Our Catawba Valley Community College (CVCC) Shark Tank event was very successful in its first two years and because of the acceptance within our college we decided to expand it this year to include the local high schools. We hoped that the interest we had created at CVCC could be replicated in the high schools.

We found that it was more challenging than we expected. In retrospect it made sense that it would be more difficult to establish a Shark Tank activity in the high schools, because the students weren’t as familiar with ABC’s Shark Tank TV show as our college students. We also were not able to promote our event as aggressively as we could at the college.

The result was that only two high schools were willing to let us come in to their careers’ (entrepreneurship and marketing) classes and pitch our Shark Tank competition. The Challenger Early College High School encouraged its students to develop business ideas for a school project based on the CVCC Executive Summary model. We believe we were able to create an interest, which we will be able to build into a Challenger Shark Tank competition next year.

The other high school which allowed us to visit their classes was Hickory High School, which is the largest school in our area. Joe Beaman, the Business/Careers Department Head, actively supported the idea of a Shark Tank event for his students.Joe, Alison Teague his Marketing instructor and Ron Turner, his Entrepreneurship instructor, were very excited about incorporating our Shark Tank event into their courses.

They divided the classes into nine teams of three people.Each team was charged with the task of creating a business/product idea and wrote an executive summary based on CVCC’s model. Then each team pitched their business idea to a panel of business leaders and school instructors.

 The nine teams did extremely well in pitching the key concepts of their business ideas. We were very pleased with the quality of the projects and the interest the students demonstrated during the semester. We believe the success of this year’s Hickory High Shark Tank will be the foundation for future years.

A lesson learned from our experience with the Hickory High Shark Tank is that for anything to be successful you need to have enthusiasm and commitment. We were very fortunate to have champions at the school, who were willing to take on a new project and the extra work involved with developing a plan for the event.

We also learned the lesson that because our event worked at CVCC did not necessarily mean it would automatically be accepted at the high schools. We needed to understand the environment at each school and the key people who are needed to promote the event. Next year we will do more pre-event planning to break down the barriers to success. 

It is estimated only 3% of all community colleges currently have some form of business incubation.  If you were in the business of job creation and knew of the research from the Kauffman Center report stating ‘all net new jobs, came from new business starts ups’, why has there not been a more concerted efforts to look to community colleges to be an integral part of business incubation.   

If you were a business and had locations across the country as this map indicates and your business was to create more jobs, why would new business incubation not be one of your strategies?   

Today, there are numerous business incubation models which could fit the needs of just about every community college in the country.   There are traditional brick and mortar incubators, incubators without walls, virtual incubators, co-working spaces, innovation centers, Fab Labs, research centers and the list could go on.   

So with the variations of incubators and with over 1,200 community colleges across the nation, who are educating around 13m students and why is there not a critical mass of business incubators in the community college system?    

A starting point:  AACC and the Mott Foundation joined forces with NACCE, NBIA, SBA and 11 diverse community colleges to create the Virtual Incubation Tool Kit.  This tool kit can be a very good starting point for any community college to look into incubation.   

Having just attended the NBIA conference in Boston (#NBIAConf), I found the conference a meeting point for experts in various fields of incubation, providing an intensive level of networking and a willingness to collaborate.  For all the NACCE aficionado’s,  I would say that this has also been true of my NACCE experiences as well.   

Now enter the new president and CEO of NBIA, Jasper Welch, whose experience includes directing  the San Juan College Enterprise Center, a mixed-use incubation program in Farmington, N.M., for 12 years. His passion for community colleges really shows.   

The stars are starting to align for community colleges to be able to become a juggernaut for new business creation and job growth.   What say you? 

In last few year years, we have worked hard to excite our local middle and high school students about the possibilities of becoming an entrepreneur. We believe there are a lot of budding young entrepreneurs in our community and we want them to understand that Catawba Valley Community College (CVCC) is committed to helping them pursue their dreams. We also want them to know we have the resources to support their efforts.

We have offered a variety of programs to get students on our campus to see the things available at CVCC. Our Entrepreneurship curriculum programs and Small Business Center work together in making presentations to our guests.

We have campus wide tours for middle school students which focus on the under the radar programs such as Entrepreneurship. These tours have been very successful in raising the awareness of these students and their teachers. This is a long term strategy for attracting new students, but it is a part of our overall strategy.

We have participated in the CVCC Successful Pathways tours for local high school guidance counselors and administrators. These tours have been successful in educating these key high school resources about CVCC’s focus on entrepreneurship.

