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 produce that idea (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 the entrepreneur reach their business goals quickly. We are especially good at supporting business owners that 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, “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 operate with 50 people or less. 65% of Wyoming businesses are 10 people or less. 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 many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of creating a job for themselves instead on focusing on developing the systems and people needed to deliver a service or product to 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 and systems to sell for entrepreneurs that 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 a small business. 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 like Kodak, IBM, and so on.
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 entrepreneurs to help them determine if they want to build scale-able businesses or create lifestyle companies. From there, we believe dollars and resources should be directed to entrepreneurs and small businesses who want to build scale-able companies.
Let’s start supporting entrepreneurs with education and advisors. Let’s direct funding to entrepreneurs building companies.
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 entrepreneurs to help them determine if they want to build scale-able businesses or create lifestyle companies. From there, we believe dollars and resources should be directed to entrepreneurs and small businesses who want to build scale-able companies.
Let’s start supporting entrepreneurs with education and advisors. Let’s direct funding to entrepreneurs building companies.
