Build Your Own Business: Grand Rapids' Start Garden, An EcoSystem Helping Ideas Become Businesses

Grand Rapids' Calder Plaza

Start Garden, in Grand Rapids, Mich. is a $15 million investment fund and business incubator where ideas become businesses every week. 

It's an incredible concept that is really very simple. Create an ecosystem that is friendly to those with ideas and help those people bring their ideas to market.

Walk into Start Garden in downtown Grand Rapids, take two steps on the wood floor and you will find yourself in the midst of what is heaven to an entrepreneur. 

You have space to work, space to think and like-minded people with which to interact.
I took part in one of their Lunch 'N Learn programs. It was focused on public relations for the start-up company. 

So you see, Start Garden is about more than just money. They are not throwing cash at people who believe they have found something even better than sliced bread nor is Start Garden trying to take over controlling interest in what is better than sliced bread.

Start Garden helps these entrepreneurs build their businesses, and is smart enough to tell them when an idea is not going to work.

So there I was at this Lunch 'N Learn surrounded by people who all had the dream of building their own business. A young couple sitting behind me had invented not a better mousetrap but they believe, a better water dish for dogs.

A young couple in front of me was developing interactive video games. I met a man who has invented a toilet that closes the lid for you, and a woman creating medical devices for Third Word countries, real Bottom of the Pyramid stuff.

What did I learn from the public relations class? How about this? It gave me the insight to actually lay out on paper, what I want my new company to do. After months of wrestling to create a plan, I was able to put my ideas together in fifteen minutes.

Incredible. But, that's what happens when you surround yourself with people who have a vision, and it is a shared vision, of building their own business.

Want to learn more about Start Garden? I think everyone should, so you would be well advised to Read More.

Build Your Own Business, Be Your Own Boss, By Your Own Bootstraps is not intended to show you the "ten secrets to success" or "how to be more productive while raising a baby," or even "how to get rich quick."

All I want to do is tell you the stories of the entrepreneurs I have met over the past twenty-five years, those who have succeed, those who have struggled, those who have failed, those who share the same dream and vision; to build their own business.

To begin reading their stories, please download the Rod Kackley app for Android or iOS through the App Store or Google Play, and start reading BYOB in the Read Tab.

And please tell me what you dream is. What business do you want to build? 

For more books, articles and essays by Rod Kackley, please visit www.rodkackley.com or go to www.lyonscirclepublishing.blogspot.com and read the story of my epiphany.

Build Your Own Business: Go With Your Passion, By Rod Kackley

Dave Engber and Mike Stevens, Founders of Founders

Founders Brewing Company is one of the brewing pioneers that brought craft-brewing to Grand Rapids in 1997...and nearly went bankrupt a few years after opening. CEO and founder Mike Stevens, a self-described “beer geek,” admitted he and his partner Dave Engbers made some bad beer decisions. They were able to keep their doors open and their beer brewing by switching their strategy. Mike and Dave started brewing the kind of beer they wanted to drink.

“When you are fighting for something you really believe in you tend to fight a little 
bit more. So, if times are a little bit tough you just come out swinging,” he said.

Stevens expects the company to produce 140,000 barrels of beer, which would move it from microbrewery to regional brewery status.

“I think the day is coming where quality is really going to play a part in survival,” he said. “There are a lot of people who are going to be getting into the industry because they see there is money to be made. But that isn’t enough. Passion can go a long way, if you back it up with quality and running a good, sound business.”

He sees Founders’ growth as being organic in the future. Stevens sees a lot of room for that, discounting the possibility of acquisitions. “We have made a decision as a company to not really expand our geography out west at this point. We are planning on digging our roots deep with our human capital and concentrate our final efforts there.”

Founders is concentrated in an area east of the Mississippi River. Stevens said the plan is to hire more market managers. “We think what is critical for our brand is to send a message loud and clear to our customers. Founders is in 23 states right now. It is very difficult for us as owners to get out there, shake hands and say thank you. The sales reps have to do that. So, our strategy is to get as many of them out there as possible so that they can tell the emotional side of the story. They have to be our conduit to the customer.”

Stevens still feels the passion of craft brewing “more than ever because there are more challenges coming out way now. I have grown personally in this business. You go through ups and downs, but we are going through such a hyper-growth period right now that it is exhilarating. It is fun. You learn something new every day.”


This is an excerpt from Quenching The Thirst, part of a five-book ebook essay series, Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance, that is available wherever ebooks are sold, including Amazon, iTunes and Vook.com.

For more by Rod Kackley please go to www.rodkackley.com, and download the free Rod Kackley app for iOS and Android devices through the App Store and Google Play.

Build Your Own Business: There's One Thing About Feet, Everybody's Got Two Of Them, By Rod Kackley

"There's one thing about feet, everybody's got two of them," the general manager at WMUS-Muskegon, Mich. told his sales department to encourage them to sell radio ads to shoe stores.

I was in the room and while everyone was groaning, a light was clicking on for me. 

Shoe stores weren't on my account list and never would be. 

Even though I saw the wisdom in what the boss had said, there just wasn't enough money in Mom and Pop shoe stores for me to clear a decent profit on the time I would have to invest to make the sale.

However, the idea, "Everybody's got two of them," did ring a bell with me. That bell sounds like this:

1. Figure out what people will want and what they will need -- often they are two different things.

2. Decide how you are going to give it to them.

3. If you give them what they want, even if they don't know they want it, what you want will naturally follow.

Did you see what I did there? I didn't write, "Give them what they need and want." I wrote, "Figure out what people WILL want and what they WILL need."

You have to be the leader. Decide what your customers are going to need and want before they need and want it. 

Henry Ford did that with the automobile. 

How many people do you think wanted a car in the 1890s or even before 1910? How many people do you think felt they needed a car?

We'd still be using horses and buggies if Ford left it up to a turn of the century focus group.

Ford didn't invent the automobile. But he came up with a way to make cars affordably so that people would want them and would then decide they needed them, and in the end would be able to buy them.

Did he wait for the market to develop? No, he did not. Ford created the market and said, "If I gave people what they wanted, I would have given them faster horses.”

What have you done that the focus groups told you was impossible? 

Just send me an email to rod@rodkackley.com  or drop a comment here and we will share it with others who are building their own businesses.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the stories of the entrepreneurs who build a cluster of prosperity in Grand Rapids, while the rest of Michigan was crashing down around them. There were plenty of people who told them it wouldn’t work.

A free read of the first three chapters is available on this app.

Last Chance Mile is available wherever books are sold online including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes, as well as on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street, and West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center, Grand Rapids.

To order a personally autographed hardcover or softcover edition, just click the Add To Cart button on my website, www.rodkackley.com

Build Your Own Business: To Be Creative, Be Lonely By Rod Kackley

Forget about collaborating to come up with a new idea. Collaboration works best after you have the idea. Then you can recruit others to follow your vision and turn it into reality.

It is better to be lonely, if you want to be creative. I didn’t say it first. John Steinbeck (pictured above) did. Not in so many words, but he made the point in his 1952 classic,East Of Eden.

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and the spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in  art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”

Don’t you wish the creator (if he was working alone) of the open office concept had stumbled upon this passage before he tore down our office and then cubicle walls.

Again, John Steinbeck from East Of Eden: 

“And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammer blows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.”

“And I this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.”

So this is why I would never hesitate to say, “No, I am not a team player” nor never hesitate to say, “Stop reading business books.”

However if you feel you cannot break the habit of reading business books, feel free to read my five-part ebook series, Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance, available wherever ebooks are sold, including Amazon,Barnes & Noble, iTunes and Vook.com.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids changed the way the world sees their community with the help of scientists, artists, some of the richest people in the world, and even zombies.

Last Chance Mile is available wherever books are sold online, can be ordered from your favorite bookseller, and is on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee on Monroe Center-Grand Rapids.

Sometimes Things Break, the story of a middle-aged man who should now better and a teenage girl young enough to want it all, will be available in early 2014.

Free reads are available on my website,www.rodkackley.com, and on the Rod Kackley app that you can download for free for Android and iOS through Google Play and the App Store.

(c) 2013 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc.

Build Your Own Business: What Is It To Be An Entrepreneur? By Rod Kackley

What is it to be an entrepreneur? What is it like to wake up at 3 a.m. wondering where your next check is coming from? What is it like to fall asleep dreaming about tomorrow’s elevator pitch and waking up at 3 a.m. to refine it.

What is it to be an entrepreneur? It is to never take a day off, not really, because there is no way to turn an entrepreneur’s mind off. An entrepreneur is always looking for that next idea, always searching for a way to bring that next idea to market, and then looking for the next idea.

“Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there’s no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”

This passage from Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller describing the play’s protagonist, Willy Loman, reminded me of the life of an entrepreneur. 

