Micro-enterprises and Economic Gardening in Iowa – BrainBelt Consulting

New Iowa Governor Terry Branstad met with the Iowa MicroLoan Board of Directors to express his interest in and support for Iowa’s small business and entrepreneurial sector. An outgrowth of the Iowa Foundation for Micro-enterprise and Community Vitality (IFMCV), Iowa MicroLoan was created in 2007 to assist microbusinesses considered on the fringe of risk-bearing capacity for most traditional financial institutions.

Micro-enterprises–those with five or less employees–account for 86 percent of all businesses in Iowa. In the Internet age, home-based businesses and sole proprietors and micro-enterprises are the fastest growing segment of the entrepreneurial class. Representing a very important investment in Iowa’s future, micro-enterprises pay dividends by adding jobs in the near future as well as 40 years down the road, as some grow to become the major rural community employers. In addition, the cost to the state appears to be minimal compared to some other strategies.

For example, the 2010 Annual Report on the Iowa Small Business Loan Program (Iowa MicroLoan is a subcontractor with IDED) shows the incremental cost to the state is only $1,562 per direct job created or retained. For comparison, The Des Moines Register recently reported Iowa’s job training costs at $13,000 per job created or retained.

Iowa MicroLoan believes that embracing entrepreneurship for startups and existing small businesses can help pull Iowa out of the cellar in the national rankings for business startups, and heavily encourages local philanthropy to help support entrepreneurship development initiatives. One of the founding IowaMicroloan Board members, Burt Chojnowski http://brainbelt.com of Fairfield, Iowa (population 9,400) reports that the IFMCV assisted in the creation of regional micro-enterprise loan fund and technical assistance programs for micro-enterprises.

Chojnowski has been instrumental in organizing community leaders and other key players in the development of an ambitious economic gardening project for Fairfield. With over $5 million planned investment infrastructure and services for micro-enterprises and early-stage companies, and the expansion of second-stage companies across the region, the project will establish innovation centers to support three local business clusters: artisan food, digital media and green building design.

"I would like to see the $280 million investment in Fairfield companies and 4,000 new jobs created over the last twenty five years repeated in the next 10 years," says Chojnowski.

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BrainBelt Consulting http://brainbelt.com is the premier entrepreneurial development consulting firm in the US.

The firm’s areas of expertise include peer-networking entrepreneurial development planning and economic gardening strategies, taking the "entrepreneurial pulse" across a region, creating local living economies, entrepreneurial community branding and grass-root strategic planning services utilizing "asset quilting".