Whereas the Successful Pathways tours target high school counselors, we are also working the Western Piedmont Council of Governments’ Youth Entrepreneurship Summit which is a program addressing the interests of high school seniors. There are 150 students broken into five groups of thirty students and the goal of each group is to develop a mini business plan in a morning session and then present a 5 minute elevator pitch to a panel of judges in the afternoon.

We are pleased that five of our entrepreneurship students were selected to serve as the facilitators to assist the student groups in preparing the mini business plans and elevator pitches. We believe the positive experience will help build CVCC awareness with the local high school students.

This spring we are expanding our CVCC Shark Tank competition to include our local high school students. Our Shark Tank event is a takeoff on the ABC reality show where students pitch their business ideas to a panel of business leaders and the top finishers receive scholarships to CVCC. Our event has been very successful and we hope a high school Shark Tank will catch the interest of some of our local young entrepreneurs and motivate them to become a part of this year’s competition.

We hope our active involvement with our local schools will build awareness of our program. We are also trying to make entrepreneurship fun and interesting.

The NACCE Fellows Program begins to take shape through the work of the individual colleges involved in the NACCE/Sam’s Club Shared Vision Program and the upcoming Regional Summits.

In our first blog, we provided an overview of our Curriculum & Training and Community Outreach Fellowship program and introduced ourselves. We also briefly mentioned two of our key initiatives: NACCE/Sam’s Club® Shared Vision program and the NACCE Regional Summits.

We now are excited to begin providing more detailed information on these initiatives.

First up is the NACCE and Sam’s® Shared Vision Project, in which NACCE and Sam’s Club are interested in seeing how community colleges can take a small, short-term investment (such as the Shared Vision grant) and incorporate it into existing programs or initiatives to create greater impact in the long-term.  This might be through adding sessions or modules to an existing program, or adding another support service. We anticipate that leveraging other resources is key to long-term success for the college and the small business owner, and that identification and communication of those other resources are essential to success.

 We look forward to working with the four colleges that have been chosen to pilot this very important project. We began our journey this week with a conference call with the college representatives. In our conference call, we discussed each college’s plan and focus for their proposed program. Here’s what we learned:

Fox Valley Technical College Venture Center plans to deliver their Small Business Design, Plan and Grow Program. This offering combines a three-day (24 hours) Business Model Generation Workshop, an eight-week (24 hours) E-Seed Express Entrepreneurship Training Series, one-on-one coaching and networking. The focus on the skill development is targeted to existing Fox Valley graduates and Venture Center clients, including minorities, women and veterans.

Long Beach City College plans to expand their customized training program for small business owners, augmented with one-on-one advising offered through the LBCC SBDC. The plan is to target businesses operating in low income areas, with the goal of helping business owners develop stronger business acumen, planning and understanding of how to secure financing. The program will serve as a feeder program for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program.

North Seattle Community College plans to enhance and expand their offerings through their Entrepreneur Success Center. The hours of operation will increase from three to nine hours a week, which will be very beneficial to their target market. Enhanced current and new value-added seminars will be offered. Three open houses will be offered to increase the visibility of the ESC and the offerings to a targeted market of recent grads, minorities, women and veterans.

South Mountain Community College is one of the ten colleges that make up the Maricopa Community College System in the Phoenix area. South Mountain plans to launch its Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program, which is focused on identifying and securing successful small business owners who can provide strong support to budding entrepreneurs. The long-term plan is to create an on-going mentorship model, which will provide the one-on-one coaching entrepreneurs need to be successful.

We will be providing you with even more details of the programs after our official Kickoff meeting at Fox Valley.

NACCE Regional Summit Dates

In addition to the exciting plans of our Shared Vision Project colleges, we also have the tentative dates for our upcoming Regional Summits:

California’s Economic and Workforce Development’s Business and Entrepreneurship Program in Santa Ana, California - April 2nd

Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, North Carolina - June 3rd

Ridgewater College in Wilmar, Minnesota -  June 7th

Rio Saldo College in Tempe, Arizona - November 14th

Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida - November 19th

New River Community and Technical College in Ghent, West Virginia - November 21

We are excited about the potential of our summits to build momentum for entrepreneurship throughout the country.

We also want to remind everyone that the NACCE National Conference will be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, from October 13th-16th. Charlotte is racing country, so come and enjoy the racing toward entrepreneurship!