SCC gets ready for entrepreneurs
Spokane’s newest board room is taking shape on East Mission Avenue and, no, it’s not inside Avista Corp.’s headquarters. When finished, the sanctum and associated classroom and offices will become the home of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Spokane Community College.
Director Julie Litzenberger envisions a separate building in a decade or so. That’s what entrepreneurs do.
Litzenberger is one of seven SCC faculty members who pulled together a program that will teach students the fundamentals of small business management. Hundreds with degrees in cooking, auto mechanics, design or other disciplines want to go to work for themselves, she says; they just do not know how. After three quarters in the entrepreneurship program, they will.
They do not even have to have a degree to apply, just an idea.
“We’re looking for people with passion, and the drive,” says Litzenberger, who also heads the college’s culinary program.
Instruction will come from college faculty and business leaders who have rallied behind the program. The center and SCC Foundation raised $185,000 to fund its first two years.
“The response in the community has been fantastic,” Litzenberger says.
Although faculty designed a program unique to SCC, she says the college drew on the experience of Gonzaga University and the University of Idaho, as well as the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship, a fast-growing organization that germinated at a technical college in Springfield, Mass.
Litzenberger says the SCC group was unaware just how vital community college entrepreneurship programs have become in just a few years. But, she adds, it makes sense. There’s not much between the programs at four-year universities and the help available to professionals through the U.S. Small Business Administration and similar agencies.
“This is that thing in the middle,” she says, that provides students with a solid foundation for just $2,100. And if they need communication, writing or other skills that are not part of the entrepreneurship curriculum, those classes are down the hall.
Each student will receive a laptop computer preprogrammed with software to assure each starts with the same information technology.
The entrepreneurship classes will focus on product development, market research, pricing, business law and budgeting. Students will be organized in teams that will present an in-depth capstone project to business leaders at the end of the third quarter.
The program already has a professional-looking logo, two interlocked “E’s”, designed by Spokane Falls Community College student Whitney Weisgerber. She had help from Rick Hosmer, himself a Spokane Falls Community College graduate and co-founder of Klundt Hosmer Design Inc., the kind of home-grown enterprise center supporters hope to foster.
He says the entrepreneurship center should boost Spokane’s economy.
“So much of the SCC program positions you to be in business for yourself,” says Hosmer, who is on the advisory committee.
Litzenberger says the program should appeal not just to those who want to run their own business, but to those who see themselves as a most valuable player in a large organization.
Younger students, she says, want to be identified by what they do, not who they do it for. Older students have done the organization thing in business or the military and want to strike out as individuals, too.
In their way, community colleges are entrepreneurship in action. If they are not providing their students with the education they want, and employers with the skilled graduates they need, they will not thrive. They must adjust to meet the market.
“This is the future of education,” Litzenberger says.
Applications are available at the SCC Web site, www.scc.edu. Interviews start soon. It could be a ticket to the board room.