Lexy Frautschy has done pretty well for himself. As majority owner of Ian’s Pizza on State in Madison, the young entrepreneur has already snagged a Dane County Small Business Award and helped spark a media firestorm after Ian’s started delivering pizzas to protesters at the Capitol last spring.
Still, Frautschy is not without regrets. As a panelist for a recent SBA Young Entrepreneurs Series (YES) event in Madison, Frautschy may have been viewed as something of an entrepreneurial rock star by many young and enthusiastic would-be business owners, but success still came to him through a fair amount of trial and error.
If he had plugged into the SBA’s resources a little earlier, he says, things might have gone a bit more smoothly.
“Clearly, the SBA is a great network to get involved with because they’re solely focused on small businesses,” said Frautschy. “When I first started my networking, it really revolved around meeting a banker, and that banker introduced me to a lawyer … and he introduced me to other people, so my network kind of expanded that way.
“But it seems like, if I’d utilized the SBA’s services, it might not have to be so dependent on chance. It might be quicker to meet certain people you’re looking to meet.”
Giving young entrepreneurs a leg up is a renewed focus of the SBA, and was the impetus behind several well-attended YES events in 2011, which wrapped up in December with a young veterans forum in Milwaukee.
According to Marianne Markowitz, regional administrator for the SBA in the Midwest region, there’s still a fairly sizable gap between the resources that are available to entrepreneurs and young business owners’ awareness of those resources.
“We want to make sure that young entrepreneurs understand our services, because what we often find is there’s a gap in knowledge,” said Markowitz. “They’re young, and they haven’t been in the world of entrepreneurship very long, and we want to make sure before they get too far into it that they know we’re out there and that we have free counseling and free services to help them get access to capital products that can help along the way.”
Youth movement
Even with youth unemployment a much-discussed topic, the subject of youth entrepreneurship is often overlooked. The Obama administration’s decision to elevate SBA chief Karen Mills to a Cabinet-level position is at least some indication that the White House is stepping up its efforts to help grow jobs from the grassroots, and younger entrepreneurs would seem to be a natural part of that effort.
“Especially in technology and other areas, young entrepreneurs are really the future of entrepreneurship,” said Markowitz. “So we’re connecting them with all the main resources that have been out there for a long time that many of them just don’t know about, such as the Access to Capital programs, our free counseling programs, and then ultimately big contracting programs. We’re also letting them know about re-energized funding vehicles like Small Business Investment Company (SBIC), the program that provides a more flexible style of funding.”
To Markowitz, these outreach efforts take a fairly holistic approach, but if there’s anything she’d like to emphasize, it’s convincing young entrepreneurs to seek the advice of the SBA – and if not the SBA directly, mentors who can help them avoid the well-known pitfalls that bedevil many business start-ups.
“If there’s anything we want to make sure they know about, it’s the free counseling,” said Markowitz. “But it’s really making them aware of all of this, so when they sit down and do their business plan, during the planning phases, they incorporate all that we’re offering. … Also, a lot of what we do at these events is just bringing successful entrepreneurs together with young entrepreneurs so they can tell their story, and talk about not just our resources, but about other resources that they’ve found along the way.”
To Frautschy, who acknowledges he could have benefited greatly from some of the SBA’s resources, participating on the YES panel was as much about lending inspiration as providing information.
“To be honest, I wanted to say a lot more than I was able to say,” said Frautschy. “A lot of the questions were revolving around, ‘How did you get started, how did you know where to start?’ So a lot of my answers were trying to make people realize you don’t have to have 10 years of formal training to get into this. I was an art major when I was going to school at the UW, and running a pizza business was my part-time job.”
Engaging young veterans
According to Markowitz, a particular focus of the SBA right now involves helping young veterans transition from service to the business world. With unemployment rates among post-9/11 veterans still high, particularly among those aged 18 to 24, the government is intent on bringing those numbers down. (Though the rate improved considerably in January, down to 9.1% from 13.3% in December and 15.2% a year ago.)
One new program, called V-WISE (Veteran Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship), is currently being rolled out on the East Coast.
The first step in finding information on any of these programs, says Markowitz, is simply visiting the SBA website and making a thorough search – and not taking for granted that any business education you might have has covered all the details.
“You’d be surprised,” said Markowitz. “I sometimes get called in to lecture at entrepreneurship classes where people are getting their MBA in entrepreneurship, and they haven’t touched on the government resources and support in many of those programs.”
According to Markowitz, the SBA is currently planning more YES events, and information on those will be made available at SBA.gov.
And if Frautschy’s testimony is to be believed, there’ll be plenty of entrepreneurial spirit to go around.
“One of the things I really enjoyed about attending this event was having people come up, and I talked to them one on one,” said Frautschy, “and there were some students who were all excited to see somebody a bit younger. It makes you very excited, I guess, that concept of showing that you don’t have to be some old man in a suit to run a business. Anybody can do it if you’re committed and passionate.”
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