In the corner conference room of Kentucky’s Life Science and Innovation Center Nucleus some of Louisville’s most brilliant minds gathered. The Young Professionals Association of Louisville hosted the Entrepreneur Seminar, a gathering dedicated to helping young professionals understand the different avenues of entrepreneurship and how to translate ideas into real business venture opportunities.
YPAL, along with the University of Louisville College of Business, brought together a group of people that generated such a feeling of electricity that I could imagine a light bulb fully illuminating without the need of socket if held in the middle of the room.
The Panel Discussion consisted of seven participants:
Vik Chadha: Executive Vice President of Venture Development for Nucleus, co-founder of Backupify, GlowTouch Technologies and Scalable Ventures
Bobby Ferreri: Executive Director of Greater Louisville Inc.’s EnterpriseCorp.
Patrick Just: UofL Entrepreneurship MBA graduate and founding partner of PackStream
David Oetken: A proud Louisville native and serial entrepreneur, Director of Business Advising and Center Director for Louisville’s Small Business Development Center
Chris Spalding: YPAL’s Entrepreneur Seminar’s Moderator, owner of Spalding Brokerage and franchisee of Snappy Tomato Pizza
Angie Tyler: Owner and founder of All About Kids Sports Center
Phoebe A. Wood: Principal of Companies Wood consulting and Intrapreneur of Brown-Forman as CFO and Motorola telecom’s subsidiary also as CFO.
Entrepreneurship is such a broad term but the selected panel captured some specific essence of what an entrepreneur is by sharing their story of what it means to them to be an entrepreneur.
Each person described their journey as an innovative member in their community—“Have as many lunch meetings as possible,” said Vik Chadha as he described a very detailed unfolding of events that led him to co-found one of his friends’ side side ventures. That company grew from $25k to over $5.5M in funding in less than two years.
The event shared both the highs and lows of small business ownership and innovation. David Oetken described his childhood dream, “I always wanted to own a business growing up and when I achieved that dream, my next dream was to own a business that made money.”
Phoebe A. Wood described her role on the panel not as an entrepreneur but rather an intrapreneur—a corporate entrepreneur skilled at spotting market opportunities and extracting their potential with a methodology that is very much entrepreneurial to the core. She was 23 years old when she convinced her boss at the time that she could save the company a substantial sum of money by building an internal team of legal assistants to tackle the deluge of legal work rather than outsourcing it to external law firms. That project grew from a handful of workers to over 150 by the time it peaked saving the company countless dollars to the bottom line.
What’s their secret to success? “I just give people what they pay for,” described Angie Tyler for the reason behind her nearly exponential rise in memberships to her children’s sports center. “There are two types of people really…there are normal people who just want their paycheck at the end of the week and will go home to watch television or something and then there is the entrepreneur… the entrepreneur will get her or his paycheck at the end of the work week and then go home to work on another project that they created themselves,” explained Chadha.
Bobby Ferreri capped off the discussion with a presentation on the State of Entrepreneurship in Louisville. “66% of all new jobs in Louisville come from businesses less than five years old,” Ferreri said. Although there were many more details of his presentation (there is an entire publication you can receive from the Greater Louisville Inc.), I’d like to end this article with that statistic in mind. 66% of all new jobs in our city from businesses less than five years old—as we continue to move onward and upward from the recession years of 2008 and 2009 let us not forget about the economic heroes fighting to grow the prosperity of our neighborhoods and communities. As consumers think about the power of your local dollar and the ability we all have together to help our next-door small business owners and friends build a solid recovery.
