JumpStart: IdeaExchange Blog

Since joining JumpStart back in 2006 and being charged with identifying strategies to engage more of our region’s minority and women-led businesses, one of my primary objectives has been to encourage our community’s diverse entrepreneurs to increase their level of involvement in regional events and activities. There is terrific information being shared on a regular basis at these events, but unfortunately too few of our region’s diverse entrepreneurs are in attendance to receive this information. Far too often, mainstream events focused on raising angel and venture capital and growing larger scale firms fail to attract a diverse audience of attendees that is more representative of our region’s population. I have written a number of articles, blogs, and newsletters on this topic, but fundamentally nothing will change until our region’s diverse entrepreneurs decide to get engaged. Without question our event planners and community leaders need to make sure that these events are promoted and publicized through a diverse set of media channels and partners, but ultimately the decision rests with the individual to decide to attend or not.

JumpStart has taken some very exciting steps over the past few years in putting on diverse and collaborative events with such leading national organizations as The Marathon Club and The Initiative For A Competitive Inner City (ICIC), and I am thrilled to announce that we are partnering again to ensure that we build on this momentum. Rather than put on a separate event as we have done in the past, the president of the Marathon Club (and now also JumpStart board member), Carmen Ortiz-McGhee, and I are joining forces with the International Economic Development Council and the Ohio Early Stage Capital Summit for two exciting and timely events taking place next month in Columbus. Carmen and I will be leading and facilitating panel discussions at these events focusing on the specific issues that disproportionately impact high growth minority and women entrepreneurs, and it is essential that more of our community’s diverse entrepreneurs are in attendance to get connected. For more information on each conference, please visit the following pages: IEDC Conference Information, Ohio Early Stage Summit Information. I am both thrilled and honored to take part in these events this year, and truly hope to see all of you there.

I would also like to announce an exciting opportunity being put on by another of our national partners, ICIC, which is hosting its 7th annual Inner City Capital Connections Conference (ICCC) this coming November 15-16th in Los Angeles, California. The ICCC is a unique opportunity for inner city based businesses and entrepreneurs to gain direct access to investors and other funding sources that are specifically committed to growing larger scale businesses in the core urban centers of our country to help revitalize our nation’s inner city economies. Entrepreneurs interested in attending and presenting their business to investors at the event should log on to www.icic.org, or contact Hyacinth Vassell at hvassell@icic.org or via phone at 617.297.3120.

The time to get involved is now! Let’s get up, get going, and get engaged in these uniquely designed events that just might be the difference between success or failure in these rapidly and constantly changing economic times. 

Darrin is Chief Economic Inclusion Officer of JumpStart and President of JumpStart Inclusion Advisors. He founded and ran his own strategic planning and management assistance firm and spent 16 years in the commercial banking and finance industry. Darrin has an MBA from Baldwin-Wallace College and an undergraduate degree from Mount Union College. He has led a series of workshops and seminars on matters of economic development and diversity.

Great things are on the horizon for minority-owned and inner city based businesses in Northeast Ohio. And that’s not only good news for those minority and inner city based firms, but it’s good news for the entire region! It’s been well documented how growing larger scale diverse businesses represent an essential component of a broader economic development strategy – particularly the positive impact on job creation given that minority, women and inner city based businesses tend to hire at greater rates from those same underserved communities. I am thrilled to announce an exciting new initiative at JumpStart that will directly address this vital component of our region’s strategy. 

On Thursday, March 25th we will unveil a game changing initiative that is already being touted by some state and federal officials as a platform that should be considered by communities across the country. The new initiative is called Launch100 which represents a five year focused objective to create a pipeline of 100 high potential minority and inner city based businesses across the state of Ohio. The initiative will be piloted in Northeast Ohio for up to 18 months, with plans to roll out the effort across the entire state should the pilot prove successful. Unique to this effort is the unprecedented collaboration with over 15 State funded business assistance organizations, all working together to ensure that Northeast Ohio’s most promising early-stage minority and inner city based firms are receiving the necessary support and resources to enable these firms to achieve their potential. 

Register for the public kick-off of this extraordinary effort to be held on March 25th at Corporate College East, 4400 Richmond Road, Cleveland, Ohio 44128. Governor Ted Strickland, and a host of dignitaries will be present to share their remarks and underscore how vital the success of this initiative is to our region’s and state’s economy. 

To preview the objectives of Launch100, and the minimum criteria to apply, please log on to www.launch100.org for more information. For an example of a recent high potential minority-owned business that received the type of assistance Launch100 firms can expect, (which ultimately led to the company being funded by JumpStart), take a look at Melody Management which has developed a revolutionary online platform for independent artists and musicians across the globe.

As I mentioned previously, great things are on the horizon for our community, so please be sure to save the date of March 25th and register for the launch event to make sure you’re on hand.

Darrin is Chief Economic Inclusion Officer of JumpStart and President of JumpStart Inclusion Advisors. He founded and ran his own strategic planning and management assistance firm and spent 16 years in the commercial banking and finance industry. Darrin has an MBA from Baldwin Wallace College and an undergraduate degree from Mount Union College. He has led a series of workshops and seminars on matters of economic development and diversity.

I might never get used to our year-end being in June, but here we are wrapping up our fiscal 2009 and moving into 2010.

2009 was a year of significant challenges for much of our business but also a year of a lot progress. Here are a few of the most important outcomes that we take great pride in from the past year:

• JumpStart Ventures made 13 investments — helping to keep JumpStart as one of the most active founding-equity investors in the country
• The companies that comprise the JumpStart Ventures portfolio raised over $23 million in follow-on funding
• Our partnerships with the North Coast Angel Fund and the North Coast Opportunities Technology Fund led to an additional 8 new investments in local companies
• We successfully integrated TechLift into JumpStart’s operations and delivered its services to over 400 companies
• We have helped to launch a new venture fund focused on women, minority and inner city entrepreneurs called the Emerging Market Venture Partners Fund
• And finally, we have successfully raised over $10 million in resources that will enable us to support and invest in more entrepreneurs through 2010 and 2011.

If you would like to learn more about all of our 2009 goals and meet over thirty companies that JumpStart has provided direct support and/or investment to throughout this past year, I invite you to attend our Annual Community Meeting on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at the John S. Knight Center in Akron. This meeting promises to be a great way to learn about all that is happening at JumpStart and give our stakeholders the opportunity to engage with the JumpStart team and the companies that embody the promise of our work. We look forward to seeing you in October!

Ray Leach is CEO of JumpStart and brings his energy and leadership experiences from founding five high growth entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial endeavors in the last 20 years. Ray is a Sloan Fellow and earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also earned a BA in Finance from the University of Akron.

I don’t know about you, but staying focused on business outcomes and goals, each hour of every day, has been uniquely challenging for me of late. Between the election, the financial meltdown, working on new strategies to help move the region forward, etc., I am certainly feeling the full brunt of what I thought working in the quasi-public/private space might be like.

Having said this, I want to share that while I believe I have a good sense of the challenges ahead, as I work my regular 15 hour days, I do believe we are going to find a way to continue our momentum at JumpStart focused on assisting entrepreneurs with new, big ideas in all industries that have the promise to create opportunities for our region’s citizens.

When people around the region were discouraged about the recent Plain Dealer article on Pittsburgh - I shared with them that JumpStart’s operating model is based on another proven model in Pittsburgh called Innovation Works. We partner with Innovation Works all the time on initiatives that not only make sense for each of our organization’s but also for our mega-region including activities like the TechBelt Initiative and the 3 Rivers Venture Fair.

When people ask me about leadership, I agree that our leaders are incredibly burdened by numerous challenges (some of which they are partly at fault for either creating or not doing a better job of minimizing or resolving). At the same time I get a chance to see up close what many of our leaders are doing to make the region better and it is inspiring to see them in action. Pittsburgh’s leaders also have their own major problems that were ignored in the latest PD article but written about on a Pittsburgh blog.

I think that the good news - in the long run - is that a larger portion of the country is now starting to understand some of the economic challenges of Northeast Ohio in a very real way. This new understanding will (or already has) accelerated a shift in political power and public policy. While it is not perfectly clear and certain right now, I do believe that this shift will serve NEO well.

The key for our work at JumpStart, the statistic that we get really excited about, is that we have helped “real” start-up companies raise over $100 million in capital in the last four years. According to the National Venture Capital Association or NVCA, these investments have the potential to create 5,000 jobs by 2015-2020 (see the NVCA’s Venture Impact Report). And if the economic train does not completely come off the tracks in 2009 and 2010, the momentum we have created should attract at least another $200M in private sector investment in startup companies in Northeast Ohio, which would mean that we would have a very good chance to generate 10,000 new jobs by 2020. This may not seem like much when we are at the bottom of the trench we are in currently, but 15,000 jobs at the equivalent of $70,000 per job is over $1 billion in payroll each year!

These kinds of numbers are our motivation at JumpStart. We strive to hit our organizational goals everyday while helping entrepreneurs’ reach their personal and organizational goals. Staying focused and positive is the most effective way we can contribute to a quicker turnaround for our region.

Ray Leach is CEO of JumpStart and brings his energy and leadership experiences from founding five high-growth entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial endeavors in the last 20 years. Ray is a Sloan Fellow and earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also earned a BA in Finance from the University of Akron.