Rock It! Lab aids entrepreneurs
LR startup hub provides resources for small businesses
Rock It! Lab at the Central Arkansas Library System helps entrepreneurs in the region and beyond grow their businesses at low or no cost through a three-month incubator program, one-on-one business consultations and a mentorship program.
With business scaling a persistent problem for the Black, Latino, veteran and female entrepreneurs it serves, much of the work revolves around novel ways of getting them capital, like micro-loans.
Benito Lubazibwa runs the startup hub, a partnership between his organization, Advancing Black Entrepreneurship, and CALS that started in 2020.
Sixty-eight entrepreneurs have gone through the incubator program since it began in 2021 while nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs have gotten one- to three-hour technical assistance and business consultations. Workshops and classes on business topics like artificial intelligence or becoming certified as a minority- or women-owned business enterprise are organized for the general public.
The headquarters in the Cox Building, 120 River Market Ave. in Little Rock, is designed to help entrepreneurs with proof of concept, demonstrating that their businesses are feasible. The headquarters contains a basement workspace, 501 Makers, with screen-printing and sewing machines, spaces to paint and draft, and a 3D printer. A co-working space is upstairs, and a retail space, the River Shop, is on the ground floor, where program participants can sell their projects.
Creating a profitable, scalable and sustainable business model is one thing, but Rock It! Lab participants often
have institutional barriers in the broader business ecosystem — getting capital the biggest among them.
Rock It! Lab works with the Huntsville-based FORGE Community Loan Fund, a nonprofit Small Business Administration intermediary micro-lender and U.S. Treasury Department-designated Community Development Financial Institution, to offer micro-loans through what it calls the Imani Fund.
Lubazibwa said Imani in Swahili means faith, a nod to the loan program’s faith in a business model.
He said most recipients use the micro-loans of up to $25,000 for working capital, marketing and new equipment. Nearly two years after the Imani Fund began, it has distributed more than $600,000 to local entrepreneurs. None of the recipients have defaulted on their fiveyear loans, he said, which have 5% interest rates. He said 99% of entrepreneurs who have gone through Rock It! Lab’s incubator program remain in business. Participants like Serreta Boson, who sells her Sarge’s Famous Pickles brand from the River Shop, have gone from generating five-figure annual revenue to six.
Program Coordinator Leah Patterson said entrepreneurs who have sold their products at the River Shop learn business skills like product and market research and customer discovery.
“Those are the things that we’re finding that a lot of our businesses just haven’t done,” she said.
Boson went into entrepreneurship with a family history and leaving a corporate career as an operations manager. She got involved in Rock It! Lab in 2021, having sold a jar of pickles to a CALS employee at a farmers market.
“Financially, I really learned that if I was going to take my business seriously, these were some of the things that I needed,” she said. Boson also sells her products to Value Foods supermarkets, Drug Emporium on Rodney Parham Road in Little Rock, and K Hall & Sons Produce on Wright Avenue in Little Rock and is in discussions with Kroger.
Boson plans to vertically integrate with a greenhouse in Benton for the produce she needs.
“I’m going to transition from being ‘founder’ to CEO,” Boson said, anticipating the day when she’ll have an even larger production facility and well-paid employees outside her immediate family.
While most of Rock It! Lab’s program participants come from Central Arkansas, Arnetta Bradford did the incubation program commuting from Hope, where she owns her HeBrews 11&1 coffee shop. The namesake Bible verse is “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for.”
“We wanted to walk that out, and so that’s what we did and have been doing since we’ve been open,” Bradford said. “God has tremendously blessed us throughout the four years now of being open.”
She said Rock It! Lab’s incubator program helped her hone her business strategy.
“Most businesses are not even aware that maybe their structure is not set up correctly,” Bradford said. “[Lubazibwa] gives you that information on how to set up a business the proper way so that you can be funding-ready, grant-ready and all of that. You can ask for a grant all day long, but if you’re not ready to receive, and your paperwork’s not correct, then it’s almost impossible to receive it.”