JumpStart: IdeaExchange Blog

As we enter autumn and prepare for the final quarter of the year, it’s a great time to assess and reassess your business strategies to ensure that the final 90 days of 2009 effectively prepare you for a strong start to the New Year. To assist in this effort, JumpStart, in collaboration with its local and national partners, will be putting on a groundbreaking event on Thursday, December 3rd designed to stimulate your strategic thinking around growing and supporting high growth minority, inner city and women-owned businesses by facilitating access to “Angel” and Venture Capital.

This continues to be an underutilized asset for both our region and the nation, and further represents one of the critical components to building and sustaining a healthy economy. The event will begin Thursday, December 3rd with a full day of power packed activities featuring a host of diverse entrepreneurs and stakeholders that have achieved extraordinary levels of success through high growth entrepreneurship, and will conclude Friday morning, December 4th with yet another intensive session that I am honored to facilitate. As part of the activities on December 3rd, JumpStart will also be selecting certain of its clients to present to a panel of regional and national investors who will be in town specifically looking to invest in some of the region’s most promising early-stage diverse businesses.

More information will soon be available via JumpStart, so please stay tuned (sign up for our email newsletter to hear the latest) and be sure to reserve those dates on your calendar in the meantime.

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.

We are busy finishing preparations for our Annual Community Meeting, and one last detail we are focusing on is music. As you know, we will have a Showcase of Entrepreneurs that will feature some of the most exciting entrepreneurs and their companies from 7:30 - 9:00 am. At approximately 8:55 am, we’ll get everyone moving from the Showcase of Entrepreneurs into the presentation area for the program starting at 9:00 am. But what is the right “mood music” for the presentation intro? It needs to capture the inspiration of entrepreneurs, the anticipation of the program, and the energy of progress. It also needs to be appropriate for the morning, familiar but not old, positive and upbeat, and something that most of us will like and will energize us. I am no music critic, so forgive any mistakes I might make w/r/t genre or commentary; I also haven’t listened to every word, so if I missed something embarrassing, let me know! That said, here is our list of considered songs that best fit the job!

10.  “I Gotta Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas. Right vibe, but our event’s in the morning. If we do an evening event next year and use this song, don’t remind me.

9.  “You Can Get It if You Really Want” by Jimmy Cliff.  What a cheerful little ditty.

8.  “For the Love of Money” by The O’Jays. This is what it’s about, after all. Good upbeat funk song (bordering on disco). Didn’t make the list purely because of age.

7.  “We are the Champions” by Queen. It’s such a classic, how can you not think it fits the bill? We absolutely think entrepreneurs (and their families) are champions of the world. But as a song, perhaps a little overplayed.

6.  “Heroes” by David Bowie. The best of the “heroes” songs (take that, Mariah and David Cook and everyone else!) The lyrics are a little romantic, not exactly about entrepreneurs, but you’ve got to love the idea. 

5.  “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba. Great energy, and the lyrics are (sometimes) spot on: “I get knocked down, but I get up again.”

4.  “Jump” by Van Halen. We liked this, but especially so when you imagine a group of people yelling “Start” after each time David Lee Roth says “might as well jump” or “go ahead and jump”. Made us laugh out loud.

3.  “Let’s Get it Started” also by Black Eyed Peas. An early favorite (of mine) but I am not quite ready for going to the club at 9:00 am. A bit jarring.

2.  “I Feel Good” by James Brown. Who doesn’t feel good thinking about this song? Even though it’s rated PG, it’s perhaps still not quite as appropriate for a business meeting as we’d like…

1.  You’ll hear it at the meeting … See you Friday morning, starting at 7:30 am at the Knight Center in downtown Akron!

Cathy Belk is the Chief Marketing Officer of JumpStart. She specializes in branding, marketing communications, and business management. She brings 16+ years of experience in a variety of marketing and business roles, but gets her energy from working daily with entrepreneurs and their growing companies.

I wrote recently about the Warrior Entrepreneurs of the North Coast, and I’m here now to write about the North Coast’s Phenomenal Founders. Initially, I wanted the criteria for Phenomenal Founders to be more about serial founders, that special breed of entrepreneur who has founded multiple wealth creating (for themselves, their employees, and investors) companies. But, I found too many phenomenal one-time (non-serial) founders that I didn’t want to limit it.

