Where are you from
originally?
What university did you go
to?
I
was a baseball player that got an undergraduate Accounting degree from the University of Arizona University of Northern
Colorado
What brought you to Austin
After
spending 21 years with IBM rising through the ranks in finance after starting
my career as a sales rep, I left IBM to join Dell, Inc in 1998 where I was a
vice president of finance until 2009. At
the very end of 2010 I assumed the role of Executive Director of the Economic
Growth Business Incubator (EGBI).
What is your group’s mission?
What need does it fulfill?
We
are the low-cost provider of incubation services and entrepreneurial training
in Austin
What exactly does it bring to
startups?
Our
entrepreneurial training is called Building
Success Program. It is a comprehensive training program that teaches
entrepreneurs the foundations for business plan development, business
administration and marketing. Our training also includes a computer literacy
segment and financial literacy training.
In 2011 we had 60 clients “graduate” from our program, 24 of which were
in business by year end. This year we
expect to have 75 clients complete our program.
What type of startup would
benefit from your group?
Any
person that is planning to open a business in the service industry is an ideal
candidate for EGBI. People with the need to develop business management skills
and entrepreneurs in need of low-cost office space would benefit from our
services.
What was the most challenging
aspect of starting up the initiative?
I
became EGBI’s first Executive Director at the start of 2011 after the organization
had been managed on a part-time basis by the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of
Commerce. We were essentially a
“restarted” non-profit. We spent the
first few months improving the curriculum and recruiting “subject matter
expert” (SME) volunteers to have in the training sessions when we taught
certain topics, e.g. legal, insurance, finance, marketing, etc… We had to accomplish that on a “bootstrap”
basis since we are in an environment with limited and decreasing investments in
the non-profit sector. As we drive to
increase the number of “investors” (prefer that to donors) in our organization
we are looking forward to our second ever celebration/fundraiser we call Celebrating Success
What advice do you have for
entrepreneurs?
My
advice is to go after your passion, but don’t fail to get advice from others
and plan. A plan doesn’t have to be a
detailed novel but every start-up should have a plan. Planning begins with bootstrapping from the
start to ensure your own finances are in order.
Then do a very honest inventory of your strengths and weaknesses so that
you know what areas you need help in, including getting objective input from 2
or 3 sources you trust would be candid with you. I would also recommend working with an
organization like ours which is a great place to get some of this input and
assistance in laying out at a minimum a basic business plan.
What Austin-based resource
have you found to be the most helpful and why?
We are a
resource organization for start-ups and we hope our clients find us to
valuable. We have networked extensively
and have relationships with the various chambers of commerce, the City of Austin Small Business Development Program
