15 August 2008
Entrepreneurial Boot Camps Light the Way for New Ventures
After formal education, business people like the intensity of boot camps
Washington -- A new generation of entrepreneurs, already out of school, is turning to entrepreneurial boot camps to learn how to launch a business, find seed money and help their companies grow.
The programs take their name from military boot camps that train soldiers in combat skills. But these boot camps are not physically taxing. Instead, they provide the mental skills to help new businesses succeed.
“We took the title from the concept of military training, which focuses on process, discipline, accountability, teamwork and constant honing of one’s skills, all the same requirements for successful sales management,” said Jack Derby, the founder of Derby Management LLC in Boston, who has been holding boot camps for three years.
Boot camps take place in many parts of the United States, offering an average of 2.5 days of counseling and costing less than $1,000 per person. The sessions are run by successful entrepreneurs and are designed to teach hopeful businesspeople to develop strategic plans and to sustain a company over time.
Potential entrepreneurs meet others who have succeeded and engage in a variety of mental exercises to help them develop ideas into sound business plans, without sitting in a classroom looking at a computer screen or reading books about how to start a company.
For most participants, their companies are not quite launched. “There are some who are still in the ‘back of the napkin’ phase,” said Scott Olson, who runs SPARK, a nonprofit in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that holds two entrepreneur boot camps a year. He said some participants have started a business that is operating, but they need help figuring out how to run it better.
Attendees learn where to find venture capital and how to promote their businesses. Each student is teamed with a mentor, who critiques or even picks apart the student’s business summary.
Todd Sullivan, of Ann Arbor, attended one of Olson’s workshops as he began his company, spiritshop.com, a Web site for T-shirts that can be custom-designed. There is no minimum order: Anyone can design a single T-shirt. The business has taken off, posting $3 million in annual sales.
“You start out in a class that helps you write a business plan. You take that plan into other classes. You have coaching along the way. They are teaching you how to do the 30-second pitch, a three-minute pitch and how to talk to venture capitalists,” Sullivan said.
Stephen S. Hau, the founder of Boston-based PatientKeeper, makers of software that gives doctors the tools to manage patient information on a handheld computer, took part in the Entrepreneur America Boot Camp in Hamilton, Montana, a number of years ago. That camp is run by well-known entrepreneur Rob Ryan. (Ryan founded Ascend Communications, which made hardware for Internet providers and was sold to Lucent Technologies Inc. in 1999 for $24 billion.)
Hau followed the boot camp’s road map, and his company has been growing ever since. It has cornered 12 percent of the U.S. hospital market and went global this year.
“There are a lot of inventors who are not entrepreneurs. Just because you invent something does not mean you are an entrepreneur,” Hau said. “Boot camp turns inventors into entrepreneurs. Having someone coach you can be very helpful.”
But not every entrepreneur who goes through a boot camp is a success story. Sometimes the boot camp discourages those whose ideas are not ready for development, and sometimes a budding entrepreneur himself realizes his idea is not good enough.
“There have been some who have come out of camp and decided they didn’t have a market, their idea didn’t have legs. Others have launched their businesses and continued product development,” Olson said.
Derby said his program includes a case study of a classic startup and the financials that go with it, how to find equity financing and how to meet investors.
Forty percent of those attending boot camp have no revenue, Derby said, but they have plenty of ideas, ranging from Web-based companies to medical devices to new games.
Using Derby’s curriculum, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce in Rhode Island held a boot camp earlier this year called the Entrepreneur Launch Pad. Andrew Schiller said it helped him move his company strategically forward. Schiller is the chief executive of Location Inc., in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The company offers a Web site that helps homebuyers locate what they want in a neighborhood and evaluate data on such issues as school ratings and crime rates.
“It helped move the company forward. It really moved the needle,” Schiller said. “It made us focus. There was a seminar on business acumen and doing the right things to move the site forward.”
The Providence chamber plans another boot camp in September 2008.
