Entrepreneurship is the key to building more equitable and thriving communities and economies. What is entrepreneurship? I define entrepreneurship as individuals taking an idea and making it marketable and profitable. Those individuals then build businesses around their idea so they can repeatedly deliver it (a product or service).
Frederick Mountain Group’s core work is helping entrepreneurs clearly understand what they are building, so we can develop a plan to help them reach their business goals quickly. We are especially good at supporting business owners who want to grow. Over the last eight years, we have learned that every small business has the potential to be big.
We have also worked with economic development organizations around Wyoming to help highlight the importance of entrepreneurship. Our message is “support entrepreneurs where they are today and deliver resources to help them grow businesses, not lifestyle companies, or jobs for themselves.”
Wyoming is a state that runs on small businesses. In fact, over 80% of businesses in Wyoming have 50 or fewer employees. 65% of Wyoming businesses have 10 or fewer employees. We are small but mighty indeed.
Scratch the surface of many businesses across the state, and you will find some of the hardest-working entrepreneurs. Behind our main street businesses, our anchor businesses that have been established for more than 20 years, there is a hardworking entrepreneur driving that business’s success.
Sometimes, though, those entrepreneurs are working too hard. That’s right, working too hard. It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of business operations and mistake being busy for being productive and moving a business forward. The result is that many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of creating a job for themselves rather than focusing on developing the systems and people needed to deliver a product or service at scale and grow their business. The result is that Wyoming communities struggle to maintain businesses when founders exit the business or pass away. There is no structure or system to sell for entrepreneurs who create jobs or lifestyle companies. They can create jobs for a period of time, but everything revolves around the founder being actively involved in the company.
In some economic development discussions, the term small business is used interchangeably with lifestyle companies, prompting conversation around focusing on high-growth companies instead of small businesses. Or, focusing on archetypes of entrepreneurs from the Silicon Valley model.
We believe that is a mistake. Especially for Wyoming. Every big business was a small business at one point. Being small is the future; with continued advancements in technology, most businesses will be “smaller” than their historic counterparts, such as Kodak and IBM.
Look to where the entrepreneur is going. Look at the tools and the skill set the entrepreneur has today. Look at the systems the entrepreneur has in place to deliver their product or service. That is how we uncover the next big “small” business.
We continue to encourage economic development organizations to provide resources to help entrepreneurs determine whether they want to build scalable businesses or create lifestyle companies. From there, we believe dollars and resources should be directed to entrepreneurs and small businesses who want to build scalable companies.
Let’s start supporting entrepreneurs with education and advisors. Let’s direct funding to entrepreneurs building companies.
