Question:

My economic development organization is struggling to identify the entrepreneurs in our region. Do you have any ideas on how I find them?

Mo: Great question and an important early step in building an ecosystem. According to Rob Williams, director at USSourcelink, you can’t serve what you cannot find, right? In the communities where I’ve worked, several effective best practices have emerged. Here are some recommendations:

• Support a Hub: Create a physical hub where entrepreneurs can readily see and access you. We used to call these ‘one stop’ shops, more often it is coworking space today. If you don’t want to run a coworking space, simply incent a local entrepreneur to open one!

• Use Data: If you have an Economic Gardening program nearby, ask them to mine their databases for a list of all the Stage One companies (those with 1-9 employees).

• Host Events: Try hosting a Jelly, BarCamp, Startup Weekend or launch 1M Cups.

• Business Registrations: I recommend this to every community, but we must do it right (low or no cost to the business, online and enforced). Not only can we learn who is doing business but we can those elusive homed-based and remote workers too.