Crossing the Divide, Part two

An excerpt from the upcoming book Building a Rural Startup Ecosystem. This section is about how to get founders in your community to engage, especially as it pertains to visiting your headquarters.

Build Community Champions

I can’t underestimate the value of community support, and in no way is this more essential than publicity and outreach. After all, what good is doing entrepreneurial support if no one knows you’re there?

When I was running the IDEA Hub Accelerator, I was often surprised how many of our referrals came from people I had never even met. This was the desired end goal of building relationships, making it clear what we were doing, and making a meaningful impact in the work we did. It displayed that word-of-mouth marketing was thriving.?

An important element of this is building a give-first culture. When people in the community see that you are all about helping anyone and everyone, and take nothing in return, you will find many people who want to pay that back by singing your praises (and nobody will think the worse of you because you’re meeting your grant obligations).?

With that being said, you’ll want to be sure that your community champions know what it is you’re actually offering (and what it is you don’t do). When something is unfamiliar, people often fill in the gaps with assumptions, so being clear about what you do will eliminate those. A common example is that if your community champions don’t understand what you do, they might think you’re an investor and come to you looking for a direct investment, mistaking you for a Venture Capital firm.?

One of the most common assumptions we had to overcome was that we were basically the same as the SBDC (small business development center). This misconception seemed especially strong among local economic development experts. This is an important one to get right very early on (something we failed to do). How to make this clear goes back to our earlier chapter on startups are not small businesses.?

The thing I did wrong as Managing Director is that I was invited to present what we were doing at a few economic development meetings, and thought this was probably good enough for them to understand our work. However, as I presented, most of these people weren’t even listening. I could see on the zoom calls they were all working on something else and barely paying any attention.

So how do you handle this, when people weren’t listening, and weren’t reading our emails??

The better way to get buy-in was through one-on-one engagements and small group meetings. After or before a meeting started, coffee in hand and chatting with someone face to face was a much more effective way to engage with them, answer their questions, and make sure it was clear where they fit in.?

Here’s another assumption you can nip right away. When you first meet with people, a great item to cover is how you partner or work with SBDC, but how in the end you are complementary services, not competitors. Rural leaders can be wary of anything that seems like it’s stepping on the toes of anything else, so making this clear immediately will pay dividends later.

Another reason to do so is because people may otherwise assume there is a bit of a turf war between you and SBDC (I would sometimes hear how economic development workers would be cautious about supporting us, fearful that they might upset SBDC, which was completely off-base). Simply knowing you are collaborators, not competitors, can go a long way.?

As far as the types of community champions that worked best, extroverts and people who are “pillar of the community” types are most effective. I also found that people who worked at banks and credit unions could be great for referrals. It was not uncommon for conversations in their workday to steer towards some fledgling company that might need money, and those people were quick to refer someone our way.?

So build a network of strong community champions and ask them to tell everyone about the work you’re doing.?

Set clear expectations (no charge, no judgement)

Uncertainty and unclear expectations are amongst the biggest things keeping people away from engaging with your entrepreneurship center and learning more. People have a very high comfort level and understanding of what happens when they enter most businesses and organizations. If they enter a grocery store they will grab a cart and shop. If they enter a shoe store someone will probably ask them what kind of shoe they would like to try on. If they enter a restaurant they will wait to be seated by a hostess.

For most people, your headquarters will have none of those comforting customs built into it. They have no idea what to expect, and that uncertainty will cause apprehension. That sense of apprehension will be a barrier that will keep people from taking that step and engaging with you.

First off, they’ll probably be afraid that you’ll charge them for consultation. They will waste a lot of mental energy on pondering whether a fee would be worth whatever advice or input you can give them, always coming back to the question of how much you would charge them.

You can make things a lot easier on everyone by communicating loud and clear that your service is free. As a little bonus, highlight the fact that the reason it is free is because you are grant-funded. This can be useful because upon learning that your services are free, people will often begin to wonder how that’s even possible (creating yet more uncertainty, which we don’t want). Giving them the “grant-funded” explanation will put that concern straight to bed, while also giving some publicity to the funding agency, which they will certainly appreciate.?

The next thing that will keep people from entering and engaging with you is fear of judgement. This is a big one. People in rural communities have a sizable sense of imposter syndrome, and many of them will feel that they are not ready. They’ll think they just need to spend a few more months perfecting their business plans or rehearsing their pitch.?

In other words, they’ll procrastinate, and once they get into the rhythm of procrastination, they’ll have a difficult time ever getting out of it.?

Find a way to communicate that whatever their idea is, whatever stage it is at, you are there to help them, judgement free. You might even create a little image of someone engaging with you, and a word bubble saying something such as, “So, I just had this idea for an app that helps people save money on their grocery bills.” Put a nice big green checkmark next to it, clearly indicating that this early stage endeavor is a great starting point.?

On the opposite end of the spectrum from fear of judgement are the NDA-wielding founders who think everyone is out to steal their brilliant ideas. While the notion that startup ideas are valuable things worth stealing has largely been squashed, it still does exist in some places, and especially those areas outside of major startup hubs. ?

For my part, I have always flat out refused to sign an NDA from a founder. My thinking behind this is that I am an educator and a culture-setter, and I am setting a bad example by enabling someone to feel they are justified in requiring people to sign NDAs to hear about their idea.

Founders need to focus on working hard and executing, and the danger in the NDA-wielding founder is that they have this notion that their idea will somehow succeed on account of its own brilliance. Within this mindset, there is a bad tendency to lean away from hard work and relationship building, living in a bit of a fairy tale kingdom? built around their amazing idea.?

Even worse, they are limiting and alienating community members who will play a big part in their success. What they need is feedback, and asking everyone to read and sign a sheet of paper before getting started slows the feedback process down tremendously.?

Finally, I will remind these individuals that I have worked with thousands of founders around the world, and have never once seen an idea get stolen. I will further remind them that I already have a job and wouldn’t have the time or energy necessary to pursue their idea, no matter how amazing.

Side note, every time a founder has agreed to overcome their reticence and share an idea they believe is worth stealing, I am always treated to a fairly mundane startup idea I have already heard dozens of times before.?

And one final item keeping people from entering your headquarters is geographical distance. In rural areas, some people might have an hour-long drive to get to your headquarters, and if they work a 9-5, this will be too much to overcome. It could be worthwhile to communicate that you are happy to do a remote meeting during their lunch break.

So what are the solutions?

We'll dive into those in our next post.