Energizing Tuscola’s Economy Through Entrepreneurship

Project Description

The Enterprise Facilitation ® project focuses on assisting entrepreneurs, both existing and new, with their various needs, including technical assistance such as management coaching in Sirolli’s Trinity of Management ®. The assistance provided to each entrepreneur is customized to their specific needs. The Enterprise Facilitator will also be trained and able to make proper referrals for additional assistance with the product/service, financial management and marketing of the business. The knowledge and resources of a diverse Board of Management will further assist the Enterprise Facilitator in his/her duties.

A major key to the success of Enterprise Facilitation ® has been that the service is provided to entrepreneurs free of charge. While the Facilitator does not offer assistance without first receiving an invitation from the client, the flexibility of the Facilitator to meet at a time and location convenient to the entrepreneur is another valuable advantage. One of the first tasks of the Enterprise Facilitator is to establish and understand the conviction, or passion, of the client. This can be accomplished by giving a simple assignment that will require the entrepreneur to demonstrate their true motivation for their idea. As a result, roughly half of those first clients will not be heard from again, but the process becomes much more efficient that way.

Returning entrepreneurs will then be introduced to the Trinity of Management ®. This aspect of Sirolli’s model stresses the importance of three aspects of sound business management: (1) the product or service, (2) financial management, and (3) marketing. The Enterprise Facilitator wants to gauge the client’s passion in these three areas. Sirolli maintains that no one person is capable of having the passion necessary to successfully take on more than one or possibly two of these necessary functions of a viable enterprise.

Consequently, the Enterprise Facilitator will endeavor to assist the client to form a team or partnership with at least one more person who can passionately and successfully perform the other function(s). This will often include professional service providers who can support the Enterprise Facilitation ® project through in-kind or sliding scale services to new entrepreneurs, or other creative arrangements that are mutually beneficial. However, the Enterprise Facilitator will never take one of these roles on themselves. With a qualified management team then in place, a sound business plan is also considerably more likely to result and will greatly assist in securing needed capital or financing.