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Our Mission
"Our mission is to benefit our local community by
supporting local business enterprise success through grassroots level
delivery of the most appropriate guidance information, referral and
support."
Our
Goals
- Promote local entrepreneurship and
innovation.
- Help start new, local businesses.
- Assist businesses to grow and expand.
- Help struggling businesses find success.
- Assist individuals to fulfill a business
dream.
- Increase the community’s capacity to meet
the challenges of changing economic and social conditions.
Our
position is not to judge the quality or worthiness of any business idea, but
to help the entrepreneur take that idea, determine the feasibility of that
idea, and if the entrepreneur determines it appropriate, to take that idea to
fruition.
About
Enterprise Facilitation®
“Enterprise
Facilitation’s major achievement is to introduce sound management principles
to the smallest project and to articulate simply and effectively what it takes
to be successful in business.” Ernesto Sirolli
Enterprise
Facilitation®
is a person-centered approach to community and economic development, developed
by Ernesto Sirolli after years of watching fledgling businesses fail.
He eventually came to realize that for an economic development plan to
work in a community, it must start at the grassroots level.
It must be the individual who decides what his path will be, and it
must be the local community who invests in that individual.
Leadership
in economic development must come from inside the community.
Local leaders have the local endorsement, and have understanding of the
community.
The base of intelligence in a local based development consists of the
people who live within that community.
The people on the Tuscola Enterprise Board of Management live within
Tuscola
County.
The leaders who investigated and chose Enterprise Facilitation live and
work in
Tuscola
County.
The Enterprise Facilitation®
project focuses on assisting entrepreneurs, both existing and new, with their
various needs, including technical assistance such as management coaching. The
assistance provided to each entrepreneur is customized to their specific
needs. A major key to the success of Enterprise Facilitation ® has been
that the service is provided to entrepreneurs free of charge.
Once
an Enterprise Facilitator, the center of the project, is hired and trained, he
is introduced to hundreds of people.
These introductions bring him in face to face contact with people who
may decide to ask for help, who may know someone who needs help, as well as
with people who have valuable skills to share.
Since the project’s focus remains at the local level, local expansion
and retention is encouraged, rather than recruiting of outside businesses.
As people look to each other rather than outside the community,
development expands within the community.
As one person’s business becomes successful, he keeps valuable skills
as well as money within the community.
He can then endorse other local businesses.
But
how does it work?
In order for a business to achieve success, it must do well in three
areas: product, finance, and marketing.
Since no single person can be good at all three things, the Facilitator
helps clients to sort out their needs.
One person may need help keeping records, another may need help getting
his product to sell, someone else may need a diemaker.
The
Facilitator, being at the center of a network, and having knowledge of the
existing economic organizations within the community as well as qualified
individuals, is able to put people together, one on one, to make things
happen. Because the project began with a group of community members all
willing to offer their expertise, the Facilitator has a pool of intelligence
to draw from.
If he doesn’t know of a person with a required skill, he has only to
call on the Board of Management for suggestions.
In this way, the local community supports individual members of the
community:
Tuscola
County
residents endorse and support other Tuscola
County
residents.
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