We really are working without a net, aren't we? At least that’s what I think. What are your thoughts?

I do want to note that I pulled the Death of A Salesman off a blog post written by Porter Anderson on Jane Friedman’s Writing on The Ether blog. 

And here’s another line from Anderson’s blog post that struck me:

“And we’re all salesman on this bus.”

(c) 2014 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Communitytells the stories of the people of Grand Rapids, the entrepreneurs of Grand Rapids and how they changed the way the world sees their community.

Last Chance Mile is available wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes, as well as on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center, Grand Rapids.

Last Chance Mile can also be ordered by your favorite bookseller.

For more of Rod Kackley's books, articles and essays, please download the free Rod Kackley mobile app for Android and iOS devices through Google Play or the App Store. 

Build Your Own Business: What Drives Entrepreneurs? By Rod Kackley

What is it with these entrepreneurs who want to build their own businesses, be their own bosses, by their own bootstraps? Are they  nuts?

 They all think they have a better idea, a better way, or perhaps even the best idea or the best way.

Here’s the reality: Most of them aren’t going to make it. They know it. They are also sure, at least 80 percent sure, that it is the other guy who is going to fail.

Believe me it happens. Entrepreneurs fail. But some continue. They are the entrepreneurs who never lose the dream of building their own business and being their own boss

Kevin McCurren, the executive director of the Grand Valley State University Family Business Institute’s Center for Entrepreneurship told me, while I was working on an article regarding the Jandernoa Entrepreneurial Mentoring program in Grand Rapids, Mich. for Crain’s Detroit Business, there are plenty of early stage or startup companies that, are born and die every year.

Some entrepreneurs will learn from their failures. They might not get back in the saddle immediately. But they will try again. These are the serial entrepreneurs.

The rest will not. It is one and done for them.

The life of an entrepreneur, especially the life of a bootstrapping entrepreneur is not for everyone.

However for some there is no other life. They are the entrepreneurs we will be concentrating on, those who want to build their own business, be their own boss, by their own bootstraps.

I have been talking to entrepreneurs for more than 20 years who bootstrapped their way into business. Some of them crashed and burned. Others walked away. A few of the entrepreneurs spent nights sleeping in their cars and dining by dome light in those vehicles on a tasty plate of Ramen Noodles.

I also know they wake up in the middle of the night. They are scared to death, wondering not how they will meet payroll like they would if their business was in its second stage and they had to be concerned with employees. These entrepreneurs are worried about how they will put food on their own tables. 

Sometimes they might be wondering how they are going to explain to their life partner lying beside them they have to go to the bank again, or why their credit cards are maxed out again, or explain why they will be eating Ramen Noodles for one more month, again.

These are the bootstrappers.

At some point in their journey, they decided to tell their life partner that the entrepreneurial life was the one they had chosen, the only one that would satisfy them.

Do they talk to their partners at the beginning of their journey? They never do. They made the decision. Their plan is set, maybe not on paper, but it is set.

Their journey begins in their own minds, in their own hearts. They convince themselves that they can do it, that they will do it, and they will be glad — at some point — that they did it.

Entrepreneurs — with or without funding — stand at the abyss, look, and leap. 

They decide on the way down.

They can’t help it.

What is it that drives them? Is it money? I don’t think so. I have found the best of the best are never driven by the dream of riches. They don’t turn it down when money comes their way, still cash is not the force that drives them. 

What could possibly be more important than money? The overriding factor that gets them out of bed every day is an overwhelming urge to persuade.

They all have it. That’s the driving force. It is the urge, the desire, even the addiction to proving they have the best idea, that they know the best way, that they really are the smartest one in the room.

How do those who are successful become successful?

How do those who fail bear their pain?  What do they learn? How do they start over, or decide to go home?

What can the rest of us learn from them?

Build Your Own Business, Be Your Own Boss, By Your Own Bootstraps is devoted to the entrepreneurs who all believe they have a better idea, or a better way.

Some will succeed. Many will fail. We will tell their stories, all of them.

So let’s begin. Please read on. I will be adding new stories as often as they come my way on the free Rod Kackley app that you can download for iOS and Android devices through the App Store and Google Play, as well as on my website, www.rodkackley.com and here on the Build Your Own Business blog.

And please join the conversation. Feel free to add your comments to the app, the website and the blog, or simply shoot me at email at rod@rodkackley.com

Rod

© 2014 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc.