to a presentation I get to share with the Wisconsin Economic Development Association (WEDA) this coming Monday evening, Nov. 9. They have asked me to discuss opening a new economic development organization.

I am coming up on my first anniversary as an economic developer in rural Wisconsin.

On my first day on the job, Dec. 1, 2008, I was sitting in a vacant conference room in Dodgeville, WI. I had been shoveling info into a newly cloned database as fast as I could all day. I turned on the radio that evening as I set up to leave. I learned that a recession was officially declared to be underway. That day the Dow Jones fell almost 700 points, the 4th biggest drop in its history. To welcome me to my new gig, there was a whopper snowstorm clogging up all of the upper Midwest. Welcome to economic development.

For my talk on Monday I have limited expertise to share about economic development theory but I certainly can share what its like to take on this kind of opportunity as a working entrepreneur.

In short, there are deep and profound opportunities available in our rural and urban economies right now. What's needed now are small, measurable action steps. If we're to create a new and better economy we need to launch as many intelligent experiments as possible, learn from them, and repeat.

I'm convinced our Iowa County initiative is a valuable experiment in this mix. All around us there are big, amorphous, meta discussions underway about improving economic development. But that's all they typically are. Discussions.

Mark Olson and I had a wonderful meeting this week with a gentleman who helps lead USDA Rural Development in Wisconsin. He shared with us a really compelling story about his early work in community development that involved red lining in poor neighborhoods. Their team was most successful when they restricted their organizing and development efforts to a geographically limited footprint. When they did that, their efforts succeeded. They could impose timelines, measurement metrics and then get on with it. When problems arose, they had a manageable scope to deal with. When their peers and managers tried to design 'more efficient' experiments in larger geographic areas, valuable data was lost and the efforts to make things better inevitably failed.

That's why I'm so pumped up about this county scale experiment Mark and I are working on. If it leaks into neighboring counties as we roll it out, all the better. Regions should be knit together by this kind of work.

What's valuable is that we will have a geography in which real experiments can be run and real meaning can be extracted. I want something that works and that's reproducible.

If something like this can't be made to work in one county, it can't be made to work in 5 or 20 or 72 counties. We're preparing a small, smart action step to help take those first steps.

Let the studies follow (informed) action. I want to make well-reasoned, inexpensive mistakes and learn. One foot in front of the other stuff, but for goodness sake, let's do something. Let's put economic development in service to the people who need it, not those who just want to talk about it.

I am very impressed by the potential for USDA Rural Development in Wisconsin to make a national impact. Their interest in our experiment is exciting.




USDA Rural Development, Wisconsin

I made new friends this week who work with Forward Community Investments. This is a wonderful organization that works with nonprofits in Wisconsin to help them make strategic financial decisions and build their financial capacity for greater success. They are holding a cool looking community investing conference on November 19th, in Madison.

I've also made new friends in the Austin, TX area bootstrapping group. I am delighted to be included in their doings. If you are in the Austin area there is a good looking gathering on Monday evening 11/9.

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, open source economic development, slow money, startups

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

The title of this post comes from a Wall Street Journal article this week which I'll link to at the end. I'll also highlight some really important points this article make about sustainable entrepreneurship.

First some news from Iowa County Economic Development. The Driftless Foods project was awarded a $24,400 grant to help organize and launch. The train is leaving the station. Big, serious steps are ahead, but I have high hopes this wonderful project will power through them and emerge as an effective, reproducible model for doing local-foods entrepreneurship.

Speaking of local-foods entrepreneurship, the contractor is moving dirt at the new Innovation Kitchen that our Hodan Center will be opening next year in Mineral Point. Here again, I would like to help create a reproducible model for opening a state certified, community shared-use kitchen. Done right, a platform like this, operating at a regional scale can create literally hundreds of new jobs and help dozens of existing small food enterprises (SFEs) grow and prosper.

It is just a flat-out challenging and wonderful experience to be able help design these economic development experiments.

The Wall Street Journal article about entrepreneurship was written by Sue Shellenbarger. It opens with a great introduction the perils and motivations of entrepreneurship: "By economic yardsticks, Roger the Plumber should be feeling pretty low. Roger Peugeot, owner of the 14-employee Overland Park, Kan., plumbing company that bears his name, is part of a sector hit hard by shrunken credit and slumping sales. He has been forced to reduce staff and is battling new competition from other plumbers fleeing the construction industry."

"So why is Mr. Peugeot so happy? He genuinely likes fixing plumbing messes, for one thing, and despite the worst recession he has seen, "I'm still excited to get up and go to work every day," he says. He relishes running into people at the local hardware store whom he has helped in the past. And in hard times, he says, his fate is in his own hands, rather than those of a manager. "Even when things get tough, I'm still in control," he says."

(me) Whew… what that guy said.

