We see all kinds of entrepreneurs come through our doors at the NEOinc incubators.  Some are looking for a place to land, some are looking for funding, most all are looking for coaching, mentoring and any kind of help they can get.  While many of the entrepreneurs we meet have a significant amount of business experience, we are also seeing an increase in very capable entrepreneurs graduating from our regional universities.

Regardless of your experience or skill in entrepreneurship, this article over at Entrepreneur.com entitled 10 tips for the first-time business owner should be a must read.  It could be a simple reinforcement of basic principles you’ve forgetten to focus on, great advice for those of you just starting out, or somewhere in the middle.  Regardless - click over to the article and give it a quick read.  Lot’s of great advice.  Here’s a quick list of what you’ll find (we particularly like #2, 6 and 8):

1. Focus. Focus. Focus
2. Know what you do.  Do what you know.
3. Say it in 30 seconds or don’t say it at all.
4. Know what you know, what you don’t know and who knows what you don’t.
5. Act like a startup
6. Learn under fire
7. No one will give you money.
8. Be healthy
9. Don’t fall victim to your own BS
10. Know when to call it quits.

A timely article over at the Wall Street Journal online, small business section.  For those of you contemplating a SBA loan, or in the process of acquiring one and it’s taking longer than you would like, some good tips on how to accelerate the process.   Most of the suggestions are more appropriate before you start, but all can be helpful to keep in mind.

Be sure to click over to the full article for all the details, but here are the six headlines:

• Update your financials
• Tap a preferred lender
• Ensure the right fit
• Hedge your bets
• Offer more backup
• Get help

Good luck!

Just about every entrepreneur is looking for funding for their startup; this is particularly true for technology companies.  Republished here with permission from the author (The Tech Czar himself), is a great recap of economic incentives for the high tech sector.  From the city level to the state, whether it’s tax credits or loan funds, the information below is a wide-ranging snapshot of incentive options for your high-tech startup. A big thanks to Michael and LNE for pulling this together.

NEOinc would add to the list to include the Innovation Loan Fund at Lorain County Community College (grants up to 25K, loans up to 100K), and the Cuyahoga County New Product Development Fund, administered by MAGNET (loans up to 60K).

Without further ado - on to the incentives. Continued

Many entrepreneurs and small businesses develop a website, and those that don’t, should.  What was not too many years ago an oddity, is now essential  A well designed website can be useful for a variety of reasons including public relations, general market awareness or even to sell product.

However, while entrepreneurs may have the “right stuff” to develop technology and bring it to market, odds are they aren’t very proficient in building a website.  Depending on the stage of their startup, they also might not have funds to hire a professional web design firm to develop it for them either.  So what’s an entrepreneur to do?

One place to start is this article we recently found on the Small Business Trends blog entitled “Are You Committing These 4 Common Site Errors?“  Targeted more toward small and medium-sized businesses, the article nonetheless has some great tips on making that first website have impact.  There’s even an idea or two in there on how to get a great looking website developed with minimal cost.

In the latest round of awards, the Innovation Fund, administered by the Lorain County Community College Foundation, is investing $300,000 in six Northeast Ohio based technology start-up companies.  Funds from Ohio’s Third Frontier Program combined with matching local support and contributions from a variety of partners are used to make the Innovation Fund awards.  These partners and collaborators include: the Ohio Department of Development, the University of Akron, Youngstown State University, the Youngstown Business Incubator, the Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise (GLIDE), JumpStart, Techlift and the Lorain County Commissioners.

The Innovation Fund advances the strategy to grow our own businesses and jobs in the region.  “In this our seventh round of funding, we continued to be impressed with depth and quality of entrepreneurial ideas that are emerging from our region,” noted Lorain County Community College President Dr. Roy A. Church.  “Including this round, the Fund has invested more than $2 million in 30 companies located in NE Ohio” Continued

For any small business and especially for early stage startups, creating exposure and getting your message out can be a distraction in addition to costing money you may just not have.  Sure there are lots of new Web 2.0 tools out there that can be leveraged, but many of them still take what amounts to significant time for an entrepreneur, and may require some specialized marketing, PR or IT skills to appropriately portray your company or brand.

While a lot business owners are still scratching their heads when it comes to Twitter, a recent post over at the SmatBlog on Social Media suggests Twitter may be an excellent starting point for small businesses to take advantage of social media channels.  This short posts lists three ways Twitter can benefit a small business or startup (with virtually no cost):

1. Use it as a home base
2. Get market research
3. Find leads

Of course, no tool is without cost.  This article, like many Twitter-focused articles, neglects to factor in the time and effort involved in attracting followers to your account, and you will need a strategy.  That said, for a very small amount of time spent using Twitter you may be able to reap significant benefits for your small business.

Re-blogged with permission from the JumpStart blog.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could achieve all of the above in a single action? I know…I know…the “free money” thing first got your attention, but we can all agree that these are all important and good things. So, how do you do it? By using the various subsidized internship programs that are available to entrepreneurial technology companies in Northeast Ohio, that’s how.

Internships can benefit your company in a number of ways. First, employers have found that student interns can get a great deal of real work done at a very reasonable cost. The key is to define a task or set of tasks that the intern can immediately “dive into” and then provide guidance when they get stuck. When this happens, most employers have found that student interns typically exceed expectations. Interns are great for those jobs where you constantly say “yeah…we need to do that,” but you never do.

Hiring a student intern can fill the talent pipeline for your company. When your company grows, you will need talent. An internship basically represents a “3 month interview” where you can judge whether a person fits your organization, while he or she can see how great it is to work in an exciting entrepreneurial company. Studies show that 65% of engineering internships and co-ops turn into job offers for full time employment. It’s the ultimate “try before you buy” for both parties.

Students today deal with the recurring dilemma of not being able to get the job because they “don’t have experience,” but cannot get the experience without getting the job. You can help invest in our youth by breaking this cycle, and having your company benefit as part of the deal.

Investing in our young people, those who are from Northeast Ohio as well as those who attend college in Northeast Ohio, is particularly important to our region. We have all heard about the “quiet crisis” and “brain drain” with regard to Northeast Ohio. Having the prospect of a good job in Northeast Ohio will keep our students here, and will ultimately make our region more vibrant and economically strong.

“So what about that free money?” you ask. There are a number of subsidized internship programs for Northeast Ohio technology entrepreneurial companies that will help pay for the interns you should hire anyway:

• Third Frontier Internship Program - This program subsidizes interns from Ohio universities and colleges and Ohio students at other colleges and universities who are enrolled in scientific, mathematics, technology and engineering programs.
  • 50% subsidy of paid wages, up to $3000 per intern
  • For more information go to www.noche.org, http://thirdfrontierintern.ohio.gov or call the program manager, Halley Marsh, at (216) 420-9292 x234
• TechLift Business Internship Program - This program, generously sponsored by the GAR Foundation, subsidizes internships at entrepreneurial technology companies for Ohio students in business applications.
  • Special consideration given to students, companies and colleges in the Summit County area
  • 50% subsidy of paid wages, up to $3000 per intern
  • For more information go to www.noche.org or contact the program manager, Halley Marsh, at hmarsh@noche.org
• Purdue University/TechLift Interns for Entrepreneurship Program - This program, partially supported by the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, subsidizes summer internships at TechLift Advisors-supported companies for Northeast Ohio students of any major attending Purdue University.
  • Subsidy up to 56% of paid wages
  • For more information, contact Kate Hanna with JumpStart at kate.hanna@jumpstartinc.org

So what are you waiting for? Design an internship and sign up for one ASAP. It’s a “win, win, win, win, win” proposition!

Just in case you live down the hole with Phil and didn’t hear about this one, here’s Jim Cossler to fill you in:

So…I  heard yesterday from some childhood friends I had lost touch with who are now living in Chicago, Houston and Phoenix.

And we probably heard, based on an eyeball estimate of my email in-box, from another 500 people from places like New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose and Denver. All thanks to National Public Radio nationally broadcasting a story yesterday morning to its 13 million listeners on the amazing software technology cluster being built by our organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

But, here’s what we’re most excited about.

We received countless numbers of emails from people who grew up in Western Pennsylvania or Northeastern Ohio, but who are now living in places across the country. They told us how thrilled they were to hear the story. They told us they wanted to learn more about what was going on. They told us that they wanted to visit with us the next time they came “home”.

That’s great, but we’re going to go one step further.

We’re going to be working very hard to get them all to move “home”.

You can listen to the story here:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100762987

Our special thanks to Ideastream/WCPN and the Center for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University for helping to make this a national story.

Jim Cossler
CEO and Chief Evangelist
Youngstown Business Incubator
www.ybi.org

In anticipation of their GoingGreenEast Greentech conference, AlwaysOn and KPMG have published a survey to capture your impressions of the greentech space.  The survey can be completely anonymously and is looking for your impressions on anticipated funding levels in 2009 and which sectors and geographic regions are on the increase, among other questions.

No word on whether the results will be published on AlwaysOn’s site, so this post is definitely for those of you in the green energy space who really like taking surveys…  We’ll keep our eyes peeled for you.

If you’ve been on the NEOinc site lately, you probably noticed our new addition: a Regional Entrepreneurial Calendar.

Any page you are on, whether it’s the home page or a blog post, will have the next five upcoming events listed in an “Upcoming Events” window on the left-hand side.  The full calendar can be viewed on it’s own page, accessible from the top menu.  The calendar is fully interactive and offers a number of ways to interact with both the calendar and individual events.  We think you’ll find two aspects of the calendar particularly useful:

1. The calendar has it’s own RSS feed.  Subscribe to the feed and you’ll automatically get updates in your feed reader whenever we add events to the calendar.
2. You can easily add events of interest to your own personal calendar.  When viewing the calendar, simply check the box next to the event you are interested in, then click the “Add to my Calendar” button at the top of the calendar.   Multiple calendar formats are supported, including Outlook, Yahoo and Google.

NEOinc would like to thank MAGNET for hosting the calendar.  It is actually a subset of MAGNET’s comprehensive Regional Datebook, listing events of interest from around the region.

While NEOinc member incubators regularly host events of interest to entrepreneurs, we know our events are just the tip of the iceberg.  If you have an event of interest to entrepeneurs, and would like it included in the NEOinc Regional Entrepreneurial Calendar, send details of your event to:

Lynne Brakeman (MAGNET)
lynne.brakeman@magnetwork.org

Please include as much detail as possible about your event, making sure to include the event’s contact person, website and registration link (if available).

NEOinc is pleased to provide this calendar of events to our region’s entrepreneurs, partners and support organizations.  We hope you find it valuable and take the time to contribute your events.