So, I expanded the criteria to include people who have founded at least one company (just one will do) that created wealth in the past ten years. Note that I did not do extensive VentureSource/VentureXpert/Dun & Bradstreet data downloads, comb through SEC filings, and conduct Martin Bashir-style in-depth interviews to get this information so I should emphasize that these are companies that seem to have created wealth. Also, you might ask: why the obsession with wealth creating exits specifically? Because it is wealth creation (through IPOs or acquisitions) that changes communities for the better: employees and investors make more money than they dreamed of, and they plough their money and their knowledge back into more early-stage ventures in a proven, well documented process called entrepreneurial spawning (see this article also). This spawning helps to create growing, dynamic communities whose workers enjoy growing average salaries. Think Microsoft, which, basically, turned Seattle/Redmond into something other than a sleepy western outpost because in-the-money employees left Microsoft and created more software startups. Take Mark Woodka at BSK Live in our portfolio. He was at TMW Systems and then Flashline and now he’s leading StaffKnex — a great example of serial entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial spawning all rolled into one.

So, back to those Phenomenal Founders — people who have founded companies that (it seems) created wealth for themselves, employees and shareholders alike. Here is my Phenomenal Founder list:

• Brian Deagan and Bill Landers (600 Monkeys)
• Stu Fishman (All Wound Up)
• Sam Gerace (Be Free)
• Chuck Hallberg (MemberHealth)
• Bruce Harris (Conferon)
• Peter Jacobsen (Dream Waffles)
• Trevor Jones (BioMec)
• Bob Lasser (Management Reports International)
• Carol Latham (Thermagon)
• Tim McCarthy (Workplace Media)
• Kevin McHale (Everstream)
• Dan Moore (Dan T. Moore Company)
• John Osher (Cap Toys/Spinbrush)
• Kenn Ricci (Flight Options)
• Geoff Thrope (NDI Medical)
• Ed Tromczynski (PlanSoft)
• Andrew Vaeth (ExpenseWire)

This is a fun list; I like it; when added to the Warrior Entrepreneurs list, and knowing that both lists are far from complete, it definitely feels like we in the North Coast have a solid entrepreneurial culture. Of course, seeing the extraordinary Carol Latham on the list, my mind naturally ambles to the question of: ladies, hey ladies, where ARE you? Yoo hoo, can some female Phenomenal Founders please stand up, come forward, don’t be shy now, if you got it flaunt it, know what I mean? I know there are many complex variables in the not-enough-female-technology-entrepreneurs issue, trust me I really, really know, but come on now. Won’t you puh-lease tell me about some women who founded high growth, wealth creating companies in the North Coast who are just not being celebrated here?

On a different note, I want to end by mentioning that I failed to include JumpStart’s very own former venture partner, Sam Gerace, in my prior post about warrior entrepreneurs. He co-founded Be Free, Inc., merged it with a public company (ValueClick), and then moved to Cleveland. We were lucky to have him spend a year with us at JumpStart, guiding first-time entrepreneurs. He is an entrepreneur through and through, and so he left us to head up another startup company here in town, Veritix, and my bet is that he will create another success. Sam is a Warrior Entrepreneur and Phenomenal Founder all rolled into one.

Okay, enough said: please let me know who you think should be added to the list of Phenomenal Founders.

Becca Braun is President of JumpStart Ventures. She founded and led a number of early-stage companies and organizations, as well as worked as a private equity investor and management consultant. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School and her BA in Linguistics from Harvard University. She is keenly interested in the intersection of wealth creation and broad-based regional economic growth.

If you have been reading my blog over the last few months you have read many comments which focus on the intersections between public policy and programs that can make a positive impact to help entrepreneurs be more successful.

Last week, two great pieces of news came out that continue to help connect the dots to smart public policy in the State of Ohio and how government can play a leading role in helping to transform the thinking and acting that states place in our national economy.

First, SRI International published a report that took at look at the economic outcomes that have resulted from the State of Ohio’s technology-based economic development initiatives including Ohio Third Frontier. A press release and a link to the report can be found here. The study found that State expenditures related to Ohio Third Frontier of $681 million generated $6.6 billion of economic activity, 41,300 total jobs, and $2.4 billion in employee wages and benefits. According to the impact study’s figures, Ohio has garnered a nearly $10 return on every dollar of the State’s investment in the period from 2003 – 2008, with the expectation of increased impacts in the years to come.

Just after this report came out from the State, Secretary Gary Locke of the U.S. Commerce Department announced  that the Commerce Department is establishing a new Office for Entrepreneurship and Innovation specifically to help entrepreneurs develop great ideas into workable business plans by giving them training, funding, advisement, access to data, and a big pair of federal-sized scissors for cutting through the red tape of starting a new business. This is an incredible example of public policy makers really getting it.

The SRI report demonstrates and verifies real, significant economic outcomes that are created by smart programs that work in Ohio. The creation of this new office in the Commerce Department shows vision and a commitment for the federal government to hopefully work more closely with the States. Now is the chance to put these two great opportunities together to really help take Ohio and the country to a new level of entrepreneurial sucess and promise.

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.