An Economic Development Incubator Will Improve the Odds for Entrepreneurs

Why not start a community economic development incubator to help your business start-ups by providing a shared facility? Research supports the notion that many entrepreneurs lack adequate knowledge and financing. Give them an edge.

A best practice for an economic development organization or local government would be to set up a business incubator to increase the likelihood that start-ups keep expenses under control and find the business expertise and emotional support they need.

The role of the economic development incubator is to be a place where a baby business can be nurtured and looked after until it is ready to survive on its own. The incubator typically employs a trained manager who has business knowledge and experience that can be shared with the new business owners.

Supporting entrepreneurs should be close to the number one task of every economic development agency.

Optional services also may be provided, including accounting and legal advice. These costs may be recovered on an hourly basis or a lump sum monthly basis to keep expenses more predictable.

It's possible, by the way, that the secretarial service is a separate entrepreneurial enterprise. Many entrepreneurs don't need a secretary as such, as they can keyboard just fine. But a secretarial/receptionist type of person can be an entrepreneur and take in other kinds of work while providing excellent reception for tenants' guests.

The financial arrangements depend solely on how much subsidy is available for operation of the economic development incubator. Note that the premise is so attractive that some entrepreneurs have set up for-profit incubators, so in that case, even allowing for a profit is necessary.

Integrate the Business Incubator with the Community

A business incubator should be closely aligned with community economic development goals. The economic development incubator is best regarded as a total-community effort to create jobs in the long term, and therefore rally the entire community behind it. If need be, explain that small business is where most job creation lies, and you're not waiting around for some big corporation to rescue you by handing you jobs. Use the grand opening of the facility to drive home your rationale.

Educate future tenants on your community economic development realities and plans, and then take your own plans and determinations of what's feasible and what's highly unlikely into account when you select tenants.

About half of all economic development incubators now say that they support virtual tenants and businesses that choose not to occupy space with the remainder of the group. The disadvantage is that this practice requires contribution of resources to those who are not receiving one of the major benefits of an incubation program, which is being eyeball to eyeball with professional management and peers on a daily basis.

However, if you can arrange a full cost recovery through fees charged to non-resident participants, there is potential for even greater community benefit.

Advantages of an Economic Development Incubator

Even if there is no subsidy as such, the incubator is worthwhile for the start-up entrepreneur because:

• The screening process for admittance to the economic development incubator may prevent the bad business idea from ever having the experience of losing money.

• Camaraderie in the building keeps the entrepreneur out of his or her house and focused on business. Subtle competition and oversight prevents procrastination.

• A ready source of information and support when things go wrong often keeps the start-up on track.

• Networking opportunities abound, of course, when you begin with an instant network within the building.

• Sharing secretarial and receptionist services always is an economy.

• The availability of a conference room and other amenities not necessarily accessible to entrepreneurs in a separate space both facilitates business getting done and impressing the right person.

• Sharing of business knowledge and expertise is invaluable, especially for first-time entrepreneurs.

Advice for Owners and Managers of a Business Incubator

Having direct inside knowledge of several different economic development incubators, here's my advice for those who set them up:

• Provide the best possible resource person/manager you can find. Don't skimp on management to save a few bucks, unless you're doing this as a private enterprise. You want a person who is a good manager of your facility and finances, but also someone who has been an entrepreneur himself or herself for the sake of good empathy with your tenants. But the critical point is that you need someone who can serve as a real resource person to the tenants.

• By definition, the manager should know other businesspeople in the community, including the accountants, lawyers, and marketing personnel your tenants may need immediately. She or he also should be sophisticated in understanding technology transfer, the basics of patents, some practical accounting systems for very small business, and the rules of the road for state and local licenses, taxes, fictitious name registration, and such.

• Preferably the entrepreneur has a viable-sounding business plan, however ill formatted and presented, before entry into the economic development incubator. I see no point in giving space to people who proceed to write for eight weeks and then turn out something that the manager thinks is trash. If the thinking and the numbers are there, let the tenant move in, but not before. Then the manager and administrative personnel can assist in making the business plan presentable.

• Invest a few bucks in making the incubator as attractive as possible, even homey. Business books and magazines, plants, and color should be everywhere. You need a walking-around place, which most layouts will provide automatically, but see to it. It takes a lot of pacing to father a business.

• Yet the economic development incubator needs to exude professionalism. It's welcoming, comforting, stimulating, upbeat, but it's really really serious about business. Make sure the waiting area for visitors is meticulous, because anyone coming to see the tenant is important to the future of that business. Keep appropriately high profile business magazines and newspapers in the reception area, neatly maintained of course. A lender or regulator could be coming to check out your tenant.

• Demand frequent reports from the tenants, and offer the most intensive referral and counseling you can afford when any problems arise. The only times a client should be allowed to fail are when a tenant has a self-realization that he or she is not an entrepreneur, or when the original business plan shows itself to have been based on false premises.

• You can definitely use a downtown space or actually any vacant space that needs to be filled for the economic development incubator. In other words, you can have more than one public purpose in mind as you set up the incubator. Just make sure your exterior environs aren't so seedy that they completely obliterate your businesslike intentions inside. While your incubator may need to move at some point to meet these multiple community objectives, keep in mind that you're forming a business incubator for the long haul. Its own business plan should be sustainable, and don't set it up to be a wandering nomad.

• I'm not a big fan of placing the incubator at the edge of some really tacky neighborhood that you hope someday to repopulate with new businesses. Entrepreneurs aren't idiots, so when they graduate from your facility (most facilities kick them out after two or three years), they simply will locate their first permanent facility in a better neighborhood.

• The incubator needs a board of directors, who may well be part of the Chamber of Commerce or city government, as well as successful businesspersons. Also plan on an advisory board that has no governing responsibilities and doesn't include any political people who may be replaced in an election cycle. Both groups can help and challenge the manager do a better job, and offer referrals and suggestions that can be priceless. The advisory board also can be a means of community involvement in the success of the entrepreneurs. Place a news media executive on the advisory board, to fill the dual role of business advice and hopefully some extra publicity for successes.

• Your incubator can be of any size, in terms of number of clients, but if you have more than about eight clients, you need to hire a second manager, who might be called a client services manager or coach. Tenant service, coaching, teaching, and referring needs to be the number one job of the manager, and beyond six to eight small businesses, the management of the business incubator itself will suffer.

• Consider and court teen-age businesses as tenants, using local high schools to recommend and screen. Having youthful energy in the building is good karma, and the most talented young people might grow an Internet-based business, for instance, that others of us wouldn't think of. By the time our young Bill Gates goes to college, the business might be able to employ someone else who could maintain and/or expand the business.

• Since the baby business won't provide employment for your community if the tenant remains a sole proprietor, provide some modest training in supervision through insisting on as many college or high school interns as you can work into the incubator program and the individual businesses. Practice in being a supervisor may be part of the entrepreneurship training for some.

• Keep data on results. When you graduate a tenant to another location, make it a major celebration and inspiration to your boards, the community, and your other tenants. But keep tabs on what the graduate accomplishes in the community. In fact, build this reporting requirement into your original contract with the tenant, and you won't meet resistance when the time comes.

• Although it's really painful, feel free to admit that you made a mistake. Kick your mistakes out of the program as tactfully, quietly, and firmly as possible, but do establish up front a method for ending the relationship.

• Commit to continuous improvement.

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