Main Street Gardening (General)

Lately there has been a lot of discussion in Florida about “economic gardening” The term refers to the success of Littleton, Colorado in growing their local economy by equipping, and accelerating the growth of “second stage” companies. Second stage companies have between 10 and 100 employees and usually are doing more than $1 million in sales. They are the companies that are expanding (adding jobs) and usually experience rapid growth. In Florida, that represents only about 10% of our companies, however, those companies produce almost the same number of jobs as the other 90% of the stage 1 businesses! So it makes good economic sense, if you want to create jobs quickly, (other than cutting taxes) invest in this group of companies, provide funding, get them what they need and then get out of their way! However, you can’t just ignore the needs of all the stage one companies (less than 10 employees and less than $1 million in sales). They make up 90% of the businesses in Florida! It seems obvious that without stage one businesses surviving, there will be very few stage 2 companies tomorrow. At the Disney Entrepreneur Center, we assist any size business, and it is no surprise that about 90% of them have fewer than 10 employees and sales of less than a million. We want to accelerate the potential for a first stage businesses to become a second stage as quickly as possible, because that should create an exponential increase in jobs…but, not every stage one business wants to grow into a second stage business, not every seed you plant will sprout, and some seeds may never get planted. Our creative and supportive environment provides fertile soil for innovation, but before you can harvest, you must plant, water, weed, feed, and show some patience! (and in my case, protect the plants from the #$%$# raccoons) So, if we ignore and postpone addressing the needs of our struggling “main street” garden, we do so at our peril. Innovation does not have a single recipe and it operates on a time schedule all it’s own. There are no two entrepreneurs that are alike, nor two businesses the same; but as any gardener will tell you, if we do not invest in the seeds, and tend to our main street garden, there will certainly be a smaller harvest for the economic garden down the road.