Steve's Enterprising Ideas

Amy Sallin gave us a lecture about business plan competition that is based out of the Seattle campus. In this competition, entrepreneurs build teams and pitch their business ideas. The most successful plan wins a top monetary prize of 20,000 dollars. The whole competition process plays out over 5 weeks. This gives teams enough time to go through the whole process of creating a detailed business plan and present it to judges who are experienced business professionals. This highly competitive process and the feedback that can be gotten from real business professionals is really helpful to students who want to one day start their own businesses. Losing competitors could also get tips from more successful one and restructure their own plans.

Pierce County based Brit Graham Evans gave us a talk that quickly took a radically different turn. I thought it was going to be another formulaic business talk about start-ups. This was the first talk given by someone from a non-profit organization. He works with the Federal Way Coalition of Trafficking (FWCAT). I cannot recall if he said that this is the only Job he does here in America. As someone who is familiar with the general Federal Way-Des Moines-SeaTac area, and more specifically has driven on Pacific Highway/International Blvd/Airport Way South at all hours countless times; I am sadly not blind to the child trafficking and modern day sexual slavery going on our streets daily in broad daylight. 2 weeks ago I saw a TV report about a girl from a middle class neighborhood in Spokane who ran away from home in the morning and by midday she had already been raped. By 5 pm, she was already on the streets getting sold for sex by a pimp. I commend people like Evans for doing something about it instead of just shaking his head in shame like me. Even though FWCAT is a non-profit organization, it has adopted a for profit model used by most businesses in order to serve its purpose more efficiently. FWCAT views its interactions though a business like prism. Like any organization it must balance it account and ensure that enough money is coming in. They use all the best practices that for profit businesses used. Graham surprised me when he say his organizations views trafficking victims, perpetrating pimps, parents, police, and community groups as its customers. The organization has like any other normal business, various departments that handle different matters. One department is concerned with maintaining revenue streams. FWCAT gets most of its money from donations, government funds, and freebies from corporations.

Make a boat load of money. That pretty much sums up life these days in America. Everyone wants to make a boat load of money, but only very few actually succeed at it. Mr. John Dimmer, it seems, has succeeded in this endeavor. A University of Oregon finance degree major, he has gone from slinging surety bonds to building industry companies from an office in Fife (of all places), to owning a Honda dealership in Wilsonville Or, cornering 40% of the sales of Airstream trailers nationwide, among other ventures. Ever since he talked about Airstream trailers, I am beginning to see them everywhere. I even saw Taylor Swift posing in one online with one of her look-alike celebrity friends. Mr. Dimmer, it turns out is a childhood friend and an old colleague of our instructor from his Free Range Media days. They both made money when they sold their company, but one of them seems to have invested better than the other. After a short-lived retirement at 39, he embarked on a second business life. This one was much more profitable than the first. After leaving the surety business with some savings he pondered his next step. He decided against both buying an insurance agency and starting a winery. Every successful business man, needs a bit of luck to fall their way. Mr. Dimmer happened to know a friend in the racing industry who was close to the head honchos at Honda. With his friend’s contacts and his (Dimmer) money, they landed a sweet Honda dealership deal in Wilsonville OR. He hired a salesman extraordinaire called Tedd who not only got the Honda dealership running smoothly and profitably, but he also landed them the deal with Airstream. Mr. Dimmer, because of his background in the financing and building industries insisted on owning his places of business to cut down on rent costs. Because he financed the premises together with the merchandise with the same lender, he was able to get a very borrowing rate. He has cleverly limited his liability by creating different holding companies for his dealerships and his buildings. This limits the spillover effect across business and property lines. However I detected a certain mean streak to him. Despite thoroughly dominating the Airstream sales industry, he is still obsessed with crushing competing small dealerships. . It is not enough to him that he has won; he wants his enemies to lose. Despite this, he is also an angel investor who has invested in 50 -60 ventures even while holding on to decades old family businesses that are still running. He also participates in the Choose Vets program which encourages employers to hire US Military veterans. The most important thing in a business plan according to him is having a firm entry and exit point.

To attract and maintain an employee base, I will use aggressive recruitment tactics which will offer selected potential employees a chance to be part of something big. Since I intend to engage in the craft brewing of beer locally, my plan is also to recruit locally. Nowadays, a lot of people brew beer in their backyards or garages. I will recruit some of these local brewers at local beer conventions and through craft brewery connoisseur websites. I will offer them an ownership stake in the business venture. The Samuel Adams Beer Company was started in someone’s kitchen using an old family recipe. On the administrative side, I will use technical analysis and growth projections to hire help. Traditional beer companies have been steadily losing market share to domestic upstarts and to esoteric foreign beer brands since the mid-90s. I can attest to this personally from my experiences walking the beer isle as a kid. Isles and isles were filled with Budweiser, Miller lite, and MGD. Today the beer isle is crowded with numerous foreign and local beers which have more appeal than Budweiser. The Budweiser NASCAR Dad image has long grown stale and lost appeal to the millennial generation. I will tell new hires of this potential for growth. I will focus my hiring on local recent college graduates who are will to take a chance on an upstart company. They will then have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a potentially future big thing versus being just another cog in the well oil gears of a large well established corporation. In the early years of the company I will reward loyal employees who stick with my upstart company decent paychecks even if it means getting little to no money personally. I believe this investment will be worth it in future when the revenue will be higher due to more sales. To maintain employees, I will furnish them with all the details of future business plans. Along with the craft beers, my future plans could include hard cider, wineries and even regular soft drinks.

Apparently having kids is detrimental to your bottom line. Everyone knows that. But still it was depressing to see the evidence presented in graph form. I would describe Eric Hanberg as the modern-day dad with interests vested in very different places. He describes himself in his website as an author and media entrepreneur. He is a member of the Metro Parks Board of Tacoma who also writes books, has dabbled in theatre management, and runs a graphic design business from home with his wife. They run a company called Side x Side Creative, a marketing firm for businesses and nonprofits. They help each client attract attention to their businesses through catchy beautiful magazine designs, creative social media campaigns, or developing a new brand for a business. They help customers navigate the rapidly changing media environment and reach new customers, new clients, and new sources of revenue. Eric also has a podcast called Media Carnivores where he talks about media trends, and local news and attractions. He probably has to adopt two different personas and world views to safely navigate daily the from his non-profit world consulting work to his profit making endeavors. I wonder what it takes to run so many businesses concurrently. Here in the computer science program, most students are barely able to take a full load of classes. Business partners would probably not like it if one of their colleagues had other businesses. I look forward to reading one of Eric’s books about business. He also wrote a series of mystery books.

I remember in the 2012 presidential election, former governor Mitt Romney got into trouble when he said he loved firing people. It confirmed a lot of people’s deepest darkest fears about him. He was stereotyped as venture capitalist and management consultant who only understood numbers, percentages, and bottom lines. That he couldn’t think twice letting go a dedicated long-term employee who had toiled for a failing company for very little pay and had nothing to show for it decades later. He parried by saying he meant firing people who provide poor services to him like cable companies, restaurants etc. But the damages was done, his opponent in the election used that to further alienate him from blue collar voters. I did not believe him because of the sneer on his face when he made the comment the first time. There is a fine line between being a venture capitalist and a vulture capitalist who only shows up to pick the bones. In the Startup movie, Khalil nonchalantly fired a child hood and had him escorted out of the building (Office Space style) when the going got tough. I could never do that to a longtime friend. If a longtime friend did that to me, our friendship would be irrevocably severed. Does a good entrepreneur need to have a heart of stone? In class, the instructor has mentioned numerous times that he has fired so many people in the course of his business career. He even walked them out of the building (Office Space style). That is something I would be very unwilling to do. Maybe this is why some people take risks and become employers, while most others like me just dream of well-paying jobs.