Baseball inspires Asheville entrepreneurial development

The Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce is implementing a baseball-inspired program to facilitate small- business development, and the group hopes the city’s entrepreneurial community steps up to the plate.

By: Flynn, Michael

(Thanks to Chris Gibbons and Greg King for passing this along- Russ)

For more information about the league system, call Carol Hensley at the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce at 258- 6116.
Tom Lyons, one of the program’s creators, will be in Asheville discussing the league system at the "Building Entrepreneurial Communities" conference Sept. 2-4 at the Grove Park Inn.

Appalachian Regional Commission and AdvantageWest NC are sponsoring the conference. For more information, call 687-7234.
"We have wonderful agencies in town that are providing great services," said the chamber’s Carol Hensley, "but we don’t have a development system where everyone is working to ensure the success of entrepreneurs." Hensley is the chamber’s assistant vice president for small business and entrepreneurship.

The program the chamber has chosen, called the Entrepreneurial Development System, is based on baseball’s multiple-league approach to preparing players for the majors. Tom Lyons, associate professor of management and urban policy at the University of Louisville, and Gregg Lichtenstein, president of New Jersey-based consulting firm Collaborative Strategies, developed the program.

The league system is designed to cultivate successful small-business owners, Lichtenstein said. Service providers such as consultants and investors are placed in different groups, or leagues, along with the entrepreneurs they are best suited to work with, from a first-time business owner to a veteran executive who has already sold a company and is starting a new one.

The first-time entrepreneurs make up the rookie league, and the most successful constitute the major league, with single-A to triple-A in between.

"The goal is to develop a farm system for entrepreneurs that develop their skills and their businesses," said Lichtenstein, who holds a doctorate in entrepreneurship from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "It’s broader than individual incubation programs because we are trying to link all of the different players that try to help entrepreneurs."

Hensley said the chamber became interested in the system after president Rick Lutovksy heard Lyons speak at a business development conference. The chamber has contracted with Collaborative Strategies to guide the program’s implementation, Hensley said, and completed the first of three phases with funds donated by RBC Centura bank.

The first phase assesses the different service providers in the area, Lichtenstein said. A group such as the Asheville chapter of the Service Corps of Retired Executives, or SCORE, is designed for double- or triple-A entrepreneurs, he noted, while the Mountain Microenterprise Fund is geared toward entry-level business owners.

"Its different being a batting coach for a rookie player than one for a major leaguer," Lichentstein said.
Greg Walker-Wilson, executive director of the Mountain Microenterprise Fund, said, "It’s a very positive step that the chamber is emphasizing a program to help small businesses." The fund is a nonprofit group that targets underserved communities for business development.

There are more than 15,000 companies in Buncombe County with fewer than five employees, Walker-Wilson said, making small businesses an appropriate focus for economic growth.
The next phases involve implementing the system for service providers to work together and creating "success teams" of entrepreneurs based on their experience. Individuals will move up in league level if their businesses grow. Efforts to secure more funding for these steps are under way, Hensley said.
The chamber will seek participants for the success teams, which will provide members with valuable peer support, Lichtenstein said. "To anybody who has ever run a business all by themselves, this makes a lot of sense," he said. "Otherwise its you, and you maximize your risk if its just you."

Walker-Wilson said people who work with small businesses "already collaborate, but this system will make it even better."

Contact Flynn at 232-5922 or [email protected].