Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Fayetteville square is entrepreneurial hub
FAYETTEVILLE — When Omar Kasim graduated last year with a business degree, he had an idea: What if he opened a taco shop with eclectic recipes and long hours for the night crowd? But his mind buzzed with more serious what-ifs, too. He’d need a lot of money to make it happen, and a misstep could be personally disastrous.
An advisor at the University of Arkansas’ Walton School of Business steered Kasim toward Startup Junkie Consulting, a group that gives nascent companies free advice, teaching programs, co-working space and other help in the Fayetteville square’s One East Center building. Kasim jumped in, spending 12-hour days holding interviews and sales meetings in the group’s office and getting answers to his questions.
Now Con Quesos Fusion Tacos has a gleaming new home on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that opened in January and hosts a crowd of customers in the evenings.
“Things are going really well,” beating his projections already, Kasim said in February.
Starting a business can be complicated and daunting. Startup Junkie, which moved into its space in 2014, is just one piece of a growing “ecosystem,” as it’s repeatedly called, where groups clustered around Fayetteville’s square aim to make the process of entrepreneurship a little easier. Even as the ecosystem settles in, some area businesspeople are working to expand it across Northwest Arkansas.
Hayseed Ventures, which moved to the center of the square last year, runs several young companies and can refine and assist others on the cusp of multimillion-dollar success. On the south side, the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce in August plans to open a “fab lab,” short for fabrication, that provides free use of laser cutters and other tools for inventors to test their product ideas. The University of Arkansas plans to move all of its entrepreneurship and innovation programs to its Global Campus on the square’s northeast corner within the next year or two.
The groups’ leaders said they can essentially work together to help businesspeople at every step of an idea, whether it’s selling birdhouses or a smartphone app, salsa or medical devices. The consultants help clients test an idea’s potential, hone it, make a successful business out of it and expand the business if possible.
“I think it’s a great foundation for some big things,” said Mike Harvey, chief operating officer for the Northwest Arkansas Council, a nonprofit that says it aims to make the region a better place to live and do business. A couple decades ago, cities always tried to lure in major industries from outside, Harvey said. That thinking has changed since then to favor “tending your garden” over “chasing smokestacks,” as he put it.
“It’s the organic growth, it’s the entrepreneurs, the one- and five- and 10-people startups, that actually drive a regional economy,” Harvey said.
Startup Junkie’s ScaleUp program is one example of these groups’ work. It’s for companies that are at least two years old and gives more detailed information on accounting and other essentials with an eye toward getting more business.
During one February session, about a dozen participants explained their companies in 60-second pitches, laughing and talking as sunlight streamed through tall windows.
“We have a lot of fun here,” Phyl Amerine, a Startup Junkie consultant, said with a laugh. Her husband, Jeff, founded the group.
The ScaleUp course is worth the time, said Cameron Magee, president of avad3, a 4-year-old event production company in Lowell.
“Every week is different, three hours, baptism by fire,” Magee said. “They should be charging us $30,000 for it. We would never be able to pay for it.”
Startup Junkie’s help is free thanks to support from Little Rock-based nonprofit Winrock International, the Walton Family Foundation and the U.S. Small Business Administration.
A few days after Startup Junkie’s session, Hayseed held its own event for businessman and developer Mark Zweig to give advice on “bootstrapping,” or getting a company running with minimal resources. More than 100 budding and current business owners gathered in the Old Post Office basement to hear him.
Zweig rattled off pointers mixed in with wisecracks and personal history: Don’t buy anything you can lease, start with less money-intensive ideas and never stop marketing.
“You don’t need to think of the next Facebook; you can be the guy who washes windows. Just return calls,” he said, referring to an acquaintance who recently started washing windows and now employs several people and makes more money than he ever had before. “There’s so many opportunities, it’s crazy.”
Each group that moves to the square also attracts others. Cybersecurity company Metova opened a location on the square in February, and the university’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is moving there as well.
“We really want to be part of what’s going on at the square,” said Carol Reeves, the university’s associate vice-provost for entrepreneurship. “It’s an exciting time to be in Northwest Arkansas.”
The square’s community came together in a gradual, almost unplanned way — the opposite of the Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” approach, Jeff Amerine said. The proximity of the university, with its facilities and pool of recruits, and the GENESIS Technology Incubator in south Fayetteville helped make Fayetteville the logical place to go, he said.
“Place matters because density matters,” Amerine said, referring to the clustering of support services around the square. “That’s when the magic happens. It’s not something that can be done in pockets here and there.”
Not all who come through the groups’ doors will succeed or become high-powered CEOs, but that’s OK, Amerine said. Entrepreneurship thrives on what he called “fast failure,” picking up the pieces and moving on quickly. The entrepreneur might settle into a lower position in a company once it gets going. People’s efforts to try out ideas also give them skills and experiences they can use for other jobs, said Steve Clark, the Fayetteville chamber’s president.
The fab lab is part of the chamber’s Northwest Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, and it’s meant to attract more people with more skills to the area, Clark said. For people here, anyone from schoolkids to “boomers like me” can come into the lab and learn how to use its machines and take its classes, he said. A nonprofit organization affiliated with Startup Junkie, the Community Venture Foundation, also runs several programs aimed at children.
The fab lab would be part of a global network of similar spaces and people, Clark said.
“We’re putting Fayetteville on the map,” he said in February. “The very best businesses are homegrown ones.”
Clark, Amerine and others added they’d be thrilled if other Northwest Arkansas cities put together their own hubs. Wal-Mart and other businesses have voiced interest in putting together a similar entrepreneurship center in Bentonville, said Rick Webb, who retired last year as WalMart senior vice president of global business processes.
Webb and others are working on asking the Walton foundation for support, he said. After support comes in, a group will quickly come together.
“There’s people clamoring to figure this out,” Webb said. “I have no doubt that we’ll end up with a different version, not a duplicate of what’s going on in Fayetteville.”
Rogers and Springdale will likely get in on the action as well, Webb and Amerine said. Each city might have its own flavor or industrial emphasis, with manufacturing in Springdale and a heavy vendor presence in Rogers, Amerine said.
“It’s a beginning,” said John James, Hayseed’s founder. He pointed to the “creative collisions” that happen at events like Zweig’s and in a space like the square as it is today. “I want to see every bit of those turned up to 11.”
“We’re putting Fayetteville on the map . ... The very best businesses are homegrown ones.”
— Steve Clark, Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce