So you want to be your own boss. You want to start a business. You’re sure your idea will work if you can just get money to start.
Perhaps you can accomplish this and run your own show — but part of doing that often includes tasks like cleaning the restrooms of your business, working very long hours, and often worrying about money. But if you love what you’re doing, you’ll be pretty happy.
On the other hand, if what you thought was a bright idea for making money and being independent fails, you might spend years paying a large debt. How can you know beforehand which fate is likely to be yours?
In the Battle Creek area, there’s an education program for would-be entrepreneurs to help them deal with all the unknowns. It’s a collaboration between the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation and
Northern Initiatives, a nonprofit lender that provides loans to small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs who might not qualify for a loan from traditional banks.
Jamie Schriner, a program officer for the Kellogg Foundation, says the business-planning education started five years ago by using Second Muse, an international organization that describes itself as “a group of people working vigorously to better the world we live in.” Two years ago Kellogg arranged for the training to be run by Northern Initiatives, which then hired trainers Justin Andert and Jenny Mualhlun from Second Muse. Schriner says, “Entrepreneurs were able to really specifically get things ready to apply for a loan from Northern Initiatives.”
The education is offered through 10-week courses, each class having 10 to 15 students. The trainers use a combination of in-person meetings and online classes. The sponsoring organizations call the groups cohorts rather than classes. Schriner lists some of the things that students learn: who your customer is; legal structures for businesses and how you should be organized; marketing and promotion; how to have a strong online presence, especially in social media; and accounting. “It’s all the things that are essentially building a business plan,” she says.
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Markeeta Palmer, owner of Simply Sensational BerriesBusiness owner Markeeta Palmer, 33, was in the first cohort of about a dozen people five years ago. She started
Simply Sensational Berries in downtown Battle Creek on Michigan Avenue in a city-owned building called a business incubator. In August this year, she moved across the street into a leased storefront that she’s turned into a comfortable and colorful dessert shop and restaurant. Her many kinds of desserts are made in her kitchen, and her lunch menu includes wraps, subs, quesadillas, and salads plus fruits and drinks. The name Simply Sensational Berries comes from Palmer’s early start when her main product was chocolate-covered fruit.
Palmer says she benefited from being in that first cohort. “If I didn’t go through it, then I wouldn’t even have the knowledge of how to budget or how to do the books. It was a resource for the financial areas,” she says.
John Hart, the City of Battle Creek’s Director of Small Business Development, has high praise for the entrepreneur-education program. “I’m very grateful that we have an agency like Northern Initiatives who are putting on this facilitated training because when I meet someone and they don’t seem quite ready yet, it’s nice to have a resource to send them to where they can decide do they go into business or do they not,” Hart says.
He makes a presentation to each cohort. “When you open a business there’s regulatory issues: planning and zoning and building inspections and working with the health department. There’s licensing,” he says. “So we walk them through all of those pieces and parts and then we try to get them attached to the resources or the right agency or department. As they’re writing their business plan through that course, they can call me up and bounce things off me.”
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The fall cohort who completed the training course in November. The next one will start in January.Hart notes there’s a bonus for completing the course. “Once they finish the cohort they’re up for between $2,500 and $5,000 traditionally from Northern Initiatives to go toward launching their business.” And there’s more financial aid available; the city can help a struggling startup business by granting up to $5,000 to pay for professional or technical assistance.
One store owner in downtown Battle Creek also is a veteran trainer of entrepreneurs. She is Tiffany Blackman, proprietor of
Bread & Basket, who says, “Over the past five years I’ve either trained, facilitated training, or coached over 75 early-stage or startup businesses. And that’s in all types of different industries, everything from agriculture to restaurants, retail, crafts, hobby-based businesses, all kinds of industries.”
She does contract work with nonprofit organizations, including Northern Initiatives. “I like to say I’m a dream puller. Entrepreneurs walk in with a dream or idea and I help them take the idea and put it into actionable steps so that they can actually launch a startup.
“There is a lot of excitement about the type of help that they’re able to connect to through a lot of these nonprofit programs that are uplifting them. Sometimes there’s attachment to some funding, which is extremely exciting for them because it’s hard to come by funding as a startup, particularly a lot of minority-owned businesses that are startups.
“There’s a lot of gratitude that they’re able to have somebody hold their hand and walk them through their business idea and get a solid plan in place for them to actually take it and run with it. It takes a lot of guts and stamina to do what you set out to do and to make sure that it’s an idea that the community can surround themselves with and support.”
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Tiffany Blackman, owner of Bread & BasketBlackman herself is an entrepreneur, having opened her Bread & Basket business in July 2021. It is full of so many kinds of merchandise that a shopper should be able to find something different for himself or a gift for somebody. Some products are made locally and others come from far away. Blackman compares her operation to running a farmers’ market.
“We are a public market that feels like a boutique. My goal is to continue to help entrepreneurs,” she says. “Our entrepreneurial ecosystem calls for a different solution than each individual entrepreneur figuring out their own brick and mortar. Public markets are known to be collaborative in nature, collective in nature, and there’s something to be said about a model that brings as many people along with you as you can. And that’s kind of who I am as a person anyway so it was pretty easy for me to take that model and create it as my own. But it takes a lot of time and effort to build it out and we definitely need all the support we can get.”
Blackman adds, “We have over 50 brands in the shop. They’re predominantly minority-owned, either women-owned or black-owned, but a really diverse mix of products.”
Anybody who would like to get assistance from a Northern Initiatives business coach can check their
website.