Now, let's bring up your entrepreneurship possibilities under this scenario. I want you to get to that state of mind. Do you have to start with employees like Roger the Plumber? Do you have to quit your day job?

I would posit that starting a small business while you are still working for managers creates hope and an empowering taste of personal independence and control in people's lives.

"The WSJ continues: "As a business owner, Mr. Peugeot says, "even when things are out of your control, as they are with this economy, you're still in control of your relationships" with customers. Corporate managers and executives may "sit and wonder if they're going to be laid off, or get frustrated with the inabilities of management," he says. "If yo're the owner, you may have to say 'I screwed up,' but it's a lot better than saying, 'I didn't deserve that.'"

As an entrepreneur, you control your outcomes.

Entrepreneurship is also a path to more control over your time. The example the WSJ cites below is about a young mother, but there are seriously great life-improvements for people of every age group when you can take some control over your time.

" The freedom business owners have to control their schedules enables them to adhere more closely to their personal priorities, says Amy Neftzger, an organizational psychologist for Healthways. They have the flexibility to "make it to a child's play, or spend time with family," she says."

In Iowa County I'm doing my darndest to design and build some new platforms that will make this kind of entrepreneurship possible. I'm getting more confident in successful outcomes by the day. This is exactly the style of entrepreneur mentorship that the Small Business Center at WCTC let me create and teach.

Yes, entrepreneurship is a (not the) way to more self-control and personal fulfillment. It's also a ton of work (a fact I've been writing about since these posts started) so go in with your eyes wide open or don't go in.

From the WSJ:

"(Business owners) are more likely to work extremely long hours than people in any other occupation group, other Gallup research shows."

So how to deal with that? Start small. Start now. Make as many mistakes as you can as inexpensively as you can. Continue moving forward even in the midst of adversity. Then you can grow your business as your life allows.

What's totally, eccentrically fun about that process is that you can end up working prodigious percents of every day doing enjoyable, challenging, rewarding work, whose time-flow you control.

You can do it.



WSJ article, ' Plumbing for Joy? Be Your Own Boss', by Sue Shellenbarger. Wall St. Journal Sept 16, 2009

WCTC Small Business Center

I located this WSJ article through Tom Peters' great site

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, Driftless Foods, entrepreneurship, startups, Tom Peters

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

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

80,000 Americans turn 60 every single day*

I look at the financial mayhem that just befell the world, and I know that it is hitting all parts of society hard.

I think the style of entrepreneurship that I've written about here is especially suited to boomers. I think that there is a clear need for information about slow paced startups that offer not only a realistic return but importantly, a path for the new entrepreneur to make a contribution to their communities. There is a real potential for creating millions of new small businesses from within this demographic. Scaled right and planned appropriately, this path could offer many of my boomer peers additional financial security and a chance to make a difference.

This is not the only demographic that needs help, but I think the tools and approach of sustainable work fit this bunch the best.

Plus, as a fellow traveler well into boomer-hood, I don't have to be polite to my peers. I get to tell it like it is.

Taking the time to research what you love is the first step. Let the research take you into challenging directions, not the same-old, same-old. Learn from the wonderful young people and all the things that we're inclined to run from. Embrace it. Take the opportunity to slow down and make changes that utilize the new digital and cultural tools that are appearing. Then hurry up and try them out.

Are you going to get rich with your boomer startup? It happens, but the strongest likelihood is that if you plan it right, you'll be able to make a sustainable job for yourself going forward. One that won't be dependent on distant corporate managers or the vagaries of the specific geography you live in.

If you team up to market yourself with like-minded peers of all ages, you can bolster the chances of success for all of you.

It does not take a lot of money to start most new enterprises. It takes the kind of skills and knowledge that most boomers have, but often don't value: time, patience, deep understanding of a specific subject, the ability to see beyond the immediate crisis.

Is Boomer Biz for everyone? Surely not. Is it a viable option that many of us should be exploring? You bet. Boomers and self enterprise are a perfect match!

I was just at a meeting of the Inventor and Entrepreneur Club in Vernon County, WI. This club is run by one of the best economic development pros I am privileged to know, Sue Noble. There were about 50 people attending. All were looking for new ideas to help them launch or improve their new enterprises. As they went around the room telling their own stories, the new ideas flowed and the inspiration just kept getting more compelling. Certainly there were young people in the group, but the vast majority were boomers starting new businesses or boomers just beginning to explore a way to put a toe into that water.

It was so cool to see peers my age just flat out excited about learning new skills and trying new things. They were challenging themselves. They were alive. It was just a really fun room to be in.

If you are a boomer take the time to start acquiring the skills to create your own small enterprise. Done right, it may be the best security you can create for yourself in this economy. More importantly, we can help create a new, better and more secure economy that benefits everyone in society.

It's not hard. It's just new. Deep breath. You can do it.



Vernon County, WI Economic Development

*Fast Company June 2009 p. 103 .

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurs

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